I don't know about you, but part of me is still a kid always asking people lots of questions.

Like, are there states of matter that keep jiggling back and forth over and over again in time indefinitely?

And the time crystal then comes in and does beep, bop, beep bop, beep bop.

And what if we could program our cells to hunt for cancer?

But here you instead put in a new receptor that you've designed that takes that awesome power

that the T cells have to kill and targets it directly at the tumor cells.

I'm Steve Strogett's. Welcome to Season 2 of The Joy of Why.

A podcast from Quantum Magazine that explores some of the biggest questions in math and science today.

How do vaccines, like ones made from messenger RNA, fool our body's defenses at the molecular level.

Think of it as a Morse code,

and when your body sees that Morse code,

it translates it into protein,

and it translates it into the spike protein.

And can mathematics help us categorize things better in context

to try to make more sense of the world? Ordinary numbers, one, two, four, five, six, seven, nine, eleven, twelve, thirty. Because they go on forever. They get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger forever. Whereas numbers on a clock go around and round in circles. And that's really important because if we didn't go around in circles, we'd be stuck saying things like, oh, I'll meet you at 1,233 o'clock.

Speaking of the world, have you ever wondered how it all might end?

I mean, the sun will at some point become so bright that it'll boil off the oceans of the

earth, and that'll only take about a billion years.

It's good to know at least we have a little bit of time.

I'm a mathematician, but you don't have to be a scientist or mathematician to wonder why.

That's the point.

The joy is in asking and trying to understand.

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