The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were efforts to control the spread of nuclear information and the newly discovered...

The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it reall...

If the twentieth century saw the rise of "Big Science", then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were surely an age of thrift. As Simon Werrett's new history shows, frugal early modern experimenters transformed their homes into laboratories as t...

On January 5, 1845, the Prussian cultural minister received a request by a group of six young men to form a new Physical Society in Berlin. In fields from thermodynamics, mechanics, and electromagnetism to animal electricity, ophthalmology, and psych...

On the great Pacific discovery expeditions of the "long eighteenth century", naturalists for the first time were commonly found aboard ships sailing forth from European ports. Lured by intoxicating opportunities to discover exotic and perhaps lucrati...

Founded around 1700 by a group of German Lutherans known as Pietists, the Halle Orphanage became the institutional headquarters of a universal seminar that still stands largely intact today. It was the base of an educational, charitable, and scientif...

Galileo's Idol offers a vivid depiction of Galileo's friend, student, and patron, Gianfrancesco Sagredo (1571-1620). Sagredo's life, which has never before been studied in depth, brings to light the inextricable relationship between the production, d...