History of Science

This talk examines the historical origin of the attempts to understand, control, and use noise in modern times. Today, the concept of noise is employed to characterize random fluctuations in general. Before the twentieth century, however, noise only...

For nearly a decade, beginning in the mid-1970s, a debate unfolded among physicists and engineers over how best to include effects from Einstein's general theory of relativity in the new military technology now known as the Global Positioning System...

In the second half of the twentieth century, liberal reformers worked to computerize welfare administration in the United States. In response to racialized rights claims of the 1960s, and the racist tropes of the “welfare queen” in the 1970s and the...

The claim is absurd: everybody knows that the order of value goes the other way. By many commonly-cited criteria, physics is better than sociology. On their side, the natural sciences have Method, experiment, and quantification; they progress and...