Philosophy of the Shadow

Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. In 1997, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; in 1998, the Pfizer Award for Image and Logic; in 1999, the Max Planck and Humboldt Stiftung Prize; and in 2018, the Pais Prize in the history of physics. His other books include How Experiments End (1987), , Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (2003), and Objectivity (with L. Daston, 2007). Collaborating with Robb Moss, the two directed Secrecy (2008), which premiered at Sundance, and then Containment (2015), about the need to guard radioactive materials for the 10,000-year future. Galison partnered with South African artist William Kentridge on a multi-screen installation, “The Refusal of Time” (2012). He is a co-founder (2016) of the Black Hole Initiative, an interdisciplinary center at Harvard, and a member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.
 
He will be speaking on the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration’s hunt for an objective image of a black hole, and its place in the centuries-long struggle to define and redefine what it means to make a reliable scientific image.