Rethinking Time in the History of Science

Time is not just a backdrop to history—it is constructed, contested, and reimagined across disciplines. This year’s Institute Colloquium brings together scholars from history, anthropology, environmental studies, the sciences, and the humanities to explore how temporal assumptions shape knowledge production, past and present.

The history of science and technology has shown that time is not simply measured but made—from clocks and calendars to scientific revolutions, technological obsolescence, and the rhythms of innovation. As the field expands its geographic and disciplinary scope, it reveals the multiplicity of time: how different epistemic traditions encode time into practices and materials, how ontologies of temporality shift across knowledge cultures and geographies, and how metaphysical debates over the nature of time continue to shape historical thinking. 

We have identified five key themes as entry points into how embracing temporal plurality can transform historical practice:

• The unsettling of historiographic operations
• Simultaneity in scientific practices that entangle multiple temporalities
• The shifting relationship between temporalization in the sciences and humanities
• Unusual experiences of time, from precognition to the strangeness of time in physics
• Non-linear writing practices