Lyne Starling Trimble Public Event Series

History, Philosophy, and Culture of Black Holes in the Midst

Peter Galison, Harvard University

Friday, May 30, 2025
5:45pm, Reception
6:30pm, Lecture and Q&A

American Center for Physics
555 12th Street NW, Suite 250
Washington, DC 20004

Abstract

In this golden age of astronomy, the sky is full of riveting objects: white dwarves, neutron stars. But nothing has captured the same attention of disciplines as black holes have, for mathematics, physics, astronomy, and the history and philosophy of science. Type in quotes “philosophy of black holes” into a search engine and you will get seminars, conferences, books; type “philosophy of neutron stars” and you will find “no results.” In 2015, a group of us from across the disciplines began formulating a center where the various disciplines could join forces to approach these perplexing objects widely studied but in disjunct ways. Opening in 2016, the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) at Harvard brought the approaches together. With major work centered at the BHI, April 2019 saw the publication by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) of the first image of a black hole, M87*. Looking to next steps, the next generation-EHT launched “History, Philosophy, Culture” as a principal scientific working group alongside the other technical working groups. Studies of responsible telescope siting, foundations of black hole science, algorithm/inference & visualization, and scientific collaboration became focal points. Now at the BHI new challenges are emerging, not least mounting a NASA small explorer mission to detect and measure the photon ring. History and philosophy of science will be part of the mix. Perhaps there is a new model integrating the history, philosophy and culture of science in rather than after the fact.

Speaker Biography

Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. He is the author of several groundbreaking books in the history of science: How Experiments End (1987); Image and Logic (1997); Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (2003); and, with Lorraine Daston, Objectivity (2007). He has co-edited other volumes, including Big Science; The Disunity of Science; The Architecture of Science; Picturing Science, Producing Art; Scientific Authorship; and Einstein for the 21st Century. As a filmmaker, Galison has made Ultimate Weapon: The H-bomb Dilemma (2000) with Pamela Hogan, and, with Rob Moss, Secrecy (2008) and Containment (2015). His most recent feature film is Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know (2020). Galison’s work on black holes revolves around his role as a leader of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, of which he is currently the director. He has also been a member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration and he is currently the science team lead for the Black Hole Explorer, a prospective space-based follow-on to the EHT. Among his many honors, Galison was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1997; the American Physical Society’s Pais Prize for History of Physics in 2017; and in 1998 the History of Science Society’s Pfizer Award for best book for Image and Logic. As a member of the EHT Collaboration, he shared in the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the first-ever image of a black hole.

Top image: A still from an animation of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekher, an early theoretician of stellar collapse, in Peter Galison’s short film, “Shattering Stars.”