The Joy of Why
Episodes
What Is the Positive Grassmannian and Why Does It Show Up Everywhere?
25 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What links certain mathematical models of traffic flow, shallow-water waves, and quantum particle scattering? The surprising answer lies in a corner o...
What’s the Future of Gene Editing?
11 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most surprising and remarkable discoveries in recent scientific history has been CRISPR. Short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Pa...
More Conversations, Complex Questions, and Bold Ideas in Season Five of ‘The Joy of Why’
04 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What is the future of gene editing with CRISPR? Has AI changed mathematics forever? Will we find other civilizations in the universe? What if we’ve ...
Do Beautiful Birds Have an Evolutionary Advantage?
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Birds are not merely descendants of dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs. For Yale evolutionary biologist and ornithologist Richard Prum, birds have been ...
How Can Math Protect Our Data?
07 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 form o...
Why Did The Universe Begin?
24 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Most cosmologists agree that our universe had a beginning. But the finer details about the Big Bang remain a mystery. A history of everything would ex...
How Can Regional Models Advance Climate Science?
10 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Climate models have changed the way we view the world. While effective, these models are imperfect, and scientists are constantly looking at ways to i...
How Does Graph Theory Shape Our World?
26 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Born in the 18th century when Leonhard Euler solved the puzzle of the seven bridges of Königsberg, graph theory has become a foundational tool in mat...
Does Form Really Shape Function?
12 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What links a Möbius strip, brain folds and termite mounds? The answer is Harvard University’s L. Mahadevan, whose career has been devoted to using ...
Will We Ever Prove String Theory?
29 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, string theory has been hailed as the leading candidate for the theory of everything in our universe. Yet despite its mathematical eleganc...
How Did Geometry Create Modern Physics?
15 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Geometry is one of the oldest disciplines in human history, yet the worlds it can describe extend far beyond its original use. What began thousands of...
Will AI Ever Understand Language Like Humans?
01 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly more impressive at creating human-like text and answering questions, but whether they can under...
Can Quantum Gravity Be Created in the Lab?
17 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Quantum gravity is one of the biggest unresolved and challenging problems in physics, as it seeks to reconcile quantum mechanics, which governs the mi...
What Is the True Promise of Quantum Computing?
03 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Quantum computing promises unprecedented speed, but in practice, it’s proven remarkably difficult to find important questions that quantum machines ...
How Did Multicellular Life Evolve?
20 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At first, life on Earth was simple. Cells existed, functioned and reproduced as free-living individuals. But then, something remarkable happened. Some...
S4 Preview: More Big Questions and No Sasquatches
13 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How did complex life evolve? Where did space-time come from? Will computers ever understand language like we do? How did geometry create modern physic...
How Will We Know We’re Not Alone?
19 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We have identified thousands of planets just in our neighborhood in the Milky Way, mostly from the way they impact their host stars. Basic calculation...
How Is Cell Death Essential to Life?
05 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 closer, to ...
What Can Birdsong Teach Us About Human Language?
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It’s fair to say that enjoyment of a podcast would be severely limited without the human capacity to create and understand speech. That capacity has...
How Is AI Changing the Science of Prediction?
07 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Scientists routinely build quantitative models — of, say, the weather or an epidemic — and then use them to make predictions, which they can then ...
Why Is It So Hard to Define a Species?
24 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The “species” category is almost certainly the best known of all the taxonomic classifications that biologists use to organize life’s vast diver...
How Can Math Help Beat Cancer?
10 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When we think about medicine’s war on cancer, treatments such as surgery, radiation and chemotherapy spring to mind first. Now there is another pote...
What Can Cave Life Tell Us About Alien Ecosystems?
26 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If instruments do someday detect evidence of life beyond Earth, whether it’s in this solar system or in the farther reaches of space, astrobiologist...
From Sidedoor — Cosmic Journey I: "Stellar Buffoonery"
19 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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. Subscribe t...
Can Thermodynamics Go Quantum?
12 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The principles of thermodynamics are cornerstones of our understanding of physics. But they were discovered in the era of steam-driven technology, lon...
Do We Need a New Theory of Gravity?
29 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Observations of the cosmos suggest that unseen sources of gravity — dark matter — tug at the stars in galaxies, while another mysterious force —...
Are Robots About to Level Up?
15 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Within just a few years, artificial intelligence systems that sometimes seem to display almost human characteristics have gone from science fiction to...
How Does Math Keep Our Secrets?
01 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Can you keep a secret? Modern techniques for maintaining the confidentiality of information are based on mathematical problems that are inherently too...
Will AI Ever Have Common Sense?
18 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Common sense rules our world. This fundamental, sometimes trivial knowledge is inherent to how humans interpret language. Yet, some of these simple hu...
What Can Tiling Patterns Teach Us?
03 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the tiling of wallpaper and bathroom floors, collective repeated patterns often emerge. Mathematicians have long tried to find a tiling shape that ...
How Is Science Even Possible?
20 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The universe seems like it should be unfathomably complex. How then is science able to crack fundamental questions about nature and life? Scientists a...
Can Psychedelics Improve Mental Health?
06 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
During traumatic periods and their aftermath, our brains can fall into habitual ways of thinking that may be helpful in the short run but become malad...
What Happens in the Brain to Cause Depression?
23 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, the best drug therapies for treating depression, like SSRIs, have been based on the idea that depressed brains don’t have enough of the...
Will Better Superconductors Transform the World?
09 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If superconductors — materials that conduct electricity without any resistance — worked at temperatures and pressures close to what we would consi...
What Does Milk Do for Babies?
25 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Milk is more than just a food for babies. Breast milk has evolved to deliver thousands of diverse molecules including growth factors, hormones and ant...
Can Information Escape a Black Hole?
11 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Nothing escapes a black hole… or does it? In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking described a subtle process by which black holes can “evaporate,” with so...
How Is Flocking Like Computing?
28 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Birds flock. Locusts swarm. Fish school. In these chaotic assemblies, order somehow emerges. Collective behaviors differ in their details from one spe...
What Is Quantum Teleportation?
14 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Quantum teleportation isn’t just science fiction; it’s entirely real and happening in laboratories today. But teleporting quantum particles and in...
What Is the Nature of Time?
29 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Time seems linear to us: We remember the past, experience the present and predict the future, moving consecutively from one moment to the next. But wh...
How Did Altruism Evolve?
15 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 help others ...
What Makes for ‘Good’ Math?
01 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 is “goo...
S4 Preview: More Big Questions and No Sasquatches
25 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How did complex life evolve? Where did space-time come from? Will computers ever understand language like we do? How did geometry create modern physic...
Trailer: The Joy of Why Season 3
25 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Tune in to the new season of ‘The Joy of Why,’ a podcast from Quanta Magazine and PRX. This season, new co-host cosmologist Janna Levin and mathem...
Does Nothingness Exist?
26 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Even empty space bubbles with energy, according to quantum mechanics — and that fact affects almost every facet of physical reality. The theoretical...
Can Math and Physics Save an Arrhythmic Heart?
12 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 cardiac dyn...
What Can Jellyfish Teach Us About Fluid Dynamics?
28 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Jellyfish and other aquatic creatures embody solutions to diverse problems in engineering, medicine and mathematics. John Dabiri, a fluid dynamics exp...
What Causes Giant Rogue Waves?
14 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Wave-science researcher Ton van den Bremer and Steven Strogatz discuss how rogue waves can form in relatively calm seas and whether their threat can b...
What Is the Nature of Consciousness?
31 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Consciousness, our experience of being in the world, is one of the mind’s greatest mysteries, but as the neuroscientist Anil Seth explains to Steven...
Are There Reasons to Believe in a Multiverse?
17 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Several areas of physics suggest reasons to think that unobservable universes with different natural laws could lie beyond ours. The theoretical physi...
Is Perpetual Motion Possible at the Quantum Level?
04 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A new phase of matter called a “time crystal” plays with our expectations of thermodynamics. The physicist Vedika Khemani talks with Steven Stroga...
How Can Some Infinities Be Bigger Than Others?
19 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
All infinities go on forever, so how is it possible for some infinities to be larger than others? The mathematician Justin Moore discusses the mysteri...
What Has the Pandemic Taught Us About Vaccines?
05 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 vaccine re...
Is There Math Beyond the Equal Sign?
22 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Can mathematics handle things that are essentially the same without being exactly equal? Category theorist Eugenia Cheng and host Steven Strogatz disc...
Can We Program Our Cells?
08 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
By genetically instructing cells to perform tasks that they wouldn't in nature, synthetic biologists can learn deep secrets about how life works. Stev...
How Will the Universe End?
22 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"The Joy of Why" is a podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge from Quanta Magazine. The acclaimed mathematician and author Steven Strogat...
The Joy of Asking About Infinity, Jellyfish and the End of the Universe
09 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 brillia...
Why and How Do We Dream?
24 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dreams are subjective and fleeting, but laboratories have developed ways of getting into the minds of people while they are dreaming. In this episode,...
What Is Quantum Field Theory and Why Is It Incomplete?
10 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Quantum field theory may be the most successful scientific theory of all time, but there's reason to think it's missing something. Steven Strogatz spe...
Why Do We Get Old, and Can Aging Be Reversed?
27 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Everybody gets older, but not everyone ages in the same way. In this episode, Steven Strogatz speaks with Judith Campisi and Dena Dubal, two biomedica...
How Do Mathematicians Know Their Proofs Are Correct?
13 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Just as scientists test hypotheses, mathematicians prove or disprove conjectures. But what makes a proof stronger than a guess? What does evidence loo...
Can Computers Be Mathematicians?
29 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Artificial intelligence has bested humans at problem-solving tasks including games like chess and Go. Is mathematics research next? Steven Strogatz sp...
What Is Life?
15 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Without a good definition of life, how do we look for it on alien planets? Steven Strogatz speaks with Robert Hazen, a mineralogist and astrobiologist...
How Could Life Evolve From Cyanide?
01 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 around us. St...
Will the James Webb Space Telescope Reveal Another Earth?
18 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
With the December 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, one of the most expensive and ambitious scientific initiatives ever attempted commenc...
Where Do Space, Time and Gravity Come From?
04 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Einstein's description of gravity as a curvature in space-time doesn't easily mesh with a universe made up of quantum wavefunctions. Theoretical physi...
Why Is Inflammation a Dangerous Necessity?
20 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 coronavirus. And...
Untangling Why Knots Are Important
06 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Everyone knows what a knot is. But they have special significance in math and science because their properties can help unlock hidden secrets like the...
Why Do We Die Without Sleep?
23 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Why do we need sleep? In the search for answers, scientists have uncovered more thought-provoking mysteries central to what sleep is, how it evolved a...
Trailer: The Joy of Why
17 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
An introduction to the new Quanta Magazine podcast The Joy of Why, in which noted mathematician and author Steven Strogatz talks with experts about so...