Curated playlist
20th-century American science writers
- Albert EinsteinAlbert Einstein once spent his days examining patents for gravel sorters.
- Leon FestingerPsychologist Leon Festinger joined a doomsday group to see what believers do when the prophecy fails.
- Carl SaganCarl Sagan once asked a librarian for a book on stars and got one about movie stars.
- Richard FeynmanRichard Feynman's last words, spoken after a long coma, were "This dying is boring." The remark suited an American theoretical physicist who never lost his taste for blunt, irreverent honesty. He was a man who treated authority, ceremony…
- Ayn RandWhen Ayn Rand died in New York City on the 6th of March 1982, her funeral included a six-foot floral arrangement shaped like a dollar sign. The tribute suited a woman who had turned self-interest into a moral code. She was born Alisa…
- James WatsonJames Watson put his name to a scientific paper that fills just two pages of the journal Nature, pages 737 and 738 of volume 171. Watson, an American molecular biologist, wrote it with Francis Crick in 1953. Its subject was DNA, and its…
- Sally RideSally Ride quietly passed along the key clue to what caused the Challenger explosion.
- Isaac AsimovIsaac Asimov coined the word "robotics" in a 1941 story, thinking it was just a natural term.
- George GamowGeorge Gamow added Hans Bethe's name to a physics paper as a prank. Bethe had not written a word of it.
- Fritjof CapraFritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics was finished one month after a discovery it missed.
- Erich FrommErich Fromm argued that falling in love is not love at all. His 1956 book The Art of Loving became a bestseller.
- David BrinAuthor David Brin won the Hugo Award for Best Novel twice with his Uplift Universe books.
- Theodosius DobzhanskyTheodosius Dobzhansky went from collecting butterflies in Kiev to writing a landmark book on evolution.
- Julian SimonJulian Simon bet Paul Ehrlich that five metals would get cheaper. All five did.