Sir Run Run Shaw Lecture
2025 Series

Jimena Canales

Vice-Chairperson
American Council of Learned Societies
Associate Faculty, Harvard University

"As our Scientific Understanding of Time Changes, Does Time Change Too?"

Wednesday, March 26, 2025 | 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Harriman Hall Room 137

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The progress of science throughout the last centuries has increased our ability to measure time with increased precision. In 2023, the Nobel Prize committee marked an important milestone in this trajectory by awarding the prize in physics to researchers who had created a new technology to study nature in attoseconds. 

It is also a milestone in the widening breach between reality determined via scientific measurements and that perceived via our senses. What is the role of the humanities in studying these accomplishments? This talk will explore the possibility of introducing a new concept of time to bridge the divide between scientific and intuitive understandings of nature.

Jimena Canales is an award-winning Mexican-American historian of science. Her scholarly work on the history of science has been published in Isis, Science in Context, History of Science, and the British Journal for the History of Science, among others. Canales’ work on visual, film and media studies has appeared in Architectural History, Journal of Visual Culture, and Thresholds. She writes for general readers, publishing in Aperture, Artforum, WIRED, Nautilus, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker.