Thomas Levenson

Tom Levenson is Professor of Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaching mostly in the Graduate Program in Science Writing.  He is currently at work on a new book, Money for Nothing, June, 2020, on the South Sea Bubble, the Scientific Revolution, and the birth of the modern idea of money.

Levenson’s career has been split between writing, mostly long-form but including some science journalism, and documentary film making, emphasizing books for the last decade.  His most recent work is The Hunt for Vulcan, (Random House, 2015), short-listed for the Royal Society’s science book award.  It’s a cautionary tale of the discovery and undiscovery of a planet that should have been there, but wasn’t.  His Newton and the Counterfeiter (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) centers on Isaac Newton’s second career as a real-world scientific detective.  Einstein in Berlin, (Bantam, 2003, reissued in 2017 by Random House in its first electronic book), is a critically acclaimed account of Albert Einstein’s eighteen years in the German capital. 

    Levenson’s most significant film and television projects includes work as executive producer for the mini-series Origins, a four part series on the evolution of the life in the cosmos, and producer, director and writer of Back to the Beginning, the series finale.  Origins was broadcast as a special presentation ofthe PBS series NOVA in September,  2004, and Back to the Beginning was awarded the 2005 National Academies Communication Award.  Prior to Origins, Mr. Levenson produced the Dome episode in the Public Broadcasting Service series Building Big, hosted by David Macaulay, honored by a 2001 George Foster Peabody Award.   

    Earlier books include Measure for Measure:  A Musical History of Science, (1994, Simon and Schuster and Oxford University Press);  and Ice Time:  Climate, Science, and Life on Earth, (1989, Harper and Row).  Levenson is also a columnist for The Boston Globe’s Ideas section, contributes fairly regularly to The Atlantic Monthly online, and has over the years published numerous articles in a wide range of magazines, newspapers and online venues.

    Other television credits include producing and writing the two hour PBS and NOVA special, Einstein Revisited, a partly dramatized biography of Albert Einstein, broadcast in 1996; the NOVA episode, Eclipse of the Century, also supported by the NSF, which won the 1992 AAAS/Westinghouse Award for best science program; and the New York Chapter - EMMY-award-winning WNET/DISCOVERY special Cathedrals of the Sky which juxtaposed the growth of scientific understanding of the cosmos to the development of telescopes and our concomitant ability to see, analyze and interpret cosmological phenomena.

    Levenson earned his bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard, and now lives about three miles from the scenes of his undergraduate indiscretions with his wife, Katha Seidman, and the apple of his eye, Henry.