“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.”
70 episodes transcribedWhen an LLM answers a question, is it reasoning like humans, or just producing text that looks like reasoning? The distinction isn’t just phi...
Pain and pleasure seem like simple facts of life, but they are far from it. Neuroscientists still cannot say why physical pain differs from p...
One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology seems to keep getting bigger. Astronomers have known since the 1930s that the universe is expanding...
Does intelligent life exist elsewhere in the universe? The question has captivated us for centuries, but despite decades of searching it rema...
What links certain mathematical models of traffic flow, shallow-water waves, and quantum particle scattering? The surprising answer lies in a...
One of the most surprising and remarkable discoveries in recent scientific history has been CRISPR. Short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced...
What is the future of gene editing with CRISPR? Has AI changed mathematics forever? Will we find other civilizations in the universe? What if...
Birds are not merely descendants of dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs. For Yale evolutionary biologist and ornithologist Richard Prum, birds hav...
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 f...
Most cosmologists agree that our universe had a beginning. But the finer details about the Big Bang remain a mystery. A history of everything...
Climate models have changed the way we view the world. While effective, these models are imperfect, and scientists are constantly looking at...
Born in the 18th century when Leonhard Euler solved the puzzle of the seven bridges of Königsberg, graph theory has become a foundational too...
What links a Möbius strip, brain folds and termite mounds? The answer is Harvard University’s L. Mahadevan, whose career has been devoted to...
For decades, string theory has been hailed as the leading candidate for the theory of everything in our universe. Yet despite its mathematica...
Geometry is one of the oldest disciplines in human history, yet the worlds it can describe extend far beyond its original use. What began tho...
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly more impressive at creating human-like text and answering questions, but whether they...
Quantum gravity is one of the biggest unresolved and challenging problems in physics, as it seeks to reconcile quantum mechanics, which gover...
Quantum computing promises unprecedented speed, but in practice, it’s proven remarkably difficult to find important questions that quantum ma...
At first, life on Earth was simple. Cells existed, operated, and reproduced as free-livingindividuals. But at some point, things became more...
How did complex life evolve? Where did space-time come from? Will computers ever understand language like we do? How did geometry create mode...
