Quanta Magazine - Season 2015
Browse all 23 episodes in this season, including available images, air dates, runtimes, ratings and episode summaries from TMDB.
Episodes
Episode 1
What Happens if You Fall Into a Black Hole?
David Kaplan explores one of the biggest mysteries in physics: the apparent contradiction between general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Episode 2
Freeman Dyson: A ‘Rebel’ Without a Ph.D.
A wide-ranging interview with the legendary mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson in which he discusses his work with Richard Feynman, his attempts to build a spaceship propelled by nuclear bombs and his controversial views on climate change.
Episode 3
Artur Avila: A Brazilian Wunderkind Who Calms Chaos
A video profile of the mathematician Artur Avila, whose solutions to ubiquitous problems in chaos theory have earned him Brazil’s first Fields Medal in 2014.
Episode 4
Manjul Bhargava: The Musical, Magical Number Theorist
A video profile of the 2014 Fields medalist Manjul Bhargava, whose search for artistic truth and beauty has led to some of the most profound recent discoveries in number theory.
Episode 5
Where Did the Universe Come From?
Where did the universe come from? David Kaplan explores the leading cosmological explanation with the help of a baking metaphor.
Episode 6
Yitang Zhang: An Unlikely Math Star Rises
The opening scene from George Csicsery’s film "Counting From Infinity," about Yitang Zhang, a previously unknown mathematician who two years ago solved a major problem in number theory that catapulted him to mathematical stardom.
Episode 7
Martin Hairer: In Noisy Equations, One Who Heard Music
A video profile of the 2014 Fields medalist Martin Hairer, whose epic masterpiece in stochastic analysis, experts say, “created a whole world.”
Episode 8
Maryam Mirzakhani: A Tenacious Explorer of Abstract Surfaces
A video profile of the 2014 Fields medalist Maryam Mirzakhani, whose monumental work draws deep connections between topology, geometry and dynamical systems.
Episode 9
Subhash Khot: A Grand Vision for the Impossible
A video profile of the 2014 Nevanlinna Prize winner Subhash Khot, whose bold conjecture is helping mathematicians explore the precise limits of computation.
Episode 10
Alan Guth: How Many Two-Headed Cows in a Multiverse?
In an infinitely branching multiverse, says MIT cosmologist Alan Guth, “there are an infinite number of one-headed cows and an infinite number of two-headed cows. What happens to the ratio?”
Episode 11
Hiranya Peiris: How to Test If We Live in a Multiverse
University College London physicist Hiranya Peiris explains the seemingly impossible -- how the multiverse can be experimentally tested.
Episode 12
How Did Life Begin on Earth?
In this 2-minute video, David Kaplan explores the leading theories for the origin of life on our planet.
Episode 13
Fly-Vac: Groundhog Day for Fruit Flies
Benjamin de Bivort’s lab at Harvard University developed a device called the fly-vac to study individual behavior. Upon entering a chamber, the fly must choose to walk toward the light or dark end. A vacuum then sucks it back to the starting point, and it makes the choice again.
Episode 14
Why Do Flies Walk This Way?
In a device in Benjamin de Bivort’s lab at Harvard University, a fly wanders through a tiny Y-shaped maze, choosing at the Y’s vertex whether to walk left or right. This array of Y-mazes allows researchers to track individual behavior in many flies simultaneously.
Episode 15
How Symmetry Shapes Nature’s Laws
In this 2-minute video, David Kaplan explains how the search for hidden symmetries leads to discoveries like the Higgs boson.
Episode 16
James Bullock: The Case for Complex Dark Matter
James Bullock, a physicist at the University of California, Irvine, explains why dark matter might be more complicated than astronomers have assumed.
Episode 17
Nancy Moran: An Explorer of Life’s Deepest Partnerships
Nancy Moran, a biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, explains how colony collapse disorder led her to study the bacteria that live in the guts of bees.
Episode 18
Nima Arkani-Hamed's Visions of Future Physics
Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, makes his "big-picture" case for building a 100-TeV particle collider.
Episode 19
What Is a Species?
David Kaplan explains why a simple definition of 'species' is hard to come by in our fifth In Theory video.
Episode 20
Gabriela González: Searching the Sky for the Wobbles of Gravity
Gabriela González explains how to measure black-hole collisions using gravitational waves.
Episode 21
Joan Strassmann: The Woman Who Stared at Wasps
Joan Strassmann explains the benefits of studying social amoebas.
Episode 22
Christoph Adami: The Information Theory of Life
Christoph Adami explains how information theory can explain the persistence of life.
Episode 23
Richard Dawid: Why Trust a Theory?
Richard Dawid discusses the fine line between science and speculation.