New Books in the History of Science

We have developed two distinct books, Indiana Steinhardt and the Quest for Quasicrystals, and Inflated Expectations: A Cosmological Tale, based on Howard Burton’s in-depth, filmed conversations with Paul Steinhardt, the Albert Einstein Professor of Science and Director of the Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton University. The first one is called Indiana Steinhardt and the Quest for Quasicrystals. This extensive conversation provides a comprehensive account of a marvellous scientific adventure story in the quest for a natural quasicrystal. You will be taken on a fascinating ride through the physics of materials, from theory, to the laboratory, to the discovery of a new state of matter, that culminated in Paul Steinhardt’s dramatic Siberian expedition. Inflated Expectations: A Cosmological Tale is based on a second in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Paul Steinhardt. He is one of the originators of the theory of cosmic inflation and has become one of its fiercest critics. This fascinating conversation covers topics such as Paul Steinhardt’s scientific development, his formative experiences at Caltech including his encounters with Richard Feynman, his development and later scepticism of the theory of cosmic inflation, the response of the scientific community to the failure of this theory, his theory of cosmology, The Ekpyrotic Universe, and more.Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With the opening of the Suez Canal, larger and faster steamships, plus dockside engineering to accommodate them – time shrunk in the British Empire. The movement of bodies between the U.K and colonial outposts quickened. In Kristen D. Hussey’s Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880-1914 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021), readers are introduced to how such mobility transformed British conceptions of health and illness and the medical practices to heal. A scramble for “imperial bodies” occurred as medical professionals sought to cure the Empire’s “tropical” diseases.Hussey’s intense archival work delivers several case studies in British medicine that brings together various historical narratives. Merging spatial theories to the history of medicine, for example, Hussey communicates well the reciprocal nature of Empire, movement, and diseased bodies. London loomed large as a place of recuperation, a place to get well, and the best that medicine had to offer. Imperial Bodies in London reads as if a microhistory, but never deviates from connecting to larger, much broader sweep of history. The story of how European men and women – administrators, soldiers, sailors, missionaries, doctors, servants, and families – returned home to recover or readjust from their imperial duties and thereby became specimens (in a sense) to advance medical knowledge is deftly handled by the author.In this interview, discussed are ways in which British medical practitioners approached diseases affecting the liver, eyes, brain and blood of those that served the Empire. Many of their discoveries and practices were the foundations of modern medicine. The current Covid-19 pandemic makes this book not only timely, but a terrific read into the origins of modern medicine.Joseph Krulder is a historian of Britain's long eighteenth-century: cultural, social, military, and economic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Appreciating Analytic Philosophy is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Scott Soames, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at University of Southern California. Scott Soames is specialized in the philosophy of language and the history of analytic philosophy. This detailed conversation provides a thoughtful introduction to analytic philosophy, including some examples of contemporary relevance to a wide range of other fields.Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Examining Time is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Lee Smolin who is a faculty member of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. The basis of this wide-ranging conversation are Lee Smolin’s books Life of the Cosmos and Time Reborn. This detailed discussion offers an investigation of time, both what it is and how the true nature of it impacts our world and future and provides behind-the scenes insights into the development of Lee Smolin’s groundbreaking theory on the nature of time.Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Edited by Diego Armus and Pablo Gómez, The Gray Zones of Medicine: Healers and History in Latin America (University of Pittsburgh Press 2021) tell the stories of health practitioners that thrived in a gray space between legality and criminality, the trajectories they followed, and the interstitial spaces they inhabited between official and unofficial medicines. Spanning from the seventeenth century up to the twentieth century, this book wonderfully brings together the little-known stories and biographies of African, Chinese, and indigenous healers, midwives, homeopaths, amongst others. In the end, The Gray Zones of Medicine question traditional narratives in the history of medicine that center around the professional doctor, as well as concepts and dichotomies that have narrowly defined different healing cultures (e.g. Western vs. non-Western medicine, popular vs. learned medicine, European vs. indigenous or African medical systems). By doing so, the contributors of this volume propose a new narrative in which healers are at the center of the social and cultural histories of the region bridging the divide between the early modern and modern periods, one in which the seeming social and cultural dominance of official medicine, and later biomedicine, was never preordained nor complete, ultimately, a world in which these health practitioners were and are incredibly resilient in the midst of change. Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Islam's contributions to the natural sciences has long been recognized within the Euro-American academy, however, such studies tend to include one of a number of narrative tropes, either emphasizing the "Golden Age" model, focusing on scientific productions in Baghdad and other centers around the first millennium CE; emphasizing Islam's role in transmitting and preserving Greco-Roman learning, and enabling it to be re-translated into Latin around the time of the Renaissance; and the vast majority suggest that the majority of Islamic scientific output came to a halt around toward the end 16th century.In Revealed Sciences: The Natural Sciences in Islam in Seventeenth-Century Morocco (Cambridge UP, 2021), Justin K. Stearns argues that there is ample evidence that scientific production continued apace, if, in fact, we know where to look for it. Demonstrating the vibrancy of seventeenth century Morocco, Revealed Sciences examines how science flourished during this period, albeit in a different manner than that of Europe. Offering an innovative analysis of the relationship between religious thought and the natural sciences, Stearns shows how nineteenth and twentieth century European and Middle Eastern scholars jointly developed a narrative of the decline of post-formative Islamic thought, including the fate of the natural sciences in the Muslim world.Challenging these depictions, Stearns uses numerous close readings of legal, biographical, and classificatory texts - alongside medical, astronomical, and alchemical works - to establish a detailed overview of the place of the natural sciences in the scholarly and educational landscapes of the early modern Maghreb, and considers non-teleological possibilities for understanding a persistent engagement with the natural sciences in Morocco and elsewhere.Justin K. Stearns is Associate Professor of Arab Crossroads Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi, where his research interests focus on the intersection of law, science, and theology in the pre-modern Middle East. He is the author of Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (2011), and an edition and translation of al-Hasan al-Yusi's The Discourses, Vol. I (2020).Christopher S. Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas and Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percentage of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious.With the internet always at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history to do? In Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) (U Chicago Press, 2018), Sam Wineburg offers answers, beginning with this: We definitely can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-questions-at-the-back snoozefest we’ve subjected students to for decades!If we want to educate citizens who can sift through the mass of information around them and separate fact from fake, we must explicitly work to give them the necessary critical thinking tools. Historical thinking has nothing to do with test prep–style ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that we can cultivate, one that encourages reasoned skepticism, discourages haste, and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg draws on surprising discoveries from an array of research and experiments to paint a picture of a dangerously mine-filled landscape, but one that, with care, attention, and awareness, we can all learn to navigate.It’s easy to look around at the public consequences of historical ignorance and despair. Wineburg is here to tell us it doesn’t have to be that way.The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the last twenty years, cosmology has unexpectedly emerged as one of the most exciting and dynamic fields of modern science. From astoundingly precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background to the ongoing mysteries of dark energy and dark matter, modern cosmology is unquestionably in the midst of its Golden Age. And yet, one of the most eminent mathematical physicists of our age, Roger Penrose is convinced that there is one fundamental problem that is consistently being overlooked: why did our universe begin in such a particular state of extremely low entropy? His Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) is an attempt to directly address that question. The Cyclic Universe is based on an extensive conversation between Howard Burton and Roger Penrose, co-recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, and explores his motivation to come up with this theory in the first place and provides detailed insights into his groundbreaking research and Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa (Cambridge UP, 2021), Kalle Kananoja tells the story of how pre-colonial communities throughout the west coast of Africa employed a wide range of medical and spiritual strategies to treat all kinds of diseases. In the sixteenth century, the arrival of European traders and colonists initiated an exchange of healing knowledge that moved across the Atlantic for the next three-hundred years. The initial links in this chain of exchanges were established by European settlers or visitors who, given the limited number of European doctors and medications available, sought the services of African healers whose methods were often seen as more suited and efficacious in the local environments. Missionaries, travelers and botanists also added to these exchanges by collecting and systematizing some of the knowledge they acquired from African informants.By documenting the richness and mobility of African healing knowledge, Kananoja points that even though plants, remedies and practices from the Americas and Asia have been more widely studied, African contributions were equally significant. Africans also sought to learn from the practices, institutions and remedies that travelers brought back from Europe and other parts of the Atlantic world, and incorporated them into what was an already rich and diverse body of healing knowledge. Ultimately the prevalence of these exchanges illustrates not just the differences that existed between European and African understandings of disease and the human body, but also how much common ground there was between them. Kananoja compellingly argues that African healing knowledge should be seen as a rich and dynamic system, which was central to the emergence of an Atlantic world.Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Race, while drawn from the visual cues of human diversity, is an idea with a measurable past, an identifiable present, and an uncertain future. The concept of race has been at the center of both triumphs and tragedies in American history and has had a profound effect on the human experience. Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century (Columbia UP, 2018)revisits the origins of commonly held beliefs about the scientific nature of racial differences, examines the roots of the modern idea of race, and explains why race continues to generate controversy as a tool of classification even in our genomic age. Surveying the work of some of the twentieth century's most notable scientists, Race Unmasked reveals how genetics and related biological disciplines formed and preserved ideas of race and, at times, racism. A gripping history of science and scientists, Race Unmasked elucidates the limitations of a racial worldview and throws the contours of our current and evolving understanding of human diversity into sharp relief.About the author: Michael Yudell is a public health ethicist, award-winning historian, and professor and Vice Dean at the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University. He is the co-editor of the Columbia University Press Series Race, Inequality, and Health and the author of several books, including Race Unmasked, for which he won the Arthur J. Viseltear Award from the American Public Health Association.About the interviewer: Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests include machine learning, cancer genomics, and the history of human genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices