Jimena Canales, "Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science" (Princeton UP, 2020)
Science may be known for banishing the demons of superstition from the modern world. Yet just as the demon-haunted world was being exorcized by the enlightening power of reason, a new kind of demon m…
00:42:06 |
Mon 16 Nov 2020
D. Bilak and T. Nummedal, "Furnace and Fugue. A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s 'Atalanta fugiens' (1618)" (U Virginia Press, 2020)
In 1618, on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, the German alchemist and physician Michael Maier published Atalanta fugiens, an intriguing and complex musical alchemical emblem book designed to engage …
00:58:40 |
Wed 21 Oct 2020
John Whysner, "The Alchemy of Disease" (Columbia UP, 2020)
Since the dawn of the industrial age, we have unleashed a bewildering number of potentially harmful chemicals. But out of this vast array, how do we identify the actual threats? What does it take to …
00:47:05 |
Thu 08 Oct 2020
Jeremy England, "Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things" (Basic Books, 2020)
“How did life begin? Most things in the universe aren't alive, and yet if you trace the evolutionary history of plants and animals back far enough, you will find that, at some point, neither were we.…
01:39:09 |
Mon 05 Oct 2020
James L. Nolan, Jr., "Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age" (Harvard UP, 2020)
After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took possession of a box of private family materials. To his surprise, the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information about his grandfa…
00:38:59 |
Thu 24 Sep 2020
Joseph E. Davis, "Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
Everyday suffering—those conditions or feelings brought on by trying circumstances that arise in everyone’s lives—is something that humans have grappled with for millennia. But the last decades have …
00:56:07 |
Fri 18 Sep 2020
Mel Schwartz, "The Possibility Principle: How Quantum Physics Can Improve the Way You Think, Live, and Love" (Sounds True, 2017)
How would you like to experience your life? It’s an intriguing question, and yet we’ve been conditioned to believe our life visions and goals are often unattainable—until now. With The Possibility Pr…
00:55:28 |
Tue 01 Sep 2020
Joshua Nall, "News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019)
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re hearing an awful lot about the fraught relationship between science and media. In his book, News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy,…
01:04:04 |
Thu 06 Aug 2020
David Kaiser, "Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
David Kaiser is a truly unique scholar: he is simultaneously a physics researcher and a historian of science whose writing beautifully melds the past and future of science.
As a historian, he studies…
01:21:41 |
Mon 13 Jul 2020
Matthew Duncombe, "Ancient Relativity: Plato, Aristotle, Stoics and Skeptics" (Oxford UP, 2020)
As a matter of basic metaphysics, we classify individuals in terms of their relations to other things – for example, a parent is a parent of someone, a larger object is larger than a smaller object. …
01:02:20 |
Wed 10 Jun 2020
Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020)
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and…
02:00:37 |
Tue 02 Jun 2020
B. Earp and J. Savulescu, "Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships" (Stanford UP, 2020) )
Consider a couple with an infant (or two) whose lives have become so harried and difficult the marriage is falling apart. Would it be ethical for them to take oxytocin to help them renew their emotio…
01:11:42 |
Mon 11 May 2020
Paul Nahin, "Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons" (Princeton UP, 2020)
Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons: From the Mathematics of Heat to the Development of the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable (Princeton University Press, 2020), by Paul Nahin, is a book that is meant for som…
00:52:02 |
Fri 03 Apr 2020
Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabb…
00:51:34 |
Mon 30 Mar 2020
Maurice Finocchiaro, "On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair" (Oxford UP, 2019)
In his new book On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair (Oxford University Press, 2019), Maurice Finocchiaro shows that there were (and are) really two Galileo “affa…
01:04:10 |
Thu 26 Mar 2020
Ellen Griffith Spears, "Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town" (UNC Press, 2016)
Professor Ellen Griffith Spears of the University of Alabama, author of Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) discusses the…
00:32:39 |
Fri 28 Feb 2020
Daniel Kennefick, "No Shadow of Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse that Confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity" (Princeton UP, 2019)
Daniel Kennefick talks about resistance to relativity theory in the early twentieth century and the huge challenges that faced British astronomers who wanted to test the theory during the solar eclip…
00:39:14 |
Fri 17 Jan 2020
Sarah Marie Wiebe, "Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley" (UBC Press, 2016)
In a foreword to Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), the public philosopher James Tully writ…
00:44:45 |
Fri 29 Nov 2019
John Gribbin, "Six Impossible Things: The ‘Quanta of Solace’ and the Mysteries of the Subatomic World" (Icon Books, 2019)
Today's podcast is on the book Six Impossible Things: The ‘Quanta of Solace’ and the Mysteries of the Subatomic World (Icon Book, 2019) by the noted author John Gribbin. Although there have been a nu…
00:54:56 |
Tue 05 Nov 2019
Cara New Daggett, "Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work" (Duke UP, 2019)
In Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke UP, 2019), Cara New Daggett suggests that reassessing our relationships with fossil fuels in the face of climate chang…
00:43:29 |
Mon 04 Nov 2019
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