David Munns
David Peter Dell Munns is perhaps the worst Australian he knows. Although raised on an outback sheep station and attending Agricultural High School in Australia's 'Country Music Capitol,' he denied his heritage by fleeing to the elitist National University in Canberra, majoring in physics and modern history. He seriously avoided ever fulfilling the great Australian dream of working for B.H.P. and owning a house on a quarter acre block. Few lives are as alien to the Australian psyche, however, as the Academic Life, where he has stayed ever since 1990; taking his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 2002. He worked at Drexel University in Philadelphia teaching sixteen courses per year, starting fights in bars over which technology was the world's most important, and being declared "too sexy for shirts, scales, and students" by the student newspaper. He moved to Imperial College London between 2006 and 2009, and took full advantage of the great academic debates curiously always occurring in pubs. Since 2009, he serves the public of New York City proudly at John Jay College, CUNY, promoting curiosity, scholarship, and enthusiasm among his students.
Munns has varied research interests and has published on such diverse topics as the origins of Copernicus' heliocentric theory, the history and community of radio astronomy, the life and death of research into the biological effects of climate change in Phytotrons, and Peter Pan. He has taught course on practically everything from Benjamin Franklin, to the History of Science and Technology, to European History, to the Atomic Bomb, to Medieval Natural Philosophy using Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, to just plain World History, 500AD to now.
Rounding out his 'American' education have been twenty-eight visited U.S. States, and going regularly to Europe.
He lives and works in New York City.
Supervisors: Andrew Warwick; Stuart Leslie; Nicolas Rasmussen
Munns has varied research interests and has published on such diverse topics as the origins of Copernicus' heliocentric theory, the history and community of radio astronomy, the life and death of research into the biological effects of climate change in Phytotrons, and Peter Pan. He has taught course on practically everything from Benjamin Franklin, to the History of Science and Technology, to European History, to the Atomic Bomb, to Medieval Natural Philosophy using Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, to just plain World History, 500AD to now.
Rounding out his 'American' education have been twenty-eight visited U.S. States, and going regularly to Europe.
He lives and works in New York City.
Supervisors: Andrew Warwick; Stuart Leslie; Nicolas Rasmussen
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (7)
Uploads
Books by David Munns
For more than three thousand years, the science of astronomy depended on visible light. In just the last sixty years, radio technology has fundamentally altered how astronomers see the universe. Combining the wartime innovation of radar and the established standards of traditional optical telescopes, the “radio telescope” offered humanity a new vision of the universe. In A Single Sky, the historian David Munns explains how the idea of the radio telescope emerged from a new scientific community uniting the power of radio with the international aspirations of the discipline of astronomy. The radio astronomers challenged Cold War era rivalries by forging a united scientific community looking at a single sky.
Munns tells the interconnecting stories of Australian, British, Dutch, and American radio astronomers, all seeking to learn how to see the universe by means of radio. Jointly, this international array of radio astronomers built a new “community” style of science opposing the “glamour” of nuclear physics. A Single Sky describes a communitarian style of science, a culture of interdisciplinary and international integration and cooperation, and counters the notion that recent science has been driven by competition. Collaboration, or what a prominent radio astronomer called “a blending of radio invention and astronomical insight,” produced a science as revolutionary as Galileo's first observations with a telescope. Working together, the community of radio astronomers revealed the structure of the galaxy.
Papers by David Munns
no “waste” inside a closed system. In 1991, during planning for the never-built American space station Freedom, planetary scientist Wendell Mendell declared that “the term ‘waste’ becomes an oxymoron [in a closed-loop life-support system] because every atom contributing to organic chemistry is precious.”
Startled by NASA’s decision to let orbiting astronauts collect their own
feces in a bag for medical experiments, a pair of sanitary engineers
at Berkeley designed an algae-based bio-regenerative system to
recycle oxygen, water, and even nutrients. This article explains the
technological choice facing the emerging space program between
the infamous ‘fecal-bag’ and a now-forgotten alternative, the ‘Algatron’,
in the mid-1960s. The article situates the case of the Algatron at the
intersection of the history of the space program and the history
of biology; it uses the case of the Algatron to expose the different
meanings of ‘shit’ as an object of scientific, medical, and engineering
study. For nearly a decade after Sputnik, engineers worked under the
assumption that human waste was part of a new space ecology, but
by the time Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, human excrement
had become understood solely as a diseased and disposable medical
object to be contained and preserved in a bag. The ecological system
was rejected in favor of a medical device and served to elevate Man
above Nature in contrast to placing people as but one component in
a biospheric system.
For more than three thousand years, the science of astronomy depended on visible light. In just the last sixty years, radio technology has fundamentally altered how astronomers see the universe. Combining the wartime innovation of radar and the established standards of traditional optical telescopes, the “radio telescope” offered humanity a new vision of the universe. In A Single Sky, the historian David Munns explains how the idea of the radio telescope emerged from a new scientific community uniting the power of radio with the international aspirations of the discipline of astronomy. The radio astronomers challenged Cold War era rivalries by forging a united scientific community looking at a single sky.
Munns tells the interconnecting stories of Australian, British, Dutch, and American radio astronomers, all seeking to learn how to see the universe by means of radio. Jointly, this international array of radio astronomers built a new “community” style of science opposing the “glamour” of nuclear physics. A Single Sky describes a communitarian style of science, a culture of interdisciplinary and international integration and cooperation, and counters the notion that recent science has been driven by competition. Collaboration, or what a prominent radio astronomer called “a blending of radio invention and astronomical insight,” produced a science as revolutionary as Galileo's first observations with a telescope. Working together, the community of radio astronomers revealed the structure of the galaxy.
no “waste” inside a closed system. In 1991, during planning for the never-built American space station Freedom, planetary scientist Wendell Mendell declared that “the term ‘waste’ becomes an oxymoron [in a closed-loop life-support system] because every atom contributing to organic chemistry is precious.”
Startled by NASA’s decision to let orbiting astronauts collect their own
feces in a bag for medical experiments, a pair of sanitary engineers
at Berkeley designed an algae-based bio-regenerative system to
recycle oxygen, water, and even nutrients. This article explains the
technological choice facing the emerging space program between
the infamous ‘fecal-bag’ and a now-forgotten alternative, the ‘Algatron’,
in the mid-1960s. The article situates the case of the Algatron at the
intersection of the history of the space program and the history
of biology; it uses the case of the Algatron to expose the different
meanings of ‘shit’ as an object of scientific, medical, and engineering
study. For nearly a decade after Sputnik, engineers worked under the
assumption that human waste was part of a new space ecology, but
by the time Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, human excrement
had become understood solely as a diseased and disposable medical
object to be contained and preserved in a bag. The ecological system
was rejected in favor of a medical device and served to elevate Man
above Nature in contrast to placing people as but one component in
a biospheric system.