Dr. Jagdish Mehra was a prominent historian of modern physics who published books on physics and scientists and organized a number of scientific conferences. His interests were not limited to physics, however, and ranged across the sciences and humanities, and he routinely assembled representatives from the two worlds of science and literature.
Margaret Mead
The Jagdish Mehra Collection in Special Collections contains scores of audio interviews with scientists, literary greats, philosophers, and Nobel Laureates, along with recordings of lectures given by prominent thinkers.
Audio of eight of these lectures, from the annual humanities series presented at the Southeastern Massachusetts Technological Institute, now the Univeristy of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, is now available in the UH Digital Library. This collection features a diverse range of speakers, including anthropologist Margaret Mead, physicist and philosopher Gerald Holton, and historian Oscar Handlin.
In addition to the interviews and lectures, the Jagdish Mehra Collection contains a vast number of books, monographs and reference works on physics, mathematics, philosophy and history of science, along with thousands of reprints of original papers autographed by their authors. The manuscripts of hundreds of published and unpublished books, papers, and lectures from physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, and literati are also in the collection. See the finding aid for more details about the collection’s contents, or listen to the lectures now.