Adam Becker: The Solar System
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 30 December 2016
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Though Adam Becker loved science as a kid, he struggled in school -- until he met first-grade teacher Mrs. Brown. Adam Becker is a writer, astrophysicist, and science publishing troublemaker. He is currently writing a book about the sordid untold history of quantum physics, which will be published in spring 2018 by Basic Books. He is also the managing editor of the Open Journal of Astrophysics, and a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Office for History of Science and Technology. Originally hailing from a tiny town in northern New Jersey, he earned a PhD in physics from the University of Michigan studying the arrangement of stuff in the very early universe. These days, he lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, Elisabeth, who is a writer, and their pet rabbit Copernicus, who is not. You can find him online at freelanceastro.com and @freelanceastro.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU a scientist? |
| 0:06.0 | I felt. |
| 0:07.0 | I felt right. |
| 0:08.0 | And I just thought, well. |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:12.0 | Because science was on my side. Hi everyone. I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to the Story Collider, where we bring you true personal stories about science. |
| 0:32.6 | This week's story is from Adam Becker. It was recorded in November 2016 at Camp Hess Kramer in Malibu, California, |
| 0:38.9 | as part of our event at SciCom Camp, an organization that brings science communicators and |
| 0:43.2 | scientists together for a weekend of training and fun. |
| 0:49.1 | So you think the things that you grow up with are normal. Eventually, you find out that some of them aren't. |
| 0:56.3 | But, you know, for some things, even if the point is really driven home, |
| 1:01.1 | and you really find out that it's not normal, you just forget, |
| 1:04.7 | or you don't even believe that it's not normal in the first place. |
| 1:08.1 | So here's something normal. |
| 1:09.8 | When I was six years old, I was obsessed with dinosaurs. |
| 1:15.2 | I had a stuffed stegosaurus, which I carried around with me everywhere I went. I fell asleep |
| 1:21.7 | every night listening to digging up dinosaurs, which was a cassette tape about, you know, |
| 1:27.1 | digging up dinosaurs. It was a cassette tape about, you know, digging up dinosaurs. |
| 1:29.5 | And it was a cassette tape because this was 1990. And cassette tapes was all we had. And |
| 1:34.9 | my cassette tape player was, in fact, see-through because six-year-old Adam was pretty sure that |
| 1:40.5 | that was radical. And the see-through cassette player and the dinosaur thing actually kind of went together |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Story Collider, Inc., and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Story Collider, Inc. and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.