Oral History of Heliophysics/Space Weather: Something New under the Sun (Invited Presentation)

For the last three years I have directed an oral history project on the emergence of heliophysics as a broadly inclusive research field, especially since the 1990s. This talk is a progress report on the Heliophysics Oral History Project, but I’ll also place it context. To me, this project follows a long line at the AIP Center for History of Physics of recording science history as it happens: on modern physics, solid state physics, and industrial physics, for example. This also points to why historians and scientists find this project interesting: Heliophysics emerged from a broad array of research streams which originally interacted little. As relations were discovered between different classes of phenomena and “interdisciplinary” investigations multiplied and fields came together, heliophysics and space weather emerged. Oral history let’s us get behind the magazines, web sites, associations, and research publications. It provides multiple perspectives on a process that is repeated across the sciences: the coalescing of a new scientific/technical field: In this case, truly “something new under the Sun.”