Science Pie (English) - Science Pie

We belong to a generation that grew up alongside Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived - and yet, it is so much more than just a children's book. Alongside the lovely Anne-Sophie Charrière, who studied English Literature, especially the Harry Potter series, we dive into Rowling's elaborate and intricate world of magic and reveal the power behind the character's names. Be bewitched (and tune in. No password required. 7th-book reference. Teehee...

Imagine if Hitler had jumped out of an airplane over Britain and got captured in Glasgow. That didn't happen. But it happened to his deputy, Rudolf Heß. Join us as we dive into the strange and twisted story of Heß' caption alongside Durham University historian Jo Fox. We investigate what the curious case of Rudolf Heß can tell us about possible distinctions between democratic and totalitarian propaganda...

We are back! Join us as we dive into the fascinating field of propaganda with the help of Jo Fox, a specialist in the history of propaganda in twentieth-century europe and professor at Durham University. This is our first interview episode! Tune in as she unravels what we need to know in order to try to begin to understand propaganda and what propaganda does...

SciPie goes Sci-Fi: There are hardly any stories about a whole society being allowed to use time machines like we use planes today. Why is that? In our new episode, we talk about general relativity and Shakespeare oscillating between the literary figure he is today and a male version of an It-girl. We also give hints on how to destroy the financial system...

When we want to describe a big number, we say things such as "almost the distance between the earth and the moon" or utter some other attempt to make the number understandable. But there are numbers which force us to up our game of comparing. In this episode, we enter into the field of homeopathy, a field with numbers that are so exceptionally big that common comparisons just won't do the trick.

This episode is an extended version of one of our blog posts...

Burnout, depression, or whatever you want to call it, seems to be omnipresent these days - but not for the first time in history. As we look back, we feature strange treatments, an exhausted population, what people feared sex had to do with it, the horror of the trenches and a time in which the people and their nerves didn't seem to be able to keep up...

We are really, really excited about our second episode, which will be the first episode for us to tackle the fields of history and literature! During the 1930s, many well-known writers (among lots of other people, of course) had to emigrate from Germany to avoid being prosecuted by the Nazi regime. One of the most famous immigrants to America: Nobel prize laureate Thomas Mann...

Finally: Our very first episode!

Getting to the moon today is a tricky business - it had been an even trickier one in the 1960s, during a time when computers tended to fill whole rooms. This is not a story about all that "First step for mankind" stuff you probably already know about. This is about what got all those twelve people to the moon. And it's not what you might think...