In the 1950s, American public universities began training a vast new cadre of nuclear engineers, technicians, and scientists in specially designed and built “teaching reactors.” As this article describes, a generation of nuclear engineering undergraduates and graduate students were exposed to an open, accessible, and above all, visible demonstration of nuclear energy through educational “swimming pool”–style reactors. Distinct from reactors for either weapons or power production, the swimming pool reactor was specifically configured to be a pedagogical tool. Educational programs were created around federally and industrially sponsored reactors for training, part of the massive Cold War era transformations of Midwestern, Western, and Southern public colleges and universities. This article offers the Ford Nuclear Reactor at the University of Michigan as an example of how the peaceful pedagogical atom developed after the 1950s. As I argue, teaching reactors were one product of the conservative compact made between government, public universities, and private industry in the early 1950s that underpinned the famed Atoms for Peace movement, with its technology and information sharing and international training priorities. Indeed, teaching reactors resolved for Eisenhower’s administration the tension between a desire for centralized control of the atom and the powerful vision of a future of prosperity brought about by open education and use of nuclear materials. This paper is part of a special issue entitled “Revealing the Michigan Memorial–Phoenix Project.”

This special issue, “Revealing the Michigan Memorial–Phoenix Project,” highlights the Michigan Memorial–Phoenix Project at the University of Michigan, a program of civilian nuclear research established after World War II that also memorialized Michigan’s victims of the two World Wars. It blossomed into a broad-based, multidisciplinary program supporting work pursuing peaceful uses of the atom, understood broadly. It became the basis for sustained interdisciplinary and international collaboration, a conduit for scientific diplomacy, a privileged site for the alliance between the US government and industry, and a pioneer in the education of nuclear engineers. The Phoenix Project was an unusual and highly local phenomenon, but contributors to this issue nevertheless find ways in which it embodied larger trends in the early Cold War. In this introduction, we highlight the multiple dimensions of the Phoenix Project and reflect on the challenges and opportunities posed by writing the history of peculiar entities.

This article addresses the history of how chemists designed syntheses of complex molecules during the mid-to-late twentieth century, and of the relationship between devising, describing, teaching, and computerizing methods of scientific thinking in this domain. It details the development of retrosynthetic analysis, a key method that chemists use to plan organic chemical syntheses, and LHASA (Logic and Heuristics Applied to Synthetic Analysis), a computer program intended to aid chemists in this task. The chemist E. J. Corey developed this method and computer program side-by-side, from the early 1960s through the 1990s. Although the LHASA program never came into widespread use, retrosynthetic analysis became a standard method for teaching and practicing synthetic planning, a subject previously taken as resistant to generalization. This article shows how the efforts of Corey and his collaborators to make synthetic planning tractable to teaching and to computer automation shaped a way of thinking taken up by chemists, unaided by machines. The method of retrosynthetic analysis made chemical thinking (as Corey perceived it) explicit, in accordance with the demands of computing (as Corey and his LHASA collaborators perceived them). This history of automation and method-making in recent chemistry suggests a potentially productive approach to the study of other projects to think on, with, or like machines.

John S. Bell openly questioned the dominance of an orthodox quantum interpretation that had seemingly raised the principle of indeterminism from an epistemological question to an ontological truth in the late 1920s. He understood the inevitability of indeterminism to be a theoretical choice made by the founding architects of quantum theory, not a fundamental principle of reality necessitated by experimental facts. As a result, Bell decried the general lull in quantum interpretation debates within the physics community, and in particular, the complete omission of Louis de Broglie’s deterministic pilot wave interpretation from all theoretical and pedagogical discourses. This paper reexamines the pilot wave’s rise, abandonment, and subsequent omission in the history of quantum theory. What emerges is not a straightforward story of victimization and hegemonic marginalization. Instead, it is a story that grapples with tensions between the polyphony of individual voices and a physics community’s evolving identity and consensus in response to particular sociopolitical and scientific contexts. At the heart of these tensions sits an international scientific community transitioning from a politically fractured and intellectually divergent community to one embracing a somewhat forced pragmatic convergence around rationally reconstructed narratives and concepts like the impossibility of determinism. The story of the pilot wave’s omission gives us a window into the inherent power that theoretical choice and a congealing rhetoric of orthodoxy have on a scientific community’s consensus, pedagogical canons, and the future development of science itself.

The historiography of physics has reached a great degree of maturity and sophistication, providing many avenues to consider the making of science from a historical perspective. However, the big picture of the making of physics is characterized by a predominant narrative focused on a conception of disciplinary formation through leadership transfers in research among France, Germany, and Britain. This focus has provided the history of physics with a periodization, a geography, and a fundamental goal commonly considered to be conceptual and theoretical unification. In this paper, I suggest the interest of reassessing this picture by analyzing the temporal, national, and epistemological viewpoint from which it is written. I use for this purpose an exemplary case study: Adolphe Ganot’s physics textbooks in France and their translation by Edmund Atkinson in England. In this context, I suggest future avenues for the study of the making of physics as a discipline, which consider the canonical role of textbooks in disciplinary formation beyond the Kuhnian paradigm.

The history of Penrose diagrams in the physics of General Relativity (GR) is presented. It is argued that the diagrams did conceptual work for physicists, providing a literal place for abstract, formal objects. Penrose diagrams were associated with the mathematics of conformal transformations applied to GR. Together the diagrams and formalism reconfigured the basic concepts of the field—notions of space, time, cosmology, and energy. Nor were the meanings of the diagrams themselves stable over time. Their physical and conceptual evolution is traced. This history also demonstrates the tight integration of the contexts of research and pedagogy in the period investigated (1962–66). Diagrams circulated rapidly between research talks and publications and the pedagogical context of summer school lectures for advanced graduate students. Further reception and circulation of the diagrams is briefly examined.