“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 transcribedBirds 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...
Abnormal waves of electrical activity can cause a heart’s muscle cells to beat out of sync. In this episode, Flavio Fenton, an expert in card...
Jellyfish and other aquatic creatures embody solutions to diverse problems in engineering, medicine and mathematics. John Dabiri, a fluid dyn...
Wave-science researcher Ton van den Bremer and Steven Strogatz discuss how rogue waves can form in relatively calm seas and whether their thr...
Consciousness, our experience of being in the world, is one of the mind’s greatest mysteries, but as the neuroscientist Anil Seth explains to...
Several areas of physics suggest reasons to think that unobservable universes with different natural laws could lie beyond ours. The theoreti...
A new phase of matter called a “time crystal” plays with our expectations of thermodynamics. The physicist Vedika Khemani talks with Steven S...
All infinities go on forever, so how is it possible for some infinities to be larger than others? The mathematician Justin Moore discusses th...
Should Covid-19 vaccines be judged by how well they prevent disease or how well they prevent death? Anna Durbin, a public health expert and v...
Can mathematics handle things that are essentially the same without being exactly equal? Category theorist Eugenia Cheng and host Steven Stro...
By genetically instructing cells to perform tasks that they wouldn't in nature, synthetic biologists can learn deep secrets about how life wo...
"The Joy of Why" is a podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge from Quanta Magazine. The acclaimed mathematician and author Steve...
As The Joy of Why podcast returns for a second season, producer Polly Stryker and host Steven Strogatz invite listeners to join them and thei...
Dreams are subjective and fleeting, but laboratories have developed ways of getting into the minds of people while they are dreaming. In this...
Quantum field theory may be the most successful scientific theory of all time, but there's reason to think it's missing something. Steven Str...
