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My Research Focusing on the History of Meteorology |
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I'm interested in how knowledge shapes the possibilities available to societies. How do learning, research, and discovery enable (some) people to do things they could not do before? How do certain ideas come to reshape the world? How have people built institutions, machines, and social systems that translate their thoughts and dreams into effective actions? How do unintended consequences ripple out from intellectual change? How are our imaginations both structured and constrained by what we believe we know? Currently, I'm exploring these big questions by studying changes in American meteorology between the 1920s and the end of World War II. While this very specific topic seems like a subject far removed from questions about knowledge's ability to reshape the world, the apparent distance actually highlights the unexpected interconnections characteristic of techno-scientific society. The development of aviation in the 20th century has profoundly shaped human existence. A few disparate examples: aviation has changed attitudes about relative distance (what is far away?), altered epidemic disease patterns, ended the seasonality of fresh fruit sales, contributed to climate change, made possible the Los Angeles (neé Brooklyn) Dodgers, and of course, profoundly reshaped warfare and the vulnerability of populations. Yet successful flying depends upon sophisticated knowledge about weather conditions. Meteorology is thus one of the supporting branches of knowledge upon which modern society depends. At another level, the story of the 20th century transformation of meteorology offers rich examples of men (and women) struggling to learn how to use new tools (like computers and radar) to understand the natural world, of trying to imagine the weather as a predictable product of physical forces, of grappling with the diversity of environments in different regions of the globe.
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