The Joy of Why - The Joy of Asking About Infinity, Jellyfish and the End of the Universe

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

As The Joy of Why podcast returns for a second season, producer Polly Stryker and host Steven Strogatz invite listeners to join them and their brilliant new guests on another voyage of discovery.

Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage trailer for our brand new series. We've got mummies, we've got magic, we've got asteroids. Mummies, magic and asteroids. What's the link? That it was an asteroid that magically went over the world that led to Imhotep the mummy coming back to life? That's correct. I thought it would be weird, scientific as ever. But the most important thing to know is that we are going to deal with the biggest scientific question we finally ask.

What is better, cats or dogs? Listen wherever you get your podcasts. I don't know about you, but part of me is still a kid always asking people lots of questions. Like, are there states of matter that keep jiggling back and forth over and over again in time indefinitely. And the time crystal then comes in and does beep bop, beep bop, beep bop. And what if we could program our cells to hunt for cancer? But here you instead put in a new receptor that you've designed that takes that awesome power that the T cells have to kill and targets it directly at the tumor cells.

I'm Steve Strogatz. Welcome to Season 2 of The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quantum Magazine that explores some of the biggest questions in math and science today. How do vaccines, like ones made from messenger RNA, fool our body's defenses at the molecular level. Think of it as a Morse code. And when your body sees that Morse code, it translates it into protein, and it translates it into the spike protein. And can mathematics help us categorize things better in context

to try to make more sense of the world? Ordinary numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, because they go on forever. They get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger forever. Whereas numbers on a clock go round and round in circles. And that's really important, because if we didn't go round in circles, we'd be stuck saying things like, oh, I'll meet you at 1,233,000,000 o'clock.

Speaking of the world, have you ever wondered how it all might end? I mean, the sun will at some point become so bright that it'll boil off the oceans of the Earth, and that'll only take about a billion years. It's good to know at least we have a little bit of time. I'm a mathematician, but you don't have to be a scientist or mathematician to wonder why. That's the point.

The joy is in asking and trying to understand. What are time crystals? Do we live in a multiverse? How big is infinity? What can jellyfish teach us about fluid dynamics? Join me on The Joy of Why as we explore these questions and more. We may not have all the answers yet, but I'm pretty sure the curiosity to find them is in our DNA. Subscribe to Season 2 of The Joy of Why wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every other Thursday starting February 23rd.