New Books in Science

Robert Charette, engineer, consultant, and contributing editor at IEEE Spectrum magazine, talks about his twelve-part series, “The Electric Vehicle Transition Explained,” with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The series takes a systems perspective on electric vehicles, and talks about all of the potential barriers – from a lack of minerals, to stressing out the electricity grid, to being short on consumers or workers – that face EVs, which are too often cast as a climate change cure-all. Charette and Vinsel also talk about the kinds of thinking that are necessary if we are to have realistic policies around EVs.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech.

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Do scientists ever reject science? Research data on the controversial topic of extraterrestrial life has met with resistance from some in the scientific community and openness from communities of faith. 

Guests

Avi Loeb, professor of astrophysics and cosmology at Harvard University, where he serves as the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science. Author of Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. 

Kate Dorsch, associate director of Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Pennsylvania .

Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), longtime U.S. Senator (1987-2017) from the state of Nevada and former Senate Majority Leader (2007-2015. *The Senator died in December 2021.  

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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 and affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge’s Department of the History and Philosophy of Science.

Jim Bennett, Keeper Emeritus at the Science Museum, London and professor emeritus of the history of science, University of Oxford.

Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory and president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation.

Stephen Barr, professor emeritus at the University of Delaware’s department of physics and astronomy.

This episode was produced by Rosalind Rei and Maria Devlin McNair.

Illuminations is supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

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"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 can make all the difference in the way we perceive and trust science as a community and society.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

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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.

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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.

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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's email read) that proved to be the first detection of gravitational waves. In Gravity's Kiss, Harry Collins--who has been watching the science of gravitational wave detection for forty-three of those fifty years and has written three previous books about it--offers a final, fascinating account, written in real time, of the unfolding of one of the most remarkable scientific discoveries ever made.

Predicted by Einstein in his theory of general relativity, gravitational waves carry energy from the collision or explosion of stars. Dying binary stars, for example, rotate faster and faster around each other until they merge, emitting a burst of gravitational waves. It is only with the development of extraordinarily sensitive, highly sophisticated detectors that physicists can now confirm Einstein's prediction. This is the story that Collins tells.

Collins, a sociologist of science who has been embedded in the gravitational wave community since 1972, traces the detection, the analysis, the confirmation, and the public presentation and the reception of the discovery--from the first email to the final published paper and the response of professionals and the public. Collins shows that science today is collaborative, far-flung (with the physical location of the participants hardly mattering), and sometimes secretive, but still one of the few institutions that has integrity built into it.

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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. 

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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 change.

To observe our immediate surroundings and to understand them faster is highly advantageous to survival; hence, there is an underlying evolutionary advantage to our discernment for ideal ratios, shapes, and beauty at large.

Time and beauty are jointly understood to explain why the global pandemic had decelerated our mind time. The author asserts that this understanding arms us with techniques to slow down our mind time (which accelerates with age), and to create the conditions for living longer and more creatively. In the process, he offers answers to key questions about cognition. Why does the mind "try" to make sense of a new mental image? Why is there a natural tendency to organize a new input and mentally position it among past perceptions?

The author suggests that principles of physics is the basis for other disparate perceptions as well, from time and beauty to ideas, message, shape, perspective, art, science, illusions, and dreams.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at [email protected]. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here.

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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 success of the field of semantics in explaining how human languages—spoken and signed—have rules for meaning. The book not only emphasizes the continuity between spoken and signed languages, but illustrates how understanding the expressive capacities, semantic and pragmatic, of signed languages helps us understand language in general. Given the many successes of semantics, which he calls an example of the scientific humanities, Schlenker argues that other forms of meaning, such as musical meaning, could be profitably analyzed with concepts from more standard syntax and semantics, even including a notion of musical truth.

Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff.

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