Season 2019

1. Been Kim: A New Approach to Understanding How Machines Think

2019-01-10

Google Brain’s Been Kim is building ways to let us interrogate the decisions made by machine learning systems.

2. Carolina Araujo on Supporting Women in Mathematics

2019-01-22

Carolina Araujo describes the effort to build a network of women mathematicians in Brazil.

3. What Is Turbulence?

2020-01-28

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.

4. Priyamvada Natarajan: How Black Holes Shape Galaxies

2019-02-04

Priyamvada Natarajan explains the role of supermassive black holes in the structure and evolution of the universe.

5. Meenakshi Wadhwa on Meteorites and the Solar System

2019-02-11

Meenakshi Wadhwa explains how meteorites illuminate the origins of Earth and the rest of the solar system.

6. CRISPR Pioneer Jennifer Doudna on Its Research Promise

2019-02-27

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.

7. Ecologist Jennifer Dunne on Humans’ Place in Food Webs

2019-03-21

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.

8. Jim Gunn on Building Astronomical Instruments

2019-04-23

The lauded astronomer Jim Gunn explains how a new spectrograph he is building will advance astronomy.

9. What Is Universality?

2019-05-13

Quanta’s In Theory video series returns with an exploration of the mysterious mathematical pattern found throughout nature.

10. What Are Feynman Diagrams?

2019-05-14

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.

11. Edward O. Wilson on the Evolution of Social Behaviors

2019-05-15

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.

12. Amie Wilkinson on the Mathematics of Change

2019-06-13

The mathematician Amie Wilkinson explains how dynamics lets mathematicians explore the fundamentals of change.

13. Lee Smolin on the Impossibility of Studying the Universe

2019-06-27

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.

14. Greg Johnson on A.I. That Sees Inside Cells

2019-07-24

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

15. Carlo Rubbia on the Future of Particle Physics

2019-08-07

Carlo Rubbia explains why he thinks particle physicists should take the next step by building a “Higgs factory.”

16. Iyad Rahwan: Why We Need a Science of Machine Behavior

2019-08-27

The behavior of algorithms is so complex and surprising that we need to study them as though they were animals in the wild.

17. Craig Callender on the Trouble With Black Hole Thermodynamics

2019-09-05

Craig Callender explains why the connection between black holes and thermodynamics is little more than an analogy.

18. Stephanie Wehner Aims to Build a Quantum Internet

2019-09-25

Wehner discusses the advantages of transmitting qubits rather than bits across a long-distance communication network.

19. Virginia Trimble on How Astronomy Has Changed

2019-11-11

Virginia Trimble discusses how astronomy has changed over the course of her half-century career.

20. Barbara Liskov on the Future of Computer Science

2019-11-20

Barbara Liskov addresses the challenges that confront computer science.