2016 AAAS Annual Meeting (February 11-15, 2016)

February 10 - 15, 2016

SARTON MEMORIAL LECTURE IN THE HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE: David Kaiser: Einstein’s Legacy: Studying Gravity in War and Peace

Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dr. David Kaiser is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Department Head of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and also Professor of Physics. He completed a bachelor’s degree in physics at Dartmouth College and Ph.D. degrees in physics and in the history of science at Harvard University. His historical research focuses on the development of physics in the United States during the Cold War, looking at how the discipline has evolved at the intersection of politics, culture, and the changing shape of higher education. His physics research focuses on early-universe cosmology at the interface of particle physics and gravitation. Kaiser is the author of the books Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (2005) and How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (2011). He is currently working on two books about gravity: a physics textbook co-authored with Alan Guth; and a historical study of Einstein’s general relativity over the course of the 20th century. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and has received the Pfizer Prize and the Davis Prize from the History of Science Society.