The Development of Aerospace Stealth Technology

Guest: Peter Westwick, author, "Stealth: The Secret Contest to Invent Invisible Aircraft," and Director, Aerospace History Project at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West

A fierce competition between Northrop Grumman and Lockheed in the 1970s and '80s led to the development of two entirely different stealth planes – the F-117A and the B-2.

Contemporary Neil Armstrong

Guest: Nils Larson, chief pilot, NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center

Test pilots have made left footprints in history, literally. Neil Armstrong was a test pilot at the Dryden Flight Research Center before he became the first man to walk on the moon. Today the Dryden Flight Research Center has been renamed in honor of Armstrong and they still continue to perform cutting-edge flight research. Learn from the perspective of their head test pilot what it's like to test one-of-a kind aircraft just like Neil Armstrong did.

Physics and Psychics

Guest: Richard Noakes, author, "Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain"

Scientists in the Victorian Age regularly integrated their beliefs in the supernatural with their scientific inquiries. People of the past were searching for new ways to push scientific and religious boundaries.

Infamous Cures in Elizabethan England

Guest: Lauren Kassell, Professor, History of Science and Medicine, and Director, The Casebooks Project, University of Cambridge

Two infamous astrologer-physicians in late 16th-century England, Simon Forman and Richard Napier, left behind a record of about 65,000 clients they saw to, offering remedies ranging from bloodletting to spells to wearing pigeons on your feet. These records provide a fascinating insight into the daily lives and personalities of the 16th and 17th century English.