Peter L. Galison

Professor Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard, as well as the Director of the Black Hole Initiative, the Founding Director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, and a member of the Event Horizon Telescope team and coordinator of the History, Philosophy, and Culture working group for the next generation Event Horizon Telescope. Galison is Science Team Leader for the Black Hole Explorer, working to capture the sharpest ever image of a black hole, and to see for the first time in history an image of a black hole’s photon ring. 

As a filmmaker, Galison has directed multiple feature films on the history of science and physics, including Secrecy; Ultimate Weapon: The H-Bomb Dilemma; Containment; and his most recent feature-length film on the journey to image a black hole for the first time, Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know. Galison has also produced and directed a number of short films, such as Shattering Stars; Dream of a Shadow; and most recently; Light at the Edge of the Universe: The Black Hole Explorer. 

Alongside his film work, Professor Galison is the author of such publications as How Experiments End, Image and Logic: a Material Culture of Microphysics, Einstein’s Clocks and Poincaré’s maps: Empires of Time, and Objectivity with Lorraine Daston. He is also working on an upcoming publication along with Professor Caroline Jones of MIT, Invisibilities. In this book, Galison and Jones explore seeing and unseeing the Anthropocene, how environmental disaster eludes visual capture.  

For interviews, invitations, and requests, please email galisonasst@fas.harvard.edu.