The John McDonald Moore Memorial Lecture: Peter Galison

Historian, philosopher and filmmaker Peter L. Galison delivers the fifth John McDonald Moore Memorial Lecture. Galison is Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and Director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. His main work explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of twentieth century physics–experimentation, instrumentation, and theory. He is author of several books among them Image & Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (1998) and Einstein’s Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (2003), and the producer of two films, The Ultimate Weapon: The H-Bomb Dilemma (2000) and Secrecy (2008). In 1997, Peter Galison was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow; in 1999, he was a winner of the Max Planck Prize given by the Max Planck Gesellschaft and Humboldt Stiftung. Named after one of the university’s most influential art history teachers, this lecture series honors John McDonald Moore’s contribution to the university’s intellectual life. Moore taught art history and criticism at The New School from 1968 until his death in 1999. His classes were famously popular for bringing the vision of an artist who is also a scholar to his students.