Fermi Podcast

First Principles Ep 4: Energy and the Hamiltonian

The Hamiltonian is the beating heart of quantum mechanics — and diagonalizing it is how you actually solve a system. This hands-on tutorial builds intuition for what a Ha

First Principles Ep 3: Symmetry and Conservation

Why is energy conserved? The deepest answer is a symmetry. This tutorial builds Emmy Noether's theorem — that every continuous symmetry yields a conservation law — throug

First Principles Ep 2: The Principle of Least Action

There's a deeper way to do mechanics than force-equals-mass-times-acceleration. This tutorial builds the principle of least action from the ground up: why forces get clum

First Principles Ep 1: The Language of Physics

The Language of Nature Ep 1: The Language of Physics — the paper, the physics behind it, and why it matters. ——— Series: Physics - Tutorial · UnderGrad level. Every equa

Great Papers #16: Nash Equilibrium and Game Theory, 1950

One idea for every situation where your best move depends on what everyone else does — markets, wars, traffic, evolution, even asking someone out. This episode reads John

Great Papers #15: The Periodic Table, Mendeleev 1869

That colored grid on every classroom wall started as one chemist's stroke of insight — and turned out to be quantum mechanics in disguise, drawn decades before quantum me

Great Papers #14: Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, 1931

Mathematics contains truths it can never prove — and that's a theorem, not a mood. This episode reads Kurt Gödel's 1931 incompleteness theorems, the result that shattered

Great Papers #13: How DNA Copies Itself, Meselson-Stahl 1958

Watson and Crick ended the double-helix paper with a wink — the structure "immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism." This episode reads the 1958 experiment that

Great Papers #12: The Dirac Equation and Antimatter, 1928

Set out to fix an equation; accidentally predict antimatter. This episode reads Paul Dirac's 1928 "The Quantum Theory of the Electron." Schrödinger's quantum mechanics qu

Great Papers #11: The Birth of the Quantum, Planck 1900

Everything glows — and explaining the exact color of that glow broke physics and forced the birth of the quantum. This episode reads Max Planck's December 1900 paper on b

Great Papers #10: The Expanding Universe, Hubble 1929

How big is the universe, and does it change? In the 1920s nobody knew. This episode reads Edwin Hubble's 1929 paper, which answered both. Using Cepheid standard candles (

Great Papers #9: Bell's Theorem, 1964

Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance" and spent his life trying to prove it couldn't be real. This episode reads John Bell's 1964 theorem, which turned that th

Great Papers #8: Natural Selection, Darwin and Wallace 1858

The first public statement of natural selection — and it isn't the Origin of Species. This episode reads the joint Darwin–Wallace paper read at the Linnean Society on 1 J

Great Papers #7: On Computable Numbers, Turing 1936

A 1936 logic paper accidentally invented the computer — and in the same pages proved its limits. This episode reads Alan Turing's "On Computable Numbers." To answer wheth

Great Papers #6: General Relativity, Einstein 1915

Special relativity had a hole in it exactly where gravity should be — and Newton's instantaneous gravity broke the new speed limit. This episode reads Einstein's 1915 gen

Great Papers #5: Attention Is All You Need, 2017

The eight-page paper behind the modern AI boom. This episode reads Vaswani et al.'s 2017 "Attention Is All You Need": why recurrent networks hit a wall, how self-attentio

Great Papers #4: Shannon and the Birth of Information, 1948

The paper that invented the bit. This episode reads Claude Shannon's 1948 "A Mathematical Theory of Communication": separating information from meaning, entropy as the tr

Great Papers #3: The Double Helix, Watson and Crick 1953

One page in Nature that founded molecular biology. This episode reads Watson & Crick's 1953 structure of DNA — how the clues (Chargaff's base ratios, Franklin's Photo 51)

Great Papers #2: How Black Holes Radiate, Hawking 1975

Hawking set out to prove black holes could not have entropy — and discovered they glow. This episode reads his 1975 "Particle Creation by Black Holes": the quantum vacuum

Great Papers #1: Einstein's Special Relativity

The paper that broke absolute time. Great Papers opens with Einstein's 1905 "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" — built from just two postulates to the relativity o