I’m a historian of science fascinated by how scientists cope with uncertainty. I’m drawn to books that identify and try to explain the gaps in scientific knowledge and describe ways of knowing that might not be called scientific. I love to read stories about how ordinary people discover extraordinary things about their environments. I’m always curious about what happens when savvy locals are visited by scientific experts. Will they join forces? Admit what they don’t know? Or is a struggle brewing?
I wrote
The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter
I was captivated by an insight that came to Firestein while he was teaching college biology. Science courses typically teach what scientists know about their disciplines, but what’s most exciting to scientists is what they don’t know.
So Firestein had the brilliant idea to design a course where scientists would share their “ignorance”—the questions that keep them up at night and propel new research. It helps that the author used to work as a stand-up comic!
Knowledge is a big subject, says Stuart Firestein, but ignorance is a bigger one. And it is ignorance-not knowledge-that is the true engine of science.
Most of us have a false impression of science as a surefire, deliberate, step-by-step method for finding things out and getting things done. In fact, says Firestein, more often than not, science is like looking for a black cat in a dark room, and there may not be a cat in the room. The process is more hit-or-miss than you might imagine, with much stumbling and groping after phantoms. But it is exactly this "not…
This classic work of history and investigative reporting reads like a whodunit. It’s about the ill-willed contrarians who tried to convince the public that scientists don’t know what they do know: that our planet is warming as a result of human actions.
So, the book is not at all about scientists’ ignorance but instead about an illusion of uncertainty that has been deliberately fabricated.
The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. Our scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers.
Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific…
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
Amazingly, the seismic disasters that this book documents, which took place in the middle of the United States in the nineteenth century, have been almost entirely forgotten by scientists and planners.
How can earthquakes remake an entire region, physically and socially—and yet to be erased from history within two generations? This is a mind-boggling story about the short attention span of those entrusted to protect against environmental destruction.
From December 1811 to February 1812, massive earthquakes shook the middle Mississippi Valley, collapsing homes, snapping large trees midtrunk, and briefly but dramatically reversing the flow of the continent's mightiest river. For decades, people puzzled over the causes of the quakes, but by the time the nation began to recover from the Civil War, the New Madrid earthquakes had been essentially forgotten. In The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes, Conevery Bolton Valencius remembers this major environmental disaster, demonstrating how events that have been long forgotten, even denied and ridiculed as tall tales, were in fact enormously important at…
Schiebinger’s archival sleuthing reveals a yawning hole in eighteenth-century science. She describes Europeans in the Caribbean behaving as knowledge pirates, stealing medicinal plants from indigenous communities as they laid the foundations for a modern drug industry.
However, one kind of knowledge didn’t travel: European physicians never mentioned the plants used by Caribbean women to manage their own fertility. Plants used by Native Americans and enslaved Africans as abortifacients and anti-fertility drugs arrived in Europe as simply pretty flowers.
Plants seldom figure in the grand narratives of war, peace, or even everyday life yet they are often at the center of high intrigue. In the eighteenth century, epic scientific voyages were sponsored by European imperial powers to explore the natural riches of the New World, and uncover the botanical secrets of its people. Bioprospectors brought back medicines, luxuries, and staples for their king and country. Risking their lives to discover exotic plants, these daredevil explorers joined with their sponsors to create a global culture of botany.
But some secrets were unearthed only to be lost again. In this moving…
Killion is born several generations after the establishment of the Cities of Light which now sprinkle each continent of the world, places where God’s spirit produces a tangible presence felt by all who enter. Yet he is raised outside these cities, under the direction of Adar, who teaches his followers…
Murphy writes about uncertainty in science better than anyone else I know. The reality of sick building syndrome was hotly debated in the 1970s and ‘80s. However, Murphy shows that the important question is not whether it was an illness but how evidence was constructed for and against its existence.
The last chapter on MCS (Multiple Chemical Sensitivity) is my favorite part of the book. Murphy describes how people living with MCS, in the face of expert skepticism, developed their own science to understand their bodies in relation to the risky ecologies of indoor spaces.
Before 1980, sick building syndrome did not exist. By the 1990s, it was among the most commonly investigated occupational health problems in the United States. Afflicted by headaches, rashes, and immune system disorders, office workers-mostly women-protested that their workplaces were filled with toxic hazards; yet federal investigators could detect no chemical cause. This richly detailed history tells the story of how sick building syndrome came into being: how indoor exposures to chemicals wafting from synthetic carpet, ink, adhesive, solvents, and so on became something that relatively privileged Americans worried over, felt, and ultimately sought to do something about. As M.…
My book tells the story of an aborted dialogue between scientists and citizens about living with environmental risk. Before reliable seismographs, scientists studied earthquakes by turning to eyewitnesses for reports. The question was how to turn an instant of panic and confusion into a field for producing scientific evidence.
By the 1930s, it seemed that seismographs and accelerometers had rendered the human seismograph obsolete. The eclipse of the human seismograph helps us understand why discussions of environmental risk between experts and the public have reached an impasse today.
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus atUW-Milwaukee, booking thousands of…
