“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 transcribedEverybody gets older, but not everyone ages in the same way. In this episode, Steven Strogatz speaks with Judith Campisi and Dena Dubal, two...
Just as scientists test hypotheses, mathematicians prove or disprove conjectures. But what makes a proof stronger than a guess? What does evi...
Artificial intelligence has bested humans at problem-solving tasks including games like chess and Go. Is mathematics research next? Steven St...
Without a good definition of life, how do we look for it on alien planets? Steven Strogatz speaks with Robert Hazen, a mineralogist and astro...
How did life arise on Earth? It's one of the greatest and most ancient mysteries in all of science - and the clues to solving it are all arou...
With the December 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, one of the most expensive and ambitious scientific initiatives ever attempte...
Einstein's description of gravity as a curvature in space-time doesn't easily mesh with a universe made up of quantum wavefunctions. Theoreti...
We've heard a lot about the immune system during the COVID-19 pandemic, but of course our immune system fights off much more than the coronav...
Everyone knows what a knot is. But they have special significance in math and science because their properties can help unlock hidden secrets...
Why do we need sleep? In the search for answers, scientists have uncovered more thought-provoking mysteries central to what sleep is, how it...
