In 1932, a group of Japanese scientists launched a journal entitled Ôyô Butsuri (Applied Physics), one of the first journals with “applied physics” in the title. The name was not necessarily chosen as a contrast to pure physics but rather as a bridge between academic and industrial physicists, or scientists and engineers working in physics.
The category “applied physics,” or the group of researchers bearing that label, had evolved from the engineering circle. From the 1910s, it took shape mainly in the Department of Technology of Ordnance at Tokyo Imperial University. Masatosi Ôkôchi, a graduate and a newly appointed department staff, set the physics experiment course in the department to ground the discipline onto physics and recruited a young physicist Masaichi Majima for this mission. Ôkôchi also added the lecture of Torahiko Terada, an experimental physicist in the physics department, to the curriculum. With the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research as another center, the field of applied physics soon encompassed the vast field, providing venues for communication on specific engineering problems, experimental techniques, and even theoretical research on related topics, thus fostering emerging research trends in fields such as crystallography and physics of matter.
This talk explores how these Japanese scientists sought to create an academic space for applied physics, negotiating with and enclosing the identities of experimental and industrial physics. The Japanese case illustrates how scientists drew boundaries between theory and experiment, academic and industrial, and pure and applied, and how it was intertwined with the national contexts.

In the 1940s, C.E. Shannon applied the entropy formula in physics to information science, which sparked the attention of many physicists to the relationship between thermodynamics and information computation, and led to further exploration of the physical explanation of "entropy" in information science. Rolf Landaur was one of the representative figures. He proposed Landaur's principle in 1961 and believed that communication and related information processing could be fully incorporated into the laws of physics. And he actively promotes the interdisciplinary research of physics and informatics, creating opportunities for the development of quantum information.

This paper explores the ways in which the aesthetic properties of platonic solids played a role in the development of molecular structures in the 19th century. By the 1860s, chemists were representing the chemical properties of organic compounds in two-dimensional, chain-like structures. In the following decades, some chemists began to represent molecules as three-dimensional geometric structures in order to explain chemical properties of molecules. Chemists appealed to the aesthetically pleasing platonic solids, namely the tetrahedron and octahedron, to be the models of molecular structures intended to mimic the physical features of chemical compounds. In 1874, Jacobus van’t Hoff published the tetrahedral carbon model to explain the optical activity of certain compounds. In 1890, Arthur Hantzsch and Alfred Werner described the stereochemistry of nitrogen in tetraamines with a tetrahedral structure. Similarly, Werner uses the octahedron to explain the stereochemistry of coordination compounds.

The aesthetic properties of these molecular models fueled further work in chemistry. For example, Werner’s octahedral shape for these coordination compounds leads him to theorize a new type of valence, giving a unifying principle of valence and bonding that can be applied to other compounds. His theory predicts the existence of isomers that were later confirmed. We conclude our paper noting how the use of aesthetic judgments by 19th century chemists is consistent with a common framework of aesthetic judgment in other scientific practices.

Dr Myron Penner

The long-standing view of science as value-independent has been increasingly contested, with recent discussions emphasizing its political dimensions. Foucauldian analyses of science and power (Rouse, 1987) have shaped political philosophy approaches, while studies of big science and megascience highlight how large-scale, collaborative experiments in high-energy physics produce epistemic claims through deliberation and dissent, mirroring political processes (Galison, 1986).

In parallel, recent discussions in social ontology (Hess, 2024) have proposed a broader framework, treating large firms and organizations as political entities akin to Aristotelian polis, arguing that they act as moral agents. Drawing upon these intersections between the political philosophy of science and social ontology, and based on an analysis of decision-making procedures in scientific collaborations, this paper explores the implications for megascience collaborations.

I argue that scientific collaborations can be seen as moral and political communities, whose epistemic claims bear affinities to political declarations. Through this lens, I examine sanctions against scientists from certain countries, considering how collaborations can maintain their epistemic benefits while balancing political coherence. Finally, I suggest that the political nature of megascience collaborations could drive trends toward the de-globalization and nationalization of science.

Rouse, Joseph. Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Galison, Peter. How Experiments End. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Hess, Kandy M. "Governing the Corpopolis: Modern Firms as Political Communities." In Collective Responsibility, edited by Simo Hormio and Bill Wringe, 153–175. Cham: Springer, 2024.