M. Norton Wise

M. Norton Wise is Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA and former Co-Director of the Institute for Society and Genetics.  Previously he directed the Program in History of Science at Princeton University. Professor Wise works on topics from the late 18th century to the present, specializing in the history of physics, with particular attention to relations between scientific development and industrialization. He has explored the role of technologies as resources for explanation in various periods: balances in the French Enlightenment, working engines in industrializing Britain, and statistically defined entities in turn-of-the-century Germany. His first book, "Energy and Empire: William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, 1824-1907" (with Crosbie Smith,1990), won the Pfizer Prize of the History of Science Society. Edited collections include The Values of Precision, Growing Explanations, Science without Laws, and Autarky/Autarchy: Genetics, Food Production and the Building of Fascism. He is currently publishing a book on Aesthetics, Industry, and Science: Hermann Helmholtz and the Berlin Physical Society. Two other active projects concern steam-powered gardens in Berlin/Potsdam (with Elaine Wise) and the role of narrative explanation in science.  Wise is a Fellow of the Academie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences, the American Phyical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has held fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and the American Academy in Berlin as well as visiting professorships in the US and Europe.