• Indian board game Pretwa. Source: Sandra Prengel, 2024.

    Feature Story

    No. 88

    Stories of Celestial Bodies: Transmitting, Translocating, and Transcreating Astral Knowledge across Asia

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  • Image 1: “Pure BASF Indigo Powder” label for the Chinese market, circa 1903; Image 2: Container for “Japanese Refined Camphor,” possibly 1910–1940; Image 3: A fertilizer advertisement by the largest agrochemical company in Palestine

    Feature Story

    No. 87

    From Natural to Synthetic? Rethinking Narratives of Chemical “Replacement” in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

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  • Swirls of Colours

    Colloquium

    Institute's Colloquium 2024-25: History of Science in Public

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  • pink and blue logo of the Into the Kn/Own podcast

    Podcast

    Knowledge Ownership Explored

    Into the Kn/own/

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Founded in 1994, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin is one of the more than 80 research institutes administered by the Max Planck Society. It is dedicated to the study of the history of science and aims to understand scientific thinking and practice as historical phenomena. Researchers pursue a historical epistemology in their studies of how new categories of thought, proof, and experience have emerged.

 

About the Institute

News & Press

Tracy Wietecha is awarded the 2025 Essay Award by The Royal Society

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Vacancies in research, administration, journalism, and technical support

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Rudolf Stichweh interviewed by WELT regarding the political situation facing the research community

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Events

Reading Group: Early Science in the Islamic World

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Forms of Labour (chapter from the monograph "Tempered by Time: Ceramics and the Fabric of Time in Medieval South India")

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Amazongraphy: An Ecopolitics of Environmental Crises

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Taming the Artificial, Ordering the Social: Divergence and Convergence in Emerging AI Governance Regimes in China, Germany/the EU and the US

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Publications

Multimedia & Digital Resources