Feb 25
Anna-Luna Post, "Galileo’s Fame: Science, Credibility, and Memory in the Seventeenth Century" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2025)
From the beginning of Galileo’s career, well before the publication of the Sidereus Nuncius, his contemporaries took pains to shape his reputation and fame. They were fully aware that their efforts would shape the course of his career; they also knew that they would profit from h ... Show More
59m 21s
Feb 24
Robert Endres, "The Unreasonable Likelihood of Being: Origin of Life, Terraforming, and AI" (arXiv, 2025)
In this episode we discuss the paper "The Unreasonable Likelihood of Being: Origin of Life, Terraforming, and AI" (arXiv, 2025) with Robert Endres. Paper Abstract: The origin of life on Earth via the spontaneous emergence of a protocell prior to Darwinian evolution remains a fun ... Show More
52m 6s
Aug 2023
Gary Smith, "Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science" (Oxford UP, 2023)
There is no doubt science is currently suffering from a credibility crisis. Gary Smith's book Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science (Oxford UP, 2023) argues that, ironically, science's credibility is being undermined by tools created by scientists themsel ... Show More
36m 48s
Sep 2021
The psychology of science denial, doubt and disbelief, with Gale Sinatra, PhD, and Barbara Hofer, PhD
On hot-button topics such as climate change, vaccines and genetically modified foods, science denial is rampant – and it crosses party and ideological lines. What are the psychological forces that lead people to disbelieve scientific consensus? Is science denial worse than it’s e ... Show More
36m 52s
May 2021
Combatting Anti-Science with Richard Dawkins
<p>How do we stop anti-science? In this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to talk about religion, the importance of science communication, and Dawkins’ new book, <em>Books Do Furnish a Life.</em></p>
<p>NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can ... Show More
53m 48s
Sep 2023
Break the Science Barrier: Why science matters
Break the Science Barrier is a TV documentary that I presented on Channel 4 in 1996. It argues for the importance, for society, of scientific ways of thinking. In it, I interviewed David Attenborough, Alec Jeffreys, who discovered DNA fingerprinting, and Douglas Adams, who gave a ... Show More
44m 27s
Listen to this interview of Joshua Schimel, Professor of soil ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded (Oxford UP, 2011). We talk about how writing is research, and about how the Vietnam War was really just one big fat rejected manuscript.
Joshua Sch ... Show More
<p><strong>Neil deGrasse Tyson</strong> (<a href="https://twitter.com/neiltyson" target="_blank">@neiltyson</a>) is the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium, host of <a href="https://www.startalkradio.net/" target="_blank"><em>StarTalk Radio</em></a>, and author o ... Show More
<p><strong>Stuart Ritchie</strong> (<a href="https://twitter.com/StuartJRitchie" target="_blank">@StuartJRitchie</a>) is a lecturer in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London and author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That- ... Show More
