The UC Santa Cruz Emeriti Association proudly presents the second annual Nauenberg History of Science Lecture on April 18. This exciting event features guest speaker, Peter Galison, the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in history of science and physics at Harvard University, who is considered one of the foremost scholars in this field. Galison’s interdisciplinary work in the history of science and film explores the complex interaction between the three main subcultures of physics—experimentation, instrumentation, and theory—and the embedding of physics in the wider world.
In his lecture, "Time: Physics, Film, History," Galison will discuss how Henri Poincaré's and Albert Einstein's reformulation of simultaneity was long seen as a development from imaginative thought experiments. But the all-too-material and the most abstract notions of time cross in essential ways, from the Swiss Patent Office to the Paris Bureau of Longitude. Galison will share how he explored this intersection with the artist William Kentridge (“The Refusal of Time,” 2012), pushing history, physics, and philosophy into a more associative-imaginative register. He will help the audience reconsider the very fabric of time, from the containment of radioactive materials for millennia to the enigmatic realms of black holes and the mesmerizing image of the photon ring.
“What I find most exciting is finding ways to get at abstract questions through altogether material and specific circumstances,” Galison says. “I like, for example, to see how ideas about how we gain and secure knowledge in physics are embodied in how we design instruments—looking for pictures in the long history of image-making devices or hunting for statistical demonstration by way of machines that count. I like thinking about something as ephemeral as Einsteinian time instantiated in ideas about wired-together clocks or coordinated telegraph signals. Or how we contemplate our obligations to the 10,000-year future through our marking of a nuclear waste repository. These last eight years, my attention has been fixed on black holes—these wildly exotic objects in spacetime—by way of imaging them. What should I call this obsession? Abstract materialism? Material abstraction? Whatever the name, it is what wakens me in the middle of the night and preoccupies me always.”
Galison currently directs the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard, a leading center for interdisciplinary research on black holes. His books include How Experiments End; Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics; Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps; and, with Lorraine Daston, Objectivity. He has won numerous awards for his work, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He has also been involved in the production of several documentary films. His latest feature film is Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know.
The Nauenberg History of Science Lecture brings the best historians of science to UC Santa Cruz to share the importance of this interdisciplinary work with faculty, students, and interested community members. The series was established by Emeritus Professor Todd Wipke, past president of the Emeriti Association in consultation with the Nauenberg family in honor of Michael Nauenberg, a founding faculty member in the Physics Department at UCSC who came to the campus in 1966.
The free lecture will be held April 18 at the Music Recital Hall from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. A virtual option will also be available. The lecture is being presented by the UC Santa Cruz Emeriti Association with co-sponsors from the Santa Cruz Institute of Particle Physics (SCIPP), the History Department, Crown College, and The Arts Research Institute (ARI) at UCSC.
