New Books in Physics and Chemistry

For the last century, physics has been treading along the paths set by the same two theories--quantum theory and general relativity--and, let's face it, it's getting pretty boring. Most scientists are simply chasing decimal points in laboratories, unable to explore the theories at large scales, where serious discrepancies could emerge. The situation is a lot like the one physics was in in 1890, right before Planck, Einstein, and Bohr blew the roof off Newtonian physics. As Vlatko Vedral argues in Portals to a New Reality: Five Pathways to the Future of Physics (Basic Books, 2025), that means we are on the brink of a revolution. Vedral shows how quantum information theory has opened radically new avenues for experiments that could upend physics. They can sound very strange--one essentially involves entangling a human with Schrödinger's cat--but they lay bare elements of our theories that are particularly problematic, such as the widespread belief that nothing truly exists unless it is observed. At present these experiments are thought experiments, albeit fascinating ones. But nothing, save inertia and a lack of ambition, stands in our way. Now is the time to rewrite the understanding of the universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The history of film calls to mind unforgettable photographs, famous directors, and the glitz and hustle of the media business. But there is another tale to tell that connects film as a material to the twentieth century's history of war, destruction, and cruelty. This story comes into focus during World War II at the factories of Tennessee Eastman, where photographic giant Kodak produced the rudiments of movie magic. Not far away, at Oak Ridge, Kodak was also enriching uranium for the Manhattan Project--uranium mined in the Belgian Congo and destined for the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. While the world's largest film manufacturer transformed into a formidable military contractor, across the ocean its competitor Agfa grew entangled with Nazi Germany's machinery of war. After 1945, Kodak's film factories stood at the front lines of a new, colder war, as their photosensitive products became harbingers of the dangers of nuclear fallout. Following scientists, soldiers, prisoners, and spies through Kodak's and Agfa's global empires, Alice Lovejoy links the golden age of cinema and photography to colonialism, the military-industrial complex, radioactive dust, and toxic waste. Revelatory and chilling, Tales of Militant Chemistry shows how film became a weapon whose chemistry irrevocably shaped the world we live in today. Alice Lovejoy is author of the award-winning Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military. A former editor at Film Comment, she is Professor of film and media studies at the University of Minnesota. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Humanity's relationship with black holes began in 1783 in a small English village, when clergyman John Michell posed a startling question: What if there are objects in space that are so large and heavy that not even light can escape them? Almost 250 years later, in April 2019, scientists presented the first picture of a black hole. Profoundly inspired by that image, physicist Jonas Enander has traveled the world to investigate how our understanding of these elusive celestial objects has evolved since the days of Michell. With the particular goal of discovering our human connection to black holes, Enander visits telescopes and observatories, delves deeply into archives, and interviews over 20 world-leading experts, including several Nobel laureates. With Facing Infinity: Black Holes and Our Place on Earth (The Experiment Press, 2025), he takes us on a spellbinding journey into the universe's greatest mystery, deciphers the most mind-bending science, and answers questions surrounding how black holes work, where they come from, and what role they play in the universe. Along the way Enander discovers how our desire to understand black holes inadvertently paved the way for the invention of Wi-Fi and the calibration of our global navigation satellites, how astronomical discovery became entangled with colonial conflicts, and how our looking outward gave us critical evidence of the impact of climate change. Facing Infinity helps us appreciate and understand as never before these mysterious celestial objects and our surprising connections to them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For a long time, scientists have wondered how life has emerged from inanimate chemistry, and whether Earth is the only place where it exists. Charles Darwin speculated about life on Earth beginning in a warm little pond. Some of his contemporaries believed that life existed on Mars. It once seemed inevitable that the truth would be known by now. It is not. For more than a century, the origins and extent of life have remained shrouded in mystery. But, as Mario Livio and Jack Szostak reveal in Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest for Cosmic Life (Basic Books, 2024), the veil is finally lifting. The authors describe how life's building blocks--from RNA to amino acids and cells--could have emerged from the chaos of Earth's early existence. They then apply the knowledge gathered from cutting-edge research across the sciences to the search for life in the cosmos: both life as we know it and life as we don't. Why and where life exists are two of the biggest unsolved problems in science. Is Earth Exceptional? is the ultimate exploration of the question of whether life is a freak accident or a chemical imperative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do the world's loneliest whale, a black hole, and twenty-three people doing Tae Bo all have in common? In 2011, a skyscraper in South Korea began to shake uncontrollably without warning and was immediately evacuated. Was it an earthquake? An attack? No one seemed quite sure. The actual cause emerged later and is utterly fascinating: Twenty-three middle-aged folks were having a Tae Bo fitness class in the office gym on the twelfth floor. Their beats had inadvertently matched the building's natural frequency, and this coincidence--harnessing a basic principle of physics--caused the building to shake at an alarming rate for ten minutes. Frequency is all around us, but little understood. Musician, composer, TV presenter, and educator Richard Mainwaring uses the concept of the Infinite Piano to reveal the extraordinary world of frequency in a multitude of arenas--from medicine to religion to the environment to the paranormal--through the universality of music and a range of memorable human (and animal) stories laced with dry humor. Whether you're science curious, musically inclined, or just want to know what a Szechuan pepper has to do with physics, What the Ear Hears (and Doesn't): Inside the Extraordinary Everyday World of Frequency (Sourcebooks, 2022) is an immensely enjoyable read filled with "did you know?" trivia you'll love to share with friends. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This book tells the story of how, over the past century, dedicated observers and pioneering scientists achieved our current understanding of the universe. It was in antiquity that humankind first attempted to explain the universe often with the help of myths and legends. This book, however, focuses on the time when cosmology finally became a true science. As the reader will learn, this was a slow process, extending over a large part of the 20th century and involving many astronomers, cosmologists and theoretical physicists. The book explains how empirical astronomical data (e.g., Leavitt, Slipher and Hubble) were reconciled with Einstein's general relativity; a challenge which finally led Friedmann, De Sitter and Lemaître, and eventually Einstein himself, to a consistent understanding of the observational results. The reader will realize the extraordinary implications of these achievements and how deeply they changed our vision of the cosmos: From being small, static, immutable and eternal, it became vast and dynamical - originating from (almost) nothing, and yet now, nearly 14 billion years later, undergoing accelerated expansion. But, as always happens, as well as precious knowledge, new mysteries have also been created where previously absolute certainty had reigned. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Atoms are unfathomably tiny. It takes fifteen million trillion of them to make up a single poppy seed—give or take a few billion. And there’s hardly anything to them: atoms are more than 99.9999999999 percent empty space. Yet scientists have learned to count these slivers of near nothingness with precision and to peer into their internal states. In looking so closely, we have learned that atoms, because of their inimitable signatures and imperturbable internal clocks, are little archives holding the secrets of the past.David J. Helfand reconstructs the history of the universe—back to its first microsecond 13.8 billion years ago—with the help of atoms. He shows how, by using detectors and reactors, microscopes and telescopes, we can decode the tales these infinitesimal particles tell, answering questions such as: Is a medieval illustrated prayer book real or forged? How did maize cultivation spread from the highlands of central Mexico to New England? What was Earth’s climate like before humans emerged? Where can we find clues to identify the culprit in the demise of the dinosaurs? When did our planet and solar system form? Can we trace the births of atoms in the cores of massive stars or even glimpse the origins of the universe itself?A lively and inviting introduction to the building blocks of everything we know, The Universal Timekeepers demonstrates the power of science to unveil the mysteries of unreachably remote times and places. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A celebration of the seemingly simple idea that allowed us to imagine the world in new dimensions--sparking both controversy and discovery. The stars of this book, vectors and tensors, are unlikely celebrities. If you ever took a physics course, the word "vector" might remind you of the mathematics needed to determine forces on an amusement park ride, a turbine, or a projectile. You might also remember that a vector is a quantity that has magnitude and (this is the key) direction. In fact, vectors are examples of tensors, which can represent even more data. It sounds simple enough--and yet, as award-winning science writer Robyn Arianrhod shows in this riveting story, the idea of a single symbol expressing more than one thing at once was millennia in the making. And without that idea, we wouldn't have such a deep understanding of our world. Vector and tensor calculus offers an elegant language for expressing the way things behave in space and time, and Arianrhod shows how this enabled physicists and mathematicians to think in a brand-new way. These include James Clerk Maxwell when he ushered in the wireless electromagnetic age; Einstein when he predicted the curving of space-time and the existence of gravitational waves; Paul Dirac, when he created quantum field theory; and Emmy Noether, when she connected mathematical symmetry and the conservation of energy. For it turned out that it's not just physical quantities and dimensions that vectors and tensors can represent, but other dimensions and other kinds of information, too. This is why physicists and mathematicians can speak of four-dimensional space-time and other higher-dimensional "spaces," and why you're likely relying on vectors or tensors whenever you use digital applications such as search engines, GPS, or your mobile phone. In exploring the evolution of vectors and tensors--and introducing the fascinating people who gave them to us--Arianrhod takes readers on an extraordinary, five-thousand-year journey through the human imagination. She shows the genius required to reimagine the world--and how a clever mathematical construct can dramatically change discovery's direction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe (Scribner, 2021) tells the incredible epic story of the scientists who, over two centuries, harnessed the power of heat and ice and formulated a theory essential to comprehending our universe. “Although thermodynamics has been studied for hundreds of years…few nonscientists appreciate how its principles have shaped the modern world” (Scientific American). Thermodynamics—the branch of physics that deals with energy and entropy—governs everything from the behavior of living cells to the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Not only that, but thermodynamics explains why we must eat and breathe, how lights turn on, the limits of computing, and how the universe will end.The brilliant people who decoded its laws came from every branch of the sciences; they were engineers, physicists, chemists, biologists, cosmologists, and mathematicians. From French military engineer and physicist Sadi Carnot to Lord Kelvin, James Joule, Albert Einstein, Emmy Noether, Alan Turing, and Stephen Hawking, author Paul Sen introduces us to all of the players who passed the baton of scientific progress through time and across nations. Incredibly driven and idealistic, these brave pioneers performed groundbreaking work often in the face of torment and tragedy. Their discoveries helped create the modern world and transformed every branch of science, from biology to cosmology.“Elegantly written and engaging” (Financial Times), Einstein’s Fridge brings to life one of the most important scientific revolutions of all time and captures the thrill of discovery and the power of scientific progress to shape the course of history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why is the universe the way it is? Wherever we look, we find ordered structures: from stars to planets to living cells. Molecular Storms: The Physics of Stars, Cells and the Origin of Life (Springer Nature, 2023) shows that the same driving force is behind structure everywhere: the incessant random motion of the components of matter. Physicists call it thermal noise. Let's call it the molecular storm. This storm drives the fusion reactions that make stars shine. It drives whirlpools and currents in atmospheres and oceans. It spins and distorts molecules until they are in the right orientation to react and form new substances. In living cells, it drives proteins to fold and molecules to self-assemble. It is behind every detail of the astonishing molecular machines that control cellular processes. Using cutting-edge research, "Molecular Storms" takes us on a dazzling journey from the early universe to the interior of the smallest living things. There, in a nanoscale world of biological devices, it explains the physics behind the chemical system which we call Life. Whether you're someone with a general interest in science or a student looking to add context to your studies, this book is for you. "Molecular Storms" is an accessible and captivating read that will deepen your appreciation of the power of science to explain the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices