pplpod

The genetic code of nearly every modern apartment block, office tower, and city skyline was sparked by a man who started his career with a self-described horror of architecture. This episode is a deep...

6 Maj 13min

Before a suspension bridge can hold morning traffic, before fluid dynamics can lift a plane, before encryption can secure your wallet, someone had to write the syntax that makes those calculations pos...

6 Maj 19min

Imagine walking into a clinic desperate for help and being told the doctor knows what you need but that it is a federal crime to even name the treatment. That was the legal reality the Comstock laws b...

6 Maj 19min

When you break a bone, an x-ray gives you a clean visual proof of the damage. Childhood trauma offers no such image. Louise Bourgeois spent seventy years trying to build one anyway, sculpting anxiety,...

6 Maj 19min

Imagine trying to map the surface of a donut. Now imagine that donut is constantly warping and stretching, and one wrong calculation collapses the entire universe of possible shapes into infinite frac...

6 Maj 19min

The biggest revolution in the history of physics was started by a man who was desperately trying to keep everything exactly the same. This episode is a deep dive into Max Planck, the reluctant father ...

6 Maj 21min

Picture a 58-year-old Danish theoretical physicist lying on a mattress in the bomb bay of an unarmed Mosquito bomber crossing the freezing North Sea, passing out from oxygen starvation because his hea...

6 Maj 24min

Architects do not stop lightning during a thunderstorm. They install a rod, give the chaos a visible target, and hope the foundation survives. That metaphor frames this episode's deep dive into Mata H...

6 Maj 23min