Mario Livio and Jack Szostak, "Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest for Cosmic Life" (Basic Books, 2024)
For a long time, scientists have wondered how life has emerged from inanimate chemistry, and whether Earth is the only place where it exists. Charles Darwin speculated about life on Earth beginning i…
00:55:44 |
Thu 21 Aug 2025
Richard Mainwaring, "What the Ear Hears (And Doesn't): Inside the Extraordinary Everyday World of Frequency" (Sourcebooks, 2022)
What do the world's loneliest whale, a black hole, and twenty-three people doing Tae Bo all have in common?
In 2011, a skyscraper in South Korea began to shake uncontrollably without warning and was…
01:10:37 |
Wed 13 Aug 2025
Emilio Elizalde, "The True Story of Modern Cosmology: Origins, Main Actors and Breakthroughs" (Springer, 2021)
This book tells the story of how, over the past century, dedicated observers and pioneering scientists achieved our current understanding of the universe. It was in antiquity that humankind first att…
01:28:20 |
Fri 08 Aug 2025
David J. Helfand, "The Universal Timekeepers: Reconstructing History Atom by Atom" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Atoms are unfathomably tiny. It takes fifteen million trillion of them to make up a single poppy seed—give or take a few billion. And there’s hardly anything to them: atoms are more than 99.999999999…
01:02:13 |
Thu 07 Aug 2025
Robyn Arianrhod, "Vector: A Surprising Story of Space, Time, and Mathematical Transformation" (U of Chicago Press, 2024)
A celebration of the seemingly simple idea that allowed us to imagine the world in new dimensions--sparking both controversy and discovery.
The stars of this book, vectors and tensors, are unlikely …
01:07:46 |
Fri 25 Jul 2025
Paul Sen, "Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe" (Scribner, 2021)
Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe (Scribner, 2021) tells the incredible epic story of the scientists who, over two centuries, harnessed the power of hea…
01:14:50 |
Thu 17 Jul 2025
Liam Graham, "Molecular Storms: The Physics of Stars, Cells and the Origin of Life" (Springer Nature, 2023)
Why is the universe the way it is? Wherever we look, we find ordered structures: from stars to planets to living cells. Molecular Storms: The Physics of Stars, Cells and the Origin of Life (Springer …
00:53:01 |
Sun 22 Jun 2025
Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin, "Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America" (Island Press, 2025)
This is the shocking true-life story of how PFAS—a set of toxic chemicals most people have never heard of—poisoned the entire country. Based on original, shoe-leather reporting in four highly contami…
00:45:19 |
Fri 02 May 2025
Scientists Cooperate while Humanists Ruminate (EF, JP)
Back in 2021, John and Elizabeth sat down with Brandeis string theorist Albion Lawrence to discuss cooperation versus solitary study across disciplines. They sink their teeth into the question, “Why …
00:39:46 |
Thu 17 Apr 2025
Grace Lindsay, "Models of the Mind: How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
Models of the Mind: How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain (Bloomsbury, 2021) provides a multifaceted and approachable introduction to theoretical neurosc…
00:49:54 |
Thu 20 Mar 2025
Patchen Barss, "The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius" (Basic Books, 2024)
When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a “world behind the world” of transcen…
00:33:16 |
Sat 18 Jan 2025
Brian Clegg, "Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe" (MIT Press, 2021)
Our universe might appear chaotic, but deep down it's simply a myriad of rules working independently to create patterns of action, force, and consequence. In Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe (M…
00:50:08 |
Mon 02 Sep 2024
Alan Lightman, "Einstein's Dreams" (Vintage, 1992)
Einstein’s Dreams (Vintage, 1992) by Alan Lightman, set in Albert Einstein’s “miracle year” of 1905, is a novel about the cultural interconnection of time, relativity and life. As the young genius cr…
00:55:06 |
Sun 07 Jul 2024
Pierre Sokolsky, "Clock in the Sun: How We Came to Understand Our Nearest Star" (Columbia UP, 2024)
On the surface of the Sun, spots appear and fade in a predictable cycle, like a great clock in the sky. In medieval Russia, China, and Korea, monks and court astronomers recorded the appearance of th…
00:29:03 |
Fri 05 Jul 2024
Siobhan Angus, "Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography" (Duke UP, 2024)
In Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke UP, 2024) Siobhan Angus tells the history of photography through the minerals upon which the medium depends. Challenging the emphasis on…
00:51:56 |
Fri 21 Jun 2024
Bernardo Kastrup, "Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A Straightforward Summary of the 21st Century's Only Plausible Metaphysics" (Iff Books, 2024)
Is reality more than the material? Raj Balkaran holds a fascinating interview with philosopher Bernardo Kastrup on this topic. At the vanguard of the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, Bern…
01:53:15 |
Fri 24 May 2024
Kevin Lambert, "Symbols and Things: Material Mathematics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)
The stereotype of the solitary mathematician is widespread, but practicing users and producers of mathematics know well that our work depends heavily on our historical and contemporary fellow travele…
01:20:03 |
Mon 15 Apr 2024
Claudia de Rham, "The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Claudia de Rham has been playing with gravity her entire life. As a diver, experimenting with her body's buoyancy in the Indian Ocean. As a pilot, soaring over Canadian waterfalls on dark mornings be…
00:50:36 |
Mon 01 Apr 2024
Philip Goff, "Why? The Purpose of the Universe" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Does the universe have a purpose? If it does, how is this connected to the meaningfulness that we seek in our lives? In Why? The Purpose of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 2023), Philip Goff a…
01:06:53 |
Sun 10 Dec 2023
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" (Vintage, 2006)
The inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s major motion picture, Oppenheimer, this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography explores the life and times of J. Robert Oppenheimer – the “Father of the Atomic Bomb”…
01:10:35 |
Sat 21 Oct 2023
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