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New Books in Physics and Chemistry

New Books Network

Interviews with physicists and chemists about their new books

arts books

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51:49

Hannah Marcus, "Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine,...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2021/02/16

Today we speak to Hannah Marcus, Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about her new monograph, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Forbidden Knowledge explores the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on them during the Counter-Reformation. How and why did books banned in Italy in the

65:55

Jacqueline Mitton and Simon Mitton, "Vera Rubin: A...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2021/02/16

Few astronomers in the 20th century did as much to expand our understanding of the universe as Vera Rubin. To tell her remarkable story in their biography Vera Rubin: A Life (Belknap Press, 2021), authors Jacqueline and Simon Mitton describe both the range of her accomplishments as well as the barriers she overcame in order to achieve them. As they explain, Rubin was drawn early to the study of the stars, determining early in her life that she wanted to be an astronomer. To become one she had to

65:43

Jennifer M. Rampling, "The Experimental Fire:...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2021/02/08

A four-hundred-year history of the development of alchemy in England that brings to light the evolution of the practice. Tracing the development of alchemy in England from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, Jennifer M. Rampling illuminates the role of alchemical reading and experimental practice in the broader context of national and scientific history. Using new manuscript sources, she shows how practitioners like George Ripley, John Dee, and Edward Kelley, as

78:25

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2020/12/24

What is life? For generations, scientists have struggled to make sense of this fundamental question, for life really does look like magic: even a humble bacterium accomplishes things so dazzling that no human engineer can match it. Huge advances in molecular biology over the past few decades have served only to deepen the mystery. In this penetrating and wide-ranging book, world-renowned physicist and science communicator Paul Davies searches for answers in a field so new and fast-moving that it

44:51

Jimena Canales, "Bedeviled: A Shadow History of...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2020/11/16

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 mischievously materialized in the scientific imagination itself. Scientists began to employ hypothetical beings to perform certain roles in thought experiments—experiments that can only be done in the imagination—and these impish assistants helped scientists achieve major breakthroughs that pushed forward

58:40

D. Bilak and T. Nummedal, "Furnace and Fugue. A...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2020/10/21

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 the ear, eye, and intellect. The book unfolds as a series of fifty emblems, each of which contains an accompanying "fugue" music scored for three voices. Historians of alchemy have long understood this virtuoso work as an ambitious demonstration of the art’s literary potential and of the possibilities of

49:50

John Whysner, "The Alchemy of Disease" (Columbia UP,...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2020/10/08

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 prove that a certain chemical causes cancer? How do we translate academic knowledge of the toxic effects of particular substances into understanding real-world health consequences? The science that answers these questions is toxicology. In The Alchemy of Disease: How Chemicals and Toxins Cause Cancer and

99:09

Jeremy England, "Every Life is on Fire: How...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2020/10/05

“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. Scientists have wrestled with the problem through the ages, and yet they still don’t agree on what kind of answer they are even looking for. But in 2013, at just 30 years old, physicist Jeremy England published a paper that has utterly upended the ongoing study of life’s origins. In Every Life is on

41:44

James L. Nolan, Jr., "Atomic Doctors: Conscience and...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2020/09/24

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 grandfather’s role as a doctor in the Manhattan Project. Dr. Nolan, it turned out, had been a significant figure. A talented ob-gyn radiologist, he cared for the scientists on the project, organized safety and evacuation plans for the Trinity test at Alamogordo, escorted the “Little Boy” bomb from Los Alamos to

58:52

Joseph E. Davis, "Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2020/09/18

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 seen a drastic change in the way we approach it. In the past, a person going through a time of difficulty might keep a journal or see a therapist, but now the psychological has been replaced by the biological: instead of treating the heart, soul, and mind, we take a pill to treat the brain. Chemically

58:13

Mel Schwartz, "The Possibility Principle: How Quantum...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2020/09/01

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 Principle: How Quantum Physics Can Improve the Way You Think, Live, and Love (Sounds True, 2017), psychotherapist Mel Schwartz offers a revolutionary approach to living the life we choose. Though science has vastly expanded our knowledge, it has also led us to adopt a worldview where we see ourselves as

64:04

Joshua Nall, "News from Mars: Mass Media and the...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2020/08/06

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, 1860-1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), historian of science Joshua Nall shows us that a blurry boundary between science and journalism was a key feature—not a bug—of the emergence of modern astronomy. Focusing on objects and media, such as newspapers, encyclopedias, cigarette cards, and

81:41

David Kaiser, "Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2020/07/13

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 mostly 20th-century physics, and in particular the history of quantum mechanics, Feynman diagrams, physics in the counterculture era, and much more. As a physicist, he studies particle physics and theories of cosmology, focused mostly on the early expansion of the universe. In this New Books Network

62:20

Matthew Duncombe, "Ancient Relativity: Plato,...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2020/06/10

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. The nature of relativity – the question of how things relate to other things – is a topic that winds its way through the history of philosophy to the present day. In Ancient Relativity: Plato, Aristotle, Stoics and Skeptics (Oxford University Press, 2020), Matthew Duncombe considers ancient views of

120:37

Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter,...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2020/06/02

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 co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End

71:42

B. Earp and J. Savulescu, "Love Drugs: The Chemical...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2020/05/11

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 emotional bonds, or would this be an unethical evasion of the hard work that keeping a marriage going requires? What if someone has sexual desires that they consider immoral – should they be able to take a drug to suppress those desires, or alternatively can society force them to? Debates about the ethics of

52:02

Paul Nahin, "Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons"...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2020/04/03

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 someone who is comfortable with calculus, but for those readers who are, it is a treat. It is a thorough study of the history and mathematics of the heat equation, which is not only important as an analysis of heat, its analysis marked the beginning of Fourier series. It came as a surprise to me that the

54:19

Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2020/03/30

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 rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and

64:10

Maurice Finocchiaro, "On Trial for Reason: Science,...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2020/03/26

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 “affairs.” Galileo’s original trial and condemnation forms the first affair, the cultural history of controversies about the meaning of the original trial, forms the second. With scrupulous attention to evidence and the argumentation employed by various participants, Dr. Finocchiaro’s book is at once an

32:39

Ellen Griffith Spears, "Baptized in PCBs: Race,...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2020/02/28

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 decades long struggle for environmental and civil rights justice in Anniston, Alabama, and broader lessons to be learned from this fight to address one community's exposure to toxic chemicals. In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto

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