Latest / The Quark Side - Quantum Physics Podcast / Scientists Discover Particles That Break Newton’s Third Law

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Scientists Discover Particles That Break Newton’s Third Law · 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 you are standing right in front of a heavy,
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: solid brick wall.
• 0:32
  Speaker 3: Okay, I'm picturing it right.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: So you plant your feet, you know, place your hands
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: flat against the rough clay, and you push as hard
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: as you possibly can. Yeah, and you'd probably remember from
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: your high school physics class, what is happening in that exact.
• 0:44
  Speaker 3: Moment Mutant's third law exactly.
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: Newton's third law dictates that for every action, there is
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: an equal and opposite reaction.
• 0:52
  Speaker 3: Right, So the wall is pushing back against your hands
• 0:55
  Speaker 3: with the exact same amount of force you are applying
• 0:58
  Speaker 3: to it.
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah. It is a foundational rule of how our universe operates.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: It's symmetric, it's predictable. I mean, it just makes sense,
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: it does. But I want you to consider a completely
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: bizarre scenario today. What happens if you can find a
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: way to.
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: Cheat cheat physics?
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, what happens if you can find a loophole in
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: the fabric of physics and break that symmetry entirely.
• 1:21
  Speaker 3: I mean, bending a fundamental law of physics sounds like
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: science fiction when you frame it.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: Like that, it really does.
• 1:27
  Speaker 3: We completely rely on that symmetry to build bridges, fly airplanes,
• 1:31
  Speaker 3: and basically just understand reality. Right.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: Finding a situation where an action does not have an
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: equal reaction is rare, but when it is achieved, the results, well,
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: they completely shatter our traditional understanding of how matter is
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: supposed to behave.
• 1:46
  Speaker 3: So that brings us to our mission for today's exploration.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: I'm ready.
• 1:49
  Speaker 3: We are going to understand how tiny, completely lifeless particles
• 1:54
  Speaker 3: are somehow successfully defying this action reaction symmetry to stay
• 1:58
  Speaker 3: in constant, life like motion.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: It's a huge deal.
• 2:01
  Speaker 3: And even better, we're going to understand how this seemingly
• 2:05
  Speaker 3: impossible behavior is laying the groundwork for a complete revolution
• 2:09
  Speaker 3: in how we understand matter itself.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: To really appreciate the sheer strangeness of this, we first
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: need to establish a concept known as active matter. Okay,
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: because when you hear the word matter, your brain defaults
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: to passive things, right.
• 2:21
  Speaker 3: Like a rock on the ground, exactly.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: A rock, a wooden chair, water just sitting still, in
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: a glass. Unless an outside force pushes them, they do
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: absolutely nothing. Active matter, on the other hand, refers to
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: systems that continuously consume energy from their environment to generate
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: their own motion. Oh so, like a massive school of
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: litch moving in pervic synchronized unison to evade a predator. Yes.
• 2:44
  Speaker 3: Or think of a flock of birds like starlings, swooping
• 2:48
  Speaker 3: and diving across the evening sky forming those giant shifting clouds.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: Right, those formations almost look like a single giant organism
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: thinking for itself. You can watch them for hours and
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: never see the same shape twice.
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: Every individual bird or agent in that flock is burning
• 3:04
  Speaker 3: energy to fly, and they are constantly interacting with the
• 3:07
  Speaker 3: environment and the birds immediately next to.
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: Them, which is incredibly complex.
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: It is scientists and engineers have been completely captivated by
• 3:15
  Speaker 3: this for decades. The ultimate goal has been to recreate
• 3:19
  Speaker 3: this kind of collective spontaneous motion in a laboratory.
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: But using synthetic, non living.
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  Speaker 3: Materials right exactly, And that pursuit leads us directly to
• 3:29
  Speaker 3: the core mystery we are unraveling today. It's a phenomenon
• 3:32
  Speaker 3: known in physics as non reciprocal interactions.
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: So just breaking down that term non reciprocal, it basically
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: means a relationship that is not returned equally.
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: That is really the defining feature here. It's an interaction
• 3:44
  Speaker 3: where the influence one particle has on another is well,
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: it's just drastically lopsided.
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: Like a one way street sort of.
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: Particle A might exert a massive pull on particle B,
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: but particle B barely affects particle A at all.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this because if I'm tracking with the
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: logic here, this is the exact moment the rule gets bent. Yep,
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: we are talking about the deep mechanics of breaking an
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: undeniable physical law. I mean, to comprehend how macroscopic active
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: matter works, like those giant flocks of birds you mentioned,
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: we have to zoom all the way in, all the
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: way down to the micro level, right. We have to
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: look at these individual microscopic interactions between two single entities
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: and how they basically start chasing each other.
• 4:27
  Speaker 3: Because understandard physics, I mean, under the strict enforcement of
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: Newton's third law, two passive objects cannot continuously push or
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  Speaker 3: pull one another in the same direction forever. If you
• 4:38
  Speaker 3: roll two billiard balls into each other, they collide and
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  Speaker 3: bounce apart. The forces cancel out.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, they definitely don't touch, stick together and suddenly start
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  Speaker 2: accelerating across the table as a team.
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  Speaker 3: No, they absolutely do not. But non reciprocal interactions create
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: a loophole.
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  Speaker 2: So, to make this a bit more concrete for you listening,
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: imagine holding two magnets. But imagine we've somehow the rules
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: of physics for these specific.
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  Speaker 3: Magnets, okay, rigged.
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  Speaker 2: How So the first magnet pulls incredibly strongly on the
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: second one, but the second magnet is practically a dud.
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: It barely exerts any pull on the first one at all.
• 5:13
  Speaker 3: Got it.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: So what happens when you put them near each other
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: on a slick table. The first one aggressively yanks the
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: second one toward it, but the second one doesn't pull
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  Speaker 2: back fast enough to balance the equation.
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  Speaker 3: Which means it just gets dragged along exactly.
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  Speaker 2: It's like a microscopic game of tag where the rules
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: are completely rigged. One is perpetually chasing the other across
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  Speaker 2: the table.
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  Speaker 3: What's fascinating here is that the particles themselves, the theoretical
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: magnets in your analogy, are not actually self propelled. Wait really, yeah,
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  Speaker 3: they don't have tiny internal motors or microscopic propellers or
• 5:48
  Speaker 3: hidden batteries. They are entirely passive, lifeless lumps of material.
• 5:53
  Speaker 3: The energy in their surrounding environment is what forces them
• 5:56
  Speaker 3: into this perpetual chase.
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  Speaker 2: So the environment is doing all the heavy life exactly.
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: The environment facilitates this broken symmetry, and that imbalance generates
• 6:06
  Speaker 3: entirely new forms of collective motion and self organization that
• 6:10
  Speaker 3: we simply do not observe in normal passive matter.
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  Speaker 2: Conceptually, I love it. It's like tricking nature into creating
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: a localized version of perpetual motion, or at least the
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: illusion of it, by unbalancing the scales. It really is,
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: But I mean drawing this on a chalkboard is one thing.
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: Actually building it forcing a non reciprocal interaction to happen
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: to the real messy world. That seems like a total
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: logistical nightmare.
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  Speaker 3: And historically it was. Experimental realizations of this phenomenon have
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  Speaker 3: been severely limited.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: I would imagine.
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: Scientists might coax a tiny handful of particles to do
• 6:42
  Speaker 3: this for brief moments, forming very small, unstable clusters at best.
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: So it's just a fleeting thing.
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: Right, but that bottleneck has finally been shattered thanks to
• 6:51
  Speaker 3: a recent groundbreaking experiment by a research team at the
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: Tokyo University of Science.
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  Speaker 2: And this wasn't just a theoretical gas either, No, not
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: at all. It was a massive team effort led by
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: Professor Yutakasumino and assistant Professor Kiwamo Yoshi, along with a
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: whole crew of researchers.
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  Speaker 3: Right, people like Sho Mahara, Keisuke Kataka, Hiroaki Shikawa, and Masazumiyokata.
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and this was published on August sixth, twenty twenty
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: six in Physical Review.
• 7:18
  Speaker 3: Letters, a very prestigious journal, definitely.
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  Speaker 2: And they actually build a physical test bed to expose
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: this exact loophole in Newton's third law. And the ingenuity
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: of the setup is what really caught my attention.
• 7:29
  Speaker 3: It's brilliant and its simplicity.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, they didn't use exotic sci fi materials or anything.
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: They used polystyrene colloidal particles.
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  Speaker 3: Which, for anyone unfamiliar, polystyrene colloidal particles are essentially just
• 7:40
  Speaker 3: microscopic solid beads of plastic.
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  Speaker 2: Right.
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  Speaker 3: The genius of the Tokyo team wasn't in the material itself,
• 7:47
  Speaker 3: but in the specific sizing they used.
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  Speaker 2: Ah, the sizes.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, they deliberately avoided using a uniform set of beads.
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  Speaker 3: They chose particles of two distinct sizes.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, Well were the sizes.
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  Speaker 3: So one set was exactly one micrometer in radius and
• 8:02
  Speaker 3: the other set was one point five micrometers in radius. Wow,
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  Speaker 3: that is small, incredibly small. To give you a mental
• 8:09
  Speaker 3: picture of that scale, a single human hair is roughly
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: fifty to one hundred micrometers thick. So we are dealing
• 8:16
  Speaker 3: with objects that are virtually invisible.
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  Speaker 2: So they have two different sizes of microscopic plastic beads.
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  Speaker 2: I'm assuming they couldn't just leave them sitting on a
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: dry table.
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  Speaker 3: No, definitely not.
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: They had to introduce an environment that would facilitate that
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: rig game of tag we.
• 8:29
  Speaker 3: Just talked about, right, They suspended these microscopic beads in
• 8:32
  Speaker 3: a very thin layer of water. Then they can find
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: that water between two transparent electrodes okay, and these electrodes
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: were coated with indium tin oxide. This created a sort
• 8:43
  Speaker 3: of microscopic sandwich electrode on the bottom water and beads
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  Speaker 3: in the middle, electrode on top.
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  Speaker 2: Sounds like a tiny battery cell exactly.
• 8:51
  Speaker 3: And once everything was sealed in there, the researchers applied
• 8:54
  Speaker 3: an alternating electric field across the entire system.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, wait, I need to pause here because this is
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: where my intuition it's a wall.
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  Speaker 3: Sure, what's up?
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  Speaker 2: So the particles themselves aren't doing anything right, They are inert, plastic,
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  Speaker 2: they don't have little engines. So how does zapping the
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: water with an electric field cause the chasing dynamic we
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: just talked about? I mean, electricity doesn't just magically make
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: plastics start swimming.
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  Speaker 3: That is the crucial mechanical question of the entire experiment.
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  Speaker 3: You are completely correct that the beads are doing absolutely
• 9:24
  Speaker 3: nothing on their own. Okay, The magic happens in the
• 9:26
  Speaker 3: fluid itself, the water. Yes, When you apply an alternating
• 9:30
  Speaker 3: electric field to water, it interacts with tiny naturally occurring
• 9:34
  Speaker 3: electrical charges ions floating in that water.
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  Speaker 2: Oh.
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  Speaker 3: I see the alternating field rapidly pushes and poles on
• 9:40
  Speaker 3: these ions back and forth, and that rapid movement causes
• 9:44
  Speaker 3: the fluid itself to start churning and swirling around any
• 9:47
  Speaker 3: solid obstacles in its path.
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  Speaker 2: And the beads are the obstacles.
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  Speaker 3: Precisely, Those swirling, churning currents in the water are called
• 9:54
  Speaker 3: electro hydrodynamic flows, or EHD flows.
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  Speaker 2: For sure, EHD flows, okay.
• 9:59
  Speaker 3: Basically it is electricity directly causing fluid dynamics.
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: Let me see if I can visualize this using a
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: real world equivalent. It's kind of like putting a massive
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: cargo ship and a tiny canoe in the same narrow canal.
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  Speaker 3: I like where this is going.
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: If both of them have some mysterious force pushing the
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: water around their hulls, the massive cargo ship is going
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: to generate a giant churning wake right, oh, absolutely, and
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: that massive wake will violently pull the tiny canoe along
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  Speaker 2: for the ride. But the tiny canoe's little ripples aren't
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: going to do absolutely anything to the giant cargo ship.
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: The physics operate on a remarkably similar principle. The strength
• 10:38
  Speaker 3: of those EHD flows depends entirely on the size of
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: the object they're swirling.
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  Speaker 2: Around, So the size difference is the key.
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  Speaker 3: Exactly, The larger one point five micrometer particles generated a
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: much stronger, more turbulent flow around themselves than the smaller
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  Speaker 3: one micrometer.
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  Speaker 2: Particles did because they're bigger.
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  Speaker 3: Right, So, because the larger particle is acting like that
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: cargo ship churning up a stronger current, it exous. It's
• 11:00
  Speaker 3: a massive physical pull on the smaller particle and a
• 11:02
  Speaker 3: smaller one. The smaller particle, generating only a weak flow,
• 11:06
  Speaker 3: exerts almost zero pull on the big one.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: Oh wow, so the action is no longer met with
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: an equal reaction. The symmetry is broken.
• 11:14
  Speaker 3: Yes, the attraction becomes completely asymmetric. The big particle pulls
• 11:18
  Speaker 3: the small one hard, the small one barely pulls back.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: That is wild.
• 11:22
  Speaker 3: This creates spontaneous pairings in the water. A big bead
• 11:26
  Speaker 3: and a small bead lock into each other's fluid wakes,
• 11:28
  Speaker 3: and because the forces are unequal, they form a paired
• 11:31
  Speaker 3: structure with a distinct front and a distinct back.
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: And because the big one keeps pulling the small one
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: in and the small one keeps perpetually falling toward it
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: without slowing the big one down, the entire pair starts
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: moving through the water as a single self propelled unit. Exactly,
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: They're zooming around like little two piece vehicles, all powered
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: by the swirling water.
• 11:52
  Speaker 3: They are sitting in and every bit of that motion
• 11:54
  Speaker 3: is a product of the non reciprocal interaction. The beads
• 11:58
  Speaker 3: remain entirely lifeless, but they are now acting like tiny
• 12:01
  Speaker 3: biological microbes swimming through the fluid.
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: It is genuinely mine bending. But earlier you mentioned that
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: scaling this up was the historical bottleneck.
• 12:09
  Speaker 3: It was.
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: I mean, getting two beads to do a microscopic square
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: dance is a great party trick, but it doesn't really
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: give us a flock of birds, does it.
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: No, it doesn't. But the researchers at the Tokyo University
• 12:21
  Speaker 3: of Science didn't stop at just two particles now. They
• 12:23
  Speaker 3: went bigger, much bigger. They scaled this up to an
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: observation of more than ten thousand individual particle ten thousand. Yeah,
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: and they watched this massive swarming system operate continuously for
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: over an hour.
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: Picture ten thousand of these microscopic pairs zooming around, bouncing
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: into each other in this tiny arena.
• 12:41
  Speaker 3: It's a lot of chaos.
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: My immediate assumption is that eventually they would just cause
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: a massive traffic jam, like they would all crash together
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: in the center of the water and form a giant,
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: solid lump of dead plastic.
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: Well, here's where it gets really interesting, because that traffic
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: jam never happens.
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: Hey it doesn't.
• 12:57
  Speaker 3: No, the clusters of particles in the experiment actively resisted,
• 13:02
  Speaker 3: forming one giant static mass.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: Oh. I think I have a good analogy for this.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: Think about a really great networking event or a lively party.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: People naturally form conversation circles. Right, a group of five
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: people gathers, they chat animatedly for a few minutes, Someone
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: gets distracted and walks away, The circle breaks apart.
• 13:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that happens all the time, and.
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: Then those individuals mingle and form totally new conversation circles
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: across the room. It is a state of constant flowing movement,
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: gathering and splitting, gathering and splitting. Compare that to a
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: terrible party where everyone just crowds into the small kitchen
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: and gets physically stuck there for the rest of the night,
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: unable to move.
• 13:43
  Speaker 3: The gathering and splitting analogy captures the exact dynamic of
• 13:46
  Speaker 3: what the research is documented. Really Yeah, because the self
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: propelled pairs within these groups were continuously generating their own motion,
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: they introduced a constant, low level chaos into the system.
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: Ah, so it couldnt settle to exactly.
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: The clusters would grow to a certain size, but the
• 14:03
  Speaker 3: internal motion made them inherently unstable. Before they could lock
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: into a permanent dead lump, they would fragment, rearrange, and
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: reform into new clusters. In physics, the process of particles
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: clumping together until they stopped moving is called coarsening, but
• 14:19
  Speaker 3: as Professor Sumino noted, things that attract each other usually
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: just gather into larger and larger clumps. The Tokyo team, however,
• 14:27
  Speaker 3: observed what they termed arrested coarsening. The continuous motion literally
• 14:34
  Speaker 3: stopped the system from dying.
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: So the non reciprocal interactions are essentially the heartbeat keeping
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: the whole system alive and preventing it from freezing out.
• 14:42
  Speaker 3: They are, and the researchers actually proved how vital this
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: was by running a brilliant control experiment.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: Oh what do they do?
• 14:48
  Speaker 3: They took the exact same setup the water, the electrodes,
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: the alternating current, but they used a suspension that contained
• 14:55
  Speaker 3: particles of only one single size.
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: Ah. So if they are all the exact same size,
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: they all generate the exact same wake in.
• 15:02
  Speaker 3: The water exactly.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: The cargo ship and the canoe become two identical speedboats.
• 15:07
  Speaker 3: That's a great way to put it. The interactions revert
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: to being reciprocal, the forces balance.
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: Out perfectly, and then what happens.
• 15:14
  Speaker 3: When action equals reaction again? The system immediately loses its
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: lifelike qualities.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: It just dies.
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: Basically, the particles simply attract each other, clump together, and
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: gradually form static, motionless crystalline aggregates. They just freeze into
• 15:29
  Speaker 3: a permanent solid.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: Structure, just like normal matter, right.
• 15:32
  Speaker 3: Like sand or powder. The size difference between the beads
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: and the resulting non reciprocal interactions where the absolute minimal
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: mechanisms required to keep the system dynamically alive.
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: Okay, so we've established how they pulled this off, and
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: we've established how they prevented this system from dying into
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: a solid lump. Yes, So what does this all mean
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: for you? I mean, why does a chaotic, microscopic square
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: dance of electrified plastic beads in Japan matter to someone
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: going about their daily life.
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: Well, if we connect this to the bigger picture, we
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: have to look far beyond plastic beads and look at actual.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: Life life itself.
• 16:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the continuous gathering and splitting, the breaking of symmetry
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: to maintain dynamic motion. These are believed to be the
• 16:13
  Speaker 3: exact same underlying mechanical principles occurring in living biological systems.
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: Wait, we aren't just talking about a loose metaphor anymore.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: You mean the physics driving the beads is mathematically mirroring
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: biological processes very much.
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: So. Consider living cell colonies migrating across a petrie dish
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: to heal a wound. Or consider the complex tissue formation
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: that happens during embryonic development, where cells must constantly organize, shift,
• 16:39
  Speaker 3: and restructure themselves. Oh wow, Or even the massive animal
• 16:42
  Speaker 3: groups we started with. Living systems are fundamentally out of equilibrium.
• 16:47
  Speaker 3: They are constantly burning energy and interacting asymmetrically with the neighbors.
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: But biology is notoriously messy. It is incredibly difficult to
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: isolate a single variable inside a living cell because there
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: are you know, thousands of chemical reactions happening simultaneously.
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: Exactly, And that's why this is so important. By building
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: the system out of simple, inert plastic beads, the researchers
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: have effectively built a clean mathematical sandbox to study life.
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: Oh that makes so much sense.
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: It provides a highly controllable physical framework. It gives scientists
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: an isolated environment to study the fundamental rules of collective
• 17:25
  Speaker 3: behavior without the messy complications of actual biology.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: Is incredibly useful.
• 17:30
  Speaker 3: The Tokyo team even reproduced their experimental observations using complex
• 17:35
  Speaker 3: numerical simulations, confirming that the specific non reciprocal pair propulsion
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: is a universal underlying mechanism.
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: A universal rule for lifelike order.
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: Exactly.
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: The biological insights are staggering, but my mind immediately jumps
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: to engineering, oh totally, because if we understand the exact
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: mechanism of how to make dumb matter self organized and
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: stay dynamic, we don't have to wait for nature to
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: do it. We can just design it ourselves.
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: And the applications in material science and engineering are immense.
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: I mean, the EHD flow was just the specific tool
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: used in this experiment, but the underlying design principle intentionally
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: breaking action reaction symmetry to generate collective motion, can be
• 18:14
  Speaker 3: applied to entirely different mediums. This paves the way for programmable.
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: Material Programmable materials. Imagine buying a product made of a
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: material that can just change its physical properties on command.
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: It sounds like magic, but its physics right.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: It could alter its shape, its density, or its flexibility
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: just by applying an external field to it, causing the
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: molecules inside to suddenly chase each other into a completely
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: new configuration.
• 18:39
  Speaker 3: It also revolutionizes how we approach microrobotics, particularly in medicine.
• 18:44
  Speaker 3: Oh how so, usually when we imagine a medical nanobot,
• 18:47
  Speaker 3: we picture a microscopic machine with tiny gears, complex circuitry,
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: and a microscopic battery.
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, tiny submarine from a.
• 18:56
  Speaker 3: Movie, right, But building something that complex at a microscopic
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: skins is incredibly difficult and expensive, not to mention batteries
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: run out of power.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: But with this non reciprocal mechanism, you don't need any
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: of that internal hardware.
• 19:09
  Speaker 3: None of it. You could manufacture thousands of incredibly simple, cheap,
• 19:13
  Speaker 3: asymmetrical particles. You inject them into the bloodstream.
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: And they do nothing on their own, right.
• 19:18
  Speaker 3: They do absolutely nothing. But when a doctor applies an
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: external magnetic or electric field, perhaps using an MRI machine,
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: the environment provides the energy.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: Oh, this is brilliant.
• 19:29
  Speaker 3: The particles spontaneously pair up, self organized into a swarm,
• 19:33
  Speaker 3: navigate to a specific blockage and a blood vessel clear
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: it out and then immediately disassemble back into harmless individual
• 19:41
  Speaker 3: particles the second the external field is turned off.
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: Allowing the body to just flesh them out normally.
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: Exactly, you are outsourcing all the complex thinking and the
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: power supplied to the environment, making the robots themselves beautifully simple.
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: It completely shifts the paradigm. Instead of trying to build
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: one incredibly smart, complex machine, you build thousands of dumb
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: particles that act brilliantly when they are together.
• 20:04
  Speaker 3: It really is a complete shift.
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: We have covered an a regretful amount of ground today.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: We started with the comfortable, predictable symmetry of Newton's third law,
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: the brick wall right, and then we saw how a
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: team of researchers shattered that symmetry simply by mixing two
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: different sizes of microscopic plastic beads in electrified water, creating
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: a lopsided fluid wake that turned passive matter into self
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: propelled chasing pairs.
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: A tiny game of tag.
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: Exactly. We saw how this rig system prevented ten thousand
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: particles from freezing into a solid lump, resulting in a chaotic, breathing,
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: lifelike state of continuous gathering and.
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: Splitting the arrested coarsening yep, And we.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: Looked at a future where this loophole in physics could
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: give us shape shifting programmable materials and medical microrobot swarms
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: that operate without a single battery.
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: It highlights just how many secrets are still hiding inside
• 20:59
  Speaker 3: the foundational laws of face physics, just waiting for someone
• 21:01
  Speaker 3: to look at them from a slightly different angle.
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: It really does.
• 21:04
  Speaker 3: It also leaves us with a profound puzzle to consider
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: on our own.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: Oh was that well?
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: If simply tweaking the size of passive, utterly lifeless plastic
• 21:12
  Speaker 3: beads in an electric field can so perfectly mirror the dynamic, clustering,
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: movement and organization of living biological cells, at what point
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: does the rigid distinction between a dumb material and a
• 21:24
  Speaker 3: living system completely disappear?
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: Man? That is the kind of thought that fundamentally changes
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: how you look at the world around you.
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: It really blurs the line.
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: It does the dividing line between cold physics and living
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: biology might just come down to a clever bit of
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: asymmetric engineering. Absolutely, thank you for joining us today to
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: explore these bizarre and beautiful boundaries of science, keep questioning
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: the established rules, keep an eye out for those broken symmetries,
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: and we'll catch you next time.