Science History Podcast

Galileo occupies an inflection point in the history of science and society. Born in 1564, Galileo changed the trajectory of science though his work in astronomy, physics and related fields. He invented various clever devices, and he used the telescope to push the boundaries of knowledge about our solar system and Earth’s place in it. Galileo’s discoveries, and the manner in which he presented them in his 1632 book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, hurled his fate into the judgements of the Roman Inquisition. Galileo recanted after he was found “vehemently suspect of heresy”. The inquisitors sentenced Galileo with the unusual punishment of house arrest, where he remained until his death in 1642.

The Dialogue represented much more than a book on Copernican heliocentrism – that is, that the Earth rotates daily and revolves around the sun. The Dialogue also became a cudgel in the European conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, and the fate of the book in the midst of the Inquisition placed Galileo’s lot in a precarious position. Did Galileo give a copy of the book to its Latin translator, which facilitated its distribution throughout Europe? Was Galileo’s recanting of heliocentrism genuine, or did he continue to spread heretical views while under house arrest? How did Galileo run afoul of a Pope who had previously supported his work? The questions surrounding the Dialogue live on, and with us to decipher the controversy is John Heilbron.

John received AB and MA degrees in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1955 and 1958, respectively. He completed his Ph.D. in history, also at Berkeley, in 1964. He then taught at the University of Pennsylvania before returning to Berkeley in 1967, where he worked his way through the ranks of academia to a full professorship and director of the Office for History of Science and Technology in 1973. He served as Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor in the early 1990s, and since then has been active as a professor emeritus.

Since 1996, John has also conducted research at the University of Oxford, and since 2012 at the California Institute of Technology. John is a member of the International Academy of the History of Science, for which he served as president from 2001-2005. He is also a member of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and The American Philosophical Society. He is the recipient of many awards for his scholarship on the history of science. John has written numerous books, and today we discuss his latest, a beautifully written book entitled, The Ghost of Galileo in a Forgotten Painting from the English Civil War, published in 2021 by Oxford University Press.

The ways people think about matters both big and small, from climate change to daily tasks, impact the outcomes. Throughout the history of science and society, key insights arose through a thought process of simplification and subtraction, though the human tendency leans towards complication and addition. Today I discuss the power of subtraction with Leidy Klotz. Leidy is a professor at the University of Virginia, where he studies the science of design. He is the author of Subtract, published in 2021 by Flatiron Books.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ensuing worldwide Great Depression left families in economic shock and despair. International trade collapsed to less than half of its previous levels and unemployment skyrocketed. Into this devastating mess stepped Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who began his long presidency in 1933. FDR spearheaded a series of programs known as the New Deal to revive the United States. The most popular of these was the government work relief program called the Civilian Conservation Corps, which ran from 1933 to 1942. Three million American men joined the Corps, gaining skills and employment while also attending to widespread conservation problems. With us to explain the significance of the Civilian Conservation Corps is Neil Maher. Neil is a professor of history in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark, and he is the author of Apollo in the Age of Aquarius and Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement.

Johan Rockström and colleagues first proposed the concept in 2009 of planetary boundary threats and a safe operating space for humanity. This conceptual framework clarifies environmental problems that are of planetary significance, such as biodiversity loss, climate change, and stratospheric ozone depletion. The most recently articulated planetary boundary threat, or set of threats, relates to chemical pollution of the biosphere. With us to unpack planetary boundary threats as they relate to pollution is Bethanie Carney Almroth. Bethanie is a professor at the University of Gothenburg, where she researches threats posed to our planet due to the immense number and quantities of synthetic chemicals released into the environment.

Whistleblowers are admired or vilified. They are saviors of democracy or traitors to their country. They confront those in power and drive the news, and some, such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, are household names. But one man is their inspiration, the person who made whistleblowing a phenomenon of modern times, and his name is Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was born in 1931 in Chicago and grew up in Detroit. He graduated with honors from Harvard with an AB in economics in 1952, and then studied at the University of Cambridge. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1954-1957, and then returned to Harvard where he completed his PhD in economics in 1962. Ellsberg worked as a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation beginning in 1958, and then in the Pentagon beginning in 1964 under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He worked for the U.S. State Department in South Vietnam for two years, and then returned to the RAND Corporation. At the end of 1969, with help from his colleague Anthony Russo, Ellsberg secretly copied the Pentagon Papers. His illegal dissemination of these papers to newspapers and the subsequent aftermath is the subject of today’s interview, along with his work related to nuclear war planning and the prevention of nuclear war. We discuss this history, and how it relates to the Vietnam War and the downfall of President Nixon, along with many other topics stretching from World War II to the disastrous Trump Administration. Our discussion centers on Ellsberg’s two seminal books, Secrets – A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers and The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Ellsberg as much as I did – his wit, his charm, and his deep historical perspective on critical moments of the 20th century. On top of the many interesting things Ellsberg has to say, he also reveals some new information for the very first time. (Photograph of Ellsberg by Christopher Michel https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Daniel_Ellsberg_2020_CM.jpg)