David Kaiser

For the historian and professor at the Naval War College, see David E. Kaiser.

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), head of its Science, Technology, and Society program, and a full professor in the department of physics.

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), and How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (2011). He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010. In March 2012 he was awarded the MacVicar fellowship, a prestigious MIT undergraduate teaching award.

Kaiser completed his AB in physics at Dartmouth College in 1993. He obtained 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."

• (2005). Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics. University of Chicago Press.
• (2005). (ed.) Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. MIT Press.
• (2010). (ed.) Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision. MIT Press.
• (2011). How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival. W. W. Norton, ISBN 0393076369.
• with W. Patrick McCray: (2016). (eds.) Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture. University of Chicago Press.
• (Forthcoming). American Physics and the Cold War Bubble. University of Chicago Press.

• Interview with David Kaiser  by Stephen McKiernan, Binghamton University Libraries Center for the Study of the 1960s, February 9, 2010