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H-PhysicalSciences: New posted content
H-Sci-Med-Tech: New posted content
H-PhysicalSciences: New posted content
Date: 28-29 January 2027
Location: University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Organized by: Gianenrico Bernasconi, Ion Mihailescu, Christoph Affolderbach, Julien Gressot, Romain Jeanneret, and Gaetano Mileti
In 1967, after two decades of experimentation and diplomatic negotiations over technological choices, the frequency of the hyperfine transition of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom was adopted as the basis for redefining the second. This shift from an astronomical to an atomic time standard was both a scientific breakthrough and a political achievement. It required the construction of consensus among metrological institutions, astronomical observatories, national laboratories, and international organizations. It also reflected a new configuration of science, politics, and industry in the postwar era, characterized by increased state support for strategic fields such as quantum electronics and by a growing commitment to international standardization. Amid Cold War tensions, atomic timekeeping emerged at the intersection of national interests and global cooperation, reshaping the governance of precision measurement.
This workshop explores the process leading to the 1967 redefinition of the second by bringing together scholars from the history of science and technology, STS, metrology, and related fields. It aims to foster a collaborative discussion on the epistemic, institutional, political, and technological dynamics that shaped this transformation in timekeeping. The workshop is organized as part of the SNSF-funded project Atomic Clocks at the Neuchâtel Observatory: Time, Quantum Technologies, and Innovation (1948-2001), which investigates the development of atomic timekeeping in Switzerland and its global implications.
We welcome contributions that explore the scientific, institutional, political, and material dimensions of the 1967 redefinition of the second. Submissions may engage with the following themes or related topics:
International Institutions and Global Contexts
- The role of metrological bodies such as the Consultative Committee for the Definition of the Second (CCDS), the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), the International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM), the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM), and the International Time Bureau (BIH) in establishing consensus.
- The global history of the 1967 redefinition in the context of postwar international cooperation and Cold War politics.
Precedents and Innovations in Measurement Standards
- The relationship between the redefinition of the second and earlier standardization efforts, such as the redefinition of the meter in 1960, highlighting continuities and shifts in procedures, criteria, and institutional strategies.
- Lessons drawn by historical actors from earlier metrological debates, and their impact on the consensus-making process.
Criteria for Choosing a Standard in the 1960s
- The technical and political factors influencing the selection of an element or system for time standardization, including cesium, thallium, rubidium, hydrogen, and ammonia, as well as the evaluation of different atomic timekeeping methods, such as masers, atomic beams, and gas cells.
- The balance of key criteria shaping the final choice of standard, including stability, accuracy, reproducibility, portability, and dissemination.
Laboratories, Observatories, and National Contexts
- The contributions of key laboratories, observatories, and national metrology institutes in testing, refining, and advocating for particular standards or technologies.
- Collaboration between institutions, including the transfer of technologies and skills, and efforts to coordinate and compare atomic clocks and atomic time scales.
Material Culture of Atomic Clocks
- The experimental practices, technical gestures, and protocols adopted by scientists and engineers in the development of atomic clocks, and their role in reshaping metrological institutions within the postwar landscape of international standardization.
- The design and manufacturing processes of atomic clocks, and the impact of this material culture on theoretical and experimental models.
Science, State, and Industry
- The role of collaborations between scientists, governments, and private industry in the development of atomic clocks.
- The contribution of private companies such as Atomichron and Hewlett-Packard to the commercialization and diffusion of atomic clocks, and their impact on the adoption of the cesium-133 standard.
- The influence of military needs, navigation, and telecommunications in creating opportunities and shaping incentives that affected the redefinition of the second.
Impact and Legacy
- The immediate and long-term consequences of the 1967 redefinition for fields such as physics, astronomy, telecommunications, and navigation.
- The impact of the adoption of cesium on the development of other frequency standards, its legacy in contemporary metrology, and its role in ongoing debates about future time standards.
Narratives and Imaginaries of the Atomic Age
- The incorporation of atomic clocks into the broader “peaceful atom” narrative promoted during the early Cold War.
- The influence of atomic clock development and promotion on public and institutional perceptions of atomic technologies, as well as their symbolic power in shaping contemporary understandings of precision and control.
Submission details
Abstracts in English or French of no more than 500 words should be sent to ion-gabriel...@unine.ch by 1 September 2026. Submissions from early career researchers, including graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, are warmly welcome.
Accommodation and meals will be covered for participants. Travel grants will also be available, within the limits of the workshop budget.
Papers presented at the workshop will be considered for publication in an edited volume. Selected participants will be asked to submit their contributions for publication by September 2027.
Please address any further inquiries to ion-gabriel...@unine.ch.
H-Sci-Med-Tech: New posted content
Brogden, Elizabeth; Frey, Christiane, eds.. Milieus of Minutiae: Contextualizing the Small in Literature, Philosophy, and Science. : University of Virginia Press, 2024. 306 pp. $39.50 (paper), ISBN 9780813952451.
Reviewed by
Floris Winckel (University of Copenhagen and Niels Bohr Archive)
Published on
H-Sci-Med-Tech (June, 2026)
Commissioned by
Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)
Printable Version:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=62645
Full disclosure: I was interested in Elizabeth Brogden and Christiane Frey’s Milieus of Minutiae: Contextualizing the Small in Literature, Philosophy, and Science primarily on the basis of its cover. As a historian of snow-crystal science, a front cover sporting Robert Hooke’s famous “frozen figures” was always going to grab my attention. To my dismay, however, these snowflakes did not feature at all in the book. Instead, I found a volume with the more ambitious goal of bringing perspectives from scholars across the humanities to bear on a shared concept: small things, and how they relate to their contexts. More precisely, the contributions to this volume detail how writers and thinkers have engaged with small or insignificant things in different contexts in early modern culture and philosophy. This modern take on the ancient genre of the paradoxical encomium—or praise of ordinary things—results in a thought-provoking volume for readers with such interests as the history of literary theory, philology, natural philosophy, and architecture.
The volume draws its primary inspiration from works exploring the cultural and philosophical importance of the “small” published around the turn of the millennium, such as Catherine Wilson’s The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (1995) and Marianne Schuller and Gunnar Schmidt’s Mikrologien: Literarische und philosophische Figuren des Kleinen (Micrologies: Literary and philosophical figures of the small) (2003). Most of the essays focus on the history of literature, particularly in the German context. But readers of H-Sci-Med-Tech will also find resonances with certain strands in history of science scholarship, for instance, works that explore different understandings of environment, such as Etienne Benson’s Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms (2020), and the notion of “epistemic things,” as in the work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (who also has a chapter in this book).
The volume is divided into four thematic parts. Part 1, “Poetics of Minutiae,” starts with Roger Maioli merging early modern theories of empiricism in literature and science, assessing the nature of the novel as a form of “virtual witnessing.” Mareike Schildmann and Elena Fabietti then look at two Romantic-era writers, Novalis and Giacomo Leopardi respectively, and explore their views on the novel as an organism and the role of minute details in arriving at general truths. Part 2, “Micrological Biospheres,” covers the history of medicine and science. It includes an analysis by Carmen Schmechel of the development of early modern disease etiology and an insightful overview by Daniel Liu of how microscopists around the turn of the twentieth century “improved” their view of magnified objects by altering their apparatus and techniques. Concluding this part is a succinct essay by Rheinberger, which draws attention to two minute things—bacteriophages and polymerase enzymes—that played major roles in the development of twentieth-century microbiology, earning them the unusual label of “major" minutiae (p. 149).
Part 3, “Philological Minima,” brings us back to the realm of literature. Andreas Mahler’s essay details the epistemological implications of John Donne’s The Flea (1590s) and is followed by Cynthia Wall’s analysis of the uses and reception of the parenthesis in eighteenth-century literature, before Christopher D. Johnson discusses the theories of three post-World War II philologists and their “love” of trivial details. The final part, “Minimilieus of Modernity,” explores themes in the history of architectural thought and modernity. Malte Fabian Rauch examines twentieth-century theories of the aesthetics of ambience in urban environments; Margareta Ingrid Christian introduces the fascinating figure of Siegfried Ebeling and his architectural theory of the house in relation to its surroundings; and the volume concludes with an essay by the late Marianne Schuller, who reads two short texts by Heinrich von Kleist and Franz Kafka as “small” but significant contributions toward modernity.
The editors deserve credit for doing something I love seeing in edited collections, namely, allowing the contributors to refer to each other’s essays (even if not all of them do). The organization of the essays also leads to surprising parallels, both in terms of explicit references and general resonances. The theme of scale, for example, is present without being addressed directly in multiple chapters. It is alluded to in the writings of Giacomo Leopardi and his theory of relationality between the small and the general, as well as in those of Ebeling, who views the house as a minute unit in the context of its wider environment. Elsewhere, Liu subtly compares the process of becoming familiar with the “world revealed by the microscope” with the process of understanding new literary forms, while Maioli explicitly notes how his essay compares with the other two contributions in part 1 (p. 125). Examples such as these make the book not only a better edited volume—with essays that feel deliberate and cohesive—but also a better work of interdisciplinary scholarship.
The volume does still have its missed opportunities. Some clear connections between chapters were left unexplored, for example, in places where they refer to the same “minute” thing (like a flea, as in Liu’s and Mahler’s chapters) or allude to similar relationships (such as truth and poetics in Fabietti’s and Maioli’s chapters). More fundamentally, I would have liked to see a more consistent engagement with the volume’s key concepts of minutiae and milieus. The space contributors dedicated to defining how they understand these terms varies significantly between chapters. Some took the time to discuss these terms in detail, while others only incorporated them in a way that feels contrived or left them out entirely, preferring similar terms like details and context. Readers should be prepared to jump between radically different ways of understanding these central concepts from chapter to chapter. This, and the fact that the essays are generally rich in theory and specialist terminology, means the volume is probably best suited to readers specialized in one or more of its disciplines, looking for provocative connections to other fields.
Despite being misled by its cover, I believe Milieus of Minutiae deserves credit for offering a creative approach to an interdisciplinary edited volume. By approaching a common but overlooked concept from different disciplinary angles and by making concerted efforts to bring chapters in conversation with one another, the editors provide a useful model for other interdisciplinary volumes centered on a conceptual core.
Citation:
Floris Winckel.
Review of
Brogden, Elizabeth; Frey, Christiane, eds..
Milieus of Minutiae: Contextualizing the Small in Literature, Philosophy, and Science.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2026.
URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=62645
This work is licensed under a
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