Peter Galison, "(In)Visible Knowledge"

Now you see it; now you also see it.

What is the relationship - and what has it been, and what could it be - between what we (can) see, and what we (can) know?

In this seed, Peter Galison reflects on the kinds of questions that have shaped his work over the course of a a long and astounding career. Specifically, he follows a thread that connects all of his work, in some way: the tension between what can be seen, and what can't be seen; between making things visible and keeping things invisible.

Galison stays focused on this question while ranging across an array of objects and themes that could form a map of the history of science: cloud chambers, psychoanalysis, art history, statistics, black holes, secrets, the Anthropocene.

And he points toward a way of thinking more foundationally, perhaps, about the generative possibilities of thinking at the intersection of what is, and what is not.

Bio

Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. He currently directs the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard, a leading center for interdisciplinary research on black holes. His books include How Experiments End; Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics; Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps; and, with Lorraine Daston, Objectivity. His latest feature film is Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know.