Historians and sociologists of science often identify the efflorescence of social stud ies of science with the work of postwar American intellectuals such as Robert K. Merton and Thomas S. Kuhn. They often also refer to the views of Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) on the roles of tacit knowledge, apprenticeship, social...
Louis de Broglie received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1929 following experimental
confirmation of his theory of the wave properties of the electron. De Broglie was an
anomaly among twentieth-century physicists: he was a prince by birth who would become
the seventh duc de Broglie. What did it mean...
Biography is one of the most popular categories of books—and indeed the most popular
category among nonfiction books, according to one British poll. Thus, biography offers
historians of science an opportunity to reach a potentially broad audience. This essay
examines approaches typical of different genres of scientific biography, including historians’...
This dissertation focuses on the life of Dixy Lee Ray as it examines important developments in marine biology and biological oceanography during the mid twentieth century. In addition, Ray's key involvement in the public understanding of science movement of the 1950s and 1960s provides a larger social and cultural context...
From 1925 to 1930, Ernest H. Wiegand, a professor of Horticultural Products at Oregon State Agricultural College, developed an improved brining process for cherries. Brined cherries are used in the production of maraschino and glacé cherries, which already had a sizable market in the United States by the 1920s. This...
The public controversy over possible health hazards from radioactive fallout from atomic bomb testing began in 1954, shortly after a thermonuclear test by the United States spread fallout world wide. In the dissertation, I address two of the fundamental questions of the fallout controversy: Was there a threshold of radiation...
John Archibald Wheeler (09 July 1911- ) is a familiar name to physicists and historians of physics alike. Among his many contributions to the corpus of knowledge, in 1939 John Wheeler and Niels Bohr co-authored the first paper on the generalized mechanism of nuclear fission. Beyond that seminal work, Wheeler...
This study examines the interactions between the scientific communities of the
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(SLAC) in the discovery of the tau lepton by physicist Martin Perl between 1973-
1977. Perl became interested in searching for heavy leptons through positron-electron
collision experiments using the...
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MaryJoNye
This study examines the interactions between the scientific communities of the