Will Thomas

The @aip.bsky.social has chosen me to represent them in this year’s cohort of the John Templeton Foundation’s Civic Science Fellows! 2/ www.aip.org/aip/can-we-s...

The Jordan-Wigner transform! You can map spin operators to fermionic operators. Super useful in quantum computing and quantum chemistry. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan%...

Great deal on a history very relevant for our times

DC friends! On the evening of Wednesday, Nov. 4, we're welcoming Dennis Overbye, retired "cosmic affairs correspondent" for the New York Times, to receive AIP's Gemant Award and discuss his career for our Lyne Starling Trimble event series. Register today! www.aip.org/history/denn...

The Library of Congress's Josh Levy interviews AIP's Anna Doel about her research on US-USSR exchanges and collaboration

Tam Dao helped NIH investigate Chinese scientists as an FBI agent. Now he's got a grant to find out whether foreign intervention is even a problem at US universities www.science.org/content/arti...

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, Vince Femia interviews AIP archivist Allison Buser about her new @hsnatsci.bsky.social article on the often-hidden contributions of women to an ambitious 19th-century project to collect weather observations from across America. #HPS

A few weeks ago we had Fara Dabhoiwala give a lecture on 18th-century Black Jamaican polymath Francis Williams, using analysis of a portrait of Williams to shed light on his achievements and debunk racist myths about him. This is one of the best talks I've ever seen, can't recommend it highly enough

Classic reviewer 2 (1973)

You can watch the lecture Elly presented to us in 2024 previewing her book on Roger Bacon, and then get your own copy!

Science in Human Culture Program (SHC) @ Northwestern Uni invites applications for 2-year postdoc in contextual study of science, technology, or medicine in any region, time period, & from range of historical, philosophical, sociological, anthropological perspectives. Due: December 4, 2026 #HPS

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, Annal Doel interviews Judy Kaplan from @sciencehistory.org. Every organization that works in the history of science is set up a bit differently, focusing on different topics, different audiences, different kinds of collections. Learn more about SHI's approach.

This touches on the excellent talk Fara Dabhoiwala gave for us (earlier written up in LRB). Francis Williams was a famous case of black genius in the 18th century, and one Hume felt he needed to explicitly refute to reinforce his racist views. What if Hume had championed Williams's talent instead?

It's publication day!! The Open Access version apparently needs another 24-48 hours to go live; I'll update with a direct link when it's available. If you prefer paper copies, however, you can order yours today!

$30,000 fellowship stipend for PhD candidates working on the history of meteorology, climate science or adjacent fields.

On the subject of DC history, it's always hard for me to believe that land now part of the National Mall was dominated by the enormous Main Navy and Munitions "temporary" buildings that stood from World War I to 1970.

I'll repost our new history guide soon, but caught an error on a side point -- it turns out Maurice Wilkes and Maurice Wilkins are not in fact the same person! Though they were both at Cambridge in the late 1930s.... Love my job, learn something new every day.

From 1885 to 1936, official time in DC was kept from atop the State, War, and Navy building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building), using a ball dropped at precisely noon each day. The time came from the Naval Observatory. h/t our postdoc Vince Femia. www.loc.gov/pictures/ite...

www.nytimes.com/2026/10/10/s...

The Trump administration has proposed a fee of $70,000 to participate in the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, plus $30,000 to extend. OPT is a key pathway international students use to continue on in the US in a paid position. Lindsay Milliken dissects the proposal in her latest primer.

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, we look at the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 34 years to be awarded to a single person. Halzen is a peculiar choice for a solo prize, given IceCube's multifaceted collaborative structure and Halzen's own view that his leadership role was almost accidental.

A cool thing about Herbert Simon was that, in addition to being a founding figure in the field of AI, he had well-worked-out views about how artifice relates to human knowledge. I feel like our discourse isn't really cutting it these days.

We just added James Fleming’s “Excuse Us, While We Fix the Weather” to our 𝘚𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 archive–now with a new foreword! Originally published in 𝘙𝘊𝘊 𝘗𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴, the piece highlights the male-dominated culture surrounding proposals for weather and climate interventions: springs-rcc.org/excuse-us-wh...

Very sad to hear that Margaret Hamilton has passed away. Here's a short thread about her role in the Apollo mission, and her lesser-known work on the simulations that led to the discovery of Chaos Theory. 🧪 👩‍🔬 ⚛️

NEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:

Ooh, @rebeccacharbon.bsky.social has been working on the history of the dead pulsar planets that were also the (weirdly neglected) first-discovered exoplanets. The pulsar and planets have been given the very Halloween-y names Lich, Draugr, Poltergeist, and Phobetor.

Accelerator Energies xkcd.com/3306/

The postwar funding boom in US physics came to a halt at the end of the 1960s, when officials in the Nixon administration made major cuts to the federal science budget. As historian Julia Menzel of @ihpst-uoft.bsky.social notes, the lessons learned then may be helpful to today’s scientists. #histSTM

The National Science Foundation has withheld $1.4 billion in research funds appropriated by Congress during Fiscal Year 2026. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/02/u...

History Dept @ University of Texas Austin invites applications for a TT assistant professor, specializing in modern history of science, technology, & medicine. Committee will consider applicants who specialize in any scientific practice in any part of the world since 1600. Deadline Nov 30 #HPS

Congratulations to my colleague Rebecca Charbonneau @rebeccacharbon.bsky.social on winning the 2027 Osterbrock Prize from the American Astronomical Society's Historical Astronomy Division! aas.org/posts/news/2...

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, we look at a new volume on the long history of efforts to measure the effects of general relativity. It showcases extraordinary efforts to secure high-precision measurements and adds to our understanding of GR's acceptance, neglect, and renaissance. #HPS

The video is now available from Fara Dabhoiwala's lecture at AIP last week—an account of a Jamaican prodigy, his failed nomination to the Royal Society, and the only known depiction of the first return of Halley's comet. A story almost lost to history recovered from clues hidden in a small painting!

New job: Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of the History of Science and Technology University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill jobs.h-net.org/jobs/70470

In today's AIP History Weekly Edition, Jon Phillips @jowiph.bsky.social looks at a new article by Alex Blum and Arnab Rai Choudhuri presenting the early history of magnetohydrodynamics. Theorists struggled for years to get a grip on MHD theory before it became the go-to tool for explaining the Sun.

The University of Vienna is hosting a lecture series this fall and winter on the "History and Foundations of Modern Physics." Christoph Lehner will kick things off by discussing Schrödinger’s equation on Oct. 1. Click through to learn more, including how to watch online. #HPS

I feel like we don't talk enough about how Mark Zuckerberg lit the equivalent of nine years' worth of NSF's entire budget on fire failing to reinvent Second Life.

If you're not in London and free this evening you can watch a video from the LRB about this amazing story. (I had no idea Hume was such a racist☹️.) I'll put that link in a comment.

"Constructing Midichlorians: The Demystification of Jedi Power/Knowledge" ... or maybe "Trade Route Taxation and the Economic Causes of the Collapse of the Old Republic"

OK gang, it's Fat Bear Week again. Get out there and vote!

Definitely a credible cover, having a "Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers" donate $150k to a PAC.