This special issue stresses the importance of material culture in diplomatic studies of science and technology. In our studies, objects are considered powerful tokens of complexity in diplomatic encounters and of asymmetry in international relations. The contributors are committed to theorizing about the role of objects in diplomatic exchanges during the postwar period and, at the same time, the role

Scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain met in Geneva in 1958 and 1959 to create the technical basis for monitoring a future nuclear test ban treaty. Despite their scientific veneer, these meetings were politically motivated and the scientists tried to forward U.S. or Soviet objectives through their technical discussions. Seismographic data was a cornerstone of the proposed monitoring regime

Anthony Ascham's Sphere is historically significant since it appeared a generation earlier than William Thomas's 1553 work, which historians had considered the earliest English-language rendering of De Sphaera. Ascham completed his folio-sized manuscript in 1527 at St. John's College, Cambridge. Suffused with color, diagrams, maps, and volvelles, The Sphere prompts the modern scholar to wonder which

S. P. Thompson developed a detailed theory of history in order to understand and explain changes in both science and religion over the centuries. This theory tried to take science and religion seriously as categories based on genuine aspects of human experience, and to understand trends that both brought them together and separated them. For him, the most important element of the practice of history

The Industrial Enlightenment is widely thought to have been a period when “science” and “technology” became intimately intertwined. In his 1791 book on the building of the Eddystone lighthouse (completed in 1759), the English engineer John Smeaton praised the Royal Society for being more than a group of abstract theoreticians. This article looks at the fellows of Smeaton's Royal Society network who

The essay outlines the development of the history of science and medicine in Croatia since the first half of the 20th century, addressing in more detail some recent research trends that seem to have the potential to reshape and reposition this relatively marginal field within the national academic landscape. It examines the origins and implication of the “historicization” of the history of science

On April 8, 1966, 4,808 barrels—208.2 L each—were buried at Savannah River nuclear cemetery in Aiken, South Carolina. They contained about 1,100 tons of radioactive contaminated soil and vegetation from Palomares, a village on the South Coast of Spain. Earlier that year, about 9 kg of plutonium had been scattered over Palomares due to a U.S. Air Force accident involving four nuclear bombs. In this

This paper is a preliminary study focused on the astronomical manuscript Marcianus latinus VIII.31 (2614) and its socio-historical context of use and production, the Venetian colony of Crete in the 15th century. It is a relevant source for the study of scientific interactions in colonial, multilinguistic, and interreligious contexts in the Eastern Mediterranean for at least two reasons: (a) it contains

This paper asks how a scientific object functions in a diplomatic context by examining the distribution of radioisotopes by the United States to Japan in 1950. In particular, it aims to shed light on some material dimensions of the diplomatic roles that a scientific object can play. With diplomacy as its main focus, this study centers on those who received the radioisotopes (Japanese scientists) as

In this article, we document how, in the public arena, British readers of the first edition of Isaac Newton's Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687) tried to make sense of the relation between gravity, matter, and divine and natural causation—an issue on which Newton had remained entirely silent in the first edition of the Principia. We show that readers attached new meanings to the Principia

Contemporary scholarship concerning science diplomacy is increasingly taking a historical approach. In our introduction to this special issue, we argue that this approach promises insight into science diplomacy because of the tools historians of science bring to their work. In particular, we observe that not only are historians of science currently poised to chart the diplomatic aspects involved in

This paper explores the construction of scientists' expertise on international affairs through a study of the rhetoric of U.S. atomic scientists during public and policy‐making debates on the international control of atomic energy between 1945 and 1947. It explores the claims scientists made about the nature of their expertise on issues of diplomacy and international relations and how their expertise

As COVID‐19 drags on and new vaccines promise widespread immunity, the world's attention has turned to predicting how the present pandemic will end. How do societies know when an epidemic is over and normal life can resume? What criteria and markers indicate such an end? Who has the insight, authority, and credibility to decipher these signs? Detailed research on past epidemics has demonstrated that

In the following article,1 the authors would like to add UID/HIS/00286/2019 as a funder to their article in the Funding information section. The authors apologize for any inconvenience caused.

In the following article,1 the authors would like to add UID/HIS/00286/2013 as a funder to their article in the Funding information section. The authors apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Due to a production failure, errors were introduced in the article “Giovan Battista Della Porta and Francis Bacon on the creative power of experimentation” in Centaurus Volume 62 Issue 3 (2020). The online version of the article has been corrected and can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1600-0498.12341.” We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Our aim is to shed light on the relationships between research, knowledge, and policy in the case of goitre and the use of iodine as a preventive measure against it in Norway from the 1850s onward. Goitre was previously widespread in certain areas of Norway, but disappeared around 1950. After many decades of silence about goitre and iodine, an expert report in 2016 argued that action should be taken

After a deadly 1958 nuclear reactor accident in Vinča, Yugoslavia, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) engaged in intensive nuclear diplomacy to assemble a major international scientific experiment on radiation dosimetry at the accident site. The 1960 Vinča Dosimetry Experiment made history as the first multinational “big science” project in this field. It was also a significant political

Bill Jenkins masterfully explores a brilliant era for science in Scotland, the first decades of the 19th century, in which Edinburgh received and participated in continental debates (led by the likes of Cuvier, Von Baer, Lamarck, and Geoffroy) on the formation and history of the Earth and, correlatively, on the possible history of life on the planet. The atmosphere of religious openness encouraged

After the outbreak of the Pacific War, the United States and the United Kingdom both set up cultural assistance programs to China in order to aid the fight against Japan in Asia and to shape the postwar world according to their interests. From 1942 to 1946, the United States sent 30 experts in science, technology, medicine, and public health to China. Among them was George Cressey, a geographer of

This article addresses the inter‐imperial collaboration in the social sciences promoted by the Commission for Technical Cooperation in Africa South of Sahara (CCTA) and its advisory board, the Scientific Council for Africa South of the Sahara (CSA), at the intersection of diplomatic history and the history of science during late colonialism. It is our purpose to re‐evaluate how the common aim of reinvigorating

This paper evaluates Kepler's 1618–1621 Epitome of Copernican Astronomy in light of two contextual events: the 1616 Decree of the Index banning Copernican books (including Volume 1 of Kepler's Epitome in 1619) and the start of the Thirty Years' War in 1618. Kepler's Epitome seems to defy traditional genre expectations: it takes the form of a textbook, and yet (especially in later volumes) it is more

This article examines the attempt by the Kingdom of Morocco—a country of pivotal geopolitical importance in the late 1970s and early 1980s—to secure a research reactor. It finds that by treating that reactor as a diplomatic object, we can observe the different diplomatic frameworks in which that object was conceived of, contextualized, and negotiated. The historical emergence of these frameworks occurred

Yves Simonin, a rather obscure professor of hydrography in Bayonne, submitted five scientific papers to the Paris Academy of Sciences between 1738 and 1740, which only survive in the original manuscript versions. The topics Simonin deals with in these texts are essentially three: the rectification of navigation charts of the Southern Sea, the shape of the Earth, and the heliocentric theory. Far from

History of science's spatial turn has focused on the horizontal dimension, leaving the role of the vertical mostly unexplored as both a condition and object of scientific knowledge production. This special issue seeks to contribute to a burgeoning discussion on the role of verticality in modern sciences, building upon a wider interdisciplinary debate about the importance of the vertical and the volumetric

The insight that scientific theories are “practice‐laden” has animated scholarship in the history of science for nearly three decades. This article examines a style of geographical thought that was, I argue, movement‐laden. The thought‐style in question has been described as a “vertical consciousness that engulfed science in the early nineteenth century,” and is closely associated with the geographical

Like other aspiring geologists in the 1830s, Darwin focused heavily on the rising and falling of the earth's crust. I use his time in the Andes to underscore the importance he placed on larger questions of vertical movement, which mountains helped to solidify in his mind. His most impressive ramblings occurred in 1835 on two high passes in the Andes. Prior to his upland journey, he was well prepared

The role of verticality in 19th‐ and 20th‐century fields of knowledge‐making has received increased attention among historians of science. Correspondingly, cultural historians have explored the growing importance of a bird's eye view in popular culture throughout the 1800s. The elevated positions created in science and public discourse have both contributed to a modern ability to see the bigger picture

This paper examines the practices and epistemic dimensions relating to subterranean space that led to a new three‐dimensional understanding of the terrain, its scientific investigation, and its political acquisition as territory. Although caves had been explored by upright descent since the 18th century, improved techniques for surveying, mapping, and exploring deep shafts established speleology (“cave

In 1942, American Nobel Prize‐winning physicist Arthur Compton pointed out that, “Because in this field of cosmic ray studies certain unique advantages are given by their geographical position, this field of physics has been especially emphasized in South America.” This paper seeks to interrogate the making of Latin America's uniqueness with respect to cosmic‐ray research through an analysis that considers

This paper is concerned with the way in which scientists speak—in extended life‐story interviews recorded recently—about the role of verticality (understood here as an orientation in space: up/down rather than across) in past scientific work. In particular, I explore several episodes of scientific work in which (the scientists involved tell us) verticality emerged unexpectedly as an important aspect

Between 1820 and 1850, the Dutch government sent several scientists to the Netherlands Indies as part of the Natuurkundige Commissie (Natural History Committee). One of these was naturalist Eltio Alegondus Forsten (1811–1843), who was sent on a collecting mission to Celebes (Sulawesi). This paper explores the ways in which Forsten was in a relationship of mutual interdependence with four spheres of

In May 1971, the Czechoslovak capital hosted an international conference on the environment that brought together high‐ranking government officials and scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain. The idea to organize such an event reflected Czechoslovakia's interest in environmental planning and was one of the main outcomes of the country's science diplomacy in the field of global environmentalism

This article considers a relatively unknown episode in the early Cold War that involved the US and Brazil, as well as a number of other countries. From 1950, the leading figure in Brazil's nuclear effort, Admiral Álvaro Alberto, established amicable connections with the representatives of other nations in order to make it possible for Brazil to develop an atomic energy complex. The U.S. reaction to

This Special Issue was selected by a dedicated ESHS committee after a public call for special issues. Abstract As technologies of ocean exploitation emerged during the late 1960s, science policy and diplomacy were formed in response to anticipated capabilities that did not match the realities of extracting deep-sea minerals and of resource exploitation in the deep ocean at the time. Promoters of ocean

The year 1968 is universally considered a watershed in history, as the world was experiencing an accelerated growth of anti‐establishment protests that would have long‐lasting impacts on the cultural, social, and political spheres of human life. On September 26, amid social and political unrest across the globe, 62 physicists gathered in Geneva to found the European Physical Society. Among these were

The first of the transfermium elements—those elements with an atomic number greater than 100—were discovered in the 1950s, largely by the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) in California and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia. After each new element was claimed to have been discovered by one lab, the claim was contested by the other. The International Union of Pure and

This special issue brings to the attention of the scholarly community some of the common features and some of the subtle, but important, differences between Francis Bacon's and Giovan Battista Della Porta's ways of dealing with the reading, selecting, enacting, and recording of recipes. Focusing on questions of genre, intellectual and material context, strategies of research, and strategies of performing

The relationship between Francis Bacon's Sylva sylvarum and Giovan Battista Della Porta's Magia naturalis has previously been discussed in terms of sources and borrowings in the literature. More recently, it has been suggested that one can read these two works as belonging to a common genre: as collections of recipes or books of secrets. Taking this as a framework, in this paper I address another type

In 1622, Francis Bacon published his Historia naturalis et experimentalis. Many of the features of Bacon's natural and experimental histories were entirely new. This paper studies this literary form as a new epistemic genre. In particular, it analyzes its origin and evolution in Bacon's work, focusing on how its basic template and features were influenced by his specific epistemic requirements. It

This article is a case study of how geographical knowledge was practiced in China before the age of print. The Shazhou tujing, or Patterned Guidelines of Shazhou, represents the earliest material evidence of “patterned guidelines” (tujing), a geographical genre which is believed to have paved the way to “local gazetteers” (difang zhi), the most important genre for our knowledge of the history and geography

A frequently recounted episode in early modern medicine concerns the physician Helvetius's introduction of ipecacuanha to French medical practice after curing Louis XIV's son of dysentery using this medicinal drug. To this day, the Helvetius story remains riven with contradictions, obscurity, and confusion, even down to the nature of the drug involved. This article, challenging histories of “information”

This paper investigates the emergence, in the second part of the 17th century, of a new body of experimental knowledge dealing with the chemical transformations of water taking place in plants. We call this body of experimental knowledge a “chemical history of vegetation.” We show that this chemical natural history originated, in terms of recipes and methods of investigation, in the works of Francis

The history of climate research in the 20th century has been characterised by a crucial shift from a geography-oriented, two-dimensional approach towards a physics-based, three-dimensional concept of climate. In the 1930s, the introduction of new technology, such as radiosondes, enabled climatologists to investigate the high atmosphere, which had before been out of reach. This “conquest of the third

In the 1960s and 1970s, scuba technology, underwater cameras, and documentarians revealed a long‐hidden underwater world to the public. At this time oceanographic science was growing exponentially. Historians of the marine sciences have focused their studies of the period on institutional and military partnerships, and on the scientist‐administrators who shaped oceanographic research institutions (such

In the decades after World War I, the development of aviation and meteorology became increasingly entangled, with the result that meteorology became a necessary part of the epistemic infrastructure of routine aviation. This paper explores the complex re‐spatialisation of meteorological practice that occurred as the New Zealand Meteorological Service (NZMS) transformed its data collection, interpretation

On March 30, 2020, UNESCO hosted a global ministerial dialogue on scientific cooperation in the face of COVID‐19. By that time, WHO had called COVID‐19 a pandemic, cases in Europe and the USA were skyrocketing, and stock markets were crashing. The first virtual meeting of its kind was clearly a success, despite the unfamiliar tools (such as the “mute” function), with 77 science ministers and several

This piece seeks to elucidate how and why Latin America is neither anecdotal nor peripheral to pandemic preoccupations—nor to larger health and disease narratives—past and present. First, it examines the world's proportionately most destructive pandemic as coterminous with the rise of imperialism. Next, it traces how the impetus for international health cooperation based on regional crises predated

In the present paper, I present and discuss some new information about the life of Paul Wittich from Wrocław, Poland (formerly Breslau, Germany), an elusive mathematician and astronomer of the late 16th century. Wittich seems to have played a significant role in the emergence of two important, though short‐lived, developments of late 16th‐century science: the so‐called prosthaphaeresis calculating

This is a study of Bernardino Ramazzini's De fontium mutinensium (1691) as an artefact that reveals how disparate historiographical approaches were shaped by the culture of the new science, when novel investigative practices and a new instrument‐mediated vision transformed the historical imagination in a similar way, creating a common 17th‐century experience of history. In England, De fontium was valued

In this paper, I explain Francis Bacon's use of plants as philosophical instruments in the context of his Historia vitae et mortis. My main claim is that Bacon experimented with plants in order to obtain knowledge about the hidden processes of nature, knowledge that could be transferred to the human case and used for the prolongation of life. Bacon's experiments were based on Giambattista della Porta's

In this paper, I suggest that research results from the history and philosophy of modern science provide a valuable methodological contribution for investigating early modern experimental philosophy and employ them to reassess the contribution of Giovan Battista Della Porta to its development. In modern science, the production of experimental knowledge is dependent on a complex array of communication

This paper explores the editorial influence of Joseph Banks on the Philosophical Transactions—still, at the time of his accession to the Presidency of the Royal Society in 1778, the most prestigious scientific periodical published in English. In particular, it examines how Banks forged, and wielded, personal influence over what went into the Transactions. Nominally, at least, the periodical was under

In 1798, astronomer Franz Xaver von Zach in Gotha and publisher Friedrich Justin Bertuch in Weimar launched the first astronomical‐geographical journal, Allgemeine geographische Ephemeriden (AGE). The journal was intended to provide professionals and interested lay readership with high‐quality maps, information about new discoveries, and statistical data. The periodical was shaped by Zach's expertise

Diagrams in medieval manuscripts of Greek mathematical and astronomical works can seem peculiar for a modern reader, given their persistent and widespread tendency to represent more geometric regularity than the argument requires and their usual visual inaccuracy in depicting the mathematical objects discussed in the text. Although most scholars believe that these tendencies go back to the original

In this article I present the unique partial transmission of Euclid's Elements in the medieval Hebrew calendrical treatise Yesod 'Olam (The Foundation of the World), which was composed by Isaac Israeli in 14th‐century Toledo. After a short introduction of Yesod 'Olam, I discuss the role of mathematics, as understood by Israeli, in the study of astronomy and the Jewish calendar. I then provide a mapping

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the transmission of Euclid's Elements in the Middle Ages, and in particular of an Arabic version of this work, which medieval sources attribute to al‐Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf ibn Maṭar. I examine some medieval reports that explicitly ascribe certain textual variants and diagrams to this “Ḥajjāj‐version.” These reports concern Books II–V and VII–X. I compare them to

The editors of scientific journals are key gatekeepers for building careers and communicating knowledge, but we know far less about them than about scientific authors and readers. Using a variety of methodological approaches, this issue of Centaurus investigates the motivations for editorship, and the practices,strategies and resources needed to carry it out successfully. It asks us to reflect on how

Ever since the Royal Society replaced the editor of the Philosophical Transactions with an editorial committee in 1752, it created an increasingly complex system which distributed editorial work and responsibility among many individuals. A 1902 suggestion that the Society ought to appoint an editor offers an opportunity to explore what the role of “editor” was believed to be: why might such a role

This article focuses on the Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev's assessment of certain representations of various aspects of the periodic system that employed more mathematical methodology. The equations of interest were created by E. J. Mills, B. N. Chicherin, and J. H. Vincent. The English chemist Mills tried to find a firmer numerical basis for the periodicity of the elements. The Russian