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

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

0:08
Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, I've got a question for you. Oh, let's hear.
0:10
Speaker 1: I love questions. I'm not sure you like this one.
0:14
Speaker 1: I've seen you cringe every time people ask you this.
0:17
Speaker 1: M all right, now I'm curious. Let's hear the question.
0:19
Speaker 1: All right? Are you still actively doing research? Oh? You're right.
0:23
Speaker 1: I used to hate that question, but actually now I've
0:25
Speaker 1: learned to love it. Oh yeah, yeah, what changed? You
0:28
Speaker 1: actually started doing research? Well? Instead of grinding my teeth
0:33
Speaker 1: at the suggestion that it's not possible to do outreach
0:36
Speaker 1: and research, I just take it as another chance to
0:39
Speaker 1: talk about my research. And hey, I love some ash
0:42
Speaker 1: and stuff together, so I love talking about it. I
0:44
Speaker 1: wonder if you pole assumed podcast and takes a long time.
0:47
Speaker 1: If only they knew. Hi am Or Handley, cartoonists and
1:04
Speaker 1: the creator of PhD comics. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a
1:07
Speaker 1: particle physicist and an actor researcher at you see Ermine,
1:11
Speaker 1: and I love smashing together podcasts with my cartoonist friend.
1:15
Speaker 1: Sounds like you said you're an actor researcher. I thought, whoa,
1:18
Speaker 1: that's pretty cool. You do acting as well. I do
1:21
Speaker 1: my own math stunts. Unlike Leonardo DiCaprio. I didn't know
1:25
Speaker 1: Leonardo needed a stunt man. Oh yeah, he couldn't write
1:28
Speaker 1: the equations himself on the board or don't look up,
1:31
Speaker 1: so they have to hire somebody to do his math
1:33
Speaker 1: for him. But me, I live that danger, man. I
1:36
Speaker 1: take those risks every day with my body. Did you
1:39
Speaker 1: audition to be Leonardo de Capitos? You know, wrist standing?
1:44
Speaker 1: I didn't even know that was a thing, But if
1:46
Speaker 1: I had known it was a thing, I definitely would
1:48
Speaker 1: have signed up for it. Absolutely. Yeah. You live right
1:50
Speaker 1: next to Hollywood, why not you could be Robert Downey
1:53
Speaker 1: Jr's wrist You could be. I think I look a
1:57
Speaker 1: little bit more like Robert Downey Junior than Leonardo DiCaprio anyway.
2:00
Speaker 1: But I don't think I look much like either of them.
2:02
Speaker 1: You can say, I mean not not to say anything
2:07
Speaker 1: about how you look, but you know, you just don't
2:09
Speaker 1: look like Robert Downey Junior or Leonardo the Copier. You
2:13
Speaker 1: look like a handsome Daniel Whitson. Like if Woody Allen
2:16
Speaker 1: needed a math double, then I would be his math double.
2:20
Speaker 1: I don't think you want to dull for Woody Allen
2:23
Speaker 1: on any set. No, that's true, he's off the list,
2:26
Speaker 1: but anyways, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain
2:29
Speaker 1: the Universe, a production of My Heart Radio in which
2:31
Speaker 1: we take all the risks by diving deep into the
2:34
Speaker 1: unanswered questions about the universe. We don't shy away from
2:38
Speaker 1: the dangerous math and the difficult questions. We ask them
2:41
Speaker 1: straight up and wonder what the answers are. How big
2:44
Speaker 1: is the universe, how old is it, what's happened to it?
2:47
Speaker 1: What is it made out of? And most importantly, can
2:49
Speaker 1: we explain it to you? Yeah, because it is a
2:52
Speaker 1: very perplexing universe, full of things to wonder about, and
2:55
Speaker 1: we like to take you right up to the edge
2:57
Speaker 1: where scientists are taking all the cree different scientific risks
3:01
Speaker 1: trying to figure out how everything works. This makes it
3:03
Speaker 1: sound like science is kind of risky, Daniel, do you
3:05
Speaker 1: have insurance for doing science? Is there science insurance? I
3:09
Speaker 1: spent three years on this paper and it turned into nothing.
3:12
Speaker 1: Pay me. Oh, I wish I would have so many payouts.
3:16
Speaker 1: I think it's called tenure. That's pretty good insurance, right,
3:20
Speaker 1: that's pretty good safety net. Although you know tenure doesn't
3:22
Speaker 1: guarantee you funding. You can have a job, but no
3:25
Speaker 1: money to do any actual work. But you still get paid.
3:28
Speaker 1: You do get paid as long as you still do teaching.
3:30
Speaker 1: That's true. But there are sort of intellectual risks involved
3:33
Speaker 1: in science. What we do is research. It's a sort
3:36
Speaker 1: of exploration. We don't know that there will be interesting
3:39
Speaker 1: answers until we go out and look. The same way,
3:42
Speaker 1: you don't know what's waiting for you when you first
3:44
Speaker 1: land on the surface of some alien planet. Is it
3:47
Speaker 1: filled with all sorts of incredible creatures or is it
3:49
Speaker 1: just a desert of rubble. You don't know until you
3:52
Speaker 1: go and look, and sometimes you hit the jackpot, and
3:55
Speaker 1: sometimes you come home with dust. You think. It's not
3:57
Speaker 1: like a casino, like a science, like a nature casino.
4:01
Speaker 1: He did a bunch of scientists pulling the lever on
4:04
Speaker 1: the slot machine of the universe. There's an enormous element
4:07
Speaker 1: of luck, absolutely in making a discovery. You know, there
4:10
Speaker 1: are people who are really clever and have good ideas
4:12
Speaker 1: about where to look for the next big thing in
4:15
Speaker 1: the universe, and then there are folks who just stumble
4:17
Speaker 1: across it. Well, I'm an artist in a cartoonage, so
4:20
Speaker 1: I don't know anything about risky at all. You know
4:25
Speaker 1: what are you talking about. I'll take ten years, sure. Yeah,
4:29
Speaker 1: you left one risky career for the ultimate risky career.
4:32
Speaker 1: Absolutely well, I do have insurance, yeah, actually have cartoonist insurance. Yeah,
4:36
Speaker 1: you've insured your right hand against injury. It's called marrying
4:41
Speaker 1: someone with the stable job. Patronage. I think they call
4:44
Speaker 1: that patronage. Yeah, patronage matronage. Actually maybe, But anyways, scientists
4:52
Speaker 1: ask a lot of questions about the universe because we're
4:54
Speaker 1: trying to figure out how the universe works. But they're
4:56
Speaker 1: not the only ones who have questions about the things
4:58
Speaker 1: around them. All of human he is trying to push
5:01
Speaker 1: forward the envelope of knowledge and understanding and mystery just
5:05
Speaker 1: by looking around us and wondering how things work. It's
5:08
Speaker 1: not just those of us with a tenure job who
5:10
Speaker 1: can take naps in the afternoon. It's everybody who wants
5:13
Speaker 1: to know how the universe works. And everybody out there
5:15
Speaker 1: asks questions about the universe. Yeah, and it's not like
5:19
Speaker 1: only the scientists asked really cool and interesting and valid questions.
5:23
Speaker 1: Everybody can ask these amazing questions, and in fact, there's
5:26
Speaker 1: a huge amount of ore lap between the questions people
5:28
Speaker 1: have every day, and the questions that scientists at the
5:31
Speaker 1: forefront are asking because we're a lot more ignorant about
5:34
Speaker 1: the nature of the universe than you might expect from
5:37
Speaker 1: the fact that you can rely on technology and flying
5:39
Speaker 1: airplanes and all that stuff. There are some pretty basic
5:42
Speaker 1: questions that we just don't know how to grapple with,
5:45
Speaker 1: so we mostly avoid them and work on other stuff
5:47
Speaker 1: that's easier to tackle. So sometimes you ask us a
5:50
Speaker 1: really hard, basic question like what is space? How does
5:54
Speaker 1: time work? And you get a blank stare because it's
5:56
Speaker 1: the kind of thing we just don't know the answer
5:58
Speaker 1: to makes you wonder what you're doing to earn that tenure. Daniel,
6:01
Speaker 1: You know, sometimes I get great ideas while napping, while
6:04
Speaker 1: napping interesting, and then you wake up and you forget him.
6:08
Speaker 1: I keep a pad of paper actually next to the couch,
6:10
Speaker 1: and sometimes I wake up and I look at the scribbles.
6:12
Speaker 1: I'm like, I have no idea what that says. And
6:14
Speaker 1: other times I'm like, that seems like a good idea.
6:16
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go try that sounds like. There's an episode
6:18
Speaker 1: of Seinfeld where he has the same thing and he
6:21
Speaker 1: spends the whole episode trying to figure out what he
6:23
Speaker 1: wrote down in the path, and so don't leave us
6:26
Speaker 1: in suspense. Did you get a great science idea? Did
6:28
Speaker 1: he launch a new experiment and win a Nobel prize? Yeah? Yeah,
6:31
Speaker 1: that was a season. But everybody has questions, and they're
6:35
Speaker 1: all awesome questions, and sometimes we get those questions here
6:37
Speaker 1: on the podcast. People write to us or contact us
6:40
Speaker 1: through social media, or they hang out at our discord
6:42
Speaker 1: and that's where they ask the questions. That's right. We
6:45
Speaker 1: welcome all of your questions. If you are curious about
6:48
Speaker 1: the universe, or there's a science concept you haven't heard
6:51
Speaker 1: explain to your satisfaction, please write to us two questions
6:54
Speaker 1: at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Everybody deserves to understand
6:58
Speaker 1: the universe, or at least understand how little we know
7:01
Speaker 1: about the universe. Yeah, so to be on the podcast,
7:03
Speaker 1: we'll be tackling listener questions number the Annihilation Confabulation special
7:17
Speaker 1: that didn't quite work out, that's right. A lot of
7:19
Speaker 1: these questions have to do with smashing stuff together, blowing
7:23
Speaker 1: things up for science, which in the end is something
7:25
Speaker 1: I love to do. You like blowing things up for science,
7:28
Speaker 1: or you're like smashing things for science. I thought we
7:30
Speaker 1: had this conversation Daniel, it's not the same thing unless
7:33
Speaker 1: you blow up the entire world and went to case, um,
7:36
Speaker 1: please don't do that, and I guess it won't matter anyways.
7:38
Speaker 1: You know, I think it's an artificial dichotomy. I think
7:40
Speaker 1: there's a spectrum between smashing stuff together and blowing stuff up,
7:44
Speaker 1: and you're just trying to force an artificial separation between them.
7:47
Speaker 1: I think you're I think you're wrong. I think there's
7:52
Speaker 1: a spectrum between right and wrong. Actually, I wonder what
7:56
Speaker 1: the legal authorities say about that. Yeah, you either go
7:59
Speaker 1: to jail or you don't. So that's definitely a quantum distinction.
8:02
Speaker 1: That's either smash things or you explode things, or you
8:06
Speaker 1: can smash things that then explode. But it's just then
8:08
Speaker 1: it's the question. It's not like a quantum superposition. But
8:11
Speaker 1: to continue our argument from the last episode, and that's
8:14
Speaker 1: exactly why we smash stuff, because then then explode and
8:17
Speaker 1: we look at what comes out. So yeah, absolutely, Wait
8:20
Speaker 1: did you say and it explodes? Yeah, protons, we smash
8:23
Speaker 1: them together and then they explode. Oh boy, well, I
8:29
Speaker 1: guess we came to an agreement. It's not the same thing.
8:31
Speaker 1: It happens one after the other. I think it's what
8:33
Speaker 1: you just admitted to. Yes, time flows forward, I do agree,
8:38
Speaker 1: all right. Anyways, we are answering listener questions once again,
8:41
Speaker 1: and there is our twenty eight episode which is amazing,
8:45
Speaker 1: and this one has a theme of annihilation. I guess
8:48
Speaker 1: that's on everyone's mind these days. Yeah, everybody's thinking about
8:51
Speaker 1: blowing stuff up or smashing stuff together or something on
8:55
Speaker 1: the spectrum between them, or something in Europe causing everyone
8:59
Speaker 1: to blow ourselves up. So we have some awesome questions
9:01
Speaker 1: here about electrons annihilating with nuance, about Daniel annihilating I
9:07
Speaker 1: guess his career prospects maybe, and also maybe an alien
9:12
Speaker 1: civilization coming to annihilate us. So some pretty grim and
9:16
Speaker 1: interesting questions. Yeah, so thanks everybody who submitted these. Please
9:19
Speaker 1: don't be shy. If you'd like to submit questions for
9:22
Speaker 1: answering on the podcast, please write to us two questions
9:25
Speaker 1: at Daniel and Jorge dot com, or come join us
9:27
Speaker 1: on the discord, or enjoy my office hours, or write
9:30
Speaker 1: to us on Twitter anyway you like it. We love
9:32
Speaker 1: interacting with our listeners. Okay, so our first question comes
9:35
Speaker 1: from David Smith, and he has a question about um,
9:38
Speaker 1: I guess shaking hands with himself. Hi, Daniel and Jorge.
9:43
Speaker 1: I recently listened to the episode about particles and their
9:46
Speaker 1: anti particles, and I was a little surprised by the
9:49
Speaker 1: statement that Daniel made the generation two particles won't cancel
9:53
Speaker 1: with generation one particles. In other words, you can't have
9:56
Speaker 1: a cancelation or an annihilation between a positron and I'm on.
10:00
Speaker 1: It made me wonder, say, hypothetically, there was a stable
10:04
Speaker 1: object that was made from generation to antimatter, and these
10:08
Speaker 1: objects came into contact with normal matter, would the opposite
10:11
Speaker 1: valence shield charges caused the objects to tend to stick together?
10:16
Speaker 1: If so, how strongly would that attraction be? For example,
10:19
Speaker 1: if I shake my generation to antimatter Doppelganger's hand, would
10:24
Speaker 1: I be able to pull it apart? Afterwards? Thank you?
10:27
Speaker 1: Whoa pretty interesting questionnaire from David. There's a lot to
10:32
Speaker 1: unpack here. I think there's antimatter and also multigenerational particles
10:36
Speaker 1: here to unpack. Yeah, he's responding to a conversation we
10:38
Speaker 1: had about annihilation of matter and antimatter, and we talked
10:43
Speaker 1: about how electrons, for example, can annihilate with their opposite
10:47
Speaker 1: particle depositron to turn into things like photons. That's something
10:51
Speaker 1: people are familiar with. But we commented that a positron can't,
10:54
Speaker 1: for example, annihilate with a mu on, which is like
10:57
Speaker 1: the heavier version of the electron. We called it a
11:00
Speaker 1: second generation particle. Electrons are the first generation, muons are
11:04
Speaker 1: the second generation. And so while an electron can annihilate
11:07
Speaker 1: with a positron, a muon cannot annihilate with a positron. Well,
11:11
Speaker 1: let's take it one step at a time. So an
11:13
Speaker 1: electron has an anti version of itself, called the anti electron,
11:18
Speaker 1: but you guys give it another name. You call it
11:20
Speaker 1: the positron. So apositron is just an anti electron. Most
11:23
Speaker 1: of the antimatter particles we just call anti whatever, But
11:26
Speaker 1: the positron, because it was the first one discovered, got
11:29
Speaker 1: a special name. Okay, So then, and it's the same
11:33
Speaker 1: as the electron, except that has one charge flipped, or
11:36
Speaker 1: all of the charges flipped. I forget, it has all
11:39
Speaker 1: of its gauge charges flipped, and so the weak hypercharge
11:42
Speaker 1: and everything else, all of that is flipped for the
11:45
Speaker 1: positron relative to the electron. Most important is the electromagnetic charge,
11:49
Speaker 1: which goes from minus one to plus one. So the
11:51
Speaker 1: positron has plus one electric charge. Well, there's only three forces, right,
11:57
Speaker 1: so it has three charges flipped, the electro magnetic charge,
12:01
Speaker 1: the strong the color right, and something else right, So
12:05
Speaker 1: it has all of its charges flipped. The electric charge obviously,
12:08
Speaker 1: the electron also feels the weak force, so it has
12:10
Speaker 1: its weak quantum numbers flipped. The electron doesn't feel the
12:14
Speaker 1: strong force. It doesn't have color, and so the opositron
12:18
Speaker 1: also doesn't have color. Okay, so if I take an
12:21
Speaker 1: electron and I mash it up with an anti electron,
12:25
Speaker 1: it annihilates, right, it turns into like pure energy, meaning
12:28
Speaker 1: like photons. Yeah, it can turn into a photonic actually
12:31
Speaker 1: also turned into something like a z boson. But yeah,
12:34
Speaker 1: the point is that that electrons matter no longer exists.
12:38
Speaker 1: It's not like you've taken the components of the electron
12:40
Speaker 1: and de positron and you've rearranged them like some sort
12:43
Speaker 1: of chemical reaction where you move atoms from one place
12:46
Speaker 1: to another. The matter that made up the electron and
12:49
Speaker 1: the postron does not exist anymore in the universe. It's
12:52
Speaker 1: converted into a photon, which has no mass. And also
12:55
Speaker 1: there's the idea that particles have sort of heavier versions
12:59
Speaker 1: or cousin for generations. So the electron has an heavier
13:03
Speaker 1: kind of twin version of itself, right called the muan,
13:06
Speaker 1: which is exactly the same same charges as the electron,
13:10
Speaker 1: just more mass. Yeah, and this is something we don't
13:12
Speaker 1: understand why these particles exist. But you see, there are
13:15
Speaker 1: all these symmetries and reflections in particle physics. You know,
13:18
Speaker 1: one is like a particle has an antiparticle, and now
13:21
Speaker 1: we're talking about a different sort of direction in which
13:24
Speaker 1: particles have reflections of themselves. So every particle has a
13:28
Speaker 1: heavy version of itself. The electron has the heavy version,
13:31
Speaker 1: the muan. Even the corks have heavier versions. So there
13:34
Speaker 1: are three of these generations, generation one, two, and three.
13:38
Speaker 1: The electron is the first generation, muan is in the
13:40
Speaker 1: second generation, and then the even heavier version is called
13:43
Speaker 1: the tow. Al Right, well, I guess the mystery then
13:45
Speaker 1: is that because I think, you know, the electron smashes
13:48
Speaker 1: with the positron because they have opposite charges, and so
13:51
Speaker 1: they can attract each other and so they get really
13:54
Speaker 1: close to each other, and that's when they annihilate. Wouldn't
13:57
Speaker 1: the same thing happen if like an electron met with
14:00
Speaker 1: its anti heavier cousin, whenn't they have the opposite charge
14:04
Speaker 1: and still attract each other. That's exactly what Dave's asking,
14:07
Speaker 1: and you would expect that that might work because it
14:09
Speaker 1: does satisfy the principle that they have the opposite charges.
14:12
Speaker 1: But to David's surprise, that's not allowed in particle physics.
14:16
Speaker 1: A muon and a positron cannot turn into a photon
14:20
Speaker 1: because while that does respect conservation of charge, it doesn't
14:24
Speaker 1: respect all of the rules of particle physics, and there's
14:27
Speaker 1: kind of a lot of them. Oh yeah, what are
14:29
Speaker 1: these rules? One of the rules, of course, is conservation
14:31
Speaker 1: of charge, And so just stepping through the reaction here,
14:34
Speaker 1: you start out with like a muan which is minus
14:37
Speaker 1: one charge, and a positron which is plus one charge.
14:40
Speaker 1: So that adds up to zero total charge. So there's
14:42
Speaker 1: no problem then turning that into a photon because the
14:45
Speaker 1: photon also has zero total charge, so you've conserved the charge.
14:49
Speaker 1: That's cool. But there's another rule, and that rule is
14:52
Speaker 1: that you have to conserve the number of electrons, Like
14:56
Speaker 1: electrons cannot just be created and destroyed willing nearly. You
15:00
Speaker 1: can't change the number of electrons in the universe. That's
15:04
Speaker 1: one of the rules. So somehow like the number of
15:07
Speaker 1: electrons in the universe has to be the same, that's right,
15:10
Speaker 1: And that seems weird because like, hold on a second,
15:12
Speaker 1: what happens when you annihilate an electron an oppositron? Aren't
15:15
Speaker 1: you destroying an electron? Yes, But the reason that works
15:18
Speaker 1: is that positrons count as negative one electrons. So in
15:22
Speaker 1: that reaction, the number of electrons is plus one from
15:25
Speaker 1: the electron minus one from the positron, so in total
15:28
Speaker 1: zero electrons, and then when you make the photon, you
15:31
Speaker 1: still have zero electrons. The problem when you try to
15:33
Speaker 1: do the muon in positron reaction is that that reaction
15:37
Speaker 1: starts out with minus one electrons from the positron and
15:40
Speaker 1: ends up with zero electrons because you just have a photon.
15:44
Speaker 1: So it violates this rule. You have to have the
15:46
Speaker 1: same number of total electron, right. But I think maybe
15:49
Speaker 1: what's probably confusing to David is that a muon is
15:52
Speaker 1: pretty much it's it's it is like an electron, right,
15:54
Speaker 1: it's like an heavier electron. So why can it count
15:56
Speaker 1: as like a plus two you know what I mean? Like,
15:59
Speaker 1: why going to be or count as as an electron
16:03
Speaker 1: just with extra energy. The answer is, we don't know.
16:05
Speaker 1: This is what we observe for some reason, there's an
16:08
Speaker 1: important difference to the universe between electrons and muans. That's
16:12
Speaker 1: basically what makes a muan a muon and not just
16:15
Speaker 1: an electron with more mass. This is the muan no
16:18
Speaker 1: of the muan because the universe doesn't just count the
16:20
Speaker 1: number of electrons, and it's a separate count for the
16:23
Speaker 1: number of muans, and the same rule applies there. You
16:26
Speaker 1: can't just create and destroy muans willy nilly. So the
16:29
Speaker 1: answer is, we don't know why this seems to be important,
16:32
Speaker 1: but we think it's a clue. You know, in particle
16:34
Speaker 1: physics all the time we're looking for things that are conserved,
16:37
Speaker 1: what are the rules of the universe follows, and then
16:39
Speaker 1: try to back that out to figure out what that
16:41
Speaker 1: means about the nature of matter. In this case, we
16:44
Speaker 1: don't yet know. M Well, I feel like you're telling
16:46
Speaker 1: me that an electron can't annihilate with an anti muon
16:50
Speaker 1: because we've never observed it. Kind of right, But have
16:53
Speaker 1: you actually like looked, You're right, we have never observed it,
16:56
Speaker 1: but we are looking very very carefully, and there are
16:58
Speaker 1: dedicated experiments look just for this. They shoot a bunch
17:02
Speaker 1: of muans and electrons, or equivalently, they look to see
17:05
Speaker 1: if muans can decay directly to electrons without producing any neutrinos.
17:10
Speaker 1: And so these are very careful, very high precision experiments,
17:13
Speaker 1: and nobody has ever seen this kind of reaction. So
17:17
Speaker 1: the azer could still be yes, that an electron could
17:20
Speaker 1: annihilate with an anti muan. Maybe that's right. The answer
17:23
Speaker 1: could be yes, it might be possible for it to happen.
17:26
Speaker 1: And in fact, there is a little wrinkle here, which
17:29
Speaker 1: is that neutrinos count in the sort of number of
17:32
Speaker 1: electrons and number of muans category. For example, an electron
17:36
Speaker 1: neutrino counts in the electron category, which is why for example,
17:40
Speaker 1: like a W can decay into an electron and a neutrino.
17:44
Speaker 1: Which really interesting is that we have seen neutrinos violate
17:47
Speaker 1: this rule. We've see neutrinos change from muon neutrinos to
17:51
Speaker 1: electron neutrinos or town neutrinos, so we know this rule
17:54
Speaker 1: is very very strong, but not a hundred percent absolute.
17:58
Speaker 1: We know neutrinos break this rule. We've never seen electrons
18:01
Speaker 1: and muons break it, but we suspect that it might
18:04
Speaker 1: be breakable. Wait, what do you mean that neutrinos break it?
18:07
Speaker 1: How do they break it? Well, we have this rule
18:08
Speaker 1: that you can't just change the number of electrons in
18:11
Speaker 1: the universe, so we can't just change the number of
18:12
Speaker 1: muans in the universe. Neutrinos count in those same categories.
18:15
Speaker 1: That's what it means to say we have three different
18:18
Speaker 1: kinds of neutrino. It's an electron neutrino, muon neutrino tow neutrino, right,
18:22
Speaker 1: And we do the same kind of accounting for neutrinos
18:24
Speaker 1: as we do for electrons and for muons, So we
18:27
Speaker 1: don't see muans decay to electrons. We don't see muans
18:30
Speaker 1: annihilate with anti electrons, but we do see neutrinos jump
18:34
Speaker 1: from generation to generation. You can have a muon neutrino
18:38
Speaker 1: which then just changes its flavor to an electron neutrino
18:42
Speaker 1: as it flies through space, which seems to break this
18:44
Speaker 1: rule that the number of electrons the number muans can't change.
18:49
Speaker 1: I guess it's confusing because you're saying the heavier neutrinos
18:51
Speaker 1: called the electron neutrino. Well, we don't know what the
18:54
Speaker 1: masses of these particles are. But there's a first generation neutrino,
18:57
Speaker 1: which is the electron neutrino, and a second generation neutrino,
19:00
Speaker 1: which is the muon neutrino, and a third generation neutrino,
19:03
Speaker 1: which is the town neutrino. We don't yet know exactly
19:05
Speaker 1: what the masses of those neutrinos are, and if they
19:07
Speaker 1: follow the rule that the first generation is lightest and
19:10
Speaker 1: the third generation is heaviest, we don't yet know. Oh,
19:13
Speaker 1: I see, But do you know that the neutrina jumps
19:15
Speaker 1: between generations, So maybe that's not a hard and fast
19:18
Speaker 1: rule for everybody exactly. In fact, that sort of proves
19:22
Speaker 1: that this rule is not like deep and fundamental to
19:24
Speaker 1: the universe like it almost is. Even neutrino oscillation is
19:27
Speaker 1: pretty rare. So it's something the universe likes to do
19:30
Speaker 1: to keep these categories and to keep these numbers in balance,
19:34
Speaker 1: but it's not absolute. The way. For example, conservation of
19:37
Speaker 1: momentum is or conservation of electric charge seems to be absolute.
19:41
Speaker 1: We've never seen any violation of conservation of electric charge.
19:44
Speaker 1: All right. Well, to get back to David's question then,
19:47
Speaker 1: is what would happen if he met a version of
19:49
Speaker 1: himself but where all the electrons are somehow made up
19:53
Speaker 1: of heavier electrons? Muans would be like a heavier version
19:56
Speaker 1: of him, but also an anti wait, an anti hea
20:00
Speaker 1: your version of him. That's a lot of caveats there.
20:03
Speaker 1: So it's like, you can make atoms out of anti particles, right,
20:08
Speaker 1: and you can also maybe make them out of the
20:10
Speaker 1: heavier particles. So what would happen if you met an
20:12
Speaker 1: anti heavier version of you? It's a super awesome question,
20:17
Speaker 1: and I love that you thought about this. My first
20:19
Speaker 1: concern though, if we're being like hyper realistic about this,
20:22
Speaker 1: is that second generation matter like Muan's is not stable.
20:26
Speaker 1: An electron can last forever, can orbit the nucleus and
20:29
Speaker 1: be here for billions of years, but a muan is heavy,
20:32
Speaker 1: and heavy particles like the decay. So a muan will
20:34
Speaker 1: decay into a new trino and a w which then
20:36
Speaker 1: turns into an electron and another neutrino, and so neutrinos
20:39
Speaker 1: only last for micro seconds. So the muonic version of
20:43
Speaker 1: you is going to very quickly decay to the electronic
20:46
Speaker 1: version of you plus a bunch of Innerget do you
20:49
Speaker 1: get to say hi really quick? Okay? So let's imagine
20:52
Speaker 1: that you say hi super quick, you high five the
20:55
Speaker 1: anti muon version of you in a fraction of a second. Uh,
20:58
Speaker 1: it's not going to be the typical annially aation you
21:00
Speaker 1: expect from like high fiving the antimatter version of you
21:03
Speaker 1: is just like hitting another kind of matter, except that
21:06
Speaker 1: the anti muon version of you does also have the
21:10
Speaker 1: opposite electric charge. Now, when you and I high five,
21:14
Speaker 1: are hands bounce off each other because the atoms repel
21:17
Speaker 1: each other, And part of that is because we both
21:21
Speaker 1: have electrons with negative electric charge, and electrons repel other electrons.
21:26
Speaker 1: But if the anti atoms have negative nuclei and positive
21:31
Speaker 1: mulans in their outer orbits, would they stick to would
21:35
Speaker 1: they attract the negative electrons in our hands? Honestly, I'm
21:39
Speaker 1: not sure, but I doubt it. The whole atom is
21:43
Speaker 1: overall electrically neutral, and so if it's not the negative
21:47
Speaker 1: electron repelling them, then it's going to be the negative
21:49
Speaker 1: nucleus that can also repel. So basically nothing would happen.
21:53
Speaker 1: You would hi high five your anti heavier version of you. Yeah,
21:57
Speaker 1: I think the anti MU and you could successfully high
21:59
Speaker 1: five view in the brief microseconds that they exist. Well, again,
22:04
Speaker 1: that's maybe right, Like, it's possible they could an island.
22:07
Speaker 1: You haven't observed that, right, That's right, it's possible they
22:09
Speaker 1: could annihilate. But if they do, it would be at
22:11
Speaker 1: a very low level. You know, like one in ten
22:14
Speaker 1: of the forty anti mues might annihilate with your electrons,
22:17
Speaker 1: So that's pretty small. But a tiny fraction of you
22:20
Speaker 1: might go up and smoke. Well, no, a tiny fraction
22:23
Speaker 1: of the anti MU and stuff would annihiliate. But maybe
22:26
Speaker 1: all of you would annihilated, right, because you're in the minority.
22:29
Speaker 1: How are you in the minority? Is and there one
22:30
Speaker 1: of you and one anti mw on you. Well, the
22:32
Speaker 1: anti mew on you version is much heavier, that's true,
22:36
Speaker 1: But that doesn't matter. It's still it's a particle to
22:38
Speaker 1: particle annihilation. It's heavier particles and lighter particles can come
22:42
Speaker 1: together and annihilate. All right, So um, some fracing of
22:47
Speaker 1: you would might annihilate. Maybe in either case, maybe just
22:50
Speaker 1: don't try it. That would be the safest thing asked
22:53
Speaker 1: this person. How did you end up being so muonic?
22:56
Speaker 1: That would be a fascinating question to answer. Well, you
22:59
Speaker 1: only have a freak in of a second to ask them, Daniel,
23:02
Speaker 1: are you gonna waste the tie fiving your anti muon
23:04
Speaker 1: self or asking them boring physics questions? Maybe we should
23:07
Speaker 1: ask them the difference between smashing stuff and blowing stuff up. Well,
23:10
Speaker 1: they would probably just take the anti position. It would
23:13
Speaker 1: be fruitless discussion. Alright, Well, I think that answers david question,
23:18
Speaker 1: and so let's get into our two other awesome questions
23:21
Speaker 1: about annihilation. But first let's take a quick break. All right,
23:37
Speaker 1: we are answering listener questions here. Today we answered a
23:40
Speaker 1: great one about anti muans and meeting your anti muan self.
23:44
Speaker 1: Now we have a question here from Bob who has
23:46
Speaker 1: a kind of a personal question for Daniel. Hi, Daniel,
23:49
Speaker 1: my name is Bob. I'm a longtime fan of your podcast.
23:53
Speaker 1: On occasion, you interview other scientists about their work, but
23:56
Speaker 1: I and other fans were in the dark about your research.
24:00
Speaker 1: Would you consider doing a podcast to talk about your
24:02
Speaker 1: major research. You could be the guest speaker in horror
24:05
Speaker 1: could interview. I could try to read your research, but
24:09
Speaker 1: for sure that's a lost cause for us listeners. You
24:12
Speaker 1: could bring your ideas and findings to a layman's level,
24:15
Speaker 1: like you always do. I think that would be informative
24:17
Speaker 1: and a lot of fun, and I hope you think
24:19
Speaker 1: so too. All Right, you got some fans out there, Daniel.
24:23
Speaker 1: At least somebody's trying to read my papers, even if
24:27
Speaker 1: they can't. Will you write a lot of papers, right,
24:29
Speaker 1: like ten or twenty a year or something? Yeah, it
24:31
Speaker 1: varies a little bit, but my research group and I
24:33
Speaker 1: we put out like ten or twenty papers every year. Yeah, yeah,
24:36
Speaker 1: to be hard to keep up. I guess it's a
24:38
Speaker 1: lot of fun. I have a group of like eight
24:40
Speaker 1: grad students and a few post docs and some undergrad researchers,
24:43
Speaker 1: and to collaborate with lots of really fun and smart
24:46
Speaker 1: people around the world. So I have a good time
24:48
Speaker 1: thinking about these questions about the universe and how to
24:50
Speaker 1: use clever techniques to try to make crazy discoveries or
24:54
Speaker 1: use artificial intelligence to try to help us sort through
24:57
Speaker 1: these crazy data that we collect. Well, break it down
25:00
Speaker 1: for us, I guess, Daniel, because I know you'd do
25:02
Speaker 1: some machine learning, and you also do some dark matter
25:05
Speaker 1: stuff and also some particle physics stuff. Maybe UM step
25:09
Speaker 1: us through from the beginning, like what did you do
25:11
Speaker 1: for your thesis? That's an interesting question. When I was
25:13
Speaker 1: a grad student in the late nineties, the most exciting
25:16
Speaker 1: thing in particle physics was the top cork because we
25:19
Speaker 1: had just discovered it. We'd seen the top cork after
25:23
Speaker 1: twenty years of looking for it. Remember, they had built
25:26
Speaker 1: like two different accelerators specifically aimed as finding the top cork,
25:30
Speaker 1: neither of which found it because it was so much
25:32
Speaker 1: heavier than they expected. So it's finally discovered at Firmy
25:35
Speaker 1: Lab in ninety. So when I started particle physics a
25:39
Speaker 1: few years later, the name of the game was understand
25:41
Speaker 1: this particle, measure its properties, and see is it the
25:44
Speaker 1: top cork that we expected or is it something new
25:47
Speaker 1: and weird. So for my PhD, I looked at some
25:50
Speaker 1: particular decays of the top cork when it turns into
25:53
Speaker 1: lighter particles and tried to understand if it was looking
25:56
Speaker 1: the way that we expected it to look. So you're
25:58
Speaker 1: getting your degree atly, but you were working in Chicago. Yeah,
26:02
Speaker 1: in particle physics. You're a nomad. You just follow the
26:04
Speaker 1: biggest accelerated around. So I spent two years taking classes
26:08
Speaker 1: at Berkeley, and then I shipped out to Chicago to
26:10
Speaker 1: do my research at the accelerator and the top cork.
26:13
Speaker 1: How do you make a top cork? Yes, smashed two
26:16
Speaker 1: protons together and they blow up, you know. At the tabotron,
26:19
Speaker 1: we smashed protons and anti protons together and they come
26:23
Speaker 1: together with a lot of energy, and sometimes they annihilate
26:26
Speaker 1: into gluons. And then those gluons can make a pair
26:29
Speaker 1: of top corks, a top cork and an anti top cork.
26:33
Speaker 1: And then just so you measured like the remains of
26:35
Speaker 1: the annihilation, and then what did I tell you about
26:38
Speaker 1: the top cork? So we measured how often the top
26:40
Speaker 1: cork was made, and then we calculated how often did
26:43
Speaker 1: we expect it to be made, like how likely is
26:45
Speaker 1: that process to happen? How often do you expect to
26:48
Speaker 1: get top quarks? And what we found is that it's
26:51
Speaker 1: made exactly the level that we expected, which is why
26:54
Speaker 1: I didn't win a Nobel prize for my people. It
26:58
Speaker 1: wasn't the top cork, the one that people that it
27:00
Speaker 1: was like heavier than people expected or something or not
27:03
Speaker 1: as heavy as people expected. Were you part of that
27:05
Speaker 1: or was that before you? That was just before my time.
27:08
Speaker 1: The theorists predicted that the top cork would be like
27:10
Speaker 1: about as heavy as the bottom cork, which is like
27:13
Speaker 1: five protons in weight. So they built a collider in
27:15
Speaker 1: Japan just to look for that and didn't see it.
27:18
Speaker 1: So then they thought maybe they would discover it at CERN,
27:21
Speaker 1: and they didn't see it there. So finally the tabatron
27:24
Speaker 1: in Fermulab they did see it, and it came out
27:26
Speaker 1: to be about a hundred and seventy five times the
27:29
Speaker 1: mass the proton. So the theorists were way off in
27:32
Speaker 1: their initial predictions. And so the advice there, the lesson
27:35
Speaker 1: learned is don't listen to the theorists. Just go out
27:38
Speaker 1: there and look for stuff and you'll find surprises, right right. Well,
27:42
Speaker 1: but you went looking for stuff and and just kind
27:44
Speaker 1: of confirm what they had found before. Was that enough
27:46
Speaker 1: for a thesis or did you have to come up
27:48
Speaker 1: with something like a new idea. It's a great question
27:50
Speaker 1: you ask, and it really goes to the heart of
27:52
Speaker 1: something of a conflict within particle physics. A lot of
27:55
Speaker 1: folks who are doing research these days are answering questions
27:59
Speaker 1: posed by theory risks. Theorist say, I think the top
28:02
Speaker 1: cork would be produced at this level, go and check,
28:04
Speaker 1: and then experimentalists go and check. And you might ask,
28:07
Speaker 1: is that enough for a thesis? Well, you know, it's
28:09
Speaker 1: a lot of work to get an accelerator to run,
28:11
Speaker 1: and to build a detector to capture these collisions, and
28:14
Speaker 1: to make that detector work and calibrate it and analyze
28:16
Speaker 1: the data and do all the statistics. It's definitely a
28:19
Speaker 1: thesis level work. But I think that there's something else
28:21
Speaker 1: that experimentalists could do, which is not just look for
28:24
Speaker 1: the things that the theorists predict, but go out and
28:27
Speaker 1: see if there's something else out there that they didn't predict.
28:30
Speaker 1: Actually be explores the sort of a pendulum in the
28:33
Speaker 1: field which swings between the theory leading the field and
28:35
Speaker 1: the experiments leading the field. And right now, I think
28:37
Speaker 1: the theory is leading the field because they have big
28:40
Speaker 1: ideas about what we should look for, and I'd like
28:42
Speaker 1: the experiments to lead the field a little bit more.
28:44
Speaker 1: I'd like us to be sort of exploration driven. Well,
28:47
Speaker 1: I guess it's kind of hard though, write, because in
28:49
Speaker 1: particle physics, I mean, there's so much stuff that comes
28:51
Speaker 1: out of these collisions. You sort of need a theoretical
28:54
Speaker 1: basis just to kind of make sense ort to find
28:56
Speaker 1: things in these and all that data, right, Like you
29:00
Speaker 1: have to look for deviations. You can just look for
29:01
Speaker 1: like random things. That's right, because there's so much data.
29:05
Speaker 1: If you just look for something weird, you're guaranteed to
29:07
Speaker 1: find it. And so you do have to be a
29:09
Speaker 1: little bit careful about how you phrase the question. And
29:12
Speaker 1: so you can't just look for like is there something strange?
29:15
Speaker 1: You have to think about what kind of strange thing
29:17
Speaker 1: could we discover, you know, and you have to put
29:20
Speaker 1: a little bit of a box around the kind of
29:21
Speaker 1: things that you're looking for. And the useful analogy is like,
29:24
Speaker 1: say you land on an alien planet and you're looking
29:27
Speaker 1: for life. What kind of things are you going to
29:28
Speaker 1: look for? Are you only going to look for cats
29:30
Speaker 1: and dogs and roses? You're pretty sure not going to
29:33
Speaker 1: find that. So you've got to broaden it a little
29:35
Speaker 1: bit and think about, well, what kinds of life am
29:38
Speaker 1: I looking for? What are the essential signatures that I'm
29:41
Speaker 1: searching for? And so in the particle physics context. What
29:44
Speaker 1: my group is trying to do is think about what
29:46
Speaker 1: are the kinds of discoveries that we could make that
29:49
Speaker 1: maybe wouldn't be anticipated, and what are the things that
29:52
Speaker 1: we're not looking for that but that we could discover
29:55
Speaker 1: and would pretty clearly be a new particle. That was
29:58
Speaker 1: the question we asked about ten years ago when we
30:00
Speaker 1: started working on this project. So I guess you did
30:03
Speaker 1: that for your thesis. Do you remember the title of
30:05
Speaker 1: your thesis. The title of my thesis was something really
30:07
Speaker 1: boring like measurement of the production of the top cork
30:10
Speaker 1: in the EMU channel or something like that. He sounds excited. Well,
30:17
Speaker 1: I'm sure it was awesome, um and would make great reading.
30:20
Speaker 1: And you did a post dog, and did you also
30:22
Speaker 1: work on that for your post doc? For my post doc,
30:24
Speaker 1: I doubled down on that exactly, and I measured the
30:26
Speaker 1: mass of the top cork using a fancy new statistical technique,
30:30
Speaker 1: and we've got the most precise measurement of the top
30:32
Speaker 1: cork mass in that kind of data that anybody had
30:35
Speaker 1: ever had before, which is a lot of fun. And
30:38
Speaker 1: you know, as a post doc you have to sort
30:39
Speaker 1: of like take one swing and hit a home run.
30:43
Speaker 1: You have like three years to demonstrate that you're a
30:45
Speaker 1: good young scientist with smart ideas and you can turn
30:48
Speaker 1: those ideas and your energy into science. So you can't
30:52
Speaker 1: take like a risk that's going to take ten years
30:54
Speaker 1: to develop. You have to do something that you know
30:56
Speaker 1: how to do and they will immediately pay benefits so
30:58
Speaker 1: you can get the faculty job right right, which you did?
31:01
Speaker 1: You went to UC Irvine And then did you switch
31:04
Speaker 1: focus that? Did you sort of continue detract, because then
31:06
Speaker 1: that's when you join the LHC. Right you switch from
31:09
Speaker 1: Fermi Lab to the LHC and they were doing other things.
31:12
Speaker 1: Did you also have to switch from the top cork
31:14
Speaker 1: to other things? I did. I moved away from the
31:16
Speaker 1: top cork because I wanted to not just study the
31:19
Speaker 1: things that the theories were predicting. I wanted to go
31:22
Speaker 1: out there and find new stuff that wasn't being looked for.
31:25
Speaker 1: I figured that was the exciting thing about the large
31:27
Speaker 1: hage On collider. You had new high energy collisions that
31:30
Speaker 1: nobody had ever seen before, and so when you turn
31:33
Speaker 1: that thing on, all sorts of crazy stuff could come out,
31:35
Speaker 1: and it could be what the theories predicted. But I
31:38
Speaker 1: felt like more likely the discoveries would be something that
31:41
Speaker 1: they hadn't even thought of, something crazy, something unanticipated. And
31:45
Speaker 1: that was my scientific fantasies to discover something weird and
31:48
Speaker 1: new that made everybody go, huh, that can't be right,
31:52
Speaker 1: mm hmmm. And so maybe talk to me about this
31:54
Speaker 1: idea about like, how do you look for things that
31:57
Speaker 1: you don't know are there? Because you know there's some
32:00
Speaker 1: data coming out and so many different kinds of explosions,
32:02
Speaker 1: you sort of need to know what you're looking for
32:05
Speaker 1: so that you can look for deviations. That's kind of
32:08
Speaker 1: how particle physics usually works. How do you even look
32:10
Speaker 1: for things that you don't know are there? You're right,
32:12
Speaker 1: you need to know what to look for, but our
32:13
Speaker 1: idea was that you only need to know sort of
32:15
Speaker 1: the category of things to look for, and the kind
32:18
Speaker 1: of things you should look for are the kind of
32:19
Speaker 1: things that you're good at seeing. And so the large
32:22
Speaker 1: hadron collider is really good at seeing heavy particles that
32:26
Speaker 1: then decay into lighter particles. For example, the top cork
32:29
Speaker 1: is a heavy particle and it decays into electrons and
32:32
Speaker 1: muans and corks, all of which we can see and
32:34
Speaker 1: when we measure those particles and put them together, we
32:37
Speaker 1: can see, oh, there was a heavy particle that was made.
32:39
Speaker 1: It shows up as like a spike in your data.
32:41
Speaker 1: So all you need to do then is look for
32:44
Speaker 1: heavy particles decaying into lighter particles in ways you didn't expect.
32:48
Speaker 1: There are some people out there who predicted heavy particles
32:51
Speaker 1: decaying into pairs of electrons or pairs of muans, for example,
32:55
Speaker 1: and people are looking for those, and those are good ideas,
32:57
Speaker 1: But I thought, what about heavy particles decaying you two
33:00
Speaker 1: weird pairs of objects? Like what about a heavy particle
33:03
Speaker 1: decaying into a Higgs and an electron or something weird
33:07
Speaker 1: like that. Why aren't we looking for those things? Because
33:10
Speaker 1: we'd be good at finding them, and if we looked
33:12
Speaker 1: in our data, they would be pretty obvious. Right, But
33:14
Speaker 1: you still need some theory behind them, right, Like you
33:16
Speaker 1: have to have a theory that says how often you
33:19
Speaker 1: should expect to see those kinds of weird things, or
33:21
Speaker 1: what are you thinking about, like totally unexpected, not even
33:24
Speaker 1: in the theory things. I was thinking, totally unexpected, not
33:28
Speaker 1: even theoretically anticipated. Actually took this idea to a theorist
33:31
Speaker 1: at you see Santa Barbara, and I said, what do
33:33
Speaker 1: you think about looking for these and he said, it's impossible.
33:36
Speaker 1: You will never find these things. I have three reasons
33:39
Speaker 1: why quantum Mechanically, it's impossible for that particle to ever
33:42
Speaker 1: be made. And I thought, well, that's cool, because then
33:45
Speaker 1: I could discover it. I'm gonna also blow up quantum gas.
33:52
Speaker 1: That's kind of that's kind of risky, Daniel, though, isn't it.
33:54
Speaker 1: It's like I think unicorns exist. I'm going to spend
33:57
Speaker 1: the rest of my life looking for unicorns, even though
33:59
Speaker 1: people tell you some possible and then you might not
34:02
Speaker 1: find it. Yeah, but you want to take a little
34:03
Speaker 1: bit of risk with your science career. And one thing
34:06
Speaker 1: that motivates me is that we know so little about
34:07
Speaker 1: the universe. We know there are big surprises out there,
34:10
Speaker 1: and we're scratching our heads about how the universe works.
34:13
Speaker 1: It's going to take somebody thinking outside the box to
34:15
Speaker 1: stumble into something new and interesting. And you know, I
34:18
Speaker 1: saw that same theorist a week later at a different
34:21
Speaker 1: conference and he said, you know, I was thinking about
34:23
Speaker 1: that idea of yours, and actually I now have five
34:25
Speaker 1: different theories that could all predict that particle, so you
34:28
Speaker 1: should go ahead and look for it. And the lesson
34:30
Speaker 1: I took from that is the reason nobody's predicting these
34:33
Speaker 1: weird particles is not because they don't think they exist.
34:36
Speaker 1: It's because they just haven't bothered to think about them.
34:39
Speaker 1: Because you know, the theory community, they're all very smart,
34:41
Speaker 1: but they tend to sort of follow a certain mainstream
34:43
Speaker 1: and all sort of think in the same direction. And
34:46
Speaker 1: so I think that experimentalists have this job, this opportunity
34:50
Speaker 1: to think outside the box and you know, be open
34:52
Speaker 1: to the universe's surprises by looking for stuff that maybe
34:55
Speaker 1: other people think is weird. So that's something you're doing
34:59
Speaker 1: right now. It's looking for the is unicorns? Yeah, absolutely, yeah,
35:02
Speaker 1: we are looking for unicorns. My plan for the next
35:04
Speaker 1: twenty years is to one by one look for these things,
35:07
Speaker 1: because then either you'll find them and you say, wow,
35:09
Speaker 1: look I found this thing nobody expected decaying into this
35:11
Speaker 1: weird pair of particles, or at least you'll rule them
35:14
Speaker 1: out and you can say conclusively, like there are no
35:17
Speaker 1: weird resonances produced at the LHC. Even that negative statement
35:21
Speaker 1: is some knowledge about the universe. Well, well, I hope
35:25
Speaker 1: you find that unicorn. Uh. And also one thing that's
35:29
Speaker 1: interesting about your research is you use machine learning or AI. Yeah,
35:32
Speaker 1: my background actually is in physics and computer science as
35:35
Speaker 1: an undergrad really interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence.
35:39
Speaker 1: My brother is a professor of artificial intelligence, so it's
35:42
Speaker 1: something I've really been interested for a long time. And
35:44
Speaker 1: we have a lot of data that's produced by our colliders.
35:46
Speaker 1: It's like head of bytes of data every day, and
35:49
Speaker 1: every collision we get like hundreds of millions of pieces
35:53
Speaker 1: of information. And the way you can tell the difference
35:55
Speaker 1: between like, oh, this was a unicorn or was not
35:57
Speaker 1: a unicorn is sometimes very subtle core relations between those measurements.
36:02
Speaker 1: And artificial intelligence is very good at handling very high
36:06
Speaker 1: dimensional data and summarizing for you, boiling down the crucial information,
36:10
Speaker 1: helping you make decisions right. It's also good at making
36:13
Speaker 1: fake tom cruizes for TikTok videos, which is which bullows
36:17
Speaker 1: my mind. But you're saying you can actually use AI
36:20
Speaker 1: to kind of replace physicists almost to analyze the data
36:24
Speaker 1: from coliders. Almost ten years ago now, I went over
36:26
Speaker 1: to the computer science department here at UC Irvine and
36:29
Speaker 1: I said, our networks are kind of dumb. We were
36:32
Speaker 1: using neural networks already, but they weren't very smart. We
36:35
Speaker 1: found that if you gave the same problem to a physicist,
36:37
Speaker 1: they could usually do better at finding new particles or
36:41
Speaker 1: understanding what was going on, and so they took on
36:43
Speaker 1: the challenge and they said, well, your networks just aren't
36:45
Speaker 1: deep enough. And at the time, there was this revolution
36:48
Speaker 1: in neural networks people have probably heard about called deep learning,
36:51
Speaker 1: where basically you just make your networks have more layers
36:54
Speaker 1: so they can learn more complex functions. And they had
36:57
Speaker 1: deeper networks, and their networks were actually smarter than our physicists,
37:00
Speaker 1: so they did a better job than we were doing
37:03
Speaker 1: at pulling this information out of our data. And that
37:06
Speaker 1: was kind of a big breakthrough in particle physics. People
37:08
Speaker 1: realized that we should be using deep learning because these
37:11
Speaker 1: colliders are expensive. It caused billions of dollars to collect
37:14
Speaker 1: this data, so we might as well get as much
37:16
Speaker 1: as we can out of it. Well, you actually feed
37:18
Speaker 1: it like the raw data from the collider, or the
37:20
Speaker 1: post filtered data, or just just like the numbers that
37:24
Speaker 1: a physicists would look at. So these networks can't handle
37:27
Speaker 1: like the actual ocean of raw data, like drinking straight
37:30
Speaker 1: from the fire hose. But what we were able to
37:32
Speaker 1: do was give them sort of more raw data than
37:35
Speaker 1: the physicists usually take, like at a lower level, higher
37:38
Speaker 1: dimensionality than physicists usually analyze, and they were able to
37:42
Speaker 1: reverse engineer a lot of the quantities the physicists used
37:45
Speaker 1: to analyze these things. What do you mean, like can
37:48
Speaker 1: detect the Higgs boson from the data for for the
37:50
Speaker 1: Higgs boson discovery without saying, hey, here's the calculation you
37:53
Speaker 1: should do on these photons. You just sort of give
37:56
Speaker 1: it all the information from the event and it figures out.
37:58
Speaker 1: It learned how to scriminate between higgs bosons and non
38:02
Speaker 1: higgs bosons, and if you peer inside a little bit,
38:04
Speaker 1: you can sort of tell what it's doing. And it's
38:06
Speaker 1: found a lot of the same kinds of calculations that
38:09
Speaker 1: physicists do when they think about these problems, right right,
38:12
Speaker 1: And the advantages. It doesn't drink as much coffee as
38:14
Speaker 1: a post and it works all night. You can enslave
38:20
Speaker 1: it until enslaves you then. But one of the challenges,
38:23
Speaker 1: of course, is understanding what it's doing. There's lots of
38:27
Speaker 1: examples of neural networks being trained to solve the problem,
38:29
Speaker 1: and then it turns out it's solving it not exactly
38:32
Speaker 1: in the way you expected. You may have heard about
38:34
Speaker 1: this case when they trained a neural network to tell
38:37
Speaker 1: the difference between wolves and dogs from pictures, and they
38:40
Speaker 1: did really, really well. But then they discovered that what
38:43
Speaker 1: it was actually learning was that the pictures of wolves
38:45
Speaker 1: had snow in the background and the pictures of dogs
38:47
Speaker 1: had grass in the background. So if there was snow
38:49
Speaker 1: in the background, they called it a wolf. And that's
38:51
Speaker 1: not exactly very interesting, right there, doesn't tell you anything
38:54
Speaker 1: about the difference between dogs and wolves. So we're trying
38:57
Speaker 1: to understand what our networks are doing to make sure
39:00
Speaker 1: that what it's learning is really physics, is not just
39:03
Speaker 1: some nonsense about the data, like whether it was snowing
39:05
Speaker 1: that day. All right, pretty interesting. It sounds like you're
39:08
Speaker 1: gonna put out a lot of physicists who don't yet
39:11
Speaker 1: have tenure out of a job. Maybe I collaborate with
39:14
Speaker 1: a lot of young physicists. They're great folks, lots of
39:17
Speaker 1: really fun ideas, and I have a good time. He
39:20
Speaker 1: totally just avoided that comment. Al Right, Well, hopefully that
39:25
Speaker 1: explains what you do for your your research, Canuel, and
39:27
Speaker 1: I guess if people want to find out more, do
39:29
Speaker 1: you have anything like do you write this up anywhere
39:32
Speaker 1: and then a more accessible way or is it all
39:34
Speaker 1: just scientific papers? I guess One thing I find is
39:36
Speaker 1: you can usually read the introduction to papers, and that
39:39
Speaker 1: usually get and the conclusion, and that gives you a
39:41
Speaker 1: pretty decent overview of things. But the having to get
39:43
Speaker 1: into the nitty gritty is that how you read papers?
39:46
Speaker 1: For hey, are we now learning you never actually read papers,
39:49
Speaker 1: You just read the abstracts. It depends, right, Like, if
39:54
Speaker 1: I just need to know what's going on, I'm not
39:56
Speaker 1: gonna read all the details. I'm taking that as a yes. No,
39:59
Speaker 1: I haven't written anything acessible at this level about my research.
40:01
Speaker 1: It's mostly heavy duty science writing and then this kind
40:04
Speaker 1: of accessible writing, but I haven't really bridged that gap. Well,
40:07
Speaker 1: as as you said earlier, you have office hours and
40:10
Speaker 1: you can actually talk to Daniel in our discord channel,
40:13
Speaker 1: so um go ask him questions if you want to
40:16
Speaker 1: know the difference between a wolf and talk. I guess, well,
40:19
Speaker 1: thanks Bob for asking about my research. I appreciate it.
40:21
Speaker 1: All right, let's get to our last question here, and
40:23
Speaker 1: this one is a it's a doozy. It's about aliens
40:25
Speaker 1: and multidimensional weapons. So let's get into that. But first
40:29
Speaker 1: let's take another quick break. All right. We are answering
40:45
Speaker 1: listener questions here, and they all seem to have a
40:47
Speaker 1: theme of annihilation, like blowing things up or blowing Daniel's
40:51
Speaker 1: career up. I guess, yeah, how did you? Why did
40:54
Speaker 1: you love the one about you? In this annihilation theme?
40:57
Speaker 1: Because that is my job. I'm annihilating per Dawns all
41:00
Speaker 1: the time. All I see, you're not annihilating young researchers
41:05
Speaker 1: career by inventing AI that does the job now, facilitating
41:10
Speaker 1: their careers, right, giving them any tools to do the
41:13
Speaker 1: job better, giving them more naptime. Right. Well, we have
41:17
Speaker 1: one more question here for today, and this one is
41:19
Speaker 1: pretty interesting and it comes from Chris from Chicago. Hi,
41:23
Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge, thanks for taking my question. It concerns
41:26
Speaker 1: a scenario in the book Death's End, which is the
41:30
Speaker 1: final book and the Three Body Problem trilogy. In this book,
41:33
Speaker 1: it's noted that supremely advanced civilizations used dimensional weapons against
41:38
Speaker 1: potential threats in the universe to eradicate them meaning that
41:41
Speaker 1: in the beginning of the universe, it started out as
41:43
Speaker 1: an eleven dimensional universe, but over time, civilizations that were
41:47
Speaker 1: able to make themselves into lower and lower dimensional beings
41:50
Speaker 1: used a weapon to drop a dimensional bomb on a
41:53
Speaker 1: particular part of space to effectively end their existence. It
41:56
Speaker 1: would be akin to someone setting off a two dimensional
41:59
Speaker 1: bomb in our aero space and then from the point
42:02
Speaker 1: of the explosion, three D space collapsed into two D
42:05
Speaker 1: space infinitely from the point of origin. So my question is,
42:10
Speaker 1: couldn't advanced civilization as described in this scenario use a
42:14
Speaker 1: weapon that sets off a quote unquote lower dimensional bomb
42:17
Speaker 1: to collapse dimensional space time to the next lowest dimension.
42:22
Speaker 1: Thanks for making science accessible and helping me and my
42:24
Speaker 1: kids understand and explore the universe. Cool. Thank you, Chris.
42:28
Speaker 1: Great question, and it's awesome he listens with the kids. Yeah, exactly.
42:32
Speaker 1: I wonder if he reads books called The Death's End
42:34
Speaker 1: with his kids. Also, Uh, that's then it's actually a
42:39
Speaker 1: positive thing, isn't it. M Yeah, I suppose the end
42:43
Speaker 1: of death life's the beginning. There's lots of alien invasion
42:47
Speaker 1: and catastrophe for humanity in this book, though, M. Well,
42:51
Speaker 1: you just described most Marvel movies. Um so, and people
42:54
Speaker 1: let their kids watch that all the time. So it
42:58
Speaker 1: sounds like we've moved past that point to you. Welcome
43:00
Speaker 1: to the parenting podcast. You do not listen to parenting
43:05
Speaker 1: advice from a cartoonis center physicist. But anyway, so his question,
43:09
Speaker 1: I guess is there that there's a scenario in this book,
43:13
Speaker 1: in the third book of this famous and best selling
43:16
Speaker 1: trilogy of science fiction books. And what's the trilogy called.
43:19
Speaker 1: The first book in this series is called The Three
43:21
Speaker 1: Body Problem. I think it's called like the Three Body Trilogy, right,
43:24
Speaker 1: or that's what they called it. You're right. The whole
43:26
Speaker 1: series is sort of called the Three Body Problem trilogy.
43:29
Speaker 1: This is three books, The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest,
43:32
Speaker 1: and then Death's End and Death's End is the last one. Wow,
43:35
Speaker 1: cheery titles. Yeah, so they're super best sellers, and they
43:39
Speaker 1: were translated into English by Ken Lu who is also
43:41
Speaker 1: an excellent award winning science fiction writer and hugely popular.
43:45
Speaker 1: I've heard them described as Chinese star Wars. WHOA, I
43:51
Speaker 1: don't know if that's a good and where this crib
43:53
Speaker 1: things are not well in the sense of, like, you know,
43:55
Speaker 1: the cultural impact. I think I mean if you wrote
43:58
Speaker 1: something and they described it as the new Star Wars,
44:00
Speaker 1: I think you'd be pretty happy about that. Interesting. Well,
44:03
Speaker 1: so in this I guess in the third chapter of
44:06
Speaker 1: the of this trilogy, at death end, there's something that
44:09
Speaker 1: happens with aliens, like they try to kill us, I guess.
44:13
Speaker 1: So the first book sets this up because we discover
44:15
Speaker 1: distant aliens that live around this world that has multiple suns,
44:19
Speaker 1: and that's why it's called the three body problem. And
44:21
Speaker 1: then the next two books are all about how you
44:23
Speaker 1: deal with aliens and aliens attacking. And we actually did
44:26
Speaker 1: an episode recently about this idea of the Dark Forest
44:29
Speaker 1: that maybe the universe is filled with dangerous civilizations and
44:32
Speaker 1: it's not a good idea to get in touch with
44:33
Speaker 1: folks because then they'll try to come and kill you.
44:35
Speaker 1: So Death's end is the fly max and that's when
44:37
Speaker 1: like the aliens come and they invade in. Our solar
44:40
Speaker 1: system is attacked, and then that's where the lightsabers come in.
44:43
Speaker 1: Or these are Chinese lightsabers. So I don't know how
44:47
Speaker 1: that translates. Fireworks. Maybe their fireworks, that's right, yes, they're
44:52
Speaker 1: light fireworks. But then somehow the concept here is about multidimensionality.
44:58
Speaker 1: So you mentioned in this question that in this universe
45:01
Speaker 1: of the book, I guess we know that the universe
45:03
Speaker 1: started with more dimensions and slowly they've been collapsing or
45:06
Speaker 1: what the idea in this book is that they have
45:08
Speaker 1: some weapon which can collapse space from a certain number
45:11
Speaker 1: of dimensions to one fewer. So you take space that's
45:14
Speaker 1: three dimensional like our space, and you collapse it to
45:17
Speaker 1: two dimensions. So things that have to live like on
45:19
Speaker 1: a surface instead of living in a volume. And the
45:22
Speaker 1: idea in the book would be that this would be
45:24
Speaker 1: an effective weapon because you're smashing anything that used to
45:27
Speaker 1: be in three D. You're smashing it now down to
45:29
Speaker 1: two D, which makes it pretty hard to survive. And
45:31
Speaker 1: so in the long arc of the history in this book,
45:33
Speaker 1: the universe started out like ten dimensional and there were
45:37
Speaker 1: these beings that were fighting each other, and one way
45:39
Speaker 1: they would fight is that they would make themselves nine
45:42
Speaker 1: dimensional and then would collapse the universe from ten dimensions
45:45
Speaker 1: down to nine before their enemies could adapt, then crushing
45:48
Speaker 1: their enemies. Wow, that sounds like the most complicated way
45:52
Speaker 1: to to way to war here. But I guess maybe
45:56
Speaker 1: a step us through a little bit what a dimension is.
45:59
Speaker 1: I guess a lot of as we talked about in
46:01
Speaker 1: our books, a lot of people when we think of
46:02
Speaker 1: dimension is like another realm or like a doorway into
46:05
Speaker 1: something else. But really physicists just think of it as
46:08
Speaker 1: another way to move. Yeah, dimension has been co opted
46:11
Speaker 1: to mean like a parallel universe or another realm or
46:14
Speaker 1: something like that. It's not another place, it's an aspect
46:17
Speaker 1: of our universe. You say, it's a way that we
46:20
Speaker 1: can move. So, our space, we think, has three spatial dimensions,
46:24
Speaker 1: which means you can move in three different directions like up, down, forward, backward,
46:29
Speaker 1: and left and right. Those are three different dimensions. And
46:32
Speaker 1: if space was four dimensional, there would be like another
46:35
Speaker 1: direction that was perpendicular to all three of those, right,
46:39
Speaker 1: it didn't overlap. That was like a unique way that
46:42
Speaker 1: you could move. Our space, we think, is three dimensional.
46:45
Speaker 1: Plus then there's the one dimension of time, which people
46:48
Speaker 1: sometimes fold together into space time. But that's what a
46:51
Speaker 1: dimension is, right, And actually string theory things that there
46:54
Speaker 1: are maybe dozens or if not hundreds of dimensions that
46:58
Speaker 1: but they're just so small we can yell them or
47:00
Speaker 1: see them. Yeah, lots of theories of physics make more
47:03
Speaker 1: sense if space has additional dimensions more than the three
47:07
Speaker 1: that we can see. And some string theories like eleven dimensions,
47:10
Speaker 1: some twenty six their arbitrary number dimensions in other theories,
47:14
Speaker 1: they're all there because the math makes more sense in
47:17
Speaker 1: those dimensions, not because we have any evidence in our
47:20
Speaker 1: universe that those dimensions exist, but just as you're putting
47:23
Speaker 1: the theory together, it works better if space has more dimensions. Right,
47:27
Speaker 1: So then um, in this book, UM, I guess there
47:31
Speaker 1: are many, or there were many other dimensions, but they're
47:34
Speaker 1: not small. I guess they're assuming that in these other
47:36
Speaker 1: dimensions in the book they weren't like smaller little loops.
47:39
Speaker 1: There were like actual other directions you can move around
47:42
Speaker 1: in and grow in. D N. You know, when theories
47:44
Speaker 1: develop ideas about our universe, they have to try to
47:47
Speaker 1: match our experience. And so if they're going to have
47:49
Speaker 1: a theory with eleven dimensions, they can't make those other
47:52
Speaker 1: dimensions the same as our dimensions. That have to be
47:54
Speaker 1: weird or different. So as you say, maybe our kind
47:57
Speaker 1: of matter doesn't move along those dimensions, or maybe those
48:00
Speaker 1: mentions aren't infinite the way X, Y and Z are
48:02
Speaker 1: there like a weird little loops. But in this book,
48:05
Speaker 1: it seems like these aliens used to move and live
48:08
Speaker 1: in these other dimensions, so probably they were infinite dimensions.
48:11
Speaker 1: You imagine like an eleven dimensional universe with eleven different directions.
48:15
Speaker 1: You can move as far as you wanted. I guess
48:17
Speaker 1: somehow in this universe that the book is in or describes,
48:21
Speaker 1: alians figured out how to like collapse themselves to a
48:25
Speaker 1: smaller number of dimensions. They have like adapted to living
48:29
Speaker 1: in a smaller number of dimensions. Like if you could
48:31
Speaker 1: make yourself a thin sheet of paper and still somehow
48:34
Speaker 1: have all of your biology and all of your synapses work.
48:37
Speaker 1: If you could do that, then you could safely collapse
48:40
Speaker 1: the universe down to two D and you would survive,
48:42
Speaker 1: and anybody who wasn't prepared would not survive. Like you
48:46
Speaker 1: could just shed and a dimension or something. But that
48:48
Speaker 1: would be weird, right, Like it seems almost unthinkable, Like
48:51
Speaker 1: how could we somehow adapt to being just too deed?
48:53
Speaker 1: Like are all of our organs are three d um
48:57
Speaker 1: If you smash them together, they wouldn't quite work the
49:00
Speaker 1: same way. Yeah, I think it would be a pretty
49:01
Speaker 1: big engineering project, right. You have to think about how
49:04
Speaker 1: things flow, you know, like how fluids flow in your body,
49:07
Speaker 1: and you know the tangle of arteries you have. You
49:09
Speaker 1: can't just like lay that stuff out. I don't know
49:11
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen that exhibit the museum where they've
49:13
Speaker 1: flast sized human bodies. You can see the incredible tangle
49:17
Speaker 1: of organs and the neurons. And it's definitely a three
49:21
Speaker 1: D set up, So you can't just like lay it flat.
49:23
Speaker 1: You'd have to definitely reorganize it. It would look more
49:26
Speaker 1: like a circuit board, right. A circuit board is like
49:28
Speaker 1: a two D representation of relationships between things, so that
49:32
Speaker 1: you're trying not to cross things. And so somehow these
49:34
Speaker 1: atings can do that. And somehow they also figured out
49:36
Speaker 1: a weapon I guess that can destroy dimensions or collapse them,
49:40
Speaker 1: collapse dimensions, you know, and they use it on the
49:43
Speaker 1: Solar System and like Jupiter is flattened into a disk.
49:47
Speaker 1: It's pretty dramatic stuff. But how does it work? Like,
49:51
Speaker 1: you know, you shoot it or you like aim it,
49:54
Speaker 1: or you send like a plane that somehow absurd dimension,
49:58
Speaker 1: Like do they talk about how that works? Yeah, they
50:00
Speaker 1: take a two dimensional plane and they shoot it into
50:03
Speaker 1: the Solar system, and anything it touches gets converted into
50:06
Speaker 1: two dimensional matter. Whoa sort of like the Phantom Zone
50:10
Speaker 1: and the Superman Original meaning, right, is that what you mean?
50:13
Speaker 1: It's like a like a mirror that floats around in
50:15
Speaker 1: space and if it touches you, you're now trapped inside
50:18
Speaker 1: the mirror. Yeah. Not exactly clear on how big this
50:21
Speaker 1: two D plane was that they shot into the Solar System,
50:23
Speaker 1: but it touched Saturn for example, before touch Urinus, because
50:26
Speaker 1: Urinus was on the other side of the Sun when
50:28
Speaker 1: this thing came into the Solar System. So yeah, it's
50:31
Speaker 1: definitely like you get touched and then you get collapsed. Oh,
50:34
Speaker 1: I see, And I guess the premise is that some
50:36
Speaker 1: of these aliens have this technology, and I guess they
50:40
Speaker 1: can go from any dimension to a lower dimension, right,
50:43
Speaker 1: And so because we're in three D, they send us
50:45
Speaker 1: a two D fire m hmm, exactly. They smash us
50:49
Speaker 1: down to two dimensions. They flatten us. But there are
50:53
Speaker 1: there are three D two or they used to be
50:55
Speaker 1: hired D. It's not clear to me in this book
50:57
Speaker 1: what dimensions those aliens are. They definitely used to be
51:00
Speaker 1: higher dimensional, like they started out ten dimensions and it's
51:03
Speaker 1: pretty hard to imagine, Like re engineering a ten dimensional
51:06
Speaker 1: being down one dimension, Now imagine re engineering it down
51:10
Speaker 1: eight dimensions to two dimensions. That seems impossible, but hey,
51:13
Speaker 1: it's science fiction for a reason. Yeah. All right, Well,
51:18
Speaker 1: I guess the question from Chris is whether this is
51:21
Speaker 1: possible because he has that could an advanced illistation set
51:23
Speaker 1: up a dimensional weapon to collapse based time? So I guess, um,
51:27
Speaker 1: is there any kind of basis for that? Like can
51:30
Speaker 1: you just collapse dimensions in spacetime? Well, you know, the
51:33
Speaker 1: first caveat is we just really have no idea how
51:36
Speaker 1: space works, how many dimensions there are, and what the
51:39
Speaker 1: rules are. We're just really beginning to discover, you know,
51:42
Speaker 1: what space is in the shape and structure of the universe.
51:46
Speaker 1: So we're early days, but with our current understanding, that
51:49
Speaker 1: seems pretty flat out impossible. You know, something that you
51:52
Speaker 1: can do with the universes. You can change like how
51:55
Speaker 1: much space curves. You could put mass in it which
51:58
Speaker 1: bends it. You can change shape, but changing it's fundamental
52:02
Speaker 1: topology like how it's connected and the dimensions, there's no
52:05
Speaker 1: way we know of that can do that, Like no
52:07
Speaker 1: amount of mass or energy can change the fundamental shape
52:12
Speaker 1: of the universe or the number of its dimensions. I mean,
52:14
Speaker 1: you could make these dimensions bigger or smaller, but you
52:17
Speaker 1: can't rule them out entirely. Right, Well, I guess there's
52:20
Speaker 1: two questions. One is I mean, technically it's possible to
52:23
Speaker 1: take something in our world that's three D and make
52:25
Speaker 1: it two D. Right, It's called squishing, just like iron
52:28
Speaker 1: it right, like you just you squish it, it will
52:31
Speaker 1: become to D. It'll be I mean, they'll be super messy.
52:33
Speaker 1: But technically you could do that, right, You just wouldn't
52:36
Speaker 1: trap it to move into D. And we did a
52:39
Speaker 1: fun podcast about whether there are two D objects in
52:42
Speaker 1: our universe, and there's some fun systems where like electrons
52:45
Speaker 1: are trapped into a plane and they move around in
52:48
Speaker 1: new weird ways following two D quantum mechanics, which is
52:52
Speaker 1: pretty interesting. So, yeah, that's something you can do. You
52:54
Speaker 1: can't have two D objects in a three D world,
52:57
Speaker 1: right right. But I guess maybe the question is is
52:59
Speaker 1: it possibable or would it maybe require like an infinite
53:02
Speaker 1: amount of energy to just get rid of a dimension.
53:05
Speaker 1: I think the most you could do if a dimension
53:07
Speaker 1: was curved is that you could enhance its curvature, right,
53:11
Speaker 1: And so you could take a dimension which is like
53:13
Speaker 1: rolled up and you could make it basically have zero radius,
53:16
Speaker 1: so you could shrink it down to almost zero. The
53:19
Speaker 1: way you enhance the curvature in a dimension is you
53:21
Speaker 1: just add energy, right, Energy curves space, and so I
53:25
Speaker 1: guess in principle, if a dimension is not infinite, if
53:28
Speaker 1: it's already finite, then you could get it to collapse.
53:30
Speaker 1: You could shrink it down by pouring in a lot
53:33
Speaker 1: of energy. I don't think you could change an infinite
53:36
Speaker 1: dimension like our X, Y, and z. I don't think
53:38
Speaker 1: you could collapse those because you can't bend an infinite
53:41
Speaker 1: sheet into a sphere right, right, But I guess, you know,
53:44
Speaker 1: I think what you're saying is that you know, we
53:46
Speaker 1: know that space is expanding right now, like the whole
53:49
Speaker 1: universe is expanding, and so it could also contract, right.
53:52
Speaker 1: I think maybe the constant might be, like you collapse
53:56
Speaker 1: only one of the dimensions, like somehow you've figured out
53:58
Speaker 1: how you know space expansion works, and you can somehow
54:02
Speaker 1: collapse one of the dimensions or maybe even expanded. And
54:06
Speaker 1: so if I could do that in an area, then
54:07
Speaker 1: everything that was in that area would collapse to two
54:10
Speaker 1: dimensions or would it continue to be the same. It's
54:13
Speaker 1: just that to us it would look squished and in
54:15
Speaker 1: one dimension. Yeah, you could definitely use space to squish stuff, right, Like,
54:20
Speaker 1: pour a lot of energy into something, space will bend
54:24
Speaker 1: and you could use that as a press, like a
54:26
Speaker 1: one dimensional black hole or something crazy like that. Yeah,
54:29
Speaker 1: one dimensional black hole. Yeah, that's what this kind of
54:31
Speaker 1: would be. Right, Well, I think that's the way you
54:33
Speaker 1: could compress stuff. That wouldn't change the dimensionality of space itself, however, right,
54:38
Speaker 1: space would still have that higher dimensionality. Would just be
54:41
Speaker 1: that you have created like a two D object in
54:44
Speaker 1: a three D space that wouldn't actually compress space. Like,
54:48
Speaker 1: if the universe is infinite and goes on forever, there's
54:51
Speaker 1: nothing you could do to remove one of those dimensions.
54:54
Speaker 1: If the universe, however, isn't infinite, if it like loops
54:57
Speaker 1: around on itself, like we've talked about, maybe in the
54:59
Speaker 1: shape of a donut or sphere, then you could potentially
55:01
Speaker 1: collapse one of those dimensions to have a very small distance.
55:05
Speaker 1: Wouldn't actually technically be gone, but it might practically be gone.
55:09
Speaker 1: It might be infinitely small, right, right. Well, I remember
55:12
Speaker 1: in in UM when I took math classes and talked
55:14
Speaker 1: about like matrix transformations that you know, certain transformations have
55:19
Speaker 1: something called the Moalth space right, where you essentially get
55:22
Speaker 1: rid of a dimension when you transform something by that matrix.
55:26
Speaker 1: Could you imagine something like that being done to the
55:28
Speaker 1: loss of the universe. Well, when we talk about transformations
55:31
Speaker 1: and we're talking about space, we're really just talking about
55:33
Speaker 1: looking at space from different points of view, Like transform
55:36
Speaker 1: your point of view, you transform your coordinate system. You
55:39
Speaker 1: don't usually transform space itself, though we don't understand why
55:43
Speaker 1: or how. It's just sort of born with certain features.
55:46
Speaker 1: Those features are like the number of dimensions and also
55:48
Speaker 1: the shapes of those dimensions. And we don't think that
55:51
Speaker 1: in any way for energy or mass to change those things.
55:55
Speaker 1: That could change the radius, that could like compress it
55:57
Speaker 1: or expand it, but it can't change that fundamental nature
56:00
Speaker 1: as far as we know. But I do think it's
56:01
Speaker 1: a really creative thing to think about, like, and that's
56:04
Speaker 1: the kind of thinking that's going to make some theories
56:06
Speaker 1: out there go maybe there is a way. Actually I
56:09
Speaker 1: used to think that was impossible, and then a week
56:11
Speaker 1: later I had five ideas. So it's a it's a
56:13
Speaker 1: great creative thinking and I think it's a really awesome
56:16
Speaker 1: part of this book. Not something I've ever heard of before.
56:18
Speaker 1: All right, Well, then, to answer Chris this question, the
56:21
Speaker 1: answers to couldn't advance positions at the collapse dimensions as
56:25
Speaker 1: a weapon? Um doesn't seem likely to Daniel, but maybe.
56:29
Speaker 1: I guess you're going to think about it. Check back
56:31
Speaker 1: with me in a week. We'll see. And I guess
56:34
Speaker 1: another question is are there e walks in this third
56:36
Speaker 1: installment of the Star Wars the thrillogy? There are two
56:40
Speaker 1: d e walks? Too many? Too many e walks, is
56:43
Speaker 1: what you're saying to the e walks is too many walks?
56:46
Speaker 1: I love the e walks. Man who hates e walks? Really,
56:49
Speaker 1: what kind of person you have to be to not
56:51
Speaker 1: like e walks. I just heard a theory that originally
56:53
Speaker 1: maybe the walks were supposed to be wookies, but somebow
56:56
Speaker 1: that it got changed at the end or something exactly
57:00
Speaker 1: producers did their job. That might be just a fan
57:02
Speaker 1: theory the book, I don't know. Well, until then, I
57:05
Speaker 1: think that Saturny and the rest of the Solar system
57:07
Speaker 1: are safe from being collapsed into two D objects. For now,
57:10
Speaker 1: you still have some room to move around in all right. Well,
57:13
Speaker 1: then answers all of our listener questions. Thanks again to
57:15
Speaker 1: everyone who submitted questions. If you have questions about the universe,
57:18
Speaker 1: about anything we've talked about here on the podcast, please
57:21
Speaker 1: let us know we'd be happy to answer them. Thanks
57:23
Speaker 1: very much to everyone who writes in and interact with us.
57:26
Speaker 1: We love hearing your questions. We hope you enjoyed that.
57:29
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, See you next time. Thanks for listening,
57:40
Speaker 1: and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
57:42
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from
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57:50
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