Michael Riordan

Lecturer, History and Philosophy of Science

Bldg. 200, Rm. 25
Stanford, CA 94305-2024
650-723-9461

mriordan@ucsc.edu

Background:

Michael Riordan is a Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science Program, at Stanford, and an Adjunct Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is author of The Hunting of the Quark (Simon & Schuster, 1987), a general book about the discovery of quarks and coauthor with Lillian Hoddeson of Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age (W. W. Norton, 1997). This history of the invention and development of the transistor won the 1999 Sally Hacker Prize of the Society for the History of Technology. He also coedited The Rise of the Standard Model: Particle Physics in the 1960s and 1970s (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Riordan studies the history of particle physics, especially the experimental culture of the discipline, and the history of the semiconductor industry. He leads a group of scholars researching and writing the history of the Superconducting Super Collider. In 1999-2000 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue research on this subject while a Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution.

In 2002 he received the Andrew Gemant Award of the American Institute of Physics for his contributions to the understanding of physics and its relationship to the wider culture.

Selected Publications

Autumn 05-06 Course offered:

History 143 / HPS 104: The Quantum Century: A History of 20th Century Physics
Historical survey of physics in the twentieth century, with emphasis on the revolutionary quantum theory and its impact upon human understanding and manipulation of Nature. Relativity and atomic physics are also discussed, as well as their applications in such age-defining artifacts as the laser, transistor, and nuclear weapons. Impact of physics upon World War II and the Cold War; the postwar growth of Big Science, leading to insights about elementary particles and the origins of the Universe.

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