Presentations

Starstruck! Astronomers and Popular Culture (2017-2018)

Presentation Date: Thursday, December 6, 2018 Location: Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University Telescopes and a last will and testament. Clocks, a sketch of a comet, and a life mask. Astronomical photographs, a fly spanker...

Scale: A Matter of Perspective (2017)

Presentation Date: Thursday, March 9, 2017 Location: Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University We see scale throughout our daily lives and navigate through it without thinking too much about our changing rank. The world is...

In the Lab with Stevens and Skinner (2017-)

Presentation Date: Wednesday, February 1, 2017 Location: William James Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA The basement of Memorial Hall was home to the Psychological Laboratories of two pioneers: S. S. Stevens and B. F. Skinner. At one end was the...

Radio Contact: Tuning In to Politics, Technology, & Culture (2016)

Presentation Date: Thursday, March 10, 2016 Location: Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Remember the times when the whole family gathered round the living room radio to listen to Roosevelt's fireside chats...

A Case for Curiosity: Old Objects, New Contexts, Unexpected Stories (2015-2016)

Presentation Date: Wednesday, May 6, 2015 Location: Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, gallery in the History of Science Department, Harvard University The microscope of a literary legend. An illustration of a cannibalistic fish in the...

Body of Knowledge: A History of Anatomy (in 3 parts) (2014)

Presentation Date: Thursday, March 6, 2014 Location: Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA This exhibition explored the act of anatomizing not as a process of mapping a finite arrangement of bodily structures...

The Mark I Computer at Harvard (2014)

Presentation Date: Wednesday, February 12, 2014 Location: Science Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Originally called the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, Mark I was designed in 1937 by a Harvard graduate student, Howard H. Aiken to solve...

Time & Time Again: How Science and Culture Shape the Past, Present, and Future (2013)

Presentation Date: Wednesday, March 6, 2013 Location: Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Time: We find it, keep it, measure it, obey it, rely on it, waste it, save it, chop it and try to stop it. We organize...

Go Ask A.L.I.C.E.: Turing Tests, Parlor Games, & Chatterbots (2012)

Presentation Date: Tuesday, September 11, 2012 Location: Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Can machines think? This exhibit explored the strange afterlife of the Turing Test as it has circulated in popular...

X-Rays of the Soul: Rorschach and the Projective Test (2012)

Presentation Date: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 Location: Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA In 1911, Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach began experimenting with inkblots to probe previously inaccessible...

Cold War in the Classroom (2011)

Presentation Date: Friday, September 30, 2011 Location: Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA In 1956, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, declared that the United States was waging a “Cold...

Tangible Things (2011)

Presentation Date: Tuesday, February 1, 2011 Location: Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA What do a Galapagos tortoise, a teapot, and a hundred-year-old tortilla have in common? They were part of an...