HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Historian of Science Named MacArthur Winner

By William J. Cromie

Gazette Staff

Peter Galison won a $265,000 prize last month. He's going to spend part of it doing something that might fail.

The prize is a no-strings-attached, five-year grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Winners of the grant, considered to be among the most creative people in the country, can spend the money on whatever they want. No reports, scholarly books, or discoveries are required.

"Normally, to get a grant you need to be far enough along on a research project to make its success nearly certain," says Galison, Mallinckrodt Professor of the History of Science and of Physics. "And you have to justify every expense item by item. This award allows me to continue my work, and at the same time do something I've always wanted to do, but have no expertise in. In other words, I get the chance to try something that might not work."

MacArthur fellowships are popularly known as "genius grants." Galison, a boyish 42, doesn't think of himself that way. "I'm glad people think my work is interesting, even exciting, but I don't see myself, or others, as being a genius or not a genius."

Galison, who received his bachelor's (1977), master's (1977), and Ph.D. (1983) degrees from Harvard, won the grant for his unusual approach to studying the history of physics. Instead of organizing it around chronologies of discoveries, he sees the history as the interconnected activities of experimenters, instrument makers, and theorists.

Galison also puts science in a larger frame. He looks at its links to architecture, art, and philosophy. He and his wife, Caroline Jones, an assistant professor of art history at Boston University, organized a joint conference on the history of art and the history of science in 1995. A book on the conference, titled Picturing Science, Producing Art, will be published later this year. The two also have written articles about spaces where science and art are done -- laboratories and studios -- one of which appears in an upcoming book on science and architecture.

Traveling to Work

Even when the work might not work, Galison is not all work and no play. He plans to use some of the $265,000 for "fun" travel. "I've never been to Africa," he says, "and I'd love to go there with my family." His family includes Sam, 8, and Sarah, 3.

There will also be travel in connection with the work at which he doesn't intend to fail. After completing books on experimenters, and on instrument makers, Galison is about to start a third on physicists who developed theories about the origin and history of the universe. Some of the good minds in that business are in countries of the former Soviet Union.

"I would like to visit there at some leisure and bring my family," Galison says. "I'll be able to do so as a MacArthur Fellow."

As to work that might wind up in a file cabinet drawer instead of in a book, Galison thinks about exploring what he calls "some odd connections" in science.

"I'd like to compare work on the development of theoretical physics with the development of theory in another field, such as biology," he says. "I enjoy talking to colleagues who are now debating what 'theoretical biology' means. I want to better understand differences and similarities in the two fields. I don't know enough to apply for an ordinary grant to do something like this; the MacArthur grant gives me that opportunity. And if I fail, then I fail."

Smashing Atoms

Galison's first book in his history of physics trilogy looks at the change in experiments as physicists went from working alone in their labs to working in teams on large-scale experiments with "atom smashers." The latter involve accelerating atoms and subatomic particles to near the speed of light (186,000 miles a second), and smashing them together to see what's inside. Such experiments required dozens, then hundreds, now thousands of physicists working cooperatively.

The atomic fragments are too small to be visible and "live" for only millionths of a second. Galison explored how the scientists decided they had found a real effect, rather than an artifact produced by the complicated machinery.

Called How Experiments End, this book was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1987.

Instruments and Images

The second book traces the story of instruments from a time when solitary scientists designed and made much of their equipment by hand. Titled Image and Logic, it will be published this month by the University of Chicago Press.

The book delves into how the physicists, engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians working on the same experiment communicated with each other. How did they overcome the differences in scientific subcultures and sometimes impenetrable jargon to share their thoughts and knowledge? Galison discovered that they evolved pidgin or creole-type languages, much the same way that sailors and traders invent words to communicate with natives in exotic lands they visit.

Galison also notes that scientists look at science from different perspectives as their instruments change. He tells the story of cloud chambers, devices in which otherwise invisible subatomic particles make themselves known by the vapor trails they leave as they pass through a gas in the chamber. These trails are much like the condensation track made by a jet airplane as it flies in a clear, cold sky.

When C.T.R. Wilson built the first cloud chamber by hand in 1911, he was interested in questions such as how rain forms and what makes fog. Later, scientists adopted his chamber to learn about the masses, charges, and motions of electrons, protons, and other elusive particles that make up the universe.

To study particles with more energy than a cloud chamber could handle, Donald Glaser, in 1952, invented the bubble chamber, wherein particles move through supercold liquid hydrogen. While Wilson blew the glass and made the fittings by himself for cloud chambers, the earliest bubble chambers were filled by hydrogen liquefers used in the making the first hydrogen bomb. These devices cooled hydrogen gas to a point where it became a liquid, the "powder" used in the bomb as well as the "atmosphere" in bubble chambers.

In the 1970s, Glaser adapted some of his bubble chamber technology for probes sent to Mars to look for signs of life.

"By looking at the development of instruments, you discover links invisible to those who view the history of physics through the chronology of discoveries alone," Galison maintains. "In short, you find a lot of history hidden in the material culture of the lab."

The next book will deal with modern theorists who have tried to make sense out of the universe. It will tell the story of the struggle to combine all the known forces and particles into a unified theory that explains the origin, history and future of, well, everything physical. The story has no end yet.

Perhaps even before that is finished, there will be another book called Physics and Biology: The Project That Didn't Fail.