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Welcome to the Titanium Physicists Podcast

My name is Dr. Ben Tippett, and I have some people I would like you to meet. Over the course of my travels, I have collected a team of the world’s smartest, most clear thinking, and well spoken physicists and astronomers.

I call them my Titanium Physicists!

Every episode, I bring together two of my physicists with some of the most fun and interesting people I have ever met, and we have a conversation about a wizard-level physics topic.  It’s fun, and fascinating, and entirely unique.

If there is a specific physics topic you are interested in learning more about, have a look through our “Topics” section. The blog below will feature our most recent episodes as they are posted.

About the Physicists
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Oct 13 2020

Episode 86: Live From the AAAS

Oh wow! the Seattle live show! recorded LIVE at the Sci-Mic Stage from the AAAS annual meeting. The Topic? One we have been building to over the last several shows! We’re talking about HOW Quantum Computers WORK. Dr. Sara Ejtemaee and Dr. Danica Marsden bust out their most coherent explanations!   Our guests today were two old […]
Feb 1 2020

Episode 85: Decoherence not Incoherence with Ted Leo

So The thing about Quantum mechanics is that they are hard to explain. Part of why they are hard to explain is that they are so entirely theoretical. Except they are not entirely theoretical. Physicists have been working hard to build quantum computers which harness the power of quantum mechanics… and so questions about superposition […]
Jan 1 2020

Episode 84: Super Stars Look Like Zebras with Ryan North

The Biggest and brightest stars in the universe are classified as type “O” (as in, the letter O. the classification, in decreasing temperature is O,B,A,F,G,K,M). They are HUGE! and BRIGHT! and VERY VERY MASSIVE! they have WAY MORE FUEL THAN THE SUN, and they run out of fuel SO MUCH FASTER. to put it in […]
Nov 30 2019

Episode 83: Feeling Feeble WIMPS and Axions with Norm Sherman

  Dark matter is one of the most interesting topics in modern physics. Because at this stage in the game, we are quite sure that it exists, but still have very few leads about WHAT it is. Look at this picture. This is called “the bullet cluster” Two galaxies crashed together, and the dust and […]
Nov 1 2019

Episode 82: Snowing Diamonds with Andray Domise

Far far far out, on the edges of our solar system — 30 times farther from the sun than our humble orbit — a freezing blue giant of ice lumbers slowly around the sun. Named after the oceans, and invisible to to the naked eye, Neptune seethes with furious winds and scalding internal heat and […]
Sep 30 2019

Episode 81: LISA the giant tumbling Space Triangle with Benjamin Ahr Harrison

Imagine  a Triangle made of lasers, and farther apart than the earth’s orbit around the moon. This triangle tumbles and tumbles as it orbits, distantly following the earth around the sun like a faithful old dog. I’m talking about LISA, one of the NEXT GENERATION of gravitational wave detectors. On this episode of Ti-Phy we talk […]
Aug 21 2019

Episode 80: Picturing the Bach Hole with Adal Rifai

  HEY EVERYONE! this is something i literally thought i would never see. In all of the years studying Black holes, i never thought i’d be able to LOOK AT an event horizon with anything other than my imagination. I heard about the Event Horizon Telescope about a decade ago, but when Leo emailed me […]
Mar 10 2019

Episode 79: MiniBooNE or GIANT CURSE with Cecil Castellucci

There is an issue which has SPLIT THE PARTICLE PHYSICS COMMUNITY IN HALLFFF. Two sets of experiments, each giving DIFFERENT results. One set says that there are only three flavours of neutrinos. The other set says that there might be a fourth type of neutrino. one which no one can directly detect. a secret, elusive, […]
Sep 9 2018

Episode 78: The Heat Death of the Universe with Ken Liu

As Much as everyone wants to know how it all began, we are also fascinated by how its going to end. The question itself is complicated and has a lot of different answers. Illness, Accident, starvation, extinction, the climate will stop supporting us, the sun will expand and we will spiral into it… but in […]
Feb 19 2018

Episode 77: Disruptive Feedback with Courtney Brooke Davis

        Okay, so lets start by looking at a galaxy. see these jet things? that’s caused by the same thing that causes Quasars. there’s a supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy spewing off radiation, pushing the gas in it all over the place and heating up the halo. all […]
Dec 18 2017

Episode 76: All That Glitters with Charlie Demers

Ring the bell. The big one. for everyone to hear! Astronomers from earth, subtle in their instruments, deep in their understanding have heard the song of the stars. We’ve heard the The Ringing of their footsteps  as two neutron stars danced so close to one another that they BURST from the knowing of one-another! we’ve […]
Nov 13 2017

Episode 75: The Undeniable Outward Push with Zach Weinersmith

Okay. some stars blow up. not all of them. but some of them. Why? why would something, which had enjoyed millions of years of a non-explody existence just explode? to get to the heart of the matter we have to get to the core of the thing. We talk about the lifecycles of stars, and […]
Aug 24 2017

Episode 74: Jinglebell Sweaters with Diana Goodman

So. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging works on the basis of looking at how the nuclei of atoms interact with big external magnetic fields. but all of the electrons in an atom also have little magnetic fields, so… we can do the same sort of thing to the electrons in an atom! the technique is called […]
Jul 10 2017

Episode 73: An episode with glass with Bobak Ferdowsi

Finally, a little glass from the titanium physicists podcast. this episode is fascinating!! the deal with glass is that it’s not a crystal. i’m sure you’ve heard that before but what does it mean? the answer is amazing. materials science is amazing!!! our guest today is Bobak Ferdowsi, the handsomest man at NASA. You can follow […]
May 1 2017

Episode 72: Moonquake

Okay i don’t want to alarm you but the moon is shrinking it’s getting smaller. and smaller and smaller. and as it shrinks, its surface SHAKES. and we’ve known for years. The unchanging moon, sitting in the sky since the dawn of time? It is a figment of our collective imagination. Today’s guest is an […]
Mar 20 2017

Episode 71: NeutriYES or NeutriNO

Okay, i’m going to be straight with you: i couldn’t think of a good pun for this episode. I’ve been working on it for so long, I just published it with the best name i could think. I’m sorry i’ve let you down. BUT THIS EPISODE WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN BECAUSE IT’S AMAZING. beams […]
Jan 16 2017

Episode 70: Muon, Science cat, Muon

Muons are very small fundamental particles that are much heavier than they should be. their name is pronounced “mew-on” btws. anyway, they fall apart pretty quickly, but they rain down on us from the upper atmosphere at almost the speed of light. It’s magical, and fascinating and pretty useful. They cascade down from spaaace!   […]
Dec 12 2016

Episode 69: Super Hyper Fire Hose Bucket Challenge

There is a mystery. in the center of our galaxy is an ENORMOUS black hole. MILLIONS OF TIMES the mass of the sun. so large that it throws enormous stars around like they were pebbles thrown by an elephant. not a human, human’s aren’t heavy enough. an elephant. but that’s not the mystery. you know, […]
Nov 7 2016

Episode 68: The Shadow of Creation

Okay, lets get the spelling over first: “The Sunyaev–Zel’dovich Effect.“ The idea is that the photons we see from the cosmic microwave background will backlight everything that we can see. Most things don’t really interact with these cold photons… but some things can. The hot gasses surrounding giant clusters of galaxies. and so, we can […]
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