M. Norton Wise

Norton Wise is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of History at UCLA. His work extends broadly over history of science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially industrialization and cultural history of science. An example of recent interests is “On the Narrative Form of Simulations,” appearing in a special issue on "Narrative in Science," SHPS—A (2017), which he edited with Mary Morgan. They aim to rejuvenate the topic of narrative understanding. Similar interests motivated Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, and Exemplary Narratives, edited with Angela N. H. Creager and Elizabeth Lunbeck (2007). Wise’s longtime project on natural science in Berlin is in press: Aesthetics, Industry, and Science: Hermann Helmholtz and the Berlin Physical Society (University of Chicago Press, 2018). And he is at work with Elaine Wise on The Steam Powered Gardens of Berlin: Industrial Transformations of the English Landscape Garden. From a methodological perspective, Wise has concentrated on how machines (and more generally technologies of many kinds) play an active mediating role in building the interrelations between science and society and between practical and theoretical understanding.