Season 2019
20 episodes · 2019
1Been Kim: A New Approach to Understanding How Machines Think
Google Brain’s Been Kim is building ways to let us interrogate the decisions made by machine learning systems.
2Carolina Araujo on Supporting Women in Mathematics
Carolina Araujo describes the effort to build a network of women mathematicians in Brazil.
3What Is Turbulence?
Physicists use the Navier-Stokes equations to describe fluid flows, taking into account viscosity, velocity, pressure and density. But because of turbulence in fluids, proving that the equations always make sense is one of the hardest problems in physics and mathematics.
4Priyamvada Natarajan: How Black Holes Shape Galaxies
Priyamvada Natarajan explains the role of supermassive black holes in the structure and evolution of the universe.
5Meenakshi Wadhwa on Meteorites and the Solar System
Meenakshi Wadhwa explains how meteorites illuminate the origins of Earth and the rest of the solar system.
6CRISPR Pioneer Jennifer Doudna on Its Research Promise
Jennifer Doudna, one of the coinventors of CRISPR technology, discusses how her work on bacterial defenses against viruses helped lead to a discovery with a revolutionary impact on biological research.
7Ecologist Jennifer Dunne on Humans’ Place in Food Webs
Jennifer Dunne of the Santa Fe Institute explains how reconstructions of food webs in past ecosystems help ecologists understand both the unusual niche of humans and new clues to a more sustainable civilization.
8Jim Gunn on Building Astronomical Instruments
The lauded astronomer Jim Gunn explains how a new spectrograph he is building will advance astronomy.
9What Is Universality?
Quanta’s In Theory video series returns with an exploration of the mysterious mathematical pattern found throughout nature.
10What Are Feynman Diagrams?
The brilliant physicist Richard Feynman devised a system of line drawings that simplified calculations of particle interactions and helped rescue the field of quantum electrodynamics.
11Edward O. Wilson on the Evolution of Social Behaviors
Edward O. Wilson, professor emeritus at Harvard University, is the influential naturalist and evolutionary theorist who introduced the concept of “sociobiology,” as well as one of the world’s leading experts on ants. Here, he explains the relevance of evolved insect behaviors to human nature.
12Amie Wilkinson on the Mathematics of Change
The mathematician Amie Wilkinson explains how dynamics lets mathematicians explore the fundamentals of change.
13Lee Smolin on the Impossibility of Studying the Universe
Lee Smolin explores the problem of understanding the universe from the perspective of being inside the universe, as well as the need for physicists to know philosophy.
14Greg Johnson on A.I. That Sees Inside Cells
Greg Johnson, a computer vision researcher at the Allen Institute for Cell Science, explains how his deep learning vision systems can advance the state of cell biology
15Carlo Rubbia on the Future of Particle Physics
Carlo Rubbia explains why he thinks particle physicists should take the next step by building a “Higgs factory.”
16Iyad Rahwan: Why We Need a Science of Machine Behavior
The behavior of algorithms is so complex and surprising that we need to study them as though they were animals in the wild.
17Craig Callender on the Trouble With Black Hole Thermodynamics
Craig Callender explains why the connection between black holes and thermodynamics is little more than an analogy.
18Stephanie Wehner Aims to Build a Quantum Internet
Wehner discusses the advantages of transmitting qubits rather than bits across a long-distance communication network.
19Virginia Trimble on How Astronomy Has Changed
Virginia Trimble discusses how astronomy has changed over the course of her half-century career.
20Barbara Liskov on the Future of Computer Science
Barbara Liskov addresses the challenges that confront computer science.