New Books In Science

Where can the the boundaries of science, philosophy, and religion be drawn? Questioning the nature of the universe is an excellent place to rethink how these categories have been deployed across time. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, professor Religious Studies at Wesleyan University, offers a genealogy of multiple-world cosmologies that demonstrates these terms pliability and the debated relationship between 'Science' and 'Religion.' In Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (Columbia University Press, 2014), Rubenstein wonders why there is a proliferation of multiverse theoretical cosmologies by contemporary scientists. While the cosmos are generally considered to be singular and finite many well-respected physicists explain the universe's complexities as evidence of a multiverse. These explanations argue that our world is just one of the infinite number of universes existing simultaneously. Worlds Without End shows that multiple-world cosmologies have had currency among many thinkers for over 2500 years

David N. Livingstone‘s new book traces the processes by which communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that shared the same Scottish Calvinist heritage engaged with Darwin and Darwinians in different local contexts. Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) locates evolutionary debates... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

The book discussed in this interview is God is Here to Stay: Science, Evolution, and Belief in God (Wipf and Stock, 2014) by Thomas McFaul and Al Brunsting, two authors with very different backgrounds. McFaul is a college professor specializing in philosophy and religion, Brunsting a physicist with numerous publications and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Why do we study the history of science? Historians of science don’t just teach us about the past: along with philosophers of science, they also help us to understand the foundations and assumptions of scientific research, and guide us to reliable sources of information on which to base our policies... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

In Omar W. Nasim‘s new book, a series of fascinating characters sketch, paint, and etch their way toward a mapping of the cosmos and the human mind. Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2013) examines the history of observation of celestial nebulae... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Philosophy of science has come a very long way from its historically rooted focus on theories, explanations, and evidential relations in physics elaborated in terms of a rather mythical “theory T”. But even in philosophy of biology, attention has largely been on the concepts and abstract mathematics of evolutionary biology,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

During the Great Fire of London in September 1666, Samuel Pepys went out to the garden and dug some holes. There he placed his documents, some wine, and “my parmezan cheese” for safekeeping as the buildings and streets of his city were licked and then consumed by flames. We know... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

The book discussed in this interview is Everyday Calculus: Discovering the Hidden Math All around Us (Princeton University Press, 2014) by Oscar E. Fernandez, who teaches mathematics – and calculus in particular – at Wellesley College.  While it can be read by someone who wants to obtain a sense of what calculus is and how... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Robert Mitchell‘s new book is wonderfully situated across several intersections: of history and literature, of the Romantic and contemporary worlds, of Keats’ urn and a laboratory cylinder full of dry ice. In Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), Mitchell argues that we are... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Abena Dove Osseo-Asare‘s wonderful new book is a thoughtful, provocative, and balanced account of the intersecting histories and practices of drug research in modern Ghana, South Africa, and Madagascar. Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2014) tells the stories of six plants, all... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

David Kaiser‘s recent book is one of the most enjoyable and informative books on the history of science that you’ll read, full-stop. The deservedly award-winning How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (W.W. Norton, 2012) takes readers into the “hazy, bong-filled excesses of the 1970s New... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

The pages of Matthew C. Hunter‘s wonderful new book are full of paper fish, comets, sleepy-eyed gazes, drunk ants, and a cast full of fascinating (and sometimes hilarious) members of the experimental community of Restoration London. Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (University of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

John Hibbing, Kevin Smith, and John Alford are the authors of Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences (Routledge, 2013). Hibbing is professor of political science and psychology at the University of Nebraska, Smith is professor of political science at the University of Nebraska, and Alford is associate... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Parapsychology. You may have heard of it. You know, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis. Spoon-bending and that sort of thing. If you have heard of it, you probably think of it as a pseudoscience. And indeed it is. But it wasn’t always so. There was a time in the late nineteenth... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

[Re-posted with permission from Wild About Math] I’ve admitted before that Physics and I have never gotten along. But, science fiction is something I enjoy. So, when Princeton University Press sent me a copy of Physics Professor Chuck Adler‘s new book Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Hallam Stevens‘s new book is a rich and fascinating ethnographic and historical account of the transformations wrought by integrating statistical and computational methods and materials into the biological sciences. Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics (University of Chicago Press, 2013) follows the data through the physical and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

When it comes to understanding why our planet’s biodiversity is declining so precipitously, no phrase has as much explanatory power as “shifting baselines”  — as essayist Derrick Jensen put it, “[T]he process of becoming accustomed to, and accepting as normal, worsening conditions.” Every generation regards its own environment as natural... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

In 1956 and 1957, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to test a plan to dam up the San Francisco Bay in order to protect its water supply: they built a 1.5 acre model of the Bay area in a warehouse, with hydraulic pumps to simulate tides and river... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

“A good wife and a healthy child are better for one’s temper than frogs.” For Gabriel Finkelstein, Emil du Bois-Reymond was “the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century.” Most famously in a series of experimental works on electricity, but also in a series of public lectures that generated... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Angela Creager‘s deeply researched and elegantly written new book is a must-read account of the history of science in twentieth-century America. Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2013) traces a history of radioisotopes as military and civilian objects, for experimentation and therapeutic... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science