Physical Sciences (inactive)

Peter Ramberg of Truman State University introduced his paper, "Popularizing Astronomy in the German Free Religious Movement, 1850-1852." Abstract: Although historians have outlined the popular treatments of astronomy in the nineteenth century Britain by Mary Somerville, Richard Proctor and Agnes Clerke, the popular presentation of astronomy in nineteenth century Germany remains relatively unexplored. This essay examines articles on astronomy that appeared in Kirchliche Reform, a prominent journal of the German free religious movement of the 1840s and 1850s. This series of eight articles were written by the Halle schoolteacher H. Weißgerber between 1850 and 1852 and took their readers on a tour of the structure and origin of the solar system and the Milky Way. In all of his articles, Weißgerber took every opportunity to show how the results of modern astronomy made traditional religion obsolete.

Cameron Lazaroff-Puck, University of Minnesota introduced his paper "Gearing up for Lagrangian Dynamics: The Flywheel Analogy in Maxwell's 1865 Paper on Electrodynamics."

Carsten Reinhardt of CHF introduced his draft paper, "The Dynamics of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology."

Nasser Zakariya of CHF introduced a draft book chapter, "Tales of Hawks and Hounds: Scientific Narratives of the SSC and NASA Origins"

Jessica Wang of UBC introduced her article "Physics, Emotion, and the Scientific Self: Merle Tuve's Cold War", HSNS v.42 n.5.

Joe Martin of Colby College introduced his paper, "The Simple and Courageous Course: Industrial Patronage of Basic Research at the University of Chicago, 1945-1961."

Bill Rankin of Yale introduced his draft chapter on the politics of military coordinate systems and alternatives to latitude and longitude, "Aiming Guns, Recording Land, and Stitching Map to Territory: The Invention of Cartographic Grid Systems, 1914­-1939."

Teasel Muir-Harmony of MIT and PACHS introduced her paper "Selling Space Capsules, Moon Rocks, and America: The Use of Spaceflight in Public Diplomacy, 1961-1979."

Alex Csiszar of Harvard University and Chemical Heritage Foundation introduced his "Owning It: authorship and discovery, 1835-1850."

Alex Wellerstein of the American Institute of Physics introduced his "'Old H-bomb arguments never die!' Secrecy, invention, and the Teller-Ulam priority dispute."