Issue date: 11/17/08 Section: Features

Media Credit: Patrick Clayton Peter L. Galison speaks Tuesday regarding "Wastelands and Wildernesses" at the Annenberg Presidential Conference Center as part of the 2008-2009 Distinguished Lecture Series. [Click to enlarge]

Authors are generally not associated with filmmaking- certainly not professors of physics. Peter Galison is a rare combination of a physics professor, history professor, filmmaker and an author of several books.

Galison, the Joseph Pellegrino University professor of the history of science and of physics at Harvard University, came to A&M on Nov. 11 for the University Distinguished Lecture series to speak about "Wastelands and Wilderness."

Galison has been involved in the production of two documentary films. The first, "The Ultimate Weapon: the H-bomb Dilemma," described the political and scientific decisions behind the creation of the first hydrogen bomb in the U.S., and premiered on the History Channel in 2000.

"My first venture into film began in the 1980s," Galison said. "I had just finished an article on the moral and political debates about the building of the hydrogen bomb, and I realized that I knew many of the key scientists who had struggled over that issue."

Scientists like Edward Teller and Hans Bethe, who were involved in the development of the first nuclear weapon in the Manhattan Project, were alive when Galison was researching the issue. Galison said that such an opportunity to convert it to a film would not come again.

"I began to interview people at Los Alamos and elsewhere," he said. "That project lasted a very long time. Life intervened, but it finally went to television in 2000."

The second film, "Secrecy," was directed with Harvard filmmaker Rob Moss. The film analyzed the costs and benefits of government secrecy and premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

Galison has a unique take on physics. Traditionally thought by science students to be a practical subject involving applications of varied concepts, "Physics has a dual personality," he said. "One is the practical aspect - what most of us associate it with, and then there is the abstract side to physics - how it fits into the broader culture we live in."

Galison said he considers physics to be an essential part of many activities. He studies the development of world events from the point of view of modern physics.

"Physics is at the center of many concrete things in the society, for example, the Cold War, which is the consequential side of the subject," he said. "Nuclear weapons, for instance, become so important in the state of physics."

In his lecture at A&M, Galison explored question of what happens to the land where all the nuclear waste goes.

"Plutonium, the critical material in most nuclear fission weapons, is one of the most toxic substances we know," Galison said. "This means that land contaminated with this metal is going to stay unusable for some 400 generations - longer by far than the whole of human recorded history. There's a law requiring that we mark those lands as dangerous for the whole of this period - and that raises one of the most astonishing problems."

Galison said he is concerned about what happens to land that is isolated for long periods and how people will communicate what happened in that period.

"I can imagine: how do we record a message for people living here so extraordinarily far in the future? Should we use words? Signs? Sculptures?" Galison said.

Galison questioned how the land is going to be classified when left uninhabited.

"There's a second issue too. How should we think about our relation to nature when big tracks of land are excluded from our or our descendants' use for this epochal amount of time? Should we think of them as some do, as 'national sacrifice' zones" Galison asked.

Galison has authored four books, including "Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics" and "Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time." His most recent book released in 2007, co-authored with Lorraine Daston, is titled "Objectivity."

He said he is looking forward to future work exploring the relationship between nuclear wastelands and wilderness.

"I'm finishing a book that includes the material I'm presenting at Texas A&M," he said, "and, if all goes well, this may lead to my next film."

Selected books by Peter Galison
"Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics"
"Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time."
"Objectivity."

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