Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchMatt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)
Episode 46
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat…
6 years, 2 months ago
Adrian Currie, "Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences" (MIT Press, 2018)
Episode 246
The “historical sciences”—geology, paleontology, and archaeology—have made extraordinary progress in advancing our understanding of the deep past. Ho…
6 years, 3 months ago
Andrew Leigh, "Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Are Changing Our World" (Yale UP, 2018)
Episode 36
From the unending quest to turn metal into gold to the major discoveries that reveal how the universe works, experiments have always been a critical …
6 years, 3 months ago
Kareem Khalifa, "Understanding, Explanation and Scientific Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2017)
Episode 213
What is the relation between understanding and knowledge in science? Can we understand a scientific theory if it is false? Do we understand a scienti…
6 years, 3 months ago
Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)
Episode 154
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillip…
6 years, 4 months ago
Amy Shira Teitel, "Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA" (Bloomsbury, 2016)
Episode 214
Amy Shira Teitel talks about Apollo and the community of people who are deeply attached to space history. Teitel is a spaceflight historian and the c…
6 years, 4 months ago
Alistair Sponsel, "Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
Episode 213
Dr. Alistair Sponsel talks about Darwin’s experiences on HMS Beagle and his early career as a naturalist. His close reading of Darwin’s journals and …
6 years, 4 months ago
Gil Eyal, "The Crisis of Expertise" (Polity, 2019)
Episode 116
In recent political debates there has been a significant change in the valence of the word “experts” from a superlative to a near pejorative, typical…
6 years, 4 months ago
Travis Dumsday, "Dispositionalism and the Metaphysics of Science" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
Episode 207
Dispositionalism is the view that there are irreducible causal powers in nature that explain why objects behave as they do. To say salt is soluble in…
6 years, 4 months ago
Michael F. Robinson, "The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2006)
Episode 212
Radio host Kevin Fox interviews Michael F. Robinson about the history of American Arctic exploration, the subject of his book, The Coldest Crucible: …
6 years, 4 months ago