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 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.”
Episodes
Mentioned books
22 snips
Oct 29, 2026 • 60min
How Do You Take a Picture of a Black Hole?
Shep Doeleman, a Harvard astrophysicist and founder of the Event Horizon Telescope, explains how 250 researchers turned Earth into a telescope powerful enough to image a black hole’s shadow. He explores the clocks, telescopes and global coordination behind the breakthrough, why M87 came first, and how future observations could become movies revealing black hole spin, magnetic fields and more.
22 snips
Oct 15, 2026 • 57min
How Do Fungi Keep the Planet Healthy?
Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist and MacArthur Fellow, explores the hidden alliances beneath our feet. She reveals how plants and fungi trade resources, stabilize soil, store carbon and negotiate without brains. Discover fungi’s surprising strategic behavior, the technology tracking their underground exchanges, and how their tangled networks challenge our ideas about individuality, cooperation and life itself.
55 snips
Oct 1, 2026 • 53min
What Does the Fourth Dimension Actually Look Like?
Maggie Miller, a mathematician at the University of Texas at Austin, explores the strange world of four-dimensional topology. She discusses knots that can untangle, spheres that can become permanently knotted, and why 4D remains mathematically mysterious. Miller also explains how topology, art, and snapshots of 3D slices help us picture higher-dimensional spaces.
52 snips
Sep 17, 2026 • 47min
Where Does the Quantum World End and Ours Begin?
Jonathan Halliwell, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London, explores where the quantum world gives way to everyday reality. He discusses decoherence, quantum cosmology, and why consciousness is not needed for classical behavior. The conversation tackles macroscopic realism, contextuality, Leggett-Garg tests, Einstein’s moon, and how meditation can help us live with scientific mystery.
Sep 3, 2026 • 53min
Live from ICM 2026: What Is Math For in the Age of AI?
Alex Kontorovich, a Rutgers number theorist, Ravi Vakil, Stanford algebraic geometer and American Mathematical Society president, and Fields Medalist Akshay Venkatesh explore AI’s growing role in mathematics. They discuss AI-generated proofs, unexpected counterexamples, mathematical storytelling, education, access, careers, and whether human creativity, beauty and understanding can endure when machines solve harder problems.
88 snips
Aug 20, 2026 • 52min
Are We Thinking Correctly about AI Intelligence?
Melanie Mitchell, cognitive and computer scientist at the Santa Fe Institute, explores AI as an alien form of intelligence. She discusses whether LLMs truly reason or just mimic reasoning. Short segments cover AI and mathematical creativity, six principles for testing machine cognition, and the Clever Hans caution about misleading signals.
45 snips
Aug 6, 2026 • 55min
How Does Touch Lead To Pain Or Pleasure?
Ishmail Abdus-Saboor, a neuroscientist at Columbia studying the skin–brain axis, touch, and pain. He talks about how researchers measure pain and pleasure without objective biomarkers. He explains molecular sensors like PIEZO and TRPV1, behavioral pain scales in rodents, the ethics of animal work, social and soothing touch pathways, and why naked mole rats are a surprising model.
44 snips
Jul 23, 2026 • 1h 5min
How Fast Is the Universe Really Expanding?
Adam Riess, Nobel-winning astronomer and expert on cosmic distance measurements. He walks through supernovae as cosmic lighthouses and the distance ladder. He lays out the rising Hubble tension between local and early-universe measures. He previews new telescopes and why this growing mystery is both maddening and exhilarating.
35 snips
Jul 9, 2026 • 54min
Will We Ever Find Alien Civilizations?
David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia who studies exoplanets and exomoons, explains why moons might hide habitable worlds. He discusses statistical frameworks for assessing habitability, surprising diversity from Kepler, the limits of biosignatures and SETI, and a birth-death model for civilizations. He stays hopeful but rigorously agnostic about detecting extraterrestrial life.
29 snips
Jun 25, 2026 • 52min
What Is the Positive Grassmannian and Why Does It Show Up Everywhere?
Lauren Williams, a Harvard mathematician and MacArthur Fellow known for work in algebraic combinatorics and the positive Grassmannian. She explains what the positive Grassmannian is and why its pieces reappear in traffic flow, wave models, and particle scattering. She also discusses a project testing AI on research-level proofs and what that might mean for the future of mathematical discovery.
