In this episode of the fAQ podcast, Tai-Danae Bradley sits down with Joe Howlett, a science journalist at Scientific American and former astroparticle physicist, to discuss his fascinating transition from experimental physics to science storytelling.

Joe takes us inside his former life as a physicist, detailing his PhD research at Columbia University where he hunted for "WIMPs"—the elusive particles thought to make up dark matter. He breaks down the mind-boggling reality that all known matter accounts for only one-sixth of the universe, and openly shares the emotional toll of a 40-year global physics search that has yielded negative results. We discuss how these unanswered questions led him to pivot away from a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford to pursue a career in science journalism.

Whether he is learning to make science ...