Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / Listener Questions about discoveries

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Listener Questions about discoveries · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:08
Speaker 1: Ay Daniel, where do you think the next big discovery
0:11
Speaker 1: in physics will come from? Oh? Man, if I knew that,
0:14
Speaker 1: I would be working on it right now, So it
0:17
Speaker 1: might come from anywhere, like particles or galaxies or anything
0:20
Speaker 1: in between. I think that's a pretty fair assessment. Yeah,
0:23
Speaker 1: that's like most of the universe. So is your strategy
0:27
Speaker 1: just look everywhere at everything all at once? Hey? I
0:29
Speaker 1: mean I think that will cover your basis. But you
0:32
Speaker 1: can decide what to do on a daily basis, right,
0:34
Speaker 1: You can't like study everything every day. I wish I could,
0:37
Speaker 1: But you know, everybody has one burning question about the
0:41
Speaker 1: universe inside them, So you just have to listen to
0:44
Speaker 1: your curious inner child to decide what's the most important question.
0:48
Speaker 1: Do you know, what if your inner child just wants
0:50
Speaker 1: to play video games, that's what my deals are mostly
0:53
Speaker 1: want to do, then maybe they'll discover the video on particle, yeah,
0:57
Speaker 1: or the roadblocks particle. Or what if your inner child
0:59
Speaker 1: just into snack, they'll discover the fundamental force that binds
1:02
Speaker 1: together the universe and the tasty on particle. I hear
1:05
Speaker 1: that one transmits flavor I am poor handmade cartoonists and
1:23
Speaker 1: the co author frequently asked questions about the universe. Hi,
1:27
Speaker 1: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at
1:30
Speaker 1: UC Irvine, and my PhD thesis was literally about heavy flavor.
1:35
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, was it a tasty thesis. It took a
1:38
Speaker 1: lot longer to swallow than I wanted. Did you make
1:40
Speaker 1: a cake out of it at the end and eat it? No,
1:42
Speaker 1: but it sounded a lot more like a good rap
1:44
Speaker 1: song than it actually was. You know, Oh, please give
1:47
Speaker 1: us a sample. Absolutely not, absolutely not. But heavy flavor
1:53
Speaker 1: flavor is my physics rap alter ego, just saying do
1:56
Speaker 1: you have a lot of bling also? Or you know
1:58
Speaker 1: stuff you've generated from a particle collider. I got ten
2:01
Speaker 1: billion dollars worth the stacks of hundreds you know that
2:04
Speaker 1: I spent on a particle collider. So that's pretty blinky.
2:06
Speaker 1: Oh I thought you were going to rhyme right there,
2:08
Speaker 1: Take a moment, do it. I'm not freestyle in man.
2:13
Speaker 1: I like big particles and I cannot lie. The other
2:16
Speaker 1: physicists won't deny. There you go. I was gonna say,
2:19
Speaker 1: my name is Daniel, and I researched particles. I published
2:22
Speaker 1: papers and lots of articles. I smashed him together like
2:25
Speaker 1: birds of a feather. Open your eyes and check out
2:28
Speaker 1: my Nobel prize. There you go, printed on a record
2:35
Speaker 1: N three d J Jazzy Jorge and Heavy Flavor. Maybe
2:38
Speaker 1: one of our fans we'll do that for us. We
2:41
Speaker 1: do have some fans with musical talents. I hope you
2:44
Speaker 1: guys all enjoyed that particle song. I've always wanted to
2:47
Speaker 1: be a loop in a rep song. I mean, you
2:48
Speaker 1: always wanted to get sampled, Yeah, looped around? Yeah, this
2:51
Speaker 1: is my chance. I just once the answer to a
2:54
Speaker 1: trivia question on a quiz show. I checked that off
2:56
Speaker 1: my bucket list. Was it which cartoonists didn't show up
2:58
Speaker 1: for the quiz show? Yeah? Unfortunately none of the contestants
3:04
Speaker 1: got it right. Nobody knew me, but I still I
3:07
Speaker 1: was I was a question. You know that's something. Yeah,
3:09
Speaker 1: I know that's a level of fame for sure. Anyways,
3:11
Speaker 1: Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe,
3:14
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio in which we wrap
3:17
Speaker 1: at you about the nature of the universe, the way
3:20
Speaker 1: it works, the things we understand, the enduring mysteries of
3:24
Speaker 1: our incredible cosmic context. We want to understand everything that's
3:28
Speaker 1: out there. We want to distill the universe down into
3:31
Speaker 1: something simple and beautiful and mathematical, but fundamentally also explainable.
3:36
Speaker 1: We want to digest the universe. We want to intuitively
3:40
Speaker 1: understand it. We think it's possible by the universe to
3:43
Speaker 1: make sense to us and our tiny human brains, or
3:46
Speaker 1: at least we think it's fun to make banana jokes
3:49
Speaker 1: as we try. That's right, because it is an amazing
3:51
Speaker 1: and incredible universe that's also very tasty, and so we
3:54
Speaker 1: like to taste it for you and bring it down
3:56
Speaker 1: to your dinner table or our ears for you to
4:00
Speaker 1: sample and to go. That's delicious and the tastiest thing
4:04
Speaker 1: about the universe, if you ask me, is about how
4:06
Speaker 1: it's always satisfying our craving for discovery. We go out there,
4:10
Speaker 1: we ask questions about the universe. We do some investigations,
4:13
Speaker 1: and often we discover something surprising, something weird, something very
4:16
Speaker 1: different from anything we might have expected. Yeah, because we
4:19
Speaker 1: all hunger for answers out there in the universe. You
4:22
Speaker 1: know how it all works, what's going on, and how
4:24
Speaker 1: it all started, and where it's it all going to go.
4:26
Speaker 1: And we have this incredible technique that works pretty well
4:29
Speaker 1: if figuring it out. You know, we do experiments, we
4:32
Speaker 1: test them against theories. We sometimes see things that we
4:35
Speaker 1: didn't expect and have to go back and totally revise
4:38
Speaker 1: our ideas about the very nature of the universe. Yeah,
4:40
Speaker 1: and it all starts with something that all of our
4:42
Speaker 1: inner childs do on a daily basis, which is to
4:46
Speaker 1: ask questions. Everyone looks at onto the universe and then
4:49
Speaker 1: wonders and they have questions about what's going on. It's
4:52
Speaker 1: not just scientists and podcasters who ask questions about the
4:55
Speaker 1: nature of the universe. It's everybody. It's the physicist inside you,
5:00
Speaker 1: the philosopher who wants to know why the universe is
5:03
Speaker 1: this way and not some other way. So on this podcast,
5:06
Speaker 1: we don't just talk about the questions asked by academic
5:08
Speaker 1: scientists in their ivory towers. We love answering questions from you,
5:12
Speaker 1: our listeners. Wait, inside of me, I have an inner
5:15
Speaker 1: child and an inner physicist. Where are they the same person?
5:18
Speaker 1: And a philosopher too? Do they get into fights? You
5:21
Speaker 1: contain multitudes, man, But that's right. Everyone has questions inside
5:24
Speaker 1: of them, and everybody can ask questions about the universe
5:27
Speaker 1: and sometimes we take those questions and we answer them
5:29
Speaker 1: here on the podcast, we take questions from listeners and
5:32
Speaker 1: we break it down for you. That's right. If you
5:34
Speaker 1: have a question that you would like answered, something you
5:36
Speaker 1: saw talked about in a science article, or something that
5:39
Speaker 1: just doesn't quite fit right in your mind, please don't
5:42
Speaker 1: be shy. Right to us two questions at Daniel and
5:44
Speaker 1: Jorge dot com or tweet to us at Daniel and Jorge.
5:48
Speaker 1: We answer everybody's questions. We engage with everybody. We want
5:51
Speaker 1: to make sure you understand. And sometimes we'll get a
5:55
Speaker 1: question that we think I met other people have this
5:57
Speaker 1: question or just think it'd be fun to chat abou
6:00
Speaker 1: out on the podcast, and so then we ask you
6:02
Speaker 1: to send in some audio so that we can share
6:03
Speaker 1: your question with everybody. So today on the podcast, we'll
6:06
Speaker 1: be tackling listener questions Discovery Edition. Now, Daniel, did we
6:16
Speaker 1: have to pay the Discovery Channel to use the Discovery
6:20
Speaker 1: on our title? Here? You've gotta stop saying that, man,
6:22
Speaker 1: It costs us like a thousand dollars every time you
6:24
Speaker 1: say that d word. Do we say discovery the Discovery
6:28
Speaker 1: word every like five minutes on this podcast? We do exactly.
6:32
Speaker 1: I hope nobody's trademark curiosity, because then we owe them
6:34
Speaker 1: a big chunk of change. Man or banana? Do we
6:37
Speaker 1: all dull fruit like a bazillion dollars by now? You man,
6:41
Speaker 1: that's a you thing. Yeah. I thought we both owned
6:46
Speaker 1: this podcast. Are we both liable? My lawyer says, I'm
6:51
Speaker 1: just kidding. I hope that Discovery doesn't own that word.
6:54
Speaker 1: We certainly didn't pay them when we discovered the Higgs boson, Yeah,
6:58
Speaker 1: although it would have been a pretty minor cost compared
7:00
Speaker 1: to the cost of actually finding the Higgs boson. That's right.
7:02
Speaker 1: What's a hundred K and license fees when you've already
7:04
Speaker 1: sunk tin bill? Yeah. So we're tackling listener questions here today,
7:09
Speaker 1: and we got three pretty awesome questions from listeners. One
7:12
Speaker 1: of them is about the lifespan of particles, another one
7:15
Speaker 1: about consequential discoveries in physics, and a third one about
7:19
Speaker 1: Dyson's fears. Wait, that's not the vacuum cleaner, is it. Now?
7:24
Speaker 1: You owe those guys money too, man, Jeez, all of
7:28
Speaker 1: this ad money is going to our sponsors. That's right.
7:30
Speaker 1: We're gonna have to run this too, legal and listen
7:32
Speaker 1: to with here a heavily beeped version. Oh man, it's
7:35
Speaker 1: I feel like all of our money is going to
7:36
Speaker 1: go to lawyer fees. So let's get to it. Let's
7:39
Speaker 1: tackle this first question about the lifespan of particles. And
7:42
Speaker 1: this question comes from Elisa from Indiana. Hey, Daniel and Jorge,
7:46
Speaker 1: this is Elissa from Indiana, and I had a question
7:49
Speaker 1: for Daniel. At the large Hadron Collider, when you smash
7:52
Speaker 1: particles together, how do you actually observe what happens? Just
7:56
Speaker 1: the particles are so small and some last for such
7:59
Speaker 1: a short time. Also, is it only protons that you
8:03
Speaker 1: collide there? And why not electrons or neutrons? Thanks so much,
8:07
Speaker 1: looking forward to hearing the response. Awesome question, Thank you
8:11
Speaker 1: Elisa and Daniel. She said, this question is for you. Um,
8:14
Speaker 1: So I'll just take a break for like fifteen minutes.
8:16
Speaker 1: I'll come back, all right. We'll probably save money if
8:18
Speaker 1: you stop mentioning company names. Anyway, I'll save money and
8:23
Speaker 1: I can go work on other things. But it's a
8:25
Speaker 1: great question, you know. She's asking, first of all, how
8:28
Speaker 1: do we see the particles that we have created at
8:31
Speaker 1: the large a drunklider? We think we discovered the Higgs boson,
8:34
Speaker 1: but what does it look like? How can we tell
8:36
Speaker 1: that it's actually there? The particles are so small and
8:39
Speaker 1: don't live very long. It's a good question. Yeah, I
8:42
Speaker 1: wonder if she's asking with a tint of suspicion or skepticism,
8:45
Speaker 1: like is she is she asking like, are you really
8:47
Speaker 1: looking at things here that seems impossible? Well, it's a
8:51
Speaker 1: fair question, and you know, I guess she's maybe a
8:52
Speaker 1: reviewer number two on our paper. You know, she's asking
8:55
Speaker 1: if we really know what we're doing, And she's right,
8:58
Speaker 1: this is hard. This is one of the major challenges
9:00
Speaker 1: of discovering new particles is that they are very, very small,
9:03
Speaker 1: and they don't last for very long. You know, you
9:05
Speaker 1: might like to just take a picture of the Higgs
9:07
Speaker 1: boson and see what it looks like. But as far
9:09
Speaker 1: as we know, the Higgs boson is a fundamental particle,
9:12
Speaker 1: which means that it's tiny. It's really, really, really small. Technically,
9:16
Speaker 1: it's probably a dot, has zero volume. It might be
9:19
Speaker 1: made out of smaller things we just haven't seen yet.
9:21
Speaker 1: But the point is that it's smaller than any wavelength
9:24
Speaker 1: of light that we can shoot at it, which means
9:26
Speaker 1: technically we can't see it, right. You can't see things
9:29
Speaker 1: smaller than the wavelength of light you are using. That's why,
9:32
Speaker 1: for example, when we want to see really really small things,
9:35
Speaker 1: we use microscopes that shoot electrons at stuff, because electrons
9:38
Speaker 1: have a wavelength that's smaller than photons we can use
9:41
Speaker 1: in our microscopes. But these things are even smaller, and
9:44
Speaker 1: so we can't see them, and even if we could,
9:47
Speaker 1: they don't last for very long. The Higgs boson, for example,
9:50
Speaker 1: lasts for ten to the minus twenty three seconds before decays.
9:55
Speaker 1: It's like unfathomably short amount of time. So even if
9:58
Speaker 1: you could somehow build a chroscope to see this thing,
10:01
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have enough time to see it. So the
10:03
Speaker 1: short answer to her question is that we don't see
10:05
Speaker 1: these things. What we see is what they turn into.
10:09
Speaker 1: So the Higgs boson, for example, turns into a pair
10:11
Speaker 1: of other particles. Like every other massive particle in the universe,
10:15
Speaker 1: it doesn't like to stick around for very long. The
10:18
Speaker 1: universe likes to spread out its energy. You've got a
10:20
Speaker 1: lot of energy in a massive particle, it will decay
10:23
Speaker 1: into lower mass particles, just like the top cork decays
10:26
Speaker 1: or the neutron decays. All these particles decay into other particles,
10:29
Speaker 1: So the Higgs boson, for example, decays into a pair
10:32
Speaker 1: of photons or a pair of z bosons, and we
10:35
Speaker 1: can see those particles as they shoot out from the
10:38
Speaker 1: collision point. Wait, what what do you need me? I
10:43
Speaker 1: think what's interesting, um, is that maybe you can break
10:46
Speaker 1: this down into two things, right, Like one is how
10:48
Speaker 1: can you see particles that are that small? And two
10:50
Speaker 1: how can you see them if they last that long?
10:52
Speaker 1: Because maybe one thing that people do know is that
10:54
Speaker 1: you can actually sort of detect single particles in your colliders. Right,
10:57
Speaker 1: we can detect single particles, but only articles that are
11:00
Speaker 1: fairly stable, articles like electrons or even muans, which technically
11:04
Speaker 1: aren't stable, but they live long enough to fly through
11:07
Speaker 1: our detector. The image you should have in your mind
11:10
Speaker 1: is a tiny little collision point where the protons smash
11:12
Speaker 1: into each other. Then surrounding that are many, many layers
11:15
Speaker 1: of electronics that detect the passages of particles that come
11:18
Speaker 1: out of that collision point, the collision point itself, and
11:21
Speaker 1: we never even look at We don't see if we
11:23
Speaker 1: don't cameras focused on it at all, we just look
11:25
Speaker 1: at what comes out of the collision. So the collision
11:27
Speaker 1: point itself is embedded inside this huge detector which is
11:31
Speaker 1: like four stories high, and then it shapes sort of
11:32
Speaker 1: like a cylinder that surrounds the collision point. And each
11:35
Speaker 1: of those layers of detector can tell you when a
11:38
Speaker 1: single particle has passed through. So Higgs boson appears and
11:41
Speaker 1: turns into two photons. Each of those photons will streak
11:44
Speaker 1: through our detector and leave a characteristic signature we can
11:47
Speaker 1: so we can say, oh, here's a photon at this
11:49
Speaker 1: angle and this energy. There was another photon at that
11:52
Speaker 1: angle and that energy. We can put them together and
11:55
Speaker 1: say this must have been a Higgs boson. Yeah, I
11:57
Speaker 1: think you've made the analogy before that. It's sort of
11:59
Speaker 1: like a studying a car crash, Like you don't actually
12:02
Speaker 1: study the crash of two cars colliding. You actually just
12:06
Speaker 1: kind of arrive after the scene and you look at
12:08
Speaker 1: all the bits of debris that are spread around or
12:10
Speaker 1: they have spread around, and then you say, oh, this
12:12
Speaker 1: is what must have happened when the two cars collided. Yeah,
12:15
Speaker 1: it's just like that. You didn't get CCTV to capture
12:18
Speaker 1: the collision. You have to try to figure out who
12:20
Speaker 1: was to blame just by looking at the evidence afterwards,
12:23
Speaker 1: and so unfortunately we never get to like touch of
12:25
Speaker 1: Higgs or see a Higgs. But we're pretty sure that
12:29
Speaker 1: they exist because we have a bunch of collisions where
12:31
Speaker 1: a pair of photons came out, and if you reconstruct
12:34
Speaker 1: all the energy that those photons had, it adds up
12:36
Speaker 1: to a certain amount, and that amount is the mass
12:39
Speaker 1: of the Higgs boson. So the mass of the Higgs
12:41
Speaker 1: went into the energy of those photons. So we can
12:43
Speaker 1: reconstruct what the mass of the Higgs boson was. If
12:46
Speaker 1: you look at a distribution of where the photon pair
12:49
Speaker 1: energies add up to, you get this little bump at
12:52
Speaker 1: a hundred twenty g v where the Higgs boson is.
12:55
Speaker 1: So that's how we knew that the Higgs was there.
12:57
Speaker 1: We had a bunch of these photon pair events that
12:59
Speaker 1: all added up to the same value. Now, technically you
13:02
Speaker 1: can't look at an individual event and say these two
13:05
Speaker 1: photons came from a Higgs boson. We can just say
13:07
Speaker 1: it's more likely because there are other ways to make
13:09
Speaker 1: pairs of photons that look kind of like the Higgs boson.
13:13
Speaker 1: So in the end, it's also statistical. We can't say
13:15
Speaker 1: for any individual collision whether there was a Higgs boson.
13:18
Speaker 1: We can just say, in this year of collisions, we're
13:21
Speaker 1: pretty sure we made seventy five Higgs bosons, right, And
13:24
Speaker 1: I think at least's question was also that the Higgs
13:26
Speaker 1: boson doesn't last very long, Like it's not out in
13:28
Speaker 1: the universe by itself very long. It disappears or turns
13:32
Speaker 1: into other particles that do last a long time. And
13:34
Speaker 1: I think that's the idea, right, Like, it turns into
13:36
Speaker 1: things that do last for a while that you can
13:38
Speaker 1: detect in your colliders, and that amazingly you you can,
13:41
Speaker 1: like in your detectors, you can tell of a single
13:43
Speaker 1: photon or electron passed through a certain point, right, Like,
13:47
Speaker 1: that's how sensitive your sensors are. Yeah, And the sensors
13:50
Speaker 1: are specifically designed to tell apart the different particles, so
13:53
Speaker 1: we can tell whether an electron went or a photon,
13:56
Speaker 1: or a muon or a kon or proton, all these
13:58
Speaker 1: different kinds of particles have specialized detectors that are good
14:01
Speaker 1: telling those apart, so we can tell what it was
14:04
Speaker 1: and also really accurately measure its direction. And its momentum,
14:08
Speaker 1: so we can figure out what it came from originally.
14:11
Speaker 1: So that's the whole name of the game. You know,
14:12
Speaker 1: the accelerator complex itself cost billions of dollars, but these
14:16
Speaker 1: detectors also cost almost a billion dollars to build because
14:20
Speaker 1: they're really sensitive technology. Plus they have to operate in
14:22
Speaker 1: a really high radiation environment. They're getting blasted by particles
14:25
Speaker 1: all the time, so the only last few years they
14:27
Speaker 1: have to go in and take them apart and rebuild them,
14:30
Speaker 1: which is what we just finished doing. And we're just
14:32
Speaker 1: starting a new run of the Large Atter and Collider
14:34
Speaker 1: with our fancy refurbished detectors. Yeah, with a clear, clean
14:37
Speaker 1: set of lenses. Well, it's it's kind of interesting because
14:40
Speaker 1: this idea that you can detect single particles and maybe
14:42
Speaker 1: something that people hadn't thought about because you know, we
14:44
Speaker 1: all assume that particles are too small to detect, but actually,
14:47
Speaker 1: like your eyeball, it just can detect single photons, right,
14:49
Speaker 1: and your camera phones can detect single electrons or protons
14:53
Speaker 1: from the sky. Right. Yeah. We had an episode of
14:55
Speaker 1: recently about the eyeball as a single photon detector, which
14:59
Speaker 1: is pretty awesome and definitely. We have detector technology capable
15:03
Speaker 1: of seeing single photons, and so yeah, you can interact
15:06
Speaker 1: with these like quantum objects almost directly, which is pretty cool. Yeah.
15:10
Speaker 1: I think like if you're in a perfectly dark room, um,
15:13
Speaker 1: you could sometimes see a photon hitting your eyeball right, Yeah,
15:15
Speaker 1: And they do these crazy experiments where they take a
15:17
Speaker 1: single photon and they split it with a special crystal
15:20
Speaker 1: into two photons, one which gets shot at the experiment's
15:24
Speaker 1: eye and another one which goes into a receptor. So
15:27
Speaker 1: you can tell that a single photon has come and
15:29
Speaker 1: people will press the button when they see it, like
15:31
Speaker 1: they can see an individual flash of a photon. It's
15:34
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Okay. So the second part of Lesa's question
15:36
Speaker 1: was why do you smash protons at the Large Hadron
15:39
Speaker 1: Collider and why not electrons or neutrons. And I'm guessing
15:43
Speaker 1: it's not just because the name of the place is
15:45
Speaker 1: the Large Hadron Collider, because the other way it's called
15:49
Speaker 1: the Large Hadron Collider because we collide hadrons. But it's
15:52
Speaker 1: a good question because neutrons are also hadron, so why
15:55
Speaker 1: don't we collide deutrons? But first I like to mention
15:57
Speaker 1: that Protons are not the only things that we collide
15:59
Speaker 1: at a hat drun collider. We actually also smash other stuff.
16:03
Speaker 1: Sometimes we smash lead nuclei together. So you take a
16:07
Speaker 1: lead atom, you strip off all the electrons. You have
16:10
Speaker 1: this big blobb or protons and neutrons, and you take
16:12
Speaker 1: another one. You accelerate that in the collider and smash
16:15
Speaker 1: that together. Makes a huge messy splash, and people use
16:20
Speaker 1: it to study crazy nuclear physics scenarios like quark gluon
16:23
Speaker 1: plasmas that we talked about recently on the podcast Cool Well,
16:27
Speaker 1: why don't you collide electrons by protons and not electrons.
16:30
Speaker 1: So the tunnel that we use for the Large Hadron
16:32
Speaker 1: Collider is the same tunnel that we used for the
16:34
Speaker 1: previous collider at CERN, which was l EP LEFT, the
16:38
Speaker 1: Large Electron Positron Collider, So we have done e plus
16:42
Speaker 1: e minus collisions in the same tunnel. The advantage of
16:45
Speaker 1: using electrons is that they're very clean because their fundamental
16:48
Speaker 1: particles and they don't feel the strong force. So you
16:50
Speaker 1: get a collision and you know exactly how much energy
16:52
Speaker 1: went into it because you can control the energy of
16:55
Speaker 1: your beams, and the beams are fundamental particles. The disadvantages
16:58
Speaker 1: that electrons are very little mass and so they tend
17:01
Speaker 1: to radiate away their energy very quickly, so it's hard
17:04
Speaker 1: to get electrons up to really high energies. Protons are
17:07
Speaker 1: more massive, and so you can get them up to
17:09
Speaker 1: really high energies more easily without them radiating away all
17:13
Speaker 1: of that energy. So proton colliders are better at discovering
17:17
Speaker 1: really high mass stuff because you can get them up
17:19
Speaker 1: to higher energies than electrons. The disadvantage is that protons
17:23
Speaker 1: are not fundamental particles, the little bags of corks, So
17:27
Speaker 1: you're colliding bags of corks against other bags of quirks,
17:29
Speaker 1: and it's really messy because corks feel a strong force,
17:32
Speaker 1: so you get this gluon radiation everywhere. It's kind of
17:35
Speaker 1: a mess, but it has more power to discover stuff
17:38
Speaker 1: in the end. But can you just accelerate electrons to
17:40
Speaker 1: go faster to get the same amount of energy. You
17:43
Speaker 1: could accelerate electrons to go faster, but if you use
17:45
Speaker 1: the same tunnel, then as they turn, they would radiate
17:48
Speaker 1: away that energy really fast, so it's hard to get
17:51
Speaker 1: electrons up to that speed. Alternatively, you could use a
17:54
Speaker 1: bigger tunnel, so they don't have to curve as much
17:56
Speaker 1: because that's when they're losing the energy by radiating away
17:59
Speaker 1: as they bend. But then you need a bigger tunnel,
18:01
Speaker 1: which is more expensive. So if you have a fixed
18:03
Speaker 1: sized tunnel and a fixed strength magnet, then you can
18:07
Speaker 1: get protons up to higher energy than you can electrons. Well,
18:11
Speaker 1: also they have to be protons and electronics. They need
18:13
Speaker 1: to have a charge in order for you to not
18:16
Speaker 1: just accelerate them but make them go in a circle, right,
18:18
Speaker 1: because if it's a neutral particle, it won't go into circle,
18:21
Speaker 1: We'll just go straight. Yeah. We use electric fields to
18:24
Speaker 1: accelerate these particles, to push them, and then we use
18:26
Speaker 1: magnetic fields to bend them. And neutrons don't have a charge,
18:30
Speaker 1: so they don't get accelerated by electric fields and they
18:32
Speaker 1: don't get bent by magnetic fields. So a neutron collider
18:35
Speaker 1: might be interesting, but we don't have a way to
18:37
Speaker 1: build a neutron collider because they don't have that crucial feature,
18:40
Speaker 1: the electric charge that we can use to tug them along. Cool. Well,
18:43
Speaker 1: I think that's the answer for a Lisa, My question
18:46
Speaker 1: is why don't you smash other things just for fun
18:48
Speaker 1: toaster Oven's bananas, you know late at night. Has anyone
18:52
Speaker 1: been tempted to like, hey, what if we just stick
18:53
Speaker 1: a cat in there? Can you accelerate a cat? Cats
18:58
Speaker 1: actually do have a pretty good charge, but no feelines
19:01
Speaker 1: were heard in the production of this podcast. We've had
19:03
Speaker 1: a bit of a variety of our colliders over the years.
19:06
Speaker 1: We once build an electron proton collider. Do you smash
19:09
Speaker 1: on electron against a proton? Which is really helpful for
19:11
Speaker 1: seeing inside the proton and the electron like breaks up
19:14
Speaker 1: the proton gives you a nice view of the quarks inside.
19:17
Speaker 1: People are talking about building a muon collider where you're
19:20
Speaker 1: smashing Muon beams against each other. We also have beams
19:23
Speaker 1: of new trinos that we shoot against targets. We have
19:26
Speaker 1: all sorts of different kind of beams that we'd like
19:28
Speaker 1: to play with, but no nobody has a cat beam
19:30
Speaker 1: or a toaster beam yet yet. Well, right now we're
19:35
Speaker 1: making plans for the future of particle physics, and I'll
19:37
Speaker 1: make sure to add that to the list. Yeah, you know,
19:40
Speaker 1: everyone loves cats on the internet. So if you want
19:43
Speaker 1: a new headline the local viral, I think cats is
19:46
Speaker 1: your your main bit most expensive cat video ever. All right,
19:50
Speaker 1: well that's a question for at least I thank you're
19:52
Speaker 1: asking the question. So let's get into our other questions
19:55
Speaker 1: here about consequential developments in physics and also about Dyson
19:59
Speaker 1: sphere years. But first let's take a quick break. Right.
20:15
Speaker 1: We're answering listener questions here today, and we just answered
20:18
Speaker 1: a pretty interesting one about the large hadron collider and
20:21
Speaker 1: wide collides large hadrons. It's a large collider of small
20:24
Speaker 1: addrons actually, which is better than a small collider of
20:29
Speaker 1: large hadrons in terms of making discoveries. You're right, I
20:32
Speaker 1: know I hadn't thought about that. You know, you could
20:34
Speaker 1: part Are there small hadrons that you could collide to? Yeah?
20:37
Speaker 1: You know, hadrons are any particles that have quarks inside,
20:40
Speaker 1: and the proton has three of them. But you can
20:42
Speaker 1: also make particles out of pairs of quarks like kaons
20:45
Speaker 1: and pions some principle, there are smaller hadrons. Interesting, and
20:50
Speaker 1: also cats are made out of hadron so you could
20:52
Speaker 1: also have a feline hadron collider. Yeah, and if you
20:57
Speaker 1: have a pion pion collider, then you could you know,
20:59
Speaker 1: read do that famous cream pie collision experiment. But at
21:02
Speaker 1: the fundamental level. Oh my goodness, you might discover the
21:06
Speaker 1: laughyan or the slat stickne. We could convert one kind
21:09
Speaker 1: of pion into another kind of pion. You know, chocolate
21:11
Speaker 1: cream pieon into a banana cream pion. You could smash
21:14
Speaker 1: cats with cream pies. There's a viral video that will
21:18
Speaker 1: get us canceled, but it might be hilarious only you
21:21
Speaker 1: like animals. All right, let's get into some of our
21:24
Speaker 1: other questions here today. Our next question comes from Cavinda,
21:27
Speaker 1: who's asking this from Sri Lanka. Hello, Daniel and hor
21:31
Speaker 1: this is Carvin the My question to you is what
21:34
Speaker 1: are the five most consequential developments in physics that have
21:38
Speaker 1: taken place since the start of the show. Thank you
21:42
Speaker 1: very much for the knowledge enjoy you bring. Best regards
21:46
Speaker 1: from Sri Lanka. Awesome. It's great to hear from listeners
21:49
Speaker 1: all over the world. And the question is what are
21:51
Speaker 1: the five most consequence of developments in physics since the
21:54
Speaker 1: start of the show. I think the answer is zero, right, Daniel,
21:57
Speaker 1: I mean once we started the show, nothing more could
22:00
Speaker 1: be more consequential in physics than this show. That's right. Also,
22:05
Speaker 1: I stopped doing research since the start of the show,
22:07
Speaker 1: So how could anybody have done anything important since I'm
22:11
Speaker 1: not participating anymore? Yeah, there you go. Is that why
22:14
Speaker 1: you haven't produced any significant research in the last couple
22:18
Speaker 1: of years? That's not why did you retire like Michael
22:21
Speaker 1: Jordan's and you went into baseball or podcasting? Yeah, exactly.
22:25
Speaker 1: I retired at the top of my game. No, I
22:27
Speaker 1: haven't given up physics. I'm still working on it. But
22:29
Speaker 1: I think the question is really fun because the goal
22:31
Speaker 1: of the podcast is not just to like summarize everything
22:34
Speaker 1: we know about physics, but to keep people up to
22:37
Speaker 1: date and to like evolve with the time, and so
22:40
Speaker 1: physics itself is a dynamic, living thing. Right. Our understanding
22:44
Speaker 1: the universe is changing as time goes on, and so
22:47
Speaker 1: amazingly the podcast has gone on for long enough that
22:49
Speaker 1: our understanding the universe is different from where it was
22:52
Speaker 1: when we started. Yeah, we've been on the air for
22:55
Speaker 1: what three years now or more three and a half. Yeah,
22:57
Speaker 1: I think we're at almost four episodes and we do
22:59
Speaker 1: it out a hundred a year, so I think we're
23:01
Speaker 1: going on four years. Oh my goodness, where has the
23:04
Speaker 1: time gone? Into a black hole of podcasts? Alright, So
23:07
Speaker 1: in the last four years, what have been the most
23:09
Speaker 1: consequence of developments in physics. So we only asked for five.
23:13
Speaker 1: And this was really hard to think about what was
23:15
Speaker 1: the most important because there's so many fascinating discoveries. So
23:19
Speaker 1: for me, in no particular order, I would start with,
23:21
Speaker 1: you know, the Hubble tension. This is our attempt to
23:24
Speaker 1: understand the rate of expansion of the universe, and we
23:28
Speaker 1: measure it by looking at how fast things are moving
23:30
Speaker 1: away from us nearby, and how fast things moving away
23:33
Speaker 1: from us in the past. And we look at the
23:35
Speaker 1: very early universe, the cosmic microwave background, and we measure
23:38
Speaker 1: the expansion of the universe at all these different times,
23:40
Speaker 1: and we see different numbers and they don't really add up,
23:43
Speaker 1: which tells us that, like, maybe we don't understand something
23:45
Speaker 1: deep about the early universe. This is really fun because
23:49
Speaker 1: we were making sort of fuzzy measurements a few years
23:51
Speaker 1: ago and they didn't really agree. But people thought when
23:53
Speaker 1: they get more precise, I'm sure they'll all come into
23:55
Speaker 1: focus and agree with each other. But they didn't, and
23:58
Speaker 1: so that suggests like maybe there's something new going on.
24:01
Speaker 1: It's like a really big hint about something we might
24:04
Speaker 1: discover around the corner. Yeah, I think we covered this
24:06
Speaker 1: in a recent episode. This idea that we're sort of
24:09
Speaker 1: measuring the expansion of the universe at the beginning of
24:12
Speaker 1: the universe, and that we were measuring it through different
24:15
Speaker 1: ways and they sort of don't match. Right. One of
24:17
Speaker 1: him says that the universe was expanding or is expanding
24:19
Speaker 1: faster than the other. Yeah. If you measure at the
24:22
Speaker 1: early universe, the expansion you get is higher, and so
24:26
Speaker 1: the universe should be expanding faster. So that predicts it
24:29
Speaker 1: today we should see a faster expansion rate than we do.
24:31
Speaker 1: Is suggests the universe might be like a billion years
24:34
Speaker 1: younger than we thought it was. It could have gotten
24:37
Speaker 1: to this size faster than we thought, or it could
24:40
Speaker 1: be that there's a mistake in one of these measurements.
24:42
Speaker 1: It's kind of cool because no matter how we resolve it,
24:45
Speaker 1: we're going to learn something really interesting about something really important.
24:49
Speaker 1: We don't know what the answer is yet, but it's
24:50
Speaker 1: a big screaming clue that there's something big to learn. Yeah,
24:54
Speaker 1: or maybe the universe. That's just one of those people
24:56
Speaker 1: who look young, you know, just ages well, like the
25:00
Speaker 1: canaries of the universe. Could that explain it? Could that
25:03
Speaker 1: be a consequential discovery there? The universe has been using
25:05
Speaker 1: lotion all these years. That's the key, right, Yeah, the
25:11
Speaker 1: cosmic lotion theory. It's on a strict diet of snack yawns,
25:15
Speaker 1: which are pretty low calorie. All right, what's the next
25:18
Speaker 1: big discovery do you think that we've made in the
25:20
Speaker 1: least four years? Well, I think in terms of consequential developments,
25:24
Speaker 1: something that's been really interesting is that we haven't seen
25:27
Speaker 1: anything else at the Large Hagon collider. We found the
25:30
Speaker 1: Higgs boson in two thousand and twelve, and before we
25:32
Speaker 1: found it, we didn't know how heavy it was going
25:34
Speaker 1: to be. We didn't know there's gonna be a hundred
25:36
Speaker 1: times as heavy as the proton, and a lot of
25:38
Speaker 1: folks expected it to be much much heavier because the
25:41
Speaker 1: mass of the Higgs boson is we've talked about once
25:44
Speaker 1: on the podcast, is affected by all the other particles
25:46
Speaker 1: in the universe, and there's a bunch of ones that
25:49
Speaker 1: make it heavier and a bunch of ones that make
25:51
Speaker 1: it lighter, and those numbers are really really big, and
25:53
Speaker 1: they seem to sort of like weirdly balance out to
25:56
Speaker 1: get kind of a small value for the Higgs boson.
25:59
Speaker 1: Was suggests like, either the universe is fine tuned, it's
26:03
Speaker 1: like precisely put together in this way to give us
26:05
Speaker 1: a low mass Higgs boson, or maybe there's a bunch
26:09
Speaker 1: of other particles out there that are balancing it. So
26:12
Speaker 1: people really expected us to find a whole slew of
26:15
Speaker 1: particles with the Large Hadron Collider to explain why the
26:18
Speaker 1: Higgs boson is so low mass, but then we didn't,
26:22
Speaker 1: and that's had like a lot of reverberations in the field.
26:24
Speaker 1: It's definitely consequential. So sometimes a non discovery can be
26:28
Speaker 1: as significant as a discovery, right, But I guess maybe
26:32
Speaker 1: explained to us what that means. So if you haven't
26:34
Speaker 1: found any other particles after the Higgs boson, that means
26:37
Speaker 1: that the Higgs boson is smaller than you expected. Is
26:39
Speaker 1: that sort of like a big mystery? Then there's a
26:41
Speaker 1: lot of arguing about how big a mystery this is.
26:44
Speaker 1: You know, either the universe just is this way where
26:47
Speaker 1: some of the particles make the Higgs heavier and some
26:49
Speaker 1: of the particles make it lighter, and it just sort
26:50
Speaker 1: of weirdly adds up to a small value. It's like
26:52
Speaker 1: if you subtracted a ten digit number from another ten
26:55
Speaker 1: digit number, you'd expect to get something about ten digits.
26:58
Speaker 1: If you get something which is like very close to zero,
27:01
Speaker 1: you think that's a weird coincidence. And so in science,
27:04
Speaker 1: whenever we see a coincidence, we wonder is it just
27:06
Speaker 1: a coincidence or is there an explanation, and we hunger
27:09
Speaker 1: for an explanation. We don't like coincidences. We think probably
27:12
Speaker 1: there's a reason, and we want to know what it is.
27:15
Speaker 1: But you never know. There are coincidences in the universe.
27:18
Speaker 1: Right The Sun of the Moon are almost exactly the
27:20
Speaker 1: same size in the sky, which is why we have
27:22
Speaker 1: incredible ellipses. That's just a coincidence. There's no deep reason
27:26
Speaker 1: for it. So we still don't know. Is the Higgs
27:29
Speaker 1: mass a coincidence or is that a hint about something
27:31
Speaker 1: else that's happening that we could discover at an even
27:34
Speaker 1: bigger collider where we smash cats into banana cream pons.
27:38
Speaker 1: I think what you're saying is that the fact that
27:40
Speaker 1: you haven't discovered anything significant since the Higgs boson is
27:43
Speaker 1: significant in itself. Exactly, it really is significant. It's canceled
27:46
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of theories that people really expected to
27:49
Speaker 1: describe the universe. So it's really made us rethink our
27:53
Speaker 1: questions about the universe and how we try to answer them.
27:56
Speaker 1: It's been also a bit of a disappointment. You know,
27:58
Speaker 1: it's more fun to discover particles to not discover particles.
28:01
Speaker 1: But when you have specific predictions and they're not confirmed,
28:04
Speaker 1: you got to go back to the drawing board and
28:05
Speaker 1: think about what assumptions you made might have been wrong. Yeah,
28:09
Speaker 1: it also seems like a convenient way to put a
28:11
Speaker 1: positive spin on the fact that you haven't done anything, Like,
28:14
Speaker 1: how do we know you were even looking? Maybe you're
28:16
Speaker 1: just sitting around eating banana and clean pies. It's win win.
28:19
Speaker 1: If we discover particles, we say, give us more money
28:22
Speaker 1: to study these particles. We don't discover particles, we say,
28:24
Speaker 1: give us more money to discover some particles. It's a scam.
28:29
Speaker 1: It's an investment scam. All right. Well, that's pretty significant
28:33
Speaker 1: or insignificant, I guess, or significantly insignificant. What are some
28:36
Speaker 1: of the other great discoveries. Another one which really made
28:38
Speaker 1: ripples in my physics soul was the observation of gravitational waves.
28:43
Speaker 1: This is discovered by Lego and Virgo just about the
28:46
Speaker 1: time that we started the podcast, and for me, it's
28:48
Speaker 1: really changed the whole nature of astronomy and our understanding
28:52
Speaker 1: of what's going on out there in the universe. We've
28:55
Speaker 1: seen black holes smashing into each other, forming super big
28:59
Speaker 1: black hole and radiating away enormous amounts of their energy.
29:04
Speaker 1: In terms of these gravitational waves, which are these ripples
29:08
Speaker 1: in space and time itself, they propagate through the universe
29:12
Speaker 1: and then they squeeze these detectors that are like two
29:15
Speaker 1: miles long, and they shrink them by like a tiny
29:18
Speaker 1: factor smaller than the width of a human hair. It's
29:20
Speaker 1: incredible technological achievement that we can even see these little wiggles.
29:24
Speaker 1: Einstein himself thought it would be impossible to ever see them.
29:27
Speaker 1: It also means something really interesting about the universe. It
29:30
Speaker 1: means that gravitational waves are real. General relativity, the theory,
29:34
Speaker 1: which we're pretty sure is fundamentally wrong at some level,
29:37
Speaker 1: keeps predicting these crazy things and being correct about the
29:41
Speaker 1: nature of the universe. And it also tells us how
29:44
Speaker 1: often black holes collide, which is really often a lot
29:47
Speaker 1: more often than we thought. Yeah, it's pretty amazing to
29:50
Speaker 1: see ripples in the fabric of space time itself. It's
29:53
Speaker 1: it's like noticing that the world around you is squishing around, right,
29:57
Speaker 1: it's not like a fixed reality we live. Yeah, this
30:00
Speaker 1: is to me a really incredible avenue for exploration. It
30:04
Speaker 1: helps us really think about one of the deepest questions
30:07
Speaker 1: in physics, which is like, what is the fundamental nature
30:09
Speaker 1: of the universe? What is space anyway? And Newton thought
30:13
Speaker 1: space was just like eternal and unchangeable and just a
30:17
Speaker 1: backdrop to the universe. But Einstein showed us that it wasn't.
30:20
Speaker 1: That it's fungible, you know, that it's gonna be squeezed,
30:23
Speaker 1: that it can ripple, that it can expand it's really
30:26
Speaker 1: just like a dynamic thing. It's incredible, And now we've
30:29
Speaker 1: seen it do something that we had never seen it
30:31
Speaker 1: do before. So to me, that was a really consequential
30:33
Speaker 1: moment in physics, and it's continued to be We've seen
30:36
Speaker 1: now dozens of these black hole mergers and even neutron
30:40
Speaker 1: star murders, and so it's opened up a whole new eyeball,
30:43
Speaker 1: a whole new way to look at the universe right, right,
30:46
Speaker 1: although some people say it's it's more like hearing the universe, right,
30:49
Speaker 1: It's more like opening another ear to the universe. I
30:51
Speaker 1: know that the PR folks like to take those waves
30:54
Speaker 1: and change them into sound waves that you can play them.
30:57
Speaker 1: In the end, though, everything we're looking at his way
31:00
Speaker 1: is like you could take photons and turn them into
31:02
Speaker 1: sound waves if you wanted to. You're not really hearing
31:05
Speaker 1: gravitational waves. They're not like sonic ripples through the universe
31:08
Speaker 1: anymore than photons are. In my view, it's just a
31:11
Speaker 1: PR thing. Well, they're more analogous to sonic waves, right,
31:14
Speaker 1: because like the waves go up and down, right, they
31:16
Speaker 1: change in amplitude, and those changes in the amplitude tell
31:19
Speaker 1: you whether you know it's two black holes colliding or
31:22
Speaker 1: a black hole and ntron start Like there's something a
31:24
Speaker 1: little bit sound wavy about them, more than like just
31:26
Speaker 1: getting photons that tell you about the look of stars,
31:29
Speaker 1: I suppose. So in the end, we're always interpreting this
31:32
Speaker 1: data in a way that makes sense to us intuitively,
31:35
Speaker 1: and so we have to translate it into our senses.
31:37
Speaker 1: You know, when we see infrared radiation, we wave length
31:40
Speaker 1: shifted into the visible so we can look at those pictures.
31:42
Speaker 1: It's not what it actually looks like in real life
31:45
Speaker 1: because it's changing their frequency. But in the end we
31:47
Speaker 1: have to translate these things to our senses. Makes me wonder,
31:50
Speaker 1: like alien physicists observing gravitational waves, what do they think
31:54
Speaker 1: about them? Are they hearing them or tasting them? Whether
31:57
Speaker 1: they don't even have eyeballs, or what if they have
31:59
Speaker 1: four eyeballs, or what if gravitational waves are like a
32:01
Speaker 1: natural sense for them and so they don't need to
32:03
Speaker 1: translate it into anything. It's just gravitational waves. Man. Yeah,
32:07
Speaker 1: may they like to serve gravitation waves, who knows. But
32:09
Speaker 1: speaking of black holes, that's another pretty significant discovering. The
32:12
Speaker 1: last couple of years, we've actually gone into see black holes, right,
32:16
Speaker 1: We actually have We have pictures of the black hole
32:18
Speaker 1: from m A seven, and we also very recently have
32:21
Speaker 1: pictures of the black hole at the center of our
32:23
Speaker 1: own galaxy, Sagittarius, a star. It look sort of like
32:27
Speaker 1: crispy cream donuts floating in space, And you might think, like,
32:30
Speaker 1: what's the big deal If we really learned it's not
32:33
Speaker 1: just like a picture of a ring in space, what
32:35
Speaker 1: does that tell us about the universe. To me, it's
32:37
Speaker 1: really fascinating because it closes the window of what they
32:40
Speaker 1: really could be. You know, we measured the mass of
32:43
Speaker 1: these things, but we don't really know exactly how big
32:45
Speaker 1: they are until we can get a picture of them.
32:48
Speaker 1: We can see things like whooshing really close to the
32:51
Speaker 1: edge of the event horizon, and the closer we can
32:53
Speaker 1: see things passing by the black hole near the event horizon,
32:56
Speaker 1: the more we know about the density of that object
32:59
Speaker 1: we sort of close. Is the door on like other
33:01
Speaker 1: explanations for people who don't really believe in black holes.
33:04
Speaker 1: So seeing these images of black holes really is almost
33:08
Speaker 1: like a smoking gun that tells us that black holes
33:10
Speaker 1: are real. Right, I think we should send people who
33:12
Speaker 1: don't believe in black holes to a black hole so
33:15
Speaker 1: they can verify with themselves. No, I'm just kidding. Well,
33:18
Speaker 1: it's also an incredible technological feed. You know, these black
33:21
Speaker 1: holes that we took pictures of are incredibly far away,
33:24
Speaker 1: there in another galaxy, there in the middle of another galaxy,
33:27
Speaker 1: in between Brazilian stars that are shining bright. It's it's
33:30
Speaker 1: incredible that we can get a picture of something so
33:33
Speaker 1: far away, so small and in the middle of so
33:35
Speaker 1: many other stuff. Yes, technologically it's very impressive, absolutely, and
33:40
Speaker 1: also though does answer important science questions, it really does
33:43
Speaker 1: tell us something. You know, black holes are not something
33:46
Speaker 1: we can ever see directly, but you can only see
33:48
Speaker 1: their lack of radiation, and you can see their effect
33:51
Speaker 1: on the stuff very very close to them. And so
33:53
Speaker 1: the closer we can get our probes, the more we
33:56
Speaker 1: can be certain that these really are these weird divots
33:58
Speaker 1: in space and time. Yeah, or at least we think
34:01
Speaker 1: it was a black hole, right, there is still the
34:02
Speaker 1: possibility that it's something else, like a super dance star
34:06
Speaker 1: in the middle of there. Not technically about black hole. Yeah,
34:08
Speaker 1: we're still not know for sure, and to understand what's
34:11
Speaker 1: going on inside this reguion space and time will need
34:14
Speaker 1: some theory of quantum gravity, and there are other theories
34:17
Speaker 1: that are still consistent with these black hole pictures. So
34:20
Speaker 1: we are not a sure these black holes really are
34:23
Speaker 1: black holes, but taking these pictures helps eliminate some other
34:26
Speaker 1: theories that suggested maybe they were larger objects that extended
34:30
Speaker 1: past the event horizon. Yeah, it's pretty cool alright, So
34:33
Speaker 1: then what's the last in your opinion, big significant discovery
34:37
Speaker 1: in the last four years. Well, this is closer to
34:39
Speaker 1: my heart again. It's particle physics. We recently saw the
34:42
Speaker 1: mu on doing something kind of weird. Had this really
34:45
Speaker 1: precise experiment called G minus two. They take muance and
34:49
Speaker 1: they send them around a loop in the magnetic field
34:51
Speaker 1: and watch them. Will you did a really fun cartoon
34:54
Speaker 1: explaining the significance of this. Everybody should go check that
34:57
Speaker 1: out because it has Jorges awesome drawings explanations. But the
35:01
Speaker 1: short version is that the muans were wiggling a little
35:03
Speaker 1: bit differently from what we expected. When muans go around
35:06
Speaker 1: in these circles, they interact with all the quantum fields
35:09
Speaker 1: that are out there, and if there are more quantum
35:11
Speaker 1: fields than the ones we account for, then when the
35:14
Speaker 1: mu ones go around, they'll interact with those fields and
35:17
Speaker 1: they'll end up pointing in a different direction from the
35:19
Speaker 1: one we expect. And so they did this really careful
35:22
Speaker 1: calculation and this study for several years at the experiment,
35:26
Speaker 1: and they get a pretty different answer when they compare
35:28
Speaker 1: the experiment and the theory, which suggests maybe there are
35:31
Speaker 1: these extra fields out there. Right. Because there more fields
35:34
Speaker 1: there are, the more it will have this magnetic moment
35:37
Speaker 1: the particle, and so what they measure was that they'd
35:39
Speaker 1: had a higher magnetic moment than what our current lists
35:42
Speaker 1: of quantum fields sessors should be exactly. And that's sort
35:45
Speaker 1: of the field picture of it. Like thinking about particles,
35:48
Speaker 1: then you can imagine that as the muan is going around,
35:50
Speaker 1: there are these virtual particles that it can interact with.
35:53
Speaker 1: So maybe more fields or more particles out there in
35:56
Speaker 1: the universe, ones that might also explain the mystery of
35:59
Speaker 1: the Higgs Boson mass, though they might just be too
36:02
Speaker 1: heavy for us to create at the large aange On cliner.
36:05
Speaker 1: Pretty cool, pretty interesting, pretty tantalizing about our knowledge of
36:08
Speaker 1: the universe. It could mean that we are kind of
36:10
Speaker 1: wrong or incomplete about what we think is out there exactly.
36:13
Speaker 1: And so those are the most fun clues, the most
36:15
Speaker 1: consequential developments when we find out that we are wrong,
36:18
Speaker 1: when our expectation is different from what the universe tells us,
36:21
Speaker 1: Because that's the moment just before we make an incredible discovery,
36:25
Speaker 1: when we understand something new about the universe. Alright, Well,
36:28
Speaker 1: those are the five most consequential developments in physics in
36:31
Speaker 1: the last four years, according to Daniel Whitson. I should
36:34
Speaker 1: know that two of these are particle physics experiments which
36:38
Speaker 1: Daniel is in. One of them is his project which
36:41
Speaker 1: actually didn't find anything, but come out. It's still on
36:44
Speaker 1: the list. I'm just saying maybe you should go ask
36:46
Speaker 1: an astrophists just in case. Of course, these are very subjective.
36:49
Speaker 1: There are lots of exciting developments in other fields of
36:51
Speaker 1: physics as well. All right, let's get to our last
36:53
Speaker 1: question here on the podcast, and this one is a
36:56
Speaker 1: bout Dyson's fears in potentially using mythology to discover them.
37:01
Speaker 1: So let's get into that, but first let's take another
37:03
Speaker 1: quick break. All right, we're answering listener questions here on
37:19
Speaker 1: the podcast, and our last question comes from Chris Peg
37:23
Speaker 1: was wondering about how we can discover Dyson's fears. Hi, Daniel,
37:27
Speaker 1: and Johey, I was listening to a recent podcast when
37:30
Speaker 1: your guests mentioned dycense fees and how we hadn't found
37:33
Speaker 1: any yet. He's got me thinking how could we go
37:36
Speaker 1: about discovering a dicense fee. One thought I had was
37:40
Speaker 1: trying to use ancient mythology about disappearing stars, often devoured
37:45
Speaker 1: by some mythical being leaving the night sky dark? Could
37:49
Speaker 1: these stories be observed dicense fees? Is there any other
37:52
Speaker 1: way to tell Thanks for the thought of woking and
37:55
Speaker 1: insightful podcasts, all right, ask him question, Thank you, Chris.
37:59
Speaker 1: And he's asking how we can discover a Dyson sphere.
38:02
Speaker 1: And I'm guessing, Daniel, this is not the little ball
38:04
Speaker 1: that's in those Dyson vacuum cleaners. That's right there, dude,
38:10
Speaker 1: Oh that's right. I forgot wait I said discovering a
38:13
Speaker 1: din Sir. That's so that's double trademark fees that we
38:16
Speaker 1: over there. I should just say nothing. I think a
38:19
Speaker 1: lot of our listeners be like, yes, please horry stop talking.
38:22
Speaker 1: Nodes in sphere is a really fun idea that comes
38:25
Speaker 1: from Freeman Dyson, a physicist, and his idea was basically
38:28
Speaker 1: to make super solar panels. So you know, if you
38:31
Speaker 1: have a solar panel on your roof, it's absorbing the
38:33
Speaker 1: energy of the Sun and it's turning that into electricity
38:36
Speaker 1: or into hot water. The idea is, what if you
38:38
Speaker 1: build a bunch of solar panels, so you surrounded an
38:42
Speaker 1: entire star with solar panels, right, because think about the
38:45
Speaker 1: fraction of the Sun's energy that falls on your solar panels.
38:49
Speaker 1: It's almost zero. It's insignificant. So if you could wrap
38:51
Speaker 1: solar panels around an entire star, I think of the
38:54
Speaker 1: energy at your disposal. Yeah, i'd be massive, right, It'd
38:57
Speaker 1: be like the entire energy of the Sun that you
39:00
Speaker 1: could capture and use for like one thing or a
39:03
Speaker 1: lot of things. Yeah, you could build a laser beam
39:05
Speaker 1: to destroy planets, or you could use it for good.
39:08
Speaker 1: What could you use the giant laser beam the size
39:11
Speaker 1: of the Sun for to good purpose? Here? Oh, I
39:15
Speaker 1: don't know. You could beam the energy to planets around
39:17
Speaker 1: the Solar system that needed it. You could grow stuff
39:20
Speaker 1: on io and ghana, meat and all sorts of stuff.
39:23
Speaker 1: I mean, if you could harness that much energy, you
39:25
Speaker 1: could basically build anything you wanted in space out of asteroids.
39:29
Speaker 1: It can power an entire solar construction industry. We could
39:32
Speaker 1: build huge settlements in space. If we could zip around
39:35
Speaker 1: the Solar system on solar sales, it would be really incredible.
39:38
Speaker 1: Energy really is the limiting factor for our entire economy. Oh,
39:41
Speaker 1: that's interesting. It would be a way to sort of
39:43
Speaker 1: like harness the Sun and focus it on maybe the
39:46
Speaker 1: like the planets were really far away, like you could
39:48
Speaker 1: maybe heat up Neptune and make it habitable, or you know,
39:52
Speaker 1: heat up one of the movements of Jupiter and make
39:54
Speaker 1: it a nice tropical vacation spot. Yeah. I think this
39:57
Speaker 1: appeared in Isaac Asthmas story I read a long time ago.
40:00
Speaker 1: Solar panels that being that energy to various parts of
40:03
Speaker 1: the Solar System. Because remember, the Sun's energy goes like
40:06
Speaker 1: one overall distance squared, and so there's a reason that
40:09
Speaker 1: like Neptune and Urinus are called the ice giants because
40:12
Speaker 1: it's cold out there, and so we could capture all
40:15
Speaker 1: the Sun's energy and then beam it around the Solar system,
40:18
Speaker 1: then you can make a lot of these places really hospitable. Yeah,
40:20
Speaker 1: because if you think about it, the Sun is shooting
40:22
Speaker 1: off all this energy, but most of it is just
40:24
Speaker 1: going out into empty space, right It's it's sort of
40:26
Speaker 1: almost being lost because there's nothing there to receive it,
40:29
Speaker 1: or it's nothing there to really capture that sunlight. So
40:32
Speaker 1: there's a lot going out there in all directions that's
40:34
Speaker 1: not being used. Yeah. Well, maybe it's being used by
40:37
Speaker 1: alien astronomers who are studying our Sun and looking for
40:40
Speaker 1: our planets, but otherwise, yes, it's being wasted, and so
40:43
Speaker 1: the ideas that you can maybe build a structure around
40:46
Speaker 1: the sun, the whole structure of solar panels to partners
40:49
Speaker 1: that energy. And I think the question that Chris Peck
40:51
Speaker 1: has is like maybe we could detect it by seeing
40:55
Speaker 1: or looking at records or starts that have suddenly been
40:58
Speaker 1: covered up. Yeah, it's question is could we see if
41:01
Speaker 1: aliens are building a dicense fhere. And the idea is
41:04
Speaker 1: if somebody builds one of these things, then their star
41:06
Speaker 1: is gonna blink out of the night sky. So if
41:08
Speaker 1: aliens are putting this thing together, we should see a
41:10
Speaker 1: star disappear, and that would be a pretty cool signature
41:13
Speaker 1: because you know, we think we understand the life cycle
41:15
Speaker 1: of stars. They don't just blink out right, They blow
41:18
Speaker 1: up in supernovas, or they go red giant and expel
41:20
Speaker 1: their outer layers. We understand the life cycle of stars.
41:23
Speaker 1: So if we saw one that just like disappeared weirdly,
41:26
Speaker 1: that would be an interesting clue. If there are aliens
41:29
Speaker 1: who are building a dicense fhere around a star out there,
41:31
Speaker 1: it's kind of unrealized such a thing. They could do
41:33
Speaker 1: it in a in a single day, right, Like would
41:34
Speaker 1: it it maybe take thousands or hundreds of years. You know,
41:37
Speaker 1: like imagine building a structure the size of the Sun.
41:41
Speaker 1: It's it's like a million times bigger than the Earth. Yeah,
41:44
Speaker 1: it would be a big project, and to finish it
41:46
Speaker 1: in one day it would be exceptional. And so I
41:48
Speaker 1: don't know anything about alien engineering, but you can imagine
41:51
Speaker 1: that it would be making steady progress. So what you
41:53
Speaker 1: can do is look for stars that are steadily dimming, right,
41:56
Speaker 1: that they're getting dimmer and dimmer as time goes on.
41:59
Speaker 1: And we rely have been noticing some interesting things about
42:02
Speaker 1: a couple of stars in the sky. Beetle Juice for example,
42:05
Speaker 1: a very familiar star, remember the Orion constellation, the tenth
42:09
Speaker 1: brightest star in the sky and one of the largest
42:11
Speaker 1: stars visible to the naked eye. This thing is massive,
42:15
Speaker 1: like if you put it in our solar system, it
42:17
Speaker 1: would extend out past Mars into the asteroid belt. But
42:21
Speaker 1: the amazing thing about this star is that it's been
42:23
Speaker 1: dimming in the last few years. It's brightness has gone
42:26
Speaker 1: down by like a factor of three. So that got
42:29
Speaker 1: people wondering, like maybe the aliens have started building a
42:32
Speaker 1: dicensphere around beetle juice m and maybe they can do
42:36
Speaker 1: it in three days. Is that the idea build something
42:38
Speaker 1: the size of the sun in three days. Well, the
42:41
Speaker 1: problem with this theory is that it wasn't dimming steadily,
42:44
Speaker 1: and like went down and went back up, and then
42:46
Speaker 1: it went down, went the back up, and actually by
42:48
Speaker 1: February two thousand twenty two, it's back to its normal
42:51
Speaker 1: brightness again. And so it doesn't seem likely to be
42:54
Speaker 1: a dicensphere unless they were working on the dicensphere and
42:57
Speaker 1: they had some terrible accident and the whole thing blew
42:59
Speaker 1: up up right right, or they ran out of money
43:03
Speaker 1: they have to dismantle the whole thing in three days,
43:07
Speaker 1: you know. The leading theory these days is that there's
43:10
Speaker 1: some big dust cloud, maybe from a collision, like maybe
43:13
Speaker 1: beetle juice ejected some material in some huge coronal mass
43:17
Speaker 1: ejection which then floated out in cooled and partially blocked
43:21
Speaker 1: beetle juice for a little while. Or maybe like some
43:23
Speaker 1: exo moon came in and smashed into a planet and
43:26
Speaker 1: turned it into dust. You might wonder, like, how could
43:28
Speaker 1: we tell the difference if the star is getting dimmer?
43:30
Speaker 1: How can you tell what's dibbing it. But we do
43:32
Speaker 1: have one extra handle on it, which is that we
43:34
Speaker 1: can look at the different wavelengths of light we get
43:37
Speaker 1: from these stars. Because remember, stars don't just glow in
43:40
Speaker 1: the visible they also glow in the infrared and in
43:43
Speaker 1: the ultra violet, and those different kinds of light they
43:47
Speaker 1: passed through the universe differently, so ultra violet light and
43:50
Speaker 1: infrared light and visible light, some kinds of material are
43:53
Speaker 1: paked to those wavelengths, and other kinds of material are transparent.
43:56
Speaker 1: And so if we look at what frequencies it's glowing in,
43:59
Speaker 1: we can try to use what might be blocking it right,
44:01
Speaker 1: because I think the idea is that stars don't typically
44:04
Speaker 1: dim right, or at least dim in a time scale
44:07
Speaker 1: that we can notice. They don't typically change, and so
44:09
Speaker 1: if we see one dimming even a little bit, it's
44:12
Speaker 1: sort of as a sign that maybe something else is
44:14
Speaker 1: going on. Well, there are some stars that do damn
44:16
Speaker 1: their variable stars, but it happens since sort of a
44:19
Speaker 1: regular cycle, and we think we understand what's going on inside,
44:22
Speaker 1: and those typically happened on a fairly short time scale,
44:24
Speaker 1: So you can see it dim and come back and
44:26
Speaker 1: dim and come back. Sephids, for example, are variable brightness stars.
44:30
Speaker 1: But to see a star that's like just gradually dims
44:33
Speaker 1: and then eventually blinks out, yeah, that's not something we expect.
44:36
Speaker 1: And if you did build a dicense fear, if you
44:38
Speaker 1: surrounded your star with all this material, then we would
44:41
Speaker 1: expect that the star would go dim in all frequencies
44:44
Speaker 1: because this dicense here should be absorbing all of that light.
44:46
Speaker 1: But then the dicense fear itself would heat up a
44:49
Speaker 1: little bit, so you expect to see a little bit
44:52
Speaker 1: of infrared radiation from this thing. Like nothing in the
44:55
Speaker 1: universe is totally dark. So if they build a sphere
44:59
Speaker 1: to absorb all the energy, the heat of the sphere
45:02
Speaker 1: itself would glow in the infrared. So a signature of
45:06
Speaker 1: a dicensphere is a star that disappears and then you
45:08
Speaker 1: see something only in the infrared where the star was,
45:12
Speaker 1: you would see like the diceenosphere kind of burning hot,
45:15
Speaker 1: kind of the same way you could see the Earth.
45:17
Speaker 1: And the Earth itself doesn't glow, but if you looked
45:19
Speaker 1: at the Earth with an infrared telescope, you could see it,
45:22
Speaker 1: because the Earth does glow in the infrared, even though
45:25
Speaker 1: it doesn't glow in the visible right, you couldn't see
45:27
Speaker 1: the Earth from an optical telescope that uses visible light.
45:30
Speaker 1: You could see the Earth from other solar systems using
45:33
Speaker 1: infrared telescopes, which is why people are so excited about
45:35
Speaker 1: the James Web telescope, for example, could see exoplanets in
45:38
Speaker 1: the infrared. So if there's a dicensphere, we should be
45:41
Speaker 1: able to see it glowing in the infrared. So the
45:44
Speaker 1: Beetle juice was exciting, but then you know, the brightness
45:47
Speaker 1: came back up, and also it wasn't glowing only in
45:49
Speaker 1: the infrared the way you would expect from a dicensphere.
45:52
Speaker 1: All right, but there are other examples of stars dimming
45:54
Speaker 1: that might be hints that somebody is building a dicensphere
45:57
Speaker 1: out there. People are not excited about another star called
46:00
Speaker 1: Tabby Stars about light years from Earth, and it deemed
46:04
Speaker 1: about twenty two in its brightness starting in about two fifteen.
46:09
Speaker 1: People didn't understand initially what was happening to this star,
46:12
Speaker 1: But then again they studied the frequencies of light that
46:14
Speaker 1: were still coming from the star, and they noticed that
46:16
Speaker 1: the wavelength dependence of his dimming was consistent with dust.
46:20
Speaker 1: Dust was blocking certain frequencies of light but not other frequencies,
46:24
Speaker 1: So not consistent with an alien megastructure, right, which was
46:27
Speaker 1: again just glow in the infrared. So probably what's happening
46:30
Speaker 1: is again like some big collision, some new creation of
46:34
Speaker 1: dust is blocking this star. Probably not a dicensphere unfortunately. Well,
46:39
Speaker 1: I feel like these scenarios you're you're painting. Assume that
46:42
Speaker 1: we catch the dicensphere as it's being built like this,
46:46
Speaker 1: then we would see a star dimming, and then we
46:48
Speaker 1: would see a glowing infrared I wonder if Chris is wondering.
46:51
Speaker 1: His question is more about, like what if somebody already
46:53
Speaker 1: built one? Is there any way that we can see
46:57
Speaker 1: see it there? Like maybe it was built billions of
46:59
Speaker 1: years ago or hundreds of years ago, And could we
47:03
Speaker 1: tell it's there just from like you know, the fact
47:05
Speaker 1: that it would have the mass of the sun, but
47:07
Speaker 1: it would only be glowing dimly in the infrared. Yeah,
47:10
Speaker 1: that would be really fascinating. That's not the kind of
47:12
Speaker 1: object we expect to see. And so if you sensed
47:15
Speaker 1: its gravitational pull on nearby objects and then it was
47:18
Speaker 1: only glowing in the infrared. Then I don't know if
47:21
Speaker 1: anything else in the universe that could explain that. You know,
47:24
Speaker 1: we might expect that a white dwarf, the remnant of
47:27
Speaker 1: a red super giant that's left over is no longer fusing,
47:30
Speaker 1: would eventually cool into something we call a black dwarf.
47:34
Speaker 1: So you have a white dwarf, which is a big
47:35
Speaker 1: hot lump of metal glowing in space. Eventually it cools
47:38
Speaker 1: off into something that's so cold it's only glowing the infrared.
47:42
Speaker 1: But we think that would take trillions of years, and
47:44
Speaker 1: we don't think there are any black dwarfs in the universe.
47:47
Speaker 1: So something with the mass of a star that's not
47:49
Speaker 1: glowing except in the infrared, that would be a great
47:52
Speaker 1: candidate for a Dicen sphere. But those are hard to find, right.
47:54
Speaker 1: You have to like scan the sky in the infrared. Yeah,
47:58
Speaker 1: and you have to sort of know whether not has
48:00
Speaker 1: planets going around it. Right. The other fun part of
48:03
Speaker 1: Chris's question is whether we can use ancient records to
48:06
Speaker 1: see whether this happened a thousand years ago or five
48:09
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. Because people have been looking at the
48:12
Speaker 1: night sky for a long time, we have records like
48:15
Speaker 1: Chinese astronomers who saw supernova even though they didn't really
48:18
Speaker 1: know what they were looking at. So people have been
48:21
Speaker 1: carefully looking at the sky for a long time, which
48:24
Speaker 1: is a really fun idea. Yeah, And I think the
48:25
Speaker 1: idea is that maybe, you know, back then in ancient civilization,
48:29
Speaker 1: they didn't have telescopes or even photographs, but maybe you know,
48:32
Speaker 1: they were looking at a constellation and they saw that
48:35
Speaker 1: maybe one of the stars in the constellation disappeared, And
48:37
Speaker 1: if it disappeared, could it be that an alien build
48:40
Speaker 1: a disensphere at that time? That would be super awesome.
48:43
Speaker 1: I did a bit of digging to see if I
48:45
Speaker 1: could find anything an ancient record that hinted at that,
48:48
Speaker 1: and of course I'm not a scholar of ancient Chinese astronomy,
48:51
Speaker 1: but I couldn't find anything in the literature of that nature.
48:54
Speaker 1: What I did find is that there's a really fun
48:55
Speaker 1: project called Vasco, which is trying to look back at
48:59
Speaker 1: all of our photo graphic records of early astronomy. So
49:02
Speaker 1: you know, we've been taking pictures of the night sky
49:05
Speaker 1: for decades and decades and decades, and people are looking
49:07
Speaker 1: back through that to try to see, like Hey, is
49:09
Speaker 1: anything big changed since we started carefully documenting the night sky?
49:13
Speaker 1: You can't look at every single star as a person
49:16
Speaker 1: and notice whether it's disappeared or not. But maybe a
49:18
Speaker 1: careful study of these old photographic plates might reveal something.
49:22
Speaker 1: So this is a tough problem because these photographs aren't
49:24
Speaker 1: always in great condition. So it's sort of fun astronomical archaeology. Well,
49:29
Speaker 1: it's a lot of disciplines in one in one sentence
49:33
Speaker 1: photography as as an archaeology. Yeah, it's really fun, and
49:37
Speaker 1: it's fun to think about how in fifty years or
49:39
Speaker 1: a hundred years, people might be digging through our old
49:42
Speaker 1: data wondering if there's something that we missed. You know,
49:45
Speaker 1: there's all these examples of times in history when we
49:48
Speaker 1: make a discovery and then we think, hold on a second,
49:50
Speaker 1: somebody else should have been able to see that thirty
49:52
Speaker 1: years ago, and we look and we discover, oh, yeah,
49:54
Speaker 1: it's right there in their data. They just missed it.
49:57
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize winning to be found that nobody noticed. So
50:00
Speaker 1: scientists out there is entirely possible that the daity you're
50:02
Speaker 1: taking today, somebody else could be looking through it in
50:05
Speaker 1: fifty years or a hundred years and seeing your big mistake. Yeah,
50:08
Speaker 1: I'm sure we'll be talking about it in our four
50:11
Speaker 1: thousand episode. You know what has been the most significant
50:14
Speaker 1: discovery since we started this podcast fifty years ago. We
50:18
Speaker 1: discovered that we can do four thousand podcasts. Well, it's interesting.
50:22
Speaker 1: I wonder if you're like an astronomer in ancient times
50:24
Speaker 1: and you're like trying to convince everyone that a star
50:26
Speaker 1: that was there before is no longer there, Like, would
50:29
Speaker 1: people believe you right? Like, you're right right, You didn't
50:32
Speaker 1: take a photograph of it before. Why would they believe
50:34
Speaker 1: you that a start disappeared? They could be gas lighting you.
50:37
Speaker 1: They'd be like, I don't know what you're talking about.
50:39
Speaker 1: That's never been a star there. There's never been a
50:41
Speaker 1: star there. Yeah, you could gas light yourself now that
50:45
Speaker 1: they had gas light. That's right. But I guess if
50:48
Speaker 1: it was a pretty famous star when people were familiar with,
50:50
Speaker 1: you know, the North Star or something, and people would
50:52
Speaker 1: definitely notice if it hadn't disappeared. But yeah, there's nothing
50:55
Speaker 1: in sort of ancient literature that I'm aware of that
50:57
Speaker 1: suggests that that happened. I see, So, Chris Peck, I
51:00
Speaker 1: guess I'm keep looking. We're counting on you to spot
51:04
Speaker 1: that giant alien solar panels fear, and we're counting on
51:08
Speaker 1: all of you to keep asking questions and to keep
51:10
Speaker 1: sending them to us so we can talk about them
51:12
Speaker 1: on this podcast. We love your questions, but I love
51:14
Speaker 1: hearing you think about the universe and wonder about how
51:17
Speaker 1: it works, and I love helping you understand it. So
51:20
Speaker 1: please don't be shy and write to us with your questions.
51:23
Speaker 1: Two questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Yeah, and
51:26
Speaker 1: keep listening, because who knows when the next consequential discovery
51:29
Speaker 1: will happen, or Daniel's case, not not happen. It might
51:33
Speaker 1: be a Dicen sphere, or it might be some new
51:35
Speaker 1: kinds of particles. Stay tuned. That's the history of humanities,
51:39
Speaker 1: to stay tuned, because we were making discoveries all the time. Whoops,
51:43
Speaker 1: I just said the word again. I might run down
51:46
Speaker 1: the hall excitedly shouting, we didn't discover anything today again.
51:51
Speaker 1: Non eureka, non eureka. Right, you should celebrate every day, Daniel,
51:55
Speaker 1: that you don't get anything done. That's my philosophy. Doing
51:59
Speaker 1: a podcast is how I celebrate. It also keeps me
52:02
Speaker 1: from getting things done. So all right, Well, we hope
52:04
Speaker 1: you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, see you next time.
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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained.
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Speaker 1: The Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. For
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Speaker 1: more podcast from my Heart Radio, visit the i heart
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Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
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Speaker 1: favorite shows.