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Percy W. Bridgman House

Coordinates: 42°22′44.69″N 71°7′44.32″W / 42.3790806°N 71.1289778°W / 42.3790806; -71.1289778
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Percy W. Bridgman House
Percy W. Bridgman House.
Percy W. Bridgman House is located in Massachusetts
Percy W. Bridgman House
Percy W. Bridgman House is located in the United States
Percy W. Bridgman House
LocationCambridge, Massachusetts
Coordinates42°22′44.69″N 71°7′44.32″W / 42.3790806°N 71.1289778°W / 42.3790806; -71.1289778
Built1928
NRHP reference No.75000298
Significant dates
Added to NRHPMay 15, 1975[1]
Designated NHLMay 15, 1975[2]

The Percy W. Bridgman House is an historic house at 10 Buckingham Place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It is a National Historic Landmark, notable for its associations with Dr. Percy Williams Bridgman, a physicist, Nobel Prize winner, and Harvard University professor. It is now part of the Buckingham Browne & Nichols (BBN) Lower School campus.[3]

The house is an architecturally undistinguished 21⁄2 story house built about 1920 in a Neo-Rationalist style. At the time of its designation as a National Historic Landmark in 1975, the house had not been significantly altered since Dr. Bridgman's death in 1961. It was acquired by the BBN School not long after his death, which has used it for a variety of purposes, including as a faculty residence and lounge.[2][3] It is used for school offices.

Percy Bridgman (1882–1961) was born in Cambridge, raised in Newton, and educated at Harvard. After receiving his Ph.D. in physics in 1908, he was invited to join the Harvard physics faculty, where he remained for the rest of his life. Bridgman's primary area of research was high pressure physics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (the fifth American to be so honored) in 1946 for his development of equipment for advancing research in that field. He also wrote extensively on the epistemology of physics and the sciences, advancing an idea that became known as operationalism,[4] the view that the concept underlying any measurement was synonymous with a corresponding set of operations performed in making the measurement.[5][6] Bridgman moved into this house in 1928, and lived there for the rest of his life.[3]

See also

References

  1. ^ "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. January 23, 2007.
  2. ^ a b "Percy W. Bridgman House". National Historic Landmark summary listing. National Park Service. Archived from the original on 2009-06-06. Retrieved 2008-07-07.
  3. ^ a b c James Sheire (February 1975). "National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination: Percy Bridgman House / Bridgman House-Buckingham School" (pdf). National Park Service. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help) and Accompanying one photo, exterior, from 1975 (32 KB)
  4. ^ Chang, Hasok (Fall 2021). "Operationalism". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Archived from the original on 12 August 2021. Retrieved 23 January 2022.
  5. ^ Bridgman, Percy (1927). The Logic of Modern Physics. New York: Macmillan.
  6. ^ Bridgman, Percy (1936). The Nature of Physical Theory. New York: Dover.
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