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CERN Recreates Matter From the Universe’s Earliest Moments · The Quark Side - Quantum Physics Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the quart Side Quantum Physics Podcast, an exploration
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: of the fundamental structure of reality where quantum laws govern matter, energy,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: and information. Here, uncertainty is a feature, not a flaw,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: and understanding begins at the smallest scales.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: Imagine for a second, trying to figure out exactly what
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: the universe looked like just one millionth of a second
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: after it was born.
• 0:34
  Speaker 3: Right, which is just an unimaginably short amount of time.
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, completely, And you can't use a telescope, right because
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: light literally did not exist yet in any way that
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: we could ever actually see.
• 0:44
  Speaker 3: No no stars, no galaxies, no dust clouds.
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: Nothing exactly nothing. So to see that far back you
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: basically have to build a time machine. And today we
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: are exploring a microscopic big Bang.
• 0:56
  Speaker 3: It's a really wild concept.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: It is. We are unpacking how scientists of the certain
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: research facility are smashing atoms together at nearly the speed
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: of light to recreate the absolute beginning of everything. And
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: as part of this journey, we are going to look
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: at how discovering an atomic nucleus shaped like a sub
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: atomic bowling pin is completely rewriting our understanding of the cosmos.
• 1:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, a bowling pin. It sounds absurd, but it's true.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this because you are about to learn
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: how the tiniest, most incomprehensibly small pieces of matter hold
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: the absolute secrets to the universe's most violent and mysterious era.
• 1:34
  Speaker 3: It really is a journey to the absolute, blistering extremes
• 1:39
  Speaker 3: of physics. I mean, when we talk about the beginning
• 1:41
  Speaker 3: of the universe, that very first millions of a second,
• 1:44
  Speaker 3: we basically have to throw out every single thing we
• 1:47
  Speaker 3: think we know about matter.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: Right, because it's nothing like what we see today, Oh.
• 1:51
  Speaker 3: Not even close. If you look at the atoms that
• 1:54
  Speaker 3: make up your own body, or you know the device
• 1:57
  Speaker 3: you were listening to this on the air, you are
• 2:01
  Speaker 3: none of those building blocks existed.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: Yet because it was just too hot exactly.
• 2:05
  Speaker 3: The universe was far too hot and chaotic for anything
• 2:08
  Speaker 3: that organized to survive.
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: So there were no molecules, no basic elements like carbon
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: or oxygen. The heat was just I mean unimaginable. You
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: couldn't even form a basic proton or neutron.
• 2:19
  Speaker 3: No, you couldn't. Instead, the universe was completely filled with
• 2:22
  Speaker 3: this primordial matter, which is an extreme state known as
• 2:25
  Speaker 3: quark gluon.
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: Plasma, quark gluon plasma.
• 2:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah, in our modern, you know, much cooler universe. Quarks
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: and gluons are essentially the fundamental hardware of reality. They
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: are locked up tightly inside protons and neutrons. But the
• 2:38
  Speaker 3: way they are locked up is actually incredibly counterintuitive. The
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: force that holds them together, which we call the strong force,
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: it acts a lot like a microscopic rubber band.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: Wait a rubber band, how so?
• 2:51
  Speaker 3: Well, Normally in physics, if you say, move two magnets apart,
• 2:54
  Speaker 3: the attraction gets weaker.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: Right, the further away they are, the less they pull, exactly.
• 2:59
  Speaker 3: But with if you try to pull two of them apart,
• 3:02
  Speaker 3: the strong force connecting them actually gets stronger the further
• 3:05
  Speaker 3: you pull. Oh wow, Yeah, the tension just builds and builds,
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: and eventually the rubber band snaps. But instead of leaving
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: you with two free, isolated quarks, the pure energy of
• 3:15
  Speaker 3: that snap instantly manifests into brand new quarks.
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: You're kidding, So it just makes more of them.
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: Yep, they immediately pair up again. So under normal conditions,
• 3:24
  Speaker 3: you can never ever get a quark by itself. They
• 3:27
  Speaker 3: are permanently confined.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: Unless I'm guessing you introduce an apocalyptic level of heat
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: and energy, which is where that primordial quark gluon plasma
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: comes in.
• 3:37
  Speaker 3: That is the threshold. Yeah, in that first fraction of
• 3:40
  Speaker 3: a microsecond after the Big Bang, the ambient heat and
• 3:44
  Speaker 3: the energy density were so unimaginably intense that those rubber
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: bands simply melted away. Wow, the boundaries of the protons
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: and neutrons just dissolved, So the quarks and gluons were
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: no longer confined into these neat little packages. They were
• 3:58
  Speaker 3: free roaming past one another in this totally chaotic, ultra hot,
• 4:04
  Speaker 3: frictionless liquid soup.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: And because that primordial soup hasn't existed naturally for what
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: thirteen point eight billion years, studying it requires actually recreating.
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: It, which is no small feat.
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: Right. If you are standing inside the CERN facility in
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: Switzerland right now, specifically at the Alice detector, you'd be
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: looking at the exact machinery designed to do that. They
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: are taking atomic nuclei, accelerating them through a twenty seven
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: kilometer underground ring to ninety nine point nine to nine
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: percent the speed of light and just collide them head on.
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: The engineering required to achieve this is staggering. I mean,
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: we're talking about engineering a microscopic event with temperatures hundreds
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: of thousands of times hotter than the core of our suns.
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: That's just nuts.
• 4:43
  Speaker 3: It is. It is a level of heat that fundamentally
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: breaks the rules of modern matter just to free those
• 4:50
  Speaker 3: subatomic particles for a fleeting moment.
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: It's kind of wild to conceptualize. To me. It's like
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: trying to understand how a massive compon plex wedding cake
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: was baked by taking two fully baked cakes and just
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: smashing them together so hard and so incredibly fast that
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: they instantly melt back down into raw flour, sugar, and eggs.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: I love that, except in this case it's the fundamental
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: matter of the universe. We are violently destroying the modern
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: structure of reality to see the raw, unbaked ingredients.
• 5:22
  Speaker 3: What's fascinating here is that this isn't just about destroying matter.
• 5:25
  Speaker 3: When you use that k analogy, you're hinting at reversing
• 5:28
  Speaker 3: a one way process. In a very real mathematical sense,
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: this experiment is a time machine. By creating that quark
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: gluon plasma, researchers are actively recreating the exact primordial conditions
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: of the early universe. It is not a computer simulation.
• 5:42
  Speaker 3: It is not a theoretical model.
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: That's a real deal.
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  Speaker 3: It is the actual physical state of the cosmos as
• 5:47
  Speaker 3: it existed thirteen point eight billion years ago, basically pulled
• 5:50
  Speaker 3: out of the past and brought into existence for a
• 5:53
  Speaker 3: fraction of a second inside a physical detector.
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: So we have this time machine that relies on a
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: total incomprehensible amount of energy to melt these subatomic bonds naturally.
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: For decades, physicists assumed the only way to generate that
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: kind of apocalyptic heat was to use the absolute heaviest,
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: most massive ammunition they could find. That was the prevailing wisdom. Right,
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: you want the biggest bang, you use the biggest ingredients.
• 6:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that was the foundational assumption of the field. For
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: a very long time, the scientific community operated on the
• 6:23
  Speaker 3: premise that creating this primordial plasma required collisions between massive,
• 6:28
  Speaker 3: extremely heavy atomic nuclei. Look lead, right, Yes, lead was
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: the standard ammunition. A single lead nucleus has over two
• 6:36
  Speaker 3: hundred protons and neutrons packed together. So when you take
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: two of those massive heavyweights and smash them together at
• 6:42
  Speaker 3: near light speed, the total kinetic energy involved in the
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: crash is astronomical, which makes sense right. It results in
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: a massive, sprawling release of energy, which everyone thought was
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: the absolute baseline requirement to generate enough heat to melt
• 6:56
  Speaker 3: protons and neutrons into that quark gluon plasma.
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: But that entire assumption has just been turned on its head.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: Physicists have now succeeded in creating this exact same primordial
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: matter by smashing together much much smaller, lighter nuclei. Specifically,
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: they used oxygen sixteen and neon.
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: Twenty, and this sent shockwaves through the physics community. I mean,
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: oxygen has just sixteen protons and neutrons in its nucleus.
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: Neon has twenty, compared to over two hundred for lead.
• 7:26
  Speaker 3: Exactly compared to lead, these are absolute featherweights. They contain
• 7:30
  Speaker 3: just a tiny fraction of the total mass.
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: Okay, hold on, I have to push back on this
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: because the math doesn't seem to add up here. You
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: just said lead has over two hundred protons and neutrons
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: and oxygen has sixteen. If lead is the heavyweight champion
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: of atoms, how does a featherweight like oxygen pack enough
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: punch to actually melt matter? It's a great question, because
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: if breaking those strong force rubber bands requires such an
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: absurd amount of heat, doesn't using a lighter ingredient contradict
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: the whole idea that you need a massive impact to
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: generate that kind of force. I thought maximum mass was
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: the whole point.
• 8:02
  Speaker 3: I know it completely sounds like a contradiction on the surface,
• 8:06
  Speaker 3: but it actually reveals a much deeper, more elegant truth
• 8:10
  Speaker 3: about the physics of phase transitions. We have to stop
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: thinking about it purely in terms of total math and
• 8:15
  Speaker 3: start thinking about relativistic energy density. Okay, think of it
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: like a stiletto heel versus a snowshoe.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: I'm listening.
• 8:21
  Speaker 3: So a massive lead nucleus is like a snowshoe. It
• 8:25
  Speaker 3: has a tremendous amount of total mass and energy, but
• 8:28
  Speaker 3: when it collides, that energy is spread out over a
• 8:30
  Speaker 3: relatively large sub atomic area.
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: Right, the impact is distributed exactly.
• 8:34
  Speaker 3: Now, Oxygen and neon are much much smaller. When you
• 8:37
  Speaker 3: accelerate an oxygen nucleus to ninety nine point ninety nine percent,
• 8:41
  Speaker 3: the speed of light, relativistic physics kicks in. Its effective
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: momentum becomes gargantuan. Okay, So when those two tiny oxygen
• 8:48
  Speaker 3: nuclei hit, all of their kinetic energy is concentrated into
• 8:51
  Speaker 3: an infinitesimally small, needle like point.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: Oh so it's the stiletto heel stepping on.
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: Your foot, exactly the stiletto heel. Because us the impact
• 9:00
  Speaker 3: zone is so incredibly small, the energy density at that
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  Speaker 3: specific pinpoint spikes dramatically. That localized concentration of energy creates
• 9:10
  Speaker 3: a temperature spite high enough to literally melt the boundaries
• 9:14
  Speaker 3: of the protons.
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: Even though the overall energy of the collision is lower
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: than the lead one.
• 9:18
  Speaker 3: Precisely, it fundamentally pushes the boundary of how small atomic
• 9:23
  Speaker 3: nuclei can be while still successfully recreating primordial matter.
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: So it's not about the total size of the crash
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: at all. It's about the sheer, intensity and focus at
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: the exact point of impact.
• 9:34
  Speaker 3: It redefines the fundamental rules for when matter transitions into
• 9:38
  Speaker 3: this extreme state. We now know that the universe's earliest,
• 9:41
  Speaker 3: most chaotic form of matter can be sparked into existence
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  Speaker 3: from much smaller starting points than we ever dare to imagine.
• 9:47
  Speaker 3: It's redefining the absolute minimum requirements for a little big bang.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, so the stiletto works. We've successfully created this tiny
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: droplet of primordial core glow on plasma using these smaller
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: lighter elements like oxenen and neon. But that breakthrough creates
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: a massive new problem, doesn't it.
• 10:06
  Speaker 3: Oh?
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, because this droplet of plasma exists for a window
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: of time so short it makes a millisecond look like
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: an eternity. We are talking about a fraction of a picosecond.
• 10:16
  Speaker 3: Almost instantly gone right.
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: The matter is so incredibly hot, so heavily pressurized and
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: volatile that it immediately expands, cools down, and crystallizes back
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: into regular particles almost instantly. So how can scientists possibly
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: see what happen inside that droplet, let alone know what
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: the original oxygen or neon atom looked like before the crash.
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: Well, the short answer is they can't see it directly.
• 10:40
  Speaker 3: The plasma phase is entirely too brief for any sensor
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: and existence to snap a picture of it.
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: What do they do?
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: Instead? They have to use incredibly complex computational physics to
• 10:49
  Speaker 3: work backward from the wreckage after the collision, As the
• 10:52
  Speaker 3: primordial plasma cools and expands, it sprays out thousands and
• 10:56
  Speaker 3: thousands of newly formed particles in every direction like shrapnel,
• 11:00
  Speaker 3: exactly like shrapnel, and the alice detector at CERNE is
• 11:03
  Speaker 3: basically a massive, multi layered cylinder of sensors surrounding the
• 11:07
  Speaker 3: collision point. Its whole job is to capture the trajectory,
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: the speed, the mass, and the angle of all that
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: subatomic shrapnel flying away from the impact zone.
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: And the distribution of that shrapnel is the key to
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: everything right, because it turns out that the geometric shape
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: of the original atomic nucleus thing that exploded directly governs
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: the fluid dynamics of how those resulting particles move after
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: the crash.
• 11:30
  Speaker 3: Yes, the flow of those particles is entirely ad dictated
• 11:34
  Speaker 3: by the initial pressure gradients of the plasma, and those
• 11:37
  Speaker 3: pressure gradients carry the imprint of the initial conditions.
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: Okay, I think I need a visual for that.
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: Imagine squishing a perfectly round water balloon in your hands
• 11:45
  Speaker 3: until it pops. The water will spray out in a
• 11:48
  Speaker 3: generally uniform symmetrical pattern because the initial shape was a sphere.
• 11:52
  Speaker 3: Makes sense, that is what happens with oxygen sixteen collisions.
• 11:56
  Speaker 3: The oxygen nucleus is essentially spherical, so when two of
• 12:00
  Speaker 3: them melt into plasma. The resulting expansion and the spray
• 12:04
  Speaker 3: of particles hitting the CERN detectors produce a very rounded,
• 12:08
  Speaker 3: symmetrical pattern.
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: But when they ran the collisions using neon twenty, the
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: pattern hitting the sensors wasn't perfectly rounded at all. The
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: spray of particles had this highly distinct asymmetrical shape. It
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: produced a pattern shaped remarkably like a bowling.
• 12:24
  Speaker 3: Pin, a sub atomic bowling pin, which is just so
• 12:27
  Speaker 3: weird to picture it is, and the reason for this
• 12:29
  Speaker 3: comes down to the internal structure of the neon twenty
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: nucleus itself. Neon has ten protons and ten neutrons, but
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: inside the nucleus they don't just slosh around evenly like
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: a smooth liquid.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: Oh they don't.
• 12:41
  Speaker 3: No, They actually tend to group together into discrete clusters
• 12:44
  Speaker 3: of two protons and two neutrons, which is essentially the
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: makeup of a helium nucleus, also known as an alpha particle.
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: In neon twenty, these clusters arrange themselves in a highly
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: specific way that creates a physical bulge at one end
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: of the nucleus and a taper at the other.
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: End, creating a bowling pin, creating a bowling pin.
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: So when two of these asymmetric elongated shapes crash into
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: each other and melt into that ultra hot liquid plasma,
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: that specific initial geometry dictates the pressure inside the droplet.
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: Ah.
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: I see the plasma is squeezed harder in some directions
• 13:16
  Speaker 3: than others, It expands faster along the short axis than
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: the long axis, and that uneven asymmetrical expansion dictates the
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: exact flight paths of the subatomic shrapnel hitting the detector walls.
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: Here's where it gets really interesting. There's this brilliant analogy
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: to explain how scientists actually decipher all of this chaos.
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: It's exactly like shining a light on an object and
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: looking at its shadow. You can't see the object itself,
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: but the shape of the shadow completely reveals what's casting it.
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: I love that analogy, right. In this case, the spray
• 13:48
  Speaker 2: of particles hitting the detector is the shadow.
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: If we connect this to the bigger picture, it is
• 13:53
  Speaker 3: a brilliant analogy. But we also have to appreciate the
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: sheer computing power required to actually look at that shadow.
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it's not literally just a shadow on a wall,
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: not at all.
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: The scientists are taking the data from tens of thousands
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: of individual particle strikes, feeding them into supercomputers and running
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: massive fluid dynamic algorithms backward. They map the exact angle, momentum,
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: and energy of every single piece of shrapnel to reverse
• 14:17
  Speaker 3: engineer the three D pressure gradient of the droplet the
• 14:20
  Speaker 3: exact moment it burst.
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: It's unbelievable, and if we pull back for a second,
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: reading that computational shadow is a massive leap forward for physics.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: The neon's bowling pin shape proves that by carefully tracking
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: the movement of post collision particles, physicists can deduce the
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: exact geometric shapes of atomic nuclei, which is huge. Yeah,
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: we are talking about objects so impossibly small that they
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: completely divide traditional observation. You can't just put an atom
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: under a microscope and look at its shape. Visible lightwaves
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: are literally too large to interact with them. But now
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: we can read their geometric signature in the explosive aftermath
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: of a relativistic collision.
• 14:58
  Speaker 3: It is difficult to over state how revolutionary this tool
• 15:02
  Speaker 3: is for the physics community. It is a wonderfully weird
• 15:05
  Speaker 3: visual The idea of a subatomic bowling pin spinning around
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: out there in the quantum realm. But this specific geometry
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: of an atomic nucleus matters deeply. It isn't just a
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: cool piece of trivia. Physicists are obsessed with knowing the
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: exact shape of these tiny building blocks, because the shape
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: is never just a random coincidence, right.
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: The question of the shape and internal structure of atomic
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: nuclei has occupied physicists for more than seventy years and
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: has incredibly deep roots because the geometric shape reveals exactly
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: how those protons and neutrons are organized inside the nucleus.
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: And that organization is entirely dictated by the laws of physics.
• 15:42
  Speaker 3: Specifically the strong force. We talked about it earlier, the
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: rubber band.
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the force pulling the quarks together exactly.
• 15:48
  Speaker 3: The strong force is one of the four fundamental forces
• 15:50
  Speaker 3: of nature, alongside gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak force. It
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: is the incredibly powerful glue that binds protons and neutrons together,
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: actively overcoming the intense electromagnetic repulsion that desperately wants to
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: tear all those positively charged protons apart.
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: Because positive charges repel each other like magnets, exactly so
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: cramming ten positive protons into a tiny neon nucleus should
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: cause it to blow itself apart instantly. The strong force
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: is basically the only thing keeping the universe.
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: Intact, that is the crux of it. But despite being
• 16:22
  Speaker 3: the most powerful force in nature by a massive margin,
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: scientists are still struggling to fully understand all its nuances.
• 16:29
  Speaker 3: How does it behave when you add more neutrons? How
• 16:31
  Speaker 3: does it organize different clusters?
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: So the shape tells us that.
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: Yes, the geometric shape of a nucleus is basically a
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: physical manifestation of the strong force at work. By understanding
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: the shape, by seeing way at bulges and where it tapers,
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: we reverse engineer the rules of the strong force itself.
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: And historically scientists study this at very low energies, right
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: like they would watch the gentle rotation and vibration of
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: atomic nuclei to figure out their structure.
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it was a much more delicate process.
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: So instead of that old delicate way of gently vibrating
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: an atom to guess its shape, tapping a crystal bell
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: to hear its ring, they are now just violently smashing
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: it at maximum energy with a particle accelerator and reading
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: the shrapnel that is a wildly different approach to studying
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: the exact same fundamental force.
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: It really frames this violent approach as a true paradigm
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: shift in the field of physics. For decades, the low
• 17:24
  Speaker 3: energy tapping the bell method was the gold standard. But
• 17:27
  Speaker 3: by reading the imprint left behind by high energy collisions,
• 17:31
  Speaker 3: scientists now have a brand new, incredibly powerful tool to
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: investigate other mysterious atomic nuclei whose structures are entirely unknown.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: They don't have to guess anymore, right, They.
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: Don't just have to rely on delicate vibrations. They can
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: read the fundamental architecture of matter in the explosive ashes
• 17:47
  Speaker 3: of a tiny big bang.
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: And the mission is an over. This breakthrough with oxygen
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: and neon is just the beginning of this new era.
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: Because researchers still haven't found the absolute boundary for when
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: our gluon plasma can be created.
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: We still don't know how small we can go.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: Right, we know the stiletto heel works for oxygen, but
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: how small can we go before the collision just isn't
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: powerful enough to melt those strong force rubber bands. The
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: immediate next step for the teams, Etcern is to run
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: these same high speed collisions with an even lighter nucleus,
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: which is helium four.
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: That is going to be the ultimate test of energy density.
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: Helium four is incredibly light, just two protons and two neutrons, So.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: It's basically just one of those clusters we were talking
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: about earlier.
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: Exactly. It is essentially one of those alpha particle clusters
• 18:33
  Speaker 3: from inside the neon nucleus, but flying entirely on its own.
• 18:37
  Speaker 3: If they can manage to generate the primordial soup from
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: a helium collision, it will once again completely rewrite the
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: rule book on the minimum conditions necessary to spark the
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: early universe. It will push the physics of phase transitions
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: to its absolute breaking point.
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: It's mind blowing. So what does this all mean for
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: you listening right now? Because I know it can be
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: very easy to get lost in the sub atomic weeds.
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: We're talking about quarks, glue ones, the strong force, relativistic speeds, supercomputers.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: It's a lot.
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: It's very dense material.
• 19:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but think about this in a deeply personal way.
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: The precise structure of the tiny atoms making up your
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: own body, the geometry of the carbon in your DNA,
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: the oxygen in the air, you are breathing, and everything
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: you interact with daily is intimately and directly connected to
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: the explosive birth of the entire universe.
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: It really is.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: The rules governing a microscopic bowling pin shaped neon nucleus
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: today in a lab in Switzerland are the exact same
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: rules that dictated how the universe behaved in its very
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: first millionth of a second. You are walking around made
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: of matter that follows rules forged in a primordial fire.
• 19:45
  Speaker 3: This raises an important question, though, something that fundamentally pushes
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: the boundaries of how we see the universe as a whole.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: What's that?
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: Well, we've just established that the microscopic bowling pin like
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: shape of a single atomic nucleus dictates the flow and
• 19:58
  Speaker 3: expansion of the primar plasma in a tiny collision right right, the.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: Shape of the explosion is governed by the shape.
• 20:04
  Speaker 3: Of the set exactly now, scale that up our early
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: universe was once entirely made of this exact same expanding
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: quark gluon plasma. Could the very macro structure of the
• 20:15
  Speaker 3: cosmos we see today, the sprawling distribution of our galaxies,
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: the massive dark voids in space, the intricate web of
• 20:22
  Speaker 3: star clusters stretching across billions of light years. Could all
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: of that simply be a massive, univers sized shadow cast
• 20:29
  Speaker 3: by the geometric quirks and quantum fluctuations of subatomic particles
• 20:33
  Speaker 3: from that first millionth of a second.
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: Wow. That is something to think about the next time
• 20:38
  Speaker 2: you look up at the night sky. The biggest and
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: most unfathomable structures in the universe might just be a
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: reflection of the tiniest invisible shapes. Until next time, keep
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: questioning the shadows.