Richard Staley
| Assistant 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:
- “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 R. Fleming, Vladimir Jankovic and Deborah Coen, eds. Intimate Universality: Local and Global Themes in the History of Weather and Climate (New York: 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-Noelle 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. 241-272.
- "On the Histories of Relativity: The Propagation and Elaboration of Relativity Theory in Participant Histories in Germany, 1905-1911," Isis 89 (1998), 263-299.