Best Practices in Earth Sciences: The National and International Experience of the Institute of Geophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences
The Institute of Geophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences is the natural successor to the glorious tradition of geophysical research in Poland. It plays the leading role in exploration of the Earth, beginning from the atmosphere across hydrosphere to the lithosphere at the end. This chapter is prepared on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of establishment of this Institution and it shows its activities in the past and nowadays.
Sixty Years of Publishing with the Institute of Geophysics
The main publications written by people associated with the Institute of Geophysics PAS are outlined. Presently, the major titles are Acta Geophysica and the GeoPlanet Book Series. The journal Acta Geophysica, formerly Acta Geophysica Polonica, is of the same age as the Institute. The GeoPlanet Book Series evolved from Monographic Volumes of the Publications of the Institute of Geophysics. Also many significant, pioneering monographs are recalled, along with some remarks on the Institute’s history.
Time and Heritage
As a historian studying what can be considered a form of intellectual history, I have slowly come to adopt Michel de Certeau’s observation made at the end of the 1980s that ‘objectifying the past, for the last three centuries, has undoubtedly left unconsidered time within a discipline that has continued to use it as a taxonomic instrument’. To a certain degree, time has become commonplace for the historian who has preserved or instrumentalized it. It is not considered because it is inconceivable, but because we do not think of it or, more simply, we do not think about it. As a historian attempting to pay attention to the time I’m living in, I have thus, like many others, noticed the swift development of the category of the present until it has become obvious that the present is omnipresent. This is what I refer to here as ‘presentism’.