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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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The SIC is delighted to announce that we have been invited by our colleagues from the Archivio Scientifico e Tecnologico of the University of Turin (ASTUT), Italy, for our symposium in 2015. Plans are in place for special visits to the noted University collections of physics, anatomy, and criminal anthropology as well as to Turin’s …

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The topic of this meeting will be New Views on Old Instruments, with the potential to include sections such as: New analytic methods New ways of public engagement with instruments New political aims (for example UNESCO recognition for material heritage) New challenges posed through (mostly, but not exclusively) post-war scientific instruments (conservation, selection, issues of …

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Welcome to the website archive of the 2013 International Congress of History of Science, Technology and Medicine, hosted at the University of Manchester, UK, from 21 to 28 July 2013. iCHSTM 2013 was the largest meeting in the history of the field. Taking as its theme Knowledge at work, it featured nearly 1400 papers across 23 parallel …

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The Museum of Astronomy and Related Sciences of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation is glad to host the 31st edition of the Symposium of the Scientific Instrument Commission. The conference is open to all interested in the history, preservation, documentation and use of scientific instruments. The Conference will take place between 08 and …

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The 30th Symposium of the Scientific Instrument Commission will take place from 19-24 September 2011 in Kassel, Germany and will be hosted by the Astronomisch-Physikalisches Kabinett (APK). The main theme of this year’s symposium is Instruments, Texts, and Images though, as always, papers on other topics relating to scientific instruments will be welcomed, space-permitting. An …

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