New Books in Science

Have faith and science always been enemies? The story of Robert Hooke, a revolutionary working in the Scientific Revolution, exemplifies the ways in which Christianity has actually provoked scientific inquiry.  Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. Patricia Fara, director of studies...

"It is not only for science to give to publishing, but the time has come for publishing to start giving back to science." Tiffany Gasbarrini clarifies the difference between commercial and mission-driven publishers and how publishers who aren't bound by commercial interests alone can make brave ideological publishing decisions. She also makes a passionate case for why telling stories in science ca...

Scientists discovered that some stars have heartbeats and that some of them can be used to measure the longest distances that exist. This episode was produced by Andrew Middleton  and Liya Rechtman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

We’re hitting up against the very nature of measurement: How can we best describe the world around us, in its infinite complexity, with finite measures? In other words, how hard are rocks? This episode was produced by Andrew Middleton and Liya Rechtman. Measure for Measure is a limited series from Ministry of Ideas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by...

The detection of gravitational waves in 2015 rocked the science community. In this episode, Chris Gondek spoke with author Harry Collins, whose book Gravity's Kiss centers around the incredible discovery. Scientists have been trying to confirm the existence of gravitational waves for fifty years. Then, in September 2015, came a "very interesting event" (as the cautious subject line in a physicist'...

Could you pick a white-breasted nuthatch out of a lineup? We explore the value - and limits - of birdwatching, categorization, and measurement. This episode was produced by Andrew Middleton and Liya Rechtman. Measure for Measure is a limited series from Ministry of Ideas. The show is executive produced by Liya Rechtman, created by Andrew Middleton, and sound engineered by Greg Fredle.  Learn more...

Poets and philosophers are fascinated by time and beauty. They are two of our most visceral perceptions. In Time and Beauty: Why Time Flies and Beauty Never Dies (World Scientific, 2022), Adrian Bejan — a physicist — explains the scientific basis for the perception of time (“mind time”) and beauty. His is an evolutionary argument for understanding both perceptions, based on visual processing and c...

In What It All Means: Semantics for (Almost) Everything (MIT Press, 2022), Philippe Schlenker takes readers on tour of meaning, from the animal kingdom to human culture, arguing that semantics should be taken to have a wide range of applications. He takes on bird song and primate calls, classical music and sign language, predicate logic and scalar implicatures. Throughout, he demonstrates the succ...

Science often draws a picture of the world as a giant machine, a meaningless mechanical clock ticking and tocking forever. But religion and poetry offer a different view, one that is teeming with life and overflowing with spirit. Guest:  Michael Ruse is a British-born Canadian philosopher of science who specializes in the philosophy of biology and works on the relationship between science and reli...

What’s actually going on in a cell–or on the spiky outside of an invading virus? Gael McGill, Director of Molecular Visualization at the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School is founder and CEO of Digizyme and has spent his career exploring and developing different modes for visualizing evidence. For this scientific conversation taped back in 2021, Recall this Book h...

Joel Sweimler, Exhibition Specialist at the American Museum of Natural History, talks about his career at the museum, working on Seeing Truth, and what his favorite object in the collection happen to be this week. Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website. Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod Alexis L. Boylan is the director of academic affairs of the...

How useful will nuclear fusion be? In a major breakthrough last year at the National Ignition Facility in California, 192 lasers achieved fusion – and created energy - for the first time. It was clearly an important moment. But might the development of fusion technology come too late? Owen Bennett Jones speaks with Sharon Ann Holgate, author of Nuclear Fusion: The Race to Build a Mini Sun on Earth...

Linking morality and science can conjure up disturbing histories around social Darwinism, eugenics, and genetically engineered humans. But scientists today are making discoveries that moral agents shouldn’t ignore: how to overcome aggression and tribalism, and how to sustain cooperation in a modern pluralist world. Guests: Diane Paul, professor emerita of the University of Massachusetts, Boston an...

Linking morality and science can conjure up disturbing histories around social Darwinism, eugenics, and genetically engineered humans. But scientists today are making discoveries that moral agents shouldn’t ignore: how to overcome aggression and tribalism, and how to sustain cooperation in a modern pluralist world. Guests: Diane Paul, professor emerita of the University of Massachusetts, Boston an...

What if human intelligence is actually more of a liability than a gift? After all, the animal kingdom, in all its diversity, gets by just fine without it. At first glance, human history is full of remarkable feats of intelligence, yet human exceptionalism can be a double-edged sword. With our unique cognitive prowess comes severe consequences, including existential angst, violence, discrimination,...

What is the difference between global warming and climate change? This episode explores: What led Dr. Wu into STEM, and to the study of climate change. Why the term global warming is misleading, and potentially confusing. Why weather around the world is getting more extreme. What she foresees for the future, and what we can do to change that. Why human choices matter on much a larger scale than mo...

Andrew Jewett is the author of Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America (2020) and Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (2012). He has taught at Harvard, Yale, NYU, Vanderbilt, and Boston College and held fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the National Academy of Edu...

Listen to this interview of Gang Wang, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We talk about using the writing to research better. Gang Wang : "I personally view writing as a very useful process to polish my own thinking. For example, when my group are on a project, until we actually put things in writing, we won't find little flaws in...

In Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Samantha Muka, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Stevens Institute of Technology, dives into the unexpected world of tank crafting. Throughout the book, Muka tells the stories behind the development of various kinds of aquariums, such as photography tanks and reef tanks. She...

The National Institute of Health recently announced its plan to retire the fifty remaining chimpanzees held in national research facilities and place them in sanctuaries. This significant decision comes after a lengthy process of examination and debate about the ethics of animal research. For decades, proponents of such research have argued that the discoveries and benefits for humans far outweigh...

This episode from the Vault is a lecture by May Berenbaum about why insects are so scary. Professor Berenbaum is an American entomologist whose research focuses on the chemical interactions between herbivorous insects and their host plants. She teaches entomology at the University of Illinois, and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2014. She is also the organizer of the annual Insect Fea...

Christopher M. Palmer's book Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health (Benbella Books, 2022) will forever change the way we understand and treat mental health. If you or someone you love is affected by mental illness, it might change your life. We are in the midst of a global mental health crisis, and mental illnesses are on the rise. But what causes mental illness...

What human qualities are needed to make scientific discoveries, and which to make great art? Many would point to 'imagination' and 'creativity' in the second case but not the first. Tom McLeish's The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (Oxford UP, 2021) challenges the assumption that doing science is in any sense less creative than art, music or fictional writing a...

Seduction is not just an end result, but a process -- and in mathematics, both the end results and the process by which those end results are achieved are often charming and elegant. This helps to explain why so many people -- not just those for whom math plays a key role in their day-to-day lives -- have found mathematics so seductive. Math is unique among all subjects in that it contains end res...

In this episode, scientists speak back to ideas about collection building, knowledge making, and the role of art and creativity in research. Bernard Goffinet and Eric Schultz, professors in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut, discuss their roles in building and maintaining UConn’s Biodiversity Research Collections and their vision for how scientific...