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...
