TrueSciPhi

Podcast Profile: The Rest Is Science

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22 episodes
2025 to 2026
Median: 37 minutes
Collection: Science

Description (podcaster-provided):

Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):

This podcast explores scientific ideas that sit between everyday intuition and what researchers can actually explain, using a mix of physics, mathematics, engineering, astronomy, and psychology. Hosted by mathematician Hannah Fry and science communicator Michael Stevens, it takes familiar concepts—like gravity, magnetism, timekeeping, randomness, and even water—and treats them as open questions worth re-interrogating. The tone is curious and explanatory, often starting from a concrete object, puzzle, or surprising anecdote and then widening out into the underlying science.

Across the episodes, listeners are guided through how invisible forces and abstract models shape the world: how sound waves can be engineered to hold small objects in place, how Earth’s magnetic field is generated and sensed by animals, and why gravity remains conceptually unfinished even after Einstein. There is recurring attention to measurement and precision—calendars and clocks, the consequences of tiny errors, and the mismatch between human-made standards and a drifting planet.

The show also uses games, puzzles, and cultural touchstones as entry points into deeper reasoning. Probability and perceived luck are examined through dice; logic and inference through classic riddles; and large-scale constraints through thought experiments that require mathematics, data, and geography. Space and cosmic phenomena appear both in discussions of messaging beyond Earth and in examples of how high-energy particles can unexpectedly affect electronics.

Alongside the physical sciences, the podcast frequently connects scientific explanations to human experience: memory and emotion in musical taste, the biology and social function of crying, and how scents arise from evolved chemical signaling rather than human-centered meaning. Overall, the episodes combine conceptual “why” questions with practical mechanisms, showing how scientific understanding is built from models, experiments, and sometimes surprising intersections between daily life and the wider universe.