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[Emeriti-faculty] Events for this week (week of April 14, 2008)



Good morning:

Events for the week are:

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Physics Graduate Students’
JOURNAL CLUB
Chang Liu
“Low Temperature Scanning Tunneling Microscopy”
Wednesday, April 1 6, 2008
Robinson Hall 250, 5:00 pm
(undergraduate students, faculty and anyone interested are also invited: food served at 4:30 pm in Knipp Library)


Friday, April 18, 2008

Lunch Talk in Space Science and Technology
Suzanne Young
Tufts University
will speak on
Friday
April 18, 2008
“The Phoenix Mission to Mars – NASA’s innovative explorer of liquids and biohability on the red planet” Pizza and beverages at Noon in Robinson 251 followed by talk at 12:30 pm or thereabouts in Anderson 211. Sponsored by the Department of Physics and Astronomy and The Massachusetts Space grant Consortium (MASGC) For further information, please contact Bill Waller at william.waller@ tufts.edu


Friday, April 18, 2008

A Joint Philosophy/Physics and Astronomy Colloquium
Friday, April 18, 2008, 3:00 PM
Nelson Auditorium, Anderson Hall
“The Image of Objectivity”
Peter Galison
Pellegrino University
Professor, Harvard University

When scientific objectivity became a goal in the early 19th century it was by no means obviously something to be desired. Natural philosophers had to invert the old epistemic virtues that involved finding ideal forms that lay behind the variations of this or that individual. Where genius was, plain-sight observation came to dominate. I will here track how the images and image-making technologies of scientific atlases helped define the modern scientific category of mechanical objectivity-and the new quieted and transparent scientific self that accompanied it. The fate of objectivity kept turning: twentieth century scientists questioned image-based, mechanical objectivity; they demanded more interpretation and modification of images than mechanical objectivity ever allowed. With that shift came a new view of the right scientific self, one that explicitly made use of intuition, expertise, and the unconscious. Now, in the early twenty-first century new kinds of scientific images are demanding quite unexpected ways of being a scientist-selves perched uneasily between scientific, engineering, and entrepreneurial forms of life.
Refreshments in Robinson Hall, Room 251 at 2:30 pm