Richard Staley
Associate Professor, History of Science
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Richard Staley (right) working
with Wolfgang Engels (left), who has replicated C.T.R. Wilson's
cloud chamber experiments at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. |
Special interests and recent research:
I have broad-ranging interests in the history of physics in Europe and America during the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular research focus on the physics community circa 1900, the development of special relativity, and the interrelations between instruments and experiment.
Recent publications:
Einstein's Generation: The Origins of the Relativity Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)
- “The Fin de Siècle Thesis,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 31 (2008), 311-330.
- “World Views and Physicists’ Experience of Disciplinary Change: On the Uses of ‘Classical’ Physics,” in a special issue on Science and the Changing Sense of Reality circa 1900 (guest editor H. Otto Sibum), Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 39 (2008), 298-311.
- "Fog, Dust and Rising Air: Understanding Cloud Formation, Cloud Chambers, and the role of Meteorology in Cambridge Physics in the late 19th Century," in James Rodger Fleming, Vladimir Jankovic and Deborah R. Coen, eds. Intimate Universality: Local and Global Themes in the History of Weather and Climate (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2006), pp. 93-113.
- "Napier Shaw and the Invention of the Cloud Chamber," in Liba Taub and Frances Willmoth, eds. The Whipple Museum of the History of Science: Instruments and Interpretations, to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of R. S. Whipple's Gift to the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, 2006), pp. 367-401.
- "Conspiracies of Proof and Diversity of Judgment in Astronomy and Physics: On Physicists' Attempts to Time Light's Wings and Solve Astronomy's Noblest Problem," Cahiers François Viète 11-12 (2007), 83-97.
- "On the Co-Creation of Classical and Modern Physics," Isis 96 (2005), 530-558.
- "Travelling Light," in Marie-Noëlle Bourget, Christian Licoppe, and H. Otto Sibum, eds. Instruments, Travel, and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 243-272.
- "On the Histories of Relativity: The Propagation and Elaboration of Relativity Theory in Participant Histories in Germany, 1905-1911," Isis 89 (1998), 263-299.