David Kaiser

This month, SHAS turns 75 and is celebrating its anniversary with a two-day conference, September 24th and 25th.

For this MIT News Roundtable, we're delighted to have three distinguished faculty members from Shas with us, historian and physicist David Kaiser, anthropologist Heather Paxson, and economist Jonathan Gruber, who are all here to talk about what makes Shas a special place.

Thank you all for joining us.

Thanks for having us.

If it's all right, I'd like to just jump in and start by asking each of you a different question about Shas.

Perhaps we could start with you, David.

David Kaiser, for our audience, is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Physics at MIT.

He's written numerous books about the history of physics and done scientific research focused on inflationary cosmology, the very rapid, very early expansion of our universe.

And what I mean by that is a bunch of Skifuza podcasts have you on, label you as a JFK expert, and therefore you become one in your own head and in the eyes of the viewers.

Scholars like David Kaiser, Michael Beschloss, that analyzed JFK's presidency with a broader political, diplomatic, or intelligence context.

Those are one sphere.

Those are what I call the academic institutional historians, right? Really, really smart guys.

We're going to murder your husband.

Bye, David Kaiser.

Pat

McAfee thinks he can do it.

You're talking about world-class physics being done.

And David Kaiser wrote a book called How the Hippies Saved Physics.

Well, those guys were all my friends.

And I'm even mentioned peripherally in that book.