Steven Shapin

Luis Alvarez​ gets only a bit part in Christopher Nolan’s movie Oppenheimer. In January 1939, the news arrives in Berkeley that two German scientists have split the uranium atom. Oppenheimer, who hasn’t yet heard, sees an excited Alvarez dashing out of a barber shop mid-haircut, newspaper in hand. He catches up with him at the physics department, where they’re joined by...

What​ are the people in our lives really like – inside? Seeming and being may not be the same. Smiles may be false and vows of love insincere. Appearances are deceptive; you can’t tell a book by its cover; beauty is only skin deep. Yet, in ordinary circumstances, surfaces are all we have to go on. We do often infer something about books from their covers.

Physiognomy was the name...

Roger Penrose​ liked puzzles. In the 1950s, inspired by a catalogue of prints made by the paradoxical Dutch artist M.C. Escher, the young Penrose and his psychiatrist-geneticist father, Lionel, set out to produce drawings of ‘impossible objects’. Pictorial conventions cue us to perceive two-dimensional drawings as representations of three-dimensional things, but these conventions...

Among​ all the things that people take into their bodies, water is special, its necessity matched by its neutrality. There’s no doubt about the necessity. Human bodies are mostly water: about 60 per cent in adult men; a little less in adult women. Without water, death comes within days. A sedentary man of roughly normal weight, living in a temperate climate, requires about three litres...

The​ tragedy of Thomas Kuhn’s life was to have written a great book. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962, when he was forty, and he spent the rest of his life distressed by its success. It has sold 1.7 million copies, and has been translated into 42 languages. Very few academic books sell in those numbers and scarcely any are still seen as state of the art...