History & Philosophy

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science....

How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don’t understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Find out....

Drawing on his decades of field research and up-to-the-minute understanding of the latest science, renowned geologist Andrew H. Knoll delivers a rigorous yet accessible biography of Earth, charting our home planet's epic 4.6 billion-year story....

The New York Times best-selling author of Darwin’s Doubt presents groundbreaking scientific evidence of the existence of God, based on breakthroughs in physics, cosmology, and biology....

One of our greatest philosophers and scientists of the mind asks where the self comes from - and how our selves can exist in the minds of others....

This controversial and compelling audiobook from Dr. Stephen C. Meyer presents a convincing new case for intelligent design based on revolutionary discoveries in science and DNA....

Sparked by a controversial debate in February 2014, Bill Nye has set off on an energetic campaign to spread awareness of evolution and the powerful way it shapes our lives....

Listeners learn the difference between how the world works at the quantum level, the cosmic level, and the human level - and then how each connects to the other....

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value....

This book conveys every aspect of the Apollo missions with breathtaking immediacy and stunning detail....

What sparks the flash of brilliance? One of our most innovative, popular thinkers takes on - in exhilarating style - one of our key questions....

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is essential listening for understanding the history, philosophy, and evolution of science....

Utterly beautiful. Profoundly disconcerting. Quantum theory is quite simply the most successful account of the physical universe ever devised....

Not only can we not currently explain the origin of the universe, it is questionable we will ever be able to explain it. The notion that there are universes within particles, or that particles are conscious, is ascientific, as is the hypothesis that our universe is a computer simulation....

There is a logical flaw in the statistical methods used across experimental science. This fault is not a minor academic quibble: It underlies a reproducibility crisis now threatening entire disciplines....

Out of the 120 billion humans who have ever lived, you're lucky to live now. Whether it's a pill, an injection, or a life-saving surgery, today's medicine has a much greater chance of being there for you when you need it most, compared to what our ancestors could access.

Bestselling author and astrophysicist Mario Livio examines the lives and theories of history’s greatest mathematicians to ask how - if mathematics is an abstract construction of the human mind - it can so perfectly explain the physical world....

Renowned neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis introduces listeners to a revolutionary new theory of how the human brain evolved to become an organic computer without rival in the known universe....

Epiphany Z is futurist Thomas Frey’s dynamic approach to envisioning, comprehending, and ultimately thriving in the radically different futures emerging around us at the speed of light....

Merchants of Doubt tells, with “brutal clarity” (Huffington Post), the disquieting story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades....

In this classic, the world’s expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language....

A belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality.....

Science may be known for banishing the demons of superstition from the modern world. Yet just as the demon-haunted world was being exorcized by the enlightening power of reason, a new kind of demon mischievously materialized in the scientific imagination itself....

A paradigm-shifting work that revolutionizes our understanding of the origins and structure of science....

The author of the best seller The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch, explores the four most fundamental strands of human knowledge: quantum physics, and the theories of knowledge, computation, and evolution - and their unexpected connections....

From ventilators to brain implants, medicine has been blurring what it means to die. In a lucid description of modern neuroscientific thinking, Zeleznikow-Johnston explains that death is not the loss of breath, but of personal identity – that the core of our identities is our minds, and that our minds are encoded in the structure of our brains. On this basis, he explores how recent discoveries now offer us all the chance of preserving our minds for future revival. Whether they discovered cures or fought for justice, we are grateful to those of our ancestors who helped craft a kinder world.

Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions: What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at ninety percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last? What if everyone only had one soulmate? What would happen if the moon went away? In pursuit of answers, Munroe runs computer simulations, pores over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations, and consults with nuclear reactor operators.

Twentieth century science completely revolutionized human understanding of the world, rewriting the story of the universe with exciting discoveries and theories—the big bang, the relativity of space and time, the accelerating expansion of the universe, along with increasingly refined ideas of evolution and the origin of life.

Hoof Beats transforms our understanding of both horses and humanity's ancient past and asks us to consider what our relationship with horses means for the future of humanity and the world around us.

In Charged, James Morton Turner unpacks the history of batteries to explore why solving "the battery problem" is critical to a clean energy transition. As climate activists focus on what a clean energy future will create the history of batteries offers a sharp reminder of what building that future will consume. With new insight on the consequences for people and communities on the front lines, Turner draws on the past for crucial lessons that will help us build a just and clean energy future, from the ground up.