The Quanta Podcast
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The Quanta Podcast
Exploring the distant universe, the insides of cells, the abstractions of math, the complexity of information itself, and much more, The Quanta Podcast is a tour of the frontier between the known and the unknown. In each episode, Quanta Magazine Editor-in-Chief Samir Patel speaks with the minds behi...
Episodis Recents
325 episodis
The Infinite Heist - Part 2
In 1874, Georg Cantor published one of the most important papers in math’s 4,000-year history. Some ideas in it were stolen. On this episode of The Qu...
Audio Edition: The Ecosystem Dynamics That Can Make or Break an Invasion
By simulating ecological networks with microbes, researchers revealed properties that may make natural communities susceptible to invasion.
The Infinite Heist - Part 1
In 1874, Georg Cantor published one of the most important papers in math’s 4,000-year history. Some ideas in it were stolen. On this episode of The Qu...
Decoding the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics
Parallel universes, mysterious collapses, divided worlds. These are among the interpretations of quantum theory’s relationship with reality. It’s no w...
Audio Edition: Epic Effort to Ground Physics in Math Opens Up the Secrets of Time
By mathematically proving how individual molecules create the complex motion of fluids, three mathematicians have illuminated why time can’t flow in r...
How Animals Build a Sense of Direction
What guides a bat’s internal compass? It’s not the stars in the sky, or the Earth’s magnetic field. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir...
Mathematicians Want To Make Fluid Equations Glitch Out
In reality, water doesn’t glitch out. It can’t instantly change direction or spurt randomly into the sky. But on a purely mathematical level, such thi...
Audio Edition: Matter vs. Force: Why There Are Exactly Two Types of Particles
Every elementary particle falls into one of two categories. Collectivist bosons account for the forces that move us while individualist fermions keep...
Do AI Models Agree On How They Encode Reality?
In the allegory of Plato’s cave, prisoners see the world only through shadows. Extending this metaphor to AI, AI models are the prisoners and the shad...
Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard?
Particle physics hasn't yet found the new physics needed to resolve its deepest mysteries. It’s hard to know what to think about or look for. But the...
Audio Edition: How Can AI Researchers Save Energy? By Going Backward.
Reversible programs run backward as easily as they run forward, saving energy in theory. After decades of research, they may soon power AI.
The...
Does Dad's Fitness Make Its Way Into Sperm?
We already know that what we eat, drink, and inhale can affect which parts of our DNA are expressed, and which aren’t. But recent research poses a sho...
The Shape That Can’t Pass Through Itself
Imagine you’re holding two equal-size dice. Is it possible to bore a tunnel through one die that’s big enough for the other to slide through? It is —...
Audio Edition: How Much Energy Does It Take To Think?
Studies of neural metabolism reveal our brain’s effort to keep us alive and the evolutionary constraints that sculpted our most complex organ.
T...
AI Filters Will Always Have Holes
Ask ChatGPT how to build a bomb, and it will flatly respond that it “can’t help with that.” But users have long played a cat-and-mouse game to try to...
ICYMI: Birds' Migratory Mitochondria
(This episode was first published in June 2025.)
Changes in the number, shape, efficiency and interconnectedness of organelles in the cells of f...
ICYMI: Is Gravity Just Rising Entropy?
(This episode was first published in July 2025.)
Where does gravity come from? In both general relativity and quantum mechanics, this question...
Audio Edition: The Core of Fermat’s Last Theorem Just Got Superpowered
By extending the scope of the key insight behind Fermat’s Last Theorem, four mathematicians have made great strides toward building a “grand unified t...
Taking the Temperature of Quantum Entanglement
We all know that hot coffee cools down. But quantum mechanics can enable heat to flow the “wrong” way, making hot objects hotter and cold objects cold...
A Simple Way To Measure Knots Has Come Unraveled
In math and science, knots do far more than keep shoes on feet. For more than a century, mathematicians have studied the properties of different knots...
Audio Edition: How a Problem About Pigeons Powers Complexity Theory
When pigeons outnumber pigeonholes, some birds must double up. This obvious statement — and its inverse — have deep connections to many areas of math...
What Happens When Lakes Stop Mixing
Every summer since 1983, scientists at Crater Lake National Park have gathered data about the lake’s famous clarity. This past summer, Quanta contribu...
Game Theory, Algorithms and High Prices
How do sellers decide how to price their goods? Competition should keep prices down, while collusion can rig higher prices (and break the law). On thi...
Why Are Waves So Hard to Grasp? TKTKTKTKT - audio coda
At first glance, studying the math of waves seems like it should be smooth sailing. But the equations that describe even the gentlest rolling waves ar...
Sleep Is Not All or Nothing
Salvador Dalí, Thomas Edison and Edgar Allan Poe all took inspiration from the state between sleep and waking life. On this week’s episode, host Samir...
Audio Edition: A New Proof Smooths Out the Math of Melting
A powerful mathematical technique is used to model melting ice and other phenomena. But it has long been imperiled by certain “nightmare scenarios.” A...
The Mystery of Early Universe’s Little Red Dots
Recently, astrophysicists identified something peculiar: An enormous “naked” black hole with no galaxy in sight. On this week’s episode, host Samir Pa...
A Biography of Earth Across the Age of Animals
Thanks to a delicate interplay between plate tectonics and life, Earth’s thermostat has kept animal life thriving on our planet for half a billion yea...
Audio Edition: ‘Paraparticles’ Would Be a Third Kingdom of Quantum Particle
A new proposal makes the case that paraparticles — a new category of quantum particle — could be created in exotic materials.
The story ‘Parapar...
What We Learn From Running ‘Life’ in Reverse
Imagine a set of simple building blocks that can self-assemble into any shape you want. The possibilities for such a technology could be boundless. In...
The Math of Catastrophe
Around 6,000 years ago, the Sahara was a lush grassland. Then, as if a switch flipped, it began to dry out, becoming the desert that we know today. Ti...
Audio Edition: Quantum Speedup Found for Huge Class of Hard Problems
It’s been difficult to find important questions that quantum computers can answer faster than classical machines, but a new algorithm appears to do it...
What Can a Cell Remember?
“Memory” means many things to many people, and in many fields. We tend to understand memory to be a phenomenon that happens primarily in the brain, bu...
Climate Modeling Is at a Crossroads
The climate is changing. So is the way we understand the climate. On this week's episode, contributing writer Zack Savitsky joins host Samir Patel to...
Audio Edition: A New, Chemical View of Ecosystems
Rare and powerful compounds, known as keystone molecules, can build a web of invisible interactions among species.
The story A New, Chemical Vie...
AI's Dark Side Is Only a Nudge Away
In order to trust machines with important jobs, we need a high level of confidence that they share our values and goals. Recent work shows that this “...
How We Came To Know Earth
For most of us, the word “climate” immediately generates thoughts of melting ice, rising seas, wildfires and gathering storms. However, in the course...
Audio Edition: ‘Once in a Century’ Proof Settles Math’s Kakeya Conjecture
The deceptively simple Kakeya conjecture has bedeviled mathematicians for 50 years. A new proof of the conjecture in three dimensions illuminates a wh...
How a 17-Year-Old Solved a Major Math Mystery
In the field of harmonic analysis, there’s a constellation of questions about how the energy of a wave concentrates.
Earlier this year, a 17-yea...
Earth’s Core Appears To Be Leaking Up and Out of Earth’s Surface
In science textbooks, Earth looks like a round layer cake. There's a hard line between the liquid metal core and the putty-like rock mantle. But maybe...