Peter Galison

thumb|Peter Galison at the 2007 History of Science Society meeting Peter Louis Galison (born May 17, 1955) is an American historian of science, and the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in history of science and physics at Harvard University. Quotes Image and Logic, 1997 Peter Galison. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. University of Chicago Press, 1 okt. 1997. The search for original cases and the "superior" rules that would emerge from them spread far outside legal practice. Wallace Donham, dean of the Harvard Business School from 1919 to 1942, was trained at the law school in the heady days of the case system's early and enthusiastic reception. Where law and business parted ways was in the contingent matter of the availability of ready- made cases — law faculty simply reached for their shelves, while professors of business needed to create a new literary species — the business case book. p. 57 To Donham, the case study stood squarely in the legal and cultural tradition of Anglo-American thought. Unlike French or Spanish law. Donham emphasized, English law was grounded on the doctrine of stare decisis, in which the written case decisions of the past shape, and instantiate, the law. Just as the recording of cases allowed English common law to break the arbitrariness of local law. Donham argued in 1925, business needed to universalize its procedures by itself adopting the case system. The chaos of local law that ruled in England before the common law. Donham contended, "is exactly the same situation that we have [in the world of business] where practically every large corporation is tightly hound by traditions which are precedents in its particular narrow field and narrow held only The recording of decisions from industry to industry [enables] us to start from facts and draw inferences from those facts; [it] will introduce principle... in the field of business to such an extent that it will control executive action in the field where executive action is haphazard or unprincipled or bound by narrow, instead of broad precedent and decision" ( W. Donham, transcript of talk to the Association of Coll. School of Business Committee Reports and Other Literature, 5-7 May 1925. Harvard Business School, box 17, folder 10. 62). p. 57, footnote 66 On Trying: An Interview with Peter Galison (2026) On Trying: An Interview with Peter Galison (2026) My filmmaking partner, Robb Moss, often says that film is where good ideas go to die. What he means is people come in and they think, ‘I’ll make a film about X, because X is an interesting topic,’ but a topic is not a film. Trying to impose too strongly your pre-formed ideas and not being open to what’s before you as you film is deadly. One of the experiences I’ve had in learning and collaborating with people in different forms of media, is that what can look like an open field to somebody that comes from the sciences—an art production—has genuine demands of coherence and expectations. You can’t just proceed as you wish. It’s simply not true. When Robb and I were working together, we often disagreed about things, and we always settled it by saying, ‘let’s try it’. Whatever it was. Sometimes it did work and sometimes it didn’t work, but once it was on the screen, we never disagreed. Never. Theoretically you can disagree, but once it’s part of the work, it becomes much clearer. That’s been true of lots of projects, not just in film but in the history of science. I think that recognizing the constraints of genre and coherence matters. The vocabulary that you’re using, whether it’s visual or textual or technical, brings demands with it. In my particular case, film has been the avenue by which I’ve wanted to become engaged in a wider realm, but also writing sometimes, addressed to a non-specialist audience. Ultimately, universities have to prove themselves worthy of support to the broader society—and it cannot be just a mantra of ‘we invent and decades later these inventions help people’. ...It’s not a matter of speaking down to people or speaking as if to a five-year-old. It’s a matter of speaking to others intelligently with dignity and respect, whether in books, articles, films, or exhibits. There’s a sense that people want to have more control over their lives and sometimes these against-the-grain conspiracy theories answer to their frustrations. I’m very sympathetic to the response to COVID-19 and the development of mRNA vaccines, which I think saved millions of lives. But there were many mistakes that the public health officials made, certainly in the United States, like saying simultaneously, masks don’t work, don’t use them, and you shouldn’t use them because the surgeons need them, and then once the shortage ended saying that they were one of the most effective means of ceasing transmission. Well, either they work, or they don’t work, and people are not stupid. If they had simply said, we need more masks for surgery, please only use them when you’re going to be in indoor situations, I think that it would have gone over much better. Film is the multiplicity of music or sound design and lighting and image and facial expression and body gestures and physical objects and scale. All those things are happening simultaneously, and they create a multimodal effect. External links Category:1955 births Category:Living people Category:People from New York City Category:Academics from the United States Category:Historians of science Category:Historians from the United States Category:MacArthur Fellows Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Harvard University faculty Category:Stanford University faculty