#peter galison

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[noosphe-re]

I want to get at the blown glass of the early cloud chambers and the oozing noodles of wet nuclear emulsion; the insistent hiss of venting nitrogen gas from the liquifiers of a bubble chamber; the resounding crack of a high-voltage spark arcing across a high-tension chamber and leaving the lab stinking of ozone; the silent, darkened room, with row after row of scanners sliding trackballs across projected bubble chamber images; the late-night computer screens flashing with the skeined complexity of rotating and disappearing tracks; the one remaining iridescent purple line cutting across the background of a terminal. Pictures and pulses—I want to know where they came from, how pictures and counts got to be the bottom-line data of physics.

Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics

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Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know Peter Galison USA, 2020

That was lovely. An amazing account of one of the biggest scientific events in recent memory. Science rules, indeed.

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Physics is a complicated patchwork of highly structured pieces.

Peter Galison, Image and Logic (1997), historian of science commenting on the history of physics

December 13: Don’t Underestimate How Complex a Complex Science Is

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Scientific cinema became an important vehicle of the objectivity effects mobilized as part of this process, whether in the context of debates about war neurosis, in the arena of postwar “human economy,” or in related fields. This reflects the medium’s contribution to a consequential ideal of scientific observation that Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have termed “mechanical objectivity”: the standardization of the object under observation through mechanical means, ostensibly free of all traces of intervention on the part of the observer. Thomalla’s claims concerning film’s role in the resolution of questions about the disease picture surrounding war neurosis, or those of Lersch concerning its advantages in analyzing facial expression, are but two examples of this ideal. They bear out the importance of cinematic processes of scientific knowledge formation to the search for a new and more reliable foundation for social policy in the postwar era. Aspirations for creating a new social order out of the ruins of the one that had collapsed at the end of the war became inextricably bound up with the creation of a new epistemic order—a powerful, if nevertheless contested, form of perceiving, organizing, and shaping social “reality.”

Andreas Killen, Homo Cinematicus

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All epistemology begins in fear – fear that the world is too labyrinthine to be threaded by reason; fear that the senses are too feeble and the intellect too frail; fear that memory fades, even between adjacent steps of a mathematical demonstration; fear that authority and convention blind; fear that God may keep secrets or demons deceive. Objectivity is a chapter in this history of intellectual fear, of errors anxiously anticipated and precautions taken. But the fear objectivity addresses is different from and deeper than the others. The threat is not external – a complex world, a mysterious God, a devious demon. … Objectivity fears subjectivity, the core self.

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity

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Unseeable” Cinema: Peter L. Galison and Robb Moss Discuss Containment

“If secrecy is unimaginable, if nuclear waste is so utterly out of our perceptual range, they vanish from our national awareness.” After their 2008 film Secrecy—on government secrets—Peter Galison and Robb Moss ventured into another realm of the “unseeable.” Here they discuss Containment, a look at hazardous waste that took them to nuclear facilities in South Carolina, New Mexico, and Fukushima, Japan.