History of Science

Could a predecessor to the phonograph have appeared a century earlier?

The problem with Pluto isn’t its planetary or nonplanetary status—it’s our insistence on declaring the world must be one or the other

After winning a Breakthrough Prize, the world’s most lucrative science award, theoretical physicist David Gross is using the moment to warn of nuclear war’s existential threat—and how we can escape it

The triumph of NASA’s first crewed lunar mission in a half-century is a reminder of what the moon really means for Earth—and why we’re going back

A new calculation helps narrow down the mass of the W boson, one of the heaviest fundamental particles in the universe

A daring 10-day voyage took four astronauts on a loop around the moon and set the stage for future forays to the lunar surface

Agnes Pockels achievements in surface science have long been overshadowed by a popular and likely untrue story that she became interested in the subject while doing the dishes

A century after Robert Goddard’s first-ever launch of a liquid-fueled rocket, two NASA experts weigh in on what his legacy still holds for spaceflight’s future

We trace the final chapter of Katharine Burr Blodgett’s career, her retirement from GE and her disappearance from public memory

The discovery adds to the Archimedes Palimpsest, an important medieval manuscript containing texts from the Greek mathematician Archimedes

At the height of her career, chemist and physicist Katharine Burr Blodgett faced challenges that not even her closest colleagues suspected

When Katharine Burr Blodgett discovered nonreflecting glass, the General Electric Company’s public relations machine made her a star