“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 episodes are released every other Wednesday. Quanta Magazine is a Pulitzer Prize–winning, editorially independent online publication launched and supported by the Simons Foundation to illuminate big ideas in science and math through public service journalism. Quanta’s reporters and editors focus on developments in mathematics, theoretical physics, theoretical computer science and the basic life sciences, emphasizing timely, accurate, in-depth and well-crafted articles for its broad discerning audience. In 2023, Steven Strogatz received a National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications partly for his work on “The Joy of Why.”
44 episodes transcribedIf instruments do someday detect evidence of life beyond Earth, whether it’s in this solar system or in the farther reaches of space, astrobi...
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. Su...
The principles of thermodynamics are cornerstones of our understanding of physics. But they were discovered in the era of steam-driven techno...
Observations of the cosmos suggest that unseen sources of gravity — dark matter — tug at the stars in galaxies, while another mysterious forc...
Within just a few years, artificial intelligence systems that sometimes seem to display almost human characteristics have gone from science f...
Can you keep a secret? Modern techniques for maintaining the confidentiality of information are based on mathematical problems that are inher...
Common sense rules our world. This fundamental, sometimes trivial knowledge is inherent to how humans interpret language. Yet, some of these...
In the tiling of wallpaper and bathroom floors, collective repeated patterns often emerge. Mathematicians have long tried to find a tiling sh...
The universe seems like it should be unfathomably complex. How then is science able to crack fundamental questions about nature and life? Sci...
During traumatic periods and their aftermath, our brains can fall into habitual ways of thinking that may be helpful in the short run but bec...
For decades, the best drug therapies for treating depression, like SSRIs, have been based on the idea that depressed brains don’t have enough...
If superconductors — materials that conduct electricity without any resistance — worked at temperatures and pressures close to what we would...
Milk is more than just a food for babies. Breast milk has evolved to deliver thousands of diverse molecules including growth factors, hormone...
Nothing escapes a black hole… or does it? In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking described a subtle process by which black holes can “evaporate,” with...
Birds flock. Locusts swarm. Fish school. In these chaotic assemblies, order somehow emerges. Collective behaviors differ in their details fro...
Quantum teleportation isn’t just science fiction; it’s entirely real and happening in laboratories today. But teleporting quantum particles a...
Time seems linear to us: We remember the past, experience the present and predict the future, moving consecutively from one moment to the nex...
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 hel...
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...
Even empty space bubbles with energy, according to quantum mechanics — and that fact affects almost every facet of physical reality. The theo...
