Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / The long race for the top quark

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The long race for the top quark · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:08
Speaker 1: Hey, Jorgey, what's the first particle discovery that you remember? Well,
0:12
Speaker 1: I've never discovered a particle yet. You don't have to
0:17
Speaker 1: have discovered it yourself though, to remember it. I mean,
0:20
Speaker 1: these are cultural moments. Don't you remember where you were
0:23
Speaker 1: and what you were wearing when the Higgs boson was discovered?
0:26
Speaker 1: Hopefully I was wearing clothes, And I like how you
0:29
Speaker 1: equate physics with culture. I'm sure there is culture within physics,
0:36
Speaker 1: but no, I was probably wearing pajamas. I'm guessing where
0:39
Speaker 1: were you. I was there at certain helping to discover
0:41
Speaker 1: the Higgs bo though. Oh yeah, you were pressing the button.
0:44
Speaker 1: They were trying to keep me from pressing the button
0:46
Speaker 1: too many times. Yeah. Well, well, what's the first particle
0:49
Speaker 1: discovery you remember? Well? I remember way back in when
0:54
Speaker 1: the top cork was discovered. Did you push the button then? No?
0:59
Speaker 1: I'm not that old. I was just in college. But
1:01
Speaker 1: I remember one of my physics professors coming into class
1:04
Speaker 1: that morning and announcing it like this was a really
1:06
Speaker 1: big deal. O nice, And do you remember what you
1:09
Speaker 1: were wearing? You know, it was college, so I was
1:11
Speaker 1: probably also in my pajamas. I am or Ham cartoonists
1:30
Speaker 1: and the creator of PhD Comics. I'm Daniel. I'm a
1:33
Speaker 1: particle physicist, and I don't usually do physics in my pajamas.
1:37
Speaker 1: What are you doing your pajamas? Then I make podcasts.
1:42
Speaker 1: You stay sleeping or cooking breakfast, staying up late having
1:46
Speaker 1: deep thoughts about the universe. And that's why we're here
1:48
Speaker 1: to plant little ideas for you to stay up late
1:51
Speaker 1: thinking about about the universe. In our podcast, Daniel and
1:54
Speaker 1: Jorge Explained the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio.
1:57
Speaker 1: That's right, our podcast in which we take you a
2:00
Speaker 1: tour of all the incredible discoveries that science has made
2:03
Speaker 1: and all the questions that science has not yet answered. Yeah,
2:06
Speaker 1: we like to talk about all the things we know
2:07
Speaker 1: and all the things we don't know or haven't discovered.
2:11
Speaker 1: There is a lot we haven't discovered out there, right.
2:13
Speaker 1: I feel like sometimes science gives the impression, or people
2:16
Speaker 1: give science the impression that it's discovered everything already, that
2:19
Speaker 1: there's nothing left to find in the universe. That's right,
2:22
Speaker 1: And in contract to that, we think that there's a
2:24
Speaker 1: huge amount of exploration left to do. That most of
2:27
Speaker 1: the deep secrets about the universe remain out there for
2:30
Speaker 1: us to be found. But science is not a process
2:33
Speaker 1: where you just sort of sit at home and have
2:35
Speaker 1: ideas float into your head. It's a slow chipping away.
2:38
Speaker 1: It's a moments of discovery and long stretches without any insight.
2:43
Speaker 1: And we also like to tell you about how that happens.
2:45
Speaker 1: How do scientists actually figure stuff out? Yeah, long stretches
2:49
Speaker 1: of sitting around in your piamas drinking coffee is how
2:52
Speaker 1: I imagine physics gets done. Well, you know, it's research,
2:56
Speaker 1: which means it's exploration. And when you go out to
2:59
Speaker 1: find something new, you never know if you're going to
3:01
Speaker 1: stumble on a vein of rich gold or if you're
3:04
Speaker 1: just going to be digging through rubble for decades. That's
3:07
Speaker 1: sort of the excitement of it, right, It's unexpected. Yeah.
3:10
Speaker 1: I always imagine mcgillan and Lewis and Clark, you know,
3:13
Speaker 1: sitting around in their pajamas drinking coffee as well, so
3:16
Speaker 1: something they all haven't in common. I'm sure they had
3:18
Speaker 1: coffee on those ships. Come on, I'm sure nobody made
3:21
Speaker 1: it through one of those tours without drinking. Saying discovery
3:24
Speaker 1: needs caffeine, I'm saying caffeine is now more widespread and
3:27
Speaker 1: the rate of discoveries is increasing, So therefore, dot dot dot,
3:32
Speaker 1: Therefore we should all drink more coffee. We should fund
3:36
Speaker 1: coffee research, is what I'm saying. But yeah, we like
3:38
Speaker 1: to talk about not just the signs that's out there
3:41
Speaker 1: for people to know about, but also how the science
3:43
Speaker 1: was discovered, because sometimes it is sort of the slow
3:46
Speaker 1: process and a little bit like chipping away at a rock.
3:49
Speaker 1: But sometimes these discoveries are pretty interesting and full of
3:53
Speaker 1: drama and intrigue. That's right, because these are real people's
3:56
Speaker 1: lives and their careers. The figures you hear about in history,
3:59
Speaker 1: they were real people. They had struggles, they went to
4:02
Speaker 1: the bathroom, they slept in, they had arguments, they made mistakes,
4:06
Speaker 1: and I think it's fascinating to get in the minds
4:08
Speaker 1: of those people and understand what it was like to
4:10
Speaker 1: be them before we understood the universe, before they had
4:14
Speaker 1: these insights, before they revealed new deep truths about the universe,
4:18
Speaker 1: because that helps us understand how to go forward and
4:21
Speaker 1: what it's gonna be like to reveal the next deep
4:23
Speaker 1: truth about the universe. So to be on the podcast,
4:25
Speaker 1: we have a really pretty interesting discovery to talk about.
4:29
Speaker 1: You're telling me full of leaks and lies and false
4:32
Speaker 1: discoveries and wasted millions. I feel like almost it should
4:35
Speaker 1: be an episode of Horrible Histories, that's right, or science telenovelas.
4:40
Speaker 1: There is a lot of drama, and it's fun because
4:44
Speaker 1: we've been doing this series about how particles were discovering,
4:47
Speaker 1: and we started way back in the late eighteen hundreds
4:49
Speaker 1: with the discovery of the electron. But you know, that's
4:51
Speaker 1: sort of like shrouded in history. Who really was J? J. Thompson?
4:55
Speaker 1: What was it like to be a particle physicist back
4:57
Speaker 1: in the dawn of science? But now how we're coming
5:00
Speaker 1: up to the present moment. We're back into the most
5:03
Speaker 1: recent few decades, and so these are real people. These
5:05
Speaker 1: people are still alive. I was around when this was happening,
5:08
Speaker 1: and so it's fun to bring people up to the
5:10
Speaker 1: present and to talk about recent dramatic discovery. Yeah. I
5:14
Speaker 1: mean this, this particle we're gonna talk about today was
5:18
Speaker 1: around when Friends was on the air and Seinfeld, which
5:22
Speaker 1: which to me sounds like yesterday. But I'm sure for
5:25
Speaker 1: younger readers it's like, what that's ancient history. I've read
5:29
Speaker 1: about that in text books. Yeah, so today on the program,
5:32
Speaker 1: we'll be talking about how is the top cork discovered,
5:40
Speaker 1: not Daniel, Is this the top cork, like the best
5:42
Speaker 1: cork that we save the best for for last year,
5:44
Speaker 1: or is this just sort of like um, the one
5:47
Speaker 1: that always put on top. Well, you know, this cork
5:50
Speaker 1: has had multiple names, and you will be not impressed
5:53
Speaker 1: to discover that particle physicists have not agreed on how
5:55
Speaker 1: to name this particle. Really, sometimes you went through several
5:59
Speaker 1: versions and this what you landed on the top. They
6:01
Speaker 1: were competing schools. I thought the top cork is the
6:04
Speaker 1: partner of the bottom cork. These corks come in pairs,
6:07
Speaker 1: and for a while people thought that the pairs should
6:09
Speaker 1: be called top and bottom, and there was another group
6:11
Speaker 1: that thought we should call them truth and beauty Corkshodness.
6:16
Speaker 1: They're like, no, this one's more confusing. No, we like
6:18
Speaker 1: this one. It's more confusing. I know that we keep
6:21
Speaker 1: doing this. We'd keep adapting words from English that means
6:24
Speaker 1: something totally different and then applying them to particle physics
6:27
Speaker 1: and just like giving it a new meeting like that
6:29
Speaker 1: wouldn't be confusing. You know, It's like let's call this
6:32
Speaker 1: one the banana cork, and that when the peach cork, Like,
6:34
Speaker 1: you know, there's some physicist s somewhere right now taking notes.
6:38
Speaker 1: It's like, well, that's a good one, and I teach
6:41
Speaker 1: somebody's working on like the tech script for a miniature banana,
6:45
Speaker 1: you know, so you can work that into your equation
6:46
Speaker 1: that I thought you were going to say that the
6:48
Speaker 1: people arguing about which one should beat the top and
6:50
Speaker 1: which one should be the bottom. No, we already know
6:51
Speaker 1: that because of their charges. These corks have really weird
6:54
Speaker 1: electric charges one third and minus two thirds. And so
6:57
Speaker 1: the ones on the top a row, the up, the charm,
7:00
Speaker 1: and the top these three quarks all have the same
7:03
Speaker 1: electric charge, and the other ones that down, the strange
7:05
Speaker 1: and the bottom all have the same charge on these
7:08
Speaker 1: two thirds, and so we know where they sit. And
7:11
Speaker 1: so top and bottom are just part of that pair.
7:14
Speaker 1: And top isn't top because it's like the best quirk.
7:16
Speaker 1: It's just the name that we gave. It's the name
7:18
Speaker 1: of that British show Top Top Engine, or am I
7:21
Speaker 1: thinking of Top Model? What am I thinking of? Is
7:24
Speaker 1: there a reality show for particles? America's next Top Particle
7:26
Speaker 1: the universe is next top particle. Man. I wish I
7:31
Speaker 1: could get auditions from brand new particles. I mean, we
7:33
Speaker 1: have to try to smash particles together at certain just
7:35
Speaker 1: to get hints of what new particles might be out there.
7:38
Speaker 1: And we could just like sit back and have the
7:39
Speaker 1: particles parade themselves in front of us. Wow, that would
7:43
Speaker 1: be Then I could really just sip coffee and wear
7:45
Speaker 1: pajamas and just make big discovery. We think, after all
7:47
Speaker 1: the fanfare about the Higgs boson, you know, the particles
7:50
Speaker 1: would be lining up, you would all want to start,
7:53
Speaker 1: and there is a giant media place. Yeah, the particles
7:55
Speaker 1: should really talk to their agents about cashing in on that.
7:58
Speaker 1: How to monetize yourself as a particle. Well, but anyways,
8:01
Speaker 1: this particle is pretty important. It's pretty interesting, the top Cork,
8:05
Speaker 1: and it also has a pretty interesting and illustrious and
8:08
Speaker 1: kind of funny history. And so, as usually, we were
8:11
Speaker 1: wondering how many people out there had heard of the
8:13
Speaker 1: top Cork, and more importantly, how it was discovered. So
8:17
Speaker 1: I asked people to volunteer to answer random questions on
8:20
Speaker 1: the Internet, and I didn't tell them what I'd be
8:22
Speaker 1: asking in advance, and the rules were no googling. So
8:26
Speaker 1: here are the answers from a bunch of brave listeners
8:29
Speaker 1: willing to answer my question. So take a moment before
8:32
Speaker 1: listening to these. If someone asked you if they if
8:34
Speaker 1: you knew what the top cork is and how it
8:36
Speaker 1: was discovered, what would you say? Here's what people had
8:38
Speaker 1: to say. I really don't know how the top corp
8:40
Speaker 1: was discovered. If I had to guess, Like with most things,
8:44
Speaker 1: it had to do with smashing particles together. But I
8:48
Speaker 1: really don't know, absolutely no idea. Did you tell me
8:52
Speaker 1: how was the top court discovered? I don't know, absolutely
8:56
Speaker 1: no idea. Um which probably was the law school to
9:00
Speaker 1: we discovered hance the name top well, I don't know
9:03
Speaker 1: how it was discovered or when. I would assume eighties maybe,
9:07
Speaker 1: but I don't know how. I have no idea. I
9:09
Speaker 1: would guess through some experiment at the LHC or certain
9:12
Speaker 1: but yeah, I'm not true. I have no idea how
9:14
Speaker 1: that was discovered, but I'm sure that it was discovered
9:16
Speaker 1: by a scientist way smarter than me at the LHC.
9:19
Speaker 1: I think probably in a particle accelerator. I'm going to
9:23
Speaker 1: guess inside a particle accelerator. Interesting question. I hope that
9:28
Speaker 1: this will be actually something that I will learn in
9:33
Speaker 1: one of your next episodes. I'm going to say the
9:37
Speaker 1: top quark was discovered from Quark's Got Talent competition show.
9:43
Speaker 1: I have no idea, but being such a specific small particle,
9:50
Speaker 1: I could suppose it was discovered using a particle accelerator.
9:55
Speaker 1: But I think the top quark was discovered in the
10:00
Speaker 1: an annoint he's after kill Man written his UM to
10:03
Speaker 1: Cheg you're in the Quark book, um. But I don't
10:06
Speaker 1: know how the top quark was specifically discovered. Maybe there's
10:09
Speaker 1: another amusing anecdote guarantee, however, you all so, I would
10:14
Speaker 1: guess either it was discovered in an accelerator or it
10:19
Speaker 1: was found in atmosphere as other particles. But I'm not rush,
10:24
Speaker 1: all right. Not a lot of name recognition here on
10:27
Speaker 1: the top cork. No, it's not definitely, definitely not on
10:30
Speaker 1: the top of people's mind. But somebody else had the
10:32
Speaker 1: same idea that maybe he was discovered on a reality
10:35
Speaker 1: show corks Got Talent. I like that job, but yeah, no,
10:39
Speaker 1: and not a lot of people know what the top
10:41
Speaker 1: cork is, and so maybe Daniel that's how we should start.
10:45
Speaker 1: Tell us a little bit about the top cork. Well
10:47
Speaker 1: why is it interesting? Well, the top cork is especially
10:50
Speaker 1: fascinating because it's different from the other corks. So remember,
10:54
Speaker 1: you know, matter is made out of electrons which orbit
10:57
Speaker 1: the nucleus, and then the protons and neutron inside the atom,
11:01
Speaker 1: and those protons and neutrons are made up of corks,
11:03
Speaker 1: of corks and down corks specifically. So the up corks
11:06
Speaker 1: and down corks are the ones that like make up
11:08
Speaker 1: me and you, and lava and ice cream, all the
11:11
Speaker 1: stars in the universe and all that stuff. But there
11:14
Speaker 1: are heavier corks out there. If you collide particles together
11:17
Speaker 1: really high energy, you can make these other corks, which
11:20
Speaker 1: are heavier, they have more mass to them. They don't
11:23
Speaker 1: last very long. They'd like to dec back down to
11:25
Speaker 1: the lighter stable corks. But you can make the charm
11:29
Speaker 1: and the strange corks. And we had a whole episode
11:31
Speaker 1: about strange matter that has strange corks in it, And
11:34
Speaker 1: if you pump even more energy into it, you can
11:37
Speaker 1: make the bottom cork and then the top cork. And
11:39
Speaker 1: the top cork is weird because it's so much heavier
11:42
Speaker 1: than all of the other ones, like the light corks up,
11:46
Speaker 1: the down, the strange, all these way about as much
11:49
Speaker 1: as a proton or less. But the top cork is
11:53
Speaker 1: like a hundred and seventy five times heavier than a
11:56
Speaker 1: single proton, and so yeah, and and a proton is
12:00
Speaker 1: filled with other quarks, so it's it's like many times
12:04
Speaker 1: heavier than a regular many many times heavier. And that's
12:07
Speaker 1: what was so surprising about it. That's why it took
12:09
Speaker 1: so long to find, because it was shockingly massive. Even
12:13
Speaker 1: to this day, we do not understand why the top
12:16
Speaker 1: cork is so darn heavy. We think it's probably a clue,
12:19
Speaker 1: a window into something else that's happening in physics, some
12:22
Speaker 1: special role it might play in mass or in generating matter,
12:27
Speaker 1: but we really don't understand. Well, you would think that
12:30
Speaker 1: the heavier it is, the easier it is to find.
12:34
Speaker 1: That's usually kind of the rule. But I guess maybe
12:36
Speaker 1: my question is, you know, because because wait, because you're
12:39
Speaker 1: imagining that we're like chasing these things on the savannah
12:42
Speaker 1: or something, and if it's heavy, it's like finding the
12:44
Speaker 1: elephant in the room. I guess maybe maybe that's a
12:47
Speaker 1: bad analogy because offense in the rumor had to see
12:50
Speaker 1: have you ever caught an elephant? It's not that easy. Yeah,
12:52
Speaker 1: I don't have a lot of personal experience. I guess no,
12:55
Speaker 1: it's actually the opposite. It's because if it's really massive,
12:58
Speaker 1: then it takes a lot of energy just to make it.
13:00
Speaker 1: So it's harder to make these particles because you have
13:03
Speaker 1: to concentrate more energy into a really small space. So
13:06
Speaker 1: it takes more technology and frankly more money just to
13:09
Speaker 1: build a bigger accelerator to make these things. Oh, I see,
13:12
Speaker 1: because you guys don't, I guess you don't discover these
13:15
Speaker 1: in the sense that you find them. It's not like
13:17
Speaker 1: you're mixing chemicals in the lab and it's like, oh,
13:19
Speaker 1: there is. It's like you have to make them to
13:21
Speaker 1: discover them. That's right. You have to make them. You
13:23
Speaker 1: have to create the environment in which they can exist,
13:26
Speaker 1: because if you just look around you, everything in the
13:28
Speaker 1: universe is sort of too cold to make any quirks
13:32
Speaker 1: except for the up corks and the down corks. Those
13:34
Speaker 1: are the stable ones that can't go lower into any
13:36
Speaker 1: lighter corks because there's nothing below them on the ladder.
13:39
Speaker 1: So to make anything above it on the ladder. You
13:41
Speaker 1: have to create special conditions. So, yeah, we're making these things.
13:45
Speaker 1: And you know, that's what happened sort of in the
13:47
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties that we first created the tools, the accelerators
13:51
Speaker 1: that we could use to create these conditions to make
13:53
Speaker 1: heavier corks. And we talked about in the podcast when
13:56
Speaker 1: we talked about how the charm cork was discovered. Than
13:59
Speaker 1: the fifties, we found all this crazy new slew of
14:02
Speaker 1: particles and when we've slowly understood that these were just
14:05
Speaker 1: different combinations of a few light corks, the up down
14:09
Speaker 1: in the strange, all put together in different ways like
14:11
Speaker 1: lego bass. Yeah, and I like how you talk about
14:15
Speaker 1: creating the conditions because it's literally like you need to
14:17
Speaker 1: create pure energy, Like you have to put it enough
14:20
Speaker 1: energy in one place that all these particles can come
14:23
Speaker 1: out of that kind of ball of pure energy. Yeah,
14:26
Speaker 1: And it's an amazing way to do exploration. It's not
14:28
Speaker 1: like we go out and find these particles. We just
14:31
Speaker 1: create the energy and there's some quantum mechanical sort of
14:34
Speaker 1: almost magic that happens there because if you create the energy,
14:38
Speaker 1: the nature turns that energy back into mass because energy
14:41
Speaker 1: just like that is unstable. Nature likes to convert it
14:44
Speaker 1: into particles, and it can convert it into any of
14:47
Speaker 1: the particles on its menu, which means you don't need
14:50
Speaker 1: to know what's on nature's menu. In order to find
14:53
Speaker 1: something new. You just have to create enough energy, and
14:55
Speaker 1: then Nature will roll a die and say, Okay, this
14:59
Speaker 1: time that energy is turning into bottom corks. This time
15:01
Speaker 1: that energy is turning into charm corks. And as long
15:04
Speaker 1: as you're above sort of the energy cost of making
15:07
Speaker 1: that particle, then it can be discovered. You do it
15:09
Speaker 1: often enough, you will see it, which is why we
15:12
Speaker 1: can go out and explore the fundamental nature of the
15:14
Speaker 1: universe just by staying in our pajamas and running our
15:17
Speaker 1: particle accelerators here at home. You sit back and roll
15:20
Speaker 1: the die over and over twenty thousand times a second. Yeah,
15:23
Speaker 1: much more than that. We run this forty million times
15:25
Speaker 1: a second because we want to see rare things. Heavy
15:28
Speaker 1: things are rare, and so the more times you're all
15:31
Speaker 1: to die, the more likely you are to see something
15:33
Speaker 1: weird and new. It's a lot of pajamas. I guess
15:36
Speaker 1: my question is you know that you found this, You
15:39
Speaker 1: found this particle. You decided to call it a top cork.
15:42
Speaker 1: But you know, how did you know it was a cork?
15:44
Speaker 1: Like what makes a cork a cork? And what? How
15:47
Speaker 1: did you know that this one was like the other
15:49
Speaker 1: corks that you found. Yeah, well, we sort of looked
15:52
Speaker 1: for it because there was a hole in our ideas.
15:55
Speaker 1: We had found five corks so far, the up, the down,
15:59
Speaker 1: the charmed strange, and then the bottom. And that was
16:02
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy seven that Leon Letterman found the bottom cork,
16:05
Speaker 1: and there was sort of like a hole there for
16:07
Speaker 1: the corks you could pair off together up and down, charming, strange,
16:11
Speaker 1: and then like I guess, pair it up in what way?
16:13
Speaker 1: Like they're the same but with a different charge, And
16:16
Speaker 1: then that's that's how you pair two of them together. Yeah,
16:18
Speaker 1: the up and the downer in the first generation, they're
16:20
Speaker 1: the lightest ones, so you sort of sort them by mass.
16:23
Speaker 1: The charm and the stranger are heavier, but they have
16:25
Speaker 1: the same charges as they up and the down there
16:27
Speaker 1: like the second generation we call them, and then alone
16:30
Speaker 1: in this third generation of corks was the bottom cork,
16:33
Speaker 1: and we were like, well, where is its partner? Shouldn't
16:35
Speaker 1: it have a partner? We're always looking for patterns and
16:38
Speaker 1: particle physics, we're always looking for trends to help us
16:41
Speaker 1: understand what's coming next. And then on the other hand,
16:45
Speaker 1: we had six kinds of leptons, right the electrons, the
16:48
Speaker 1: particles that whizz around the atom. There are also six
16:51
Speaker 1: kinds of those particles. So we thought, well, if there's
16:54
Speaker 1: six leptons which formed nicely into three pairs, and then
16:57
Speaker 1: there are five corks, that's were and they formed two
17:01
Speaker 1: and a half pairs. It's just very suggestive, like if
17:04
Speaker 1: you write this periodic table of particles on paper, there's
17:07
Speaker 1: a hole there, and you say, well, is there a
17:09
Speaker 1: particle that feels in that hole? Let's go look for it.
17:12
Speaker 1: So we sort of knew what to look for before
17:14
Speaker 1: we found We thought it probably did exist, and we
17:17
Speaker 1: went looking for it. I feel like maybe you set
17:19
Speaker 1: yourself up. You're like, we'll call this fifth one the
17:21
Speaker 1: bottom cor Again, who knows if there's a sixth one,
17:24
Speaker 1: but wink wink, it's probably the top called the top corn. Well, yeah,
17:28
Speaker 1: and a lot of discoveries and particle physics work this
17:31
Speaker 1: way that we see a pattern in our data and
17:34
Speaker 1: then we think, you know, this would make a lot
17:35
Speaker 1: more sense if there was one more particle. That's the
17:38
Speaker 1: way it happened with the Higgs boson, right. The theorists
17:41
Speaker 1: they saw this pattern in the data and they thought
17:44
Speaker 1: the universe would make more sense. Maybe you had one
17:47
Speaker 1: more piece, because it would all click together. And that's
17:49
Speaker 1: really powerful. That tells you that, like, wow, you've understood
17:52
Speaker 1: something deep in the universe. If you can call the
17:55
Speaker 1: next discovery, if you can say I see a trend
17:57
Speaker 1: and it means this is gonna be the next thing
17:59
Speaker 1: we can find. All right, let's get into how it
18:02
Speaker 1: was discovered, and let's see if the drama involved here
18:05
Speaker 1: can top the history of the other particles. But first
18:09
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break. All right, we're talking about
18:24
Speaker 1: the discovery of the top cork, and Daniel, you were
18:27
Speaker 1: telling me that this could very well be an episode
18:29
Speaker 1: of horrible histories in physics, because it's full of drama
18:33
Speaker 1: and intrigue and a lot of twist and turns in
18:36
Speaker 1: this story. So maybe step us through and set it up. First,
18:40
Speaker 1: of how you would look for a particle. So the
18:43
Speaker 1: way to find new particles is really just to spend money,
18:47
Speaker 1: like you need to create the conditions where the particle
18:50
Speaker 1: can exist. The more energy you put into this tiny
18:53
Speaker 1: little collision, the more likely you are to find a big, heavy,
18:57
Speaker 1: fat particle. And the way to do that it's just
19:00
Speaker 1: to spend more money to build a bigger accelerator. So
19:03
Speaker 1: there's nothing limiting us from building accelerators like this size
19:06
Speaker 1: the Solar system to discover crazy new massive particles other
19:10
Speaker 1: than money, Like it would cost a good jillion dollars.
19:13
Speaker 1: And back in the day before we discovered the top cork,
19:16
Speaker 1: before we knew it was so crazy heavy, nobody ever
19:19
Speaker 1: imagined it would be so massive. Nobody ever thought it
19:21
Speaker 1: would take so much time and money and such a
19:24
Speaker 1: big accelerator to discover. So they were sort of thinking smaller, right,
19:28
Speaker 1: because the other courts they were all sort of in
19:30
Speaker 1: the same range. Yeah, they're all in the same range.
19:32
Speaker 1: Like the heaviest one we had ever found was the
19:34
Speaker 1: bottom cork, which is five g ev, about five times
19:37
Speaker 1: the mass of the proton. So the theorists got to
19:39
Speaker 1: work and they said, well, we're very sure the top
19:42
Speaker 1: cork exists, and we're also very sure that its mass
19:45
Speaker 1: must be around ten or fifteen g ev. They had
19:48
Speaker 1: like very convincing arguments. They were so sure that it
19:52
Speaker 1: was right around that range, you know, and theorists they
19:54
Speaker 1: can come because they were they were just connecting the
19:56
Speaker 1: thoughts kind of like the lightest course started about one
19:59
Speaker 1: GeV and then the next bigger one is about one
20:02
Speaker 1: point six and the next one is five, and so
20:04
Speaker 1: they kind of extrapolated like it's probably about ten. Yeah,
20:07
Speaker 1: but you know, they made their arguments sound very confident,
20:10
Speaker 1: like you when you go to a funding agency and
20:12
Speaker 1: you're like, look, I want a hundred million dollars to
20:14
Speaker 1: build this collider. You want that funding agency to think
20:17
Speaker 1: we're going to find it, like we're right about where
20:19
Speaker 1: this is. Because if you build it and your accelerators
20:22
Speaker 1: not big enough, then you just find nothing. Right, You've
20:25
Speaker 1: explored a little bit of territory and found nothing. That's
20:28
Speaker 1: very disappointing. So you want to make your accelerator big
20:30
Speaker 1: enough that you're sure you're gonna find this thing, but
20:33
Speaker 1: not too big because then you're wasting money, right, So
20:36
Speaker 1: it's a balancing act. So they were very confident we
20:39
Speaker 1: were going to find this thing if it was like
20:40
Speaker 1: ten or fifteen g V and this So take us back,
20:43
Speaker 1: what year was the first I guess project that tried
20:46
Speaker 1: to find this top cor So the bottom cork was
20:48
Speaker 1: found in seventies seven, and so in the late seventies
20:51
Speaker 1: and early eighties people thought, well, this must be right
20:54
Speaker 1: around the corner because the charm cork was in seventy three.
20:56
Speaker 1: So we were like finding a new particle every few years.
20:59
Speaker 1: People were like getting to a rhythm of it, right,
21:01
Speaker 1: and so they thought, you know, in the early eighties,
21:05
Speaker 1: it's like Avengers sequels every three years, that's right. And
21:09
Speaker 1: so in the early eighties they looked for it in
21:11
Speaker 1: Hamburg at this accelerator called Daisy, and they looked for
21:14
Speaker 1: it up to about twenty five g e v. And
21:17
Speaker 1: it was very surprising that they didn't see it. I
21:19
Speaker 1: mean they were surprised that they didn't see They were like, what,
21:22
Speaker 1: we thought it was going to be maybe up to fifteen,
21:24
Speaker 1: and we looked all the way up to twenty five
21:26
Speaker 1: and it's not there. That's crazy. So that was the
21:28
Speaker 1: early eighties, and of course the theory community that had
21:31
Speaker 1: very confidently said it must be around ten or fifteen,
21:34
Speaker 1: they said, oh, wait, hold on a second, we have
21:36
Speaker 1: a new calculation. Now we're very sure it's around thirty,
21:42
Speaker 1: what's the what's the latest number, what's the biggest number
21:45
Speaker 1: that you haven't found anything? Twenty five? Well, then I
21:47
Speaker 1: think it's a thirty exactly, exactly. And that's the game
21:51
Speaker 1: of theoretical physics. They're always predicting things to be just
21:54
Speaker 1: around the corner, and they're very confident in their predictions
21:57
Speaker 1: every time, you know, and you're thinking like, well, why
22:00
Speaker 1: why this factor of two and not a factor of three,
22:02
Speaker 1: They're like, you know, two is a more natural number.
22:06
Speaker 1: It's a more natural number for us to get funding. Yeah,
22:09
Speaker 1: all the other numbers don't work out. And so then
22:11
Speaker 1: the Japanese built a collider and they were going to
22:14
Speaker 1: be able to see it up to around thirty g
22:16
Speaker 1: V and so, you know, they spent a lot of
22:18
Speaker 1: money on this thing. It's called Tristan, and it ran
22:21
Speaker 1: for about ten years and it didn't find anything. We're
22:24
Speaker 1: talking about like hundreds of millions of dollars, right, yes,
22:27
Speaker 1: and a lot of time and a lot of people's work.
22:29
Speaker 1: And they were very certain, like they thought they were
22:32
Speaker 1: buying a discovery. You know, the Japanese government thought, we
22:35
Speaker 1: are going to discover the top corker. It's gonna secure
22:37
Speaker 1: our place in the history of particle physics. But they
22:40
Speaker 1: came up empty and they didn't find it, and so then,
22:43
Speaker 1: of course, you know, the theory community is like, oh,
22:45
Speaker 1: you know what, it turns out it's gonna be around
22:46
Speaker 1: forty g e v. And so this game continued for
22:52
Speaker 1: a little while. At Stanford they looked for it. They
22:55
Speaker 1: could see it up to about forty five g v.
22:58
Speaker 1: And the reason these accelerators had different cut capabilities was
23:00
Speaker 1: just because they had different amounts of power. They had
23:02
Speaker 1: more money to build them longer, to push the particles faster,
23:06
Speaker 1: to make more energy in these collisions, and so Slack
23:10
Speaker 1: was able to slack. That's the accelerator at Stanford was
23:12
Speaker 1: able to push it up to about forty five GV.
23:15
Speaker 1: I like how the name the acronym just says slack.
23:20
Speaker 1: It's like, a are they slackers? They did they voluntarily picked.
23:24
Speaker 1: I don't know. Everybody I know who went to Stanford
23:26
Speaker 1: is a bit of a slacker in a good way, right,
23:31
Speaker 1: in the best possible But I guess my question is
23:35
Speaker 1: what does it mean to not find something? It's like,
23:38
Speaker 1: you run the machine and you get all these bazilion collisions,
23:41
Speaker 1: and you get all this stuff coming out, and then
23:43
Speaker 1: you don't see what you thought you were going to see,
23:45
Speaker 1: or you or you don't find anything. Yeah, you don't
23:48
Speaker 1: see what you thought you were going to see. Like,
23:49
Speaker 1: if the top works exists, then we already understand how
23:53
Speaker 1: it should be made and how it should decay, so
23:55
Speaker 1: we know how to look for it. Now there are
23:57
Speaker 1: other things that could also look like that. Remember we
24:00
Speaker 1: don't actually create the particle and then get to look
24:03
Speaker 1: at it. It lasts for like ten to the mind
24:05
Speaker 1: is twenty three seconds, and it turns into other particles,
24:08
Speaker 1: which turned other particles, and then they make these splashes
24:11
Speaker 1: and our detector. But we're pretty good these days of
24:14
Speaker 1: figuring out like, okay, given this splash and the detector,
24:17
Speaker 1: it looked probably like it was a time, but you
24:19
Speaker 1: can never know for sure. You can't say that this
24:21
Speaker 1: event was a Higgs boson, this one was a top cork.
24:25
Speaker 1: What you can do is you can count. You can say, well,
24:27
Speaker 1: there are other ways to make the same kind of splashes,
24:30
Speaker 1: the same patterns, but we know how often that happens.
24:32
Speaker 1: We expect to see maybe ten of those, and so
24:35
Speaker 1: if instead we see fifty, that tells us Oh, we
24:37
Speaker 1: see more of these specific kinds of splashes in the
24:41
Speaker 1: detector than we expected without the top cork, and so
24:45
Speaker 1: we think that the top cork is there, and you
24:47
Speaker 1: can see it in in lots of different ways, like
24:49
Speaker 1: the top cork should decay in this way and in
24:52
Speaker 1: that way and in this third way. If you see
24:54
Speaker 1: them all together, you sort of build confidence in the story.
24:57
Speaker 1: I think it's amazing to me how dependent this is
25:00
Speaker 1: on the on the theory. You know. It's like it's
25:03
Speaker 1: not like you're looking through rubble and saying and finding
25:05
Speaker 1: a pearl or something. It's like, you know, you're really
25:08
Speaker 1: relying on the theories to tell you exactly what to
25:11
Speaker 1: look for and where to look, and you know they're
25:14
Speaker 1: they're also kind of you know, theorizing, and they're not sure,
25:17
Speaker 1: and so you could be totally looking in the wrong place.
25:20
Speaker 1: You're looking for the wrong thing. It's amazing that it
25:22
Speaker 1: ever works. Yes, And there are certainly some discoveries you
25:26
Speaker 1: could never make if you didn't know what to look for, Like,
25:30
Speaker 1: you know, could we have found the Higgs boson if
25:32
Speaker 1: nobody had thought of a pretty subtle signal. Yeah, it's
25:35
Speaker 1: a pretty small effect, and so you can imagine another
25:39
Speaker 1: universe where you delete Higgs and everybody else who had
25:42
Speaker 1: similar ideas from history, and then what experimentalists discover it?
25:46
Speaker 1: And there are times that experimentalists have found particles before
25:50
Speaker 1: they were conceived of, before anybody had the idea of them.
25:53
Speaker 1: And you know, that's my personal scientific fantasy is to
25:56
Speaker 1: find a new unanticipated particle, particle that makes that theory
26:00
Speaker 1: us go, what that can't be true? What are you
26:02
Speaker 1: talking about? If that exists, then we got to erase
26:05
Speaker 1: all these other things we thought we understood. And that's
26:08
Speaker 1: you know, that's the goal, is to crack open the
26:10
Speaker 1: deep mysteries of nature and find something surprising. All right,
26:13
Speaker 1: So it sounds like up until the seventies and eighties
26:16
Speaker 1: and people had looked up to six d g e
26:18
Speaker 1: v and found nothing. But so then this is where
26:21
Speaker 1: the plot against yea. So now the Sarain gets into
26:24
Speaker 1: the game, the Europeans sort of step it up, that's right,
26:27
Speaker 1: And so the Americans had it up to a forty
26:29
Speaker 1: five g EV and everybody felt like, Okay, this thing
26:32
Speaker 1: is around the corner, like it's ridiculous that we haven't
26:34
Speaker 1: found it yet. Where like four times the mass. We
26:38
Speaker 1: thought it should be. We were certain it should be,
26:40
Speaker 1: and so the next collider is definitely going to discover it.
26:43
Speaker 1: And so Sarin turned on the collider in the early
26:45
Speaker 1: eighties called the SPS the super Proton Signatron, and this
26:50
Speaker 1: was run by a guy with a really big personality,
26:53
Speaker 1: Carlo Rubia, and he ended up winning the Nobel Prize
26:57
Speaker 1: using this collider and this detector for the discovering the
27:00
Speaker 1: W boson and the Z boson. And he's a famously
27:04
Speaker 1: huge personality, I mean, and he has two Nobel Prizes,
27:07
Speaker 1: but he got one for the discovery of those of
27:09
Speaker 1: the W and the Z. So he was sort of
27:11
Speaker 1: writing high. He was like, hey, I am you know,
27:13
Speaker 1: basically got of particle physics. And they saw some interesting
27:17
Speaker 1: things in their data around and they started putting stuff
27:22
Speaker 1: together and Carlo Rubia sort of got out ahead of
27:25
Speaker 1: his skis and before people really looked at this data
27:28
Speaker 1: very carefully, he went and called up a reporter for
27:31
Speaker 1: the New York Times and said and claimed discovery and said, hey,
27:34
Speaker 1: we found this, and he said it like, it looks
27:36
Speaker 1: really good. Yeah, he said, it looks really good. And
27:38
Speaker 1: then they wrote a paper and they claimed discovery of
27:41
Speaker 1: the top cork had around six d g V and
27:45
Speaker 1: you know, of course that was not correct. The top
27:47
Speaker 1: cork was not there. And I talked to some folks
27:50
Speaker 1: who are around at the time and part of that experiment,
27:53
Speaker 1: and one guy in particular who worked for Rubia, and
27:56
Speaker 1: his job was to go through the data and verify
27:58
Speaker 1: that everything looked good. And on his first day he
28:01
Speaker 1: could tell him very soon that things were very slowly.
28:05
Speaker 1: He looked back at the data and it didn't look
28:07
Speaker 1: the way it was described, and the record of what
28:09
Speaker 1: had been done didn't seem to match up with the
28:11
Speaker 1: results they were getting, and so there's just sort of
28:13
Speaker 1: like a lot of sloppy work there. I think there
28:15
Speaker 1: was a bit of a rush, like an anticipation. People were,
28:18
Speaker 1: you know, I'm sure it's there. So if we claim discovery,
28:21
Speaker 1: even if the data is not quite right, we're sure
28:24
Speaker 1: that the data will eventually back us up. I wonder
28:26
Speaker 1: how that phone call went, Like did he call the
28:28
Speaker 1: public line at the New York Times. It's like, Hi,
28:31
Speaker 1: my name is Carla. I think I just covered the particle.
28:35
Speaker 1: This is you know, he was a celebrity and he's
28:37
Speaker 1: still a big figure in his son is a big
28:39
Speaker 1: figure in particle physics today. So this is like it's
28:42
Speaker 1: Stephen Hawking calls the New York Times, you know, then
28:45
Speaker 1: they pick up they want to hear what he has
28:46
Speaker 1: to say. And so he was making a big claim
28:50
Speaker 1: and it's kind of embarrassing because they had to walk
28:52
Speaker 1: it back. Right, This is they did not discover the
28:54
Speaker 1: top work despite their claims. All right, so CERN kind
28:57
Speaker 1: of crash and burn here and when um more people
29:01
Speaker 1: get into the game, that's right. And that's when the
29:03
Speaker 1: Americans picked up the race. And we had a collider
29:06
Speaker 1: outside of Chicago at Fermi Lab. It's called the Tevatron,
29:09
Speaker 1: and it was the most powerful collider in the history
29:12
Speaker 1: of human science at the time, and so it picked
29:16
Speaker 1: up the race. The CERN didn't see the top work,
29:19
Speaker 1: and they left the limited about sixty nine g V.
29:21
Speaker 1: We knew that if it existed, it had to be
29:24
Speaker 1: heavierly and about sixty nine g EV and I guess
29:26
Speaker 1: people believed each other. Like if you were at the
29:29
Speaker 1: Tevatron and CERN says we can't find out at the
29:31
Speaker 1: sixty nine, you sort of assume that they were right.
29:33
Speaker 1: You don't do you go back or do you go
29:35
Speaker 1: back and check. You definitely go back and check absolutely,
29:37
Speaker 1: because if they missed it. Yeah, I mean that's the
29:39
Speaker 1: point of having these independent experiments is to check each other.
29:43
Speaker 1: And also, you know, there's a lot of antagonism and
29:46
Speaker 1: rivalry between these experiments, like they want to find it
29:48
Speaker 1: and they want to scoop the other one. I mean,
29:51
Speaker 1: scientists are all about scooping other experiments. That's one thing
29:54
Speaker 1: I think the public doesn't understand about science. It's not
29:56
Speaker 1: a monolithic enterprise where we all sit down together and
29:59
Speaker 1: decide what we're going to announce, right. You know. That's
30:02
Speaker 1: why it's impossible to have like scientific conspiracies for very long,
30:06
Speaker 1: because the data reveals the truth. And some scientists out there,
30:10
Speaker 1: if you're b essing with your results, if you're covering
30:12
Speaker 1: up something, some scientists out there is going to get
30:15
Speaker 1: some data that shows you're wrong, and they are going
30:17
Speaker 1: to show you're wrong, and you're gonna be embarrassed. Yeah. Yeah,
30:20
Speaker 1: I think the same way too. It's like scientists would
30:23
Speaker 1: wish nothing more than to prove each other wrong. And
30:25
Speaker 1: so if we have something like climate Chamber of Scientists
30:29
Speaker 1: agree that you know, you know that those ninety eight
30:34
Speaker 1: scientists are trying to disprove each other, so the fact
30:37
Speaker 1: that they agree is must mean a lot. Yeah, and
30:39
Speaker 1: you know there's also international politics here because the torches
30:42
Speaker 1: passing back and forth between Europe and America started looking
30:46
Speaker 1: for it in Germany and went to Japan, momentarily went
30:49
Speaker 1: back to America with slack. Then Cerin thought they were
30:52
Speaker 1: gonna win it. And then the Americans come in with
30:54
Speaker 1: their new accelerator, and you know, they seem like they're
30:56
Speaker 1: poised to find this thing. So there's also a lot
30:59
Speaker 1: of national dre right, all right, so the Americans have
31:02
Speaker 1: the football the running, they will Will this be a
31:05
Speaker 1: Bruce Willis movie where American wins at the end? Let's
31:09
Speaker 1: find out after the break, all right, Daniel, we are
31:25
Speaker 1: We are in the middle of this drama that's unfolding
31:28
Speaker 1: about the discovery of the top cork. And the Germans failed,
31:33
Speaker 1: the Japanese failed, the people in California. I guess California
31:38
Speaker 1: is kind of like a different country, the nation state
31:40
Speaker 1: of California. We failed a certain didn't couldn't find it
31:45
Speaker 1: up to sixty nine giga electron VOLD. Now there's a
31:50
Speaker 1: new collider called Tematron outside of Chicago that thinks they
31:54
Speaker 1: get to football and they make a run for it.
31:56
Speaker 1: But the drama is not over right, And so the
31:58
Speaker 1: tavatron very powerful collid or. It had the potential to
32:01
Speaker 1: discover the top cork up to about two hundred g V.
32:05
Speaker 1: So there was like a lot of territory there that
32:08
Speaker 1: the Tevatron could discover. But it was not just a
32:11
Speaker 1: happy party. It wasn't just like the Tevatron is just
32:13
Speaker 1: one group. They set it up like a competition. They
32:16
Speaker 1: set it up they had two separate groups with their
32:19
Speaker 1: own detector competing to find this thing. Wow, that's and
32:23
Speaker 1: that's new too, right, That's like none of the other
32:26
Speaker 1: teams have done that. It's like putting your kids to
32:28
Speaker 1: fight against each other. It's a bit like a reality show.
32:31
Speaker 1: Some of the other accelerators, like Tristan had multiple experiments, um,
32:34
Speaker 1: but some of them only had one. But it's you know,
32:37
Speaker 1: it's a bit controversial, but I think it's good because
32:39
Speaker 1: it motivates people, you know, it keeps them honest. And also,
32:42
Speaker 1: if you're gonna make this big discovery that people have
32:43
Speaker 1: been looking for for now twenty years, you really want
32:47
Speaker 1: to have independent information. And so we're here by now
32:50
Speaker 1: in the very late eighties, in the early nineties, and
32:53
Speaker 1: we had two experimental collaborations. One was called c d
32:56
Speaker 1: F and the other one was called D zero. There
32:59
Speaker 1: was some friend leanness between them, but also there was
33:01
Speaker 1: a lot of animosity really. So they're all working the
33:05
Speaker 1: same place, like eating at the same cafeteria. Yes, they're
33:08
Speaker 1: all eating at the same cafeteria, but they have their
33:10
Speaker 1: own detectors. So Fermilab is a big ring. It's like
33:13
Speaker 1: four miles around where the protons swing around and smash
33:16
Speaker 1: into each other. And the protons collided at four different
33:20
Speaker 1: places around the ring. And CDF had one of those places,
33:22
Speaker 1: they had their own collisions and D zero had a
33:25
Speaker 1: different place when they built their detector around that other
33:28
Speaker 1: collision point. So they would go off to their own
33:30
Speaker 1: detectors and work during the day, and then you have
33:32
Speaker 1: lunch together and you know, try not to growl at
33:35
Speaker 1: each other too much over their sandwiches and the others
33:38
Speaker 1: cafeteria food. Yeah, and you know there's something of a
33:40
Speaker 1: cultural difference here because CDF was earlier, like they got
33:44
Speaker 1: funding first, they got built first, they started collecting data
33:47
Speaker 1: before D zero was even finished, and they had sort
33:50
Speaker 1: of the fancier universities, you know, Harvard, m T. Yale,
33:56
Speaker 1: all these Stanford, all these big famous universities there on
33:59
Speaker 1: CDF and zero sort of came along later. It was
34:02
Speaker 1: a scrappy er. It was cheaper, it was late in
34:04
Speaker 1: the game, and so you had the sort of different
34:07
Speaker 1: culture and different personalities and c DF was very hierarchical
34:10
Speaker 1: and D zero was a bit more wide open in
34:12
Speaker 1: terms of the culture of the feel like you're sending
34:14
Speaker 1: it up here. Who is the clear underdog? Yes, exactly,
34:18
Speaker 1: like the Ivy League. You know, um snotty dude, or
34:24
Speaker 1: who has all the money and the attention, and then
34:26
Speaker 1: there's a scrappy This is definitely Bob's College of Knowledge
34:30
Speaker 1: versus the Ivy League. Man. All right, well, if this
34:34
Speaker 1: was a Hollywood movie, I would know who to root
34:36
Speaker 1: for it, but who knows it signs? Yeah, exactly, Well,
34:39
Speaker 1: maybe we'll make a Hollywood movie about this story. So
34:42
Speaker 1: they turned the accelerator on, it starts to run, and
34:46
Speaker 1: by like lateree, CDF had some interesting hints. They're like,
34:51
Speaker 1: they had some events that looked like maybe top cork,
34:55
Speaker 1: but it's hard to say, right, there are ways that
34:57
Speaker 1: you can mimic what the top cork looks like. You
34:59
Speaker 1: can't take a picture of the event and say with
35:01
Speaker 1: one event, I found it, here's the one. You need
35:04
Speaker 1: enough statistics. You need to say, you know, the background
35:07
Speaker 1: looks like ten, but there's an uncertainty of one, and
35:10
Speaker 1: I found twenty and that's very unlikely to have come
35:13
Speaker 1: from this background. So you know, is that the number
35:15
Speaker 1: that you typically need, just like twenty times you have
35:19
Speaker 1: to find it and that's it. What you need is
35:21
Speaker 1: you need to calculate the chance for the background to
35:23
Speaker 1: fluctuate to look like the signal, like the background is
35:27
Speaker 1: other ways to make the same signature, and your detector
35:30
Speaker 1: that looks like a top cork, and you know there's fluctuation.
35:33
Speaker 1: Quantum mechanics is random. You do the same experiment a
35:35
Speaker 1: hundred times, you get a different set of splashes and
35:37
Speaker 1: your detector. So what you calculate is the probability for
35:41
Speaker 1: there to be no top cork and for your data
35:44
Speaker 1: to look like top corks. It's like it's if you
35:46
Speaker 1: roll a die, you know you're going to get four
35:49
Speaker 1: a certain number of times, but if you roll the die,
35:52
Speaker 1: keep rolling the die and you get four a lot
35:55
Speaker 1: more than one six of the time. Then you know
35:57
Speaker 1: it's like a there's something funny about that die exactly,
36:00
Speaker 1: And before you're certain that the die is biased, you
36:02
Speaker 1: want to roll it a lot of times. You don't
36:04
Speaker 1: just roll it and get four. Once we're like, oh,
36:06
Speaker 1: the die is biased, right, because that could happen randomly, exactly.
36:09
Speaker 1: And so CDF saw a few events which looked interesting
36:13
Speaker 1: and looked weird. But you know, everybody was primed to
36:15
Speaker 1: discover this thing, and so they try to also be
36:17
Speaker 1: really skeptical and unbiased on the statistics. We decided we
36:21
Speaker 1: were not going to declare we had actually discovered this
36:23
Speaker 1: thing until the chances that were a fluctuation were less
36:26
Speaker 1: than one in millions. Because they learned from Carla Rubia
36:30
Speaker 1: what happens if you claim discovery too early. Yes, it's embarrassing,
36:36
Speaker 1: and particle physics, I think because of that experience with
36:39
Speaker 1: Ruby on the top cork at certain is now very
36:42
Speaker 1: very conservative. They're terrified of claiming discovery and then having
36:46
Speaker 1: to walk it back, and so they only claim discovery
36:49
Speaker 1: when they get to this five sigma threshold, which is
36:52
Speaker 1: when the odds are millions against it being a fluctuation.
36:55
Speaker 1: All right, so CDF, the snotty Ivy League favorite twin
37:01
Speaker 1: find something, but it's not enough, that's right. In ninety
37:04
Speaker 1: three they had some hints and then in they had,
37:09
Speaker 1: you know, a nice little collection events that seemed unlikely
37:12
Speaker 1: to be just background. It seemed it smelled like top
37:15
Speaker 1: cork um and there are a lot of rumors swirling
37:18
Speaker 1: around the community. And there was an agreement at the lab.
37:22
Speaker 1: You know, these two different groups c d F and
37:24
Speaker 1: D zero, and the agreement was, if you're going to
37:26
Speaker 1: go public, if you're gonna claim your discovery, you have
37:29
Speaker 1: to tell the director of the lab first and give
37:31
Speaker 1: the other experiment two weeks to sort of scramble together
37:35
Speaker 1: to say something. At the same time, they wanted to
37:37
Speaker 1: present sort of a unified message. What really, wasn't it
37:42
Speaker 1: a competition, like what's the incentive them or do you
37:44
Speaker 1: get to claim to be the ones who discovered it? Well,
37:47
Speaker 1: it is a competition, but also, you know, Fermia Lab
37:50
Speaker 1: didn't want like racing press conferences. You know, if these
37:53
Speaker 1: two groups really are going to discover it about the
37:56
Speaker 1: same time, then they wanted a unified statement. If one
37:58
Speaker 1: was really far a head, then two weeks was not
38:01
Speaker 1: going to give anybody enough time to like really catch up.
38:04
Speaker 1: But they felt like it was a sort of a
38:06
Speaker 1: you know, a gentleman's agreement, like we'll let you know
38:09
Speaker 1: if we're about to call the New York Times. Oh,
38:11
Speaker 1: I see, because and then then what would happen Like
38:15
Speaker 1: press release would go out and would say CDF founded
38:18
Speaker 1: and it's confirmed by d O D zero. Yeah, that's
38:22
Speaker 1: the idea. But you know, in ninety four D zero
38:25
Speaker 1: really didn't have very much, like they had one interesting
38:28
Speaker 1: event they had found, but you know, they had really
38:30
Speaker 1: just turned on. They didn't even have access to the
38:32
Speaker 1: earlier data because their detector didn't even exist for those
38:35
Speaker 1: first runs, so it was really just CDF on its own.
38:37
Speaker 1: And in about CDF told the firmulab director. They said, look,
38:41
Speaker 1: we have twelve events that look like top works. The
38:44
Speaker 1: chance of fluctuations about one in four hundred, which is
38:48
Speaker 1: not enough for discovery. It's like it smells like top work,
38:51
Speaker 1: it seems like top works. A lot of arguments inside
38:54
Speaker 1: CDF about what exactly to claim, but finally the conservative
38:58
Speaker 1: group inside there said we are not play mean discovery
39:00
Speaker 1: on a one four hundred chants but they put this
39:03
Speaker 1: paper out because they wanted to sort of like stick
39:05
Speaker 1: their their namely they put it in what did the
39:07
Speaker 1: papers say that we found something but we don't know. Yeah,
39:10
Speaker 1: it looks really good. Yeah it looks really good. But
39:13
Speaker 1: you can't use the word discovery unless you've reached this
39:16
Speaker 1: statistical threshold for significance. And at the time D zero
39:20
Speaker 1: was like, well, we don't have enough, Like, we have
39:22
Speaker 1: some interesting stuff, but our data looks more like background
39:26
Speaker 1: than CDs data. Their fluctuation probability was one in forty,
39:30
Speaker 1: so they didn't their data was not nearly as the
39:33
Speaker 1: information from CDF maybe told them where to look, yes,
39:36
Speaker 1: or were they both looking at near the same you know,
39:39
Speaker 1: kind of energy level. No. That was a very important
39:41
Speaker 1: clue because remember Sirin left the game around sixty nine
39:44
Speaker 1: g vs and then people thought, well, the top must
39:47
Speaker 1: be like a hundred. It couldn't possibly be much more
39:49
Speaker 1: than a hundred, right, the people were focusing their search
39:53
Speaker 1: around a hundred a hundred twenty. It makes a difference
39:55
Speaker 1: because as it gets heavier, it changes how it decays
39:58
Speaker 1: the other kind of particles that can turned into. So
40:01
Speaker 1: this gave D zero a clue and then in the
40:03
Speaker 1: summer of zero got very very lucky. Really, so wait,
40:08
Speaker 1: so they were both looking so CDF was looking in
40:11
Speaker 1: the higher energies and d zero was not. But now
40:14
Speaker 1: they got a hint at CCF was was looking at
40:16
Speaker 1: the higher energy. So now they we're both looking at
40:18
Speaker 1: the higher energy. And then then then they got more data.
40:21
Speaker 1: And then they got more data because the accelerator group
40:23
Speaker 1: discovered that one of the magnets had been put in wrong.
40:27
Speaker 1: So like what exactly it was turned ninety degrees from
40:31
Speaker 1: where it was supposed to be, and so the not
40:34
Speaker 1: like point zero one degree. Somebody she really messed it up.
40:40
Speaker 1: Somebody really messed it up. You know. They had one
40:41
Speaker 1: of these Ikea drawings for how to assemble a particle accelerator,
40:45
Speaker 1: and it's hard to get that stuff right. You know,
40:47
Speaker 1: I feel like tetron is do sound like an Ikea name? Yeah,
40:50
Speaker 1: And and so what they did is they discovered this
40:53
Speaker 1: and they fixed it. They rotated the magnet, and then
40:55
Speaker 1: all of a sudden the accelerator was working much better.
40:58
Speaker 1: It's very important that these magnets are arranged correctly because
41:01
Speaker 1: they focused the beams, and the more you can get
41:04
Speaker 1: those beams down to really small locations so that the
41:08
Speaker 1: two beams of protons overlap, the more collisions you're going
41:10
Speaker 1: to get. They hadn't notice this before they had well,
41:13
Speaker 1: they had noticed that it wasn't working as well as
41:15
Speaker 1: they hoped. But you know, this is not like downloaded
41:18
Speaker 1: from the Internet and running on your laptop. This is
41:20
Speaker 1: something nobody had ever built before, this cutting edge technology.
41:25
Speaker 1: So you know, you never know how these things are
41:27
Speaker 1: going to operate, but it often takes a few years
41:29
Speaker 1: for the engineers to figure out, like how to make
41:31
Speaker 1: this thing really humb You know, you gotta kick it
41:34
Speaker 1: here and twist this knob and flip that button three times,
41:36
Speaker 1: and then it's really gonna sing. And so that's what
41:39
Speaker 1: happened in the summer. I feel like this in the
41:42
Speaker 1: next part of the story is gonna tell me that
41:43
Speaker 1: the this magnet that was discovered that was wrong was
41:46
Speaker 1: discovered by this upstart intern called Daniel Wison, who was
41:50
Speaker 1: working there at the time. No, I was in college
41:53
Speaker 1: at the time. I didn't even know about particle physics
41:55
Speaker 1: at the time I was. I was still thinking I
41:57
Speaker 1: was going to do plasma physics, so I was involved
42:00
Speaker 1: at all somebody found somebody found it. And the reason
42:02
Speaker 1: it's important in the story is that all of a sudden,
42:05
Speaker 1: the data started coming in much more rapidly, so it
42:07
Speaker 1: didn't make much of a difference anymore that CDF had
42:10
Speaker 1: been there early, that they had access to data that
42:12
Speaker 1: D zero didn't have, because now there was like an
42:15
Speaker 1: avalanche of data, and so this first few percent of
42:18
Speaker 1: the data now irrelevant. So DZ are basically caught up
42:21
Speaker 1: to where CDF was in terms of how much data
42:23
Speaker 1: that had access to because the flood. And they both
42:27
Speaker 1: share the same collider, so it's like everyone's getting more data.
42:31
Speaker 1: Everyone's getting more data. Exactly, they have different collisions. Actual
42:35
Speaker 1: collisions are different statistically independent, but they share the collider.
42:38
Speaker 1: They're drinking from the same river, all right. So now
42:41
Speaker 1: and now there's a lots of data, and so who
42:43
Speaker 1: makes the first claim. So in January d zero showed
42:47
Speaker 1: some results at the Aspen Winter Conference, a very important
42:50
Speaker 1: conference in particle physics. But they didn't look great. There
42:53
Speaker 1: was more convincing evidence of the top cork than they
42:55
Speaker 1: had before, but they hadn't yet like re optimized their analysis.
42:59
Speaker 1: They were still doing their calculations the old way, and
43:02
Speaker 1: so their results were like, you know, one and one
43:05
Speaker 1: fifty chances of fluctuation. So people thought like, oh, that's weird.
43:09
Speaker 1: You know. D zero's has all this new data, but
43:11
Speaker 1: they haven't yet like really optimized how to look at it.
43:15
Speaker 1: So CDF was like in top Speed. They were like
43:18
Speaker 1: they were racing. They were sure they were going to
43:20
Speaker 1: find this thing, and they had a bunch of really
43:23
Speaker 1: smart people and they worked really hard and they had
43:26
Speaker 1: a great result. And this is in February. Now they
43:31
Speaker 1: had a result which is basically totally inconsistent with just background.
43:35
Speaker 1: It looked like top cork. Top cork was the only
43:37
Speaker 1: way to explain it. The chances of it being a
43:40
Speaker 1: fluctuation were now like one in a million. So they
43:43
Speaker 1: did it. They did it, but they had to tell
43:46
Speaker 1: the director. They couldn't just go to the New York
43:48
Speaker 1: Times and claim discovery. They had to call them lab
43:51
Speaker 1: director and say we're going public in two They had
43:55
Speaker 1: to follow the rules. They had to follow the rules.
43:56
Speaker 1: So then from a lab director calls D zero and says,
43:59
Speaker 1: by the way, DF has found the top cork. You
44:01
Speaker 1: guys got I wonder if that's the phrase he used.
44:05
Speaker 1: He's like, oh, yeah, did you guys want the bathroom
44:06
Speaker 1: t h. Yeah. Oh, by the way, your brother, your
44:10
Speaker 1: sister just found the top cork. Yeah. Well D zero
44:14
Speaker 1: had been working furiously, of course, because they had this
44:16
Speaker 1: new pilot data and they were working to improve the
44:18
Speaker 1: way they were analyzing it. And so I'm very curious
44:22
Speaker 1: to know, like what it was like to be on
44:24
Speaker 1: that experiment in those two weeks. Did anybody sleep at all?
44:26
Speaker 1: Did they stay up all night because the option was
44:29
Speaker 1: discovered the top cork alongside CDF or be left in
44:33
Speaker 1: the dust. Right, So nobody's like on vacation, nobody's like,
44:37
Speaker 1: you know, taking a break to watch a movie or whatever.
44:39
Speaker 1: This is like these two yeah, these two weeks to
44:43
Speaker 1: find your scientific legacy, right, and so, but they did it,
44:47
Speaker 1: and they came out with a really strong results. They
44:51
Speaker 1: were almost there anyways, right, Yeah. Well, there's a lot
44:55
Speaker 1: of discussion here. There's a lot of grumbling from old
44:58
Speaker 1: folks who are on CDF that they shouldn't have had
45:00
Speaker 1: to tell D zero and that only because they gave
45:02
Speaker 1: de zero the clue that it was there, that the
45:04
Speaker 1: zero scrambled something together. And then you know, when you're
45:08
Speaker 1: on the giving side, they complained, but if they were
45:10
Speaker 1: on the receiving side of it, it would be grateful.
45:12
Speaker 1: And then you know, you talk to people who are
45:14
Speaker 1: on D zero at the time and they're like, no,
45:15
Speaker 1: we were totally on track. We had this thing. You know,
45:18
Speaker 1: we were gonna be ready anyway. We were about to
45:20
Speaker 1: pick up a call on the phone to call the director. Also,
45:22
Speaker 1: I also had that idea, yeah, exactly, exactly, a lot
45:26
Speaker 1: of this, and so then in the end it was
45:29
Speaker 1: March second, they had a press conference together, a joint
45:33
Speaker 1: discovery press conference. They submitted papers the same second, like
45:37
Speaker 1: they synchronized their computers, really submitted their papers and discovered
45:42
Speaker 1: and the claim discovery of the top so that each
45:45
Speaker 1: of the papers said that they found it together or
45:47
Speaker 1: or just both papers said we found it at the
45:49
Speaker 1: same time. Each independently wrote their own papers saying we
45:52
Speaker 1: discovered the top corks and other two papers published on
45:55
Speaker 1: the same day, so they have equal precedents that have
45:58
Speaker 1: independent evidence for the top cork, each with a background
46:02
Speaker 1: fluctuation probability around a million around. I''m picturing it like
46:07
Speaker 1: a Hollywood movie, right, I'm picturing the press release and
46:10
Speaker 1: I'm preaching the fancy folks at CDF looking bitter and
46:15
Speaker 1: uh like they're upstage and and I'm picturing the zero physicists,
46:20
Speaker 1: you know, scruffee. They're wearing sandals, they haven't shaved, and
46:23
Speaker 1: they're feeling pretty happy in high five of each other. Yeah,
46:25
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot of that. I think there
46:27
Speaker 1: is a lot of that. And you know, I wasn't
46:28
Speaker 1: around at the time. And the professor who came into
46:32
Speaker 1: my class that March morning, very probably showing this paper.
46:37
Speaker 1: He was on D zero and went to Rice and
46:40
Speaker 1: it was on the D zero experiment. He was a
46:45
Speaker 1: finished guy. Actually bore the same thing every day. He
46:47
Speaker 1: used to joke like, did he only didn't have like
46:49
Speaker 1: a closet full of those shirts? It was it just
46:52
Speaker 1: the same shirt every day. We didn't know it was
46:55
Speaker 1: a quantum mechanical question, but he knew had to dress.
46:58
Speaker 1: You know. It was a nice button down shirt, buttoned
47:00
Speaker 1: all the way to the very top. Yeah, you need
47:02
Speaker 1: exactly how to dress. That's why he never came. He
47:06
Speaker 1: was really he was a really nice guy. He's the
47:08
Speaker 1: guy who got me into particle physics. And here we are,
47:12
Speaker 1: and here we are. They found the top quart that
47:14
Speaker 1: was it in March? Second? What was I doing in Daniel?
47:18
Speaker 1: You're probably drawing cartoons up and I was? Was it
47:23
Speaker 1: Georgia tech Um, Yeah, I was a junior sophomore. I
47:27
Speaker 1: was probably in my pajama. Probably. Well, it's a you know,
47:31
Speaker 1: it's a crazy long saga because they started looking for
47:34
Speaker 1: this thing in the late seventies, expecting to find it
47:36
Speaker 1: at any moment, and then for basically the next twenty
47:39
Speaker 1: years they thought it was gonna be around the corner,
47:41
Speaker 1: around the corner, around the corner, and then finally they
47:44
Speaker 1: did actually find it. So it was a real moment
47:46
Speaker 1: of triumph for particle physics, but also a moment of
47:49
Speaker 1: head scratching because this thing is a hundred and seventy
47:52
Speaker 1: five times heavier than the proton. It weighs as much
47:55
Speaker 1: as the nucleus of a gold atom, and that's really weird,
47:59
Speaker 1: you know, And time you see something in particle physics
48:02
Speaker 1: that doesn't fit into a pattern, you ask why, because
48:05
Speaker 1: often those questions lead to ideas that lead to like
48:08
Speaker 1: pulling back a layer of reality and seeing what's underneath.
48:11
Speaker 1: And it's been you know what, almost thirty years since
48:15
Speaker 1: we found the top cork and we still don't know
48:18
Speaker 1: why it's so have you. We're still studying it at
48:20
Speaker 1: the large h On Collider, trying to figure out what
48:23
Speaker 1: it means that the top cork is so mass because
48:25
Speaker 1: it's weird, right, because it weighs more than you know,
48:29
Speaker 1: it's a basic particle of nature, but it weighs more
48:32
Speaker 1: than all of these complex build atoms. That's right. And
48:34
Speaker 1: remember when we're talking about particles in their masses, we're
48:37
Speaker 1: not talking about like different sizes of particles. It's not
48:40
Speaker 1: like the top cork has more stuff to it. These
48:42
Speaker 1: are points in space. Each point just gets assigned a
48:46
Speaker 1: certain amount of mass based on how much it's slowed
48:49
Speaker 1: down by the Higgs field. So you might say, well,
48:52
Speaker 1: doesn't that just mean that this thing interacts with the
48:54
Speaker 1: Higgs field more and that's why it has more mass. Yeah? Sure,
48:58
Speaker 1: but you just transform the question into why does this
49:01
Speaker 1: one interact with the Higgs field more? Why does the
49:03
Speaker 1: up work interact very little with Higgs field and the
49:05
Speaker 1: top work aligne What sets that knob? And that's a
49:09
Speaker 1: question we have no clue about the end. I feel
49:11
Speaker 1: like it's also more expensive than gold. You know, has
49:14
Speaker 1: anyone figured out like how much money was spent to
49:16
Speaker 1: find this work that divided that. No, that's good, that's
49:22
Speaker 1: a good point. Yeah. You know, a ring made out
49:24
Speaker 1: of top quirks would be very experiensive and also kind
49:27
Speaker 1: of explosive and not good for your finger and last
49:30
Speaker 1: or about ten of the twenty three seconds, So not
49:33
Speaker 1: a good investment. All right, Well, I think this is
49:36
Speaker 1: I was. I was glued to my seat, Daniel, and
49:38
Speaker 1: I'm a little exhausted now all this drama. Well, you know,
49:41
Speaker 1: the funny thing is that that was the last discovery
49:44
Speaker 1: of that century, and then we didn't discover a new
49:48
Speaker 1: particle until the Higgs Boson in twelve and so Higgs
49:52
Speaker 1: boson has kind of also this kind of drama about it. Right.
49:55
Speaker 1: There was a famous documentary movie called what's it called
49:58
Speaker 1: Particle Particle Fever, Yeah, and which which shows you these
50:01
Speaker 1: two groups trying to find the Higgs Boson and and
50:04
Speaker 1: and a lot of this drama as well. It's a
50:06
Speaker 1: pretty good movie. Yes, And you know, Carlo Rubia plays
50:09
Speaker 1: a big role in the discovery of the Higgs boson, Yes,
50:13
Speaker 1: and in sabotaging the Americans attempts to discover it. We'll
50:19
Speaker 1: tell that story in another episode, a sequel. We'll do
50:21
Speaker 1: it in three years, but we never know when the
50:26
Speaker 1: next discovery will come. Would be another twenty years before
50:29
Speaker 1: we find a new particle, or tomorrow when I opened
50:32
Speaker 1: my laptop, well, I get an email from my students saying,
50:34
Speaker 1: look at this weird bump in the data. You never
50:37
Speaker 1: bring me some coffee. I need my discovery pajamas. Where
50:41
Speaker 1: are my Discovery pajamas? They're in the wash. Oh no,
50:44
Speaker 1: dang it. The Europeans are gonna beat us. They don't
50:47
Speaker 1: wear pajamas. All right. Well, I think this again points
50:51
Speaker 1: to you know, how much stories to discover. You know,
50:53
Speaker 1: we never know. We never know what's out there beyond
50:56
Speaker 1: what we can see with our telescopes or with our colliders.
51:00
Speaker 1: You know that, it's like we're blind to a huge
51:02
Speaker 1: part of the universe. There's a huge unknown out there,
51:05
Speaker 1: that's right. We just keep chipping away at this rock,
51:07
Speaker 1: hoping to discover fascinating fossils underneath, hoping that there's something
51:11
Speaker 1: for us to learn. But you never know. That's why
51:13
Speaker 1: research really is like exploration. We're not reading textbooks, we're
51:18
Speaker 1: trying to write them, and we don't know what's coming next,
51:20
Speaker 1: and the only way to figure it out to just
51:22
Speaker 1: go out there and tap, tap, tap and see what
51:24
Speaker 1: we learned. Thank sure you have your magnets on the
51:26
Speaker 1: right way, and that you'll be you'll be good. Follow
51:30
Speaker 1: those like keya diagrams very carefully. All right, Well, we
51:34
Speaker 1: hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, see you
51:37
Speaker 1: next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and
51:47
Speaker 1: Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio.
51:51
Speaker 1: For more podcast for my heart Radio, visit the i
51:54
Speaker 1: heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
51:57
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.