NBA History of Science Seminar: Karl Grandin

Karl Grandin (Center for History of Science, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm), “The Cold War and the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics”

The Cold War period did not consist solely of two opposing blocs and their nuclear arms race; it also included a “Third World” and a small number of neutral countries positioned between the superpowers. Among these was Sweden, which pursued a policy of non-alignment and neutrality and developed what came to be known as the Swedish Middle Way. Whether neutral politics were compatible with an assumed scientific objectivity was occasionally debated and sometimes asserted.

As the home of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences, one may ask whether Sweden’s neutrality served as a resource for the successful administration of the Nobel Prizes. This paper examines the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964, which was shared by the American physicist Charles H. Townes and the Soviet physicists Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov for “fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser–laser principle.”

The talk will explore how this decision came about and to what extent political interpretations of the award emerged at the height of the Cold War.

Karl Grandin
Karl Grandin, Center for History of Science, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm.

Karl Grandin is Director of and Professor at the Center for History of Science at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. He holds a MSc in engineering physics and a PhD in history of science and ideas from Uppsala University. His research mainly deals with the history of modern physics. He is on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Niels Bohr Archive and the Centro Ricerche Enrico Fermi, and since 2017 he chairs the History of Physics Group of the European Physical Society and from 2019 the Historic Sites committee of the European Physical Society. He is the editor of the Nobel Foundation yearbook since 2006. Since 2011 he is entrusted with the Nobel Diplomas and Nobel Medals during the awarding ceremony in Stockholm.