This website is created by me, William Thomas. Since fall 2023, I have been the Spencer R. Weart Director of Research in History, Policy, and Culture at the American Institute of Physics. Before that, I spent seven years working for AIP’s FYI science policy news service. I received my BA in history and a minor in physics from Northwestern University in 2001, and a PhD in the history of science from Harvard University in 2007. I then spent three years as a postdoctoral historian at AIP, and I was a junior research fellow for a further three years at Imperial College London’s Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, which has since relocated to King’s College London. From 2013 to 2016, I did contract history work with History Associates, Inc.

This website relates to my scholarly work, mostly done during the earlier phases of my career, and its blog features material and thoughts spun off from my 2015 book, Rational Action: The Sciences of Policy in Britain and America, 1940–1960, which you can read more about here. In addition to the “sciences of policy,” I have published on the history of early particle detection techniques in physics, and on the links between glaciology and climate research in Antarctica, and these are all subjects that still interest me a great deal. See a full list of my publications here.

From 2008 to roughly 2015, I (with another scholar Chris Donohue) also maintained a more general blog on methodological/historiographical issues called Ether Wave Propaganda. It was possible at that time to take an ironic view of “propaganda,” though more recently I’ve become disturbed by the efficacy of true propaganda in shaping polity, both in the U.S. and abroad. I still post at that blog, and here, very occasionally.

I live in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside of Washington, DC. Any views expressed here are solely my own.