Description: Formal portrait photographs of scientists tend to preserve the stiffness of the moment, rather than capture the sitter’s personality. Perhaps that is the reason that candid photographs of celebrities like Albert Einstein stick in public memory.A 1931 photograph of three Nobel laureate physicists illustrates why we tend to remember the informal photos of scientists more than
Description: May 11 is the anniversary of establishment of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). That 1976 legislation further ratified the influence of scientists on national policy, positioning them to provide ready advice to the President.
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_arc_391843,size=300,center]By the 1960s, Science Service had been acquiring photographs of scientists, obscure as well as famous, for over four decades. Portraits of Edison or Einstein were always in demand, but experience had also shown that bright, accomplished young people might someday be awarded a major prize or make a discovery deemed
Description: Everyone loves a parade – especially one followed by a banquet. When scientists and politicians met in Washington, D.C., on November 23, 1936, to celebrate the centennial of the U.S. patent system, they listened first to a conventional program of speeches. Then, in the afternoon, Science Service director Watson Davis arranged something different: a “Research Parade” featuring
Description: For six seasons, beginning in 1984, the television series Smithsonian World opened new windows on the research and scientists at the Smithsonian Institution.
Description: At a September 27, 1931, symposium about the evolution of the universe, Watson Davis photographed astronomer Abbé Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, astrophysicist Edward Arthur Milne, and Anglican bishop and mathematician Ernest William Barnes.