Science

The Joy of Why

by Steven Strogatz, Janna Levin and Quanta Magazine

Life SciencesScience

Today: #124 in Science, New Zealand on our combined chart.

Share this ranking Is this your show? Claim it

Listen on Apple Podcasts Spotify Pocket Casts Website RSS feed

Chart positions today · New Zealand

Science

#124

#124 Pulse 10

If you like The Joy of Why, try…

The Quanta Podcast

Shared creator or host credits

Flow Radio

Also in Life Sciences

Clinical Pharmacology Podcast with Nathan Teuscher

Also in Life Sciences

Inside Neuroscience

Also in Life Sciences

The Beyond Tomorrow Podcast with Julian Issa

Also in Life Sciences

Diagnosing Dx

Also in Life Sciences

Ranking history · New Zealand

Science Trending · History only

Latest daily rankings: Oct 21. New rankings will appear after the next update.

Position on the Science, New Zealand combined chart over the last 7 days. Toggle platforms to compare their positions. Lower rank numbers are better.

View as table

Date	Combined Rank	Apple Podcasts	Pocket Casts	Castbox
Oct 21	#124	#124	—	—
Oct 20	#98	#98	—	#84
Oct 19	#73	#73	—	#72
Oct 18	#48	#50	#39	#38
Oct 17	#30	#28	—	—
Oct 16	#119	#119	—	—

Latest episodes

How Do Fungi Keep the Planet Healthy?

October 15, 2026 · 57 min

People may think of soil as just dirt, but it is anything but inert. Beneath your feet, a vast network of mycorrhizal fungi is hard at work, trading minerals with plant roots. This trading system helps enrich the soil, and it sequesters 13…
What Does the Fourth Dimension Actually Look Like?

October 1, 2026 · 53 min

We know all about how things exist in the three dimensions of length, width, and height. Physicists often talk about time as a fourth dimension, but what if there were a fourth spatial dimension — another direction entirely? How on earth…
Where Does the Quantum World End and Ours Begin?

September 17, 2026 · 47 min

Quantum mechanics may be one of the most precisely tested paradigms in science, but there’s still no universally accepted interpretation of what it tells us about reality. How do we get from the wave-like behavior of quantum systems to the…
Live from ICM 2026: What Is Math For in the Age of AI?

September 3, 2026 · 53 min

Mathematicians are witnessing a profound shift in their field. AI systems are now producing proofs, spotting connections between distant fields, and, in a few cases, solving problems that had stumped mathematicians for decades. The pace of…
Are We Thinking Correctly about AI Intelligence?

August 20, 2026 · 52 min

When an LLM answers a question, is it reasoning like humans, or just producing text that looks like reasoning? The distinction isn’t just philosophical, this determines what we can trust AI to do, how closely we need to supervise it, and…

Show 7 more episodesShow fewer episodes

How Does Touch Lead To Pain Or Pleasure?

August 6, 2026 · 55 min

Pain and pleasure seem like simple facts of life, but they are far from it. Neuroscientists still cannot say why physical pain differs from psychological pain, for instance, nor why a loved one’s touch soothes while a stranger’s touch…
How Fast Is the Universe Really Expanding?

July 23, 2026 · 1 hr 5 min

One 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…
Will We Ever Find Alien Civilizations?

July 9, 2026 · 54 min

Does intelligent life exist elsewhere in the universe? The question has captivated us for centuries, but despite decades of searching it remains frustratingly unanswered. Every so often a curious signal appears — fossilized structures in a…
What Is the Positive Grassmannian and Why Does It Show Up Everywhere?

June 25, 2026 · 52 min

What links certain mathematical models of traffic flow, shallow-water waves, and quantum particle scattering? The surprising answer lies in a corner of the algebraic combinatorics world that goes by the name of positive Grassmannian. In…
What’s the Future of Gene Editing?

June 11, 2026 · 51 min

One 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…
More Conversations, Complex Questions, and Bold Ideas in Season Five of ‘The Joy of Why’

June 4, 2026 · 1 min

What is the future of gene editing with CRISPR? Has AI changed mathematics forever? Will we find other civilizations in the universe? What if we’ve been wrong about dark energy all along? These are just a few of the big, bold questions…
Do Beautiful Birds Have an Evolutionary Advantage?

August 21, 2025 · 46 min

Birds are not merely descendants of dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs. For Yale evolutionary biologist and ornithologist Richard Prum, birds have been a lifelong passion and a window into some of evolution’s most intriguing mysteries.In a…

Full episode archive on Apple Podcasts →

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.”