Arianna Borrelli is a historian and philosopher of natural philosophy and modern science, currently research scholar and publications coordinator at c:o/re. She has a background both in the natural sciences and in the humanities and held research positions in theoretical high energy physics (Rome University, CERN, Paul-Scherrer-Institute) and in the history and philosophy of science (MPI for History of Science (Berlin), University of Wuppertal, TU Berlin, Leuphana University Lüneburg). She was a fellow at c:o/re in 2023/24 and after that she was substitute Professor of Historical Science Studies at Bielefeld University.
Arianna graduated in physics at Rome University and in philosophy and history at the University of Braunschweig, where she subsequently took a PhD in history of science with a study of the transmission of knowledge on the astrolabe from the Arabic-Islamic to the Latin-Christian culture in the high medieval period. She took a habilitation in history of science at the Technische Universität Berlin with a thesis on: Formulating Phenomena: Concept Formation and the Materiality of Theory in the Early Modern and Modern Period.
The overarching focus of her research is the relationship between knowledge on natural phenomena and the strategies employed to represent, communicate, store and transform it. Her specific fields of interest include medieval mathematical cosmology, early modern meteorology and mechanics, and quantum theories from their early days up to the present. Currently she is focussing on the historical-epistemological premises and implications of the increasing use of computational tools in the natural sciences.
Selected publications
Borrelli, Arianna. 2024. Angels and Blue Brains: Aesthetics of Knowledge in Science and Religion. Artnodes 34, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.7238/artnodes.v0i34.426353 
Borrelli, Arianna. 2024. The Eye Stays in the Picture: Virtual Images in Early Modern and Modern Optics. Perspectives on Science 32, 300–328. https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_a_00608 .
Borrelli, Arianna. 2024. From Rays to Waves and Beyond: Light Propagation in Historical Perspective. Journal of Physics: Conference Series 2877 (1), 012066. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/2877/1/012066 .
Hocquet, A., Wieber, F., Gramelsberger, G., Hinsen, K., Diesmann, M., Pasquini Santos, F., Landström, C., Peters, B., Kasprowicz, D., Borrelli, A., Roth, P., Lee, C. A. L., Olteanu, A., & Böschen, S. (2024). Software in science is ubiquitous yet overlooked. Nature Computational Science, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-024-00651-2
Borrelli, Arianna. 2023. Aristotelianism, Chymistry and Mechanics in Early Seventeenth-century Europe. The Techno-magical Approach. In: Aristotelianism and Magic in Early Modern Europe: Philosophers, Experimenters and Wonderworkers, edited by Donato Verardi. Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 105–144. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350357198 .
Borrelli, Arianna. 2022. The Great Yogurt Project: Models and Symmetry Principles in Early Particle Physics. In: Model and Mathematics: From the 19th to the 21st Century, edited by Michael Friedman and Karin Krauthausen, Springer, pp 221–254. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97833-4_6
