Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics Talk: Filming and Writing Physics: Concrete Abstractions

In the long twentieth century of physics—from Einstein to the present—the discipline has stood at a crossroads. At the center, a vital exchange between theory and experiment, given urgency on two sides. On one road, a reconfiguration of deep philosophical concerns: What is the origin and fate of the universe, the nature of space and time, the determinism of the world? On the other, the all-too worldly—national security and industrial demands of electronics, computation, and nuclear weapons. Throughout, a back-and-forth between high abstraction and concrete circumstance. My work aims to engage that exchange by exploring the specific development of instruments, experiments, images, and calculations, explored through writing and filming (I will show some clips) to approach the concrete abstractions that power the physics we know.