John L. Heilbron

John Lewis Heilbron is an American historian of science best known for his work in the history of physics and the history of astronomy. He is a Professor Emeritus of History and History of Science and Vice-Chancellor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He edited the academic journal Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences for twenty-five years.

His books range from H. G. J. Moseley: The Life and Letters of an English Physicist, 1887-1915 published in 1974 to The ghost of Galileo: In a Forgotten Painting from the English Civil War published in 2021, and include The Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck and the Fortunes of German Science (1986), The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science (2003), and Galileo (2010).

Heilbron attended Lowell High School in San Francisco, California, and was a member of the Lowell Forensic Society. He received his A.B. and M.A. degrees in physics and his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley. He was Thomas Kuhn's graduate student in the 1960s when Kuhn was writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.