312 | Thomas Levenson on the Mutual History of Humans and Germs

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the great things about the existence of podcasts as a medium, I guess it's not that different from just interview shows on radio or TV, but they're a little bit more ubiquitous now, so they provide a glimpse into things almost as they happen, right? I mean, obviously news events can happen very rapidly, but The increase in knowledge that we get through scholarship and research happens on a relatively more leisurely timescale.

And by talking to the kinds of people that we get as guests here on Mindscape, you can see science and research more broadly as it is being done. You get some interesting results, but you also get some insight. into the messiness of we don't know the answer yet, we're still thinking about this, there's still some controversy, let's see where we go. And it becomes pretty obvious that, of course, we're all human beings, we have our favorite ideas, favorite ways of thinking, and so forth. It's a human endeavor, science and scholarship more broadly.

So it can be possible to forget that it has always been that way, because the science that was done in the past we receive as students and readers and listeners in kind of a finished polished form, right? We're given Maxwell's equations or Newton's laws in notation that is much easier to understand than what they actually used. And we're given the final result after they had to go back and forth and think about lots of different things.

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