Paula Q speaks from 2127, Q-Level Three. She opens channels across the multiverse to the people who built our understanding of reality -- physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, artists, builders -- and asks them what they built, why they built it, and whether they understood what they were building. Each episode features Paula meeting one or two historical figures. The conversations are grounded in real physics, real history, and real primary sources -- every quote verified against original letters, papers, and archives. They are not based on real conversations. The Paula Scale is part of the QUASI project. Written by Daniel Hinderink. All...
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Sep 29, 2026 · 41:40
Two rooms, two years, both in England. Cambridge, nineteen twenty-nine. Ludwig Wittgenstein has just returned to Trinity after six years away. He came in nineteen eleven at…
Sep 23, 2026 · 14:58
Paris, nineteen sixty-nine. Samuel Beckett is sixty-three. He has just been given the Nobel Prize in Literature. Suzanne, his wife, called it a catastrophe. He agreed. He will…
Sep 15, 2026 · 26:13
Two rooms, two decades. Pasadena, nineteen fifty-one. Jack Parsons is thirty-seven. His security clearance has been permanently revoked. The man who co-founded the Jet Propulsion…
Sep 8, 2026 · 13:09
Cinecittà, spring nineteen ninety-three. Federico Fellini is seventy-three. He has just received an honorary Oscar -- Sophia Loren handed it to him in Los Angeles a few weeks…
Sep 1, 2026 · 13:11
Toronto, late nineteen eighty-one. Glenn Gould is forty-eight. He has just come back from the last recording sessions ever held at Columbia's Thirtieth Street Studio in New York.…
Aug 25, 2026 · 18:56
Cambridge, England, nineteen sixty. Lise Meitner is eighty-one. She has recently retired here to be near her nephew Otto Frisch. She is sorting sixty years of correspondence --…
Aug 18, 2026 · 19:33
Vienna, spring 1905. Ludwig Boltzmann is sixty-one. He holds two chairs at the University of Vienna -- theoretical physics, and the philosophy of science chair that Ernst Mach…
Aug 11, 2026 · 16:53
London, autumn eighteen fifty-two. Ada, Countess of Lovelace, is thirty-six -- the same age at which her father, whom she never knew, was found in a rented house in Missolonghi.…
Aug 4, 2026 · 15:52
Paris, spring 1934. Marie Sklodowska-Curie is sixty-six. She has just come in from the courtyard where a fresh delivery of pitchblende residue is waiting, and she is already at…
Jul 31, 2026 · 19:59
Hughes Research Laboratories, Malibu, California. May 1960. Theodore Maiman is thirty-two. Two weeks ago, on the sixteenth of May, he wrapped a ruby crystal the size of a…
Jul 28, 2026 · 40:14
Cambridge, February 2016. Stephen Hawking is seventy-four and has just heard the news that direct evidence for gravitational waves has been recorded by the LIGO collaboration --…
Jul 21, 2026 · 22:06
Ithaca, New York, February 1990 and a hotel room in Stockholm, April 1972. Two men at two different tables, two decades apart. Carl Sagan is fifty-five and has just persuaded…
Jul 14, 2026 · 17:55
Riverside Drive, New York. Late summer 1973. Hannah Arendt is sixty-six years old, has just returned from Aberdeen where she became the first woman to deliver the Gifford…
Jul 7, 2026 · 23:32
Paris, 1967. Jacques Tati is sixty years old, his masterwork is finished, and he has just lost everything. Playtime is in the can. He shot it in seventy millimetre. He built an…
Jun 30, 2026 · 19:55
Chicago, September 1954. Enrico Fermi is fifty-three and has just returned from teaching the summer school at Varenna on the Italian lakes. He still walks to the office at the…
Jun 23, 2026 · 19:29
Berkeley, late 1989. Paul Feyerabend is sixty-five, retired from the philosophy department where he taught for thirty-six years, and has sat down to write Conquest of Abundance…
Jun 16, 2026 · 20:18
Stockholm, December 1954. Max Born is seventy-two and has just received the Nobel Prize. The committee has cited him for the Born rule: |psi|² is probability – the wave function…
Jun 9, 2026 · 26:17
Dublin, 1954. Erwin Schroedinger is sixty-seven and has lived in Ireland for fourteen years. He is at the Institute for Advanced Studies, the one Eamon de Valera built around…
Jun 2, 2026 · 28:22
Princeton, New Jersey. 1972. Kurt Gödel is sixty-six. He lives in a quiet house on Linden Lane with his wife Adele, who is the reason he is still alive. The food is not always…
May 26, 2026 · 28:20
Königsberg, September 1930. David Hilbert is sixty-eight years old, the most influential mathematician of his generation, and in excellent spirits. The day before, he stepped in…
May 22, 2026 · 18:45
Prague, 1888. Ernst Mach is fifty years old and has just finished developing eighty photographic plates. With his collaborator Peter Salcher firing rifle bullets through the…
May 19, 2026 · 34:39
Helsinki, 1913. Before Paula tells you about today's conversation she needs to tell you about a visit that will not become an episode. She went to see Karl Frithiof Sundman, a…
May 12, 2026 · 51:20
Leiden, late October 1927. Paul Ehrenfest has just come home from the Fifth Solvay Conference in Brussels and has not slept properly in four days. Tatiana, his wife, is waiting…
May 5, 2026 · 26:23
Copenhagen, 1962. Niels Bohr is seventy-seven and living in the Carlsberg Honorary Residence – a mansion provided by the brewery, complete with a life annuity of beer, reserved…
Apr 28, 2026 · 23:45
Vevey, April 1972. Charlie Chaplin is eighty-three. He is sitting in his house above Lake Geneva. A few weeks ago he flew to Los Angeles for the first time in twenty years to…
Apr 21, 2026 · 20:29
Pasadena, 1986. Richard Feynman is sixty-seven and has not slept. He has just finished serving on the Rogers Commission investigating the Challenger disaster, where he dunked a…
Apr 14, 2026 · 23:18
London, 1972. Arnold Toynbee is writing a narrative history of the entire world in a single volume. He suspects this cannot be done in a single volume, but he is too far in to…
Apr 7, 2026 · 23:49
Munich, 1965. Werner Heisenberg is sixty-four. He directs the Max Planck Institute for Physics and spends his evenings playing late Beethoven sonatas. He is chasing a unified…
Mar 31, 2026 · 19:00
Goettingen, 1947. Max Planck is eighty-nine. He has survived two world wars, the death of his first wife, the execution of his son Erwin by the Gestapo, and the destruction of…
Mar 24, 2026 · 26:15
Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. Autumn 1934. Emmy Noether is fifty-two, exiled from Goettingen, surrounded by students who adore her. Paula has visited before. In 1918, Hilbert…
Mar 21, 2026 · 18:26
This Episode In this episode Paula visits Albert Einstein in Princeton, 1947. Their conversation covers the EPR paradox, the Trennungsprinzip, the unified field theory, Gödel’s…
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