al-mofhariz

Chicago's Field Museum is making drastic cuts to basic research in order to meet a constrained budget. Lukas has argued that this should be seen as a blow to scientists, historians of science, and members of the public, even while we acknowledge museums' complex roots in the cultural capital of the Gilded Age.

Both Lukas's analysis and poignancy feel spot on, and I take seriously the idea that we can't cleave them apart. Museums don't just conveniently blur analytical binaries (like public and private, internal and external, expert and lay) for historians of science; they're also sites with which people fall in love, and thus a hook for wider audiences.

People who study museums—like Lukas, Jenna Tonn, and others—know this well. But I think one thing the Field Museum episode reveals is that, even within the academy (indeed, even within history of science), there are some widespread misperceptions about today's museum curation—some will be surprised that curato…

A few weeks ago, I attended a birthday party at the University of Chicago called "Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." It was a stimulating event, and I left with many thoughts, problems, and puzzles. Below, I try to capture the gestalt of the presentations and discussions there. My post follows a nice summary that Michael Barany gave us of a sister Kuhn event at Princeton.

If there was one theme that came through during the conference, it was a renewed interest in reasoning by exemplars, and the papers there suggested that a great deal of compelling work is being done on this topic and that a great deal more remains to be explored. At times, discussions of reasoning by exemplar took on the feeling of agenda-setting: some programmatic vision for the history of science being cast on the shores of Lake Michigan. We'll see what it nets. You'll see flashes of this theme throughout the summaries below.

This post is…