David I. Kaiser

Biography

"David Kaiser is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Department Head of MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and also Professor of Physics in MIT's Department of Physics. He completed an A.B. in physics at Dartmouth College and Ph.D.s in physics and the history of science at Harvard University. Kaiser's historical research focuses on the development of physics in the United States during the Cold War, looking at how the discipline has evolved at the intersection of politics, culture, and the changing shape of higher education. His physics research focuses on early-universe cosmology, working at the interface of particle physics and gravitation. Kaiser is author of the award-winning book, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (University of Chicago Press, 2005), which traces how Richard Feynman's idiosyncratic approach to quantum physics entered the mainstream. His latest book, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (W. W. Norton, 2011), charts the early history of Bell's theorem and quantum entanglement and was named ""Book of the Year"" by Physics World magazine. His edited volumes includePedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (MIT Press, 2005), Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision(MIT Press, 2010), and Science and the American Century, co-edited with Sally Gregory Kohlstedt (University of Chicago Press, 2013). He is presently working on two books about gravity: a physics textbook on gravitation and cosmology co-authored with Alan Guth; and a historical study of Einstein's general relativity over the course of the twentieth century. He is also completing a book entitled American Physics and the Cold War Bubble (University of Chicago Press, in preparation). Kaiser serves as an editor of the journal, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences."

Research Interest

"My physics research is in particle cosmology, working at the interface of particle physics and gravitation. In particular, most of my work has focused on inflationary cosmology, an early phase during which the size of the universe expanded exponentially quickly just fractions of a second after the big bang. (For a review, see ""Inflationary Cosmology."") Since 2011, I have been leading a research group at MIT with Alan Guth on aspects of cosmic inflation. Much like the early universe, our group has grown rapidly. My interest has centered on whether successful inflation might be achieved with familiar particles from the Standard Model of particle physics, such as the Higgs boson. Recent work has focused on predictions from models with several interacting fields, and whether multifield models produce new features that could be observed in the cosmic microwave background radiation, compared to single-field models. Much of this work has also concerned interactions between matter and gravity that extend beyond Einstein's general relativity, and whether such ""nonminimal couplings"" might account for specific observable features in the spectrum of primordial perturbations. For a brief and accessible introduction to this work, see ""Elegant Wiggles: Why the Universe is Lumpy."""