Sam Kean, “The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other L...

The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with ly ...  Show more

Jonathan Fuller’s The New Modern Medicine: Disease, Evidence, and Epidemiological Medicine (Oxford UP, 2025) takes the reader on a philosophical tour through scientific medicine, visiting its distinctive problems, particularly problems brought about by the twentieth century fusio ...  Show more

The Disappearing Spoon, a podcast collaboration between the Science History Institute and New York Times best-selling author Sam Kean, returns for its third season ...

Did you know that Gandhi hated iodine? Or that Silicon Valley was almost called Germanium Valley? Our producer

In this week’s episode we pay tribute to the periodic table. We talk to Sam Kean, author of the best-selling book The Disappearing Spoon and hear an excerpt from Primo Levi’s book The Periodic Table.

SHOW CLOCK

00:00 Opening Credits

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss whether the mass of scientific understanding and knowledge we have accumulated has destroyed our sense of poetic wonder at the world. Has our sense of awe at how the world works obscured our desire to know why it works the way it does? With Richard ...  Show more