How Rational is America?

Neil Denny: There is a familiar cliché in the UK media of an overtly religious, backward-looking, anti-intellectual and anti-science America, an America under sustained attack from the forces of irrationality.

...Yet it remains a fact that America was founded on explicitly Enlightenment principles, is a bona fide secular state, will remain for the foreseeable future the number one country for science research in the world and contains a significant proportion of the world's top-rated universities. This contradiction has always interested me.

So, on 12 May I'm travelling to America and embarking on a month-long, 6,000 mile road trip, with the aim of making a series of podcasts that present a wide-ranging overview of science and scepticism from an American perspective. I'll be interviewing scientists working on groundbreaking, cutting-edge science, educators combatting the encroachment of anti-science and irrationality into politics and the classroom, and writers attempting to popularise amazing ideas and concepts to the wider public.

I'm flying in to San Francisco and passing through Los Angeles, Tucson, Phoenix, Santa Fe, Roswell, Oklahoma City, St Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Washington DC, Durham, Asheville, Philadelphia, New York and Ithaca en route to Boston. I'm going to be visiting the Seti Institute, the BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the American Museum of Natural History. I'll also be paying a visit to Kentucky's Creation Museum.

I'm flying in to San Francisco and passing through Los Angeles, Tucson, Phoenix, Santa Fe, Roswell, Oklahoma City, St Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Washington DC, Durham, Asheville, Philadelphia, New York and Ithaca en route to Boston. I'm going to be visiting the Seti Institute, theBEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, the Los Alamos National Laboratoryand the American Museum of Natural History. I'll also be paying a visit to Kentucky's Creation Museum.

I'll be spending a weekend at the annual conference of the Orange County Freethought Alliance, and attending the 5th World Science Festival in New York. And I'll be recording lots of interviews with scientists, a very short selection of which includes Leonard Susskind, Eugenie Scott, Sarah Hrdy, Kip Thorne, David Gross, Lucianne Walkowicz, Ann Druyan (Sagan's widow), George Church, Priya Natarayan, Paul Offit, Sara Seager and Steven Pinker.

I'll be posting a weekly dispatch on this blog while I'm travelling, and I'll be returning home with enough material for around 40 podcast episodes, which will be published once a week in a new RSS feed. The first episode will go online on Friday 18 May.

You can find the feed here or search for Little Atoms Road Trip on iTunes, and also follow my progress on Twitter @littleatoms.