Horst Kant

Horst Kant was 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. Together with Dieter Hoffmann, he founded in 1978 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 with Hubert Laitko at the Academy of Sciences of the GDR.

Horst Kant worked at the MPIWG from 1995. He research mainly concerned 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 was a member of the Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftschaftsforschung Berlin. From 2014, he was a member of the Leibniz Association of Sciences in Berlin and from 2016 deputy secretary of the class of natural sciences and engineering sciences.