STEP - Science and Technology in the European Periphery

CFP. “Communicating conceptual changes in the physical sciences”

European Society for the History of Science, Lisbon 4-6 September, 2014

In preparation for the next conference of the ESHS, I would like to open a CFP
for papers within a panel on the history of the physical sciences (broadly
understood) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The goal of the panel
would be to study the role of communication in the dissemination and
configuration of new concepts and theories, as well as the abandonment or
rejection of previous ones. I am especially (but not only) thinking of papers
related to novel physical ideas that relate to the development and establishment
of “classical” and “modern” physics. Actors in these case studies would extend
not only to “top” theoretical physicists but also to engineers, popularisers,
and any other practitioner of science.

Just to give an example, my own contribution will explore the way debates on the
abandonment of the electromagnetic ether in the early twentieth century clashed
with the epistemic needs of wireless engineers, posing problems in the
understanding of action at a distance

If you are interested to join in the panel, please contact jaume.navarro@ehu.es
by 1st December 2013.

Dr. Jaume Navarro
Ikerbasque Research Professor
UPV/EHU
Santamaria Zentroa, D10
Plaza Elhuyar 2, 20018, Donostia (Spain)
Phone: +34 943017424