Sebastian Fernandez-Mulligan
History of Physics; History of Social Sciences; 20th Century Europe and the United States; Aesthetics; Decay
Sebastian is a PhD candidate in the History of Science & Medicine Program. His research focuses on the exchange of mathematics and metaphors between physics and social theory in the twentieth century. His dissertation constructs a history of entropy in American science, art, and economics from the technocracy movement in the 1930s to the rise of complexity science in the 1990s. It examines how, amid the coupled economic and environmental crises of the twentieth century, social scientists and international policymakers came to adopt a specific definition of order from many-body physics as a model to understand and engineer order in society.
Before arriving at Yale, Sebastian worked as a researcher in condensed matter physics. He studied non-equilibrium electronic states, with the goal of understanding the interplay between magnetism and topology in candidate materials for high-efficiency electronics. His historical research has been published or is forthcoming in Critical Inquiry, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Physics Today, and elsewhere.