Thomas Levenson

In 1695, Isaac Newton—already renowned as the greatest mind of his age—made a surprising career change. He left quiet Cambridge, where he had lived for thirty years and made his earth-shattering discoveries, and moved to London to take up the post of Warden of His Majesty’s Mint. Newton was preceded to the city by a genius of another kind, the budding criminal William Chaloner. Thanks to his preternatural skills as a counterfeiter, Chaloner was rapidly rising in London’s highly competitive underworld, at a time when organized law enforcement was all but unknown and money in the modern sense was just coming into being. Then he crossed paths with the formidable new warden. In the courts and streets of London—and amid the tremors of a world being transformed by the ideas Newton himself had set in motion—the two played out an epic game of cat and mouse.

A short, charming, character-driven book on science that tells the story of the 50-year search by the world’s top scientists for the “missing” planet Vulcan and Albert Einstein’s remarkable proof of the Theory of Relativity, which once and for all proved that the planet never existed in the first place. November 2015 is the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s discovery of the General Theory of Relativity.Levenson, head of MIT’s Science Writing Program, tells the captivating, unusual, and nearly-forgotten backstory behind Einstein’s invention of the Theory of Relativity, which completely changed the course of science forever. For over 50 years before Einstein developed his theory, the world’s top astronomers spent countless hours and energy searching for a planet, which came to be named Vulcan, that had to exist, it was thought, given Isaac Newton’s theories of gravity. Indeed, in the two centuries since Newton’s death, his theory had essentially become accepted as fact. It took Einstein’s genius to realize the mystery of the missing planet wasn’t a problem of measurements or math but of Newton’s theory of gravity itself. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity proved that Vulcan did not and could not exist, and that the decades-long search for it had merely been a quirk of operating under the wrong set of assumptions about the universe. Thomas Levenson tells this unique story, one of the strangest episodes in the history of science, with elegant simplicity, fast-paced drama, and lively characters sure to capture the attention of a wide group of readers.

The sweeping story of how the greatest minds of the Scientific Revolution applied their new ideas to people, money, and markets--and along the way, invented modern finance.Money for Nothing chronicles the moment when the needs of war, discoveries of natural philosophy, and ambitions of investors collided. It's about how the Scientific Revolution intertwined with finance to set England--and the world--off in an entirely new direction.At the dawn of the eighteenth century, England was running out of money due to a prolonged war with France. Parliament tried raising additional funds by selling debt to its citizens, taking in money now with the promise of interest later. It was the first permanent national debt, but still they needed more. They turned to the stock market--a relatively new invention itself--where Isaac Newton's new mathematics of change over time, which he applied to the motions of the planets and the natural world, were fast being applied to the world of money. What kind of future returns could a person expect on an investment today? The Scientific Revolution could help. In the hub of London's stock market--Exchange Alley--the South Sea Company hatched a scheme to turn pieces of the national debt into shares of company stock, and over the spring of 1720 the plan worked brilliantly. Stock prices doubled, doubled again, and then doubled once more, getting everyone in London from tradespeople to the Prince of Wales involved in money mania that consumed the people, press, and pocketbooks of the empire.Unlike science, though, with its tightly controlled experiments, the financial revolution was subject to trial and error on a grand scale, with dramatic, sometimes devastating, consequences for people's lives. With England at war and in need of funds and "stock-jobbers" looking for any opportunity to get in on the action, this new world of finance had the potential to save the nation--but only if it didn't bankrupt it first.

The centuries-long quest to discover the critical role of germs in disease reveals as much about human reasoning—and the pitfalls of ego—as it does about microbes.Scientists and enthusiastic amateurs first confirmed the existence of living things invisible to the human eye in the late sixteenth century. So why did it take two centuries to connect microbes to disease? As late as the Civil War in the 1860s, most soldiers who perished died not on the battlefield but of infected wounds, typhoid, and other diseases. Twenty years later, the outcome might have been different, following one of the most radical intellectual transformations in germ theory, the recognition that the tiniest forms of life have been humankind’s greatest killers. It was a discovery centuries in the making, and it transformed modern life and public health.As Thomas Levenson reveals in this globe-spanning history, it has everything to do with how we see ourselves. For centuries, people in the West, believing themselves to hold God-given dominion over nature, thought too much of humanity and too little of microbes to believe they could take us down. When nineteenth-century scientists finally made the connection, life-saving methods to control infections and contain outbreaks soon followed. The next big break came with the birth of the antibiotic era in the 1930s. And yet, less than a century later, the promise of the antibiotic revolution is already receding due to years of overuse. Is our self-confidence getting the better of us again?So Very Small follows the thread of human ingenuity and hubris across centuries—along the way peering into microscopes, spelunking down sewers, visiting army hospitals, traipsing across sheep fields, and more—to show how we came to understand the microbial environment and how little we understand ourselves. Levenson traces how and why ideas are pursued, accepted, or ignored—and hence how human habits of mind can, so often, make it terribly hard to ask the right questions.

In a book that is both biography and the most exciting form of history, here are eighteen years in the life of a man, Albert Einstein, and a city, Berlin, that were in many ways the defining years of the twentieth century.Einstein in BerlinIn the spring of 1913 two of the giants of modern science traveled to Zurich. Their to offer the most prestigious position in the very center of European scientific life to a man who had just six years before been a mere patent clerk. Albert Einstein accepted, arriving in Berlin in March 1914 to take up his new post. In December 1932 he left Berlin forever. “Take a good look,” he said to his wife as they walked away from their house. “You will never see it again.”In between, Einstein’s Berlin years capture in microcosm the odyssey of the twentieth century. It is a century that opens with extravagant hopes--and climaxes in unparalleled calamity. These are tumultuous times, seen through the life of one man who is at once witness to and architect of his day--and ours. He is present at the events that will shape the journey from the commencement of the Great War to the rumblings of the next one.We begin with the eminent scientist, already widely recognized for his special theory of relativity. His personal life is in turmoil, with his marriage collapsing, an affair under way. Within two years of his arrival in Berlin he makes one of the landmark discoveries of all a new theory of gravity--and before long is transformed into the first international pop star of science. He flourishes during a war he hates, and serves as an instrument of reconciliation in the early months of the peace; he becomes first a symbol of the hope of reason, then a focus for the rage and madness of the right.And throughout these years Berlin is an equal character, with its astonishing eruption of revolutionary pathways in art and architecture, in music, theater, and literature. Its wild street life and sexual excesses are notorious. But with the debacle of the depression and Hitler’s growing power, Berlin will be transformed, until by the end of 1932 it is no longer a safe home for Einstein. Once a hero, now vilified not only as the perpetrator of “Jewish physics” but as the preeminent symbol of all that the Nazis loathe, he knows it is time to leave.From the Hardcover edition.

Scientific thinking is traced from Pythagorean origins to the present through the microscope, precision measuring devices, the chemical still, and the genetically engineered mouse, as well as the organ, the cello, and the electronic synthesizer

Looks at the relationship between climate and the development of the earth, discusses current research, and warns of the dangers of disrupting the climate system

In August of 1941 the German High Command pressured Ion Antonescu, then Dictator of Romania, into using his Fourth Army to take back the area known today as Transnistria, an area of the Ukraine between the Southern Bug and Dniester Rivers. The Romanians drove the Soviets as far as Odessa and then placed them under siege. The siege lasted two months, with the Soviets inflicting more than 92,000 casualties on the Romanian Army. The Romanians took control of the NKVD (Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del) building and used it to headquarter two of the Fourth Army’s Divisions. The Soviets had mined the building and blew it up, killing more than 100 people, over half of them Romanian officers.Ion Antonescu ordered that the civilians who had helped the Soviets arrested and killed. When the soldiers were unable to identify the civilians who helped the Soviets, Antonescu ordered that Jews be singled out as those responsible. In the ensuing massacre, more than 19,000 Jews were systematically killed. In October and November of 1941, another 30,000 Jews were murdered. Afterwards, many more were arrested and sent to two concentration camps and several “colonies” north of Odessa. Over 100,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina were herded into these areas as well. In December of 1941, Romanian troops and Ukraine conscripts fell on Bogdanovka, Domanevka and Akhmetchetkha, and the killing went on for nearly a week.The army, local police and local Romanian population, in cooperation with the Wehrmacht and Einsatzgruppe D carried out the methodical extermination of the Jews, and the Jewish people that were left alive were actively persecuted and were brutally deported to Transnistria. By the end of the war, between 250,000 and 500,000 Jews had been murdered or had died of malnutrition, hypothermia, or one of the rampant epidemics caused by their deportation to the primitive camps and ghettos in Transnistria. Because of the involvement of three sovereign nations and their varying degrees of denial regarding the events concerning the birth of the area we now know as Transnistria, we may never know the exact number of people who died there.The following story is based on the actual experience of a chess player and his family living in Bucharest during this time period and how is love for chess saved him his life

An urgent and profound history of the origins of vaccine skepticism, seeking to understand how our three most common fears about vaccines hardened into a lethal ideology—from a leading science writerSince the advent of smallpox inoculation in the eighteenth century, the idea that a disease introduced to the body in some lesser, weakened form might prevent full-blown infection has been one of the greatest public health insights of the modern era, inspiring the invention of numerous vaccines and saving countless human lives. But, just as humanity acquired the god-like power to stop infectious disease in its tracks, some feared we had gone too far, leading to the skepticism that has hijacked public health discourse today.In three sweeping essays written for our current moment of scientific mistrust, Thomas Levenson searches for the origin points of the most common arguments against that they are unnatural; that they are more dangerous than the illnesses they claim to prevent; and that they are an affront to freedom. Each arose from the earliest development of particular vaccines and the campaigns to distribute them. What surprises Levenson, though, even as the pattern repeats, is how innocent the skepticism initially was and, in each case, how very human fears and questions ultimately turned into something darker, where no truth would be enough to overcome the doubt.Searing but ultimately empathetic, Prometheus Scorned explores the human impulse to question and wonder—sometimes past the point at which the very act of questioning turns deadly.

An urgent and timely history of anti-vaccine arguments and the dangers of their proliferation. The promise of Robert F. Kennedy, the incoming Health Secretary in Donald Trump's administration, to revoke the validation of the polio vaccine is a spectacular example of self-inflicted harm. The effective eradication of a terrible disease is under threat from a man who believes that vaccines – almost all vaccines – cause autism and other conditions, and that seed oils are a deadly threat to human health. Tom Levenson's brilliant, short historical book exposes the refusal of the anti-vax movement to accept the reality of communicable diseases and how to prevent them. Vaccines in earlier times provoked fear of the new and seemed to limit the liberty of individuals, but we are now dealing with historical amnesia on a grand the anti-vaxxers have forgotten, or never knew, how terrifying life was with diseases like polio and mumps.