"Wastelands and Wilderness": Presentation by Peter Galison January 22, 2009

Peter Galison will discuss the strange and often hidden connections between land too pure to be used, and land so defiled with nuclear waste that it must be forbidden, legally, from human use for 10,000 years. What does this form of self-exclusion say about who we think we are and how we relate to nature?

Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Among other works, he is the author of How Experiments End (Chicago University Press, 1987), Image and Logic: a Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago University Press, 1997), with C.A. Jones, Picturing Science, Producing Art (Routledge, 1998), and, with Lorraine Daston, Objectivity (Zone Books, 2007).

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/thursdayscals09.php