Curated playlist
20th-century American science writers
- Albert EinsteinGerman-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955)
- Leon FestingerLeon Festinger spent months living a lie among people who believed the world would end on the 21st of December 1954. A suburban housewife named Dorothy Martin had told them she was receiving messages from beings called the Guardians, on a…
- Carl SaganCarl Sagan grew up in a modest Bensonhurst apartment with parents who, by his own account, "knew almost nothing about science." Yet it was precisely those parents who set him on a path that would eventually lead hundreds of millions of…
- Sally RideSally Kristen Ride was born on the 26th of May, 1951, in Santa Monica, California, and died on the 23rd of July, 2012, having spent more than 343 hours in space and nearly three decades of her private life hidden from the world. She was…
- Isaac AsimovIsaac Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books, and on top of that he sent an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. He once said the only thing about himself severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment was his compulsion to…
- George GamowGeorge Gamow once loaded a kayak with supplies for a 250-kilometer crossing of the Black Sea. The year was 1932. He and his wife Lyubov were trying to paddle from Soviet territory to Turkey. Poor weather foiled the attempt, and the…
- Fritjof CapraFritjof Capra was born in Vienna on the 1st of February 1939. His book The Tao of Physics, published in 1975, proposed that modern physics and Eastern mysticism lead to the same conclusions. Capra would spend decades building an…
- Erich FrommErich Fromm was born on the 23rd of March 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Rosa and Naphtali Fromm, and he would spend the next eight decades asking a question that unsettled everyone who heard it: why do people choose their…
- David BrinDavid Brin's grandfather was drafted into the Russian army and sent to fight in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. Brin was born on the 6th of October, 1950, in Glendale, California, to parents Selma and Herb Brin. Over the following…
- Theodosius DobzhanskyTheodosius Dobzhansky was born on the 25th of January 1900 in Nemirov, a small town in what was then the Russian Empire, to a mathematics teacher and his wife who had prayed to St. Theodosius of Chernigov for a child. That unusual name…
- Julian SimonJulian Lincoln Simon stood at the podium on Earth Day 1970 in Urbana, Illinois, and told a crowd that population growth was not a disaster. It was, he said, a triumph for mankind. The room included Planned Parenthood president Alan Frank…