Uncertainty in the social, political, and economic spheres, seems like the watchword for our era. (Just look at the E.U. elections.) This macro uncertainty is an epiphenomenon of the laws that govern the physical universe. Investigating the paradoxes and confusion they can produce has long been a key project of mathematicians. For this week’s podcast we spoke with Ian Stewart, professor emeritus of mathematics at Warwick University in England, to talk about the mathematics of uncertainty — which is also the subtitle of Stewart’s upcoming book, Do Dice Play God?