Explore every episode of the podcast NRTGE | No Reason to Get Excited
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Can We Actually Detect Gravitational Waves with Atoms? | Peter Graham | 12 May 2026 | 01:30:20 | |
What happens when a psychiatrist sits down with a Stanford physics professor to talk about gravitational waves, dark matter, quantum mechanics, and atoms existing in two places at once? In this episode of No Reason to Get Excited (NRTGE), Dr. Aaron Winkler talks with Stanford Physicist Peter Graham about the strange and fascinating world of modern physics. What starts as a conversation about gravitational wave detection quickly turns into a deep exploration of quantum mechanics, atom interferometry, atomic clocks, dark matter, and the bizarre reality of particles behaving like waves. Peter explains how researchers are building tabletop experiments capable of measuring incredibly small distortions in space-time, why gravity is surprisingly weak compared to electromagnetism, and how a single atom can exist in two places at once. Along the way, Aaron asks the kinds of questions many listeners are probably thinking themselves, leading to a conversation that feels less like a formal interview and more like two curious minds trying to make sense of the universe together. This episode is not a simplified science lecture. It’s an intellectually alive conversation about uncertainty, experimentation, physics, and the limits of human intuition.
Peter Graham is a professor of physics at Stanford University whose research focuses on fundamental physics, dark matter, gravitational waves, and precision measurement techniques using atomic systems. His work often bridges theoretical physics and experimental collaboration, helping develop new ways to probe some of the deepest unanswered questions in modern science. Connect with Peter: Website: https://physics.stanford.edu/people/peter-graham Chapters 00:00 – Introduction to Peter Graham and Stanford Physics If you enjoyed this episode of No Reason to Get Excited, make sure to follow the show, leave a rating or review, and share this episode with someone who loves deep conversations about science, physics, and the mysteries of the universe. Connect with Dr. Aaron Winkler
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| The Chemistry of Creativity, Light, and High-Energy Molecules | Noah Burns | 12 May 2026 | 00:58:03 | |
What does it actually mean to create a molecule that has never existed before? In this episode of No Reason to Get Excited (NRTGE), Dr. Aaron Winkler sits down with Stanford organic chemist Noah Burns for a wide-ranging conversation about chemistry, creativity, photochemistry, molecular design, and the strange beauty hidden inside organic reactions. What begins as a discussion about bromination and halogenation quickly expands into something much bigger: the relationship between science and imagination, the role of intuition in research, and how chemists develop entirely new reaction pathways capable of creating highly strained molecular structures. Noah explains how his lab designs reactions that selectively create one molecular “handedness” over another, why chirality matters in medicine and biology, and how light can be used to drive reactions that would otherwise be energetically impossible. Along the way, Aaron connects chemistry to psychology, creativity, consciousness, traffic systems, human relationships, and even the metaphorical power of molecules like porphyrin. This is not a technical lecture disguised as a podcast. It’s an intellectually playful conversation about discovery, emergence, energy, and the deeply human side of scientific work. About the Guest Connect with Noah Website: https://chemistry.stanford.edu/people/noah-burns Chapters 00:00 – Introduction to Noah Burns and Organic Chemistry If you enjoyed this episode of No Reason to Get Excited, make sure to follow the show, leave a rating or review, and share this episode with someone who loves deep conversations about science, physics, and the mysteries of the universe. Connect with Dr. Aaron Winkler
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| The Price of Power: Campaign Finance, Press Coverage, and the Polarization of American Politics | Andrew Myers | 15 May 2026 | 01:52:52 | |
What happens when you apply machine learning and rigorous data analysis to the "Wild West" of American campaign finance? In this episode of No Reason to Get Excited (NRTGE), Dr. Aaron Winkler sits down with Andrew Myers, a PhD candidate at Stanford University and incoming Assistant Professor at MIT, to pull back the curtain on how money, media, and institutional rules shape our democracy. From the surprising ways donors "punish" extremist candidates to the hidden consequences of term limits, Andrew shares insights from his dissertation that challenge standard political assumptions. Along the way, Aaron draws fascinating parallels between the circulatory system of the human body and the systematic flow of modern civilization. About the Guest Andrew Myers is a political scientist and PhD candidate at Stanford University specializing in American politics and political methodology. His research focuses on polarization in legislatures, campaign finance, and election administration. After completing a fellowship at the Hoover Institution, he will join the faculty at MIT as an Assistant Professor. Connect with Andrew Website: www.andrewcwmyers.com
00:00 – The "Block Power" of Parliamentary Systems If you enjoyed this episode of No Reason to Get Excited, make sure to follow the show, leave a rating or review, and share this episode with someone who loves deep conversations about science, physics, and the mysteries of the universe. Connect with Dr. Aaron Winkler
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| Life at the Edge of Equilibrium: Non-Equilibrium Physics, Machine Learning, and the Molecular Machinery of Life | Grant Rotskoff | 19 May 2026 | 01:09:52 | |
What if the secret to understanding life lies in the mathematics of systems that can never sit still? In this episode of No Reason to Get Excited (NRTGE), Dr. Aaron Winkler sits down with Grant Rotskoff, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University, to explore the breathtaking frontier where statistical physics, computation, and biology collide. From the unsolved mystery of how ATP, the "spark of life," actually hydrolyzes, to the way muscle tissue self-assembles from molecular ratchets, Grant unpacks what it means to study living systems that are, by their very nature, perpetually far from equilibrium. Along the way, Aaron draws striking parallels between the molecular machinery of cells and the deepest questions of consciousness, attention, and emergence. About the Guest Grant Rotskoff is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University. His research sits at the intersection of theoretical chemistry, statistical physics, and machine learning, with a focus on understanding the non-equilibrium dynamics of biological systems. He trained as a mathematician at the University of Chicago before turning to biophysics, and his lab uses cutting-edge computational methods, including machine-learned interatomic potentials and importance sampling, to study problems ranging from ATP hydrolysis to the self-assembly of muscle tissue. Connect with Grant Chapters 00:00 – Why Great Research Questions Live in the Gaps If you enjoyed this episode of No Reason to Get Excited, make sure to follow the show, leave a rating or review, and share this episode with someone who loves deep conversations about science, physics, and the mysteries of the universe. Connect with Dr. Aaron Winkler
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| Building Brains on Chips: Carbon Nanotubes, Lipid Nanoparticles, and Engineering the Frontier of Neurodegeneration | Rebecca Pinals | 26 May 2026 | 01:12:12 | |
What if the most powerful tools for understanding the human brain are the very tiny particles we're learning to build, atom by atom? In this episode of No Reason to Get Excited (NRTGE), Dr. Aaron Winkler sits down with Rebecca Pinals, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University and Institute Scholar at Sarafan ChEM-H, to explore the frontier where nanotechnology, neuroscience, and chemical engineering collide. From carbon nanotubes that glow in the near-infrared, to the "protein corona" that makes biological systems so beautifully unpredictable, to lipid nanoparticles that may one day flush the brain clean of disease, Rebecca walks through how her lab is engineering microscopic tools to crack one of medicine's hardest problems: Alzheimer's disease. Along the way, Aaron and Rebecca dig into why almost everything we know about the brain comes from animals that aren't quite us, how a handful of cells can self-assemble into a working capillary inside a hydrogel, and why the long-overlooked story of lipids may be the missing piece in our understanding of neurodegeneration.
Connect with Rebecca
00:00 – Cold Open: A Chemical Engineer at the Edge of Neuroscience 00:32 – Meet Rebecca Pinals 01:20 – From Conventional Catalysis to a Love of the Nanoscale 03:42 – Carbon Nanotubes That Glow in the Near-Infrared 09:55 – The Protein Corona Problem 12:30 – Lipid Nanoparticles, mRNA Vaccines, and a COVID Pivot 14:18 – Why Alzheimer's: The Forgotten Lipid Story 18:34 – APOE, Astrocytes, and Lipoproteins as Therapeutics 24:15 – Why We Need a Human Blood-Brain Barrier Model 33:35 – Endothelial Cells, Pericytes, and the Real Anatomy of the BBB 42:48 – When Cells Find Each Other: Self-Assembly Into Capillaries 50:51 – Microplastics, Prions, and What We Don't Know We're Doing 54:17 – The Moments a Scientist Lives For 57:40 – Becoming a PI: From the Bench to Big Science If you enjoyed this episode of No Reason to Get Excited, make sure to follow the show, leave a rating or review, and share this episode with someone who loves deep conversations about science, physics, and the mysteries of the universe. Connect with Dr. Aaron Winkler
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| Between Bonds and Forces: Building Monolayers, Twisting Bilayers, and Watching Lattices Move at Trillionths of a Second | Fang Liu | 09 Jun 2026 | 01:07:10 | |
What if the most powerful materials of the future are only one atom thick? In this episode of No Reason to Get Excited (NRTGE), Dr. Aaron Winkler sits down with Fang Liu, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University, to explore the cutting-edge world of two-dimensional materials, where single-atom-thick semiconductors stack, twist, and transform in ways that could redefine electronics, quantum computing, and energy technology. From a childhood in Northeast China where she barely made it into chemistry at Peking University (the major with the lowest score threshold), to inventing a gold-based exfoliation technique that won her a faculty position at Stanford, Fang walks through how her lab creates moiré superlattices at centimeter scales, uses ultrafast lasers to make atomic lattices twist in trillionths of a second, and collaborates with Cornell and SLAC to watch quantum materials dance. Along the way, she and Aaron dig into why Scotch tape won a Nobel Prize, what lives between van der Waals forces and chemical bonds, why twisted bilayer graphene becomes a superconductor at exactly 1.1 degrees, and how sometimes the best career path is the one where you take the only offer you get.
Connect with Fang Chapters If you enjoyed this episode of No Reason to Get Excited, make sure to follow the show, leave a rating or review, and share this episode with someone who loves deep conversations about science, physics, and the mysteries of the universe. Connect with Dr. Aaron Winkler
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| Living Drug Factories: Bioelectronics, Wireless Power, and the Implantable Future of Medicine | Siddharth Krishnan | 02 Jun 2026 | 00:57:30 | |
What if curing a chronic disease looked less like a daily pill and more like a tiny, wireless implant of living cells that quietly produces your medicine on demand? In this episode of No Reason to Get Excited (NRTGE), Dr. Aaron Winkler sits down with Siddharth Krishnan, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, to explore the rapidly evolving frontier of bioelectronic medicine. From his grandfather's soldering iron in Chennai, to a New Yorker article on John Rogers that changed his life, to a battery-free implant that has cured diabetes in mice for months, Siddharth walks through how his lab is engineering devices that combine living cells with thin-film electronics to deliver biologic drugs continuously, sense biomarkers in real time, and reshape what treatment for chronic disease can even look like. Along the way, he and Aaron dig into why oxygen is the hardest problem in implantable cell therapy, why the solution borrows physics from fuel cells, RFID credit cards, and photosynthesis, and why the future of medicine might involve all of us walking around with our own tiny bioreactors under the skin.
Connect with Siddharth Chapters 00:30 – Meet Siddharth Krishnan 01:08 – From Chennai to the Midwest 04:52 – The Light in Olin Library: From Humanities to Engineering 07:09 – A Grandfather, a Soldering Iron, and a Homemade Guitar Amp 10:47 – The New Yorker Article That Changed Everything 15:23 – Living Drug Factories: Engineering Cells Inside Implants 19:30 – Pancreatic Islets, Glucagon, and Type 1 Diabetes 24:24 – The Real Bottleneck: Solving the Oxygen Problem 27:38 – Borrowing Physics from Fuel Cells and Silicone Membranes 34:34 – Engineering Photosynthesis Inside the Body 36:18 – Wireless Power Harvesting and the RFID Trick 40:00 – Building a Bioelectronic Artificial Pancreas 46:44 – Why Life Stays Small Without Blood Supply 49:05 – From Drug Delivery to Living Biosensors 52:42 – Real-Time Inflammation Tracking and Long COVID 54:42 – Curing Mouse Diabetes for Months If you enjoyed this episode of No Reason to Get Excited, make sure to follow the show, leave a rating or review, and share this episode with someone who loves deep conversations about science, physics, and the mysteries of the universe. Connect with Dr. Aaron Winkler
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