New Books in Physics and Chemistry

Mar 20 2025 181 ep. 62 mins 219
New Books in Physics and Chemistry Podcast artwork

Interviews with physicists and chemists about their new books

  Arts  Science
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Grace Lindsay, "Models of the Mind: How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Mar 20 2025 51 mins  
Models of the Mind: How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain (Bloomsbury, 2021) provides a multifaceted and approachable introduction to theoretical neuroscience. It discusses some major topics of the field, including both the milestones from their history and the currently open questions. It's accessible for a general audience, not expect

Patchen Barss, "The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius" (Basic Books, 2024)

Jan 18 2025 35 mins  
When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a “world behind the world” of transcendently beautiful geometry. It spurred him on a journey to become one of the world’s most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists. Penrose would prove the limitati

Brian Clegg, "Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe" (MIT Press, 2021)

Sep 02 2024 52 mins  
Our universe might appear chaotic, but deep down it's simply a myriad of rules working independently to create patterns of action, force, and consequence. In Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe (MIT Press, 2021), Brian Clegg explores the phenomena that make up the very fabric of our world by examining ten essential sequenced systems. From diagrams that show the deep relationship

Alan Lightman, "Einstein's Dreams" (Vintage, 1992)

Jul 07 2024 55 mins  
Einstein’s Dreams (Vintage, 1992) by Alan Lightman, set in Albert Einstein’s “miracle year” of 1905, is a novel about the cultural interconnection of time, relativity and life. As the young genius creates his theory of relativity, in a series of dreams, he imagines other worlds, each with a different conceptualization of time. In one, time is circular, and people are destin

Pierre Sokolsky, "Clock in the Sun: How We Came to Understand Our Nearest Star" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Jul 05 2024 29 mins  
On the surface of the Sun, spots appear and fade in a predictable cycle, like a great clock in the sky. In medieval Russia, China, and Korea, monks and court astronomers recorded the appearance of these dark shapes, interpreting them as omens of things to come. In Western Europe, by contrast, where a cosmology originating with Aristotle prevailed, the Sun was regarded as part of th

Siobhan Angus, "Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography" (Duke UP, 2024)

Jun 21 2024 51 mins  
In Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke UP, 2024) Siobhan Angus tells the history of photography through the minerals upon which the medium depends. Challenging the emphasis on immateriality in discourses on photography, Angus focuses on the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction, revealing how the mining of bitumen, silver, platinum,

Bernardo Kastrup, "Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A Straightforward Summary of the 21st Century's Only Plausible Metaphysics" (Iff Books, 2024)

May 24 2024 113 mins  
Is reality more than the material? Raj Balkaran holds a fascinating interview with philosopher Bernardo Kastrup on this topic. At the vanguard of the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, Bernardo presents cogent argumentation that reality is essentially mental, and examines the proper place of the scientific method in this deliberation. Bernardo’s research exhibits some a

Kevin Lambert, "Symbols and Things: Material Mathematics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)

Apr 15 2024 80 mins  
The stereotype of the solitary mathematician is widespread, but practicing users and producers of mathematics know well that our work depends heavily on our historical and contemporary fellow travelers. Yet we may not appreciate how our work also extends beyond us into our physical and societal environments. Kevin Lambert takes what might be a first crack at this perspective in his

Claudia de Rham, "The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Apr 01 2024 50 mins  
Claudia de Rham has been playing with gravity her entire life. As a diver, experimenting with her body's buoyancy in the Indian Ocean. As a pilot, soaring over Canadian waterfalls on dark mornings before beginning her daily scientific research. As an astronaut candidate, dreaming of the experience of flying free from Earth's pull. And as a physicist, discovering new sides to gravit

Philip Goff, "Why? The Purpose of the Universe" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Dec 10 2023 66 mins  
Does the universe have a purpose? If it does, how is this connected to the meaningfulness that we seek in our lives? In Why? The Purpose of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 2023), Philip Goff argues for cosmic purposivism, the idea that the universe does have a purpose – although this is not because there is an all-powerful God who provides it with one. Instead, Goff argues