In this talk I will start with a brief review of recent discourse about interdisciplinarity, especially focusing on a popular distinction between inter- and multidisciplinarity and the related notion of ‘integration’. Next, I will present an analytical approach that can be used for examining research activities that cross boundaries between disciplines, subdisciplines or research fields. I...
In the decades following World War II, biophysics flourished as a field. The paper will review the historical constellations that propelled this development. It will consider the scientific promise and the cultural and political appeal of the field, the careers of the scientists that were attracted to work at the intersection of physics and biology, the techniques and practices they brought...
Christian Bohr was an eminent and successful professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen. At the time when Georg Brandes trailblazed the Modern Breakthrough in literature opening Danish inward-looking mentality to European culture, Christian Bohr contributed crucially to elevate Danish medical science from its secluded, provincial state to a field to be reckoned with on the...
Bohr’s deep and in some respects fruitful interest in the interface between physics and biology should not overshadow the fact that he and his institute was in general remarkably foreign to inter- or crossdisciplinary aspects of physics. Thus, despite some work was done on quantum chemistry in the late 1920s (Ø. Burrau), it was not followed up. Likewise, there were a few early contributions to...
Schweber was an accomplished historian of science, with seminal contributions to the 20th-century history of science. Before, he had been a great physicist for more than 20 years. While he was not the single case of such a transition from science to humanities (Abraham Pais, Léon Rosenfeld and Ernst Mayr are the names to be evoked, as well as other cases from physics to philosophy, and...
This paper explores several historical and methodological implications of the unusually thorough-going cross disciplinary arguments that Ernst Mach developed as a result of his work between physics, physiology and psychology from the 1860s through the 1880s, by examining legacies of Mach’s approach in the development of theories of gravity and economic anthropology by Albert Einstein and...
Physicists and, before their existence, natural philosophers and applied mathematicians, made fundamental contributions to the development of the historical sciences as well as to the history of science. That was not mere coincidence: both the historical and experimental sciences had their origins in the Scientific Revolution. I shall give a few Indicators of the parallel rise of the...
In his August 1932 lecture to the second meeting of the International Congress for Light Therapy, Bohr made in public the transfer of his concept of “complementarity,” originally applied in physics in his paper of 1927 to the wave-particle duality, to the domain of biology. This lecture, subsequently published in English (1932, 1933), Danish (1933) and German (1933), positioned...
George de Hevesy (1885-1966), Hungarian-born chemist and Nobel laureate, developed the use of radioactive indicators in 1913 while working in Rutherford’s lab in Manchester, where he also met Niels Bohr. After World War I, Hevesy came to Copenhagen to work at Bohr’s Institute, where he and the Dutch physicist Dirk Coster discovered element 72 of the periodic table, hafnium. In the 1920s,...
The history of post-war climate science has been written with a strong focus on the role of global geopolitics and global climate models. In this talk, I will broaden this perspective with a smaller scale approach and a different technology. Drawing on the history of a specific radiocarbon dating laboratory, I show, on the one hand, how also local conditions influenced global climate science...
Despite the interest of natural philosophers-turned-physicists in the physical nature of the atmosphere and the development of instruments to measure it since at least the 16th century, physicists were often not overly enamored of meteorology as a topic of serious merit. Thus, in the US, meteorology was relegated to geography departments and physicists like Theodore von Kármán felt compelled...
Member of the organizing committee. Will introduce Nobel Laureate Prof. Morten Meldal
Thousands of planets have been discovered around stars other than our
Sun. But how and where are these exo-planets born, and why are they so
different from those in our own solar system? Which ingredients are
available to build them? Thanks to powerful new telescopes, including
the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers can now zoom in to
planetary construction sites and study their...
I am a molecular biologist on a journey towards theoretical biology. My field of research is epigenetic gene regulation by the Polycomb and Trithorax groups of proteins. I am fascinated by the apparently incompatible properties of randomness and precision in this system, both of which have been observed experimentally.
The field of Polycomb and Trithorax regulation has seen a rapid expansion...
This talk will discuss new observations of the role of weak interactions in liquids that can transform them into solids. This includes interactions between oil and water that can lead to anomalous stability of water-oil mixtures and the interactions of of proteins that can lead to phase separation, gelation and self-assembly of proteins.
Living matter relies on the self organization of its components into higher order structures, on the molecular as well as on the cellular, organ or even organism scale. Collective motion due to active transport processes has been shown to be a promising route for attributing fascinating order formation processes on these different length scales. Here I will present recent results on structure...
The cells in our bodies are highly dynamic: Myriads of vital
processes take place inside a cell every second. An individual cell can use
filopodia, dynamic 'cellular fingers', to 'feel', explore, and manipulate its
close by environment for instance during development as well as during
cancer invasion.
In this talk I will explain how we use optical tweezers in combination with...
The emergence of organization from the collective interactions of cells with no central guidance is a fundamental question in developmental biology, regeneration and biomedicine. Though widely studied from biochemistry and genetics perspectives, the interplay of mechanical interactions and the dynamics of self-organization remains elusive. In this talk, I will focus on the role of...
