Augustinian and Manichaean Science

Peter Louis Galison is the Pellegrino University Professor in History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in both Physics and the History of Science in 1983. In 1997 Galison was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; won a 1998 Pfizer Award (forImage and Logic) as the best book that year in the History of Science; and in 1999 received the Max Planck and Humboldt Stiftung Prize. His publications include How Experiments End (1987), Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (2003), Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics  (1997) and Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré'sMaps: Empires of Time. His most recent book (2007), co-authored with Lorraine Daston, is titled Objectivity. Before moving to Harvard, Galison taught for several years at Stanford University where he was professor of History, Philosophy, and Physics. He is considered part of the Stanford School of philosophy of science along with Ian Hacking,John Dupré, and Nancy Cartwright. He has worked extensively with de-classified material in his studies of physics in the Cold War. His film on the moral-political debates over the H-bomb, “Ultimate Weapon: The H-bomb Dilemma” (44 minutes, with Pamela Hogan) has been shown frequently on the History Channel and is widely used in courses and seminars in the United States and abroad. Galison co-curated a major exhibition, “Iconoclash” at the German Media Museum (ZKM) in 2002. The show explored the battles between iconoclasm and iconophilia—the necessity and impossibility of images—in art, science, and religion.