History of Science, Technology, and Medicine

Astronomer Kevin Schlaufman, Carnegie-Princeton Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories, tells the story of exoplanets to date, and outlines the progress being made in the search for life elsewhere in our galaxy. This talk is part of the Carnegie Lecture series.

Asif Siddiqi, professor of history at Fordham University and the Searle Visiting Professor in the History at Caltech and The Huntington, discusses a lost “global” history of space exploration and the reach of space activities at the height of the Cold War.

Join Anat Shahar, staff scientist in the geophysical laboratory at the Carnegie Institution for Science, for an exploration of terrestrial planets and a discussion of what laboratory experiments can reveal about the conditions that formed them.

Amanda E. Herbert, assistant professor of history at Christopher Newport University, describes 17th- and 18th-century medical regimes, exploring why Britons drank and swam in mineral waters in order to heal themselves from disease or injury.

Kip Thorne, Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech, describes the ideas underlying general relativity and the amazing discoveries about warped spacetime that have been made in the past 100 years. One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein formulated his general relativity theory, which describes space and time as warped by mass and energy.

Dena Goodman, professor of history at the University of Michigan, discusses a group of young men whose passion for science guided them through the turmoil of the French Revolution and into leadership roles in the decades that followed.

Simon Winchester, author of The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, tells the extraordinary story of British surveyor, William Smith.

Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, co-creators of “The Knick,” have a discussion and Q&A about their Cinemax series. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the show follows Dr. John Thackery (played by Clive Owen) at The Knickerbocker Hospital – aka The Knick – a microcosm of medical progress, racial tension, sexism, addiction, and class conflict in 1900s New York City. The panel focuses on what it takes to bring medical history to life, and the resonance of the past for a 21st-century present. Dock Society members Dr. Richard Ellis and Dr. Claire Panosian Dunavan moderate.

William Rankin, assistant professor of the history of science at Yale University, explores the links between roadside surveying markers, nuclear missile targeting, and new forms of mapping in the twentieth century. His talk will focus on the grid-like alternatives to latitude and longitude that were created during and after the World Wars, especially the global system installed by the US Army. For soldiers, engineers, and homeowners alike, these invisible but now ubiquitous technologies blurred the line between the paper map and the real world and made it possible to treat the spherical earth as perfectly flat. This was part of the Trent Dames Lecture series.

Best-selling author Andrea Wulf (Founding Gardeners; The Brother Gardeners) discusses her new book on the extraordinary life of the visionary German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Humboldt, says Wulf, created the way we understand nature today. Perceiving nature as an interconnected global force, Humboldt discovered similarities between climate zones across the world and predicted human-induced climate change. His eloquent writings inspired naturalists and poets such as Darwin, Wordsworth, Muir, and Thoreau.