First Principles
Where it charts
Today’s combined position on our country charts.
Ranking history
View as table
| Date | Combined Rank | Apple Podcasts | Castbox |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 10 | #108 | #93 | #92 |
About the show
Latest episodes
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EP79 - The Impossible Physics of the Heat Pump
October 8, 2026 · 20 minWhen you turn up the thermostat on a freezing winter morning, you expect your heating system to spark a flame or fire up a glowing coil to create warmth. But what if the machine keeping your house cozy is not making any heat at all? In…
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EP78 - E-Ink and the Secret Physics of the Screen That Remembers
October 5, 2026 · 25 minYou take it to the bright, sun-drenched beach, leave it on a table for weeks, and the words never fade. E-Ink feels like ordinary paper infused with digital magic, defying the battery-draining rules of every other screen we own. But what…
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EP77 - Maglev and the Impossible Physics of Racing Without Wheels
October 2, 2026 · 16 minYou are sitting in a train carriage, sipping a perfectly still cup of coffee while the landscape outside blurs past at nearly four hundred miles per hour. It feels like the ultimate high speed rail experience, but the truth is your vehicle…
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EP76 - The Geometry of Gravity: How 3D Printing Builds the Future One Slice at a Time
September 29, 2026 · 19 minWe live in a world where you can click print on a computer and watch a physical, three dimensional object materialize before your eyes. It feels like pure science fiction magic, conjuring matter out of thin air. But what are the hidden…
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EP75 - The Chip That Feels You: Inside MEMS Motion Sensors
September 26, 2026 · 31 minDescend a spiral parking ramp with every satellite out of sight and your map still traces every curve, as if something above were watching. Nothing is, because a speck of vibrating silicon has been feeling your motion the whole way down…
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EP74 - Starlink: Ten Thousand Tiny Routers Stitched Across the Sky
September 26, 2026 · 31 minMidway across an ocean, miles from any tower or cable, passengers now join video calls as if the whole sky had gone online overnight. It looks impossible, internet delivered by machines falling permanently around the Earth. This episode…
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EP73 - Direct Air Capture: Wringing Carbon From the Endless Sky
September 20, 2026 · 24 minOn a black volcanic field in Iceland, rows of fan-walled machines inhale ordinary air and hand the carbon they extract to the ground, which turns it to stone. It sounds like science fiction, or like an impossible way to clean something as…
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EP72 - Federated Learning: Teaching Machines Without Showing Your Secrets
September 17, 2026 · 25 minYour phone's keyboard has learned your slang, your nicknames, the strange words only your group chat uses, which means some machine somewhere studied your most private typing. Except it didn't have to. We crack open federated learning, the…