American public life is rife with questions of scientific judgment. Does red meat really cause cancers and heart disease, or are such fears overblown? How can scientists tell that climate change is occurring and what the effects of global warming might be?

In the title of his keynote address at a conference to investigate Einstein’s impact on science, culture, and the public-political discourse at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Gerald Holton, a pioneer of Einstein scholarship in the historical and philosophical context, asked why Einstein is still so alive.

Naomi Oreskes has offered recent commentary on why many Americans reject the facts about the coronavirus and strategies for addressing a scientific skepticism that has long existed. Do doctors really know what they are talking about when they tell us vaccines are safe?

At the end of World War II, Albert Einstein was invited to write his intellectual autobiography for the Library of Living Philosophers. The resulting book was his uniquely personal Autobiographical Notes, a classic work in the history of science that explains the development of his ideas with unmatched warmth and clarity.

It is once again time to talk about time. On March 14, 1988, Larry Shaw of the San Francisco Exploratorium organized the first official “Pi Day” to celebrate mathematics (and also, for the broad minded, physics).

Jimena Canales is the author of The Physicist and the Philosopher, which tells the remarkable story of how an explosive debate between two intellectual giants transformed our understanding of time and drove a rift between science and the humanities that persists today. This is the story of how she came to study the iconic physicist when she initially had no interest in “such a great man, or any great men.”