David I. Kaiser is an American
physicist and
historian of science. He is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a full professor in MIT's department of physics. He also served as an inaugural associate dean for MIT's cross-disciplinary program in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing.[1]
Kaiser is the author or editor of several books on the history of science, including Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (2005), How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (2011),[2] and Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World (2020).[3] He received the Apker Award[4] from the
American Physical Society in 1993 and was elected a Fellow of the
American Physical Society in 2010. His historical scholarship has been honored with the
Pfizer Award (2007)[5] and the Davis Prize (2013)[6] from the
History of Science Society. In March 2012 he was awarded the MacVicar fellowship, a prestigious MIT undergraduate teaching award.[7] In 2012, he also received the Frank E. Perkins Award from MIT for excellence in mentoring graduate students.[8]
Education
Kaiser completed his AB in physics at
Dartmouth College in 1993. He completed two PhDs from
Harvard University. The first was in physics in 1997 for a thesis entitled "Post-Inflation Reheating in an Expanding Universe," the second in the history of science in 2000 for a thesis on "Making Theory: Producing Physics and Physicists in Postwar America."[1]
Research
Kaiser's physics research mostly focuses on early-universe cosmology, including topics such as
cosmic inflation,[9][10] post-inflation reheating,[11][12][13] and
primordial black holes.[14][15][16] He has also helped to design and conduct novel experimental tests of quantum theory, including the "Cosmic Bell" experiments[17][18][19] that Kaiser worked on with Nobel laureate
Anton Zeilinger,[20] and which were featured in the
PBS Nova documentary film Einstein's Quantum Riddle (2019).[21]