The Joy of Why
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The Joy of Why
“The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz and the cosmologist and author Janna Levin take turns interviewing leading researchers about the great scientific and mathematical questions of our time. New episo...
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Do Beautiful Birds Have an Evolutionary Advantage?
Birds are not merely descendants of dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs. For Yale evolutionary biologist and ornithologist Richard Prum, birds have been a...
How Can Math Protect Our Data?
Every time data travels — from smartphones to the cloud, or across the vacuum of space — it relies on a silent but vigilant guardian in the form of er...
Why Did The Universe Begin?
Most cosmologists agree that our universe had a beginning. But the finer details about the Big Bang remain a mystery. A history of everything would ex...
How Can Regional Models Advance Climate Science?
Climate models have changed the way we view the world. While effective, these models are imperfect, and scientists are constantly looking at ways to i...
How Does Graph Theory Shape Our World?
Born in the 18th century when Leonhard Euler solved the puzzle of the seven bridges of Königsberg, graph theory has become a foundational tool in math...
Does Form Really Shape Function?
What links a Möbius strip, brain folds and termite mounds? The answer is Harvard University’s L. Mahadevan, whose career has been devoted to using mat...
Will We Ever Prove String Theory?
For decades, string theory has been hailed as the leading candidate for the theory of everything in our universe. Yet despite its mathematical eleganc...
How Did Geometry Create Modern Physics?
Geometry is one of the oldest disciplines in human history, yet the worlds it can describe extend far beyond its original use. What began thousands of...
Will AI Ever Understand Language Like Humans?
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly more impressive at creating human-like text and answering questions, but whether they can under...
Can Quantum Gravity Be Created in the Lab?
Quantum gravity is one of the biggest unresolved and challenging problems in physics, as it seeks to reconcile quantum mechanics, which governs the mi...
What Is the True Promise of Quantum Computing?
Quantum computing promises unprecedented speed, but in practice, it’s proven remarkably difficult to find important questions that quantum machines ca...
How Did Multicellular Life Evolve?
At first, life on Earth was simple. Cells existed, functioned and reproduced as free-living individuals. But then, something remarkable happened. Some...
S4 Preview: More Big Questions and No Sasquatches
How did complex life evolve? Where did space-time come from? Will computers ever understand language like we do? How did geometry create modern physic...
How Will We Know We’re Not Alone?
We have identified thousands of planets just in our neighborhood in the Milky Way, mostly from the way they impact their host stars. Basic calculation...
How Is Cell Death Essential to Life?
Death might seem like a pure loss, the disappearance of what makes a living thing distinct from everything else on our planet. But zoom in closer, to...
What Can Birdsong Teach Us About Human Language?
It’s fair to say that enjoyment of a podcast would be severely limited without the human capacity to create and understand speech. That capacity has o...
How Is AI Changing the Science of Prediction?
Scientists routinely build quantitative models — of, say, the weather or an epidemic — and then use them to make predictions, which they can then test...
Why Is It So Hard to Define a Species?
The “species” category is almost certainly the best known of all the taxonomic classifications that biologists use to organize life’s vast diversity....
How Can Math Help Beat Cancer?
When we think about medicine’s war on cancer, treatments such as surgery, radiation and chemotherapy spring to mind first. Now there is another potent...
What Can Cave Life Tell Us About Alien Ecosystems?
If instruments do someday detect evidence of life beyond Earth, whether it’s in this solar system or in the farther reaches of space, astrobiologists...
From Sidedoor — Cosmic Journey I: "Stellar Buffoonery"
As a treat to our listeners, we are posting a full episode of Sidedoor, a podcast that explores the treasures in the Smithsonian's vaults. Subscribe t...
Can Thermodynamics Go Quantum?
The principles of thermodynamics are cornerstones of our understanding of physics. But they were discovered in the era of steam-driven technology, lon...
Do We Need a New Theory of Gravity?
Observations of the cosmos suggest that unseen sources of gravity — dark matter — tug at the stars in galaxies, while another mysterious force — dark...
Are Robots About to Level Up?
Within just a few years, artificial intelligence systems that sometimes seem to display almost human characteristics have gone from science fiction to...
How Does Math Keep Our Secrets?
Can you keep a secret? Modern techniques for maintaining the confidentiality of information are based on mathematical problems that are inherently too...
Will AI Ever Have Common Sense?
Common sense rules our world. This fundamental, sometimes trivial knowledge is inherent to how humans interpret language. Yet, some of these simple hu...
What Can Tiling Patterns Teach Us?
In the tiling of wallpaper and bathroom floors, collective repeated patterns often emerge. Mathematicians have long tried to find a tiling shape that...
How Is Science Even Possible?
The universe seems like it should be unfathomably complex. How then is science able to crack fundamental questions about nature and life? Scientists a...
Can Psychedelics Improve Mental Health?
During traumatic periods and their aftermath, our brains can fall into habitual ways of thinking that may be helpful in the short run but become malad...
What Happens in the Brain to Cause Depression?
For decades, the best drug therapies for treating depression, like SSRIs, have been based on the idea that depressed brains don’t have enough of the n...
Will Better Superconductors Transform the World?
If superconductors — materials that conduct electricity without any resistance — worked at temperatures and pressures close to what we would consider...
What Does Milk Do for Babies?
Milk is more than just a food for babies. Breast milk has evolved to deliver thousands of diverse molecules including growth factors, hormones and ant...
Can Information Escape a Black Hole?
Nothing escapes a black hole… or does it? In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking described a subtle process by which black holes can “evaporate,” with some par...
How Is Flocking Like Computing?
Birds flock. Locusts swarm. Fish school. In these chaotic assemblies, order somehow emerges. Collective behaviors differ in their details from one spe...
What Is Quantum Teleportation?
Quantum teleportation isn’t just science fiction; it’s entirely real and happening in laboratories today. But teleporting quantum particles and inform...
What Is the Nature of Time?
Time seems linear to us: We remember the past, experience the present and predict the future, moving consecutively from one moment to the next. But wh...
How Did Altruism Evolve?
We often talk about evolution as the survival of the fittest. But if it is, then where did the widespread (and widely admired) impulse to help others...
What Makes for ‘Good’ Math?
We tend to think of mathematics as purely logical, but the teaching of math, its usefulness and its workings are packed with nuance. So what is “good”...
S4 Preview: More Big Questions and No Sasquatches
How did complex life evolve? Where did space-time come from? Will computers ever understand language like we do? How did geometry create modern physic...
Trailer: The Joy of Why Season 3
Tune in to the new season of ‘The Joy of Why,’ a podcast from Quanta Magazine and PRX. This season, new co-host cosmologist Janna Levin and mathematic...