About this season
Explore mind-bending developments in basic science and math research. Quanta Magazine is an award-winning, editorially independent magazine published by the Simons Foundation.
Episodes (20)
1. Been Kim: A New Approach to Understanding How Machines Think
Aired 10 January 2019
Google Brain’s Been Kim is building ways to let us interrogate the decisions made by machine learning systems.
2. Carolina Araujo on Supporting Women in Mathematics
Aired 22 January 2019
Carolina Araujo describes the effort to build a network of women mathematicians in Brazil.
3. What Is Turbulence?
Aired 28 January 2020
Physicists use the Navier-Stokes equations to describe fluid flows, taking into account viscosity, velocity, pressure and density. But because of turbulence in fluids, proving that the equations always make sense is one of the hardest problems in physics and mathematics.
4. Priyamvada Natarajan: How Black Holes Shape Galaxies
Aired 4 February 2019
Priyamvada Natarajan explains the role of supermassive black holes in the structure and evolution of the universe.
5. Meenakshi Wadhwa on Meteorites and the Solar System
Aired 11 February 2019
Meenakshi Wadhwa explains how meteorites illuminate the origins of Earth and the rest of the solar system.
6. CRISPR Pioneer Jennifer Doudna on Its Research Promise
Aired 27 February 2019
Jennifer Doudna, one of the coinventors of CRISPR technology, discusses how her work on bacterial defenses against viruses helped lead to a discovery with a revolutionary impact on biological research.
7. Ecologist Jennifer Dunne on Humans’ Place in Food Webs
Aired 21 March 2019
Jennifer Dunne of the Santa Fe Institute explains how reconstructions of food webs in past ecosystems help ecologists understand both the unusual niche of humans and new clues to a more sustainable civilization.
8. Jim Gunn on Building Astronomical Instruments
Aired 23 April 2019
The lauded astronomer Jim Gunn explains how a new spectrograph he is building will advance astronomy.
9. What Is Universality?
Aired 13 May 2019
Quanta’s In Theory video series returns with an exploration of the mysterious mathematical pattern found throughout nature.
10. What Are Feynman Diagrams?
Aired 14 May 2019
The brilliant physicist Richard Feynman devised a system of line drawings that simplified calculations of particle interactions and helped rescue the field of quantum electrodynamics.
11. Edward O. Wilson on the Evolution of Social Behaviors
Aired 15 May 2019
Edward O. Wilson, professor emeritus at Harvard University, is the influential naturalist and evolutionary theorist who introduced the concept of “sociobiology,” as well as one of the world’s leading experts on ants. Here, he explains the relevance of evolved insect behaviors to human nature.
12. Amie Wilkinson on the Mathematics of Change
Aired 13 June 2019
The mathematician Amie Wilkinson explains how dynamics lets mathematicians explore the fundamentals of change.
13. Lee Smolin on the Impossibility of Studying the Universe
Aired 27 June 2019
Lee Smolin explores the problem of understanding the universe from the perspective of being inside the universe, as well as the need for physicists to know philosophy.
14. Greg Johnson on A.I. That Sees Inside Cells
Aired 24 July 2019
Greg Johnson, a computer vision researcher at the Allen Institute for Cell Science, explains how his deep learning vision systems can advance the state of cell biology
15. Carlo Rubbia on the Future of Particle Physics
Aired 7 August 2019
Carlo Rubbia explains why he thinks particle physicists should take the next step by building a “Higgs factory.”
16. Iyad Rahwan: Why We Need a Science of Machine Behavior
Aired 27 August 2019
The behavior of algorithms is so complex and surprising that we need to study them as though they were animals in the wild.
17. Craig Callender on the Trouble With Black Hole Thermodynamics
Aired 5 September 2019
Craig Callender explains why the connection between black holes and thermodynamics is little more than an analogy.
18. Stephanie Wehner Aims to Build a Quantum Internet
Aired 25 September 2019
Wehner discusses the advantages of transmitting qubits rather than bits across a long-distance communication network.
19. Virginia Trimble on How Astronomy Has Changed
Aired 11 November 2019
Virginia Trimble discusses how astronomy has changed over the course of her half-century career.
20. Barbara Liskov on the Future of Computer Science
Aired 20 November 2019
Barbara Liskov addresses the challenges that confront computer science.