Do you want to see into the future?

Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life?

Do you want to experience the frontiers of what makes us human?

On tech stuff, we travel from the minds of Congo to the surface of Mars,

from conversations with Nobel Prize winners to the depths of TikTok,

to ask burning questions about technology.

From high tech to low culture and

everywhere in between, join us. Listen to tech stuff on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or

wherever you get your podcasts.

The universe is beautiful and amazing and strange and confusing, and we struggle sometimes,

or a lot of times, to make sense of it.

One reason is that we have a limited vocabulary to explain it to ourselves, not just limited

to the words that we choose, but the concepts that we find

familiar, the things we accept as explanations. Most of physics is about explaining the weird

bonkers rules of our universe in terms that do make sense to us, like eating some new weird

fruit nobody's ever tasted before, and

then describing it in terms of familiar childhood staples.

It's a little bit like an orange, but with hints of cherry and blackberry.

That's what we try to do, for example, with photons. We say, oh, they're kind of like waves, they're kind of like particles, even though we know that neither of those fully capture the alienness of the photon.

But today's episode isn't about oranges or about photons, at least not directly.

We're going to dig into another basic concept and try to understand what it really is.

Electric charge.

...