Rebecca Charbonneau

We've squeezed in one last AIP Lyne Starling Trimble Public Event for 2025. Come to our DC location at 6pm on Wednesday, December 10 to catch David DeVorkin's lecture, "The Quiet Genius of George Carruthers."

RSVP here:
www.aip.org/history/davi...

🔭

Rebecca Charbonneau discusses Project Ozma at HSS 2025

Hello again, #HSS2025! Despite the Sheraton's weird elevator system, I've made it to the Oak Alley Room for a panel on Astronomical Futures during the #ColdWar.

Our 1st speaker, @rebeccacharbon.bsky.social, is discussing the history of #SETI, including Project Ozma.

www.seti.org/research/set...

Selection of new books on display in the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies Library. Eleven volumes arranged on a stand. Featured titles include: Looking at Women Looking at War - Victoria Amelina, The Last Days of Budapest - Adam LeBor, The Last Peasant War - Jakub Benes, Contemporary Russia - Edwin Bacon, Narratives of the Russo-Ukrainian War - Oleksandr Pankieiev, Putin's Digital Front and the Truth Behind - Steven Broschart, Mixed Signals: Alien Communication across the Iron Curtain - Rebecca Charbonneau, Reading Russian Literature, 1980-2024, Literary Consumption, Memory and Identity, Their Faraway Home: The Story of Croats in New Zealand through publications, Kino Polonia, A Voice from the Lost Town of Trochenbrod.

Hope everyone had a good break over Easter. We're back to our regular opening hours from today: Monday-Friday 09:00-21:00, Saturday 10:00-17:00. Don't forget to check out our #NewBooks display if you are in the Library! 📚📚😊

In memoriam: Margaret Walsh Rossiter, pathbreaker in “writing women into science” AIP History Weekly Edition: October 24, 2025

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

🚀 We’re hiring a 3-year Postdoctoral Fellow in history of science/STS to join my team at the American Institute of Physics! If you're looking for a fellowship opportunity in the history of the physical sciences post-1850, please see our ad for more details: workforcenow.adp.com/mascsr/defau...

Policy primer: A new $100,000 fee on H-1B Visas President Trump has issued a proclamation requiring a $100,000 payment for each new H-1B petition. We examine what it does and does not do, how it is being justified, and what developments to look out...

At AIP we've launched a new policy research program to go deep on current questions and pull together more comprehensive pictures. Leading this work, Lindsay Milliken has produced her first public product, a primer on the new $100,000 fee on H-1B petitions.

Physical Science Careers Disrupted Documenting the Impact of Federal Funding & Policy Changes

📣 AIP's Niels Bohr Library and Archives is collecting personal stories from scientists, engineers, students & others in the physical sciences whose careers have been impacted by recent U.S. policy & funding changes. Learn more about how to get involved here ->
www.aip.org/library/ex-l...

August 2025 AIP History August Update

The August edition of the AIP History Monthly is out—and it’s packed with exciting updates, new resources, and ways to get involved in preserving and interpreting the history of the physical sciences. -> www.aip.org/history/aip-...

The successes and challenges of US–Soviet scientific communication Research exchanges between US and Soviet scientists during the second half of the 20th century may be instructive for navigating today’s debates on scientific collaboration.

Despite working in a time of tense diplomatic relations, proxy wars, and budget cuts, many US and Soviet scientists collaborated productively during the 1970s and 1980s, writes Anna Doel. Prior exchanges help better understand the challenges to scientific cooperation today.

https://bit.ly/4neNFWQ

Huge thank you to AIP (@aip.bsky.social) History and Rebecca Charbonneau (@rebeccacharbon.bsky.social) for spotlighting my latest article! 🤩 #ligo #physics #history #histstem

YouTube video by AIP History Tiffany Nichols : An Eclectic Array of Expertise:The Federal-Level Site Selection History of LIGO

For the fuller story of how NSF took over site selection and decided to place the detectors at Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, check out Tiffany's lecture here at AIP this past spring

From radio with love: A Cold War astronomical collaboration To construct an interferometer with a baseline spanning the planet, US radio astronomers reached out to their Soviet counterparts.

AIP historian @rebeccacharbon.bsky.social has a new article out in @physicstoday.bsky.social looking at a US-Soviet collaboration in the 1960s to combine observations of radio telescopes across the globe, a powerful early initiative in very long baseline interferometry.

Article spotlight: When LIGO might have been in Maine AIP History Weekly Edition: August 22, 2025

In this week's history newsletter from AIP, @rebeccacharbon.bsky.social spotlights the new article by @tiffanynichols.bsky.social in Isis, digging into the rise and fall of an early proposal to site a @ligo.org detector in Maine's Blueberry Barrens.

From radio with love: A Cold War astronomical collaboration To construct an interferometer with a baseline spanning the planet, US radio astronomers reached out to their Soviet counterparts.

I wrote a short article on my research in the history of VLBI for Physics Today this week :-) pubs.aip.org/physicstoday...

A huge loss for NASA science.

Another self-inflicted wound to our national science portfolio.

Finished knitting my fishy sweater! Now I’m ready for fall.

More Avi and 3I/ATLAS Following up on this and this: Today images from the Hubble Space Telescope were published by Jewitt et al., and they show the coma of 3I/ATLAS very well: Would this be enough to convince Avi that it’...

It gets worse and worse.

If you're interested in the slow-motion train wreck that is Avi's sci-comm on this, here are some of the latest (it's very hard to keep up!)

In which spacecraft can have comae, 3I/ATLAS has a 60% chance of being alien, and new papers validate and adopt his calculations.

More photos from @aip.bsky.social Early Career Conference for Historians of the Physical Sciences! Too bad they couldn’t find us a meeting space with better views ;-)

You have come up in conversation (very fondly!) by many people here already :-)

Monkey spotting at lunch during @aip.bsky.social Early Career Conference for Historians of the Physical Sciences in Salvador, Brazil 😆🐒

Conference program: Sixth AIP Early-Career Conference for Historians of the Physical Sciences AIP History Weekly Edition for August 1, 2025

We're heading to Salvador, Brazil, for the Sixth AIP Early-Career Conference for Historians of the Physical Sciences. This #histsci meeting gathers young scholars from the world over to exchange work and build a supportive global community.

Check out what folks are working on these days:

I hope you enjoy it! :-)

July 25, 2025 Book spotlight: The Board of Longitude

I've long been a fanboy of the Cambridge HPS / National Maritime Museum Board of Longitude project. It recovered a rich institutional history from a heavily mythologized narrative and digitized the board's papers too. Its capstone book is an excellent contribution to #histSTM & #scipol studies.

Doing a SETI History AMA on r/AskScience, if anyone is curious :-) www.reddit.com/r/askscience...

🔭 Last month, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory wowed the world with its first ultra-high-resolution images. Ahead of Rubin’s 97th on July 23rd, @rebeccacharbon.bsky.social spotlights Rubin's 1989 oral history with Alan Lightman in this week’s AIP History Weekly. -> www.aip.org/history/oral...

For those who missed it over the 4th, Women in the History of Quantum Physics is a great example of what a multi-author effort can accomplish. Available now from Cambridge UP www.cambridge.org/us/universit...

Excited to speak @shafrhistorians.bsky.social #shafr2025 this week - I'll present on Cuba & communications satellite regulation in the global Cold War

Honored to join the panel Empire, Security & Militarism in the Final Frontier w Andrew Ross, @rebeccacharbon.bsky.social, @aaronbateman.bsky.social

Three side-by-side images of, respectively, Peter Galison, Jaco de Swart, and Tiffany Nichols lecturing.

It was a gravitational spring here at AIP, with our three excellent Trimble lectures:

-Peter Galison on imaging black holes
-Jaco de Swart on the hunt for dark matter particles
-Tiffany Nichols on siting the LIGO gravitational wave detectors

Videos here:
www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

LOVE Ruby!