Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / Can we see what's inside the electron?

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Can we see what's inside the electron? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

• 0:06
  Speaker 1: What's the point of building bigger and bigger colliders other
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: than the obvious fun and awesomeness of it all. It's
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: a machine that opens up the sub atomic world. It's
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: not just because we like to see things go boom,
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: though of course we do, but because we want to
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: know what happens when you pull things apart. What's inside me,
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: what's inside you, what's inside everything. At the root of
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: it all is a desire to dig as deep as
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: we can into the very nature of matter, to hope
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: to reveal its inner workings and understand how it all
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: comes together to make our amazing, crazy and delicious world.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: Is the universe made of quarks and leptons and dark matter?
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: Or is it made of strings or shmings or bada bings?
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Right now we don't know. We might never know, or
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: one day and we might build a collider powerful enough
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: to show us the universe's fundamental lego bricks. Then we
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: can turned to the philosophers and ask them, hey, so
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: what does this mean? Dude? But what if we don't
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: get the billions to build a bigger collider? Is that
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: the only way forward? Can we find some other clever
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: way to get this information through the universe's back door.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: That's what we're going to talk about on today's episode.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, brought to you
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: by all the tiny particles that make it possible.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: Hello. I'm Kelly leader Smith. I'm a parasitologist who also
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: studies space, and I'm wondering if today we're going to
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: be talking about something that Daniel studies staring his day job.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and my job
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: is to play with taxpayer funded billion dollar toys.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: Ooh, my job usually involves playing with fish bomb and
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: I think your job might be better.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: I hope nobody I've ever paid a billion dollars for
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: fish vomit.
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: There are some important questions that can get answered with
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: a lot of fish vomit. But yeah, probably not a
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: billion dollars worth. I'll give you that. Maybe a million
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: dollars worth. So you work at the LAC and we're
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: going to be talking about research happening at the LAC.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: Is the thing that we're talking about today? Is this
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: a question that you were working on or what does
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: your lab do exactly? Daniel?
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: Mostly I take naps, in my office. Isn't that enough?
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm sure everyone feels great about where their taxpayer
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: dollars are going right now.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a fair question. What is Daniel actually do
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: all day? We should have a whole episode where I
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: talk about my research, But very briefly, in the last
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: ten years or so, I was looking for dark matter
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: at the Large Hadron Collider, smashing particles together, hoping to
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: make dark matter particles which would leave an invisible signature
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: which is really hard to pick out, and using machine
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: learning to try to filter those patterns out from all
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: of the noise, which is a fun challenge. But then
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: dark matter sort of became too popular at the Large
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: Hadron Collider and everybody was doing it, and there wasn't
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: a whole lot of opportunity to like do new clever stuff.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: So more recently I've pivoted to looking for weird, unexpected stuff. Like,
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: we know that dark matter is out there, we should
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: be able to see at the collider, so let's go
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: look for it. That makes sense. But what would be
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: even more exciting to me is to find something that
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: nobody expected, a discovery that makes people go, what, that's impossible,
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: or that's crazy or huh, how could that even be
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: something that nobody expected? And that's hard to do because
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: you sort of have to have an idea for what
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: you're looking for in order to go looking for it.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: But we use some cool machine learning tools, anomaly detection
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: and all sorts of other algorithms to try to make
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: mathematical what we're looking for, what we're not looking for,
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: and to figure out clever ways to look for it.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: So that's one of the things that I'm focusing on
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: more recently, is looking for anomalies.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: It's always so interesting to me the way the questions
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: that we ask are influenced by things like, well, what
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: are other people asking? And too many people are asking this,
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: and so I'm going to move on to something else.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: And there's a lot of like social and funding things
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: that go into the decision about what to study. I
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: guess it makes sense. We're all humans doing work.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's definitely a lot of that. But I think
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: people also underestimate how personal science is. Like people ask
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: questions because those are their personal questions, and we all
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: benefit from that, like the fact that some people are
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: weirdly into fish guts, you know, we learn cool stuff
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: about the universe. Because of that, and because some people
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: want to stay up late looking into telescopes or get
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: their socks wet in the rainforest counting spiders. Because different
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: people enjoy different kinds of activities and have different questions,
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: we get to learn about all lots of different kinds
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: of science. And so you know, there's no like magic
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: sorting hat that tells people what science to do. They
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: just follow their instincts and also, you know, look for
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: opportunities for sure. But I think it really reflects the
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: sort of breadth of human curiosity, all the different kinds
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: of science that we have, and I think that's all
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: wonderful and delicious.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: I absolutely agree limitless human curiosity. You can be interested
• 5:05
  Speaker 2: in fish, vomits, leeches, or dark matter or anything in between,
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: and even chemistry.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: Don't go that far. You know, I was going to
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: say dark matter fish vomit, Like maybe dark fish's vomit
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: up dark matter vomit. That would be pretty awesome. That
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: would be like where our research overlaps.
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: Oh my gosh. Yes, I hope somebody will fund the
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: intersection of our research interests. Let's write to the NSF
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: and find out.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: But more broadly, There's something really cool about the Large
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: A Drunk Collider, which is that it lets you do
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: lots of different kinds of things. People have the idea
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: that the Large A Drunk Collider is like an experiment
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: that I do and then somebody else get the turn
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: they do an experiment. In reality, it's the same experiment.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: It's just running twenty four to seven collecting very very
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: general data, and people can ask different kinds of questions
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: about it. People can be like, hey, dude, we find
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: a new particle. People can be like, hey, are the
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: particles we've seen do they behave the way we expected?
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: Or also like is is there anything weird in the data?
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: You can ask all these different kinds of questions with
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: the same data from the same setup, and so it's
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: very general and very powerful in that way, which I
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: love because it lets you pivot easily from different kinds
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: of questions.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: So, what is the experiment that's constantly running in the LHC.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: And I'm always going to call it Hadron and embarrass myself.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: So I'm just going to call it the LHC to
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: avoid that.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: What's embarrassing about saying Hadron is it because it's so
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: close to another word you're afraid of saying.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah it is.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: That's not family friendly.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: You called out Wienersmith.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: It's true, the large Wienersmith collider. Yeah, what is the experiment? Essentially,
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: it's just a big camera around a collision point. You
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: smash particles together, and then you try to capture all
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: the debris that comes out to get it's much information
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: about the collision and the aftermath, so you can piece
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: together what happened because you can't see the actual collision directly,
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: Like when the quarks annihilate, you don't get to see
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: that happen. You just get to see what they turn into.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: So we have these layers of detectors around the collision
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: point to take information about those particles so we can
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: reconstruct their trajectories and their energies and their angles and
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: all sorts of stuff and figure out what happened. And
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: we just do that for every collision, no matter what.
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: And is it like today we're just running electrons through there,
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: or it's like whatever particles happen to be in there
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: we're going to run into, or you know, is there
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: like a certain combination. What do you start with?
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we just go outside and take a scoop of stuff,
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: toss it in the collider and see what happened.
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: It's like, oh my gosh, you're like biologists.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: We're colliding fish bombit today. No, the collider is very
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: sensitive and very carefully tuned, so you have to put
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: the right stuff in and tune it. Most of the
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: time it runs protons, and so you just start from hydrogen.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: You kick off the electrons, you give them energy, and
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: you separate them using their charges. You have pure protons
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: and you collide those. The previous collider I worked at
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: in Chicago, the Tepatron, collided protons and anti protons, so
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: you have to make a source of anti protons a
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: whole other factory. That was too complicated. So for the
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: next collider, the Large Hadron Collider is just protons and protons,
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: but sometimes we do other stuff. Sometimes we put lead
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: in there or gold atoms and smash them together because
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: you can ask all sorts of interesting questions when you
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: have like zillions of protons smashing together. It's called heavy
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: ion physics. So yeah, the Large Adron collider is pretty flexible.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: You can collide other kinds of stuff, not just protons,
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: probably not fish guts though.
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: That's disappointing, but I guess we'll keep talking about physics anyway.
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: And so is it like you know, Fridays or the
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: gold days, or just somebody like gets a grant and
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: that's the day you do the gold ions or whatever instead.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: No, it's like ninety five percent protons. That's the main physics.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: And then occasionally we'll do a run with gold or
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: with lead or something else, but it's mostly just proton
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: proton physics. That's the bread and butter. The large Adron collider,
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: and it's decided some very high level of committees ascerned.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: It is like a collection of dozens of countries, and
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: so everything's decided by committees that take forever, and so
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: it's very bureaucratic. Even the way we publish a paper
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: is very bureaucratic. We have five thousand authors on a
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: paper and everybody gets to read it and comment on it.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: So you know, you put a paper through and somebody's
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: like add a comma, and somebody else is like remove
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: that comments. We also know add that comment, put that comments.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: It's very slow and frustrating, but it's also wonderful to
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: work with people from all over the world.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: You have a very nuanced viewpoint on it. That's great.
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: I do get frustrated by those bureaucracy, like who cares
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: about the comma, Let's just get the paper done. But
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: on the other hand, I'm sure you get lots of
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: great ideas you wouldn't have gotten otherwise and it was
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: just two people working together on the paper.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but the particle collider is very powerful and it
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: lets you do things like look for new kind of
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: particles directly. But also I think this underappreciated, is that
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: there are indirect ways to discover new particles without actually
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: seeing them. And that's the thing I want to talk
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: about today. How we can use that potentially to see
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: inside particles, to learn about what's going on inside the
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: particles we think might be fundamental.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: All right, well, and today we're going to be talking
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: about how can we see what's inside the electron? And
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: we asked our amazing listeners, who are always insightful, to
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: tell us what they think the answer is to how
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: can we see inside an electron? So let's go ahead
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: and hear. What they had to say is that in order.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: To see things at that scale, we would need a
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: solar system sized particle collider. If we wanted to try
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: to see inside of it, we'd probably have to smash
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: other particles into it, and we just have to smash
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: them together block we do everything else. To see inside
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: an electron, we would need to probe it with something
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: that has a wavelength that's smaller than the electron.
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: I thought that we couldn't. I thought electrons a fundamental
• 10:35
  Speaker 3: and there's nothing in there.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: Because we could crash them together with high energy particle physics,
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: can we actually see inside of an electrons? You can't
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: smash electrons together, so maybe you do it with neutrinos.
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: We might only be able just to look at the
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: outside of it, and there might not be anything different
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: on the inside.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: I think that electrons are fundamental particles.
• 10:56
  Speaker 3: By colliding it with other electrons or other particles and
• 10:59
  Speaker 3: seeing what comes.
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: Out, it's various quantum states. When probed multiple times with
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: perhaps light, will generate some sort of semblance of a structure.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: With a very powerful microscope and a lot of imagination,
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: get some pliers and a set of thirty weight ball bearings.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: It's all about ball bearings nowadays.
• 11:21
  Speaker 3: Okay, I'm pretty certain Daniel's job is smashing particles together
• 11:25
  Speaker 3: and seeing their guts when they pop out. So that's
• 11:28
  Speaker 3: my guess. Or maybe the answer is math, but that's
• 11:31
  Speaker 3: not nearly as exciting.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: I'm imagining something like X ray crystallography, like Rosalind Franklin
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: saw the structure of DNA, but much much more sensitive.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: I mean electron microscope. It's right there in the name.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: Wait wait wait wait wait, I see where this is going.
• 11:50
  Speaker 3: Are you asking for more funds to build an even
• 11:52
  Speaker 3: larger particle collider?
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: As far as I know, there's not an insight of
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: the electron to see.
• 12:00
  Speaker 4: You like collide electrons together and when they hit each other,
• 12:09
  Speaker 4: they like four minutees a big explosion, like a big
• 12:13
  Speaker 4: like a big electronic explosion, and when and when that happens,
• 12:20
  Speaker 4: it will there's like a giant microscope over it, and
• 12:25
  Speaker 4: there's like somebody looking through the microscope and they like
• 12:29
  Speaker 4: see what comes out of the explosion.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: M magnets. Thanks to everybody who's sent in these answers.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: If you would like to play for future episodes, don't
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: be shy. Write to us two questions at Danielandkelly dot org.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: We want to hear from you and we want your
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: voice on the podcast. I love that so many people
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: said smash them together. These are particle physicists and folks
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: after my heart.
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: They've been listening to you. I think they've been listening
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: to the show for a while. I like the one
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: person who said it involves ball. I think a lot
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: of really great scientific questions involve ball bearings. That was
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: a good guess.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: If you don't know, use some ball bearings, right. They
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: can't hurt.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: No, no, no, and they're always fun to play with,
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: although I always lose them.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: But these folks are basically right on the direct approach,
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: smash it together, see what comes out. If you have
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: enough energy, you can break the electron open. You know.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: That's basically the short answer, and they're right, But nobody
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: got the indirect answer. The more subtle, the clever, the
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: back door way to maybe see what's inside the electron
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: without actually breaking it open, which I'm very excited to
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: talk about.
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: And I'm very excited to hear the explanation because I
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: looked at the outline and I was like, I have
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: never heard about this before, so this will be exciting
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: and new for me. Let's start from the very beginning.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: You know, we're all made of molecules. Molecules are made
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: of atoms. Give me some more detail, what background do
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: we need?
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, And I just love this question because I
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: love like looking at the stuff around us and wondering,
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: like how it comes together? What's the recipe for my coffee?
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: What's the recipe for those fish guts? How do we
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: end up in this universe? You know? And to me,
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: unraveling with things are made of is really like looking
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: at the matrix, you know, finding the source code for
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: the universe. It's something really deeply satisfying. So it's no
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: surprise that I am a particle physicist instead of like
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: a rainforest spider ologist. But I hope other people out
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: there also find that exciting. And we get to live
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: in a time when we have unraveled so much of nature.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: You know, thousands of years ago people were like, I
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: don't know, maybe there's four kinds of stuff, who knows.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: But you know, we figured out what used to summarize, like, Okay,
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: we're made of molecules, we're made of atoms. That took
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: us thousands of years to figure out. It's just like
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: obvious high school chemistry by now. But it's also hugely
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: revealing about the way our universe works, you know, and
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: it tells you something already really powerful, which is that
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: you have a huge complexity of stuff, right, Like how
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: many different kinds of things are out there in the universe?
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: Ice cream and blueberries and mushrooms and fish guts and planets,
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: so many things. Maybe infinite numbers of kinds of things.
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: Definitely a huge number, even white chocolate unfortunately, but yeah,
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: there's a lot of stuff out.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: There, hey said fish cuts, Okay, don't be redundant. The
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: amazing thing is that you can build all of that
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: with like one hundred atoms, right, It's kind of incredible.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: You put those hundred items together in different ways, and
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: you get lava, or you get kittens, or you get hamsters,
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: or you get whatever. It's incredible that this huge complexity
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: is built out of simplicity, and the complexity comes from
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: the arrangements of the stuff. I think that says something
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: really deep and powerful about the nature of our universe.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: And so I want to dig deeper, but I want
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: to past for a moment and like appreciate how far
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: we've come, even just when we get to the atom, right,
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: because the universe could have been different. It could have
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: been that like everything's made of its own kind of
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: particle and there isn't simplicity, or as you get lower,
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: there's more and more kinds of stuff. And so I'm
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: grateful that we live in the universe where as you
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: dig deeper, things seem to get simpler. And it's tantalizing
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: because it tells you like, ooh, maybe keep going. There's
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: a really simple hints they're waiting for you. It's all
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: forty two.
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: And as someone who studies behavior, I also think it's
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: awesome that we live in a time where you can
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: get a bunch of nations together to agree that we're
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: interested in the fundamental nature of the universe and we're
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: going to invest in something like the LHC. It's just
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: I don't know. I think it's an amazing time to
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: live for a lot of different reasons.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it is, And so for anybody out there who
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: happens to be in the US Congress, for example, I
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: think funding for particle physics is great for lots of reasons.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: One is the huge return on investment in terms of
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: transforming the nature of society economically and militarily and all
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: that stuff. But also just for the sheer knowledge, you know,
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: like it's worth it anyway, Let's dig deeper. So we
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: have molecules. Molecules are atoms, is like roughly one hundred
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: kinds of atoms. Inside the atom, of course, is the
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: nucleus and then electrons. Nucleus is made of protons and neutrons,
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: and so now we have structure inside the atom, right,
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: and don't take that for granted. There's an amazing correlation
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: between the structure of the atom and the behavior of
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: the atom. All this complexity we're talking about, all the
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: fascinating different behavior like why are metals metallic, and why
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: something's active and something's inactive. That all comes from the
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: structure of the atom. And you could almost have guessed
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: it if you looked at the periodic table you said, oh,
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: look at these different kinds of atoms. Why there are
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: so many different ones, and why are there patterns here?
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: You could have guessed that it comes from internal structure.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: That the atoms weren't themselves fundamental, meaning they weren't just
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: made of their own stuff. They were made of something smaller.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: So we had a very strong clue already when you
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: look at the periodic table that there was more structure
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: deep down, and it's amazing that when we dig in
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: we find that structure and we're then able to explain
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: all of those patterns we saw, right, It's incredible.
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: I feel like you just said that chemistry is important,
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: and I'm feeling a little uncomfortable. But we talked about this.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: There was a listener question about why is carbon so
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: important for life forms and that did come out of
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: a long discussion about, you know, what we can learn
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: from the periodic, So it's important even if it's chemistry.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: Now I would say it's redundant. All you need to
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: know is the structure of the atom, and chemistry you
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: should just follow naturally from that if you knew what
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: you were doing.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: It's always about physics.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: Exactly anyway. So now let's dig inside the nucleus. Right,
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: we have the protons and the neutrons. Protons and neutrons
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: we know are made of smaller particles. They're made of quarks,
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: and the mass of the proton is fascinating, you know,
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: like basically the proton is the mass of hydrogen. That's
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: what the hydrogen is, basically just a proton. So fix
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: that in your mind is like the unit, and in
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: particle physics we use units of GeV giga electron volts
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: to talk about mass. It really is GeV divided by
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: the speed of light squared, but we just set the
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: speed of light to equal one because otherwise it's such
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: a pain in the butt. Anyways, So the proton has
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: a certain mass. And if you dig into the proton
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: and you ask, like, well, the proton is made of
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: the quarks. Does that mean I can get the proton
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: mass by adding up the mass of the quarks the
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: way you feel like if you take your car apart,
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: the mass of the car is equal to the mass
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: of the parts of the car, right, Well, that's not
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: true for the proton, and this is going to be
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: very important later. The proton's mass is made of things
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: with much much smaller mass. Like you add up the
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: mass of the quarks that make up the proton, you
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: get like a few percent of its mass. So where
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: do the rest of its mass come from? Or? Remember
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: mass is not stuff, right, Mass is internal stored energy,
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: and there's a lot of energy between those quarks holding
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: those quarks together, and that energy inside the proton contributes
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: to the proton's mass. The same way, like shining a
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: photon into a box of mirrors makes that box more massive,
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: even though what you've added hasn't added any actual mass
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: on its own. So the proton is pretty massive, but
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: it's made of very low mass stuff, and a lot
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: of its mass doesn't come from the mass of the
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: things that's made out.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: Of this mass is internal stored energy thing. I remember
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: you blew my mind when we were talking about that
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: in the Where does Energy Come From? Episode? So if
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: folks want a bit of a deeper dive into that concept,
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: they should check out that episode.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, So we've zoomed it now inside the protons
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: and neutrons, and protons and neutrons both made of quarks,
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: just different arrangements. You got upcorks and down quarks and
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: two upcorks in it. Down makes one of them to
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: down quarks and up and makes the other one. Honestly,
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: I don't even remember which is which. I can never
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: keep that straight, but you can look it up.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: I don't bother memorizing stuff like that either.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: I often remember this stuff, but I feel like if
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: you confuse it too many times early on when you're
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: learning it, then it's forever scrambled in your brain, and
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: I will never be able to snangle them and always
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: have to look it up.
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: And this is why I'm never going to try to
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: say hadrawn, because I've gotten it totally confused. If there
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: are some people in my life where I said their
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: name wrong so many times, I will never be constantly
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: I'm going to say it right where I'm just like, hey,
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: I've known you for five years. I don't want to
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: mess it up now that we're face to face.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: You remember my name though, right?
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: Hey?
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: You putting you on the spot.
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: It's Whitson right.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: In French they call me Wittissan. I was actually one
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: time waiting for an aployment at a bank in France
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: and they came out and said Monsieur Wisson and I
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: was like, that's not me, and calling him and calling him.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: I was like, who is this moron? We're going for
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: your appointment already.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: Your whole never would come with me, oh.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: Exact, oh simla. Anyway, I go to.
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: Doctor's appointments, including to the like obgyn, where you think
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: that people would be comfortable saying the word wiener. It's
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: always like when they call people out from the waiting
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: room it's like, oh, uh, you know, miss Smith, Miss Jordan,
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: Miss god Luski, uh Kelly, would they get to me?
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: And nobody wants to try to say Wiener Smith, even
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: at the Obgyn. But anyway, that's all right, I go
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: buy anything. It's all fine.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: Maybe they think you're Bird Simpson, you're playing a brank
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: on them.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe nobody would actually do that. We did one
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: We went to go pick up our turkey for Thanksgiving
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: it Whole Foods, and they called to the back, the
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: wiener Smiths are here for their turkey. And then fifteen
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: minutes later we hadn't gotten the turkey, and I was like, hey,
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: could you call them in the back and see what's up.
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: They called back and they said, what about the turkey
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: for the Wienersmith's. And I heard the person on the
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: walkie talkie go, oh oh gosh, you were serious. So
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: then we got our turkey. All right, I've gotten us
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: off track, daniell get us back on track.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: Please, that's right. So we're zooming inside of matter inside
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: your frozen turkey. You have molecules and atoms, and those
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: are made of protons and neutrons and electrons, and the
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: protons and neutrons are made of quarks. So we've zoomed
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: all the way down, and everything that you've ever tasted
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: or eaten or thrown at your family members on Thanksgiving
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: is made of quarks and electrons, right down to this
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: very basic Two kinds of quarks and one kind of
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: electron can make basically everything. So the particle physicists cookbook
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: has three ingredients. And the most amazing thing, the most
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: mind blowing to me, is that everything in the universe
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: is made of the same ratio of that stuff. It's
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: like one proton to one neutron to one electron, which
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: means the same numbers of quarks and electrons in everything.
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: It's just the arrangement of stuff. But you know, we're
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: never satisfied just knowing that it's not like that's the answer,
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: and so we're always interested in the question of like,
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: is there something deeper? Is there something inside the electron?
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: Is there something inside the quarks? And we haven't talked
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: about it today and probably won't, But obviously there's a
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: huge chunk of the universe dark matter that's not made
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: of quarks and leptons, So we know there's other kinds
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: of matter out there. Definitely not the end of the story.
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: Well, and you said leptons, which we haven't talked about yet.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: What is elepton? Is a lepton like a quark, but
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: it jumps a lot. I'm stretched.
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: No, it's a particle that's slept in. No electon, Sorry
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: for the terminology. There's a category of particles that the
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: electron belongs in, and the electron has cousins the muon
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: and the towel that make up the other leptons. But
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: we can also do say quarks and electrons because that's
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: what makes up the matter that we are made out of.
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: There are other quarks out there, and there are other
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: versions of the electron out there, the muon and the towel,
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: but our kind of matter is made out of two quarks,
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: the up and the down, and the electron.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: Got it, Okay, So after the break, we're going to
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: talk about why we think that digging into the electron
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: is worth it doing. Do we have any evidence to
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: suggest there's something else making that up? And we'll discuss
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: that after the break and we're back. Okay. So we've
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: dug into protons and neutrons. We know that there's quarks
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: that are making them up. Do we have any indication
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: that if we dig farther into electrons we will find
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: that electrons are made up out of something.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: We have no really direct smoking gun, right. What we
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: do have is a sort of history and some hints
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: that encourage us. Recall when we were talking about the
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: periodic table. We saw all these patterns in the periodic
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: table and we were wondering, could that be explained by
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: internal structure? Could these actually all be made out of
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: smaller bits? And the patterns come from how those bits
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: arrange themselves and come together naturally, from the different ways
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: that they can click together, or whatever. And now we
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: know the answer is yes. So we can also look
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: at the current list of particles that we don't know
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: what's inside and ask are there patterns there? Are there
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: unexplained phenomena, things that seem suggestive that maybe these are
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: built out of the same smaller bits. The answer to
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: that is, oh, yeah, absolutely, there are huge, obvious, screaming
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: patterns that suggest very strongly this is not the final answer.
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: And if you were to find something fundamental making up electrons,
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: what would you name it?
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: The white son? Of course?
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: The what toll exactly?
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: So yeah, I hope I'm around to do that, and
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: I suspect the particle physics community would overrule me, and
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: that happens occasionally, you get overruled, like the electron discovered
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: by JJ Thompson. He didn't call it the electron. He
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: wanted to call them corpuscules, like little bits of matter.
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: But people are like, yeah, no, we're going to go
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: with electron.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: I mean, as long as they don't name it like
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: A or B, like what was it Jupiter's rings? It
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: needs to be something exciting. But okay, all right, so
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: tell me more about these tantalizing patterns.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: Yes, So we mentioned earlier that there's more than just
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: the electron, right, the electron has cousins. There's the muon
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: in the towel, so there's three kinds of electrons. The
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: electron also has a partner, the new trino, which isn't
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: part of our matter, but it's part of the universe.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: It's something the universe can do. So in total, there
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: are six of these lepton particles, the electron, muon, TAW,
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: and then the three neutrinos that correspond to them. So
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: that's interesting and you might ask like, well, why are
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: there three these particles are all so closely related that
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: muon is just a little heavier than the electron. The
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: toaw is even heavier. It feels like you patterns in
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: the periodic table. There's like three columns of these particles.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: So that's already very interesting and suggestive. It makes you wonder, like,
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: are there three ways to click together their internal bits?
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: And this is how it happens, three ways for some
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: string inside of it to vibrate. And that's just one
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: of the really interesting patterns. That whole pattern of like
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: six particles three pairs of two is also reflected in
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: the quarks. We talked about the quarks the up and
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: the down. That's one doublet of quarks up and the
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: down go together. There's a copy of that doublet the
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: charm and the strange, very similar to the up and
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: the down, but heavier. And then there's another copy of
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: that doublet the top and the bottom. So all in
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: all the quarks have six and it breaks into these
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: three columns of two particles exactly the same way the
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: leptons do. So you have this structure which is interesting
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: and suggestive, and then you have it repeated in another
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: set of particles. The amazing thing is that the quarks
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: and leptons are very different. The quarks feel the strong force,
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: the leptons don't. The quarks make up the nucleus, the
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: leptons make up the stuff that orbits around it. We
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: don't actually know what the relationship is between quarks and leptons,
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: yet there's this very strong symmetry between them. It's like
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: if you go into a suburban street and you see,
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: like all the houses on the left have this one
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: floor plan, all the houses on the right have this
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: other floor plan, but they're similar. You might be like, oh, okay,
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: well this is obviously built by one company and they
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: got two floor plans, right, it's the same deal. It's
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: like the universe can do this or it could do that,
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: and probably they're built out of the same bits, you know, Like,
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: for example, the charge of the proton is plus one
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: and the charge of the electron is minus one. Those
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: two things cancel exactly. For that to happen, there has
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: to be some relationship between the quarks and leftons. Can't
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: just be chance that the quarks add up to make
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: plus one and the electron adds up to make minus one.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: So there's definitely some connection there. But we don't know
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: what it is. So all of this to me are
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: very obvious clues. And in one hundred years, when we
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: know what's inside the electron and the quarks, people will
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: be like, God, it was so obvious. How did you
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: not see it? Right? But right now we don't know.
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: We know that we have these patterns, and it could
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: be that the universe is just this way, that all
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: this stuff is fundamental and the universe has made it
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: of these complex bits with these weird patterns, and there
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: is no explanation, but I refuse to believe it. I
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: think that everything out there should be explained.
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: So if we've got you know, three different kinds of neutrinos,
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: they've got up and down quarks, charm and strange and
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: top and bottom charm and strange was a good naming thing.
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: When we break the electron into its component parts, do
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: we expect there to be two parts then, to match
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: with what we're seeing with the neutrinos.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, good question. We don't know. There could be made
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: of two things, could we have three things? Could just
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: be made of itself. Whatever is down there is going
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: to be very different from what we've seen before. And
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: you know, when we saw the proton, it was made
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: out of three things. And it's interesting it's made of
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: three things because of the way the strong force works.
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: There's three colors, and one way to get a balance
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: is to have all three colors, you know. It's not
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: just like a plus charge and a minus charge is red, green, blue,
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: and if you have a red, green, and a blue,
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: it comes together to make a color neutral object, which
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: is stable. So one reason why the proton is made
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: out of three is for that reason, because of the
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: structure of that force. So we don't know what force
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: is holding together the quarks or the electrons, and that's
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: what would determine how many pieces there are and how
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: they interact, you know. And so it could be that
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: the electron is fundamental. It's just made of itself, and
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: when the coders of our simulation put together the universe,
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: they started with electrons and that's it, and there's just
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: nothing else inside. But it could also be that it's
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: made of smaller stuff. The frustrating thing is that you
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: can never prove that something is fundamental, right. You can
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: prove it's not by breaking it open and seeing what's inside.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: But all you can do is not to discover that
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: it is made of something. That doesn't prove that it
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: is fundamental, right, just shows that, well, maybe it's fundamental,
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: or maybe it's stuff that's so small you can't see,
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: or it's bound together so tightly you can't break it open,
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: so you can never actually prove that it's fundamental.
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: The universe can be very frustrating that way.
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: And it might also be this is really philosophical, that
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: there's nothing fundamental, like maybe the electron is made of
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: something else, Schma electrons and those are made of something else,
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: but electrons and those are made of something else, is
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: made of something else. And your instinct is, well, there's
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: got to be something at the bottom, right, it's got
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: to be a bedrock layer of reality. And maybe but
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: that's just a philosophical hunch, you know, we have no
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: evidence that there is. There are theories out there in
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: philosophy that the universe could just be an infinite ladder
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: of particles with no bottom, right, it just goes on forever,
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: which would be great for particle physics because like infinite funding, right,
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: just keep.
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: Digging infinite nobels. Yeah, there go, there you go.
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: But that could be our reality, right, it's possible, but
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: there also could be a bedrock, and that's what I
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: hope for. I hope that we get someday to some
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: set of particles that's so simple, so basic, so obvious
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: and beautiful that we think, okay, this must be it.
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: It would make sense for the universe to have this
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: beats fundamental, because it'd be very unsatisfying if the answer
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: is what we have today. The answer is, well, there
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: are twelve matter particles and there are five forced particles,
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: and that's just it. They're seventeen and that's the basic
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: elements of the universe, and that's what we start from.
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: And like, really, come on, it's got to be simpler
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: than that. We have this tendency towards simplicity, and I
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: just hope that the march continues, but there's no guarantees, so.
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: I gotta be honest. Before you and I started talking regularly,
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: I also held out hope that they were like simple, beautiful,
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: elegant answers. And then you told me about the weak force.
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: That was the moment for me where I'm like, I
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: don't think any of this is gonna make sense. We're
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: just gonna have to keep buddling our way through. But
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: hopefully I'm wrong.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: So I ruined your view of particle physics. Used to
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: think of it as like a shining cathedral of simplicity
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: and beauty, and then you're like, man, this is a
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: mess that's.
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: All held together with zip ties and duct tape in there.
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: I don't know what's going on, but it is.
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, But you know, at least now we understand why
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: the weak force is a mess. They used to just
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: be like, gosh, this is kind of ugly, and now
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: we see, oh, it was beautiful and it was shattered
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: by the Higgs boson in this precise way, and that's
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: at least satisfying, and we can explain it, and we
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: can hark back to an earlier day in the universe
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: before it all got messed up. Something satisfying there, and
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: I hope we get that kind of explanation.
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: All right, sounds good. I'm sure the more I learn,
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: the more satisfied I'll become. That's so nice of you,
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: You know, you make a strong effort to be interested
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: in biology. We're both supporting each other here. So let's
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: talk about the methods that are currently being used to
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: try to break electrons into smaller pieces. If that's a
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: thing that exists.
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, So the most obvious thing is what
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: the listener suggested, which is like, hey, let's smash it open, right,
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: Take two electrons or an electron and a positron, doesn't
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: really matter, point them at each other, give them a
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: lot of energy, and bounce them off each other. See
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: what happens. Like This method works also for things like toasters. Right,
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: want to know what's inside your toaster? Take two toasters,
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: throw them at each other at really high speeds. You're
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: gonna have a shower of stuff that comes out, and
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: you can sift through the debris and be like, oh
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: look there's two springs and there's two handles, and oh okay,
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: this must be what the toaster is made out of.
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: An ouch just should have unplugged it first.
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: That's a long extension cord. And there's something fundamentally different
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: about the way it happens or quantum particles, but the
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: spirit is the same. I mean, if you smash two
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: toasters together, you're not destroying parts of the toaster and
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: converting their math into energy and trains meeting them into
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: something else. The bits that come out of the toaster
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: collision are the same bits that went into the toaster collision.
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: In a quantum collision, you can annihilate the particles like
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: eve an electron and a positron. They can annihilate into
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: a photon and then turn into something else. Crazy. What
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: comes out isn't always what went in, right, So you're
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: not always learning about what's inside the electron if you
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: annihilate it.
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: So, say you smashed two toasters into each other, and
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: you expected to see like screws and springs and stuff
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: like that. We don't even know what we should expect
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: to see when you break the electron. And so if
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: you know, things we had never seen before came out
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: of the toaster, like fish cuts, fish guts, exactly, how
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: would we even know what to do with that? And so, like,
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: how do we know what to look for or how
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: to measure it if we've never seen it before?
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, good question. It would be amazing if we discover
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: this fish all the way down.
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: I'm skeptical.
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: The simplest version of what we do is that we
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: start at low energy and we know what we expect
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: to see. Like, if you shoot two electrons at each
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: other at fairly low energy, they're going to bounce off
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: each other in a way that's similar to what happens
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: if you shoot two baseballs at each other. They're going
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: to bounce off, and you can calculate the angles they're
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: going to come out at and the energy. And they're
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: quantum particles, so you can't predict an individual one, but
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: you can predict the distribution. And so if you have
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: what we call elastic scattering, which means you're not breaking
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: the particles open, you know, changing the configuration they're just
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: bouncing off each other is very predictable. So you start
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: with that and you see the distributions you expect, the
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: angles that you expect, you're like, okay, that's cool. And
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: then you increase the energy, and like with baseballs, at
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: some point when you increase the energy, you're going to
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: get what we call an inelastic collision, which means the
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: baseballs shatter or they stick together, or something else happens. Right,
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: And it's an energy threshold because the baseball's help together
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: with energy, right, it's bound together. And if you have
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: a high enough energy, you can break those bonds. If
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: you don't, you don't, So below some energy threshold, you're
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: not probing inside the baseball. You're probing the baseball behavior itself,
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: but above some energy, it's inelastic, and then the distribution changes. Yeah,
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: maybe a baseball comes out, but first of all, it's mangled.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: It looks different, and the angles look very different. Like
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: if you collide to baseballs and they stick together, they
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: don't come back out at you in the same way.
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: Or imagine if you're doing it, like you throw a
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: baseball at a wall, and if you throw it low energy,
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: it bounces off, it doesn't break the wall. Throw it
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: high enough energy, baseball just doesn't come back right. It
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: just goes through the wall. So that's very different. And
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: so that's what you look for to see. If you're
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: probing inside a particle, you shoot it at higher, higher
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: and energy, and you look for deviations from the distributions
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: you would expect from elastic scattering to see that you're
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: starting to do inelastic scattering. You're starting to probe maybe
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: what's inside the particles instead of probing the particles as
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: a whole.
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: We found an energy at which we can shoot electrons
• 37:02
  Speaker 2: at each other where it looks like we're transitioning from
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: elastic to inelastic scattering.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: Unfortunately not yet, but This is exactly how we discovered
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: the structure of the proton. We shot electrons and protons
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: at each other, and a low energy they bounce off
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: elastic scattering. At higher energy, you start to destroy the proton,
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: and what's happening is the electron is now interacting with
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: the quarks inside of it, and so at some energy
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: you start to just get like shrapnel from the proton
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: and it's definitely not elastic scattering, so you can tell
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: you're doing inelastic scattering. For people who want to learn
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: more about these experiments, they're fascinating and amazing. They're called
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: deep in elastic scattering, so you can google that. And
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: if you get to high enough energy, you actually start
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: to see elastic scattering from the things inside the proton.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: And that's, for example, how we know we have three
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: quarks inside the proton, because you shoot electrons at the
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: proton and you start to get elastic scattering as if
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: there are three tight little dots of objects that you're
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: interacting with. Because at high enough energy, the bonds of
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: the quarks are irrelevant. If your energy of your probe
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: is larger than the energy of the bonds between the quarks,
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: you're just shooting it at three quarks and sometimes they
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: bounce off and exactly the way you would expect from
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: elastic scattering between electrons and quarks. So it's this incredibly
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: beautiful transition from elastic to inelastic to then three times
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: elastic scattering. It's really amazing.
• 38:23
  Speaker 2: That must have been so cool to realize that you,
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: instead of a proton, now have three other things that
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: have popped out and be like the answer is three.
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know.
• 38:31
  Speaker 2: That sounds really cool to me.
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: It is really cool, but for a while people didn't
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: believe it. They're like, okay, well that's cool and that's clever,
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: but that's just mathematics, Like is that real. And for
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: a long time people call these partons like parts of
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: the proton, and nobody believes that they were like actually
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: physically real things inside the proton until somebody predicted, like, okay,
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: well if these things are real, these quarks are real,
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: they should be able to do other things also, like
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: make other states bound together. And somebody predicted one of
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: these states. And the day they saw this in the experiment,
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: is this new state made of just these quarks together.
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: That's when everybody started to believe Okay, quarks are real.
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: It's called the October Revolution. It was a very yeah,
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: absolutely in physics. And a guy I worked with tells
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: a story about his father who's also a particle physicist,
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: getting a phone call that day in October and like
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: leaping out of the shower naked and dripping wet because
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: he knew he was going to be exciting news to
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: take that phone call. So sometimes there is drama in
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: particle physics. And so that's what we saw for the
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: inside the proton. We know the proton has structure, and
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: that's how we know, and we can try the same
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: thing shooting electrons at each other. But so far we've
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: seen no structure.
• 39:37
  Speaker 2: And have we gone up to what you would consider
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: to be very very very high energies doing these experiments, Well.
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: We've done the highest we can, right. The large hadron
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: collider is the highest energy collisions of protons and protons,
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: and before that we had a high energy electron collider.
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: You know, we built these things as large as we can.
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: The limitation is just money, Like, there's no fundamental limitation
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: to building a bigger collidse. We know how to do it.
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: It just costs a lot of cash. You got to
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: build a tunnel, you got magnets, you got little accelerating modules.
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: We could, in principle build one that circumnavigates the moon
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: or you know, the galaxy or whatever. You just cost
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: a zillion dollars, and even I think that's probably not
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: a good way to spend to your cash. But it's
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: awesome sort of to think that, like we could just
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: buy this knowledge of the universe, Like it's out there,
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: we're in the candy store, we have the money in
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: our pockets. We're just like, hmmm, I feel like that
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: Snickers bar is too much money.
• 40:30
  Speaker 2: Maybe we should figure out what causes cancer.
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, save some kids from dying. Exactly. So one
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: approach is like, just build bigger colliders. But the problem
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: is we don't know how big it has to be,
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: Like until you see the inside of the electron, you
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: have no idea. Is it right beyond our capability if
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: we build it a little bit bigger we see it,
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: or is it going to require a solar system sized
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: collider or a galaxy sized colider or use black holes
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: or just like a revolution in collider technology, so we
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: don't need to make them so big and expensive something
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: are working on that, So it's an exploration game the
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: same way. You don't know when you land on an
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: alien planet is going to be all dust and rubble?
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: Or are the aliens waiting for us? And you want
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: to land on as many planets as possible. We don't
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: know when we build a collider, are we about to
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: see inside the electron? Or is this thing way too
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: small and we're not going to see anything. You just
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: don't know, all right.
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: Well, so we've talked about direct methods of trying to
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: figure out if electrons are made of smaller parts. Next,
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: you are going to tell us about the indirect method
• 41:27
  Speaker 2: that you queued up for us as a super exciting
• 41:29
  Speaker 2: thing earlier in the episode, And when we get back
• 41:31
  Speaker 2: from the break, we're going to learn all about it.
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: We're back and during the break I asked Daniel if
• 41:52
  Speaker 2: the indirect method required bigger colliders, and he said the
• 41:55
  Speaker 2: answer is no, which means maybe this could be the
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: key with existing technologies for figuring it out exactly. I'm
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: super excited. How do we do this indirectly?
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah? So, particle physicists loves smashing stuff together and they
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: love making bigger and bigger colliders, and that's all fun
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: and everybody would prefer to do it's a direct way.
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: It's the most fun, it's the most obvious, it's the cleanest,
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: the data is beautiful. But hey, it's expensive, and you know,
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: it's hard to build new colliders, and so we also
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: try to be resourceful and we try to find other
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: ways to discover things without having to build the collider
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: to make them directly. So we have these indirect methods
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: of discovering things. Essentially, if we can see the influence
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: of some new particle, for example, on the particles we
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: already are able to make in the collider, even if
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: we don't have enough energy to make that new particle,
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: that can still influence the particles we have. So for example,
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: before we discovered the top quark, we were pretty sure
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: it was there, and we're pretty sure we knew where
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: it was, like how much mass it had because of
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: the way it influenced the particles we were able to
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: make at the lower energy colliders. So we can play
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: this indirect game of seeing the influence of new particles
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: out there on the particles we see to discover new
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: particles without like having the energy to make them, but
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: we can also do something similar to see inside the
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: electron using a very clever trick of studying the Higgs boson.
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: So you remember, the Higgs boson is the particle it
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: messes up the weak force, but also it gives mass
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: to all the particles, like it gives mass to the electron,
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: for example, by interacting with it. So without the Higgs boson,
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: the electron would have no mass. It would be a
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: speed of light, massless particle, similar to the photon, but
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: with charge. Of course, once you have the Higgs boson
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: in the universe, the Higgs and the electron interact, and
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: so the electron that we see is not the pure electron.
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: It's the electron interacting with the Higgs field, and that
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: interaction is sort of like a big pulsing ball. The
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: energy is sliding back and forth between the electron field
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: and Higgs field, back and forth constantly, and that basically
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: counts as internal stored mass of this thing, this thing
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: which is a combination of the electron in the Higgs field.
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: We talked in the Charge episode about how fields are
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: coupled together sloshes back and forth between them. That's what's
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: happening with the electron field and the Higgs field. So
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: the thing that we see is not really a pure electron.
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: What we call the electron is actually a combination of
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: the electron field and the Higgs field, and that thing
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: has energy inside of it because of this interaction, and
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: that's where the electrons mass comes from. Still with me,
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: So I'm.
• 44:19
  Speaker 2: Trying to connect what you just said and thinking about
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: what we were talking about before. So is this interaction
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: going to give us more energy than you would get
• 44:26
  Speaker 2: if you were just smashing electrons together. No, that's not
• 44:30
  Speaker 2: what we're going for. We're just expecting the interactions to
• 44:32
  Speaker 2: be different in a way that is formative.
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. You can't use that as a source of
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: fuel to like push things further or anything. But what's
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: really fascinating is that the electron has a different mass
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: than the muon. For example, right, muon is the cousin
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: of the electron. Muon has a lot more mass, interacts
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: much more strongly with the Higgs boson, and so the
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: Higgs boson interacts with the muon more intensely. So the
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: muon has more mass. And that's really interesting because it
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: means that by studying the interaction between the Higgs boson
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: and a particle, you can understand how much mass it
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: should have. Like if you knew the strength of the
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: interaction between the Higgs boson the electron, you could predict
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: the electrons mass. You'd be like, Okay, I know how
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: much these two fields couple together, so I can calculate
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: how that little pulsling ball of energy should be and
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: I can predict the electrons mass. Right, And the same way,
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: you know, Okay, the muon interacts more strongly with the Higgs,
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: so we should have a higher mass. And the top
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: quark crazy interaction with the Higgs. Huge mass for the
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: top quark. Top quark is like two hundred times the
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: mass of the proton, which is much more massive than
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: the electron. So enormous variations in the amount that the
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: Higgs boson interacts with this stuff. So say you knew
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: how the Higgs boson interacts with these particles, you could
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: predict their mass, and then you went out and you
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: measured their mass, and what if you saw a discrepancy.
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: What if the Higgs boson interacts with the electron and
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: it should give it a mass of like zero point one.
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: But you go out and you measure the mass and
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: it's point five where it's ten point zero, then you'd
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: be like, hold on a second, the electron has more
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: mass than it's getting from the Higgs boson. We think
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: the Higgs boson is giving the electron a certain amount
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: of mass, but we can go out and measure it
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: in the universe it has more mass than that. What
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: could that mean. Well, we've seen that before, haven't we.
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: The proton is made of three quarks, and those quarks
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: get their mass from the Higgs boson, But the proton
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: gets most of its mass not from the Higgs boson,
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: but from the interaction of the quarks, and so in
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: a similar way, if you measure the mass of the
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: electron and it's heavier than you can explain with the
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: Higgs boson, that means that it's got some energy inside
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: of it, some bonds that are holding its bits together.
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: That its mass is not just coming from the Higgs boson.
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: Its mass is coming from the interaction of the things
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: inside of it, which means there are things inside of it. Haha,
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: look at that, ha ha.
• 46:53
  Speaker 2: But that doesn't tell us how many things are inside
• 46:55
  Speaker 2: of it, or the nature of the things inside of it.
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: Don't throw cold water on our discovery. Oh my god,
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: we just had an aha moment. We revealed something about
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: the universe, and now you're not sad.
• 47:04
  Speaker 2: Now I'm excited. I'm excited. I'm just trying to figure
• 47:06
  Speaker 2: out how excited.
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: I should be. No, you're totally right. The indirect method
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: is not as exciting as the direct method. It tells
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: us that there is something inside of it, and you
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: can tell us something about the nature of those bonds.
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: But you're right, it doesn't tell us what it is.
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: It doesn't show it to us, It doesn't give it
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: to us to play with.
• 47:21
  Speaker 2: But has this been done?
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: So this is what we're working on. And this is
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: something we can do with a large hadron collider because
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: we can study the interaction of the Higgs boson in
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: various particles. Who The way we do that is by
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: measuring how often the Higgs boson turns into those particles.
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: Like you create a Higgs boson, does it turn into
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: a pair of bottom quarks or a pair of top quarks,
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: or a pair of electrons or a pair of muons.
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: The rate at which it interacts with these particles determines
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: how often it turns into those particles, so electrons very
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: very low mass, low interaction with the higgs, very rare.
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: To see higgs turn into electrons very difficult, but you
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: run the collider long enough, you'll see it and you'll
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: be able to measure that, and then we can compare
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: that to the mass of the higgs. So we don't
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: have that number yet because the higgs decase to electrons
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: very very very rarely because they're so light. But we're
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: starting to be able to measure that for other particles.
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: So we've measured it for the top cork and for
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: the bottom cork, and those numbers are as we expect.
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: So the higgs boson de case to the top cork
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: in a way that suggests that all of its mass
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: comes from the higgs boson. I mean, you would have
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: heard about it already if we discovered something inside the quarks.
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: So far the number is don't indicate that there's anything
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: inside the top cork or the bottom cork. We haven't
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: been able to probe the other particles because they're lower
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: masks and therefore the higgs the case to them more rarely.
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: But that is something we can do, and we have
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: ten more years to run this collider and get all
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: that data and analyze these things. And I just think
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: it's cool that we have sort of these backdoor methods
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: to be like, well, let's look to see if we
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: can figure out if there is something there before we
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: actually build the collider to break it open and show
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: it to us.
• 48:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So say you had an electron a muon what
• 48:55
  Speaker 2: is a tau town?
• 48:56
  Speaker 4: Good?
• 48:57
  Speaker 2: Right? Towh man, it was so cool question stuff.
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: I'm rounding you up to any of plus.
• 49:02
  Speaker 2: All right, thank you? Great? Oh yeah, okay, So you've
• 49:05
  Speaker 2: got these three things and you interact them with the
• 49:07
  Speaker 2: Higgs if the answer for their mass differs in some
• 49:11
  Speaker 2: predictable way, like you know, one is always twenty five
• 49:14
  Speaker 2: percent higher than the other, and then the other one
• 49:16
  Speaker 2: is another twenty five percent beyond that, could you guess
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: how many there were in there, like you know, there's
• 49:22
  Speaker 2: probably three, and then there's an additional one in this
• 49:24
  Speaker 2: one and an additional one in that one, Like could
• 49:26
  Speaker 2: you get a handle on like the relative numbers of
• 49:28
  Speaker 2: things that way?
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly the game we'd love to play. You know,
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: look at these things, look for patterns, look for clues.
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: If we saw this, there would be instantly a zillion
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: theories explaining it, you know, to match all those numbers,
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: which would be really fun. And you know, we need
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: that kind of inspiration. We need this kind of data
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: to give us a clue to come up with these ideas.
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: There are lots of theories of electron compositeness, you know,
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: things that could be inside the electron, but nobody's any
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: idea if any of them are true. Maybe the most
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: famous is string theory. String theory says all the particles
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: are just string oscillating in different ways, which is cool
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: and very beautiful, but strings are so tiny that we
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: could never see them with a direct method, like we
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: would need a ridiculous collider to see strings. And you know,
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: not everything that's inside the electron could be seen even
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: with this indirect method, because it has to couple to
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: the Higgs boson. In order for this to work, it
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: has to directly get its mass from the Higgs boson
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: the constituents of the electron. It could be that the
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: constituous electron don't get their mass from the Higgs boson,
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: and the electron itself is some like effective approximate description
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: of it, and it gets its mass directly from the
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: Higgs boson, unlike the proton, for example. So there are
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: ways that this could fail, but it's an exciting way
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: to see inside the electron anyway.
• 50:43
  Speaker 2: So is this the kind of thing where, like tomorrow,
• 50:45
  Speaker 2: the news could be saying, oh my gosh, using the
• 50:47
  Speaker 2: indirect method, we are now sure that the electron is
• 50:49
  Speaker 2: made up of stuff. You said something about a decade's
• 50:51
  Speaker 2: worth of data. Is this the kind of thing where
• 50:52
  Speaker 2: we're gonna need ten years to figure it out? To
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: see a signature, We're gonna.
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: Need a while. This is hard. You're measuring something that's
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: very very rarely happens, and then you want to measure
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: very precisely, which means you need a bunch of examples.
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: But this is what we're good at, you know, we
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: are good at using machine learning to extract this information
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: from the data to get the most juice out of
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: the dollars that we have spent on it. And you know,
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: this is what particle physicists do. We're blocked by this wall,
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: so let's see if we can find a way around it.
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: And I'm impressed with the cleverness. I mean, I didn't
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: come over this. Yeah, somebody else thought of this, and
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: it just goes to show you the ingenuity of humanity.
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: You know, there are questions we have, and we will
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: always push to find the answers, even if it seems
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: impossible or impractical or ridiculously expensive, we will find a
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: way to get there.
• 51:36
  Speaker 2: So you said that the LEDC right now mostly has
• 51:39
  Speaker 2: protons shooting around. So are we even collecting the right
• 51:42
  Speaker 2: kind of data to use the indirect method right now
• 51:44
  Speaker 2: or is that happening at like a different collider.
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: No, proton shooting around is a good way to make
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: Higgs bosons. One thing that LEDC is really good at
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: is making Higgs bosons. It was built to discover the Higgs,
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: but it was also built to discover lots of different
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: versions of the Higgs, because we didn't know in advance
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: how much mass the Higgs would have, and so exactly
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: the best way to make it. So proton collider is
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: really good at discovering things you don't know much about,
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: because it can make lots of different kinds of things.
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: Now that we know more about the Higgs boson, people
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: are talking about making a Higgs factory, which is a
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: machine that makes zillions and zillions of higgs. It's like
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: perfect for making higgs, and it does it by colliding
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: muons actually, so you make beams of muons because muons
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: interact with the higgs more than the electrons do. This
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: is a good way to make lots of higgs. It's
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: really hard to make muon beams because muons don't last
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: very long that the k back into electrons. But people
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: have figured that out. So that's one thing on the
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: docket for the next colliders. Maybe make a big muon
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: collider higgs factory so you can study these things incredible detail.
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: So that'd be exciting, but of course you know that
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: cost a few bill Yeah, yeah.
• 52:47
  Speaker 2: I would like to make a discovery there where people
• 52:49
  Speaker 2: can say, like, well, we need to make more Wienersmiths,
• 52:52
  Speaker 2: make more higgs. Like that's a person and that's just
• 52:54
  Speaker 2: so great that his name has become, you know, used
• 52:57
  Speaker 2: in that way. But anyway, maybe one day they'll be
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: wanting to make more Wienersmiths, but maybe not.
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: Maybe one day, And I hope that in a one
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: hundred years or a thousand years, people know more about
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: the structure of matter and they can talk about the
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: fundamental bits and you can smoke banana peels on the
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: roof and talk about why the universe is made out
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: of squiggly ons and what that even means and why
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: are the two of them? And you know, to me,
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: these are fun philosophical questions and we don't even get
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: to ask them yet because we don't know what those
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: answers are. And I hope to live long enough to
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: see some of that.
• 53:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's cool that we live in a time
• 53:27
  Speaker 2: where you can devise the experiments to ask these questions
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: that we've gotten this far down the ladder. So I'm excited.
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: The ancient Greece would be very impressed.
• 53:35
  Speaker 2: I hope, I think so. Yeah. I mean, even though
• 53:37
  Speaker 2: this isn't about fish cuts or fish vomit, I still
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: think this.
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: Is very cool in a way. It is about fish
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: cuts because it's about all of us.
• 53:44
  Speaker 2: That's aw man. That was poetic, really poetics modern days.
• 53:50
  Speaker 5: Saga over here, all right, all right, thanks everyone for
• 53:54
  Speaker 5: going on this journey with us into the dark heart
• 53:57
  Speaker 5: of matter and understanding what makes up our uni and
• 54:00
  Speaker 5: what we know about it.
• 54:01
  Speaker 2: And if you have a question about the universe, you
• 54:03
  Speaker 2: can send it to us at Questions at Daniel and
• 54:05
  Speaker 2: Kelly dot org. We look forward to hearing from you.
• 54:15
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