Horst Kant is a physicist and historian of science. He received his physics diploma at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 1969. In 1978, he was a scientific researcher. He founded Dieter Hoffmann in 1978 as a working group on physics history in the physical society of the GDR, which Kant headed until 1990. He worked at the Institute for Theory, History, and Organization of Sciences at Hubert Laitko in the Academy of Sciences of the GDR.
Horst Kant has been at the MPIWG since 1995. He is mainly concerned with the history of natural sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example with an early history of radioactivity and nuclear fission (Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Werner Heisenberg in the Second World War), Soviet physics history, physics history in Berlin and physical history institutions.
He is a member of the Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftschaftsforschung Berlin. Since 2014 he has been a member of the Leibniz Association of Sciences in Berlin and since 2016 deputy secretary of the class of natural sciences and engineering sciences.
Projekte
Albert Einstein—Chief Engineer of the Universe (Exhibition 2005)
Selected Publications
Kant, Horst and Gerhard Pfaff, eds. (2022). Triebkräfte der Entwicklung in Natur, Technik und Gesellschaft: Kolloquium zu Ehren von Werner Ebeling, Armin Jähne, Werner Kriesel und Heinz Jürgen Rothe am 17.02.2022. Sitzungsberichte der Leibniz…
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Kant, Horst (2022). “Research and Use of Nuclear Energy — Its Ambivalence(s) in Historical Context.” In The Responsibility of Science, ed. H. Mieg, 107–139. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91597-1_6.
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Kant, Horst (2022). “Hermann [von] Helmholtz’ Wirken in Berlin — ‘Reichskanzler der Physik.’” In Rudolf Virchow & Hermann von Helmholtz: ihr Wirken in und für Berlin — Impulse für die Gesundheitsstadt Berlin, ed. G. Banse, 165–192. Berlin: trafo…
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Kant, Horst and Gerhard Pfaff (2022). “Vorwort.” In Triebkräfte der Entwicklung in Natur, Technik und Gesellschaft: Kolloquium zu Ehren von Werner Ebeling, Armin Jähne, Werner Kriesel und Heinz-Jürgen Rothe am 17.02.2022, ed. H. Kant and G. Pfaff,…
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