History of Science on the Web: Podcasts

Elizabeth Musselman, an historian of science at Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX, produces a wonderful series of podcasts called The Missing Link. You should all know about it.

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(It's Bertrand Russell)

Of The Missing Link, she writes that it is:

A monthly program about science and its delightfully strange history. For people who are scared of science but deeply intrigued by it. For scientists who know there must be a better back story than what's told in the sidebars of their textbooks. And - oh yes - for those three dozen of you out there who, like me, actually make a living as historians of science.

There have been five episodes thus far. The most recent is called "Strength in Numbers." Here's the summary:

This episode transports us to two conferences that can change the way we think about the sciences' past. First, you will tag along with me to the History of Science Society (HSS) annual meeting that took place recently in Washington, DC. I'll share with you some excerpts from Ted Porter's fascinating lecture on "How Science Became Technical." Then, we'll travel back a half-century to the first Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, a remarkable event at which 21 eminent scientists - including Leo Szilard, Joseph Rotblat, and Herman Muller - met to discuss the threat posed to world peace by thermonuclear weapons.

It's actually somewhat related to a series of posts Wyatt Galusky wrote for us earlier this Fall (the last of which is here).

Episode 4 is: Constant Companions (about "animals...that have accompanied us humans on our journeys through the history of scientific and medical discovery")
Episode 3 is: On Location in Berlin (about two Berlin institutions of interest in the history of science and medicine, Charité and the Berlin Phonogram Archive)
Episode 2 is: Opposites Attract (about the "idea that women and men are opposites")
Episode 1 is: Stranger than Fiction (about a topic of recent discussion at The World's Fair, the "ways that science fiction has drawn inspiration from planetary science")

Fuller summaries are available at Musselman's main page.

Good stuff.

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