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What's a proton made of? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Hey, or hey, do you know what you are made
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: out of? I think I'm mostly made out of bananas
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: and granola and cereal. That's my main diet, all right.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: Well what's that stuff made out of? Right right? I
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: think it's made out of protons, neutrons and electrons, right right,
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: And then those are made out of those are made
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: out of um up corks, down corks, and also electrons.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: All right. That's like, what's the other one percent of me?
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: Made out of? All sorts of weird exotic particles? Now
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: I feel exotic. You call me exotic, Orge, I said,
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: I don't have any exotic tigers. Well it's not just you,
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: it's everyone and everything. It's actually normal to be exotic.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: Every tiger has exotic particles. Hi am jorhand made cartoonists
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: and the creator of PhD comics. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: a particle of physicist, and I'm made of the same
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: particles that you are. That I am the same, like
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: we share the same particle. I thought my particles were
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: exclusive to me. Are we going to break? Your electrons
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: and my electrons are all just different wiggles on the
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: same electron field. Man, Oh, we're all connected, dude. Yeah,
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: we're all just different fluctuations in the same quantum field. Well,
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: this is me waving at you with I guess the
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: wave function in the same field. Yeah, you're not just
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: waving at me. You are a wave at me. We
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: are We're all waves. We are all waves exactly. But
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explained the Universe,
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio in which we wave
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: our around the mysteries of the universe, talking about the deepest,
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: biggest questions, the nature of reality, what everything is made
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: out of, how it all works, what science has figured
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: out about the tiniest little particles and the largest galaxies
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: and everything in between. We don't shy away from the biggest, deepest, scariest,
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: most interesting questions that define the nature of human existence
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: and the context of our lives. We dig right into
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: them and explain all of them to you. That's right,
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: because it is an exotic and also exotic universe, full
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: of interesting mysteries and questions and lots of interesting kinds
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: of particles and celestial bodies to think about, to wonder about,
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: and for us to discover. That's right. It's a crazy,
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: beautiful universe. Out there with so many weird things, and
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: we would like to understand all of them, not just
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: like one or two of them, or even nine of them.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: We want to figure it all out because we want
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: to have a deep, comprehensive understanding of the entire universe.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: We're greedy that way. Yeah, Physicists are just basically pulled
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: him on collector, Right, you got to catch them all.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: You can't leave any Pokemon ball unturned, that's right. And
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: sometimes we want to evolve our particles from the lowest,
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: most boring particles to the weird, exotic forms that we
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: can use to defeat our neighbors. Yeah. And in this episode, Daniel,
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: we're sort of stretching the maybe the limits of these
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: quantum fields because we are more far apart than usual.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: This is an interesting international version of Daniel and Horge
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: explaining the universe. That's right. This is late night Coast
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: to Coast with Daniel and Jorge. Yeah, we just need
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: that groovy jazz music maybe in the background. Can we
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: work that in? But you're right. I'm coming to you
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: live from Copenhagen, Denmark, where I'm spending my summer on
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: a mini sabbatical doing research at the niels Bore Institute,
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: Nice Neil's Bore. He's a pretty big name in physics. Right.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: He discovered sort of the structure or the initial structure
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: of the atom. That's right. He had a big role
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: to play in the early derivation of quantum mechanics, which
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: is one reason why it's called the Copenhagen interpretation of
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: quantum mechanics. And here at the niels Borg Institute is
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: sort of an old fashioned physics institute. Back in the day,
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: if you had an institute named after you, you were
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: also in residence there. So some of the buildings here
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: at the niels Bore Institute are like his apartments, and
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: then later they all got turned into graduate student offices,
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: some of which have like his bathtub in them. That's
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: where he yelled eurek and ran down the street naked. Right,
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: Is that is that the famous bathtub? That's right? Am
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: I thinking of another discoverer? No? I think every science
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: story involves a bathtub and somebody yelling eureka, well naked,
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: every single one. And if it doesn't, it should because
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: because why not, that's right, because you need the drama. No,
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: it's an exciting place to be if you've seen the
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: play Copenhagen. That's all about Niels Born Werner Heisenberg's conversations
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: about vision and quantum mechanics during World War Two. It
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: takes place here the Niels Born Institute and the park
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: right behind it, so it's a place that sort of
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: steeped in history. So yeah, it's a nice place to
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: come and do some science. So are you recording this
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: from Niels Boor's closet or are you actually in his bathtub?
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: I'm in Neil's bors podcast booth. Of course, he was
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: a famous podcaster back in the day. That's right. You
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: cann't shut that guy up. And she's loved to talk.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: He invented everything quantum mechanics, structure, the atom, podcasting. Also,
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: he was the first Instagram star. I heard, the first
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: TikTok dancer. He definitely was not boring. He's a man
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: of many talents. But anyways, we're here to talk about
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: the universe and try to explain it to you because
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: it is a pretty interesting universe. And one of the
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: biggest questions in this universe that we can ask is
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: what are we made out of? Like what are humans?
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: What are people? What are dogs? What are watermelons? What's
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: it all made out of? And Daniel, we've made a
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: lot of progress, not just in this podcast, but as
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: a human species trying to figure that out, and we've
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: broken things down pretty well upting out. Yeah, I am
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: impressed with how far we have gotten. Several hundred years ago,
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: we knew that things around us were made out of, like,
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: you know, about a hundred basic elements, which is already
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: huge progress. Right, to describe all those things you mentioned
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: in terms of just a hundred building blocks is a
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: huge step. Right. It could have been an infinite number
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: of building blocks that describe all the things around is
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: it could have been that every kind of thing had
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: its own particle. Watermelons could have been made out of
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: little water melon ETOs, for example. But in our universe, weirdly,
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: everything can be built out of a smaller set of stuff.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: So even being able to describe the universe around you
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: in terms of like a hundred elements is a huge deal.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: But we have made progress since then, Right, we have
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: shown that those elements are made out of just a
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: few smaller particles from which you can make lithium and
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: technetium and uranium, all with the same ingredients. So, yeah,
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: we have made a lot of progress. And as you say,
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: it's not just about the universe around us, it's a
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: very personal question. We are asking what we are made
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: out of? What is the recipe for me? And I
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: like to think that I'm made out of the right stuff.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: I don't know about you, or at least the mostly
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: right stuff. Sometimes I feel like there's a bit of
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: wrong stuff in there, but mostly the right stuff, mostly
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: wrong right. It is a pretty interesting arc for sort
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: of our our journey as a human species to sort
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: of think that there's all this stuff around is it's
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: made out of that looks really different and looks very
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: varied and wonderfully diverse. But it turns out that as
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: we dig down deeper and deeper, it's all sort of
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: made out of the same stuff. First it's made out
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: of the same elements and there and then the same particles,
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: and so right now we have a pretty good picture
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: of where we stand in terms of what we're made
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: out of. We do have a sort of a good picture.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: We've made a lot of progress. As you say, we
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: boil it down from like a hundred elements to just
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: the proton, the neutron, and the electron. And now, of
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: course we know the proton and neutron are just made
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: out of a couple of quarks, So it sort of
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: seems like, wow, we've really narrowed this down. Everything we
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: are made out of has only three basic ingredients. But
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: you know, there's a twist to this story. As we
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: dig down deeper, we discover that the answer is not
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: quite as simple as we thought, and that some of
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: those other weird particles we see in colliders and in
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: strange exotic cosmic rays from space might also be playing
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: a role in making us up. Yeah, because I think
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: you know, as we've talked about in this podcast a lot,
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: and then people who have read our books, we know
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: that the like the atoms and elements, they are made
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: out of protons and electrons, and protons are made out
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: of quarks. But you're saying some more complicated pictures than that.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: That's right. It turns out the deeper you dig, the
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: weirder we are to be. On the podcast, we'll be
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: asking the question what's inside a proton? Daniel, I'll assume
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to find tigers, exotic tigers, or bananas
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: and crenulas in there. You might just actually you might
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: tigers and anti tigers. Oh my. But when I was
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: a kid, I always wondered, like, what were the particles
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: themselves made out of? Like I had this idea that
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: a proton was like a scoop of particles stuff. You know,
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: It's like a tiny little spinning ball made out of
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: some particle stuff. And really the question was, then what
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: was that stuff? What is like the basic clay of
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: the universe out of which you built these particles, Because
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: that's more interesting than you know, like the fact that
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: you happen to take a scoop of it to make
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: a proton. So to me, that was always the more interesting,
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: deeper question. Well, it's kind of interesting that, you know,
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: we me in high school, we sort of learned about
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: protons and electrons, and then you learned that protons are
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: made out of quarks. And it feels like you call
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: these things particles, but really they're made out of smaller
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: particles inside of them. Yeah, exactly. Everything is just shells
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: within shells within shells until we get down to the
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: smallest particles we know of, which we think of as
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: tiny little dots, which contain all sorts of weird energy
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: and interactions. So it's sort of like we are made
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: out of legos, and then those legos are made of
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: smaller legos, and those legos are made of smaller legos.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: So the proton is a pretty basic particle. But I
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: guess the question we're asking today is what's inside a proton?
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: And as we talked about, most people think that it's
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: just quarks inside of them, but maybe there's more to them.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: So we were wondering how many people out there have
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: thought about what is exactly inside of a proton, whether
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: or not it's just quarks or not. So it's usual
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: Dina went out there into the Internet to ask people
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: what is inside a proton? So thank you to everybody
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: out there in the Internet who was willing to volunteer,
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: And if you would like to participate for future episodes,
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: please don't be shy right to us. It's fun, there's
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: no pressure, you'll have a good time, and you'll hear
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: your voice on the podcast. So please send us a
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: note to questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. So
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: think about it for a second, what do you think
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: is inside a proton? It was what people had to say.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: I think it was free quarks but I don't know
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: which ones. Isn't that two plus quarks and on minus court.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: It's been a long time since I read any of
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: the stuff, so I forgot a lot. But I think
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: that's it. I know that there are sub atomic particles
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: inside a proton. I think you don't you break it
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: open and find isn't it quarks inside? I can't remember
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: it's glue ones or something. There's something inside it. I
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: don't know. I'm just gonna say in general quirks. I
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: know that there's some up ones and some down ones,
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: and some strange intron's and I don't know which ones. Proton,
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: it's uh a particle, and well, together with neutron and
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: electron makeup the atom. Um, that's it. I think a
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: proton being a sub atomic particle is just a oscillation
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: of the electro weak force or something like that. Well,
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: in a proton, you have three quarks. I can't remember
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: if it's two up quarks and a down quirk or
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: two down quirks in an up quark, but there are
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: three of them. And from reading I've recently read this
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: really amazing book called We Have No Ideas by these
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: guys called Daniel and Joe, maybe you've heard of them.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: I don't mean a name drop. There's a lot of
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: energy wrapped up in the bonds holding those quarks together.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: So I'm gonna go with three quarks and a ton
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: of energy in the bonds. All right, some pretty consistent answers.
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: I feel like everyone who maybe listen to this podcast
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: has this pretty basic idea that what's inside of a
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: proton are basically three quarks and yeah, mostly hands down
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: people thought quirks and a few glue ons to stick
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: them together. There's even a nice plug for a great
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: sounding book in They're called We Have No Idea that
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: tells everybody all about the mysteries of the universe. Oh yeah,
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: what is this book about? And four are the two
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: handsome gentlemen that wrote it. It was gost written by us,
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: but it looks like it was written by two handsome gentlemen.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: It's all about everything we don't know about the universe,
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: all the big open questions that science still has not
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: figured out, that scientists on the very forefront of knowledge
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: are digging down into the minds of truth that try
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: to understand. It's a fun book all about physics with
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: hilarious cartoons drawn by Jorge, and you should check it out.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: It's called we have no idea. Yeah, at least one
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: of our listeners read it, according to this sample of responses,
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: but most people seem to have this idea that protons
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: are made out of good three quarts. So maybe Daniel
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: has started with that, what are the basics of what
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: we know about what's insidet a proton? That's right. The
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: first answer, this sort of best approximate answer to what's
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: inside of proton is exactly what our listeners have said,
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: which is three corks. Right, you take two up corks
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: and one down cork, and you put them together and
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: you make a proton. And that's already sort of fascinating
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: and weird because you know, the proton has charge plus one, right,
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: is the opposite charge of the electron, which is of
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: course charge minus one. So how do you get three
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: corks to add up to a charge of plus one. Well,
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: it means that the corks themselves have weird fractional charges,
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: like the up cork has an electric charge of plus
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: two thirds and the down cork has an electric charge
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: of minus one third. So you take two up corks
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: for a total charge of four thirds, and then you
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: add a down cork which has a charge of minus
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: one third, and boom, it adds up to one the
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: charge of the proton. And I always thought that was weird, Like,
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: how exotic to have particles with fractional charges, you know,
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: two thirds words minus one third? How strange is that? Right,
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: that's weird because like one third, it's it's not an
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: even numbers, like it's a it's an even fraction, but
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: it's it's one of these sort of infinite numbers. Right, Yeah,
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: it is weird. And you might think, well, you could
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: have just defined the charges of the proton and the
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: electron to be plus three and minus three, right, because
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: then the upcork would have charged plus two and the
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: down corp would have charged minus one. So in that
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: sends you would avoid like any fractional charges. But the
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: weird thing is that we don't see any other intermediate values,
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: Like we don't see particles that have charge one in
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: two thirds or minus four thirds or something like that.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: We only see integer charges sort of the macroscopic level.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: The proton, the electron, you know, the neutron has charged zero.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: But they are made out of particles that have fractional charges,
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: so they just seem to always add up to these
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: integer values, which is kind of weird. Yeah, it's weird
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: also that it adds up to like plus one, exactly
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: plus one, which just happens to be the opposite of
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: the charge of the electron, like exactly the same exactly,
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: because the electron is not made of quarks, right. The
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: electron is made out of the electron as far as
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: we know, it's not made of anything smaller. So the
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: fact that the corks add up to exactly plus one,
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: which balances the electron, that's totally necessary for chemistry, right,
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: for the hydrogen atom to form. But according to our theory,
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: those are very different things. You're balancing completely different ingredients,
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: and they happen to exactly balance, and in our theory
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: that's sort of an accident. We have a parameter in
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: the standard model for the electric charge and another one
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: for the charge of the quarks, and there's no reason
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: they have to balance, but they somehow do. And that's
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: a hint, right, that's a clue that says that something
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: is going on here that you haven't really figured out.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: There's some connection between the corks and the leptons. The
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: electron that we don't understand. But that's a mystery for
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: another day. But I guess maybe the basic takeaway is
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: that inside of a proton, the basics of a proton
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: involved is having three quarts inside of him, two up
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: works and one down. Right, that's the basics, and for
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: most things it will do. But as soon as you
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: take a closer look, you realize that can't be the
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: whole story. There must be something else going on in
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: the proton, because just these corks by themselves can't explain
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: the way the proton is really it has some strange behavior. Well,
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: first of all, look at the mass of the proton.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: Like the proton wags one giga electron voult. That's like
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: a billion electron volts, but it's made out of quarks
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: whose masses are much much smaller than like a thousand
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: times smaller. There are a few million electron volts. So
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: how do you make something out of millions of electron
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: volts and end up with a billion electron volts? Right?
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: That's pretty weird. That's like taking a few million bucks
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: and turning into a billion dollars. Right, there's some sort
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: of like stock market magic pre so the proton is
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: much much more heavy than the things it's made out of,
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: which tells you something else must be going on. It
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: sounds like a dot com boom, which means where are
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: we headed for? Like a universal crash? Here Daniel with
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: the particles? That's right? Can I interest you in investing
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: in my proton fund? It's not a bubble. I promise
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: you it won't collapse. The proton is stable. Yeah, But
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: I think the basic mystery is that you know, each
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: cork weighs a little bit, but once you put them
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: together into a proton, suddenly the whole thing weighs a lot.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: And so the question, I guess the first mysteries like
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: where does that extra mask come from? Yeah, Like, imagine
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: it takes three lego pieces and you put them together,
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, the thing you've made is
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: now like super duper heavy. It weighs a thousand pounds
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: or something. You wonder like, WHOA, what's going on? And
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: so already we know that there's something else in the proton,
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: something else that's contributing a lot to the mass of
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: the proton, and the number one missing element there, of course,
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: is the thing holding those corks together. Those the gluons
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: and the photons that are binding these corks together. Because
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: remember that corks are special in a really important way.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: They feel the strong nuclear force. Strong nuclear force being
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: the strongest, the most powerful, and also the weirdest force
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: in the universe. And it's the source of like fusion
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: and fission and all those crazy sources of energy. It
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: powers the stars. It's the dominant force in the universe,
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: especially at these very short distances. And so to hold
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: these corks together into a stable particle called the proton,
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: you have to have a lot of energy, and that
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: energy is whizzing around inside the proton in the form
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: of gluons, right, So it's all this extra energy inside
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: holding the three quarts together that gives the proton. It's
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: extra mass. That's kind of how you explain how it
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: has so much more mass in the three corks. Yeah,
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: and you have to get away from the idea of
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: mass as just being the mass of the stuff it's
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: made out of. When you calculate the mass of an object,
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: it also gets mass from the energy inside it. So
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: there's energy inside and object. If you have to put
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: energy into those legos to combine them together to make
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: a proton. Then that energy also contributes to the mass
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: of the object. Right E equals mc squared. So as
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: you add energy to an object, it gains in mass.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: And so the mass of the proton is not just
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: the mass of the stuff that makes it up, but
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: also the energy of those objects, and that energy is
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: represented in particle form in terms of gluons, these massless
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: but very energetic particles that are whizzing around between the corks. Yeah,
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: so the proton is not just a simple like three
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: building blocks stuck together at three quarks. It's like it's
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: got this weird sort of quantum mechanical the sea of frothing,
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: sea of other particles also holding the whole thing together.
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: And so let's get into what that c is made
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: out of, how exotic it is, and how we know
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: what's going on inside of the proton. But first let's
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: take a quick break. All Right, we're talking about what's
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: inside the proton, and Daniel, I assume it's not bananas
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: an ice cream metaphorically speaking, yet it's kind of bananas
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: an ice cream. I mean, we talked in the beginning
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: of the podcast about how, yeah, mostly the proton is
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: upquorks and down corks, And that's sort of conceptually true
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: that it's mostly that, but from like an accounting point
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: of view, it's mostly not. Right, most of the proton
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: is this c Most of the mass of the proton
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: comes from the energy of these gluons. So actually you
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: can sort of like ignore the upquorks and down corks
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: and say that mostly a proton is just like a
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: seeding mass of gluons, right right, Well, this is kind
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: of a difficult concept, maybe for a lot of people
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: who might be listening to this. Is like we're saying
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: like that the mass of the proton is mostly the
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: energy that it takes to bind them together. But then
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: you're saying that this energy sort of exists glass that
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: are kind of popping into and out of existence. Is
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: that what you mean, or is that mass sort of
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: just in the potential energy of holding these courts together. Yeah,
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: that's sort of a deep philosophical question, and people are
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: divided about how to think about it. You know. One
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: way to think about it is that you have the
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: real objects, the up corks and the down corks, and
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: they have these strong forces between them, like strong with
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: the capital s, like the strong nuclear force, and those
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: forces can be represented in two different ways. One is
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: as a field. You say like, well, there's a lot
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: of energy stored in the quantum fields of the strong
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: force inside the proton. So some people think of it
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: as like particles and the energy is the fields. And
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: from that point of view, you could also think of
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: the up corks and down corks. It's just like part
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: of the upcork and down cork fields. So you think
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: of it like, it's all fields, right, the forces are fields, matters, fields,
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: just energy stored in quantum fields. There's another way to
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: think about it in terms of the particles. You say, well,
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: the particles are the real thing. Up corks and down
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: corks inside the protons are particles, and then what about
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: the forces in between them? When you can also think
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: about those forces in terms of particles. And so when
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: we say like the energy is stored into the form
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: of gluons, what we mean is that the strong force
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: which holds all these particles together is exchanging gluons. Like
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: the energy of the strong force is used to make
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: these like virtual gluons which whiz back and forth. It's
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: just like another way to think about how to account
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: for that energy. Is it in the fields is it
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: in these virtual particles? Mathematically it's sort of equivalent philosophically,
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: makes you think about it conceptually differently because I imagine gluons,
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: I mean, they're not theoretical, like they have a mass
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: to them, right, Gluons have mass. Gluons are do not
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: have mass, but they are not theoretical there are a
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: real thing. But yet gluons are massless just like the photon,
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: but they have energy to them, right, They have energy
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: to them, and so they move at the speed of light,
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: just like photons do. And just like photons, they have energy. Right,
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: Photons canna have energy even though they have no mass, right,
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: But mass is energy, so I'm sort of right, sort of. Well,
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: it's especially complicated because photons don't have internal energy, right,
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: Mass comes from internal stored energy, and a photon doesn't
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: have any internal stored energy. Like you look inside a photon,
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: there's nothing there. All it is is the motion. So
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: you don't get mass from having like energy of motion.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: You get mass from having internal stored energy, which is
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: why you can weirdly have a photon that has energy
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: but no mass. And also if you want to go
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: there for those listeners, really into the details of the
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: full equation for the equals mc squared has another term
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: to it equals mc square. The m there refers to
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: the rest mass of the particle. There's another term for
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: adding momentum of the particle. And photons, of course have
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: no rest mass because they can't ever be at rest,
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: So there's some fine print there. So then maybe can
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: you give us an explanation of how these gloss or
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: how this kind of stored energy gives something more mass?
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: Like is it that if I try to push a proton,
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: I also have to sort of, I don't know, create
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: these gluons interacting between the course, and that takes some energy,
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: and so that's why it's harder to push the proton.
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: You know, I wish I could, But it's not something
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: that physics really understands. It's just something we sort of describe.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: Like we notice that if you have more energy stored
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: inside something, it has more inertial mass, Like this is
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: something we observe and describe. We do experiments. We see
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: that if you add internal energy to something, then it
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: takes a larger force to accelerate it. So somehow there's
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: a property of internal stored energy that it has inertia. Right,
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: that energy takes a force to move it around. And
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: I wish we had like a deep, fundamental understanding of
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: why that is. But it's just something we sort of
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: observe about our universe and describe. It's a massive mess
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: to try to it is. You have intuitively sort of
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: an understanding of why objects that have mass take a
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: force to accelerate them. Right, Like, if you want to
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: push on a really big rock and get it going,
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: it takes a big force. It's sort of hard to
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: wrap your mind and around, like why if you give
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: that the internal energy, if you like make the rock hot,
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: why should it take a larger force to accelerate it? Right?
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: But that's because you think of the rock in terms
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: of like the stuff inside of it. But really, mass
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: is not a measure of the stuff inside of it.
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: It's sort of more like an indicator of how much
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: energy there is inside something. That's really what mass is.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: It's like a dial that tells you how much energy
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: is stored inside this thing, either in terms of the
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: masses of the particles it's made out of or the
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: energy between them. So then all this extra mass I've
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: gained the summer. That's really just energy, is what you're saying.
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: You could probably turn it into lots of energy for
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: it to go for a long, long jog. Yeah all right,
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: well so but you're saying, one interpretation of this extra
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: energy that's that's stored inside is as a sea of particles,
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: meaning like there's a throbbing kind of quantum sort of
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: volume that where particles are popping into and out of existence. Yeah,
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: every time two corks interact with each other, they're very
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: deep inside these like on states of the strong force.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: Every time they interact with each other, you can think
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: of it like they're passing a gluon back and forth,
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: the same way you can imagine, like what happens when
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: two electrons repel each other is that they use a photon.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: Because a photon carries the electromagnetic force, a gluon carries
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: the strong force. And so when two quarks interact with
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: each other, they're passing a gluon back and forth. And
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: so that means that the best picture of what's inside
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: a proton are like three tiny little dots and then
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: a huge swarm of these luons going back and forth
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: between and around all those corks, right, so then they're
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: creating gluons, and then the gluons trying to other particles. Right,
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: that's where this weird sea of particles come from. That's right,
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: because gluons don't just hang out. They're very energetic, and
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: they fly through space, and they are quantum objects, and
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: when they fly through space, they have a lot of
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: options for what they can do. They can just stay
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: a gluon do nothing. That's sort of the most boring,
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: most likely thing. But they can also turn in two
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: pairs of particles. Like the same way that a photon
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: flying through space can momentarily turn into an electron and
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: its anti particle, a gluon can do that. Also, a
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: gluon can turn into a cork and an anti cork.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: It can also turn into two gluons. A Gluons feel
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: the strong force themselves as part of the reason the
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: strong force is so strong, because gluons make more gluons,
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: which make more gluons, And so these gluons don't just
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: fly through space simply. They create this flickering blob of
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: virtual other particles, quirks and antiquarks all the time. So
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: then is the idea. Then the three quarks inside of
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: our proton there constantly interacting with each other even though
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: they're just sitting there. They're constantly in a sort of
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: quantum mechanical virtual way, changing gluons all the time, and
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: those gluons are creating other particles, so there's like a
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: virtual party all the time inside of a proton, exactly
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: the same way that like an electron flying through a
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: field is surrounded by a swarm of photons, and those
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: photons are turning into like other pairs of particles all
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: the time, So every particle is actually surrounded by a
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: little frothing virtual massive particles, but especially where there's a
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: lot of energy, And so you're exactly right. These corks
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: are constantly interacting the same way like a proton and
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: an electron, which makes a hydrogen. Those two things are
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: bound together, which means they are interacting. They're held together
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: by their electromagnetic force in the same way quarks are
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: being held together. So they're interacting constantly, and the gluons
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: that are passing back and forth between them don't just
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: stay gluons. They turn into all sorts of crazy particles
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: all the time, right, So then that's sort of the
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: answer to the question of what's inside a proton is
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: that there's quarks, two up quarks, one down cork, and
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: also a whole bunch of other particles like gluons and
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: and all these other crazy particles that gluon's turned into.
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: That's right, and that's sort of the other side of
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: this story that we discovered that mostly we are made
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: out of a few simple particles up quirks, down corks,
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: and electrons, but there are other particles out there. In
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: our collider experiments and in cosmic rays, we discovered weird
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: particles muons and town halls and other corks, strange quirks
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: and charm corks and bottom quirks and top corks. And
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: we thought, well, what do we need those four We
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: don't really need those to make up ourselves, to make
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: up ordinary matter. But actually it turns out that those
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: do play a role in matter, because when the gluons
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: are flying around inside the proton, they can turn into
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: any of those particles. They can turn into a pair
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: of corks, right, any quarks, even bottom quarks, even top corks.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: So that means that the proton has inside it not
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: just up corks and down corks, but a little bit
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: of everything, a little bit of everything. Everyone's coming to
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: the party, that's right. It's like when you go to
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: the kitchen and you just sort of like take all
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: the spices and you put them inside your dinner. Like
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: that's what the burton is. It's a little bit of
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: every flavor. It's an international pot pourri. And I guess
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: it's not just the proton. I mean any one of
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: these sort of composite particles that are made out of
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: multiple corks. Maybe they're also a big party in themselves. Yes, exactly.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: Neutrons have a very similar story, and even particles that
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: we think are fundamental, right, like the electron on is
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: surrounded by a swarm of virtual particles. Even when it's
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: not like bound into a hydrogen atom together with a proton,
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: it's still interacting. It still has an e M field
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: around it, which means photons, and those photons are doing
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: the same thing these gluons are doing. They're turning into
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: muons and towels and corks and all sorts of crazy
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: stuff all the time. So there's some cool consequences of that, right.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: It means that these particles don't just have matter in them,
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: because when a gluon turns into corks. They can't just
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: like create corks out of nothing. It has to at
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: the same time create antiquarks, or like a gluon can
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: become up anti up or bottom anti bottom or top
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: anti top. So what that means is that inside every
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: proton there's also antimatter. Whoa then wouldn't then antimatter touch
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: regular matter and then explode It does exactly. So what
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: happens is the gluon is flying along and it turns
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: into a particle anti particle pair, and then very quickly
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: those to annihilate back into a gluon. And that's what
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: happens when matter meets antimatter turns into a gluon or
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: photon or some other kind of energy carrying force particle.
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: If you have a lot of it around that it
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: very quickly turns into a lot of energy, and that's
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: very dangerous. Here they're just turning sort of back into
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: the gluon or back into the original photon they came from.
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: I see what you're saying is that it's a pretty
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: good party inside of it is definitely stuff happening. All right, Well,
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: let's get into how we actually know what's going on
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: inside the proton and what it could all mean for
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: our understanding about particles and what we're made out of.
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: But first, let's take another quick break. All right. Then
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: we're talking about what inside of a proton, and it's
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: a lot. It's not just a couple of quarks. It's
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: not just two up corks and a down cork. It's
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: also this virtual sea of quantum particles popping into and
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: out of existence, gluons turning into antimatter and other kinds
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: of particles. I guess a big question then that a
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: lot of people might have is how do we know
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: this thing? Is this something like we know out of theory,
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: or how we actually observed this crazy party inside of
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: the proton? Yeah, we have actually observed this crazy party.
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: We know that you and I are all made out
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: of all this stuff, including antimatter. And you know, I
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: remember learning this fact that, like WHOA, I'm partially made
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: out of antimatter. It made me sort of feel different
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: about like who I am and you know what I
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: made out of I really thought myself as solidly in
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: the matter category. Now I felt like, oh, those lines
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: are blurred a little bit. It's like when you grow
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: up and you start to have more conservative values and leadings.
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: You're like, whoa, what's going on? What's going on inside
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: of me? Yeah? Exactly. I won't say which political side
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: of the spectrum is matter and which side is antimatter,
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: but exactly everything turns out to be more complicated when
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: you grow up. Welcome to adulthood. You're partially made out
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: of antimatter. But yes, exactly. There's a long series of
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: experiments here dating back to the early nineteen hundreds that
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: have allowed us to probe what's going on inside our bodies.
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: And as usually, you have to be really careful with
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: the question you are asking, like, what do we mean
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: when we say we're made out of this stuff? You know,
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: because in science you can only do experiments. You can't
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: talk about like what's there when you're not looking at it?
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: You can only talk about what are the results of
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: experiments you can do, And here, specifically, there's only one
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: kind of experiment we really can do, which is basically,
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: shoot particles at something and see what it bounces off.
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: So when we say, for example, what's inside a proton,
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: what we really mean is what happens if we shoot
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: particles out of proton? What does it bounce off of.
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: And we know that mostly it bounces off of up
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: corks because there's two of those in there, and sometimes
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: it bounces off of a down cork. And when we
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: say there are gluons and top corks and towels and
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: all sorts of stuff inside the proton, what we mean
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: is that sometimes when you shoot a particle out of proton,
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: it bounces off of a top cork or bounces off
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: of a towel. And so this comes from a long
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: line of really fascinating experiments, beginning with Ernest Rutherford, who
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: did this kind of experiment in the early nineteen hundreds.
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: He was the one that discovered that like the atom
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: has something inside of it called the nucleus. He shot
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: alpha particles at a sheet of gold and saw that
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: occasionally these things bounce right back, meaning that he found
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: like something hard inside the nucleus to bounce these particles
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: off of. And everything we've been doing in particle physics
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: for the last hundred years is basically an extension of
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: that one experiment, but zoomed in a little bit. So
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: like in the nineteen sixties we did these experiments called
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: deep in elastic scattering, where we shot electrons into the proton,
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: and what we saw there was that there were sort
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: of three hard nuggets you could bounce off of, and
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: those were the corks. That's how we know that there
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: are corks inside the proton. If you shoot really high
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: energy electrons inside them, the sort of bounced back from
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: three specific points for real, like you can take a
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: picture of inside of a proton kind of right, Like
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: you you shoot a bunch of particles electron at it
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: and you sort of get an image. On the other side,
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: you're saying that you can actually see these hard nuggets
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: of the corps inside of it. Yeah, it's sort of
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: like taking an image. Unfortunately, you can only shoot one
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: particle at an individual proton, so to really image it
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: the way you're describing, you would have to shoot like
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: a lot of particles at a specific proton, like hold
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: it in place or something. We can't do that because
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: once you shoot one electron at a proton, it blows
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: it up. You just get one measurement. But statistically we
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: can do it many many times over many protons and
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: just like count the number of electrons that bounce back,
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: you know, they indicate they hit something hard versus the
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: number of electrons that like went right through the indicates
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: that they sort of missed all the good stuff inside
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: the proton. And from all those calculations, so then we
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: can calculate like how many hard points are there inside
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: the proton. And so that's the same basic thing that
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: Rutherford was doing basically a hundred years ago, but now
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: we're just like doing it with higher energy and we're
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: doing it to the proton instead of doing it to
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: the atom. So it's it's sort of almost like an
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: X ray of the proton, but you have to do
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: it in bulk. Yeah, you have to do it involved.
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: And what we can do are specific calculations for like
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: what would happen if there were also a little bit
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: of bottom cork inside the proton, and what would it
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: look like if there was occasionally how particles inside the proton,
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: Because these particles are all different, they all would give
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: like a different reaction spectrum from the electrons you're using
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: to shoot inside there. So that's like one way we
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: can get a sense for what's inside the proton or
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: like X raying it with electrons, as you said, all right,
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: so that was in the sixties. So what's sort of
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: the cutting edge right now in terms of looking inside
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: of the proton. So people really want to understand in
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: detail what's going on inside the proton in terms of
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: how much anti matter is there. It's really sort of
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: exciting and cool to think that there is antimatter inside
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: of us, and we want to understand how much anti
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: matter is there and what kind is it specifically and
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: mostly interesting people want to know, like is there more
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: anti up corks or anti down corks inside the proton
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: or are there the same number? We figure like, you know,
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: a gluon has the same chance to turn into an
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: up anti up pair as it does to turn into
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: a down anti down pair, so there should be the
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: same amount of anti downs and anti ups inside the proton.
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: So those are the kind of questions people are asking now.
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: And there's a new experiment being going off for the
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: last couple of decades that's trying to understand exactly the
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: anti matter component of this sea of gluons and stuff
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: inside the proton. And so the experiment is called c Quest.
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: That's a pretty cool name. Sounds like a TV show
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: or the nineties cartoon. It is the name of a
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: TV show, And I don't know if the experiment or
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: the TV show came first. But this has nothing to
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: do with the ocean of water, right, It's like thinking
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: about the ocean of gluons, and so this is a
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: very different kind of sea than like underwater science fiction adventure. Right,
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: although technically water is made out of protons, which has
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: a sea of particles to really, all quests are sequence.
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: You're right, we're all from the ocean originally, and so
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: this experiment, it's a little bit different from the ones
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: they did in the sixties. Here, what they're doing is
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: they're taking the proton itself and they're smashing it into
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: other stuff. One reason for that is that they're doing
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: this experiment at Fermulab, and Fermulab is a place that's
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: good at accelerating protons. We used to have the largest
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: particle accelerator in the world. They're called the Tevatron, where
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: the top cork was discovered in So they're very good
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: at making protons and accelerating them. So they decided to
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: sort of reuse that and smash protons into stuff to
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: see is sort of what they turned into. The original
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: experiment was like X ray the proton by shooting electrons
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: at it. Here, it's like, take the proton and smash
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: it into stuff and see what comes out, and try
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: to deduce from what comes out what's inside the proton, right,
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: and so what have they found. So they've been doing
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: these experiments where they shoot protons at two different kinds
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: of stuff. One is a target just of hydrogen, which
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: is basically pure protons, and another is a target with deuterium,
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: which is a combination of photons and neutrons. And now
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: neutrons have a different mix of up corks and down corks, right,
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: they have more down corks than up corks, whereas the
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: proton has more up corks and down corks. So by
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: shooting it at hydrogen and then shooting it deterium, you
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: can get a sense by looking at the ratios for
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: like how much down corks there are and how many
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: up corks there are. So they smash protons into these
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: two different targets, and sometimes a cork in the proton
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: in your beam interacts with an anti cork in the target. So,
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: for example, maybe an up cork in the proton you're
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: shooting from your beam interacts with an anti upcork inside
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: the neutron or inside the proton and when that happens,
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: you can tell because it creates a photon because they annihilate,
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: and that photon sometimes creates like a muon anti muon,
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: And that's what this experiment looks for. It looks for
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: these pairs of muans and anti muons coming out of
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: these collisions, and by looking at those muans and their energies,
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: they can get a sense for like, oh, did we
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: hit an anti upcork or did we hit an anti
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: down cork? And so people expected to see the same
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: amount of anti down corks and anti upcorks inside the proton,
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: but what they found is that there's actually a lot
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: more anti down corks than anti up works. There's like
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: more anti down corks than anti upquorks inside every proton.
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: I think this is where it gets confusing, because you're
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: saying anti ups and I'm thinking anti up is just down.
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: But that's that's different than anti down, which is not up. Yeah, exactly,
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: it's anti in a different way. That's the sort of
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: confusing but also awesome thing about particle physics is that
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: there are all these reflections. Right, You're right that the
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: up and down are reflections of each other. But in
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: sort of like a different direction than the anti particle way.
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: And there's other reflections, right, Like the charm is like
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: another reflection of the up but in terms of particle flavor.
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: So there's like this multi layers, many faceted symmetries, and
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: particle physics can be hard to keep track of, right,
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: But I think what you're saying is that this experiment
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: sequence is trying some smashing protons and it's trying to
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: determine to the amount of antimatter inside of these protons.
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: And the weird thing is that you're seeing a lot
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: more antimatter of the kind that comes from down course
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: then from the antimatter that comes from up corks. And
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: that's weird. That's weird. It's not what we expected. Yeah,
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: we expected sort of a balance there, because you know,
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: where's the anti matter come from. It comes from gluons
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: and photons flying around inside the proton. It only exists briefly,
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: and we think that those luons should have the same
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: chance to create down cork type antimatter as upcork type
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: anti matter. Why would they prefer one to the other.
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: That's really strange, and it's a clue that something else
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: might be going on something we don't yet understand. So
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: it's a nice little like thread to pull on to
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: try to unravel some of the other mysteries of particle physics.
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: Guess that the weird thing is that it likes one
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: kind of antimatter and not another kind of antimatter. Is
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: that what you're saying. Yeah, it likes them both, but
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: it likes on more. And so that's a pretty interesting mystery.
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: But what does it all mean? What that tells about
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: what's inside of the proton? Well, it's interesting because the proton,
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: is we learned, is mostly gluons, right, mostly this energy
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: from the strong force. So if you want to understand
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: what's inside the proton, meaning what you and I are
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: made out of, you really have to understand the strong force.
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: And this is something we've been struggling with for decades
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: since we discovered the strong force. It's very weird and
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: very hard to understand. And one reason is because it's
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: so strong and it couples to itself, right, Like gluons,
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: they feel the strong force themselves. So every time you
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: create a gluon, you're creating the chances for more gluons,
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: and then those gluons can create more gluons and more
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: glue ones. The same is not true for photons, Like
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: photons do not feel electromagnetic forces right because they do
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: not have a charge. It's sort of like if the
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: photon had plus one or minus one electric charge and
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: it like created its own electromagnetic fields and crazy stuff
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: like that. So the strong force is very difficult to
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: deal with because anytime you do a calculation, you instantly
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: have to account for like infinities and infinities of gluons.
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: So we don't really know how to do calculations using
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: the strong force. It's much harder than calculations for electromagnetism.
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: So we can't answer simple questions about what would happen
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: if you put together quirks into a proton, Which means
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: that we need to look into nature to see what
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: actually happens and use that as a guide to say, well,
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: how should we build our theory what's going on with
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: the strong force. So to get a better understanding of
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: the strong force, we can't just like think about it
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: inside our heads and do computer simulations. We need to
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: actually go out into the universe and see what it's doing.
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: I think you're saying that looking inside of the proton
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: and discovering all these virtual particles and these gluons turning
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: into other things. It's sort of our window into how
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: these basic forces behave, and it's kind of our in
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: into understanding how they actually work. Yeah, we are watching
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: them at work because we don't understand how they work,
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: and so by watching them, hopefully we can get ideas
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: and glimmers for what's going on and how to just
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: gribe these things. You know, we have a mathematical tool
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: for describing the strong force, but it doesn't work very well.
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: We can't use it to make predictions and calculations. It's
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: sort of like impossible to use. It's like if somebody
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: told you how to calculate something, but there was like
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: an infinite number of steps. You say, well, that's not
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: very useful. I can't use that to do any calculations.
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: And so if we want to understand these things, You're right,
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: we have to look at them in action. We have
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: to watch them actually happen and hope to observe some trends,
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: some ideas which can help us come up with a
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: better model. When we can actually use to play with
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: theoretically and understand how these things work, well, then what's
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: on the on the horizon? I know, this experiment found
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: an interesting mystery, but are there any other experiments sort
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: of looking into what's inside of the proton? Yeah, so
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: these guys found interesting mystery. And I love this experiment
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: because they're sort of like a scrappy bunch. They don't
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: have a lot of money, so they like repurposed stuff
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: from other experiments, you know, like they used old scintillators
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: left over from another lab, and old particle detectors left
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: over from another experiment, and iron slab is used from
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: the fifties in the Colombia, And so they sort of
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: like build this experiment from spare parts, which is really
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: pretty cool. And they're doing it again. They're making a
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: new experiment called spin Quest. Spin Quest is going to
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: reuse most of the same parts, but it's gonna pro
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: even deeper and try to understand another basic question about
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: the proton, which is why does the proton spin have
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: the value that it does. We can't understand the spin
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: of the proton from the spin of the corks, the
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: same way we can't understand the mass of the proton
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: just from the mass of the corks. This is the
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: same kind of question about the protons spin. So they're
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: gonna do an experiment to try to understand where the
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: spin of the proton comes from with the same people
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: in the same re used parts. Interesting, So, like, the
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: spin of the proton is like the sum of all
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: of the spins of all the things inside of it,
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: which is a lot, which is a big party. Yeah,
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: it's not just from the spins of the upcork and
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: down corks. Those gluons and photons also contribute to the
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: spin of the proton. So if we can measure the
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: spin of the proton really accurately, we can try to
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: get another handle for what the proton is made out of.
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: What this mystery cake that we're all built out of,
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: how it was actually cooked? Right? What are all these
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: exotic flavors and tasting that's right? I thought I was
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: pretty vanilla. It turns out from a little spicy, it's
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: a lot of tiger flavors in there. And I like
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: how you're like sitting on top of your LHC multibillion
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: dollar experiment and looking at these other experimenters coupling together
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: with spare parts and calling them cute. Yeah, you know
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: this thing only costs a couple of tens and millions
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: of bucks. What a fun little experiment, just like a
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: Saturday project. All right, Well, I think the main takeaway though,
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: is that we are not as simple as we thought
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: we were are. Even though we're only made out of
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: quarks and electrons, those corks that make up the proton,
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: there's a lot going on in there. It's not just
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: quarks inside of our protons and neutrons. It's also all
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: these crazy exotic particles, virtual particles popping into an out
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: of existence, influencing how much we weigh and how much
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: mass we have. And there's also a lot of antimatter
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: inside of us. Yeah, so these exotic particles that we
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: discovered in cosmic rays and in colliders are not just
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: an intellectual curiosity. They're not just clues about the organization
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: of the universe. They are also part of me and you.
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: They are part of the definition of what it means
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: to be a proton, which is the basic building block
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: of everybody and everything and every dinner you have ever had.
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: So exotic is a new normal. That's right. We're all exotic,
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: so nothing is exotic. Yeah, Well, we have all enjoyed
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: eating antimatter, for example. So I don't know if that
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: counts as exotic. I'll give it an anti review. I'll
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: give it an up review, which is really an anti
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: down review, which is actually a good thing. Right. That's
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: if particle physicists had built YELP, there would be up down,
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: anti up, pro down, all all of them. I'm down
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: with that, if you're up for it. Yeah, and you
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: can give it five to an infinite number of stars, yeah,
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: fractional stars. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: and got you to think a little bit more by
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: what we're made out of, what you're made out of,
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: what that banana you're eating is made out of, what
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: the stars are made out of. Because it's a much
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: more interesting story than we think it is, and the
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: story continues. In this arc of understanding what we are
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: made out of. We have discovered many surprises along the way,
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: and I'm sure there are many more to come. I'm
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: just glad this podcast wasn't boring, even though you're at
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: the meals board exactly. I hope that it's annealed your
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: understanding of the non boring nature at the oh Man,
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: that was an extra I tried to put a little
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: Danish on it, all right, Well, enjoy your bath there
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: in the bathtub. Daniel, we'll talk to you next time
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: you hope you enjoyed that. Talk to you later. Thanks
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: Universe is a production of I Heart Radio or more
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: podcast For my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.