You and Betty and the Nancy's and Bill's and Joes and James will find in the study of science

a richer, more rewarding life.

Hey, welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gontas.

This is a podcast that explores the space where science and society collide.

We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover,

and why it matters. I recently finished writing and recording a series of lectures for the

great courses on how technology is shaping how we think.

Now, a lot of people have written about that topic.

And you can probably already guess a number of ways in which your interactions with the internet

and other technologies has essentially changed how you think.

But what about materials?

What are the big inventions, the big discoveries in terms of actual things that have

changed humanity forever? That's what materials scientist and science communicator Anisa Ramirez has

written about in her book The Alchemy of Us, how humans and matter transformed one another.

In the book, she talks about eight different inventions,

clocks, steel, copper communication cables, photographic film,

light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips,

and demonstrates the ways in which each of them has shaped the human experience.

But she doesn't just stick to how materials were used by inventors. She talks about how those inventions then shaped

our culture. Ramirez has had a prolific career. She's worked as a research scientist at Bell Labs

and had academic positions at Yale University and MIT.

She's also hosted her own podcast, and she's written for Time, Scientific American, American

...