Red Flight: Discovering Elements in An Atomic Storm

Guest: Kit Chapman, historian at the University of Sunderland and author, "Superheavy: Making and Breaking the Periodic Table"

Flying into an atomic explosion is as crazy as it sounds. However, it was common practice in the heyday of atomic testing and development in the 1950s. While missions like the “Red Flight” of 1952 resulted in groundbreaking scientific discoveries, the Atomic Veterans of these missions paid a high price.

 

New Matter

Guest: Paul J. Steinhardt, Professor of Physics at Princeton University, and author of “The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter”

Science may seem very clear cut—there are things that are possible, and things that are not. Paul Steinhardt disagrees. His discovery of quasicrystals—a new form of matter with an arrangement of atoms and molecules that were deemed impossible—upset nearly 200 years of scientific understanding.