---
id: people/paul-edwards
about:
  label: Paul N. Edwards
  description: >-
    Historian of science and technology who wrote A Vast Machine, on how climate
    data and climate models depend on each other.
  tags:
    - history of science
    - climate models
    - infrastructure
person:
  affiliation: Stanford University
  role: historian of science and technology
  homepage: 'https://profiles.stanford.edu/paul-edwards'
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Paul N. Edwards (Stanford Profiles)
      url: 'https://profiles.stanford.edu/paul-edwards'
    - title: 'Paul N. Edwards, About Me (University of Michigan)'
      url: 'https://pne.people.si.umich.edu/'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Paul N. Edwards is a historian of information infrastructures, especially the systems that produce knowledge about the climate.[^1] He took his PhD in the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1988.[^1] He taught for 19 years at the University of Michigan, where he is now emeritus Professor of Information and History.[^1,2] Until he retired in January 2026 he directed Stanford's Program on Science, Technology and Society.[^1]

MIT Press published his books The Closed World in 1996 and A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming in 2010, and Changing the Atmosphere, which he co-edited with Clark Miller, in 2001.[^1] He was one of the lead authors of Working Group I of the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report, released in August 2021, and co-edits the MIT Press book series Infrastructures.[^1] In 2025 he received the John Desmond Bernal Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science.[^1]

He wrote [A Vast Machine](/media/a-vast-machine/).