David D. Vail, "Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945" (U Alabama Press, 2019)
Over fifty years ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) scolded the agricultural industry for its profligate spread of “poison” and pesticides “indiscriminately from the skies.” Now, in Chemical L…
00:38:54 |
Tue 15 Oct 2019
Sharra L. Vostral, "Toxic Shock: A Social History" (NYU Press, 2018)
In 1978, doctors in Denver, Colorado observed several healthy children who suddenly and mysteriously developed a serious, life-threatening illness with no visible source. Their condition, which docto…
00:20:48 |
Fri 02 Aug 2019
Paul Sutter, "Your Place in the Universe: Understanding Our Big, Messy Existence" (Prometheus, 2018)
In Your Place in the Universe: Understanding Our Big, Messy Existence (Prometheus, 2018), Paul Sutter presents an in-depth yet accessible tour of the universe for lay readers, while conveying the exc…
00:54:25 |
Thu 18 Jul 2019
Chris Bernhardt, "Quantum Computing for Everyone" (MIT Press, 2019)
Today I talked with Chris Bernhardt about his book Quantum Computing for Everyone (MIT Press, 2019). This is a book that involves a lot of mathematics, but most of it is accessible to anyone who surv…
00:53:41 |
Thu 02 May 2019
Gregory Dawes, "Galileo and the Conflict between Religion and Science" (Routledge, 2016)
Open conflict between religion and science may not be inevitable, but a germ of discord resides in some of the fundamental commitments of both; in this sense, war is always, potentially, just around …
00:47:03 |
Mon 18 Mar 2019
Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes, “A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
If the universe was even slightly different in some of its fundamental physical properties, life could not exist – such is the claim of ‘fine tuning’ of the universe for life. The topic of fine tunin…
00:42:34 |
Tue 13 Nov 2018
Daniel Stolz, “The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Both a history of science and a history of Islam, The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Daniel Stolz tells the sto…
00:57:18 |
Mon 05 Nov 2018
Norah MacKendrick, “Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics” (U California Press, 2018).
Consumers today have a lot of choices. Whether in stores or online, people are inundated by an abundance of options for what to buy. At the same time, the products we consume seem to have more and mo…
01:09:37 |
Thu 19 Jul 2018
Eli Maor, “Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg” (Princeton UP, 2018)
Most of us have heard of the math-music connection, but Eli Maor’s Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg (Princeton University Press, 2018) is THE book that explains what that connectio…
00:54:42 |
Wed 18 Jul 2018
Randi Hutter Epstein, “Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything” (Norton, 2018)
Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies control with hormones. Armed with a healthy dose of wit…
00:42:38 |
Wed 18 Jul 2018
Scott Bembenek, “The Cosmic Machine: The Science That Runs Our Universe and the Story Behind It” (Zoari Press, 2017)
Scott Bembenek‘s The Cosmic Machine: The Science That Runs Our Universe and the Story Behind It (Zoari Press, 2017) is a wonderful way to introduce an intellectually curious person to how physics and…
00:56:05 |
Mon 23 Oct 2017
Brian Clegg, “The Reality Frame: Relativity and Our Place in the Universe” (Icon Books, 2017)
Brian Clegg is one of England’s most prolific and popular writers on science. His latest work, The Reality Frame: Relativity and Our Place in the Universe (Icon Books, 2017), covers Einstein’s Theori…
00:52:01 |
Thu 29 Jun 2017
Raz Chen-Morris, “Measuring Shadows: Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility” (Penn State UP, 2016)
Raz Chen-Morris‘s new book traces a significant and surprising notion through the work of Johannes Kepler: in order to account for real physical motions, one has to investigate artificially produced …
01:00:52 |
Wed 29 Mar 2017
Stephanie Ruphy, “Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered: A New Approach to the (Dis)unity of Science (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2017)
The idea that the sciences can’t be unified–that there will never be a single ‘theory of everything’–is the current orthodoxy in philosophy of science and in many sciences as well. But different vers…
01:06:43 |
Wed 15 Mar 2017
Meredith K. Ray, “Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in 17th-Century Italy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
Meredith K. Ray’s new book contextualizes and translates a range of seventeenth-century letters, mostly between Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), that collectively off…
01:01:10 |
Mon 13 Mar 2017
Ian Stewart, “Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe” (Basic Books, 2016)
The book discussed here is Ian Stewart’s Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe (Basic Books, 2016). If you would like to read a book that in my opinion represents the nicest jo…
00:54:10 |
Thu 29 Dec 2016
J.D. Trout, “Wondrous Truths: The Improbable Triumph of Modern Science” (Oxford UP, 2016)
The social practice we call science has had spectacular success in explaining the natural world since the 17th century. While advanced mathematics and other precursors of modern science were not uniq…
01:10:33 |
Sat 15 Oct 2016
Margaret Morrison, “Reconstructing Reality: Models, Mathematics, and Simulations” (Oxford UP, 2015)
Almost 400 years ago, Galileo wrote that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Today, mathematics is integral to physics and chemistry, and is becoming so in biology, economic…
01:08:30 |
Wed 15 Jul 2015
Meredith K. Ray, “Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy” (Harvard UP, 2015)
According to sixteenth-century writer Moderata Fonte, the untapped potential of women to contribute to the liberal arts was “buried gold.” Exploring the work of Fonte and that of many other incredibl…
01:01:38 |
Wed 08 Jul 2015
Tom McLeish, “Faith and Wisdom in Science” (Oxford UP, 2014)
Much of the public debate about the relationship between science and theology has been antagonistic or adversarial. Proponents on both sides argue that their respective claims are contradictory–that …
00:51:12 |
Fri 22 May 2015
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