TALK BY HARVARD PHYSICIST TO LAUNCH SERIES ON
VISUAL STUDIES AT MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. ­ What is left in, and what is left out, when the story of an historical event is told in images or in the written word? Peter L. Galison, a Harvard University physicist and scientific historian, will explore that question in “The Hydrogen Bomb: Writing and Filming History,” a talk he will deliver on Thursday, September 26, at 7 pm in the art building’s Gamble Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public, and the auditorium is accessible by wheelchair.

“Print and film each illuminate—and obscure—dimensions of history. The moral and political history of the hydrogen bomb offers an instructive example," says Galison, Mallinckrodt Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard. "First detonated in 1952, the H-bomb is in many ways a unique weapon, developed in a brief interregnum between World War II and the establishment of a full-scale military-industrial complex. During that pause, leading civilian scientists not only were vital to the building of nuclear weapons; they were also (relatively) free to intercede at the moral-political level. J. Robert Oppenheimer and James Conant led a central group of physicists as they actively resisted the production of the 'super bomb.' In an effort to understand the furious debate that ensued, I have approached the material first through written history and then through a documentary film—this lecture is an analysis of the very striking differences between the two media."

Galison’s lecture kicks off The Culture and Nature of the Visual, the College's yearlong public lecture series focusing on visual literacy. Tied to the series is a faculty seminar that, over the course of the year, will enable more than thirty-five MHC faculty members from many different disciplines to exchange ideas about topics of visuality in relation to teaching and scholarship and to explore ways that visual literacy can be incorporated across the curriculum. Each lecture will be held on a Thursday evening, and faculty seminar participants will meet the next day to discuss the lecture's topic with the speaker. The seminar and lectures are being cosponsored by the Office of the Dean of Faculty and the Weissman Center for Leadership.

Says coorganizer Debbora Battaglia, professor of anthropology, "Our hope is that the seminar and lecture series will foster new awareness of the social, cultural, and historical dimensions of visuality as practiced diversely within the arts, sciences, humanities, and social sciences. In addition to serving members of the Five College community, the series is intended to foster a long term and necessary conversation about visuality across Mount Holyoke College, in the classroom, and in faculty research.

" Associate Professor of Art and series coorganizer Anthony Lee feels that visual literacy is a necessity duirng modern times. “The visual can be the lingua franca of the twenty-first century,” he says, “a language to help cross borders and make connections with others.”

In addition to his main work, exploring the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of twentieth century physics -- experimentation, instrumentation, and theory -- Galison is well-known for his studies of links between the history of science and neighboring fields. He is the author of How Experiments End (Chicago University Press, 1987), (Chicago University Press, 1997), and Big Science: The Growth of Large Scale Research (Stanford University Press, 1992), and the co-editor of Picturing Science, Producing Art (Routledge, 1998) and The Architecture of Science (MIT Press, 2000). He was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1997, and in 1999 was a winner of the Max Planck Prize, given to individual researchers for outstanding, internationally recognised scientific achievements.

Upcoming speakers in the visuality series include Margaret Livingstone, professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, who will give an October 24 talk titled "Vision and Art: Anatomy, Physiology, Painting, and Illusion." Columbia University Professor of Anthropology Michael Taussig will give a lecture titled "The Language of Flowers" on December 5.

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