PODCAST

New Books in Physics and Chemistry

New Books Network

Interviews with physicists and chemists about their new books

arts books

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65:59

Jonas Enander, "Facing Infinity: Black Holes and Our...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2025/09/23

Humanity's relationship with black holes began in 1783 in a small English village, when clergyman John Michell posed a startling question: What if there are objects in space that are so large and heavy that not even light can escape them? Almost 250 years later, in April 2019, scientists presented the first picture of a black hole. Profoundly inspired by that image, physicist Jonas Enander has traveled the world to investigate how our understanding of these elusive celestial objects has evolved

55:44

Mario Livio and Jack Szostak, "Is Earth Exceptional?:...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2025/08/21

For a long time, scientists have wondered how life has emerged from inanimate chemistry, and whether Earth is the only place where it exists. Charles Darwin speculated about life on Earth beginning in a warm little pond. Some of his contemporaries believed that life existed on Mars. It once seemed inevitable that the truth would be known by now.It is not. For more than a century, the origins and extent of life have remained shrouded in mystery. But, as Mario Livio and Jack Szostak reveal in Is

70:37

Richard Mainwaring, "What the Ear Hears (And...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2025/08/13

What do the world's loneliest whale, a black hole, and twenty-three people doing Tae Bo all have in common?In 2011, a skyscraper in South Korea began to shake uncontrollably without warning and was immediately evacuated. Was it an earthquake? An attack? No one seemed quite sure. The actual cause emerged later and is utterly fascinating: Twenty-three middle-aged folks were having a Tae Bo fitness class in the office gym on the twelfth floor. Their beats had inadvertently matched the building's

88:20

Emilio Elizalde, "The True Story of Modern Cosmology:...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2025/08/08

This book tells the story of how, over the past century, dedicated observers and pioneering scientists achieved our current understanding of the universe. It was in antiquity that humankind first attempted to explain the universe often with the help of myths and legends. This book, however, focuses on the time when cosmology finally became a true science. As the reader will learn, this was a slow process, extending over a large part of the 20th century and involving many astronomers, cosmologists

62:13

David J. Helfand, "The Universal Timekeepers:...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2025/08/07

Atoms are unfathomably tiny. It takes fifteen million trillion of them to make up a single poppy seed—give or take a few billion. And there’s hardly anything to them: atoms are more than 99.9999999999 percent empty space. Yet scientists have learned to count these slivers of near nothingness with precision and to peer into their internal states. In looking so closely, we have learned that atoms, because of their inimitable signatures and imperturbable internal clocks, are little archives holding the

71:46

Robyn Arianrhod, "Vector: A Surprising Story of...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2025/07/25

A celebration of the seemingly simple idea that allowed us to imagine the world in new dimensions--sparking both controversy and discovery.The stars of this book, vectors and tensors, are unlikely celebrities. If you ever took a physics course, the word "vector" might remind you of the mathematics needed to determine forces on an amusement park ride, a turbine, or a projectile. You might also remember that a vector is a quantity that has magnitude and (this is the key) direction. In fact, vectors

78:50

Paul Sen, "Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2025/07/17

Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe (Scribner, 2021) tells the incredible epic story of the scientists who, over two centuries, harnessed the power of heat and ice and formulated a theory essential to comprehending our universe. “Although thermodynamics has been studied for hundreds of years…few nonscientists appreciate how its principles have shaped the modern world” (Scientific American). Thermodynamics—the branch of physics that deals with energy and

57:01

Liam Graham, "Molecular Storms: The Physics of Stars,...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2025/06/22

Why is the universe the way it is? Wherever we look, we find ordered structures: from stars to planets to living cells. Molecular Storms: The Physics of Stars, Cells and the Origin of Life (Springer Nature, 2023) shows that the same driving force is behind structure everywhere: the incessant random motion of the components of matter. Physicists call it thermal noise. Let's call it the molecular storm.This storm drives the fusion reactions that make stars shine. It drives whirlpools and currents in

47:19

Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin, "Poisoning the Well:...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2025/05/02

This is the shocking true-life story of how PFAS—a set of toxic chemicals most people have never heard of—poisoned the entire country. Based on original, shoe-leather reporting in four highly contaminated towns and damning documents from the polluters’ own files, Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America (Island Press, 2025) traces an ugly history of corporate greed and devastation of human lives.We learn that PFAS, the ‘forever chemicals’ found in everyday products, from

41:46

Scientists Cooperate while Humanists Ruminate (EF, JP)

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2025/04/17

Back in 2021, John and Elizabeth sat down with Brandeis string theorist Albion Lawrence to discuss cooperation versus solitary study across disciplines. They sink their teeth into the question, “Why do scientists seem to do collaboration and teamwork better than other kinds of scholars and academics?”The conversation ranges from the merits of collective biography to the influence of place and geographic location in scientific collaboration to mountaineering traditions in the sciences. As a

51:54

Grace Lindsay, "Models of the Mind: How Physics,...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2025/03/20

Models of the Mind: How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain (Bloomsbury, 2021) provides a multifaceted and approachable introduction to theoretical neuroscience. It discusses some major topics of the field, including both the milestones from their history and the currently open questions.It's accessible for a general audience, not expecting any previous knowledge of neuroscience or maths. At the same time, neuroscientists have described it as impressive

35:16

Patchen Barss, "The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2025/01/18

When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a “world behind the world” of transcendently beautiful geometry. It spurred him on a journey to become one of the world’s most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists.Penrose would prove the limitations of general relativity, set a new agenda for theoretical physics, and astound colleagues and admirers with the elegance and

52:08

Brian Clegg, "Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe"...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2024/09/02

Our universe might appear chaotic, but deep down it's simply a myriad of rules working independently to create patterns of action, force, and consequence. In Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe (MIT Press, 2021), Brian Clegg explores the phenomena that make up the very fabric of our world by examining ten essential sequenced systems. From diagrams that show the deep relationships between space and time to the quantum behaviors that rule the way that matter and light interact, Clegg shows how

55:06

Alan Lightman, "Einstein's Dreams" (Vintage, 1992)

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2024/07/07

Einstein’s Dreams (Vintage, 1992) by Alan Lightman, set in Albert Einstein’s “miracle year” of 1905, is a novel about the cultural interconnection of time, relativity and life. As the young genius creates his theory of relativity, in a series of dreams, he imagines other worlds, each with a different conceptualization of time. In one, time is circular, and people are destined to repeat triumphs and failures over and over. In another, time stands still. In yet another, time is a nightingale, trapped

29:03

Pierre Sokolsky, "Clock in the Sun: How We Came to...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2024/07/05

On the surface of the Sun, spots appear and fade in a predictable cycle, like a great clock in the sky. In medieval Russia, China, and Korea, monks and court astronomers recorded the appearance of these dark shapes, interpreting them as omens of things to come. In Western Europe, by contrast, where a cosmology originating with Aristotle prevailed, the Sun was regarded as part of the unchanging celestial realm, and it took observations through telescopes by Galileo and others to establish the reality

51:56

Siobhan Angus, "Camera Geologica: An Elemental...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2024/06/21

In Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke UP, 2024) Siobhan Angus tells the history of photography through the minerals upon which the medium depends. Challenging the emphasis on immateriality in discourses on photography, Angus focuses on the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction, revealing how the mining of bitumen, silver, platinum, iron, uranium, and rare earth elements is a precondition of photography. Through a materials-driven analysis of visual

113:15

Bernardo Kastrup, "Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2024/05/24

Is reality more than the material? Raj Balkaran holds a fascinating interview with philosopher Bernardo Kastrup on this topic. At the vanguard of the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, Bernardo presents cogent argumentation that reality is essentially mental, and examines the proper place of the scientific method in this deliberation. Bernardo’s research exhibits some astonishing parallels with ancient Indic thought. Bernardo Kastrup is the author of Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A

80:03

Kevin Lambert, "Symbols and Things: Material...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2024/04/15

The stereotype of the solitary mathematician is widespread, but practicing users and producers of mathematics know well that our work depends heavily on our historical and contemporary fellow travelers. Yet we may not appreciate how our work also extends beyond us into our physical and societal environments.Kevin Lambert takes what might be a first crack at this perspective in his book Symbols and Things: Material Mathematics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (University of Pittsburgh

50:36

Claudia de Rham, "The Beauty of Falling: A Life in...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2024/04/01

Claudia de Rham has been playing with gravity her entire life. As a diver, experimenting with her body's buoyancy in the Indian Ocean. As a pilot, soaring over Canadian waterfalls on dark mornings before beginning her daily scientific research. As an astronaut candidate, dreaming of the experience of flying free from Earth's pull. And as a physicist, discovering new sides to gravity's irresistible personality by exploring the limits of Einstein's general theory of relativity. In The Beauty of

66:53

Philip Goff, "Why? The Purpose of the Universe"...

New Books in Physics and Chemistry ·

2023/12/10

Does the universe have a purpose? If it does, how is this connected to the meaningfulness that we seek in our lives? In Why? The Purpose of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 2023), Philip Goff argues for cosmic purposivism, the idea that the universe does have a purpose – although this is not because there is an all-powerful God who provides it with one. Instead, Goff argues, fundamental physics provides us with reason to think it is probable there is a cosmic purpose – and, moreover, the best

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