Democracy depends on numbers. This was recognized from the founding of the American republic. The US Constitution defined terms for periodic elections and for the reapportionment of representatives among the states as their populations grew.

In the summer of 1828, the natural scientist and physician Thomas Young spent an afternoon with Jean-François Champollion, the scholar who, six years earlier, had announced a system for reading Egyptian hieroglyphs, considerably complicating Young’s preceding efforts to do the same thing.

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.