The Multiverse Employee Handbook

Robb Corrigan
  • 4.5 (12)
  • PHYSICS
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

The Multiverse Employee Handbook is a science comedy podcast where workplace humor meets cosmic exploration. From quantum mechanics explained through staff meetings to space history through annual reviews, we decode scientific mysteries through corporate metaphors. Each episode combines rigorous science with absurdist office scenarios, whether exploring the strange physics of black holes or the equally baffling logic of expense reports. Perfect for curious minds who suspect their workplace might exist across multiple dimensions, we deliver astronomical insights wrapped in corporate satire. Whether you’re fascinated by the mysteries of dark matter or the inexplicable disappearance of break room snacks, our show provides genuine scientific knowledge with existential humor. Subscribe now to navigate both the cosmos and cubicle culture with equal parts wonder and skepticism! New episodes arrive every Tuesday, regardless of temporal anomalies.

  1. Is Space Trying to Kill Us? (Radiation)

    2D AGO

    Is Space Trying to Kill Us? (Radiation)

    Space radiation is constant, omnidirectional, and entirely unbothered by your feelings about it. 🎧 Love the show? Help us improve in 2 minutes: https://tally.so/r/nr1evM This week: what's actually out there, why Earth has been quietly protecting us for four billion years without asking for credit, and what happens when you leave that protection behind. Exploding stars, Van Allen's doughnuts, the surprisingly violent history of how we first noticed, and why the most sophisticated radiation shielding strategy currently available is, in certain respects, a cave. Plus: NASA's Artemis programme is heading back into deep space for the first time in fifty years, and this time we're bringing considerably better instruments. AI Transparency: In a universe increasingly filled with AI-generated content, we believe in being clear about what’s human and what’s not. Your time is valuable, and you deserve to know what you’re experiencing. The narrator, David, is a professional voice actor who has digitized his voice using ElevenLabs’ voice-cloning technology and is fairly compensated for his vocal performance. Thumbnails are created using OpenArt, and sound effects come from Pixabay which are generated by human artists. Everything else—the research, the writing, jokes, music, sound editing, and interdimensional coffee consumption—is 100% human-made by humans. https://multiverseemployeehandbook.com

    34 min
  2. Our Other Nearest Neighbours

    MAR 24

    Our Other Nearest Neighbours

    Humanity has spent thousands of years naming constellations, building calendars, and writing mythology onto the night sky — largely ignoring the actual stars next door. 🎧 Love the show? Help us improve in 2 minutes: https://tally.so/r/nr1evM This week, we meet the ten nearest star systems to Earth: a collection of failed stars, violent flare stars, one object colder than a freezer, and a sales territory that Brad from Quantum Improbability Solutions would like formally struck from the Q4 quota. Space is stranger than advertised. The neighbourhood association has concerns. AI Transparency: In a universe increasingly filled with AI-generated content, we believe in being clear about what’s human and what’s not. Your time is valuable, and you deserve to know what you’re experiencing. The narrator, David, is a professional voice actor who has digitized his voice using ElevenLabs’ voice-cloning technology and is fairly compensated for his vocal performance. Thumbnails are created using OpenArt, and sound effects come from Pixabay. Everything else—the research, the writing, jokes, music, sound editing, and interdimensional coffee consumption—is 100% human-made by a human. https://multiverseemployeehandbook.com

    29 min
  3. Is Tau Ceti Our Project Hail Mary?

    MAR 17

    Is Tau Ceti Our Project Hail Mary?

    Eleven point nine light-years away, in the constellation of a mythological sea monster, sits a star that astronomers, SETI researchers, and science fiction writers have been collectively obsessed with since 1960. 🎧 Love the show? Help us improve in 2 minutes: https://tally.so/r/nr1evM In this episode of The Multiverse Employee Handbook, we visit Tau Ceti — the Sun-like neighbour that has everything you'd want in a nearby stellar system: stability, age, a habitable zone, and almost certainly planets. Almost certainly. We explore the full and rather remarkable story of this ancient star, from Johann Bayer's 1603 star atlas and Frank Drake's original SETI search, through decades of planet hunting, a debris disk of genuinely alarming proportions, and the latest findings from the ESPRESSO spectrograph, which has made everything considerably more complicated. We also ask whether Tau Ceti represents a genuine opportunity for life beyond our Solar System — and why, despite everything, it refuses to stop being interesting. Plus: Ryan Gosling, the Kobayashi Maru, and the nine-billion-year question the universe is still sitting on. Peer-reviewed papers Refining the Stellar Parameters of τ Ceti (2023) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.10394 Integrated Analysis of the Tau Ceti Planetary System (2020) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.14675 Debris Disk of τ Ceti — Herschel Observations — https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2791 AI Transparency: In a universe increasingly filled with AI-generated content, we believe in being clear about what’s human and what’s not. Your time is valuable, and you deserve to know what you’re experiencing. The narrator, David, is a professional voice actor who has digitized his voice using ElevenLabs’ voice-cloning technology and is fairly compensated for his vocal performance. Thumbnails are created using OpenArt, and music and sound effects come from Pixabay. Everything else—the research, the writing, jokes, sound editing, and interdimensional coffee consumption—is 100% human-made by a human. https://multiverseemployeehandbook.com

    33 min
  4. Rewind: Don’t Panic - 42 and the Cosmic Coincidences

    MAR 11 ·  BONUS

    Rewind: Don’t Panic - 42 and the Cosmic Coincidences

    Join us for a towel-mandatory celebration of Douglas Adams as we explore the most suspiciously significant number in the multiverse! 🎧 Love the show? Help us improve in 2 minutes: https://tally.so/r/nr1evM In this special birthday episode, we put aside our regular corporate chaos to honor the man who taught us the importance of always knowing where your towel is. Join our quantum-superposed guide as we investigate why the number 42 keeps appearing in the fabric of reality like an interdimensional typo that nobody can quite correct. Explore the remarkable life and legacy of Douglas Adams, from chicken shed cleaner to galactic navigator, and discover the mathematical coincidences that make 42 more significant than Deep Thought ever calculated. We'll examine Earth's alarming tendency to narrowly avoid destruction in ways eerily similar to Adams' fiction, and contemplate the philosophical implications of discovering the Answer without knowing the Question. Along the way, marvel at how Adams predicted modern technology with uncanny accuracy decades before it existed. Sign up to our mailing list (bottom of this page): https://multiverseemployeehandbook.com/about/listen/ AI Transparency: In a universe increasingly filled with AI-generated content, we believe in being clear about what’s human and what’s not. Your time is valuable, and you deserve to know what you’re experiencing. The narrator, David, is a professional voice actor who has digitized his voice using ElevenLabs’ voice-cloning technology and is fairly compensated for his vocal performance. Thumbnails are created using OpenArt, and music and sound effects come from Pixabay. Everything else—the research, the writing, jokes, sound editing, and interdimensional coffee consumption—is 100% human-made by a human. https://multiverseemployeehandbook.com

    34 min
  5. Why The Renewed Interest in Uranus?

    MAR 10

    Why The Renewed Interest in Uranus?

    Uranus has been rolling through the solar system on its side for four and a half billion years, confidently labelled an ice giant since a single spacecraft spent six hours there in 1986 — and until very recently, nobody had particularly strong grounds to argue otherwise. Then 2025 happened. 🎧 Love the show? Help us improve in 2 minutes: https://tally.so/r/nr1evM The James Webb Space Telescope found a moon that the original mission missed entirely, sitting quietly in the inner system at roughly ten kilometres across, invisible to everything previously aimed at it. And two astrophysicists in Zürich published a paper suggesting that beneath that hydrogen-helium atmosphere, Uranus may be predominantly rock rather than ice — making the classification we've built forty years of textbook confidence around a historical artefact rather than a robust physical fact. In this episode, we explore what we actually know about the seventh planet, how planetary interiors are modelled when you cannot visit them, why the magnetic field has always been quietly awkward, and what it means for thousands of exoplanets across the galaxy if our local reference point turns out to have been the wrong kind of world all along. Sources & Further Reading: Uranus Facts — NASA New Moon Discovered Orbiting Uranus — NASA/Webb Morf & Helled, 2025: Icy or Rocky? New Interior Models of Uranus and Neptune AI Transparency: In a universe increasingly filled with AI-generated content, we believe in being clear about what’s human and what’s not. Your time is valuable, and you deserve to know what you’re experiencing. The narrator, David, is a professional voice actor who has digitized his voice using ElevenLabs’ voice-cloning technology and is fairly compensated for his vocal performance. Thumbnails are created using OpenArt, and music and sound effects come from Pixabay. Everything else—the research, the writing, jokes, sound editing, and interdimensional coffee consumption—is 100% human-made by a human. https://multiverseemployeehandbook.com

    35 min
  6. What Happens if We Catch a Graviton? (It Changes Everything)

    MAR 3

    What Happens if We Catch a Graviton? (It Changes Everything)

    Gravity has been operating continuously, without maintenance, since approximately 13.8 billion years ago — and it still hasn't confirmed its own carrier particle. 🎧 Love the show? Help us improve in 2 minutes: https://tally.so/r/nr1evM Every other fundamental force has one, but the graviton, the particle that ought to be riding gravity's Nobel Prize-winning waves, remains the most wanted and most elusive entry in the whole of fundamental physics. In this episode, we trace the chain of discovery from a seventeenth-century pendulum clock to a Louisiana laser detector to laboratories cooling beryllium to the edge of absolute zero, and ask the question nobody has yet been able to answer: how do you catch a graviton — and what happens to physics if you do? Sign up to our mailing list (bottom of this page): https://multiverseemployeehandbook.com/about/listen/ AI Transparency: In a universe increasingly filled with AI-generated content, we believe in being clear about what’s human and what’s not. Your time is valuable, and you deserve to know what you’re experiencing. The narrator, David, is a professional voice actor who has digitized his voice using ElevenLabs’ voice-cloning technology and is fairly compensated for his vocal performance. Thumbnails are created using OpenArt, and music and sound effects come from Pixabay. Everything else—the research, the writing, jokes, sound editing, and interdimensional coffee consumption—is 100% human-made by a human. https://multiverseemployeehandbook.com

    32 min
  7. Srinivasa Ramanujan: A Life in Numbers

    FEB 24

    Srinivasa Ramanujan: A Life in Numbers

    In January 1913, Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy received a letter from an unknown clerk in Madras containing nine pages of mathematical theorems with no proofs—just raw conclusions that seemed impossibly advanced. 🎧 Did you listen? Help us improve in 2 minutes: https://tally.so/r/nr1evM "They must be true," Hardy concluded, "because if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them." Thus began one of history's most extraordinary mathematical collaborations: a rigorous atheist trying to teach proof methodology to a mystic who claimed the goddess Namagiri showed him formulas in dreams. Today we explore how Srinivasa Ramanujan became one of the twentieth century's most important mathematicians despite minimal formal training, why his work on mock theta functions written on his deathbed in 1920 is now calculating black hole entropy, and what happens when mathematical genius arrives without credentials, formal education, or any intention of showing its working. We discover why Ramanujan's instant recognition of taxi number 1729's properties demonstrated supernatural intimacy with numbers, how his "Lost Notebook" misfiled for fifty-six years contained solutions to problems that wouldn't be posed for decades, and why the universe appears to have granted one self-taught clerk from colonial India direct access to mathematics' future. AI Transparency: In a universe increasingly filled with AI-generated content, we believe in being clear about what’s human and what’s not. Your time is valuable, and you deserve to know what you’re experiencing. The narrator, David, is a professional voice actor who has digitized his voice using ElevenLabs’ voice-cloning technology and is fairly compensated for his vocal performance. Thumbnails are created using OpenArt, and music and sound effects come from Pixabay. Everything else—the research, the writing, jokes, sound editing, and interdimensional coffee consumption—is 100% human-made by a human. https://multiverseemployeehandbook.com

    34 min
  8. Can We Live On the Moon?

    FEB 17

    Can We Live On the Moon?

    More than fifty years after Eugene Cernan left the last human bootprint in lunar regolith, the Moon has become the focal point of a new space race driven by geopolitics, commercial ambition, and the promise of water ice. 🎧 Love the show? Help us improve in 2 minutes: https://tally.so/r/nr1evM This episode examines whether humans can actually establish permanent residence on the lunar surface, exploring NASA's Artemis programme and China's International Lunar Research Station timelines, the engineering challenges of razor-sharp regolith and radiation exposure without atmospheric shielding, the economics of In-Situ Resource Utilisation that transforms ice into rocket fuel, and what daily life might look like for the first permanent lunar residents living underground in lava tubes whilst monitoring their bone density and gazing at Earth hanging in the black sky above—all whilst confronting the greatest unknown: what happens when someone gives birth at one-sixth gravity. AI Transparency: In a universe increasingly filled with AI-generated content, we believe in being clear about what’s human and what’s not. Your time is valuable, and you deserve to know what you’re experiencing. The narrator, David, is a professional voice actor who has digitized his voice using ElevenLabs’ voice-cloning technology and is fairly compensated for his vocal performance. Thumbnails are created using OpenArt AI, and music and sound effects come from Pixabay, created by human artists. Everything else—the research, the writing, jokes, sound editing, and interdimensional coffee consumption—is 100% human-made by a human. https://multiverseemployeehandbook.com

    35 min
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About

The Multiverse Employee Handbook is a science comedy podcast where workplace humor meets cosmic exploration. From quantum mechanics explained through staff meetings to space history through annual reviews, we decode scientific mysteries through corporate metaphors. Each episode combines rigorous science with absurdist office scenarios, whether exploring the strange physics of black holes or the equally baffling logic of expense reports. Perfect for curious minds who suspect their workplace might exist across multiple dimensions, we deliver astronomical insights wrapped in corporate satire. Whether you’re fascinated by the mysteries of dark matter or the inexplicable disappearance of break room snacks, our show provides genuine scientific knowledge with existential humor. Subscribe now to navigate both the cosmos and cubicle culture with equal parts wonder and skepticism! New episodes arrive every Tuesday, regardless of temporal anomalies.

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