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 job of presenting astronomy and cosmology in one volume since Isaac Asimov wrote The Universe half a century ago, this is absolutely the one to get. In addition, for those of us who are lovers of math, this book does a far better job than Asimov of presenting the close relationship between mathematics,...
Dec 29, 2016•54 min
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 unique to Europe, it was there that Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and others came up with theories that got modern physics and chemistry off the ground. In his latest book, Wondrous Truths: The Improbable Triumph of Modern Science (Oxford University Press, 2016), J.D. Trout mounts a spirited defense of the...
Oct 15, 2016•1 hr 11 min
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, economics, and other sciences, although amid great controversy. The messy reality of biological creatures and their social relations cannot be captured in mathematical models or computer simulations, it is argued. But what is the relation between mathematics and physical reality? Do highly abstract mathemati...
Jul 15, 2015•1 hr 9 min
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 incredible women, Meredith K. Ray‘s new book explores women’s contributions to the landscape of scientific culture in early modern Italy from about 1500 to 1623. Women in this period were engaging with science in the home, at court, in vernacular literature, in academies, in salons, and in letters, and Daught...
Jul 08, 2015•1 hr 2 min
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 the claims of science trump and even discredit the claims of religion or theology. Some have sought to portray the relationship in a different light. The evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould famously asserted that the two realms were “nonoverlapping magisteria.” But recently theologians and scient...
May 22, 2015•51 min
A. Mark Smith‘s new book is a magisterial history of optics over the course of two millennia. From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) suggests that the transition from ancient toward modern optics was accompanied by a turn in optical studies from a concern with explaining sight to a focus on light by optical scholars. The book argues that Kepler’s theory of retinal imaging was instrumental in this turn. In the course of an amazingly comp...
Mar 21, 2015•1 hr 2 min
DMT and the Soul of Prophecy:A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible (Park Street Press, 2014) asks a number of provocative questions about drugs, consciousness, prophecy, and the Hebrew Bible–with attention to how a particular chemical can help us understand mystical experience. DMT (dimethyltryptamine) is a molecule endogenous to several mammals including humans, as well as the active psychedelic ingredient in a number of plant species around the world–most notably in an Amaz...
Mar 15, 2015•1 hr 25 min
Galactic Encounters: Our Majestic and Evolving Star-System, From the Big Bang to Time’s End, by William Sheehan and Christopher Conselice, takes readers on a journey through time, unfolding the long history of investigation into the fuzzy objects–nebulae, galaxies, dust clouds–in the night sky. This book will be of interest to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jan 12, 2015•1 hr 7 min
Planet Mercury: From Pale Pink Dot to Dynamic World (Springer, 2014) by David A. Rothery, introduces the innermost planet in our solar system and brings readers up to speed on recent spacecraft discoveries and the unsolved mysteries of Mercury. From Mariner 10 in the 1970s to NASA’s (Mercury Surface, Space... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dec 28, 2014•1 hr 10 min
Astrobiology: An Evolutionary Approach (CRC Press, 2014) is a new volume edited by Dr. Vera Kolb that brings together 37 authors from a variety of different research backgrounds to introduce this rapidly developing interdisciplinary field. Anyone coming to the book with questions about the origin or possible manifestations of life... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dec 11, 2014•1 hr 2 min
Lawrence Lipking‘s new book, What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) examines the role of imagination and creativity in the seventeenth century developments that have come to be known as the Scientific Revolution. Whereas some accounts suggest that this period involved the rejection of imaginative thinking,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nov 05, 2014•1 hr 10 min
Roberto Trotta‘s new book, The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is (Basic Books, 2014) uses only the thousand (or ten-hundred) most common words in the English language to describe our current understanding and the most compelling outstanding mysteries in astrophysics and particle physics. A... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Oct 21, 2014•1 hr 2 min
Don Lincoln‘s new book, The Large Hadron Collider: The Extraordinary Story of the Higgs Boson and Other Stuff That Will Blow Your Mind (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), presents an insider’s view of the largest physics experiment of our time and the discoveries that have come out of it over the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Oct 09, 2014•1 hr 2 min
Where can the the boundaries of science, philosophy, and religion be drawn? Questioning the nature of the universe is an excellent place to rethink how these categories have been deployed across time. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, professor Religious Studies at Wesleyan University, offers a genealogy of multiple-world cosmologies that demonstrates these terms pliability and the debated relationship between 'Science' and 'Religion.' In Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (Columbia Univer...
Sep 29, 2014•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 36
In Omar W. Nasim‘s new book, a series of fascinating characters sketch, paint, and etch their way toward a mapping of the cosmos and the human mind. Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2013) examines the history of observation of celestial nebulae in the nineteenth century, exploring the relationships among the acts of seeing, drawing, and knowing in producing visual knowledge about the heavens and its bodies. Observing by Hand treats ...
Jun 02, 2014•1 hr 9 min
The book discussed in this interview is Everyday Calculus: Discovering the Hidden Math All around Us (Princeton University Press, 2014) by Oscar E. Fernandez, who teaches mathematics – and calculus in particular – at Wellesley College. While it can be read by someone who wants to obtain a sense of what calculus is and how it’s used, it is even more enjoyable and enlightening if the reader has taken the first semester of a calculus course. The author takes the reader through a day in the author’s...
Apr 17, 2014•54 min
David Kaiser‘s recent book is one of the most enjoyable and informative books on the history of science that you’ll read, full-stop. The deservedly award-winning How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (W.W. Norton, 2012) takes readers into the “hazy, bong-filled excesses of the 1970s New Age movement” in order to explain and reveal the origins of some of the most transformative breakthroughs in twentieth-century quantum physics. Kaiser shows how the roots...
Apr 02, 2014•1 hr 12 min
[Re-posted with permission from Wild About Math] I’ve admitted before that Physics and I have never gotten along. But, science fiction is something I enjoy. So, when Princeton University Press sent me a copy of Physics Professor Chuck Adler‘s new book Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction (Princeton University Press, 2014), I was intrigued enough that I wanted to interview the author. This interview rambled, but in a good way. Chuck is a great guest, he’...
Feb 14, 2014•1 hr 34 min
Angela Creager‘s deeply researched and elegantly written new book is a must-read account of the history of science in twentieth-century America. Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2013) traces a history of radioisotopes as military and civilian objects, for experimentation and therapeutic use, from the 1930s through the late twentieth century. Creager follows the emergence of a political and economic market for radioisotopes, looking car...
Jan 07, 2014•1 hr 11 min
The book discussed in this interview is Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality Basic Books, 2013) by Edward Frenkel of the University of California at Berkeley.It’s a toss-up which is more interesting – the description of Frenkel’s life or his description of his interest in – and love for – mathematics and physics. Before he was twenty years old, Frenkel had written a paper that a visiting Swedish physicist thought so intriguing that he smuggled it out of Russia.That paper started Frenkel on...
Nov 08, 2013•55 min
Tim Maudlin‘s Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time (Princeton University Press, 2012) is a clear, approachable, and engaging introduction to the philosophy of physics that focuses on fundamental notions of space and time. The book expertly interweaves the history and philosophy of science in the course of its narrative; readers will explore the historical development of ideas about space and time in the course of learning the outlines and intricacies of some of the most powerful physical concep...
Sep 17, 2013•57 min
How do you measure a star? In the middle of the 20thcentury, an interdisciplinary and international community of scientists began using radio waves to measure heavenly bodies and transformed astronomy as a result. David P. D. Munns‘s new book charts the process through which radio astronomers learned to see the sounds of the sky, creating a new space for Cold War science. A Single Sky: How an International Community Forged the Science of Radio Astronomy (MIT Press, 2012) uses the emergence of ra...
Jul 29, 2013•1 hr 9 min
The book discussed in this interview is Dice World: Science and Life in a Random Universe (Icon Books, 2013), by Brian Clegg, an acclaimed British writer of books on science for the general public. Brian has a knack for taking concepts that seem abstruse and explaining them in ways that those who lack a technical background can readily understand. This talent is on display inDice World, where he takes the reader on an intriguing trip through the world of probability and statistics, and shows how...
Jun 04, 2013•53 min
What is alchemy? Who were the alchemists, what did they believe and do and dream, and what did they accomplish? Lawrence M. Principe‘s new book explores these questions and some possible answers to them in a wonderfully written and argued introduction to the history of western alchemy. The Secrets of Alchemy (University of Chicago Press, 2012) traces the genealogy of alchemical practices from their early Greco-Egyptian foundations through early modern chymistry, pausing along the way to reflect ...
Mar 18, 2013•1 hr 5 min
In A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing (Atria, 2012), Lawrence M. Krauss presents this big idea: something can–and perhaps must–come from nothing. That something is, well, everything–you, me, and the entire universe. If that doesn’t get your attention, nothing will. Of course, as Lawrence explains, nothing usually turns out on close inspection to be something. Listen in and find out how. Lawrence and I also discussed the relationship between science (especially ph...
Feb 13, 2013•32 min
Audra Wolfe‘s new book, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (John Hopkins University Press, 2013) offers a synthetic account of American science during the Cold War. Wolfe pulls together a rich and disparate literature to provide a thematic, chronological and accessible story about the distinctive ways that Americans wove science and government together for the five decades after WWII. Beyond the familiar story of physics, Wolfe shows not only how s...
Feb 04, 2013•51 min
You were amused to find you too could fear “The eternal silence of the infinite spaces.” The astronomy love poems of William Empson, from which the preceding quote was taken, were just some of the many media through which people explored the ramifications of Einstein’s ideas about the cosmos in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Masterfully incorporating a contextual sensibility of the historian of science with a sensitivity to textual texture of the literary scholar, Katy Price guides us through t...
Jan 09, 2013•1 hr 1 min
Near the opening of his book A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable (Cambridge University Press, 2007; paperback 2010), Anjan Chakravartty warns readers: snack before reading! Though the occasional exemplary slice of pumpkin pie and chocolate fudge brownies do sweetly sprinkle the narrative, fear not, intrepid reader: most of A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism is devoted to providing a unified account of a metaphysical proposal in support of one of the most crucial conc...
Jul 27, 2012•1 hr 8 min
What happens in our brains when we do things that feel good, such as drinking a glass of wine, exercising, or gambling? How and why do we become addicted to certain foods, chemicals and behaviors? David Linden, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, explains these phenomena in his latest book, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good (Viking, 2011). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.f...
Jun 26, 2012•37 min
Though Einstein, Planck, and Pauli have become household names in the history of science, the work of Arnold Sommerfeld has yet to reach the same level of wide recognition outside the field of theoretical physics and its history. In Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890-1926 (MIT Press, 2010), Suman Seth not only makes a compelling case for the centrality of Sommerfeld as a theoretician and teacher of physics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...
Feb 24, 2012•1 hr 21 min
