Michael D. Gordin is a professor of history at Princeton. He has done research on the early development of the natural sciences in Russia in the 18th century, biological warfare in the Soviet Union, the relationship of Russian literature to the natural sciences, Lysenkoism, Immanuel Velikovsky, pseudosciences, the early history of the atomic bombs and the Cold War, Albert Einstein in Prague, the history of global scientific languages, the life of Dmitri Medeleyev, and the history of the periodic table.
Michael D. Gordin
Articles
Nothing “Proto” About It: More on MIT Press’s New Radium Age Series
The pleasures of reading the titles from MIT Press’s new Radium Age series, writes historian of science Michael Gordin, lies in the science fiction genre not yet having congealed.
Weird Science
From anti-vaxxers to Flat Earthers, the public’s (and scholars’) perception of science shifted sometime between 1990-2010, writes Michael Gordin.
Every Age Gets the Mythology It Deserves
Colin Burgess’s “The Greatest Adventure: A History of Human Space Exploration” fails to take off.
Anti-Anti-Anti-Science
A gentle critique of Andrew Jewett’s “Science under Fire,” and a nuanced exploration of science-hesitancy.
Suicide Missions
Historian Michael D. Gordin reviews several books in order to tackle the problem of deferred solutions — the fact that we seem rigged to defer suffering.
Quantum Conversations, Entanglement, and the American Cold War “Physics Bubble”
Historian of science Michael D. Gordin reviews his former lab partner’s new book on the fuzziness of the quantum world.
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