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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 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...
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...
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 exploitation in the late 1960s envisaged wonders such as rare mineral extraction and the stationing of divers...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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