I'm Steve Strogatz, and this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quantum Magazine that takes you into some of the biggest unanswered questions in math and science today.

In this episode, we're going to ask, how can we use math and physics to stop deadly heart arrhythmias?

You may remember the horrifying scene that occurred during a recent pro football game when Buffalo Bill's safety, Damar Hamlin, collapsed on

the field after taking a thunderous hit. One theory is that the slam he took to the ribcage disrupted

the rhythm of his heart, causing its normal electrical

waves to go haywire. The resulting condition known as ventricular fibrillation can kill someone

in a matter of minutes because it stops a heart from pumping blood effectively to the body and brain.

And as DeMar Hamlin's stunned teammates and millions of TV viewers looked on for what seemed

like in eternity, medical personnel struggled to revive him. The instant Flavio Fenton saw the footage

of the hit. He knew what had happened. Fenton is a professor in the School of Physics at Georgia Tech,

and cardiac arrhythmias are his specialty.

Fenton studies mathematical and computational models of arrhythmias and the strange spiral

waves that underlie them, and he also conducts experiments on animal hearts and on donated

human hearts. He's hoping to find a way to stop arrhythmias without having to use traditional

defibrillator paddles that send a huge blast of electricity through the patient's entire body.

Instead, Fenton is trying to fight waves with waves. He's making waves of his own to snuff out the pernicious

spiral waves that can send a heart into disarray.

The goal is to find a gentler, less damaging way to treat arrhythmias.

Flavio, thanks for joining us today and tell us about the amazing work you've been doing.

Oh, Steve, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

How does the heart work when it's working properly? So the heart is an amazing system, and one of the things I would like to say, that's one the things I think separates us a little bit. How we investigate the arrhythmias is I'm trying to do it from a point of view of a physicist. Most people who investigate cardiac arrhythmias are biomedical engineers or cardiologists. So we try to do from the point of view of how

physics works in the modeling of the heart. The evolution of the heart, the different animal species

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