Feature Stories

Research Topics

Feature Stories Overview

Deputy Head, Communications Team

Stephanie Hood

+49 30 22667 242/315

shood@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) has published its format “Research Topics” since 2008. Every six to eight weeks, researchers present individual contributions of one relevant aspect of their research or present a new research project. “Research Topics” appear on the home page of the Institute’s website and in a printed version available in the MPIWG’s entrance hall. The online version makes the latest research easily available and offers links to sources, databases, audiovisual material, publications, authors, and partner institutions. Published in German and English, the collection of Research Topics gives a representative picture of the ways in which research is conducted at the Institute. Copies can be ordered in brochure form through the Institute's press contact.

No 26
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Parts Unknown: Making the Familiar Strange

MPIWG artist-in-residence Rohini Devasher explores the interface between art practice and science, specifically drawing and astronomy, through the lens of metaphor.

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No 24
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Endangerment and Its Consequences

A new working group is challenging the taken-for-granted nature of endangerment in contemporary discourse by placing it in conceptual and historical perspective and exploring the situated, cult...

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No 23
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The Equilibrium Controversy

Published in Edition Open Access, a new volume by Jürgen Renn and Peter Damerow sheds fresh light on a major Renaissance controversy: through the equilibrium controversy, key aspects of mechani...

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No 20
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Baby Science in fin-de-siècle America

In her new project, Christine von Oertzen explores why members of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae in the United States came to focus in the 1880s on the early development of infants and t...

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No 18
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Histories of Scientific Observation

Lorraine Daston, director of the MPIWG, has coedited a book on the histories of scientific observation from the fifth to the late twentieth century which presents studies from the working group...

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No 17
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On Historicizing Epistemology: an Essay

On the occasion of the 65th birthday of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, the MPIWG is publishing excerpts from his recent publication On Historicizing Epistemology: An Essay (Stanford University Press, 2...

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No 16
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Johann Lambert's Conversion to a Geometry of Space

The new Max Planck research group director Vincenzo De Risi is studying the development of a new concept of geometry in the eighteenth century.

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No 15
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The Uncertain Boundaries between Light and Matter

Historian of physics Marta Jordi Taltavull examines the history of optical dispersion, from classical to quantum physics.

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No 14
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Every Move Will Be Recorded

Historian Grégoire Chamayou describes the machinic police utopia in eighteenth-century Paris.

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No 12
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The Concepts of Immanuel Kant’s Natural Philosophy

A new database developed by Wolfgang Lefèvre renders the explicit and implicit networks of concepts in Kant’s natural philosophy.

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No 11
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Jean Piaget and the Child’s Spontaneous Geometry

Barbara Wittmann examines the history of children’s drawings as research objects and instruments in the human sciences and humanities between 1880 and 1950.

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No 10
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Galileo and the Others

To mark the anniversary of Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s moons, the magazine Sterne und Weltraum will publish a special issue with contributions from researchers of the MPIWG.

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No 8
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Dreaming in and of Neurophilosophy

Nicolas Langlitz’s anthropological investigation of brain research and philosophy in the sleep laboratory shows how philosophical questions that scholars have wrestled with for centuries are ad...

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No 7
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Who Were Einstein’s Opponents?

Historian Milena Wazeck’s recent monograph focuses on the popular opposition to the theory of relativity in the 1920s.

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