The 45th Scientific Instrument Symposium will be held in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, from 7 to 11 September 2026 for the first time. This global event will bring together specialists in the history of science, scientific and technical heritage conservation, museologists and researchers from leading international institutions in La Chaux-de-Fonds and Neuchâtel. Organised by the Association Automates […]
The 44th Scientific Instrument Symposium will be held in Dunedin, New Zealand, from 29 June – 5 July 2025 as part of the 27th International Congress of History of Science and Technology. https://www.ichst2025.org/ The theme of the XLIV Scientific Instrument Symposium is ‘Peoples, Places, Exchanges, and Circulation’ in accordance with the theme of the […]
The 43rd Scientific Instrument Symposium was held in Ottawa, Canada from 16 - 20 September 2024 at Ingenium - Canada's Museums of Science and Innovation. Call for papers: SIC-XLIII Call-for-Papers 2024 Eng/French Conference website (to be discontinued soon) English: https://sic2024.ca/ French: https://sic2024.ca/fr/ Documents: XLIII_Scientific_Instrument_Symposium-SIC_2024_Print_Schedule SIC XLIII conference poem Precision on the Rapids (English, […]
Thanks to the generous support of our parent organisation, the DHST, we can offer a limited number of fixed grants of 300 Euros per person to help subsidise registration or travel costs for current students and early career researchers to attend our annual symposium in September: https://sic2024.ca/ Scholars with the following criteria may apply: - You are a […]
Hosted by Ileana Chinnici at the INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo, Sicily Through Ages, Cultures, Concepts: Instruments in Collections, Books, Archives The INAF (National Institute for Astrophysics– Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo and Servizi Biblioteche, Musei e Terza Missione) and the University of Palermo, Department of Physics and Chemistry, are pleased to host the annual symposium of […]
Call for Papers We will take the 40th anniversary of the Scientific Instrument Symposia as an occasion to discuss how the study of scientific instruments has changed in the last four decades and where we stand today. Are we now studying different kinds of instruments? Has the very definition of what is a scientific instrument […]
Call for Papers Symposium theme: Giants, Dwarfs and Scientific Instruments For its annual symposium to be held at the 26th International Congress of History of Science in Prague, the Scientific Instrument Commission invites papers related to the congress theme of “Giants and Dwarfs”, that is, the question of scale in the making and using of […]
The XXXIX Symposium was held as a virtual conference from 14-18 September. Presentations were pre-recorded, with live Q&A sessions held between 12.00 – 18.00 London time, to enable maximum participation across different time zones. Symposium theme: Spaces for Instruments The ‘spatial turn’ in history of science and historical geography has seen fruitful exploration of the […]
Report - “Instruments at Crossroads” The XXXVIII Symposium of the Scientific Instrument Commission took place from the 23d to the 27th of September 2019 in Havana, Cuba. It was jointly organized by the University of Havana, the Cuban Chemical Society, the Cuban Physics Society and the Office of the Historian of Havana. It took place […]
The XXXVII Symposium of the Scientific Instrument Commission will take place from the 3d to the 7th of September 2018 in Leiden and Haarlem, the Netherlands. The general topic of the conference is Instruments and the ‘Empire of Man over Things’. In The New Organon (1620), Francis Bacon famously wrote that “the empire of man over […]
Questions of place are gaining increasing importance in the work of historians of science, technology and medicine, to such an extent that some scholars suggest this corresponds to a veritable "spatial turn". It is unavoidable that researchers take sides on issues such as the situatedness of knowledge and practices, the problems pertaining to their movements […]
The SIC is delighted to announce that we have been invited by our colleagues from the Department of History of Science, Faculty of Letters, Istanbul University, for our symposium in 2016. ‘Instruments between East and West’ will be the conference theme. ‘Between East and West’ in this context might refer to ‘Orient and Occident’ or […]
