India Bhalla-Ladd
  • September 29, 2026

  • UC Irvine logic & philosophy of science grad student India Bhalla-Ladd sat down with the American Institute of Physics to share her research on technical typists whose expertise helped shape scientific communications in the 60s and 70s

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“In 2022, I spent a year as a Visiting Researcher at the University of Cambridge working with historian and philosopher of science Hasok Chang. I was looking into the origins of the Higgs Mechanism and spontaneous symmetry breaking, which meant I was spending a lot of time reading articles published in Physical Review from the 1970s. These articles are instantly recognizable, given the journal’s trademark typesetting style and layout. At the time, I had also been hanging out around a friend of mine at Cambridge -- fellow PhD student Emma Marie Duke – who was studying for an MPhil in English Literature. Emma and I have been friends for a while, and we spent a lot of time talking about her interests in the physical life cycle of a book. These conversations got me thinking about the articles I was reading as physical objects rather than just records of interesting physics, with their own life cycle. I realized what a difficult job mathematical typesetting would have been before software systems like LATEX – and specifically, I realized that there must have been a group of people with some amount of technical knowledge responsible for typesetting these articles. Furthermore, I had a hunch that it was likely a group of women, seeing as they would have been proficient in typing as well as mathematics.”

Continue reading, courtesy of the American Institute of Physics.

 

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