The invisible technician today

This is free writing while I work out what I want to put in my PhD chapter. Bits of it are probably wrong to varying degrees, but being wrong is most of doing research. Our reward at the end of a research project is to be slightly less wrong. One of the things that made […]

On material culture and legibility

As I write about material culture – the study of the things that people make and what it can tell us about our cultures – in my thesis, I’m conscious that I’m trying to balance two different aspects of material culture at once. One is material culture as a thing that academics write about – […]

What can we learn from printed circuit boards?

This is a post that mainly exists because my research has thrown me a curveball and I need to think out loud about what I’m doing. I research the history of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, a space lab housed in a Victorian mansion in the middle of nowhere. (Yes, really.) Part of my research […]

Is quantitative always better?

When it really comes down to it, the wild success of mathematics in describing physical concepts is what makes it matter so much. The mythologies and folk legends that have sprung up around the history of science tell us that it was mathematics that led us out of our ignorant state, that it was quantitative […]