Harvard's Peter Galison on “Filming and Writing Science”

Join the Harvard Club of Austin for a special conversation with one of the university's most original professors: Peter Galison.

Galison is a rare polymath who stands in sharp contrast against today's backdrop of increasingly "niche" intellectuals. He is a physicist and a filmmaker. A philosopher and a historian. A writer and a visual artist. While he is respected in each individual field, Galison’s most important contributions are derived from his unique ability to make unexpected connections between them.

Peter Galison works at the intersection of Physics, History & Philosophy of Science, and Film. Winner of the Max Planck/Humboldt Stiftung Prize (1999) and the Pais Prize for the History of Physics, American Institute of Physics (2018), Peter is the author of How Experiments End (1987), Image and Logic (1997), Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (2003), and Objectivity (2007, with Lorraine Daston). His films include “Secrecy” (2008, with Robb Moss, Sundance, SXSW) and “Containment” (2015, Full Frame, PBS). In 2012, he partnered with William Kentridge on the multi-screen installation “The Refusal of Time” (2012, documenta13). A MacArthur Fellow (1997), he is co-founder of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard, an interdisciplinary center for the study of extreme astronomical objects. As Joseph Pellegrino University Professor, Peter leads an international research group on the philosophy of black holes and is completing a new film about black holes and the limits of scientific knowledge.