Hidden Brain
Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam
Science
The Joy of Why
by Steven Strogatz, Janna Levin and Quanta Magazine
Today: #87 in Science on our combined chart.
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Ranking history
History builds daily. We started tracking this show on the Science chart recently, so the trend line appears after a second day of data.
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| Date | Apple Podcasts |
|---|---|
| Oct 1 | #61 |
About the show
“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.”
Latest episodes
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Live from ICM 2026: What Is Math For in the Age of AI?
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Are We Thinking Correctly about AI Intelligence?
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How Fast Is the Universe Really Expanding?
July 23, 2026 · 1 hr 5 minOne of the biggest mysteries in cosmology seems to keep getting bigger. Astronomers have known since the 1930s that the universe is expanding, but in the 1990s, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating rather than slowing down…
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Will We Ever Find Alien Civilizations?
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What Is the Positive Grassmannian and Why Does It Show Up Everywhere?
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What’s the Future of Gene Editing?
June 11, 2026 · 51 minOne of the most surprising and remarkable discoveries in recent scientific history has been CRISPR. Short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, CRISPR is a form of immune system that evolved in bacteria more than a…