Month: February 2015
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Harm Kamerlingh Onnes in Museum Boerhaave. Machine-esthetiek van een milde modernist
Onlangs verwierf Museum Boerhaave een collectie tekeningen van de Leidse kunstenaar Harm Kamerlingh Onnes (1893-1985), gemaakt rond 1920 in het natuurkundig laboratorium van zijn Nobelprijswinnende oom Heike. Voor het museum zijn deze tekeningen een welkome aanvulling op de verzameling: aantrekkelijke artistieke impressies van Heike Kamerlingh Onnes’ onderzoeksapparatuur uit het begin van de twintigste eeuw, die…
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Not so Jurassic a World as we might prefer
A big-budget film about dinosaurs will always make the headlines, particularly if it is the follow-up of Steven Spielberg’s wildly successful Jurassic Park, from 1991. Dinosaurs, at least those visible to us on cinema and TV screens, were never the same after that. But not all is well in the land of blockbuster dinosaurs. Paleontologists,…
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The History of Mathematics in Economics I: Mirowski, Fisher and the Conservation of Energy
As the dust settles in the aftermath of the economic crisis, we are left to contemplate the nature of the shock that hit us in 2008. Much of the initial debate concerned the ethics of the financial sector: many of the world’s most powerful institutions had been at best naïve and at worst thoroughly perverted…
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Mediating machines: a proposal for a big picture of the history of science
Over the last few decades there have been several calls for a ‘big picture’ of the history of science. The gradual fragmentation – or even dismissal – of older grand narratives, accelerated by the cultural turn, is increasingly seen as problematic. There is a general need for a concise overview of the rise of modern…