Talks and website articles

Here are links to recordings of some of my talks and interviews and to articles of mine that have been posted on various websites:

2024
"Hunting Oppenheimer." The release of Christopher Nolan's movie Oppenheimer in July 2023 stirred up a lot of interest in the history of the atomic bomb and I was called upon to give soeveral talks and do some interview. Dan Oppenheimer (no relation to J. Robert), who heads up public affairs for UT's College of Liberal Arts, interviewed me in the fall of 2023 and in March 2024, just after the Oscars, posted a recording of our conversation as part of COLA's "Extra Credit" podcast series. 

2023
"Austin's Moonlight Towers." Jonathan Cooper is a local entrepreneur who has started putting on what he calls "Tiny Talks," sort of mini-TED Talks with a mix of seven or eight short illustrated talks on a wide variety of topics. For his second session on December 12th he invited me to speak about the moonlight towers. It seemed to go over well and certainly made for an enjoyable (and well paid) evening.

"The Victorian Cable Empire and the Making of 'Maxwell's Equations.'" The Center for the History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics invited me to give one of their Trimble Lectures in the history of science, which I delivered online on 15 Nov. 2023. It sums up some of the main themes of my book Imperial Science.

2022
"Under the Moontower" podcast on the history of Austin's moonlight towers. Carrie Maher and Anne Harrington launched a podcast about Austin that they call "Under the Moontower," and for the first episode, they asked me to talk a bit about the moonlight towers and their place in Austin's history. We recorded it in Feb. 2022 and it finally went live that December. It's pretty informal but I hope informative.

2021
"Veritasium" YouTube video "The Big Misconception About Electricity." I was a featured commentator in a program on Derek Muller's "Veritasium" YouTube channel in which he examined the paths by which energy flows in electrical circuits—basically the "Poynting flux," which tells us that electrical energy does not flow within conducting wires, as most people assume, but instead passes through the electromagnetic field around them and then converges on the wires and their loads. "Veritasium" has over 11 million subscribers and this video, which was released on 19 Nov. 2021, drew over 6 million views in its first week, reaching 11 million by the end of thw year and well over 20 million by January 2024. Derek skates over some of the subtleties of the thought experiment with a very long circuit and a light bulb with which he opens the program—only a small fraction of the final steady power level will reach the bulb as quickly as he suggests, and the rate at which it rises to full power will depend on exactly how the circuit is laid out—but the overall presentation is illuminating and the computer graphics are outstanding. I was happy to give a little historical perspective on the question. Derek later ran a follow-up to clarify some of the points he'd glossed over in the original video; I'm afraid I don't appear in that one, but it's also well work watching.

"Lighting a Brighter Future: The Story of Austin Energy." I was a featured commentator in a documentary Mat Hames of Alpheus Media made for Austin Energy to mark the 125th anniversary of Austin's municipal electric utility. Austin Energy released the full documentary (running a little under 30 minutes) on YouTube in October 2021, and also put together some shorter films drawn from it, including one on the moonlight towers.
 
KUT radio broadcast "What Can We Learn From the Bursting of an Austin Dam Some 100 Years Ago?" I was a featured commentator in a program Austin's local public radio station did on the building of the Austin Dam of the 1890s, its failure in 1900, and the role it played in the origin of Austin's municipal electrical utility. It was first broadcast on 12 August 2021 and can now be downloaded as a podcast.


Article on UT's "Not Even Past" website—"To Rule the Waves: Britain's Cable Empire and the Birth of Global Communications." This was posted in May 2021 in connection with the "New Book Talk" I gave to our Institute for Historical Studies about my book Imperial Science: Cable Telegraphy and Electrical Physics in the Victorian British Empire.

University of Texas Physics Department Colloquium—"To Rule the Waves: Victorian Cable Telegraphy and the Making of 'Maxwell's Equations.'" This is a recording of a talk I delivered via Zoom on 21 April 2021. 

2019
BBC World Service radio broadcast program "The Forum" on the history of the electric telegraph. I was one of three historians who took part. From the link, you can also download the program as a podcast. I was visiting Copenhagen when the program was recorded in July 2019, so very appropriately it was all conducted over the wires (well, probably mostly fiber optic cables). The program was broadcast worldwide in October 2019.

2015
Audio recording of Steven Weinberg's talk, "Keeping an Eye on the Present," delivered at UT's Institute for Historical Studies on 28 Sept. 2015. A revised version of Weinberg's talk appeared in the 17 Dec. 2015 issue of the New York Review of Books. The last part of this recording, beginning around 32:30 and running about ten minutes, includes my response, "The Whig Interpretation of the History of Science: A Cambridge Story."

PowerPoint slides of a paper on cable telegraphy and Oliver Heaviside's recasting of 'Maxwell's equations,' presented at the March 2015 meeting of the American Physical Society in San Antonio.

Podcast "Under the Moonlight" on the history of Austin's moonlight towers, from the website "99 Percent Invisible."


2014
Condensed version of a talk on Oliver Lodge, lightning, and the discovery of electromagnetic waves, delivered at a "Lodge Project" workshop held in Liverpool in October 2014. A revised and expanded version of this talk became my chapter "The Alternative Path" in the volume 2020 volume on Lodge edited by James Mussell and Graeme Gooday.


2013
Article on UT's "Not Even Past" website about Austin's first electric streetcar era.


2012
Video interview on UT's "Not Even Past" website about my book Pursuing Power and Light.

Audio and PowerPoint slides of a talk on the Maxwellians and the making of 'Maxwell's equations,' presented at the March 2012 meeting of American Physical Society in Boston. This session included several historians of science, including myself, but we were well aware that most of the large audience came to see Nobel Prize winners Frank Wilczek and Roy Glauber, not us.

Article in The Appendix on the 1947 A-bomb movie "The Beginning or the End?"


2011
Video of a talk on "Darwin and Religion–Or the Lack of It." I gave this talk to the Atheist Community of Austin, 2 October 2011. The recording cuts off toward the end of the Q&A, as I was debunking the "Darwin legend" about his supposed (and quite fictional) deathbed conversion; for the full story on that, see James Moore's book The Darwin Legend (1994).