Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

More than a century after Ernest Rutherford discovered the positively charged particle at the heart of every atom,

physicists are still struggling to fully understand the proton.

The positively charged particle is at the heart of the atom.

It's an object of unspeakable complexity.

That's next.

Did you ever wonder what a time crystal would sound like if you could hear it?

Beep bop, beep, bop.

Or what schools of fish can teach us about where to place wind turbines?

How about synthetic biology, rogue waves, or infinity?

I'm Steve Strogatz, and this is The Joy of Why,

a podcast from Quantum Magazine that invites you to explore some of the biggest unanswered questions in math and science today.

New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 23rd.

High school physics teachers describe protons as featureless balls with one unit each of positive electric charge. They're the perfect foils for the negatively charged electrons

that buzz around them.

College students learn that the ball is actually a bundle of three elementary particles called quarks.

But decades of research have revealed a deeper truth, one that's too bizarre to fully capture with words or images.

Mike Williams is a physicist at MIT.

Any human language we use in this context is going to be imprecise,

because this is the most complicated thing that you could possibly imagine.

...