Phunday
Phunday is the unofficial name given to the History of the Physical Sciences Workshop organized annually by Princeton, Harvard, and MIT. Graduate students and faculty members pre-circulate short 10 page papers and discuss each of them as a group. Typical submissions include condensed versions of dissertation chapters, seminar papers, research proposals, and prospectuses. The workshop provides an excellent opportunity for participants to receive constructive feedback and fresh ideas on work in progress from people outside their own departments.
Phunday 2012
Saturday April 21, 2012
Dickinson Hall 211
Phunday will again be hosted by Princeton's History of Science Program on Saturday April 21, 2012. Papers for discussion and a schedule for the day's events will be accessible from this website one week before the workshop.
To access the papers, please follow this link.
The site is password protected. Please contact Iain Watts (iwatts@princeton.edu) for login information required to access papers.
Schedule:
Friday, April 20
8:00PM Welcome Dinner for Participants
Saturday, April 21
The Workshop will be held in Room 211, Department of History, Dickinson Hall
8:30am - Breakfast
9:00am - Welcome and Introductions
9:15-10:45am - Session 1: "Technologies of Accuracy"
- Margaret Schotte (Princeton) - Searching for Certainty at Sea
- Shreeharsh Kelkar (MIT) - The Power of Sight: The Case of Hawk-Eye in Tennis
- James Bergman (Harvard) - Independent Versus Networked Observation: The Blue Hill-Signal Service Controversy of 1887
10:45am - Coffee
11:00-12:30pm - Session 2: "Integrating Machines and People"
- Stephanie Dick (Harvard) - MZCSYMA: The Making of a Computing Community
- Marie Burks (MIT) - It's a bird...it's a plane...: Representations of bird flight and the prospect of mechanical flight in the 19th century
- Ksenia Tatarchenko (Princeton) - Splitting Minds, Bilateral Agreements and International Science
12:30pm - Lunch
Lunch will feature "Speaking Utopian," a talk by Professor Michael Gordin (Princeton), to begin at 12:40, followed by questions.
1:45-2:45pm - Session 3: "Time, Space, and Crossing Borders"
- Iain Watts (Princeton) - Electric Circuits: Following international pathways of scientific news during the Napoleonic Wars
- Lisa Crystal (Harvard) - Atomic Times: Clock Making in the Postwar Era
2:45 - Coffee
3:00-4:30 - Session 4: "Maintaining Ordered States"
- Aaron Wright (MIT) - Forgetting physics: the physicalization of logic at IBM 1959-1967
- Robert MacGregor (Princeton) - Managing Complexity in the Apollo Program
- Benjamin Wilson (MIT) - Cold War Dreams: Nuclear Arms Control in American Science, Politics, and Culture
4:30 - Conclusions and final thoughts
Past Events
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Phunday was held in Princeton on Saturday, April 24, 2010. Paper submissions and a full schedule of events can be accessed on this website.