Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know

Lorraine Daston is Director Emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She has published on a wide range of topics in the history of science, including the history of probability and statistics, wonders in early modern science, the emergence of the scientific fact, scientific models, objects of scientific inquiry, the moral authority of nature, and the history of scientific objectivity. She is the recipient of the Pfizer Prize and Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society, the Schelling Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, the Lichtenberg Medal of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, the Luhmann Prize of the University of Bielefeld, and honorary doctorates from Princeton University and the Hebrew University. In 2018 she was awarded the Dan David Prize in the History of Science.

Peter Galison is a physicist, historian of science, and filmmaker at Harvard University, where he is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor. In 1997, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. In 1998, Galison was awarded the Pfizer Prize by the History of Science Society for the best book in the History of Science. In 1999, he received the Max Planck and Humboldt Stiftung Prize. In 2017, he won the American Physical Society’s Abraham Pais Prize. With his Event Horizon Telescope colleagues, Galison shared in the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the first image of a black hole.

Simon Schaffer is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. He was trained in natural sciences and history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University. He has taught history of the sciences at Imperial College, London, at UCLA and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and Sarton Medalist of the History of Science Society. His research addresses the practices, materials and organization of scientific inquiry between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, including studies of astronomy, natural philosophy, technology and the physical sciences. Schaffer has collaborated with several museum and gallery projects, is a Caird Medalist of the National Maritime Museum, and is a member of the advisory board of the Science Museum.