Science History Podcast

The weather has always been a critical element of the human experience - deadly during storms and droughts, sustaining when aligned with the harvest schedule, beautiful and frightening, and integrated into the myths and religions of all societies. How did a scientific understanding of the weather come about? Here to guide us on this question is Simon Winchester. Simon's articles and approximately...

In Episodes 10 and 11 of the Science History Podcast, I interviewed James Muller on the role that Winston Churchill played in the unparalleled advancement of science and technology during the first half of the 20th Century, particularly as it related to the two world wars. In today's episode, Jim returns to discuss Churchill and an earlier war fought in the Sudan at the end of the 19th Century....

Our health, and the health of wildlife, depends on a clean environment. Since the advent of the industrial revolution, our environment has suffered from waves of pollution as different technologies came to the fore, each with its own set of practical benefits and associated chemical waste. Perhaps the most insidious of these environmental pollutants is lead. With us to discuss the history of lead...

The year 2025 has seen the most aggressive moves ever by the US executive branch against scientific research as the Trump Administration has gutted federal science and regulatory agencies and cancelled billions of dollars in research grants that had already been awarded to universities. With me to discuss the Trump Administration attacks on university research is Claudia Polsky. Claudia is a...

In Episode 62, I interviewed two Reuters journalists about how industry and government in the United States use conservation easements to avoid rigorous cleanup of contaminated sites. Today, one of those journalists, Jaimi Dowdell, is back to discuss how a federal agency responsible for community health assessments has a history of failing to protect the communities that seek its aid. Jaimi was...

In prior episodes, we examined political interference and bias in science in a few contexts, including episode 3 on the history of U.S. congressional attacks on science, episode 57 on types of bias, episode 65 on ideology and science, and episode 84 on the academy's ideological march to the left and antisemitism on American college campuses. Since those episodes, America went back to the future...

In prior episodes, I have interviewed many people about the history of physics and physics-adjacent topics such as nuclear disarmament. Many of the physicists we have discussed also made forays into biology. Today I explore this transition of physicists working in biology with William Lanouette. Bill is a writer and public policy analyst who has specialized in the history of nuclear energy and...

Prior to the rise of Nazism, the University of Göttingen hosted most of the top physicists in the world, either as resident or visiting scientists. With us to discuss the history of physics in Göttingen are Tim Salditt, Kurt Schönhammer, and Sarah Köster. In this conversation over tea at the University of Göttingen, we discuss how Göttingen became a focal point of physics, key moments and people...

The history of science is punctuated by moments of technological innovation that produce a paradigm shift and a subsequent flurry of discovery. A recent technological innovation that generated diverse discoveries, ranging from a profound shift in our understanding of the origin of humanity to a seismic change in the criminal justice system, is the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. With us to...

Lise Meitner was the most important female physicist of the 20th century. She made fundamental discoveries on the atom, including, most famously, being the first to discover the idea of fission. This she did as she puzzled over experimental results generated by her colleague Otto Hahn. Hahn, but not Meitner, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this monumental discovery. More generally,...