Professor Don Howard and HPS Student Sebastián Murgueitio Ramírez Assemble an Online Archive of Epistemological Letters

Author: Char Brecevic

Congratulations to Professor Don Howard and HPS student Sebastián Murgueitio Ramírez for successfully assembling an online archive of Epistemological Letters—an obscure physics newsletter published in the 1970s and 1980s in Switzerland. Howard, with the help of Howard Stein in procuring one missing issue, supplied physical copies of the newsletter, while Murgueitio Ramírez scanned them and worked with CurateND to publish the scanned archives online. After the newsletters had been scanned, Howard generously donated the physical copies to the University of Notre Dame's Rare Books & Special Collections.

Accounting for the value of this collection, Erin Blasko writes that "Epistemological Letters was a critical venue for work that was viewed as marginal by mainstream physicists of the era — work that would later contribute to important developments in areas such as quantum computing, quantum encryption and quantum teleportation." For more on Blasko's story about the Espitemological Letters archive, please follow this link: https://www.nd.edu/stories/quantum-interest/

You can access the online archive here: https://curate.nd.edu/catalog
You can also find a brief story about the assembly of the online archive published on Daily Nous here: http://dailynous.com/2020/02/03

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