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PODCAST

The Joy of Why

Steven Strogatz, Janna Levin and Quanta Magazine

“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

science life sciences

All Episodes

46:06

Do Beautiful Birds Have an Evolutionary Advantage?

The Joy of Why ·

2025/08/21

Birds are not merely descendants of dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs. For Yale evolutionary biologist and ornithologist Richard Prum, birds have been a lifelong passion and a window into some of evolution’s most intriguing mysteries.In a wide-ranging conversation with co-host Janna Levin, Prum traces the deep evolutionary origins of feathers, which he argues first emerged not for flight but for insulation, camouflage and display. Their colors — often invisible to the human eye — come into

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39:39

How Can Math Protect Our Data?

The Joy of Why ·

2025/08/07

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 of error-correcting codes. These codes, baked into nearly every digital system, are designed to detect and repair any errors that noise, interference or cosmic rays might inflict.In this episode of The Joy of Why, Stanford computer scientist Mary Wootters joins co-host Steven Strogatz to explain how these codes work, and why they matter more than

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52:08

Why Did The Universe Begin?

The Joy of Why ·

2025/07/24

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 explain all, or so theoretical physicists hoped. In his final years, Stephen Hawking working with Thomas Hertog proposed a striking idea: The laws of physics were not precisely determined before the Big Bang; they evolved as the universe evolved. In this episode of The Joy of Why, Hertog speaks with co-host Janna Levin about his work and

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45:04

How Can Regional Models Advance Climate Science?

The Joy of Why ·

2025/07/10

Climate models have changed the way we view the world. While effective, these models are imperfect, and scientists are constantly looking at ways to improve their accuracy and predictability.MIT professor Elfatih Eltahir has spent decades developing complex models to understand how climate change affects vulnerable regions like the Nile Basin and Singapore. In this episode of The Joy of Why, Eltahir tells co-host Steven Strogatz how growing up near the Nile in Sudan helped him realize that

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34:13

How Does Graph Theory Shape Our World?

The Joy of Why ·

2025/06/26

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 mathematics. It studies relationships through nodes (vertices) and the links (edges) that connect them, transforming the complexity of systems — from friendship networks to airline routes — into elegant abstractions that reveal underlying structure and interaction.Maria Chudnovsky from Princeton University is a leading mathematician in the field

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47:24

Does Form Really Shape Function?

The Joy of Why ·

2025/06/12

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 mathematics and physics to explore the form and function of common phenomena.Mahadevan, or Maha to his friends and colleagues, has long been fascinated by questions one wouldn’t normally ask — from the equilibrium shape of inert objects like a Möbius strip, to the complex factors that drive biological systems like morphogenesis or social insect

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48:39

Will We Ever Prove String Theory?

The Joy of Why ·

2025/05/29

For decades, string theory has been hailed as the leading candidate for the theory of everything in our universe. Yet despite its mathematical elegance, the theory still lacks empirical evidence.One of its most intriguing, yet vexing, implications is that if all matter and forces are composed of vibrations of tiny strands of energy, then this allows for a vast landscape of possible universes with different physical properties, varieties of particles and complex spacetimes. How, then, can we

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46:07

How Did Geometry Create Modern Physics?

The Joy of Why ·

2025/05/15

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 years ago as a way to measure land and build pyramids was given rigor by Euclid in ancient Greece, became applied to curves and surfaces in the 19th century, and eventually helped Einstein understand the universe.Yang-Hui He sees geometry as a unifying language for modern physics, a mutual exchange in which each discipline can influence and

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41:47

Will AI Ever Understand Language Like Humans?

The Joy of Why ·

2025/05/01

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly more impressive at creating human-like text and answering questions, but whether they can understand the meaning of the words they generate is a hotly debated issue. A big challenge is that LLMs are black boxes; they can make predictions and decisions on the order of words, but they cannot communicate the reasons for doing so.Ellie Pavlick at Brown University is building models that could help understand how LLMs process language

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42:33

Can Quantum Gravity Be Created in the Lab?

The Joy of Why ·

2025/04/17

Quantum gravity is one of the biggest unresolved and challenging problems in physics, as it seeks to reconcile quantum mechanics, which governs the microscopic world, and general relativity, which describes the macroscopic world of gravity and space-time. Efforts to understand quantum gravity have been focused almost entirely at the theoretical level, but Monika Schleier-Smith at Stanford University has been exploring a novel experimental approach — trying to create quantum gravity from

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38:47

What Is the True Promise of Quantum Computing?

The Joy of Why ·

2025/04/03

Quantum computing promises unprecedented speed, but in practice, it’s proven remarkably difficult to find important questions that quantum machines can solve faster than classical ones. One of the most notable demonstrations of this came from Ewin Tang who rose to prominence in the field as a teenager. When quantum algorithms had in principle cracked the so-called recommendation problem, Tang designed classical algorithms that could match them.So began the approach of “dequantizing,” in

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46:06

How Did Multicellular Life Evolve?

The Joy of Why ·

2025/03/20

At first, life on Earth was simple. Cells existed, functioned and reproduced as free-living individuals. But then, something remarkable happened. Some cells joined forces, working together instead of being alone. This transition, known as multicellularity, was a pivotal event in the history of life on Earth. Multicellularity enabled greater biological complexity, which sparked an extraordinary diversity of organisms and structures.How life evolved from unicellular to multicellular organisms

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17:55

S4 Preview: More Big Questions and No Sasquatches

The Joy of Why ·

2025/03/13

How did complex life evolve? Where did space-time come from? Will computers ever understand language like we do? How did geometry create modern physics? These are just a few of the big and bold questions that we’ll be exploring in the latest season of Quanta’s interview podcast, “The Joy of Why,” starting March 20, and released every other Thursday.As ever, we will be talking to researchers and exploring the latest thinking on great scientific and mathematical questions of our time. But

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37:55

How Will We Know We’re Not Alone?

The Joy of Why ·

2024/12/19

We have identified thousands of planets just in our neighborhood in the Milky Way, mostly from the way they impact their host stars. Basic calculations suggest that there are countless more across the galaxy, and that billions of them could potentially support life. But what kind of life they host, and how we would be able to detect the presence of those biological processes from Earth, remain big questions in the world of exoplanets and astrobiology. What technologies might lie ahead to

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38:57

How Is Cell Death Essential to Life?

The Joy of Why ·

2024/12/05

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 the cellular level, and death takes on a different, more nuanced meaning. There is a challenge in simply defining what makes an individual cell alive or dead. Scientists today are working to understand the various ways and reasons that cells disappear, and what these processes mean to biological systems. In this episode, cellular biologist

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42:15

What Can Birdsong Teach Us About Human Language?

The Joy of Why ·

2024/11/21

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 often been cited as a defining characteristic of our species, and one that sets us apart in the long history of life on Earth. Yet we know that other species communicate in complex ways. Studies of the neurological foundations of language suggest that birdsong, or communication among bats or elephants, originates with brain structures similar

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37:01

How Is AI Changing the Science of Prediction?

The Joy of Why ·

2024/11/07

Scientists routinely build quantitative models — of, say, the weather or an epidemic — and then use them to make predictions, which they can then test against the real thing. This work can reveal how well we understand complex phenomena, and also dictate where research should go next. In recent years, the remarkable successes of “black box” systems such as large language models suggest that it is sometimes possible to make successful predictions without knowing how something works at

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30:19

Why Is It So Hard to Define a Species?

The Joy of Why ·

2024/10/24

The “species” category is almost certainly the best known of all the taxonomic classifications that biologists use to organize life’s vast diversity. It’s a linchpin of both conservation policy and evolutionary theory, though in practice biologists have struggled to find a definition that works across the natural world. In this episode, Kevin de Queiroz, a zoologist and evolutionary biologist, talks with host Janna Levin about the variety of ways to conceive of a species, and ways to

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42:58

How Can Math Help Beat Cancer?

The Joy of Why ·

2024/10/10

When we think about medicine’s war on cancer, treatments such as surgery, radiation and chemotherapy spring to mind first. Now there is another potential weapon for defeating tumors: statistics and mathematical models that can optimize the selection, combination or timing of treatment. Building and feeding these models requires accounting for the complexity of the body, and recognizing that cancer cells are constantly evolving. In this episode, host Steven Strogatz hears from Franziska

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44:42

What Can Cave Life Tell Us About Alien Ecosystems?

The Joy of Why ·

2024/09/26

If instruments do someday detect evidence of life beyond Earth, whether it’s in this solar system or in the farther reaches of space, astrobiologists want to be ready. One of the best ways to learn how alien life might function can be to study the organisms called extremophiles, which live in incredibly challenging environments on or in the Earth. In this episode, Penelope Boston, a microbiologist who has worked for many years with NASA, speaks with Janna Levin about the bizarre life found

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