The Disappearing Spoon: a science history podcast with Sam Kean

In 1971, Stephen Hawking made a hasty, emotional mistake in a paper about black holes—and it turned out to be the smartest thing he ever did. Sometimes in science, big blunders are the best way forward...

Albert Einstein’s self-proclaimed “biggest blunder”—the cosmological constant in his theory of relativity—turned out to not be blunder at all. In fact, it might hold the key to the future of physics. (Now that’s genius!)

You think Isaac Newton was smart? Not so fast. He made one mistake so dumb that scholars still shake their heads over it. Find out how to avoid this mistake—and be smarter than Newton—in this episode...

When Impressionist painter Claude Monet developed cataracts, he thought his painting career was over. Hardly. He actually developed a human superpower—the ability to see, like bees do, a much wider range of colors...

Charles Darwin didn’t give a crap about Galápagos finches, despite what you maybe heard. So what animals did light his fire while forming his theory of evolution? Pigeons, worms, and especially a despised marine pest—the lowly barnacle...

How a simple operation—castrating little boys—produced the greatest singers the world has ever known...

How a bloody gun duel between two doctors in Transylvania sparked a frenzy of outrage—as well as the American Medical Association...

How a feisty, suicidal Nobel laureate infuriated both Hitler and Stalin, and stalled cancer research for fifty years along the way...

In a building full of dead bodies, how can you tell a murder victim from an unlucky stiff?

The world’s first plastic made Hollywood possible—and killed thousands of people along the way...