The HPS Podcast - Conversations from History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science

This week, Dr Sophie Ritson is in conversation with Professor Peter Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in History of Science and Physics at Harvard University, a founding member of the Black Hole Initiative, and coordinator of the History, Philosophy and Culture (HPC) Working Group of the next-generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT).
Galison is a historian and philosopher of science whose work has explored how experiments end, how scientific images are made and interpreted, and how practices of objectivity have developed. His books include How Experiments End, Image and Logic, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps, and Objectivity (with Lorraine Daston). He also co-directed Secrecy and directed Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know, which follows the effort to produce the first image of a black hole.
Sophie Ritson is a historian and philosopher of science at the University of Melbourne, and one of the leaders of the Collaborations focus group within the ngEHT’s HPC Working Group. The group brings historians, philosophers, ethnographers and sociologists into a physics collaboration while it is still being built, rather than studying it retrospectively. Its work examines questions of governance and social epistemology, including authorship, consensus and disagreement. Ritson’s own research has explored the string theory controversy, “non-discovery” in high-energy physics, and research governance, drawing closely on her engagement with physicists at CERN and the Large Hadron Collider.
In this episode, Galison traces his path into the history and philosophy of science through family, teaching, and laboratory experience, emphasising how experimentalists taught him to distinguish effects from artefacts—a question that shaped his first book. He explains his interest in scientific images as a way of recovering the craft and tacit knowledge obscured by the protocol-driven view inherited from logical empiricism. The conversation then turns to the 2019 M87* image, which he presents as the culmination of his interest in secrecy and invisibility. The discussion concludes with broader questions about distributed knowledge, the state of HPS, and how to design billion-dollar instruments that remain open to the unexpected.
This episode:
Describes Galison's path into physics and the history of science
Explains how distinguishing a real effect from an artefact shaped How Experiments End
Introduces visualisation as a topic in HPS, against protocol-driven accounts of knowledge
Discusses the materiality of science, and why the laboratory has looked like a church, a factory, and a startup
Frames secrecy as "anti-epistemology," and how blocked knowledge illuminates how knowledge is secured
Argues the black hole image is a computational image, and that photography is an expansive category
Reflects on the reconvergence of history and philosophy of science with contemporary practice
Closes on why images can surprise us, and how to design experiments open enough to find the unexpected
This interview was recorded in July 2025.
Relevant Links
Peter Galison, Harvard
Sophie Ritson
ngEHT History, Philosophy and Culture Working Group
"Big STEM collaborations should include humanities and social science", Nature Human Behaviour (2023)
A unique collaboration using a virtual Earth-sized telescope shows how science is changing in the 21st century, The Conversation
The HPC White Paper, Galaxies (2023)
Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know (2020)
Black Hole Initiative, Harvard University
Event Horizon Telescope, first image, 10 April 2019
Objectivity (Zone Books, 2007)
How Experiments End (University of Chicago Press, 1987)
S3 Ep 7, Sophie Ritson on 'Collaboration in Science' 
Episode production assistant: Paul Carter
Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast. You can find more about us on our website, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook feeds. 

This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme.
Music by ComaStudio.
Website HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org

This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Dr Jahnavi Phalkey, historian of science and technology, filmmaker, and Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru. Phalkey is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India, and producer-director of the documentary film Cyclotron (2020) – a film about the world's oldest functional particle accelerator and the people who keep it running today. Her writing spans the history of science, technology, and the state in twentieth-century India.
The conversation traces Phalkey's route into the history of science by way of political sociology, silent cinema, and a chance funded place at Georgia Tech under John Krige, and her eventual return to studying India after finding its absence conspicuous in accounts of twentieth-century science. She discusses how Atomic State pushes back against two dominant framings in the historiography of science in India: the "tools of empire" argument for the imperial period, and the scarcity of histories of Indian science after independence. Drawing on the early efforts to build particle accelerators in Kolkata and Bangalore, and the eventual rise of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Department of Atomic Energy, she describes how the demands of a single, resource-intensive field reshaped the relationship between Indian science and the Indian state — and how that "big science" model went on to marginalise both university research and smaller-scale inquiry.
The discussion broadens into Phalkey's work reframing India and China as "conceptual sites" rather than deviant "cases" measured against a European norm, and closes with her current thinking on critique in the history and philosophy of science, informed in part by Bruno Latour, and on what it means for historians of science to help the public make meaning of research in an age of climate change, AI, and new gene technologies.
In this episode, Phalkey:
Describes her winding path into history of science
Explains what drew her back to studying science in India specifically, after finding it missing from standard histories of twentieth-century science
Outlines the two historiographical tendencies Atomic State argues against: the "tools of empire" framework and the neglect of post-independence science
Discusses the concept of India and China as "conceptual sites," against the limits of a Europe-benchmarked history of science
Traces the early, fragile efforts to build particle accelerators in Kolkata and Bangalore, and the wartime origins of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Reflects on how the everyday bureaucracy of running a national laboratory shaped the entangled relationship between Indian science and the postcolonial state
Discusses her documentary Cyclotron and the material, practical difficulties of building and maintaining a particle accelerator in a resource-constrained setting
Considers how the "big science" model, centred on the Department of Atomic Energy, drew resources and people away from Indian universities and small-scale research
Calls for a connected rather than a difference-based history of science in the Global South, and reflects on reconstituting the meaning of critique in history and philosophy of science
Relevant Links
Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India — Permanent Black
Cyclotron (2020) — documentary directed and produced by Jahnavi Phalkey
Science Gallery Bengaluru
Science of Giants
Devi Prize – for promoting "public engagement with science" (2024)
Infosys Prize, Humanities ( 2023)
Mentioned scholarship
David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (Cambridge History of India)
Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" (2004)
Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985)
Note: This conversation was recorded in May, 2026
Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast. You can find more about us on our website, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook feeds. 

This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme.
Music by ComaStudio.
Website HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org

This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Dr Mazviita Chirimuuta, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and author of The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024) –  winner of the 2025 Lakatos Award and the 2024 Nayef Al-Rodhan International Prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy from the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
The conversation centres on the central argument of the book: that the leading ideas which have shaped neuroscience are best understood as attempts to simplify the brain, one of the more complex objects of scientific inquiry. Mazviita describes this in practice as a mismatch between the brain's overwhelming complexity and the representations — models, theories, diagrams — that scientists rely on, which necessarily ignore much of that complexity. She identifies three recurring simplifying strategies running through the book — reduction, mathematisation, and analogy — and discusses how "proxy systems," from anesthetised cats to cerebral organoids, let scientists study minimal, decontextualised versions of the brain built using these strategies.
She also discusses the diverging paths of neuroscience and AI research, the risk of conflating predictive power with genuine understanding, and why she advocates for greater theoretical pluralism in how science approaches the brain.
In this episode, Chirimuuta:
Describes her academic path from psychophysics and vision science back into philosophy of science
Introduces The Brain Abstracted and its central concern with simplification in neuroscience
Unpacks three recurring simplification strategies in neuroscience — reduction, mathematisation, and analogy
Traces how the computer analogy shaped artificial neural networks, from McCulloch and Pitts through Hubel and Wiesel to today's deep learning models
Introduces the idea of the "Heraclitean brain" — a system always in flux — and what this means for scientific explanation
Reflects on the historical back-and-forth between localisationist and dynamic/distributed views of brain function
Considers the shifting, increasingly divergent relationship between neuroscience and AI research, including energy efficiency as a new point of biological inspiration
Calls for greater theoretical humility and pluralism in neuroscience, drawing on the 19th-century work of John Hughlings Jackson as a case study
Relevant Links
The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press)
Mazviita Chirimuuta wins the 2025 Lakatos Award — LSE
Mazviita Chirimuuta's research site / Outside Colour
Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy (MIT Press, 2017)
Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World (1999)
Nicole Rust, Elusive Cures (2025)
Note: This conversation was recorded at the end of 2025.
Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast. You can find more about us on our website, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook feeds. 

This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme.
Music by ComaStudio.
Website HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org

This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Dr. Magdalena Skipper, Editor-in-Chief of Nature. Skipper has held the role since 2018, and has a background in the genetic sciences. She is also notably the first female — and only the eighth person — to lead the journal since its founding in 1869.
Skipper reflects on what she has worked to preserve and change since taking on the role, from deepening the connection between Nature's research and journalism teams to broadening the journal's scope beyond the natural sciences into engineering, social sciences, and clinical research. Drawing on her training as a geneticist, she discusses how evidence and rigor take different forms across disciplines, and why she sees no single "final word" in science.
The conversation turns to some of the defining pressures on contemporary research culture: the COVID-19 pandemic's paradoxical effect on public trust in science, the discipline-specific nature of the replication crisis, and the rise of meta-science as a lens for understanding how research itself is produced. Skipper also discusses Nature's move toward transparent peer review, the persistent inequities shaping who gets published, and why she remains fundamentally hopeful about science's capacity for self-correction.
In this episode, Skipper:
Describes what she set out to preserve and change on becoming Nature's Editor-in-Chief, including expanding the journal's scope into engineering, social sciences, and clinical research
Reflects on how her background in genetics shaped her thinking about evidence, rigor, and multiple valid paths to a scientific claim
Discusses the COVID-19 pandemic's dual legacy: accelerating the adoption of preprints while eroding public trust in science
Unpacks the replication crisis as a discipline-specific phenomenon and what Nature has learned from it
Explains the growing role of meta-science, particularly at the intersection of psychology, human behaviour, and research practice
Details Nature's move to transparent and, since June 2025, mandatory published peer review reports
Addresses persistent inequities in scientific publishing and Nature's editorial efforts to counter "helicopter science"
Shares why she remains hopeful about science's capacity for self-correction and its role in building a more equitable world
Relevant Links
Nature Journal
Nature Profile
Begley & Ellis (2012), "Raise standards for preclinical cancer research" — Nature comment on reproducibility in cancer research
Nature: Registered Reports format
Nature : Transparent Peer Review initiative
Note: This conversation was recorded in October 2025.
Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast. You can find more about us on our website, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook feeds. 

This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme.
Music by ComaStudio.
Website HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org

This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Steven Shapin, Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Harvard. Shapin reflects on his path into the history and sociology of science and discusses the central concerns of his work: how knowledge is produced, the social foundations of trust in science, the embodied nature of knowledge, and the performance of expertise. 
He revisits Leviathan and the Air-Pump, co-authored with Simon Schaffer, outlining the Boyle–Hobbes controversy and showing how seventeenth-century scientific credibility depended on rhetoric, social standing, and performance, while highlighting the broader relevance of the book’s insights into the social foundations of knowledge. Shapin considers contemporary challenges, including political interventions in science and universities, the effects of digital communication, and the fragmentation of expertise, and reframes the “crisis of truth” as a crisis of social knowledge.
Finally, he connects these themes to his recent work on taste and eating (Eating and Being), examining how communities form shared judgments about food and flavour, paralleling the intersubjective construction of objectivity in science.
In this episode:
Recounts his path through Edinburgh, UCSD, and Harvard and what each taught about interdisciplinarity.
Explains the story and broader thesis of Leviathan and the Air-Pump: facts are made credible through practice, rhetoric, and social arrangements.
Reflects on shifting disciplinary fault lines.
Describes how credibility is performed today and the growing value of face-to-face embodiment.
Surveys credibility issues from science’s entanglement with business, government, and partisan politics.
Discusses Eating and Being, drawing parallels between intersubjective agreement in science and taste.
Transcript being prepared.
Photo: Steven Shapin, Groningen, Netherlands, March 2020, by Newfrogm, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Relevant links
Steven Shapin — Harvard profile / home page
LARB Essay “Is There a Crisis of Truth?” (2019)
Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Shapin & Schaffer, 1985) – Wikipedia entry
Steven Shapin's books
Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast. You can find more about us on our website, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook feeds. 

This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme.
Music by ComaStudio.
Website HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org