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SUMMARY:Meso-science and modernism: work at the Royal Society Mond Laborat
 ory\, 1933–1972 - Boris Jardine (Department of History and Philosophy of
  Science)
DTSTART:20141023T153000Z
DTEND:20141023T170000Z
UID:TALK54694@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Richard Staley
DESCRIPTION:In February 1933 the great and good of Cambridge physics gathe
 red for the opening of the Royal Society Mond Laboratory\, an 'ultra-moder
 n' building in which\, as Ernest Rutherford was at pains to point out\, th
 e atom would definitely not be split. But soon enough even the low-tempera
 ture work that the Mond was made for was scuppered by an international sca
 ndal: in 1934 Piotr Kapitza\, the head of the lab\, was detained by the So
 viets and Rutherford had to fight to keep science and politics apart. This
  story is well known\, but the Mond itself tends to get lost in the tellin
 g. So the first part of my talk consists in a close reading of the buildin
 g: the site\, the training of the architect and the nature of the work don
 e there are key to its striking form\, and its distinctive place in inter-
 war physics. My argument here\, which has consequences for notions of scie
 ntific heritage and material culture\, is that the Mond was itself a scien
 tific instrument – all of its parts working together for the execution o
 f a single experimental programme. After Kapitza left\, the function of th
 e building became ambiguous\, yet through the work of two generations of s
 cientists the Mond remained important as a site for experiment and also fo
 r the planning of research. The second half of my talk is taken up with th
 is period. Here questions of scale become important\, and I pursue two lin
 es of inquiry: first\, I describe the Mond as an intermediary stage in the
  development of Big Science\; second\, I show that it has a key role in th
 e history of 'meso-scale physics' – a role that has much to do with the 
 nature of the building and its (literal) place in the Cavendish Laboratory
 .
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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