Tag: Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments

  • Nation & World

    Doors reopen at Harvard Museums of Science & Culture

    After having its doors closed for 20 months, Harvard Museums of Science & Culture has announced its in-person reopening Nov. 26.

    2 minutes
    Scott Fulton (left) and Jennifer Brown.
  • Nation & World

    Mark I, rebooted

    After a yearlong delay, the landmark Harvard IBM Mark I Automatic Calculator shifts residences to its new Science and Engineering Complex in Allston.

    8 minutes
    Mark 1.
  • Nation & World

    A lens for detail

    Diana Zlatanovski photographed a collection of cicadas housed at the Museum of Comparative Zoology for her new book of images, “Typology: Collections at the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture.”

    2 minutes
    Cicadas.
  • Nation & World

    A faithful keeper of time

    Harvard’s on-call horologist Richard Ketchen keeps busy round the clock.

    9 minutes
    Richard Ketchen working on a clock.
  • Nation & World

    A collection of knowledge

    Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments has grown to 20,000 objects, making it one of the three largest university collections of its kind.

    3 minutes
    A glass door looking into a museum of Harvard historical instruments.
  • Nation & World

    Places we love

    Harvard students, professors, alumni, and staff talk about the places on campus they love most.

    14 minutes
    Harvard square as seen from above
  • Nation & World

    A better sense of place

    Alyssa Goodman, professor of astronomy at Harvard University, will give a talk titled “Lost Without Longitude” on Thursday at the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Scholarship of things

    Addressing an audience at the Harvard Ed Portal, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the 300th Anniversary University Professor and a Pulitzer Prize winner for history, said that many objects in Harvard’s collections defy easy categorization. Consider, she said, the tortilla.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Artful balance

    Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev spoke at Harvard about her work with exhibit “dOCUMENTA (13,” launching a new annual program on curatorial practice.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Body exhibit

    A new exhibit, “Body of Knowledge,” offers a five-century foray through the culture and history of anatomy and dissection, from the days of autopsies in private homes to the present debate over using digital ways to study the body without saws and knives. The exhibit will offer a special viewing May 3, 11 a.m. to…

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Down to the details, a giant in computing history

    University leaders gathered at the Science Center to celebrate an update of the Harvard Mark I exhibit.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Probing how the past behaved

    Harvard faculty and graduate students lectured, organized, and moderated in big ways throughout a four-day annual meeting in Boston of the History of Science Society.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Time for a movie

    A Harvard summer film series explores the tick and tock of time, and time travel too. Upcoming films include “Run Lola Run” on July 16, “Memento” on July 30, and “Primer” on Aug. 13. All films are shown at 7 p.m., Science Center Lecture Hall C.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Pages out of time

    “Time & Time Again,” a new exhibit centered on Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, uses artifacts to illustrate shifting conceptions of making and marking time, from the cyclic sun and stars to linear springs and gears.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    A director for Museums of Science and Culture

    Dean Michael D. Smith of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced that Jane Pickering has been named executive director of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Alan Turing at 100

    Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments celebrates the 100th birthday of Alan Turing, whose ideas theorized the first computers, spurred the science of artificial intelligence, and — oh yes — helped save the Allies during World War II.

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    The last dance between Venus and the sun

    Before 2004, the most recent Venus transit occurred more than a century ago, in 1882, and was used to compute the distance from the Earth to the sun. On June 5, 2012, another Venus transit will occur. Scientists with NASA’s Kepler mission hope to discover Earth-like planets outside our solar system by searching for transits…

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    You, revealed

    “X-Rays of the Soul: Rorschach and the Projective Test,” at Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, tells the story of the projective test movement and portrays the heady confidence that science could be used to extract and access the most human parts of human beings.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    America’s first time zone

    The Harvard College Observatory built its foundation in the mid-1800s, after an epidemic of train wrecks prompted the railroads to seek a regional standard for greater accuracy and safety.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Cold War fever

    A tactile exhibit called “Cold War in the Classroom” views recent history through the artifacts of a dangerous era, the tensions from which penetrated American schools.

    8 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Objects of instruction

    Harvard College Dean Evelynn M. Hammonds and some of Harvard’s leading faculty convened at Harvard Hall on Friday (April 1) to participate in “Teaching with Collections,” a discussion of the University’s treasures and their use in the classroom.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Putting things in their place

    Two professors shake up Harvard’s museum collections with a new course and exhibit that aim to challenge the ways in which tangible things are classified in traditional categories.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Hide and seek

    A new Harvard exhibit aims to challenge how things are categorized by delving into the University’s vast museum and archival collections.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Art, printmaking, and science

    Students in a History of Science class worked to create an exhibit that illustrates the importance of print technologies and printmaking, not only to the dissemination of scientific knowledge in early modern Europe, but also to its creation.

    5 minutes