Science is all about observing the world. But how do you study something you can't see, smell, or hear — like the tiniest particles all around us? How do you test a new energy source when it doesn't really exist yet? These are the challenges that the world of physics often faces. You can come up with theories, using modeling and calculations, and devise some kind of experiment on paper to investigate things. But then you have to translate those ideas into tangible, real-world experiments, which is often incredibly challenging. On this episode, we peek behind the curtain of multimillion-dollar physics experiments that are changing the way we understand our world — and hear about some of the big challenges they face. We dig into the origins of the James Webb Space Telescope, talk with xkcd cartoonist Randall Munroe about some of his more outlandish — and complicated — physics calculations, and hear from accelerator physicist Suzie Sheehy about the physics experiments that changed the world.

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