Robert P. Crease
Encyclopedia
Robert P. Crease is a philosopher
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 and historian of science
History of science
The history of science is the study of the historical development of human understandings of the natural world and the domains of the social sciences....

. He writes a monthly column, "Critical Point ", for the international physics magazine Physics World
Physics World
Physics World is the membership magazine of the Institute of Physics, one of the largest physical societies in the world. It is an international monthly magazine covering all areas of physics, both pure and applied, and is aimed at physicists in research, industry and education worldwide...

.

He is Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, where he has been a professor since 1987. In philosophy his interests lie in performance theory, expertise, and trust. In history of science his interest focuses on the history of Brookhaven National Laboratory
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Brookhaven National Laboratory , is a United States national laboratory located in Upton, New York on Long Island, and was formally established in 1947 at the site of Camp Upton, a former U.S. Army base...

, one of the first three U.S. national laboratories; he is co-founder of the Laboratory History conferences which have been held bi-annually since 1999. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society
American Physical Society
The American Physical Society is the world's second largest organization of physicists, behind the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. The Society publishes more than a dozen scientific journals, including the world renowned Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, and organizes more than 20...

 (APS) in the United States, and the Institute of Physics
Institute of Physics
The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. It has a worldwide membership of around 40,000....

 (IOP) in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

.

He has written, co-written, translated, or edited over a dozen books. His articles have appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other places.

History of Science

Robert P. Crease (Professor Bob) began to work on the history of Brookhaven National Laboratory shortly after arriving at Stony Brook in 1987. Brookhaven, established in 1947 and the site of several Nobel-prizewinning
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...

 work, was among the first three U.S. National Laboratories. Due to its scientific ambitions and geographical location (not far from New York City), Brookhaven has experienced the tensions and conflicts affecting U.S. science-society relations “writ large”. These tensions and conflicts affect the management of science, science policy, the construction of large scientific facilities, and environmental concerns and community trust. Crease has written about the history of Brookhaven’s first quarter-century: Making Physics: A Biography of Brookhaven National Laboratory (University of Chicago Press, 1999). He is currently working on a sequel.

His articles about Brookhaven include:

The National Synchrotron Light Source, Part I: Bright Idea – "Physics in Perspective 10 (2008)", pp. 438–467.

The National Synchrotron Light Source, Part II: The Bakeout – "Physics in Perspective 11 (2009)", pp. 15–45.

Recombinant Science: The Birth of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) – "Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences", 38:4, pp. 535–568.

Quenched! The ISABELLE Saga, Part 1 – ”Physics in Perspective 7, Sept. 2005"

Quenched! The ISABELLE Saga, Part 2 – ”Physics in Perspective, 7, Dec. 2005"

Anxious History: The High Flux Beam Reactor and Brookhaven National Laboratory – "Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences" 32:1 (2001), pp. 41–56.

Conflicting Interpretations of Risk: The Case of Brookhaven’s Spent Fuel Rods
"Technology: A Journal of Science Serving Legislative, Regulatory, and Judicial Systems, V 6 - (1999)", pp. 495–500.

Performance Theory

In performance theory Crease treats performance not as merely a praxis – an application of a skill, technique, or practice that simply produces what it does – but a poiesis; a bringing forth of a phenomenon, something with its own identity in the world, able to appear in different ways in different circumstances, but exhibiting some lawlike integrity. Works of the performing arts are clearly of this sort – but so are scientific experiments. An experiment is not something automatic, but must be planned, executed, and witnessed – and its result sometimes leads the planners to have to alter an experiment so that what appears in it can be seen more clearly.

Crease treats performance as not simply a metaphor that is extended merely suggestively from the arts to the sciences, but as something that happens alike in artistic and scientific activity. Treating experiments as performances in the service of inquiry, however, leads us to understand better several features of experiments, such as why they can “give us back” more information than we put into them, causing us to reshape the theories that led us to create them.

Relevant publications include:

Technique, (with John Lutterbie) in "Staging Philosophy", ed. D. Saltz and D. Krasner, forthcoming – Univ. of Michigan Press, 2006, pp. 160–179

From Workbench to Cyberstage, in "Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde", ed. E. Selinger – Albany, SUNY Press, 2006, pp. 221–229

Inquiry and Performance: Analogies and Identities Between the Arts and the Sciences – Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 28:4 (2003), pp. 266–272

The Play of Nature: Experimentation as Performance – Indiana University Press

Books

  • World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for a Universal System of Measurement - W. W. Norton & Company, 2011
  • The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg – W. W. Norton & Company, 2009
  • The Philosophy of Expertise (with E. Selinger) – Columbia University Press, 2006
  • J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life, by Abraham Pais
    Abraham Pais
    Abraham Pais was a Dutch-born American physicist and science historian. Pais earned his Ph.D. from University of Utrecht just prior to a Nazi ban on Jewish participation in Dutch universities during World War II...

    , with supplemental material by Robert P. Crease – Oxford University Press, 2006
  • American Philosophy of Technology, trans. from the Dutch – Indiana University Press, 2001
  • The Prism and the Pendulum: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science – Random House 2003
  • What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design, by P. P. Verbeek, trans. by Robert P. Crease – Penn State Press, 2005
  • Making Science: A Biography of Brookhaven National Laboratory – University of Chicago Press, 1999
  • Peace and War: Reflections on a Life at the Frontiers of Science, by Robert Serber with Robert P. Crease – Columbia University Press, 1998
  • Hermeneutics and the Natural Sciences, ed. Robert P. Crease – Kluwer 1997
  • The Play of Nature: Experimentation as Performance – Indiana University Press, 1993
  • The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in 20th Century Physics (with Charles C. Mann
    Charles C. Mann
    Charles C. Mann is an American journalist and author, specializing in scientific topics.He is the coauthor of four books, and contributing editor for Science and Atlantic Monthly. In 2005 he wrote 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, followed in 2011 by 1493: Uncovering the New...

    ) – Macmillan, 1986 (repr. Rutgers University Press, 1996)

Articles

  • Trust, Expertise, and the Philosophy of Science, with Kyle Powys Whyte, forthcoming, 2009.
  • Technique (with John Lutterbie) in Staging Philosophy, ed. D. Saltz and D. Krasner – University of Michigan Press, 2006, pp. 160–179
  • From Workbench to Cyberstage, in Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde, ed. E. Selinger – Albany, SUNY Press, 2006, pp. 221–229
  • Inquiry and Performance: Analogies and Identities Between the Arts and the Sciences – Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 28:4 (2003), pp. 266–272
  • Dreyfus on Expertise: The Limits of Phenomenological Analysis (with Evan Selinger) – Continental Philosophy Review 35:3, 2003
  • Fallout: Issues in the Study, Treatment, and Reparations of Exposed Marshall Islanders, in Exploring Diversity in the Philosophy of Science and Technology, ed. by Robert Figueroa and Sandra Harding – Routledge, 2003, pp. 106–125

External links

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