Breaking Math Podcast

Join Sofia Baca and her guests Millicent Oriana from Nerd Forensics and Arianna Lunarosa as they discuss energy.

The sound that you're listening to, the device that you're listening on, and the cells in both the ear you're using to listen and the brain that understands these words have at least one thing in common: they represent the consumption or transference of energy. The same goes for your eyes if you're reading a transcript of this. The waves in the ears are pressure waves, while eyes receive information in the form of radiant energy, but they both are still called "energy". But what is energy? Energy is a scalar quantity measured in dimensions of force times distance, and the role that energy plays depends on the dynamics of the system. So what is the difference between potential and kinetic energy? How can understanding energy simplify problems? And how do we design a roller coaster in frictionless physics land?[Featuring: Sofia Baca; Millicent Oriana, Arianna Lunarosa]

This episode is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Full text here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

An interview with Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder about her second book Existential Physics. Sabine is host of the famous youtube show Science with Sabine. 

The world around us is a four-dimensional world; there are three spatial dimensions, and one temporal dimension. Many of these objects emit an almost unfathomable number of photons. As we developed as creatures on this planet, we gathered the ability to sense the world around us; and given the amount of information represented as photons, it is no surprise that we developed an organ for sensing photons. But because of the amount of photons that are involved, and our relatively limited computational resources, it is necessary to develop shortcuts if we want to simulate an environment in silico. So what is raytracing? How is that different from what happens in games? And what does Ptolemy have to do with 3D graphics? All of this and more on this episode of Breaking Math.

Physical objects are everywhere, and they're all made out of molecules, and atoms. However, the arrangement and refinement of these atoms can be the difference between a computer and sand, or between a tree and paper. For a species as reliant on tool use, the ability to conceieve of, design, create, and produce these materials is an ongoing concern. Since we've been around as humans, and even before, we have been material scientists in some regard, searching for new materials to make things out of, including the tools we use to make things. So what is the difference between iron and steel? How do we think up new things to make things out of? And what are time crystals? All of this and more on this episode of Breaking Math.

This episode is released under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. More information here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

[Featuring: Sofía Baca, Gabriel Hesch; Taylor Sparks]

Black holes are objects that seem exotic to us because they have properties that boggle our comparatively mild-mannered minds. These are objects that light cannot escape from, yet glow with the energy they have captured until they evaporate out all of their mass. They thus have temperature, but Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts a paradoxically smooth form. And perhaps most mind-boggling of all, it seems at first glance that they have the ability to erase information. So what is black hole thermodynamics? How does it interact with the fabric of space? And what are virtual particles?