Physics

Steven Strogatz and Janna Levin return for a new season on major scientific and mathematical questions of our time, with 12 all-new episodes and a new format.

Astronomers are ready to search for the fingerprints of life in faraway planetary atmospheres. But first, they need to know where to look — and that means figuring out which planets are likely to have atmospheres in the first place.

In math and computer science, researchers have long understood that some questions are fundamentally unanswerable. Now physicists are exploring how even ordinary physical systems put hard limits on what we can predict, even in principle.

By training machine learning models with enough examples of basic science, Miles Cranmer hopes to push the pace of scientific discovery forward.

Physicists hope that understanding the churning region near singularities might help them reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics.

Quantum calculations amount to sophisticated estimates. But in 1931, Hans Bethe intuited precisely how a chain of particles would behave — an insight that had far-reaching consequences.

Emmy Noether showed that fundamental physical laws are just a consequence of simple symmetries. A century later, her insights continue to shape physics.

Is the universe flat and infinite, or something more complex? We can’t say for sure, but a new search strategy is mapping out the subtle signals that could reveal if the universe has a shape.

Heat is supposed to ruin anything it touches. But physicists have shown that an idealized form of magnetism is heatproof.