Chamber Pieces

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“Particle physics images can easily be taken as art, provided they are interpreted wholly in the light of nonscientific art-world criteria.”—James Elkins

Striking images of, and from, the once groundbreaking but now obsolete tool of 20th-century physics—the bubble chamber.

Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in the History of Science and Physics at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1983. His books include How Experiments End (University of Chicago Press, 1987), Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (W. W. Norton & Co., 2003), and Objectivity with Lorraine Daston (Zone Books, 2007). He has worked on several documentaries, including Secrecy, co-directed by Galison and Robb Moss, which debuted at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. A 1997 MacArthur Fellow, Galison also won the Max Planck Prize in 1999 and served on the editorial board of the journal Critical Inquiry. In 2018, he received the Abraham Pais Award in the History of Physics.

Stanley Greenberg’s photographs have been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and more. His monograph Invisible New York was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1998; a companion volume, Waterworks (Princeton Architectural Press), appeared in 2003. His other published works include Olmsted Trees (Hirmer Verlag, 2022), Springs and Wells, Manhattan and the Bronx (FW:Books 2021), CODEX: New York (Monacelli Press, 2019), Time Machines (Hirmer Verlag, 2011), and Under Construction (University of Chicago Press, 2010). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.