Dibner Institute Closes

Posted on May 9, 2006 by woit

The Dibner Institute and Burndy Library at MIT will soon be closing, with the Burndy collection moving to the Huntington Library in California near Caltech. The Dibner Institute is devoted to research in the history of science and technology, and I mentioned it a couple years ago here. Among the interesting things the Dibner has on-line are copies of lecture notes on quantum electrodynamics from Freeman Dyson in 1951 and Fritz Rohrlich in 1953.

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7 Responses to Dibner Institute Closes

  1. D R Lunsford says:
    May 9, 2006 at 2:37 pm

    The notes by Rohrlich are priceless! What a find!

    -drl

  2. Bert Schroer says:
    May 9, 2006 at 3:28 pm

    Is Fritz Rohrlich still alive? Did he invite Jauch, who probably was in Geneva during the war, to come over and collaborate with him? Why did both change the area of interests years after having written that influential textbook? My main association with the two names is related to the book.

  3. Brett says:
    May 9, 2006 at 4:54 pm

    I’m sorry to see the Dibner Institute disappear. They brought in interesting people to talk about the history of science, and I enjoyed occasionally attending the lectures. However, I am not too surprised that this has happened. Although I naturally never knew anything about the Institute’s finances, I always had the impression that they were probably overspending themselves, on publicity and other things.

  4. D R Lunsford says:
    May 9, 2006 at 9:16 pm

    Yes, he’s alive, at least as of November when he told me to (paraphrasing) “get some experimental backup or it’s just speculation!” 🙂

    He’s one of a vanishing breed, no doubt.. “Classical Charged Particles” was – is still – a great read. So was “Theory of Photons and Electrons”, one of the best QED books ever..

    -drl

  5. Alejandro Rivero says:
    May 10, 2006 at 12:06 pm

    Is the website going down?

  6. woit says:
    May 10, 2006 at 12:18 pm

    No idea, you’d have to contact them to find out what their plans are.

  7. Alejandro Rivero says:
    May 10, 2006 at 3:48 pm

    Hmm I tried but the email address for ashrafi@mit.edu fails, so the website is already obsolete…

    The interviews in the website are also of some value, and interesting to read. Visitors can enjoy a remark from KG Wilson:

    The U.S. had a period in the 1960s when it was a buyer’s market for positions in academe, and so a lot of people had this kind of opportunity. But at the same time, you look at how people struggled at the time of Kepler, at the kind of struggles he went through in order to be able to continue for twenty years, and it’s clear there are many more people who, if they’re willing to engage in the kind of struggle that Kepler did, can do it and not starve. A lot of people complain today that the conditions are tight, you have to toe the line and everything, but the people who are like Kepler are going just as stubborn today as Kepler was, as far as I can see.

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