Description: Long ago and far away, before gray hairs and creaky knees, before history became my passion, I was an undergraduate physics major. Physics seemed fascinating and beautiful, if difficult. Later, after career paths led into history and science policy, I learned that physics, however elegant, did not reside in a cultural vacuum. Its people and discoveries coexisted with
Description: As editor E. E. Slosson began setting up the Science Service news office, his mail was flooded with inquiries from potential contributors. Writers and photographers described their accomplishments and submitted samples of their work. One such letter, from Albert Harlingue on April 13, 1921, must have piqued Slosson’s interest, for it coincided with the Washington visit of “a
Description: President Calvin Coolidge's second inauguration in 1925 reaches an audience of millions, thanks to a new technological innovation--the radio.
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: For six seasons, beginning in 1984, the television series Smithsonian World opened new windows on the research and scientists at the Smithsonian Institution.
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_arc_395101,size=300,left]When Harvard Medical School distributed these photographs of John Clavon Norman, Jr., M.D. (1930-2014) to news services in the 1960s, Dr. Norman was at an exciting stage of his career. The young physician had already made quite a journey, but there would be even more paths to blaze. He had been born in West Virginia to parents who
Description: This post is the second in a series this month that honors the anniversary of the famous Scopes Trial, held in Tennessee from July 10–21, 1925, and highlights a set of rare and newly digitized photographs, from the Smithsonian Institution Archives, of witnesses at the trial collections, which have been added to the Smithsonian Flickr Commons. In tone, composition, and setting,
Description: In a world drowning in images, where we swipe past photos of friends, relatives, and selves in mere seconds, a set of remarkable portraits taken in the 1910s and 1920s by Julian Papin Scott (1877-1961) deserve more considered attention. Sometimes, his subjects appear immersed in work, surrounded by microscopes, beakers, or stacks of books, as if unaware of the photographer.
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.
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