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 […]
I’m going to try to articulate why studying scientific objects matters. I’m going to talk about why we study objects in the first place, how this started out, and how we study scientific objects today.
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 – […]
Scientific objects are different enough from the things you might find in your house and home that academics treat them differently. But is that the right approach?
Science is pretty damn personal.
Sometimes, you look at why people do things and you think “why on earth are they doing this?”.
There are a couple of things I’d like to unpack in this blogpost: the feelings of not being a “real” expert, how they come about, and what someone might be able to do about them.
The important parts of an oral history, I think, are as much about what people don’t say as anything else.
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 […]
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 […]
Osnat Katz Moon 