Black Hole Initiative

Darüber sprechen wir mit einem Wissenschaftler, der mit kühnen Thesen und kompromissloser empirischer Strenge die Suche nach außerirdischer Intelligenz revolutioniert hat.

Als Leiter des Galileo-Projekts und Gründungsdirektor der Black Hole Initiative an der Harvard Universität widmet er sich der systematischen Suche nach technologischen Signaturen außerirdischer Zivilisationen und der wissenschaftlichen Analyse unidentifizierter Anomalien beziehungsweise Phänomene, kurz UAPs.

Mit zahlreichen Fachpublikationen, mit seinen Bestsellern wie Außerirdisch und seiner Arbeit in wissenschaftlichen Beratungsgremien plädiert er für akademische Bescheidenheit und Transparenz gegenüber der Öffentlichkeit.

Gemeinsam mit ihm werfen wir heute in unserem Podcast einen differenzierten Blick auf die wissenschaftliche UAP-Forschung, das Spannungsfeld zwischen militärischer Geheimhaltung und der Forschungsfreiheit, die es geben sollte, sowie die möglichen gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen eines Erstkontakts.

He is especially interested in interpretations of quantum theory, the measurement problem, and what our best physical theories have to tell us about ongoing debates in metaphysics.

He is a faculty affiliate with Harvard's Black Hole Initiative, a fellow of the John Bell Institute, founder organizers of the annual New England workshop on the history of philosophy and physics, and co-founder organizer of the Boston Network for History and Philosophy of Physics.

Claudia Brodsky is a professor of comparative literature at Princeton who has previously taught German and comparative literature at Yale where she also received her PhD.

Professor Brodsky has been an Alexandra von Humboldt fellow, a DAAD fellow.

That working group is coordinated by Peter Gallison.

He's the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in History of Science and Physics at Harvard, a founding member of the Black Hole Initiative, and the author of many well-known books, How Experiments End, Image and Logic, and, with Lorraine Daston, Objectivity.

He's also a documentary filmmaker, most recently of Black Holes, The Edge of All We Know.

The conversation begins by tracing Peter's path into the field, from a great-grandfather who worked in Edison's lab to a year in a plasma physics laboratory in Paris, the experimentalists who taught him to tell a real effect from an artefact, and from there they turn to visualisation, why images become a topic for HBS at all.

And then with black holes, they're the ultimate invisible object.

They're the objects that reflect no light, they emit no light, They seem impossible, right? Their things fall in, but they don't come out, except in some far distant and too small to measure Hawking radiation way.

So when I was approached by a group of my friends and colleagues to start a black hole initiative, it would bring together these different fields of physics and astrophysics, observers, for me also philosophy and history of science.

It built on other experiences I'd had with working with a South African artist, a close friend, William Kentridge, and we'd collaborated together on something called Refuse the Hour and an associated chamber opera called Refusal of Time.