Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2018
Volume 63, Number 1
Monday–Friday, March 5–9, 2018; Los Angeles, California
Session B16: Pais Prize Session: Peter GalisonInvited Prize/Award Undergraduate
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Sponsoring Units: FHP Chair: Alan Chodos, American Physical Society APS Room: LACC 305 |
Monday, March 5, 2018 11:15AM - 11:51AM |
B16.00001: Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics Talk: Filming and Writing Physics: Concrete Abstractions Invited Speaker: Peter Galison In the long twentieth century of physics—from Einstein to the present—the discipline has stood at a crossroads. At the center, a vital exchange between theory and experiment, given urgency on two sides. On one road, a reconfiguration of deep philosophical concerns: What is the origin and fate of the universe, the nature of space and time, the determinism of the world? On the other, the all-too worldly—national security and industrial demands of electronics, computation, and nuclear weapons. Throughout, a back-and-forth between high abstraction and concrete circumstance. My work aims to engage that exchange by exploring the specific development of instruments, experiments, images, and calculations, explored through writing and filming (I will show some clips) to approach the concrete abstractions that power the physics we know. |
Monday, March 5, 2018 11:51AM - 12:27PM |
B16.00002: Einstein’s Quest for a Unified Theory Invited Speaker: David Gross In this talk I will discuss some aspects of Einstein’s attempts to unify all the forces of nature. In particular, I will describe his fascination with Kaluza-Klein theory and his failed attempts to derive the structure of (quantized) matter using this approach. |
Monday, March 5, 2018 12:27PM - 1:03PM |
B16.00003: Physics and History, Data and Time Invited Speaker: Cathryn Carson As academic disciplines, physics and history took their present form in the half-century centered on 1900, shaping themselves as empirically grounded disciplines of temporal dynamics -- namely, structured, force-driven processes of fast or slow change. This talk in honor of Peter L. Galison reflects on the forms of thought and life that go with being a historian of physics in the contemporary university, and the places that temporal identity may take one in an age of data science. |
Monday, March 5, 2018 1:03PM - 1:39PM |
B16.00004: Physics and the Ideals of Human Reason Invited Speaker: Ted Porter Physicists often idealize their field as remote from the ordinary affairs of life, but of course this is valid only in specific sense. Historians in recent times have tried to specify how the sciences, including physics, have not only contributed to shaping ideas and technologies, but draw from its resources, and not only material ones. Peter Galison has shown how Einstein's experience in a Swiss patent office linked up with elaborate, passionate negotiations over the terms of a political and technological standardization of clocks and of time. This lecture will consider episodes from the history of physics involving statistical tools and methods and drawing on historical experience, to reconstruct human reason. Is this a proper task for scientists? It is perhaps too easy to say no. |
Monday, March 5, 2018 1:39PM - 2:15PM |
B16.00005: Science Films in America Invited Speaker: Jon Else Drawing on my own experience as a documentary director and videographer over the four decades, I will trace the gyrations in how public undertanding of science---its findings and its process---are served, underserved, and ill-served by American mass media. The peculiar rhetorical demands of streaming and prime time broadcasting are ripe for discussion, as are the original structural underpinnings of American television and the Internet, forces driving what science and technology programs get made and how they are distributed. |
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