David is interested in topics across the history and sociology of science, especially in the physical sciences during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In particular, he likes anything and everything that has to do with measurements and standards, whether procedural or embodied. His undergraduate history thesis at Columbia used the development of domestic electrical meters to show how early generations of electrical engineers distinguished themselves by training and education. At NIST, and later at the University of Cambridge's Department of the History and Philosophy of Science, he explored the convoluted networks of the sugar industry supported or resisted propagation of global standards for purity. His MPhil dissertation for HPS showed how analytical chemists replaced slave overseers as the agents responsible for controlling and disciplining the work done by hired labor in the new, mechanized sugar factories, and so became implicated in the administration of colonial industry even as they tried to turn their factories into giant laboratory-like environments. He is just beginning a project on the mischievous and world-famous nineteenth-century America scientist Simon Newcomb, which will show how astronomical theories influenced economic ones and how Newcomb brought the practices of national businesses to bear on the problem of organizing national scientific enterprises.
But he--David, not Newcomb--has tried to broaden his perspective, so while in Cambridge he also connected John Maynard Keynes's unexplored early interest in genetics to his ethics, philosophy of probability, and support for eugenics, in a paper which will be published in "Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science." And he hopes to continue this wider education at MIT, taking advantage of this program's unique mix of disciplines and specialties. So he expects to spend time digging into such interesting subjects as neuroeconomics, space weapons (and the junk they leave behind), architectural drawings, private space projects, and--dearest and coolest of all--doping in professional bicycle racing.
physical sciences; space weapons; imperial and colonial science (especially sugar); metrology; SSK (sociology of scientific knowledge); the (long) nineteenth century, especially in the US; racism and eugenics; the history of economic thought; the magnificent Simon Newcomb
 |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
MIT HASTS Building E51-185 | 617-253-9759 | hasts@mit.edu |
