{"podcast":{"title":"New Books in Mathematics","slug":"new-books-in-mathematics-736372","podcast_index_feed_id":736372,"rss_url":"https://feeds.megaphone.fm/LIT8989774512","website_url":"https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/science-technology/mathematics/","image_url":"https://megaphone.imgix.net/podcasts/bd5e76ba-eda3-11e8-949d-1b696f92facc/image/2907bb4f8e3fb589b390ec6e53b6b845.png?ixlib=rails-4.3.1&max-w=3000&max-h=3000&fit=crop&auto=format,compress","author":"New Books Network","episode_count":172,"summary":"This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/mathematics","last_synced_at":null,"page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-mathematics-736372"},"episode":{"title":"Antonio Padilla, \"Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Cosmic Quest from Zero to Infinity\" (FSG,2022)","slug":"antonio-padilla-fantastic-numbers-and-where-to-find-them-a-cosmic-quest-from-zero-to-infinity-fsg-2022","published_at":"2026-02-15T09:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-mathematics-736372/antonio-padilla-fantastic-numbers-and-where-to-find-them-a-cosmic-quest-from-zero-to-infinity-fsg-2022","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-mathematics-736372","url":"https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK4545680656.mp3?updated=1770960748","audio_url":"https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK4545680656.mp3?updated=1770960748","summary":"A fun, dazzling exploration of the strange numbers that illuminate the ultimate nature of reality. For particularly brilliant theoretical physicists like James Clerk Maxwell, Paul Dirac, or Albert Einstein, the search for mathematical truths led to strange new understandings of the ultimate nature of reality. But what are these truths? What are the mysterious numbers that explain the universe?In Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Cosmic Quest from Zero to Infinity (FSG,2022), the leading theoretical physicist and YouTube star Antonio Padilla takes us on an irreverent cosmic tour of nine of the most extraordinary numbers in physics, offering a startling picture of how the universe works. These strange numbers include Graham’s number, which is so large that if you thought about it in the wrong way, your head would collapse into a singularity; TREE(3), whose finite nature can never be definitively proved, because to do so would take so much time that the universe would experience a Poincaré Recurrence—resetting to precisely the state it currently holds, down to the arrangement of individual atoms; and 10^{-120}, measuring the desperately unlikely balance of energy needed to allow the universe to exist for more than just a moment, to extend beyond the size of a single atom—in other words, the mystery of our unexpected universe.Leading us down the rabbit hole to a deeper understanding of reality, Padilla explains how these unusual numbers are the key to understanding such mind-boggling phenomena as black holes, relativity, and the problem of the cosmological constant—that the two best and most rigorously tested ways of understanding the universe contradict one another. Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them is a combination of popular and cutting-edge science—an…","meta_description":"A fun, dazzling exploration of the strange numbers that illuminate the ultimate nature of reality. For particularly brilliant theoretical physicists like…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":3960,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/new-books-in-mathematics-736372/episodes/antonio-padilla-fantastic-numbers-and-where-to-find-them-a-cosmic-quest-from-zero-to-infinity-fsg-2022/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-mathematics-736372/antonio-padilla-fantastic-numbers-and-where-to-find-them-a-cosmic-quest-from-zero-to-infinity-fsg-2022.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}