Rushing to finish up things before I have to leave for Europe to go to this symposium. I am excited, because this series, launched at Fermilab in 1980, represents probably the most serious attempt we've had to rally physicists around creating a robust historical record.

But may I also point out that STS has always trafficked in themes long-trodden by religious intellectuals, as so ably documented in Andrew Jewett's Science Under Fire?

Folks, are we forgetting that Francis cited Haraway?

75th anniversary. It's not top tier for me, but I don't think I can wipe off a dirty chef's knife without thinking, "Peter, Son of Adam, clean your sword!"

Physicist Richard Garwin, a giant in the field, died in May 2025 at age 97. Famous for designing the first hydrogen bomb, Garwin was also a prominent adviser—and occasional critic—of the US government. Three of his close colleagues examine his career for @physicstoday.bsky.social. #physics #histSTM

REMINDER: AIP's grant-in-aid program for research in history of the physical sciences has an application deadline coming up on November 15. Awards are for up to $2,500, and we are able to offer up to $6,000 for oral histories with physicists in industry. www.aip.org/aip/awards/h...

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

@moiraweigel.bsky.social is great on this: www.boundary2.org/2020/07/moir...

The WSJ piece notably omits that Palantir CEO Karp holds a PhD in philosophy/social theory from Goethe University—home of the Frankfurt School—mentioning only his Haverford BA and Stanford JD.

In which Palantir recruits high school students for fellowships by telling them to skip college because its holds little value and then puts them through a cherry-picked curriculum that oddly resembles… college

This is one of the coolest things the history and library team at @aip.bsky.social is doing. If you have photos, please consider contributing! Future historians will thank you :)

This symposium in Berlin next week looks amazing—wish I could be there! Also, I'm most pleased with our accompanying photo selection here. Bohr, Meitner, and everyone else looking very cool at the 1920 "bonzenfreie" (no big-wigs) colloquium organized to get face time with the visiting Bohr.

The Phil-Sci Archive at Pitt is now pushing papers out on Bluesky. Follow the account below to see them @philsci-archive.bsky.social

Do you take snapshots of your everyday life as a physical scientist? @aip.bsky.social is soliciting photos from scientists at all career stages and disciplines from around the world to broaden its 30 000+ photo collection, which is used frequently by historians. #physics #astronomy #histSTM

Ooh, Simon Schaffer reader coming down the pike. I blogged through a good chunk of his oeuvre back in the day, which was really illuminating. Too bad they didn't include "The Show That Never Ends" (on perpetual motion), which is probably my favorite: doi.org/10.1017/S000... #HPS

Sorry for going on about this, but it's fascinating. This is an interesting recollection from @preskill.bsky.social about Stu Freedman's early reaction to an early divergence from the results he got with John Clauser in '72. A wry remark? A nod to Bohm? 🤷https://repository.aip.org/node/129433

Side note: has anyone written about the history of physics at Technion? The department is founded in the mid-'50s and immediately gets Nathan Rosen of EPR fame, Red Scare refugee David Bohm, and Kurt Sitte, a Buchenwald survivor who was soon to be the first person in Israel convicted for espionage.

Interview: Historian of science Michael Gordin tells us why he and Diana Buchwald felt there was room for another book on Einstein, why fascination with Einstein remains high, and new areas of Einstein research. popsciencebooks.blogspot.com/2025/10/mich... #interview #einstein #historyofscience

"For scholars everywhere, [her] research laid the bedrock for comprehensive, gendered studies of the history of women scientists within national contexts." Today's #histSTM & #WomenInSTEM lunch read: @donluke.bsky.social reflects on Margaret Rossiter's contributions to #histsci for @aip.bsky.social

Warning: If you read Churchman and related work by Ackoff, you may end up convinced that the one true science of ethics is management science done from a systems thinking perspective even if you don't really know what any of those words mean.

My account will boost any and all Churchman & Ackoff content and then talk your ear off about how, frustrated by their inability to influence the philosophy of science, tried to commander the nascent operations research profession and graft their vision onto it.

The world if Churchman and Ackoff had gotten their "Institutes of Experimental Method" instead of ending up at business schools. www.jstor.org/stable/185209

I am also coming around to the heretical* position that Dave Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics may have done more harm than good. Noting that Sam Schweber felt this way: physicstoday.aip.org/reviews/how-... *(If, like me, you learned a ton from Dave, who is totally the best)

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, guest contributor Don Opitz looks at the multitudinous scholarly and professional contributions of the late Margaret Rossiter in creating a historiography of women in science. #HPS

Working on something related to quantum entanglement, and suddenly realized that in 2008 I totally misunderstood what Joan Bromberg was doing with her 2006 Isis piece on Marlan Scully. It nicely turns tables on Forman's claim that "quantum electronics" distracted from foundational inquiries.

This is quite the shift in R&D policy, part 1

On the Uncertainty Principle, I just now ran into this gem from Asher Peres's obituary: #HPS

Chinese Nobel laureate and physicist Chen Ning Yang dies aged 103 www.bbc.com/news/article...

Alex is very right about how strange and brutal LeMay is. One thing that's usually lost about him is how intensely interested he was in the anatomy of bombing missions, employing a variety of expert analysts, including McNamara, who seem to have generally worked well with him.

One does not simply detect a gravitational wave. Next week, physicists, historians, and philosophers will gather in Potsdam to examine efforts to tackle the two-body problem in general relativity that is behind all those black hole mergers. See who will be there: www.aip.org/history/work... #HPS

Big deal in the science policy for physics world. DOE Office of Science has consolidated all its advisory committees into one. The High Energy Physics Advisory Panel dated back to 1967. www.aip.org/fyi/doe-cons...

On y aborde les questions suivantes: un prix pour des méthodes? pour des conclusions sur les sources de la croissance? Pour des recommendations de politiques économique? D'où vient ce prix qui n'est pas tout à fait un Nobel, à quoi sert-il dans le monde universitaire et la société?

Woah, Joel Mokyr gets the Nobel Prize for Economics. That's like a hair's breadth from giving it to historian of science & technology Margaret Jacob. Blogged a bit about them back in the day: rational-action.com/etherwave/20... rational-action.com/etherwave/20...

That's like four economics awards in a row with a substantial economic-history component, right? That strikes me as a remarkable shift. www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists...

For Hispanic Heritage Month, Adriana Minor looks at Mexican physicist Manuel Sandoval Vallarta's career at MIT, where he strove to build scientific relations between the US and Latin America. He returned to Mexico during WW2 when asked to abandon that work to focus only on teaching duties. #HPS

My little book on Schrödinger's famous classic 'What Is Life?' is out! Offering the most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken of the book's origins, reception, impact, and legacy, it uncovers Schrödinger's motivations in writing it, and shows how it has shaped our current understanding of the cell

You've probably heard how a high percentage of #Nobel laureates are immigrants. The US in particular has benefited from the influx of bright minds. @jennaahart.bsky.social ran the data for this century's Nobel prizewinners — and shows more than 30% immigrated. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Thirty years after the 1995 Beijing Women’s Conference, the Chinese government is once again calling on women to serve the nation, this time in science and technology. In this essay, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social revisits a century of women in science in China, tracing their struggles and achievements.

And Martinis? His dad was a refugee from Yugoslavia. repository.aip.org/node/129661

Ooh, nice one! Reminds me of @airminded.org

John Martinis on the advising style of fellow Nobel laureate John Clarke: "He came into the lab and talked with you every day. At the time it was sometimes annoying, but looking back this was probably the single most important thing he did to train me as an experimentalist." #NobelPrize

Michel Devoret also recalled John Clarke's "strict and intense training" in his 2021 @aip.bsky.social oral history interview: "Basically, John Clarke was coming to see us every day in the lab and was asking, 'What is new today?'" He was both jovial and respectful, besides being demanding."

Congratulations to this year's winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Be sure to check out our oral histories with: John Martinis: repository.aip.org/node/129661 Michel Devoret: repository.aip.org/node/129778

Remarkable stats here. Big year-over-year dropoff in international student arrivals, including a 44% dropoff from India. Smaller dropoff from China, but those numbers were already way down post-pandemic.

In this week's AIP History Weekly Edition, we look at Barbara Hof's new article in BJHS on an unsuccessful push by British engineer John Adams to move @cern.bsky.social into fusion research. A footnote in CERN's history, the episode had lasting effects on the fusion landscape.

This is fun, Jay Gambetta is the new head of IBM Research. He did his PhD on quantum interpretations and got into quantum computing because he thought it was a good way to figure out which interpretation is right! From my oral history with him: repository.aip.org/gambetta-jay...

My hot take on the Turing Test: it's pretty wild how computers' ability to at-least-sort-of pass it seems to have had a huge effect on the psychology of human relations with their machines. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked" and all that.

An icon

I like how the impression here is of the hurricanes approaching the US and basically taking a look and saying, "woah, let's get outta here" www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025...

Book comes out tomorrow! I'm terrified and excited. LFG. www.bloomsbury.com/us/contempor...