Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / The Sticky Story of the Gluon's Discovery

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The Sticky Story of the Gluon's Discovery · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:08
Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, is size as dramatic as they make it
0:12
Speaker 1: out to be in the movies? You mean, like we
0:13
Speaker 1: all wear white lab coats and go ah ha while
0:16
Speaker 1: making discoveries in the shower. I don't want to know
0:19
Speaker 1: if you wear a lab coat in the shower. But
0:22
Speaker 1: isn't that dramatic? No, it's not usually so exciting. I mean,
0:26
Speaker 1: you don't storm into a room with a piece of
0:27
Speaker 1: definitive evidence on a piece of paper and claim some
0:30
Speaker 1: amazing discovery all the time. I'm waiting for the day
0:33
Speaker 1: I have a chance to do that, But so far
0:35
Speaker 1: nothing really that doesn't happen in particle physics, not usually.
0:39
Speaker 1: But there was this one time in which you wore
0:41
Speaker 1: a lap coat in the shower, or in which he
0:43
Speaker 1: had definitive evidence. I'm not going to answer that question.
1:02
Speaker 1: I am poor handy cartoonists and the creator of PhD comments. Hi,
1:05
Speaker 1: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I love storming
1:09
Speaker 1: into rooms with definitive evidence. How often do you get
1:12
Speaker 1: to do it, Daniel? Never? Almost never. I'm desperate for
1:15
Speaker 1: an opportunity. How do you know you love it if
1:18
Speaker 1: you've never done it? I dream about it? How was
1:21
Speaker 1: that you stimulated in your head. It's funny when I
1:24
Speaker 1: talked to young students who are interested in particle physics
1:27
Speaker 1: and they read about big discoveries and amazing revelations about
1:30
Speaker 1: the universe, and then I tell them that, you know,
1:32
Speaker 1: we don't make discoveries every day. It's not like that
1:35
Speaker 1: on a day to day basis. Unfortunately, really, you throw
1:39
Speaker 1: cold water into their optimism and enthusiasm. I do. I
1:42
Speaker 1: don't want to mislead them. And then I show them
1:44
Speaker 1: all the fun puzzles that we do get to solve
1:46
Speaker 1: on a day to day basis, which is more like
1:48
Speaker 1: why is my code not working? And less like what
1:51
Speaker 1: is universe made at of? And then they walk out
1:53
Speaker 1: of your office? Or are they hooked by the small puzzle?
1:57
Speaker 1: You get some of both, You get some of both.
2:00
Speaker 1: Welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe,
2:03
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio in which we try
2:05
Speaker 1: to hook you on the puzzles of the universe, the
2:08
Speaker 1: big questions about how the universe was made, how it
2:11
Speaker 1: all fits together, why it works at all, and whether
2:14
Speaker 1: we can understand it. Yeah, because science is a process,
2:18
Speaker 1: it's real people asking questions about the universe and trying
2:22
Speaker 1: to figure out how to answer those questions because it's
2:25
Speaker 1: not always clear. That's right. It's people pushing forward individually
2:29
Speaker 1: with their curiosity on the boundary of knowledge, trying to
2:32
Speaker 1: figure out is this the way things work? Is that
2:34
Speaker 1: the way things work? Does this particle exist? How about
2:37
Speaker 1: that other weird particle? And sometimes there are dramatic days
2:41
Speaker 1: of discovery, though those are few and far between. Usually
2:45
Speaker 1: it's more subdued. You would say, you know more about
2:48
Speaker 1: you know, slow discoveries or slow consensus of discovery, slow discoveries.
2:53
Speaker 1: You know, these days the particles were discovering take more
2:56
Speaker 1: information to find them. You don't have like a single
2:59
Speaker 1: picture of an event where you say, oh, look at
3:01
Speaker 1: this new weird particle that nobody's ever seen before. It's
3:04
Speaker 1: more statistical. But back in the early days of particle physics,
3:07
Speaker 1: you really could. You could like have a cloud chamber
3:10
Speaker 1: and you could see a particle decay in a new
3:11
Speaker 1: way that nobody's ever seen before. So you could have
3:14
Speaker 1: this like single event discovery. But those days are behind us.
3:18
Speaker 1: Do you think those people would also describe it as
3:20
Speaker 1: exciting and dramatic or maybe I wonder if it was
3:22
Speaker 1: still a slock for them, you know, like it was.
3:25
Speaker 1: It was incremental and slow for them. I think there
3:27
Speaker 1: were a lot of boring days in between the dramatic
3:30
Speaker 1: days of discovery, but those individual days must have been
3:33
Speaker 1: pretty exciting. I think about the way archaeologists like dig
3:36
Speaker 1: for human bones, and sometimes you hear about like a
3:39
Speaker 1: twenty five year career that finally they found a jaw bone,
3:43
Speaker 1: and I'm thinking, like, why do they keep digging after
3:45
Speaker 1: twenty two or twenty three years. That takes a lot
3:48
Speaker 1: of determination. They were waiting for so much to throw
3:50
Speaker 1: them a bone to their career, and then it happens
3:54
Speaker 1: and does happen. And that's why I think these stories
3:56
Speaker 1: of discovery are useful because they help inspire the next
3:59
Speaker 1: generation of scientists to remember that we don't make discoveries
4:03
Speaker 1: unless somebody keeps pushing forward. At least it helps get
4:07
Speaker 1: them into your office, at which point you discourage them
4:10
Speaker 1: and tell them the real truth about research. I tell
4:14
Speaker 1: them the real truth to encourage them, because there's lots
4:16
Speaker 1: of different ways to do science. Some people like to
4:18
Speaker 1: do science by writing programs. Some people like to do
4:21
Speaker 1: science by tweaking lasers in the basement. There's lots of
4:24
Speaker 1: different ways to do science, and the most important thing
4:26
Speaker 1: is to find the way that you find fun. Well,
4:29
Speaker 1: it is fun to discover new things. And so today
4:32
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about a very specific discovery that
4:36
Speaker 1: was done in particle physics and Daniel, this is a
4:40
Speaker 1: bit of a sticky story. It is a bit of
4:42
Speaker 1: a sticky story, and it's part of a series of
4:45
Speaker 1: episodes we've had on how we understand the standard model.
4:48
Speaker 1: We know that everything is made out of particles, but
4:50
Speaker 1: how do we know that those particles exist? Are they
4:53
Speaker 1: just theoretical ideas? What experiments did we do to really
4:56
Speaker 1: reveal them? And for me this is really fun because
5:00
Speaker 1: minds people that all these concepts about how the universe
5:02
Speaker 1: works came out of individual experiments, things people saw, weird
5:07
Speaker 1: stuff that happened when we smashed stuff together that reveal
5:10
Speaker 1: the nature of the universe. And by standard model, you
5:13
Speaker 1: mean sort of like our collection or our idea, our
5:17
Speaker 1: our survey of all the particles that make up the universe. Right, Yeah,
5:20
Speaker 1: we've been building it for decades now. Our understanding of
5:24
Speaker 1: what is out there, what kind of particles can be
5:27
Speaker 1: used to make up the universe not just what particles
5:30
Speaker 1: are used to make up me and you and hamsters
5:32
Speaker 1: and lamas and ice cream, but also what kinds of
5:35
Speaker 1: particles are possible, and that gives us a sense for
5:38
Speaker 1: like how the universe is organized and what the patterns are,
5:41
Speaker 1: and and gives us access to some of those really
5:43
Speaker 1: interesting fundamental and basic questions. But we find these one
5:47
Speaker 1: at a time, bit by bit, sometimes after years of
5:50
Speaker 1: painful work. So you call this list or this I
5:53
Speaker 1: guess it's more like a table or like a like
5:55
Speaker 1: a grid of particles. You call that the standard model. Yeah,
5:58
Speaker 1: the standard model is sort of like our current consensus
6:01
Speaker 1: list of particles we found and what we know about them.
6:05
Speaker 1: And so it's filled with a bunch of particles, about
6:08
Speaker 1: twelve of them right so far. Yeah, there are twelve
6:10
Speaker 1: matter particles, the kind of particles that make up me
6:13
Speaker 1: and you and all sorts of stuff. And then there
6:15
Speaker 1: are other kinds of particles that represent forces, the way
6:18
Speaker 1: the things push against each other and pull themselves together.
6:21
Speaker 1: And so there's a handful of those extra particles as well. Yeah,
6:25
Speaker 1: and so today we'll be talking about one that's I mean,
6:27
Speaker 1: you could literally say it's at the nucleus of all
6:30
Speaker 1: the things that we're made out of. Right, that's right.
6:33
Speaker 1: It holds all of us together. So to be on
6:36
Speaker 1: the program, we'll be asking the question how was the
6:43
Speaker 1: glue on discovered? And the glue on is one of
6:46
Speaker 1: my favorite particles because it has such an awesome name.
6:51
Speaker 1: I wonder what that meeting was like. They're like, um,
6:55
Speaker 1: we got this new particle and it's it's really sticky.
6:57
Speaker 1: I can't get it off my fingers. You know. I
7:00
Speaker 1: did a little informal survey here in my household just
7:02
Speaker 1: a few minutes ago. I asked my kids. I said,
7:04
Speaker 1: if I said the word glue on to you, what
7:07
Speaker 1: do you think that means? And my daughter said, I
7:10
Speaker 1: don't know something particle physics ce maybe, but it sounds
7:13
Speaker 1: kind of sticky, and so I thought that was a
7:16
Speaker 1: pretty good guest. Yeah. I think having a particle physics
7:19
Speaker 1: dad might have influenced their answer. That could have been
7:24
Speaker 1: a clue. Yes. Yeah, So this is one of the
7:26
Speaker 1: fundamental particles and it's it's pretty important, right, It's definitely
7:31
Speaker 1: very important. Without the glue on, we would not be here,
7:33
Speaker 1: nuclear I would not hold together the universe as we
7:36
Speaker 1: know it would look totally different without the glue on,
7:39
Speaker 1: but it took a while for us to find It's
7:41
Speaker 1: a pretty interesting story and so we'll jump into that.
7:44
Speaker 1: But first we were wondering how many people out there
7:47
Speaker 1: know about I guess, first of all the glue on,
7:49
Speaker 1: and second of all how it was discovered. So, as usual,
7:52
Speaker 1: Daniel went out there into the wilds of the internet
7:55
Speaker 1: and asked people to send in their answers without looking
7:58
Speaker 1: it up to what they thought was the process in
8:01
Speaker 1: which the glue was discovered. That's right, and so if
8:04
Speaker 1: you'd like the volunteer to answer hard physics questions with
8:07
Speaker 1: no preparation and no googling, please right to us two
8:10
Speaker 1: questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. We'd love to
8:13
Speaker 1: put your baseless speculation on the podcast. So think about
8:16
Speaker 1: it for a second. How would you answer the question
8:19
Speaker 1: what is the gluon? And how was it discovered? Here's
8:22
Speaker 1: what people had to say. I don't know how the
8:24
Speaker 1: clue one was to check it, but like the rest
8:26
Speaker 1: of the tenant and wh community of an imagine, it
8:29
Speaker 1: happened at the LHC and it's discovery as an epic
8:32
Speaker 1: tail that changed the fundamental understanding of the universe, maybe
8:36
Speaker 1: by firing lasers at protons and then protons explode and
8:40
Speaker 1: you can measure bluans flying away. It was about time
8:44
Speaker 1: he was hiding for a long time. Probably was a
8:47
Speaker 1: sting operation there. I think gluon is what holds quarks together.
8:52
Speaker 1: So my guess is, when quirks were discovered, um, we
8:56
Speaker 1: wanted to find out, well, what connects these quirks, what's
8:59
Speaker 1: the strong words that holds these things together? And that
9:02
Speaker 1: might be how blue ones were detected. I think that
9:07
Speaker 1: it's likely that some physicists or scientists discovered it by
9:12
Speaker 1: a happy accident. I think particle physics, you take normal matter,
9:17
Speaker 1: you smash normal matter, normal metal goes boom, and all
9:21
Speaker 1: that is left is some viad stuff. Alright, A lot
9:24
Speaker 1: of people, uh want to give you credit. They think
9:27
Speaker 1: it came from the LHC. That's right. Everybody just gives
9:31
Speaker 1: all the credit for particle discoveries to the latest, hottest, biggest,
9:35
Speaker 1: sexiest collider. Yeah. Well, you guys have taken up a
9:38
Speaker 1: lot of headlines, at least in the last ten years. Yeah,
9:40
Speaker 1: well that's true. That's because it takes a while to
9:42
Speaker 1: build a collider, so you don't get like a new
9:44
Speaker 1: one every year or so. So when you build a
9:46
Speaker 1: collider it sort of takes up the popular imagination for
9:49
Speaker 1: a couple of decades. Well, there are a lot of
9:51
Speaker 1: answers here about it holds nuclear together, involves courts and lasers.
9:57
Speaker 1: So a step us through this, Daniel, I guess, first
10:01
Speaker 1: of all, what is the gluon and does it dry
10:04
Speaker 1: really quickly or do you have to wait like twenty
10:05
Speaker 1: four hours. Well, first of all, I have to say
10:09
Speaker 1: I wish that I had more lasers to play with
10:11
Speaker 1: in my job. Mostly it's just tapping on a keyboard.
10:13
Speaker 1: I don't get a fire laser basically anything ever, which
10:16
Speaker 1: is too bad. Well, you probably have a laser in
10:18
Speaker 1: your mouth, right, but you have a little like a laser.
10:22
Speaker 1: That's how your mouth probably reads where it is. Yeah,
10:24
Speaker 1: that's true. There are lasers everywhere. I have a laser
10:27
Speaker 1: in my laser pointer, which I used to use for
10:29
Speaker 1: lecturing when I gave lectures in person, but no more anyway.
10:33
Speaker 1: A gluon is a really fun particle, and it's a
10:35
Speaker 1: really important particle, and it's connected to the strong nuclear force,
10:40
Speaker 1: and I has sort of the same relationship to the
10:42
Speaker 1: strong nuclear force that the photon does to electromagnetism. Electromagnetism,
10:47
Speaker 1: you remember, is the force that gives us like electricity
10:51
Speaker 1: and magnetism. It's you know, the thing that gives us
10:53
Speaker 1: lightning and electricity and all that good stuff. And that
10:57
Speaker 1: force is carried by the photon. Like any time you
11:00
Speaker 1: have an electromagnetic interaction, you have photons flying around carrying
11:05
Speaker 1: that information. Really, so it's sort of like the transmitter
11:09
Speaker 1: particle the photon. Yeah, exactly. We break up particles into
11:13
Speaker 1: two kinds, matter particles, which are like electrons and corks
11:16
Speaker 1: and that kind of stuff, the stuff that makes up
11:18
Speaker 1: matter and stuff, and then the force particles. And that's
11:21
Speaker 1: how the particles talk to each other. And you can
11:24
Speaker 1: think about two electrons coming near each other. How do
11:27
Speaker 1: they bounce off each other? They don't have like physical
11:30
Speaker 1: edges that touch the way that your elbow touches the table.
11:34
Speaker 1: What happens. They shoot photons at each other to talk
11:37
Speaker 1: to each other and bounce off each other, even like
11:39
Speaker 1: a fridge magnet, or like if if I take two
11:41
Speaker 1: magnets and they repel each other, they're actually shooting photons
11:45
Speaker 1: at each other. Yeah, and it can get a little
11:47
Speaker 1: hairy to think about what the actual photons are. Really.
11:50
Speaker 1: What we're talking about our wiggles in the fields between them.
11:53
Speaker 1: So every magnet has a magnetic field, and when it moves,
11:57
Speaker 1: it changes that magnetic field, and infer nation about the
12:01
Speaker 1: changing field is what we call a photon. These aren't
12:04
Speaker 1: always the same kinds of photons that hit your eyes.
12:07
Speaker 1: That can have very low frequency, a very high frequency,
12:10
Speaker 1: or sometimes they're even virtual particles, not particles that like
12:14
Speaker 1: live a very long time. We have a whole fun
12:17
Speaker 1: podcast about what it means to be a virtual particle.
12:19
Speaker 1: It's just sort of the name you give to the wiggles.
12:23
Speaker 1: When two particles talk to each other, yeah, exactly. The
12:26
Speaker 1: way they talk to each other is sort of action
12:28
Speaker 1: at a distance. You know, people wondered for a long time,
12:30
Speaker 1: like how do things push on each other without touching,
12:33
Speaker 1: And the answer is that they have these fields. Right,
12:35
Speaker 1: An electron, for example, as an electric field around it,
12:38
Speaker 1: and that field is what pushes on the other electron.
12:41
Speaker 1: A totally equivalent way to think about that field is
12:43
Speaker 1: to think about it as a bunch of particles. So
12:46
Speaker 1: you can either think about as fields or particles. For now,
12:49
Speaker 1: we think about it as particles, or think about those
12:51
Speaker 1: particles as the wiggles in the fields. It's really all equivalent, right,
12:55
Speaker 1: And so the gluon is the one that transmits to
12:57
Speaker 1: force for the strong nuke your force. So that's one
13:01
Speaker 1: of the one of the fore fund mental forces. Electromagnetism
13:04
Speaker 1: and gravity are two of them. A third one is
13:06
Speaker 1: the strong nuclear force. That's right exactly. And we spent
13:08
Speaker 1: a lot of time understanding electromagnetism. The first theory of
13:12
Speaker 1: quantum fields was by Feynman and quantum electrodynamics with the
13:16
Speaker 1: understanding of how electrons use photons to talk to each other.
13:20
Speaker 1: And then we thought, well, can we also use this
13:22
Speaker 1: for the other fields and the other forces, and so
13:25
Speaker 1: like the strong nuclear force is a very important one.
13:28
Speaker 1: So people were thinking, if electromagnetism has a particle that's
13:32
Speaker 1: used to go back and forth between electrons, what's the
13:35
Speaker 1: particle that goes back and forth between corks when they
13:38
Speaker 1: interact using the strong nuclear force. And so that's the
13:42
Speaker 1: idea of the gluon. That's why we thought maybe there
13:45
Speaker 1: is a gluon in the universe. And I guess maybe
13:48
Speaker 1: just to recap the strong nuclear forces. It's not a
13:50
Speaker 1: force that we feel on an everyday basis, like you don't,
13:54
Speaker 1: so they need to know about it. But it is
13:56
Speaker 1: sort of what's keeping the nuclear of your atoms together, right,
13:59
Speaker 1: Like it's pretty much the sort of the main place
14:02
Speaker 1: where it acts. Yeah, it's a very short range force,
14:04
Speaker 1: and so it likes to hold things together very very tightly.
14:07
Speaker 1: It's very very powerful, and so it's mostly balanced out.
14:11
Speaker 1: Like anything that's imbalanced on the strong nuclear force. Very
14:15
Speaker 1: rapidly that force will realign so that everything gets like
14:17
Speaker 1: smoothed out and balanced out, and that you don't feel
14:20
Speaker 1: the force anymore. And so it operates mostly very short distances,
14:24
Speaker 1: like the size of the proton. It ties those corks
14:27
Speaker 1: together into a proton and hold it together. And what
14:30
Speaker 1: you feel on a normal, everyday basis is mostly electromagnetism,
14:34
Speaker 1: like when you push against the wall. It's the electromagnetic
14:37
Speaker 1: force of the bonds of the electrons to the atom
14:40
Speaker 1: that are keeping the atoms from passing between each other. Right.
14:43
Speaker 1: But it's very short range, and that like if I
14:45
Speaker 1: have a cork here and a court meter away, they're
14:49
Speaker 1: not going to feel the strong nuclear force, right, It's
14:51
Speaker 1: only when you get them really close to each other,
14:53
Speaker 1: but they then snap together. Yeah, actually you can't have
14:55
Speaker 1: a cork by itself because the strong nuclear force is
14:58
Speaker 1: so powerful that it as soon as you create a
15:01
Speaker 1: quirk by itself and give it like any distance at all,
15:04
Speaker 1: the energy stored in the strong nuclear field is so
15:07
Speaker 1: powerful that other quarks will just be created out of
15:09
Speaker 1: the vacuum to surround it. So the situation you just described,
15:13
Speaker 1: having like two quarks a meter apart is essentially impossible
15:16
Speaker 1: in our universe because so much energy would be stored
15:19
Speaker 1: in the strong nuclear force between them that would just
15:22
Speaker 1: create a shower of other matter in between them to
15:24
Speaker 1: surround them with other quarks. Well that's wild, all right. Well, well,
15:28
Speaker 1: so that's the gluon, but it's different than the photon.
15:30
Speaker 1: That's the gluon exactly, And it's different from the photon,
15:33
Speaker 1: like it's the force particle for the strong nuclear force,
15:36
Speaker 1: and the strong nuclear forces also created different from electromagnetism
15:39
Speaker 1: in lots of other ways, Like it's not just that
15:42
Speaker 1: it's a short range force and it holds a nucleus together.
15:45
Speaker 1: It's different because it's more complicated, like electromagnetism has positive
15:49
Speaker 1: and negative charges, and photons only interact with things that
15:52
Speaker 1: have positive and negative charges. Like if you're neutral, like
15:55
Speaker 1: a neutron or a neutrino, then you can't interact with
15:58
Speaker 1: the photon. The photon ignores you. You on the interact
16:00
Speaker 1: with things that have positive and negative charges. But the
16:03
Speaker 1: strong nuclear force is really weird. It doesn't just have
16:06
Speaker 1: two charges like positive and negative. So you can't like
16:10
Speaker 1: line them up on a number line and think about
16:12
Speaker 1: like plus one plus two zero minus one minus two.
16:16
Speaker 1: It has three different charges, three different directions, so you
16:20
Speaker 1: need like three axis to think about instead of just two,
16:24
Speaker 1: Like it has a plus and minus and a and
16:26
Speaker 1: an x. Yeah, And so instead of lining them up
16:29
Speaker 1: on the number line, we actually think about them in
16:32
Speaker 1: terms of colors. We think about them and the red axis,
16:34
Speaker 1: the green axis, and the blue axis, and that sort
16:38
Speaker 1: of works mathematically because if you add them all up together,
16:41
Speaker 1: you end up in the middle. We call that white
16:44
Speaker 1: or like color lists, And so we try to make
16:46
Speaker 1: this analogy to how we know colors mixed together to
16:50
Speaker 1: help us think about these color charges. These are not
16:53
Speaker 1: electric charges. Their charges for the strong nuclear force their
16:57
Speaker 1: color charges. And I guess maybe a question is how
17:00
Speaker 1: do we know about these different charges, Like it's such
17:03
Speaker 1: a strange concept, it's really weird. And it was a
17:06
Speaker 1: cool discovery actually in the sixties and seventies because when
17:09
Speaker 1: we first started understanding that particles are made out of quarks.
17:13
Speaker 1: You know that protons have quarks inside them, we found
17:16
Speaker 1: all these other particles that were different mixtures of quarks.
17:19
Speaker 1: We found this really weird one, the delta plus plus particle,
17:23
Speaker 1: and it was made of three up corks, which just
17:25
Speaker 1: like three upquorks combined, gives you this doubly charged delta
17:29
Speaker 1: plus plus particle. But there's a problem with that because
17:33
Speaker 1: we think that quarks are fermions. That means that, like electrons,
17:37
Speaker 1: you can't have two of them in the same state.
17:39
Speaker 1: Like you know how if you have an atom, you
17:41
Speaker 1: put an electron around it, the next one has to
17:43
Speaker 1: go up in the next energy level. You can't like
17:45
Speaker 1: hang out together. For meons don't like to be together
17:47
Speaker 1: in the same quantum state. And so the problem with
17:50
Speaker 1: the delta plus plus is that it has three of
17:52
Speaker 1: these corks, but they should be interchangeable, Like how can
17:56
Speaker 1: you have three fermions all in the same quantum state?
17:59
Speaker 1: Together in a particle seemed to violate this basic principle,
18:03
Speaker 1: and so somebody thought, well, maybe they're not the same.
18:05
Speaker 1: Maybe they all have like a different color charge. One
18:09
Speaker 1: is red, one is green, and one is blue, and
18:12
Speaker 1: that would explain it. And so that was sort of
18:14
Speaker 1: the origin of the idea. And so I guess maybe
18:17
Speaker 1: courts can have any one of these three charges, like
18:20
Speaker 1: an upcork or a down court can be red, green,
18:23
Speaker 1: or blue. Yeah, exactly the way, like an electron and
18:26
Speaker 1: positron are related because they have opposite electric charge, but
18:29
Speaker 1: they are a different particle. A quirk can be a
18:32
Speaker 1: red cork or green cork or blue cork. We don't
18:34
Speaker 1: call a different particle. What the truth is that there
18:36
Speaker 1: are three different kinds of up corks. They really are
18:39
Speaker 1: different particles. Green upcork is different from a red upcork
18:43
Speaker 1: or a blue upcork, the same way an electron is
18:45
Speaker 1: different from a positron. All right, So that's the glue on.
18:48
Speaker 1: The blue on is what transmits the strong the dervors
18:51
Speaker 1: and which therefore holds all the quarks inside of your
18:54
Speaker 1: protons and neutrons together, which is kind of important. Without it,
18:57
Speaker 1: you would just fall apart. You totally would be because
19:00
Speaker 1: I remember that these corks also have electric charges, like
19:03
Speaker 1: a proton has two up corks in it and a
19:06
Speaker 1: down court, and the charges they were totally blow it
19:08
Speaker 1: apart if the glue wasn't there to hold it together.
19:10
Speaker 1: So thank you gluon. Thanks thanks for sticking with us
19:15
Speaker 1: and sticking us together. All right, So it's super important,
19:18
Speaker 1: and people theorized that it might exist, just like the
19:20
Speaker 1: photon existed, But discovery of it was pretty interesting and
19:24
Speaker 1: pretty dramatic. So let's get into that. But first let's
19:28
Speaker 1: take a quick break, all right. So we're talking about
19:42
Speaker 1: the discovery of the gluon, which was not a simple
19:47
Speaker 1: or easy discovery apparently, Daniel. Yeah, and it was a
19:49
Speaker 1: dramatic race actually between two different groups of folks, the
19:53
Speaker 1: Europeans in Americans, both trying to build a collider capable
19:57
Speaker 1: of discovering the gluon and racing again to each other. Wow,
20:01
Speaker 1: that does sound dramatic. So I guess people knew that
20:03
Speaker 1: it probably existed, right because it something must be transmitting
20:07
Speaker 1: the strong nuclear force. But I guess maybe just the
20:11
Speaker 1: question was like nobody had seen it, right, nobody had
20:14
Speaker 1: seen it on like a piece of paper or an experiment. Yeah,
20:17
Speaker 1: so this is like the late seventies, and at that
20:20
Speaker 1: point we had found all the corks, the up, the down,
20:23
Speaker 1: the charm, the strangers to bottom, but not yet the
20:25
Speaker 1: top corp. People were pretty sure the top cork was
20:28
Speaker 1: out there, but it's gonna be another fifteen years or
20:31
Speaker 1: so before it was discovered. And we knew about the
20:33
Speaker 1: photon and electrons and stuff, but all the other force
20:36
Speaker 1: particles that we now know that gluon, the W and
20:39
Speaker 1: di z, those had not yet been discovered, and so
20:42
Speaker 1: we really only had evidence for one force particle, the photon,
20:46
Speaker 1: and so we were pretty sure the glueon existed, but
20:48
Speaker 1: it was kind of a big extrapolation, and so it
20:51
Speaker 1: was gonna be really nice to say, like, wow, it
20:52
Speaker 1: really existed actually out there. It was sort of a
20:55
Speaker 1: big question for particle physics whether this whole like forces
20:59
Speaker 1: as particles moving between other particles thing was real, you know,
21:03
Speaker 1: the same way like we think maybe gravity has a graviton,
21:07
Speaker 1: but nobody's ever found it before. We could be totally wrong.
21:09
Speaker 1: Maybe gravity doesn't work by exchanging particles. So it was
21:13
Speaker 1: really a big open question. It's easy to look back
21:15
Speaker 1: on these things and say, oh, yeah, well that was obvious.
21:17
Speaker 1: But at the time there was a lot of uncertainty
21:19
Speaker 1: about whether this whole picture of particles talking into each
21:22
Speaker 1: other by passing other particles back and forth was really valid.
21:26
Speaker 1: We didn't know the idea would stick together. So I
21:30
Speaker 1: guess maybe you know it's interesting because a photon you
21:33
Speaker 1: can sort of see right, Like you can literally see
21:35
Speaker 1: a photon it it'll hit your eyeball in the back
21:38
Speaker 1: and you'll see it. But concluance do that too, Like
21:41
Speaker 1: can you see an individual gluon? Like can it float
21:44
Speaker 1: out into space and hit your eyeball? Well, a gluon,
21:47
Speaker 1: like a cork, can't be by itself, and that's because
21:49
Speaker 1: it's colored, not in the sense of it like is red, green,
21:52
Speaker 1: or blue, but in the sense of the strong nuclear charge.
21:55
Speaker 1: And anything that has a strong nuclear charge has so
21:58
Speaker 1: much energy bound up in that fours that immediately creates
22:01
Speaker 1: a spray of particles. So if you had a gluon
22:04
Speaker 1: flying through the air somehow, what would happen is that
22:06
Speaker 1: would create other quirks around it to balance out that
22:10
Speaker 1: color charge. So what you get is a stream of particles. Wait,
22:14
Speaker 1: a gluon has charged, but like a photon doesn't have charge.
22:17
Speaker 1: A photon is neutral, right, Like light doesn't have positive
22:21
Speaker 1: or negative charge, but gluons do have charge. Yeah, and
22:24
Speaker 1: that's one thing that makes a strong force very different
22:27
Speaker 1: from electromagtism. You totally put your finger on it. Photons
22:29
Speaker 1: don't talk to each other. Like photons passed right through
22:32
Speaker 1: each other. They don't have electric charges. Photons can only
22:35
Speaker 1: talk to things that do have electric charges, but they
22:38
Speaker 1: don't talk to each other. So like two rays of
22:40
Speaker 1: light don't bounce off each other. But gluons, you're totally right.
22:44
Speaker 1: They have color and they actually carry two colors each
22:47
Speaker 1: of them. And because of that, they can interact with
22:49
Speaker 1: each other. And so two gluons like shooting at each
22:52
Speaker 1: other with totally like form a little particle. In fact,
22:55
Speaker 1: we're searching for that. We're gonna talk about that later.
22:57
Speaker 1: It's called a glue ball when you combine two gluons
22:59
Speaker 1: and do a particle and glue ball. Nice, all right,
23:04
Speaker 1: So there was a race to detect the glue. So
23:07
Speaker 1: we said, have had an idea of it and maybe
23:09
Speaker 1: a theory about it, but nobody had actually seen it
23:12
Speaker 1: until people were smashing things together hoping that one one
23:15
Speaker 1: would pop out, or that you know, evidence of one
23:17
Speaker 1: would pomp out. Yeah, the idea was that you needed
23:19
Speaker 1: enough energy to make them. What we had done already
23:22
Speaker 1: was smash particles together and see pairs of quarks. So
23:26
Speaker 1: you can smash, for example, an electron and a positron together,
23:30
Speaker 1: and those will annihily and turn into a little ball
23:32
Speaker 1: of energy like a photon. And sometimes that photon will
23:35
Speaker 1: turn into two quarks, like an up quirk and an
23:38
Speaker 1: anti up cork. Whence you get there, there's two quarks
23:40
Speaker 1: flying out. But because of what we talked about earlier,
23:43
Speaker 1: how corks can't be by themselves, each one turns into
23:45
Speaker 1: like a stream of particles. We call this a jet
23:48
Speaker 1: of particles. What do you mean a stream like? Wouldn't
23:51
Speaker 1: that mean that they're like one in front of the other,
23:53
Speaker 1: or wouldn't they stick together? Well, you have two quirks
23:55
Speaker 1: coming out a really high energy back to back, so
23:57
Speaker 1: like one with a lot of energy in one direction
23:59
Speaker 1: and other going in the other direction with a lot
24:02
Speaker 1: of energy, and so they don't stick together because they
24:04
Speaker 1: have too much energy. They're flying apart. So it happens
24:07
Speaker 1: that they create new particles out of that energy and
24:10
Speaker 1: turn that energy into mass. And so instead of one
24:13
Speaker 1: cork flying one way and antiquork flying the other way,
24:15
Speaker 1: you get like ten quirks in the deck, quirks in
24:18
Speaker 1: one direction and ten flying the opposite direction, like one
24:21
Speaker 1: in front of the other. They come together because quarks
24:23
Speaker 1: don't like to be by themselves, and so they form
24:25
Speaker 1: other particles. So you never actually see a cork. What
24:27
Speaker 1: you see are particles made from corks. You see protons
24:31
Speaker 1: and chons and pyons and masons and all sorts of
24:33
Speaker 1: crazy stuff. So when you create a quirk and an antiquork,
24:37
Speaker 1: you create these two jets of particles. Each one has
24:41
Speaker 1: particles inside of it that are made of quirks. Okay,
24:45
Speaker 1: but I guess you don't actually see the individual gluons.
24:47
Speaker 1: Then you just see kind of like the gluon after
24:50
Speaker 1: it's created friends for itself. Yeah. So people had already
24:53
Speaker 1: done that. They had seen pairs of quirks, and the
24:55
Speaker 1: idea was what would happen if you put more energy
24:58
Speaker 1: into the collision. You pour more energy into this electron
25:02
Speaker 1: positron pair, and there might be enough energy for a
25:05
Speaker 1: gluon to be created. So not just create the cork
25:08
Speaker 1: and antiquark, but also in addition, create this glue on,
25:11
Speaker 1: because just like an electron can give off a photon
25:14
Speaker 1: if it has a lot of energy, a cork can
25:17
Speaker 1: give off a glue on. It can radiate a glue
25:19
Speaker 1: on if it has enough energy. Because it's just so
25:22
Speaker 1: much energy flying around that you might occasionally randomly create
25:25
Speaker 1: one and send it off in a new direction. In
25:27
Speaker 1: that case, you would see three of these jets, not
25:30
Speaker 1: just two back to back, but three, and sort of
25:32
Speaker 1: like a Mercedes pattern, each flying off in a different direction.
25:36
Speaker 1: But we hadn't yet done that. We hadn't built a
25:38
Speaker 1: collider with enough energy to create these gluons. So the
25:40
Speaker 1: idea was build a bigger collider, smash particles together, higher energy.
25:45
Speaker 1: Maybe instead of just seeing two quirk jets back to back,
25:48
Speaker 1: you'd see two cork jets with a glue on jet
25:50
Speaker 1: coming out the side right, But you wouldn't see the
25:52
Speaker 1: glue on. The clue jet would just be again more quirk, yeah, exactly.
25:56
Speaker 1: You wouldn't ever see the glue on directly. So it's
25:59
Speaker 1: frustrating some times in particle physics because these detections are
26:02
Speaker 1: never like perfect little pictures. It's not like we went
26:05
Speaker 1: hunting for a unicorn and we have a picture of
26:08
Speaker 1: the unicorn and it's indisputable. They're always sort of indirect
26:12
Speaker 1: and here with cork and gluons, you never catch them
26:14
Speaker 1: by themselves. You just sort of see the evidence for
26:16
Speaker 1: what they made. You just see the hoofprints and those parkles. Yeah,
26:21
Speaker 1: it's more like you look for a celebrity and instead
26:24
Speaker 1: you see like the paparazzi around them. Because these corks
26:27
Speaker 1: and gluons create these whole streams of particles which you
26:30
Speaker 1: can see. You can't actually see those anyway. So there
26:33
Speaker 1: was this race between the Americans and they were building
26:35
Speaker 1: a collider at Slack, and then the Germans were building
26:38
Speaker 1: one at this collider at Daisy, which is a lab
26:41
Speaker 1: outside of Hamburg. See, so it's Americans versus Germans. Slack
26:44
Speaker 1: is the one at Stanford, right, Stanford Linear Accelerator, the
26:49
Speaker 1: Complex Center Club collider, that's right. And so it was
26:54
Speaker 1: the late seventies and everybody was trying to build their
26:56
Speaker 1: collider to get there first, and the juror Wins turned
27:00
Speaker 1: to sort of an unusual source to build the materials
27:03
Speaker 1: and the facilities for their collider. They had a revolutionary
27:06
Speaker 1: idea to hire manufacturers that used to build refrigerators what
27:11
Speaker 1: to build their collider. Yeah, and so they subcontracted out
27:14
Speaker 1: to this refrigerator company, and that company would like able
27:18
Speaker 1: to ramp up really quickly and deliver the parts and
27:20
Speaker 1: needed for this accelerator. It's called Petra p E t
27:24
Speaker 1: R A. And it may be the first collider ever
27:26
Speaker 1: in the history of particle physics to turn on ahead
27:30
Speaker 1: of schedule and under budget. What it was also the
27:33
Speaker 1: first one to have an ice dispenser. Conveniently, somehow they
27:37
Speaker 1: stunked it in. So well, why French manufacturers just because
27:41
Speaker 1: the equipment was similar, or they're they're just good German engineers. Yeah. Both.
27:45
Speaker 1: You know, we use a lot of refrigeration in particle physics,
27:49
Speaker 1: but mostly we're building you know, high precision machined objects.
27:53
Speaker 1: You need these vacuum tubes, you need the struts. And
27:55
Speaker 1: they were in a race and they said, hey, look,
27:58
Speaker 1: this company says they can do it. Let's get at
28:00
Speaker 1: them to try. And so they gambled a little bit
28:02
Speaker 1: and one so they were able to build their collider
28:05
Speaker 1: and come in ahead of the Americans. Which so this
28:08
Speaker 1: one and Slack we're being built at the same time.
28:12
Speaker 1: We're being built at the same time. Yeah, and then
28:16
Speaker 1: unfortunately the Americans went with the toaster manufacturer, which had
28:19
Speaker 1: a lot of delays. Is that what happened. They spent
28:22
Speaker 1: all their money on avocados also an anticipation of the toast,
28:25
Speaker 1: and then they went bad. These Californians too far out,
28:30
Speaker 1: all right, So the Germans build it first, and so
28:32
Speaker 1: did they find it first or what happened when they
28:34
Speaker 1: trend it on? So they found it first, and they
28:36
Speaker 1: cranked this thing up. And you know these days are
28:39
Speaker 1: colliders are very very high energy. You know, the LHC,
28:42
Speaker 1: for example, works at fourteen terra electron volts, which is
28:46
Speaker 1: fourteen thousand billion electron volts. Back the end in the day,
28:50
Speaker 1: in the late seventies, it was a big deal to
28:52
Speaker 1: have like thirteen billion electron volts. And so this collider
28:56
Speaker 1: turned on first at thirteen giga electron volts and then
29:00
Speaker 1: i ainked its way up to like twenties seven giga
29:02
Speaker 1: electron bolts in the spring of nineteen seventy nine. And
29:06
Speaker 1: the cool thing about particle physics discoveries is that once
29:09
Speaker 1: you have enough energy, it can come pretty quickly. Like
29:12
Speaker 1: the barrier to creating these particles, it really is just
29:15
Speaker 1: having enough energy in your collisions. And so once you
29:19
Speaker 1: turn it on and you have enough energy, you really
29:21
Speaker 1: only need a little bit of data to actually find something,
29:24
Speaker 1: because I guess things are quantum, right, So like you
29:26
Speaker 1: need to hit a certain threshold of energy before certain
29:30
Speaker 1: particles will be created, because you can't like make half
29:32
Speaker 1: of a gluon, right, that's right, you can't make half
29:36
Speaker 1: of the glue on. What you can do is make
29:38
Speaker 1: a low energy glue on. And so what you need
29:40
Speaker 1: to do is put enough energy into this collision that
29:43
Speaker 1: the gluon can grab enough the energy that it can
29:45
Speaker 1: fly off by itself and make that third jet. So
29:48
Speaker 1: people have seen events with two cork jets in them,
29:51
Speaker 1: but nobody ever seen a gluon come off and make
29:54
Speaker 1: that third jet. So as you crank up the energy,
29:56
Speaker 1: you expect to get more and more energy into the gluon,
29:59
Speaker 1: and then the glue one should have enough energy sort
30:01
Speaker 1: of like fly off and be on its own so
30:03
Speaker 1: you can actually see its own third separate jet. Alright,
30:08
Speaker 1: So then how much further ahead were the Germans like
30:10
Speaker 1: were the years or months ahead of the Americans. It
30:13
Speaker 1: was just months ahead. And there was a conference in
30:16
Speaker 1: the middle of the summer in nineteen seventy nine that
30:19
Speaker 1: everybody was aiming for, and the Germans were hoping to
30:22
Speaker 1: turn their machine on and to see this and to
30:24
Speaker 1: deliver decisive results at that June conference. They're hoping to
30:29
Speaker 1: have some pretty cool results to freeze out the Americans
30:33
Speaker 1: with their fridge collider. They were going to stick it
30:36
Speaker 1: to him. All right, well, let's get into the actual
30:39
Speaker 1: discovery of it, because um, apparently it was pretty significant
30:42
Speaker 1: and interesting to finally get to that big drama moment.
30:46
Speaker 1: But first let's take a quick break. All right, Daniel,
31:02
Speaker 1: we are in the late seventies right now, nineteen seventy nine,
31:06
Speaker 1: and the Americans are competing with the Germans to discover
31:09
Speaker 1: the glue on and so finally the Germans build it first.
31:14
Speaker 1: They're collider and discovered it. Was it that simple or
31:17
Speaker 1: was it? Was? It kind of a hard discovery to make.
31:20
Speaker 1: It was a little bit tricky, and that's because this
31:22
Speaker 1: is the first era of colliders where we really have
31:25
Speaker 1: a lot of data coming in, Like you're doing collisions
31:28
Speaker 1: many times per second, and then you need some sort
31:30
Speaker 1: of computer assistance to sift through all these collisions and
31:34
Speaker 1: find the most exciting ones. These days, everything we do
31:37
Speaker 1: is on the computer. Like at the large hage On collider,
31:39
Speaker 1: you know, there's millions of collisions per second, and the
31:42
Speaker 1: computers sift through them before we ever look at them.
31:44
Speaker 1: In the early days of particle physics, you had stuff like, well,
31:47
Speaker 1: you had a collision, you took a picture, you looked
31:49
Speaker 1: at it, and you looked at the next one. This
31:52
Speaker 1: is the first time we really had filtered the events
31:55
Speaker 1: and the collisions by the computer. But you know, it's
31:57
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies, and so the computers back then or
32:00
Speaker 1: like much much slower and less powerful than the computer
32:03
Speaker 1: that's literally in your refrigerator today. Yeah, they had They
32:07
Speaker 1: took up whole rooms, and you needed punch cards, right, Yeah,
32:10
Speaker 1: they had punch cards, And so they had to be
32:12
Speaker 1: really careful and clever about how they're going to use
32:14
Speaker 1: these computers. And not a lot of memory in them,
32:17
Speaker 1: you can't just you know, write whatever computer program you
32:19
Speaker 1: want to be sloppy about it. So there were a
32:21
Speaker 1: bunch of folks who wrote some really clever computer algorithms
32:23
Speaker 1: to try to isolate these events where you had three
32:26
Speaker 1: different sprays of particles, and they wrote this code to
32:29
Speaker 1: like figure out on what was the best angle to
32:32
Speaker 1: look for these three prongs and to isolate the events
32:35
Speaker 1: that were most likely to look like this. And so
32:38
Speaker 1: not only did they build this accelerator ahead of schedule,
32:41
Speaker 1: but they had this cool new snazzy computer software to
32:44
Speaker 1: help them sift through all the collisions to find the
32:47
Speaker 1: one they were looking for. They're like, see this little
32:50
Speaker 1: paper cardboard card, that's my awesome new algorithm. It's pretty funny. Actually,
32:56
Speaker 1: I remember my dad writing his master's thesis in and
33:00
Speaker 1: nearing and using punch cards and you know, feeding them
33:03
Speaker 1: into the computer and then it doesn't work, and he's
33:05
Speaker 1: gonna go to the back of the line and the
33:06
Speaker 1: way to turn again to feed them in. It's pretty crazy.
33:09
Speaker 1: I guess you need a computer because how are you
33:12
Speaker 1: getting all this data? Like you're getting this data through
33:15
Speaker 1: detectors or like are they recording these events by hand?
33:19
Speaker 1: These are definitely from detectors. And so just like at
33:21
Speaker 1: the led C, the collision point, the point where the
33:24
Speaker 1: electron and the protons smashed into each other is surrounded
33:27
Speaker 1: by layers and layers of detectors that image particles that
33:30
Speaker 1: come out. So the electron apolittron collide together in the
33:33
Speaker 1: heart of the detector, and then you know, whatever happens
33:36
Speaker 1: happens and things fly out, and we have these layers
33:39
Speaker 1: of detectors that say a particle passed me, or a
33:42
Speaker 1: particle passed over here, and then we use that to
33:45
Speaker 1: sort of try to get an image of what happened,
33:47
Speaker 1: so you can think of it's sort of like a
33:49
Speaker 1: three D camera that makes a picture of everything that's
33:52
Speaker 1: flying out from the detector. Where it went. All right,
33:55
Speaker 1: So then they ran it and they found the glue on.
33:59
Speaker 1: Did they find one event of the gluon or whole
34:02
Speaker 1: like millions of events? What did the data look like.
34:05
Speaker 1: Did they have to you know, sort of like sift
34:07
Speaker 1: through sand or was it like one big like boom
34:09
Speaker 1: there is They did actually have to sit through a
34:11
Speaker 1: lot because luans are not that common at those energies.
34:15
Speaker 1: Most likely you're just gonna have two corks back to
34:17
Speaker 1: back and it's two jets. So they had to say
34:19
Speaker 1: through a lot of events to find one. But then
34:21
Speaker 1: they did and they turned it on and this is
34:23
Speaker 1: like in June of nineteen seventy nine, they're like, you know,
34:26
Speaker 1: a week before the conference and they find one. Their
34:29
Speaker 1: computer says, ding, ding, ding, we found one that's interesting.
34:32
Speaker 1: Take a look. They print this thing out there, like
34:34
Speaker 1: you know, lay it flat on a piece of papers
34:36
Speaker 1: that they can see what it looks like. And it's
34:38
Speaker 1: very clear. There's like three of these sprays of particles,
34:41
Speaker 1: not too like you expect to see from two corks,
34:44
Speaker 1: but there's three. There's definitely this whole third jet that's
34:47
Speaker 1: flying out the side. And they looked at it and
34:49
Speaker 1: they just knew. They were like, this is it. And
34:52
Speaker 1: they went and they brought like that transparency to this
34:55
Speaker 1: conference in Bergen and like slapped it up there during
34:59
Speaker 1: the presentation and showed it and that was it. Like
35:01
Speaker 1: everybody was like, Okay, that's it. You have found the
35:04
Speaker 1: gluon were convinced just one event, like they didn't wait
35:08
Speaker 1: to get to After that, they collected a lot more data,
35:12
Speaker 1: and you know, one event was enough to convince people
35:14
Speaker 1: this is coming. They didn't actually write the science paper
35:17
Speaker 1: until they had a few more events to support it,
35:19
Speaker 1: and other detectors at the same accelerator had seen it, etcetera, etcetera.
35:23
Speaker 1: But that one event really broke people's skepticism. That one
35:26
Speaker 1: event told them, yeah, this is real. The backup data
35:30
Speaker 1: is coming, but now we know it's here. So that
35:32
Speaker 1: was sort of a famous event. You know, people were
35:34
Speaker 1: at that conference or in the field know that one event.
35:37
Speaker 1: They know what that picture looks like. Have you talked
35:39
Speaker 1: to anyone who was in the room when they did?
35:41
Speaker 1: They did they actually slapped the transparency down on the overhead.
35:45
Speaker 1: They stormed in white lab coat flaring behind them. You
35:49
Speaker 1: know here it is boom. But this is sort of
35:52
Speaker 1: what I imagine, like this is the moment of discovery.
35:55
Speaker 1: This is sort of the thing that we all hope
35:57
Speaker 1: for that you're trying to crack a problem in the
35:59
Speaker 1: universe in particle physics, trying to understand how things work,
36:02
Speaker 1: and then it's just revealed to you. You like, see it,
36:05
Speaker 1: there's the answer. Gluons are real. This kind of event,
36:08
Speaker 1: this three jet event, just couldn't exist without glually, it
36:11
Speaker 1: couldn't be like noise in the system or some kind
36:14
Speaker 1: of fluke or some kind of um, I don't know,
36:16
Speaker 1: some weird other thing that could have happened with the equipment. Yeah,
36:20
Speaker 1: you know, there's a possibility of that. It's very unlikely
36:22
Speaker 1: for it to just be some weird, noisy fluke, but
36:25
Speaker 1: it's a possibility. And so of course they cross checked
36:27
Speaker 1: their results and other people saw similar things, and so
36:30
Speaker 1: eventually the data was just indisputable. But that first event
36:33
Speaker 1: will always be the one that like really heralded the
36:36
Speaker 1: age of the gluons and also opened up this whole
36:39
Speaker 1: era where we think about forces as transmitting particles. This
36:43
Speaker 1: really showed us that this picture of sending particles back
36:46
Speaker 1: and forth as the way forces work was not just
36:50
Speaker 1: limited to electromagnetism. It also worked for the strong force,
36:54
Speaker 1: and it led to other discoveries. A few years later.
36:57
Speaker 1: All right, well, then what have we learned about glue
37:00
Speaker 1: on since then? Like what makes them express special or weird? Well,
37:03
Speaker 1: gluons are weird because, as you say, they can talk
37:06
Speaker 1: to each other, Like each gluon carries colors with it,
37:10
Speaker 1: and that means that they can talk to other gluons
37:12
Speaker 1: and potentially they can even like hang out together. There's
37:16
Speaker 1: this idea that if you get two gluons and the
37:18
Speaker 1: right configuration, they can even form a particle just made
37:22
Speaker 1: out of gluons. This would be like a thing that's
37:25
Speaker 1: pure glue, right, because they like if you get three
37:29
Speaker 1: of them with different charges, when they just naturally stick together. Yeah,
37:32
Speaker 1: and there's also complicated math of ways you can combine
37:35
Speaker 1: gluons that make a color neutral object. You can also
37:38
Speaker 1: just do with two gluons. They can have the opposite
37:41
Speaker 1: colors of each other. Now, nobody's ever seen this before.
37:43
Speaker 1: We call this a glue ball. And their experiments out there,
37:46
Speaker 1: one of them is called glue X that's looking for
37:49
Speaker 1: exactly this kind of thing. So we don't know if
37:52
Speaker 1: it's real, sort of in the realm of things people
37:54
Speaker 1: have predicted calculations we've done. We don't know if we
37:57
Speaker 1: will see it. If it does exist, it's not going
38:00
Speaker 1: to be that heavy. It's just like about the mass
38:02
Speaker 1: of a proton or so. But it's pretty tricky to
38:05
Speaker 1: spot because if it does exist, it's gonna look a
38:08
Speaker 1: lot like other stuff. And it sounds more like a
38:10
Speaker 1: playground game Globall. Okay, let's play goloball. Yeah, exactly. So
38:17
Speaker 1: we're looking for these particles made out of just force particles,
38:20
Speaker 1: you know, is there any president for that? Like, you
38:23
Speaker 1: can't make a particle out of photons. Right now, the
38:25
Speaker 1: strong force is the only one where the force carrier
38:28
Speaker 1: actually feels the force. You can't make a particle out
38:31
Speaker 1: of two photons. And a few years later we found
38:34
Speaker 1: other force particles. There's the W and the Z bosons.
38:38
Speaker 1: These are the ones that correspond to the weak nuclear force,
38:42
Speaker 1: and they also they don't feel the weak nuclear force, right,
38:45
Speaker 1: so you can't make a particle just out of ws
38:48
Speaker 1: and zs. So the strong nuclear force is definitely weird.
38:51
Speaker 1: It's weird and lots of ways. It's weird because there's
38:53
Speaker 1: three charges. It's weird because the force carrying particles feel
38:57
Speaker 1: their own force. And in fact, just like there are
39:00
Speaker 1: three kinds of quirks because of the colors, there are
39:02
Speaker 1: actually eight different kinds of gluon. Eight What do you
39:05
Speaker 1: mean eight? I thought there were only there was only
39:08
Speaker 1: one with three colors to it. Well, the corks have
39:10
Speaker 1: one color, but the gluons each carry two colors. What
39:14
Speaker 1: I guess is they have to match to the two
39:17
Speaker 1: quirks or what exactly right? And so for example, a
39:19
Speaker 1: gluon can be like red anti blue, or it can
39:23
Speaker 1: be green anti red or whatever. There's lots of different combinations,
39:27
Speaker 1: and so it turns out there eight individual different kinds
39:30
Speaker 1: of gluons. We have one photon for electromagnetism, but there
39:34
Speaker 1: are eight different gluons because of all the colors. And
39:37
Speaker 1: it makes you realize like there's a lot going on
39:39
Speaker 1: inside these particles that we can't see or even really
39:42
Speaker 1: imagined that most of the particles out there are actually
39:45
Speaker 1: colored particles, because we think of them as like one
39:48
Speaker 1: cork and one gluon, but really there's eight gluons and
39:51
Speaker 1: three of each. Kind of quirk. They sound strange enough
39:55
Speaker 1: to be their own like matter particle, but they're not
39:57
Speaker 1: a matter part they're not matter particles. But if you
40:00
Speaker 1: could make a glue ball that would be sort of
40:02
Speaker 1: like a kind of matter just made out of forces.
40:05
Speaker 1: That would be really strange. We've never seen that before,
40:08
Speaker 1: totally fascinating. If we could create it and study it, well,
40:11
Speaker 1: it sounds like maybe you guys did pick a pretty
40:13
Speaker 1: good name, because you know, gluants are so sticky they
40:16
Speaker 1: even stick to themselves exactly. They're like that clinger up
40:21
Speaker 1: that's not supposed to stick to yourself, but it does,
40:24
Speaker 1: all right. So and that's so that's a discovery. Nine.
40:28
Speaker 1: That's when we discovered gluont and that's how we knew
40:30
Speaker 1: how the nucleus of your atoms stayed together. Yeah, and
40:33
Speaker 1: that really powered the generation of discoveries that came next.
40:36
Speaker 1: Like in the eighties, we discovered the W and the
40:38
Speaker 1: z bosons and with a lot of confidence that they
40:41
Speaker 1: existed because we understood that a lot of these forces
40:44
Speaker 1: really were mediated by these force particles. And so it
40:47
Speaker 1: was a pretty exciting moment for the field. And it
40:49
Speaker 1: gives everyone who has a rich company hope that they
40:52
Speaker 1: can maybe build the next great particle collider. You should
40:56
Speaker 1: always put your bid in because you never know when
40:58
Speaker 1: the government will come back and say, yes, actually we
41:01
Speaker 1: want you to do this. All right, Well, that was
41:05
Speaker 1: pretty interesting, pretty dramatic, and very fundamental. You know, without
41:08
Speaker 1: this particle, we none of us would be here. I mean,
41:10
Speaker 1: the universe could go on, but we, like as beings
41:13
Speaker 1: held together, wouldn't be here to talk about it. Yeah,
41:16
Speaker 1: me and you, we have lots of luans inside us.
41:19
Speaker 1: It's sort of weird to be searching for a particle
41:21
Speaker 1: that we know is an inherent part of who we
41:23
Speaker 1: are and how we operate. But sometimes it takes a
41:26
Speaker 1: while to reveal its shy nature. But yeah, you and
41:29
Speaker 1: me and stars and everything around us has gluons inside
41:33
Speaker 1: of it. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that.
41:35
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, See you next time. Thanks for listening,
41:47
Speaker 1: and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is
41:50
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