person · draft
Paul N. Edwards
Historian of science and technology who wrote A Vast Machine, on how climate data and climate models depend on each other.
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.
- affiliation
- Stanford University
- role
- historian of science and technology
- homepage
- https://profiles.stanford.edu/paul-edwards
makes
Paul Edwards's 2010 history of how climate knowledge is made from models and data together, from early weather observation to global climate simulation.
Tags: history of science, climate models, infrastructure