Alan Chalmers
Alan works in the history and philosophy of the physical sciences and has published on seventeenth-century physics and chemistry, nineteenth-century chemistry and nineteenth-century electromagnetic theory and the history of the atom. His more philosophically-oriented research includes symmetry in physics, the nature of laws in physics and Brownian motion.
Alan is widely known for his book What is This Thing Called Science? (QUP 2013), designed to be an account of the nature and status of science accessible to a wide audience and which has gone through four editions and been translated into seventeen languages. His scholarly research has been published in some eighty articles published in international journals and two books, The Scientist’s Atom and the Philosopher’s Stone (Springer 2009) and One Hundred Years of Pressure: Hydrostatics from Stevin to Newton (Springer 2017).
His main administrative achievement was building up the History and Philosophy of Science outfit at the University Sydney from the single person affair that it was in 1985 into the four person Unit for History and Philosophy of Science by the time of his retirement in 1999, paving the way for its growth into the School for History and Philosophy of Science that it now is.
Biography
Alan Chalmers was born in Bristol, England in 1939. He graduated in physics at the University of Bristol in 1961, and received an MSc at the University of Manchester in 1964. He taught physics for two years before returning to full-time study at the University of London, where his PhD on the electromagnetic theory of JC Maxwell was granted in 1971.
Dr Chalmers first came to Australia in 1971 as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney, soon progressing to Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer. He moved to the Science faculty in 1985 as Director of the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, a position he held until his retirement in 1999.
Upon retiring Alan became a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at Flinders University (1999 to 2010) and Visiting Fellow in the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh (2003 to 2004). In the period 2015-2017 Alan was able to fine-tune his research at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
Alan is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney.
Alan was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities in 1997 and in 2003 he was awarded a Centenary Medal by the Australian Government for “Services to the Humanities in the area of History and Philosophy of Science”.
For a decade, from 2003, Alan was a member of the International committee &HPS, designed to promote the integration of studies in the history of science and in philosophy of science.
Publications
Since 2015, as part of our commitment to community and science, Co Serve Consulting | Technology has hosted information about Alan and his work.