Particles of Thought

Why does thinking too hard ruin your rhythm? Neuroscientist Heather Berlin unpacks the science of flow states, explaining why mastery means trusting your brain’s hidden systems to do what they do best.

For more, check out the extended interview with Heather Berlin.

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Black holes can be bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. Astrophysicist Janna Levin explains how this is possible, and what that means about how black holes work. 

For more, check out the extended interview with Janna Levin.

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What’s the difference between a fact, a law, and a theory? Mineralogist Robert Hazen and astrobiologist Michael Wong unpack the hierarchy of scientific ideas and reveal how laws of nature elegantly unify the universe.

For more, check out the extended interview with Robert Hazen and Michael Wong.

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Sorry, Beyoncé, it turns out microbes rule the world. Microbiologist Peter Girguis explains how to conceptualize just how many microbes are on Earth… and how understanding this helps us look for life on other worlds. 

For more, check out the extended interview with Peter Girguis.

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Growth rings on trees can measure time, allowing scientists to date things from the deep past. But, paleobotantist Dr. Kirk Johnson explains why, in the tropics, some trees have no rings.

For more, check out the extended interview with Kirk Johnson.

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Nature has been solving problems for billions of years. Evolutionary biologist Sean B. Carroll reveals why scientists still turn to evolution’s inventions for life-saving breakthroughs, from GLP-1 drugs to statins.

For more, check out the extended interview with Sean B. Carroll.

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In 2024, scientists claimed they achieved the unthinkable: the birth of dire wolf pups, reviving a species that vanished thousands of years ago. Now, those pups are growing—and changing. Evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro reveals what it’s like to watch these predators mature into modern beasts.

For more, check out the extended interview with Beth Shapiro. 

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Is AI coming for your job? AI Expert Hany Farid breaks down how AI is taking jobs once considered “future-proof” and shares his advice to prepare young people for the future.

For more, check out the extended interview with Hany Farid. 

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What does it feel like to make one of the biggest discoveries in physics? Adam Riess knows — because his work revealed that the universe isn’t just expanding, it’s accelerating. In this episode, the Nobel Prize–winning astrophysicist takes us behind the scenes of the moment that changed cosmology forever. How did his team use exploding stars as “standard candles” to measure the cosmos? Why did the data point to a mysterious force now called dark energy, making up nearly 70% of the universe? And what’s behind today’s biggest cosmic puzzle: the Hubble tension? Plus, Adam shares what new telescopes could uncover — and why the next decade might rewrite the laws of physics all over again.
 

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Guest Bio: 

Adam Riess is an astrophysicist, professor at Johns Hopkins University, and a distinguished astronomer at Space Telescope Science Institute. In 2011, he was named as a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the discovery that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating. Since then, he has continued refining measurements of cosmic expansion and the Hubble constant, aiming to find and measure the most distant type Ia supernovae known, to probe the origin of cosmic acceleration.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:03:16) What Is a Type Ia Supernova? 

(00:10:52) The Discovery of Dark Energy

(00:44:39) What Is the Hubble Tension?

(00:58:59) Winning a Nobel Prize

(01:15:32) Credits

The universe isn’t adding up—and it’s creating a crisis in cosmology. Nobel Prize winner Adam Riess explains why measurements of the universe’s expansion rate from its earliest light and from nearby galaxies don’t match, and how this growing gap threatens the foundations of our standard model of the cosmos.

For more, check out the extended interview with Adam Riess

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