Scholar Ken Alder to Give Lecture about the History of Scientific Values

Event Information

Time: 11 a.m.
Date: Thursday, March 14
Place: Room 101 of the Joe Rosenfield ’25 Center, 1115 Eighth Ave.

Ken Alder, professor of history and Milton H. Wilson Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University and director of Northwestern’s Science in Human Culture Program, will present a Scholars’ Convocation Lecture on Thursday, March 14. The lecture, titled “The World’s Measure: A History of Scientific Values,” is free and open to the public.

Event Sponsor

Scholars’ Convocation Lecture Series

Speaker Bio

Ken Alder studies the transnational history of science and technology in the context of social and political change. One central theme in his work is the history of measurement – both of nature and of human beings – and the many ways that quantitative values reflect social values.

The other central theme in his work is the potency of material artifacts. He has worked on 18th-century France and 20th-century America, and his new project on the history of objects carries him from ancient Mesopotamia and colonial West Africa to our own era of Chinese manufacturing and the genomics revolution.

• Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France (1997, 2010) examined the role of engineering sciences in the unfolding of the French Revolution. It won the 1998 Dexter Prize of the Society for the History of Technology. 
• The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error that Transformed the World (2002) tells the quixotic story of two astronomers sent out during the French Revolution to measure the size of the world so as to define a new unit of measure – the meter. The book has been translated into 13 languages and won the Kagan Prize of The Historical Society, the Davis Prize of the History of Science Society, and the Dingle Prize of the British Society for the History of Science. 
• The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (2007) examines the failed effort to transform American justice by means of this infamous truth-telling device. 

Alder was born and raised near Berkeley, California, where he was part of a busing program to achieve racial integration in the public schools – the subject of his first book, “The White Bus” (New York, 1987). He attended Harvard University as a physics major, then received his Ph.D. there in the history of science in 1991. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.