“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.”
50 episodes transcribedWe have identified thousands of planets just in our neighborhood in the Milky Way, mostly from the way they impact their host stars. Basic ca...
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 cl...
It’s fair to say that enjoyment of a podcast would be severely limited without the human capacity to create and understand speech. That capac...
Scientists routinely build quantitative models — of, say, the weather or an epidemic — and then use them to make predictions, which they can...
The “species” category is almost certainly the best known of all the taxonomic classifications that biologists use to organize life’s vast di...
When we think about medicine’s war on cancer, treatments such as surgery, radiation and chemotherapy spring to mind first. Now there is anoth...
If 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...
