New Books Network
60 episodes listed below
PRESS PLAY
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Author interviews turn complex ideas from cosmology, evolution and geology into patient explanations built from definitions, examples and follow-up questions.
New Books in Physics and Chemistry lets authors work through the machinery of an idea instead of compressing it into a headline. Its interviewers ask for definitions, examples and consequences, giving Antonio Padilla room to connect enormous numbers with possible cosmic…
Mars's imaginary canals get a reality check, and your science-fiction shelf may never recover.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Fictional worlds meet real astronomy in a lively tour through habitability, water, and the history of Martian canals.
Keith Cooper's Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact frames the episode around a clean question: what happens when famous fictional planets are held up against real astronomy?
Keith Cooper tests imagined planets against real science, and finds the borrowings most interesting where they bend.
Keith Cooper turns Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact into a guided tour of planets that began in fiction but keep bumping into real astronomy and physics.
Infrared light turns cosmic dust from a barrier into a window.
Matthew Bothwell's The Invisible Universe makes astronomy feel close by starting with what cannot be seen. In Gregory McNiff's conversation with the author, radio waves, infrared radiation, and gravity become practical ways of looking past ordinary light, while the blue sky and…
A measured science conversation on how novelty begins, changes, and sometimes takes hold.
How does something genuinely new appear? The episode follows that question from turtle shells and the origins of limbs to first eyes, early turtles in New Mexico and China, and the broader problem of defining novelty clearly.
A practical geology episode that turns a found stone into a story of formation, movement, and human use.
Rocks opens on a familiar bit of curiosity: finding a striking stone and having no easy way to name it. From there, the episode turns that uncertainty into an approachable lesson in practical geology, showing how rocks can be identified, classified, formed, and discovered.
A clear walk from giant numbers to the strange outer edge of physical possibility.
Antonio Padilla takes a book about huge numbers and turns it into a brisk tour of how scale changes what physics can mean. The discussion moves through Googleplex-sized improbabilities, internal inflation, doppelgangers, and Graham's Number, yet it stays readable enough to…
A particle physicist and a cartoonist take listener questions on dark matter and black holes.
Recorded PhD summer-school lectures from LMU Munich's Arnold Sommerfeld Center on quantum computing.
Theoretical physics, patiently brought to the board.
Curious physics, explained in motion.
Theoretical physicist Antonio Padilla discusses his book 'Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them,' exploring the intersection of mathematics and physics through topics like relativity, entropy, black holes, and infinity.
["Keith Cooper says astronomers have found more than 6,000 exoplanets, yet none is confirmed to be Earth-like or habitable.", "He ties that statistic to Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact, a book that compares real planetary science with Star Wars, Dune, and Ursula K.
On New Books Network, Dr.
["Matthew Bothwell argues that visible light is only one octave of a roughly 65-octave electromagnetic spectrum, so astronomy depends on radio, infrared, microwaves, x-rays, and gamma rays to see the rest.", "Gregory McNiff frames The Invisible Universe as a December 2021 book from One World Publications, and Bothwell says he wrote it in April 2020 for complete beginners with no astronomy background.", "The conversation moves through William Herschel, James Clerk Maxwell, IRAS, and COBE, including the discovery that the cosmic microwave background carries ripples rather than a perfectly smooth glow.", "Bothwell also explains black body radiation, Rayleigh scattering, spectroscopy, black holes, and pulsars as ways to infer hidden structure from light."]
Eleonora Mattiaci of Amherst College speaks with Douglas Irwin, an independent researcher at the Santa Fe Institute and former Smithsonian paleobiology curator, about his 2026 Princeton University Press book The Origins of the New.
Miranda Melcher’s New Books Network interview with Wojta Hibble centers on Rocks: A Guide to the Stones Around Us and the Stories They Tell, a 2026 Francis Lincoln field guide built around identifying rocks rather than minerals.
An interview with Dr.
An interview with astrophysicist Emma Chapman about her book on radio astronomy and the invisible cosmos.
An interview with a photographer about her book featuring portraits and interviews with pioneering researchers.
This episode is a survey request followed by an interview about a new book on glyphosate and its environmental impact.
This episode features an interview with astronomer Chris Impey about his new book on exoplanets and astrobiology.