A thrilling tour of Earth that shows the search for extraterrestrial life starts in our own backyard.
Is there life off Earth? Bound by the limitations of spaceflight, a growing number of astrobiologists investigate the question by studying life on our planet. Astronomer and author Jon Willis shows us how it’s done, allowing readers to envision extraterrestrial landscapes by exploring their closest Earth analogs in The Pale Blue Data Point: An Earth-Based Perspective on the Search for Alien Life (U Chicago Press, 2025). With Willis, we dive into the Pacific Ocean from the submersible-equipped E/V Nautilus to ponder the uncharted seas of Saturn’s and Jupiter’s moons; search the Australian desert for some of Earth’s oldest fossils and consider the prospects for a Martian fossil hunt; visit mountaintop observatories in Chile to search for the telltale twinkle of extrasolar planets; and eavesdrop on dolphins in the Bahamas to imagine alien minds.
With investigations ranging from meteorite hunting to exoplanet detection, Willis conjures up alien worlds and unthought-of biological possibilities, speculating what life might look like on other planets by extrapolating from what we can see on Earth, our single “pale blue dot”—as Carl Sagan famously called it—or, in Willis’s reframing, scientists’ “pale blue data point.”

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An award-winning astrophysicist looks at how the understanding of uncertainty and randomness has led to breakthroughs in our knowledge of the cosmos

All of us understand the world around us by constructing models, comparing them to observations, and drawing conclusions. Scientists create, test, and replace these models by applying the twinned concepts of probability and randomness. Exploring how this process has refined our knowledge of quantum mechanics and the birth of the universe,

In The Random Universe: How Models and Probability Help Us Make Sense of the Cosmos (Yale UP, 2025) Andrew H. Jaffe offers a unique synthesis of the philosophy of epistemology, the mathematics of probability, and the science of cosmology.

As Jaffe puts Enlightenment thinkers like David Hume in conversation with contemporary philosophers such as Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos and engages with scientists ranging from Isaac Newton and Galileo to Albert Einstein and Arthur Eddington, he uses Thomas Bayes's seminal studies of statistics and probability to make sense of conflicting currents of thought. This is a deep look into how we have learned to account for uncertainty in our search for knowledge--and a reminder that science is not about facts and data as such but about creating models that correctly account for those facts and data.

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In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world's largest, most advanced economies--the United States and China--have fallen short of expectations. To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers a remarkable and fascinating journey across the globe, spanning the past 1,000 years, to explain why some societies flourish and others fail in the wake of rapid technological change.

By examining key historical moments--from the rise of the steam engine to the dawn of AI--Frey shows why technological shifts have shaped, and sometimes destabilized, entire civilizations. He explores why some leading technological powers of the past--such as Song China, the Dutch Republic, and Victorian Britain--ultimately lost their innovative edge, why some modern nations such as Japan had periods of rapid growth followed by stagnation, and why planned economies like the Soviet Union collapsed after brief surges of progress. Frey uncovers a recurring tension in history: while decentralization fosters the exploration of new technologies, bureaucracy is crucial for scaling them. When institutions fail to adapt to technological change, stagnation inevitably follows. Only by carefully balancing decentralization and bureaucracy can nations innovate and grow over the long term--findings that have worrying implications for the United States, Europe, China, and other economies today.

Through a rich narrative that weaves together history, economics, and technology, How Progress Ends reveals that managing the future requires us to draw the right lessons from the past.

Carl Benedikt Frey is the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at the Oxford Martin School, both at the University of Oxford.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Of all the patterns that could possibly be preserved in the post–Big Bang radiation, the one we see is surprisingly smooth on large angular scales.

Sitting by a campfire on a dark night, looking up at the Milky Way, a curious child asks, “What does the sky tell us? Where does it all come from? Does space go on forever?” A caring adult might share a little awe and humility about humanity’s place in the grand scheme or perhaps relate a traditional creation story. A scientist like me, who came of age soon after the discovery that the sky is not actually dark but awash in primeval radiation, might instead relate the still-unfinished scientific story of the boundaries and origins of time and space. That tale is displayed in nature’s own record of the structure of the early universe, a mosaic of temperature and density fluctuations preserved in the primordial light that astronomers call the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

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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 since the days of Michell. With the particular goal of discovering our human connection to black holes, Enander visits telescopes and observatories, delves deeply into archives, and interviews over 20 world-leading experts, including several Nobel laureates.

In Facing Infinity: Black Holes and Our Place on Earth (The Experiment, 2025), Dr. Enander takes us on a spellbinding journey into the universe’s greatest mystery, deciphers the most mind-bending science, and answers questions surrounding how black holes work, where they come from, and what role they play in the universe. Along the way, he discovers how our desire to understand black holes inadvertently paved the way for the invention of Wi-Fi and the calibration of our global navigation satellites, how astronomical discovery became entangled with colonial conflicts, and how our looking outward gave us critical evidence of the impact of climate change. Facing Infinity helps us appreciate and understand as never before these mysterious celestial objects and our surprising connections to them.

Our guest is: Dr. Jonas Enander, who is a science communicator with a background in cosmology and astrophysics. His previous research focused on dark matter and Einstein’s theory of general relativity. He has worked as a physics teacher at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and participated in the construction of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole. He hosts the podcasts Spacetime Fika and Rumtiden.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a freelance editor. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and writes the show’s newsletter at ChristinaGessler.Substack.Com.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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With breathtaking complexity and haunting beauty, the songs of whales have long fascinated scientists. Whales are the only mammals that can sing continuously for ten hours or more, changing the unique songs they sing every year. In Why Whales Sing (JHU Press, 2025), bioacoustician and cognitive scientist Eduardo Mercado transforms our understanding of these enigmatic sounds and proposes a groundbreaking theory that challenges decades of established science.

Fifty years of field research have led most scientists to conclude that humpback whales sing for the same reason that birds do: to advertise their sexual fitness. But if whale songs are nothing more than tools of attraction, why do whales sing even when they're alone and there are no listeners nearby? In light of modern advances in neuroscience and ocean acoustics, Mercado reaches the surprising conclusion that whales may not actually be "singing," but rather engaging in an activity more commonly associated with dolphins and bats--echolocating--which enables them to see their world with sound. By incessantly streaming sounds while listening closely to the returning echoes, whales may be actively tuning their brains in ways that allow them to monitor the movements of silent whales located miles away.

Sophisticated, long-range sonar can enable whales to perceive their vast underwater worlds in unimaginable ways. From the military origins of whale song recordings to the persistent mysteries of cetacean communication, this book displays the wonder of whales and reshapes how we view their intelligence, behavior, and acoustic mastery.

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Black holes, demystified: follow along the quest to understand the history and influence of one of space science's most fascinating and confounding phenomena
Led by physicist James Trefil and astrophysicist Shobita Satyapal, Supermassive: Black Holes at the Beginning and End of the Universe (Smithsonian Books, 2025) traverses the incredible history of black holes and introduces contemporary developments and theories on still unanswered questions about the enigmatic objects. From the early work of Albert Einstein and Karl Schwarzschild to an insider look at black hole-galaxy connection research led by co-author Satyapa, the comprehensive book surveys an exciting and evolving branch of space science, with topics that include:

Invisible to the naked eye and telescopes, black holes have mystified and entranced astronomers, scientists, and humanity for more than a century. The first image of a supermassive black hole was only unveiled in 2019, and new black holes are continually discovered. Supermassive illuminates what we know about black holes so far and what we have yet to uncover.

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What is space? What is time? Where did the universe come from? The answers to mankind's most enduring questions may lie in science's greatest enigma: black holes.
A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. This can occur when a star approaches the end of its life. Unable to generate enough heat to maintain its outer layers, it shrinks catastrophically down to an infinitely dense point.
When this phenomenon was first proposed in 1916, it defied scientific understanding so much that Albert Einstein dismissed it as too ridiculous to be true. But scientists have since proven otherwise. In 1971, Paul Murdin and Louise Webster discovered the first black hole: Cygnus X-1. Later, in the 1990s, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope found that not only do black holes exist, supermassive black holes lie at the heart of almost every galaxy, including our own. It would take another three decades to confirm this phenomenon. On 10 April 2019, a team of astronomers made history by producing the first image of a black hole.
A Crack in Everything: How Black Holes Came in from the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage (Apollo, 2025)is the story of how black holes came in from the cold and took cosmic centre stage. As a journalist, Marcus Chown interviews many of the scientists who made the key discoveries, and, as a former physicist, he translates the most esoteric of science into everyday language. The result is a uniquely engaging page-turner that tells one of the great untold stories in modern science.

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Complex systems seem to magically emerge from the interactions of their parts. A whirlpool emerges from water molecules. A living cell from organic molecules. You emerge from the cells of your body. Not since chaos has a concept from physics spread like wildfire to other disciplines. Emergence can be found from chemistry to economics; from psychology to ecology. At its heart is the alluring idea that there's more to the world than physics, that there is a holistic component to nature, an edge of mystery.

"Physics Fixes All the Facts" starts by taking you on a tour through a fascinating world of complexity, exploring phenomena from the inside of an atomic nucleus to bacterial behaviour to the ability of your thoughts to affect the world. These examples are used along with a thorough exploration of the philosophical literature to untangle the notoriously poorly defined concept of emergence. This reveals something surprising: the term emergence is redundant. In its weak form it is so weak that it applies to everything. In its strong form it is so restrictive that it is like the belief that there are pixies in your garden, impossible to exclude but not worth spending your time on. Emergence either applies to all systems or to none. Rather than telling us something about the nature of the world, it is an illusion, an artefact of our cognitive limitations.

The past decade has seen a dozen or so monographs and collections about emergence, almost all resolutely supportive of the concept. This book aims to redress the balance. But it is more than just a campaign against the idea of emergence. Graham presents a framework called Austere Physicalism and argues that it is the only coherent way to view the world. He uses this framework to reinterpret so-called emergent phenomena and investigates its wider implications for science. In this radically materialist view, we are nothing but physical systems among others. "Physics Fixes All the Facts" ends by exploring what this means for our sense of free will and consciousness.

The book will appeal to academics in fields which use the concepts of complexity or emergence. Scientists and philosophers alike will find unexpected and exciting ideas in these pages. But the target audience is much broader including students who want to add context to their studies and the intellectually curious with some scientific background.

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For the last century, physics has been treading along the paths set by the same two theories--quantum theory and general relativity--and, let's face it, it's getting pretty boring. Most scientists are simply chasing decimal points in laboratories, unable to explore the theories at large scales, where serious discrepancies could emerge.

The situation is a lot like the one physics was in in 1890, right before Planck, Einstein, and Bohr blew the roof off Newtonian physics. As Vlatko Vedral argues in Portals to a New Reality: Five Pathways to the Future of Physics (Basic Books, 2025), that means we are on the brink of a revolution. Vedral shows how quantum information theory has opened radically new avenues for experiments that could upend physics. They can sound very strange--one essentially involves entangling a human with Schrödinger's cat--but they lay bare elements of our theories that are particularly problematic, such as the widespread belief that nothing truly exists unless it is observed.

At present these experiments are thought experiments, albeit fascinating ones. But nothing, save inertia and a lack of ambition, stands in our way. Now is the time to rewrite the understanding of the universe.

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