2023 Speakers

Banquet Speaker

Peter Galison

Department of Physics, Harvard University

Peter Galison is a physicist, historian of science, and filmmaker at Harvard University, where is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and Director of the Black Hole Initiative. In 1997, he was named a MacArthur Fellow; with his Event Horizon Telescope colleagues, Galison shared in the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the first image of a black hole. He is the author of several books, including How Experiments End; Image and Logic; Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps; and (with L. Daston), Objectivity. Galison partnered (as dramaturg) with South African artist William Kentridge on a multi-screen installation, The Refusal of Time (2012) and an associated chamber opera. He and Robb Moss co-directed Secrecy (2008), on national security secrecy, which premiered at Sundance. The two also co-directed Containment (2015), about the need to guard radioactive materials. The latest feature film produced and directed by Peter Galison is: Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know, which was released in 2020.