New Books in Science New Books Network

From early myths to the latest LEDs, light has been "the magician of the cosmos." But what is light? Is it God? Truth? Particle or wave? This "radiant history" sees light through the eyes of mystics, sages, artists, poets, and scientists. Like the Nobel-winning physicist who studied light "because it's so much fun," Bruce Watson enjoys taking readers along in search of this eternal force of nature. 
Light: A Radiant History from Creation to the Quantum Age (Bloombury, 2016) explores ancient observatories and Gothic cathedrals, Galileo's workshop and Isaac Newton's "darken'd chamber." Readers will visit Rembrandt's studio and watch stunning sunrises at Stonehenge and at Newgrange in Ireland. The story follows light as it is captured by cameras, framed by Impressionists, and electrified by Edison. Finally, Light brings us to a world remade by lasers, making ours truly the Age of Light.
Garima Garg is a New Delhi based journalist and author.
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We have increasingly sophisticated ways of acquiring and communicating knowledge, but efforts to spread this knowledge often encounter resistance to evidence. The phenomenon of resistance to evidence, while subject to thorough investigation in social psychology, is acutely under-theorised in the philosophical literature. 
Mona Simion's Resistance to Evidence (Cambridge UP, 2024) is concerned with positive epistemology: it argues that we have epistemic obligations to update and form beliefs on available and undefeated evidence. In turn, our resistance to easily available evidence is unpacked as an instance of epistemic malfunctioning. Simion develops a full positive, integrated epistemological picture in conjunction with novel accounts of evidence, defeat, norms of inquiry, permissible suspension, and disinformation. Her book is relevant for anyone with an interest in the nature of evidence and justified belief and in the best ways to avoid the high-stakes practical consequences of evidence resistance in policy and practice.
Mona Simion is a philosopher. She is professor of philosophy at the University of Glasgow where she is also deputy director of the COGITO Epistemology Research Centre. Simion's work focuses on issues in epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of language, and feminist philosophy.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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Today’s book is: At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans (Columbia UP, 2024), by Tessa Hill and Eric Simons, which takes readers beneath the waves and along the coasts, to explore how climate change and environmental degradation have spurred the most radical transformations in human history. The world’s oceans are changing at a drastic pace. In response, the people who know the ocean most intimately are taking action for the sake of our shared future. Community scientists track species in California tidepools. Researchers dive into the waters around Sydney to replant kelp forests. Scientists and First Nations communities collaborate to restore clam gardens in the Pacific Northwest. In At Every Depth, the oceanographer Dr. Tessa Hill and the science journalist Eric Simons profile these and other efforts to understand and protect marine environments, taking readers to habitats from shallow tidepools to the deep sea. By sharing the stories of scientists, coastal community members, Indigenous people, shellfish farmers, and fisheries workers, At Every Depth brings together varied viewpoints, showing how scientists’ research and local and Indigenous knowledge can all complement each other to inform a more sustainable future.
Our guest is: Dr. Tessa Hill, who is a professor in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at the University of California, Davis. She teaches and researches oceanography and climate change. She is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and she was awarded the Rachel Carson Lecture by the American Geophysical Union.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.
Listeners may also enjoy these episodes with women in science:

Climate Change Explained

Women in Shark Sciences

This conversation with Dr. Ware about dragonflies

The surprising world of wasps

When Dr. Martin was considering whether to stay or drop out


Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world.
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Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can’t answer that question here on Earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society’s most charged conflicts - whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead.
Life's Edge: The Search For What it Means to be Alive (Dutton, 2022) is an utterly fascinating investigation that no one but one of the most celebrated science writers of our generation could craft. Zimmer journeys through the strange experiments that have attempted to recreate life. Literally hundreds of definitions of what that should look like now exist, but none has yet emerged as an obvious winner. Lists of what living things have in common do not add up to a theory of life. It's never clear why some items on the list are essential and others not. Coronaviruses have altered the course of history, and yet many scientists maintain they are not alive. Chemists are creating droplets that can swarm, sense their environment, and multiply. Have they made life in the lab?
Whether he is handling pythons in Alabama or searching for hibernating bats in the Adirondacks, Zimmer revels in astounding examples of life at its most bizarre. He tries his own hand at evolving life in a test tube with unnerving results. Charting the obsession with Dr. Frankenstein's monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive, Zimmer leads us all the way into the labs and minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground up.
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Beginning graduate students in mathematical sciences and related areas in physical and computer sciences and engineering are expected to be familiar with a daunting breadth of mathematics, but few have such a background. This bestselling book helps students fill in the gaps in their knowledge. Thomas A. Garrity explains the basic points and a few key results of all the most important undergraduate topics in mathematics, emphasizing the intuitions behind the subject. The explanations are accompanied by numerous examples, exercises and suggestions for further reading that allow the reader to test and develop their understanding of these core topics. 
Featuring four new chapters and many other improvements, this second edition of All the Math You Missed (But Need to Know for Graduate School) (Cambridge UP, 2021) is an essential resource for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students who need to learn some serious mathematics quickly.
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Listen to this interview of Lee McIntyre, Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science (Boston University) and Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science (Aspen Institute). We talk about his book The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience (MIT Press, 2019).
Lee McIntyre : "Scientists have an enormous role — and I'll even say, a responsibility, to make sure that their work does not end just with the discoveries, but extends, as well, to include the communication of those discoveries to their scientific colleagues and beyond them, to society more broadly. And I think that there's enormous room for more public education, not just about the results of science, but also about how science actually works."
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