Will Thomas

I mean...

At Harvard in the '00s, the consensus was that Statler and Waldorf were Steve Shapin and Charles Rosenberg.

My experience of grading humanities at Harvard was the work was of uniformly "pretty good" quality, by professional standards. There wasn't a clean distribution. If you weren't giving out a bunch of As, it would be all Bs and Cs, and you weren't about to do that unilaterally.

ISABELLE was one of those cases where the delays eroded the motivation for it, so the decision was reasonable. It was very painful at the time, but it might have been less painful if RHIC had been part of the conversation as an alternative. It wasn't partly because of the nuclear/HEP split at DOE.

Q&A: Ankita Anirban on Black scientists at Bell Labs AIP Weekly Edition: February 6, 2026

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, Anna Doel interviews Ankita Anirban about her interview/book project on the successful push at Bell Labs to elevate black scientists. At a time when such efforts are on the back foot, it's important to know more about these examples.

Great blend of personal narrative and compelling nuclear physics. Colliders like RHIC (and the EIC) are often overlooked by people focusing on the highest energies of particle physics—which I've been guilty of. A fitting final toast(ed bagel) for RHIC.

My favorite thing about RHIC is it rose from the ashes when ISABELLE got sacrificed to move ahead with the ill-fated Superconducting Super Collider. Bob Crease wrote about this doi.org/10.1525/hsns... and I also did a piece called "Last Collider Standing". aip.brightspotcdn.com/62/12/6f9164...

UK to scrap more than £250mn in planned physics project funding Cern particle accelerator led by British scientist among institutions affected by wider research shake-up

The funding cuts also include £59 million for the Electron-Ion Collider in Brookhaven.

Very bad news for CERN, it seems.

I think a lot of the material in The Visioneers is very relevant, too. That whole Omni culture you wrote about.

So, who's going to write the five-volume history of star culture in science, 1975 to 2020? What needs to be in there?

If we all agree it is convincing, we can prove the philosophical primacy of social epistemology.

Policy analysis: Prospective changes to prevailing wage levels and impacts on international hiring In early 2026 the Department of Labor is expected to post a notice of proposed rulemaking to revise upward the pay employers must offer to foreign workers who would have an H-1B visa or an employment-...

The Trump administration is expected to soon propose adjustments to the minimum pay levels that employers must offer foreign researchers. This will pick up where a proposal from the first Trump administration left off. AIP's Lindsay Milliken takes a closer look. #scipol

Capturing Carrington A speculative search in the right place at the right time turned up what is thought to be the only image of the eponymous solar observer.

Richard Carrington was the namesake of history's largest known geomagnetic storm, but no one knew what he looked like--until now!

Today's #histSTM & #astronomy lunch read: @royalastrosoc.bsky.social archivist Kate Bond discusses the serendipitous discovery of the 1st known photo of Carrington 🗃️📜🔭📷

This article confirms that the Nobel committee discussed Wu's experimental confirmation of Lee & Yang's theory. But there appears to have been no discussion of delaying the prize so as to include Wu the following year. Wu's snub has long been regarded as unjust.

That she was frequently nominated is known, but, with the death of Chen-Ning Yang last year, the 1957 archive has been opened, when she might have won with Lee & Yang for parity violation. Wu received no nominations in '57 as her paper (w/ Ambler) appeared after the deadline.

Twenty-three nominations, yet no Nobel prize: how Chien-Shiung Wu missed out on the top award in physics – Physics World Mats Larsson and Ramon Wyss reveal why Chien-Shiung Wu never won a Nobel prize

Many people have wondered why the Chien-Shiung Wu never won the Nobel Prize for Physics. New findings from the Nobel archives, exclusively revealed in Physics World, show she was nominated 23 times by 18 different physicists - and yet was still left empty-handed. 🧪⚛️
physicsworld.com/a/twenty-thr...

I'm not sure if there's anything that hits the sweet spot here, particularly with respect to serious examinations of law, but Issues in S&T (issues.org) and Minerva (link.springer.com/journal/11024) are maybe in that general zone.

Sad news in the UK #histSTM community - my former University of Kent colleague and admired historian of 19thC energy physics and steam ocean navigation, Crosbie Smith, died at the weekend following a short illness. We owe him a great deal.
www.kent.ac.uk/history/peop...

Phillips: I will say that there were many people who behaved very beautifully then, and there were many people who were very cowardly.

Sopka raises the issue, twenty five years later, of how colleagues responded to Melba Phillips being targeted by the McCarran Committee in 1952. (10/10)

The screenshot reads NIELS BOHR LIBRARY & ARCHIVES / TRANSCRIPT ONE PHYSICS ELLIPSE, COLLEGE PARK, MD 20740 • (301)-209-3177 • NBL@AIP.ORG Melba Phillips December 5, 1977 Interviewed by: Katherine Sopka Location: Transcript version date: July 10, 2025 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1063/nbla.pefw.bjmi

The AIP has an excellent oral history interview with Melba Newell Phillips. Katherine Sopka spoke with her in 1977. (9/n)
repository.aip.org/node/128531

A summons instructing Melba Phillips to appear before the Security Sub-Committee of the Judiciary Committee of the US Senate to testify as part of McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunts.

Here is the summons sent to Phillips, ordering her to appear before the McCarran Committee. (6/n)

Image: Box 1, Folder 1, Melba Phillips papers / AIP www.aip.org/library/melb...

After the war, Melba Newell Phillips became a professor at Brooklyn College and also worked at the Columbia University Radiation Laboratory.

Both institutions fired her in 1952 when she refused to testify against her colleagues during McCarthy's witch hunts. (5/n)

Melba Newell Phillips sitting on the stairs in front of a building just after arriving at UC Berkeley, wearing a dress she made herself. Photo credit: Ellen and John Vinson Ref: Neuenschwander, D.E., Watkins, S.A. Professional and Personal Coherence: The Life and Work of Melba Newell Phillips. Phys. perspect. 10, 295–364 (2008).

Nuclear physicist Melba Newell Phillips was born #OTD in 1907. Author of two standard textbooks and numerous articles on physics history, she worked tirelessly to promote the teaching of physics as an AAPT member. 🧪 ⚛️ 👩‍🔬 (1/n)

Image: Ellen and John Vinson, in link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Special issue spotlight: Shaping a multi-messenger universe AIP History Weekly Edition: January 30, 2026

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, @rebeccacharbon.bsky.social looks at a new issue of Centaurus examining what is and is not distinctive about the new era of "multi-messenger" astronomy.

📷IceCube Laboratory and South Pole Telescope, Moreno Baricevic, IceCube / NSF.

Thanks for pointing it out! We're working on a visa policy project right now, so that's very handy.

H-1B Employer Data Hub The H-1B program allows employers in the United States

Very granular data here: www.uscis.gov/tools/report...

You can narrow by state and to educational institutions at NAICS code 61. UT Austin has 165 H-1B beneficiaries for instance.

YouTube video by The Obama White House The Polar Vortex Explained in 2 Minutes

Remembering how 12 years and eons ago CEI got into a years-long lawsuit with the White House under the Data Quality Act because John Holdren made a video that supposedly didn't use hedgy-enough language to connect the wandering of the polar vortex to climate change. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eDT...

Tomorrow's front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune: Jan. 24, 2026

Can you tell the difference between a hydrometer & a hygrometer? A Leyden jar & a Crookes tube? An armillary sphere & an equatorial ring?

Then you should follow @sis-instrument-soc.bsky.social for updates concerning the history of scientific instruments!

#histSTM #histsci #histtech #FollowFriday 🗃️