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Is there matter that is not made of particles? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:08
Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, have we figured out yet what dark matter
0:11
Speaker 1: is made out of? Checking? Checking, checking? Nope, not yet.
0:15
Speaker 1: We'll have a new theory. I think it's made out
0:17
Speaker 1: of everyone's lost socks. Oh man, it's not lost socks,
0:22
Speaker 1: not even the really dark socks. No, they just aren't
0:26
Speaker 1: enough socks in the universe to explain dark matter. All right,
0:29
Speaker 1: it's not made out of socks. But have you found
0:31
Speaker 1: the particle yet? It's made out of you know, no
0:34
Speaker 1: sign so far. You just need to think outside the box. Well,
0:38
Speaker 1: we're trying to be open minded. I mean, we're open
0:40
Speaker 1: to any kind of particle, but what if it's not
0:44
Speaker 1: even made out of particles? Then maybe asking a particle
0:47
Speaker 1: physicist is the wrong approach. Hi am orhandmade cartoonists and
1:06
Speaker 1: the creator of PhD comments. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a
1:10
Speaker 1: particle physicist and I'm particularly good about thinking about particles.
1:14
Speaker 1: And welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe,
1:17
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio in which we think
1:19
Speaker 1: about everything in the universe and its particles. We try
1:22
Speaker 1: to take all the big questions about life, the universe,
1:26
Speaker 1: and everything and break them up into their smallest microscopic
1:30
Speaker 1: little pieces so that we can all understand them, because
1:33
Speaker 1: we all have a certain curiosity about what things are
1:36
Speaker 1: made of. We see all the things around us and
1:38
Speaker 1: we wonder, is that made out of what? And it's
1:41
Speaker 1: fascinating how taking something apart is somehow explaining what it is. Right,
1:47
Speaker 1: you look at something and you wonder, what is that thing? Well,
1:50
Speaker 1: let me zoom in and see what it's made out of,
1:53
Speaker 1: because that will give me some insight into what it is. Yeah.
1:56
Speaker 1: This kind of strange that breaking something tells you what
1:59
Speaker 1: it is. Yeah, I guess it tells you what's inside
2:01
Speaker 1: or what the little bits it's made out of. Art
2:03
Speaker 1: And it works for physics, not so much for society.
2:06
Speaker 1: Like you meet a friend and you want to understand
2:07
Speaker 1: what's their motivation. You don't like slice them up into
2:10
Speaker 1: little pieces. Oh boy, that's dark. But in physics we
2:16
Speaker 1: do that. We say, if we try to understand why
2:18
Speaker 1: this wave works the way it does, or why this
2:20
Speaker 1: hurricane turned left instead of right, we think that we
2:23
Speaker 1: can explain it by breaking it into as small as
2:25
Speaker 1: pieces and then somehow reassembling it mentally, understanding how those
2:29
Speaker 1: small pieces work together to make the emergent phenomenon the
2:32
Speaker 1: thing at the larger scale. Yeah, because there's a lot
2:35
Speaker 1: of stuff out there in the universe, and by now
2:38
Speaker 1: we know that a lot of it is made out
2:40
Speaker 1: of atoms, and those atoms are made out of protons
2:42
Speaker 1: and neutrons and electrons, and those protons and neutrons are
2:45
Speaker 1: made out of quarks, and that's pretty much it. We
2:48
Speaker 1: sort of know what most regular matter is made out of.
2:52
Speaker 1: And this approach has worked pretty well. You know, a
2:54
Speaker 1: hundreds or so years ago, we had all these weird
2:57
Speaker 1: kinds of stuff, different kinds of metals and gases, and
3:00
Speaker 1: all had different behavior, and we didn't understand why why
3:03
Speaker 1: does this thing conduct electricity and this thing is active
3:05
Speaker 1: and that thing is not. And now we found that
3:08
Speaker 1: explanation precisely by peeling back a layer and digging deeper
3:12
Speaker 1: and understanding what's going on inside. And it's all those
3:15
Speaker 1: atomic orbitals and the electrons moving around, which precisely explains
3:18
Speaker 1: that behavior and answers those questions. So, you know, we
3:21
Speaker 1: make fun of it a little bit, but this approach
3:23
Speaker 1: has been spectacularly successful. Yeah, And it's actually when you
3:26
Speaker 1: step back, it's a little maybe surprising or interesting that
3:30
Speaker 1: it is made out of little bits like matter, and
3:32
Speaker 1: everything we know about is made out of little tiny
3:36
Speaker 1: lego bits that you can't break apart. It's pretty weird
3:39
Speaker 1: because things seem smooth like you look around you and
3:42
Speaker 1: things seem pretty much like continuous It's weird to imagine
3:46
Speaker 1: that when you zoom in suddenly it looks different, that
3:49
Speaker 1: it looks like it's made out of these tiny dots.
3:51
Speaker 1: Is incredible that you can make something smooth out of
3:54
Speaker 1: something that's not smooth. Yeah, the universe, I guess that
3:57
Speaker 1: as hard is chunky, like chunky peanut butter. It's not smooth. Yeah,
4:01
Speaker 1: it's incredible. It tells you that what you see with
4:03
Speaker 1: your eyes, your idea of the universe, just from interactions
4:07
Speaker 1: at this sort of size of stuff and speed, is
4:10
Speaker 1: not fundamental to the universe. That you need to dig
4:12
Speaker 1: deeper and peer into the smaller, smaller distances to understand
4:16
Speaker 1: what the real rules are. Yeah, and I feel like
4:18
Speaker 1: this idea is kind of really ingrained now for those
4:22
Speaker 1: of us who know a little bit of physics and science.
4:25
Speaker 1: Is it's just that it seems natural now to think
4:27
Speaker 1: that everything is made out of little tiny pieces. Yeah,
4:29
Speaker 1: And That's why it's fun, I think, to go back
4:31
Speaker 1: to the Greeks and hear their discussions. You know, they
4:33
Speaker 1: had no data, no evidence, but they were open to
4:36
Speaker 1: lots of different ideas about how the world might work.
4:38
Speaker 1: Like maybe it's made out of four smooth elemental things fire, air, water,
4:43
Speaker 1: and earth. Right, maybe it's made out of some tiny bits,
4:46
Speaker 1: or maybe they had all sorts of crazy, bonkers ideas.
4:48
Speaker 1: But the cool thing about those ideas is that they
4:51
Speaker 1: were trying to be as open minded as possible. They
4:53
Speaker 1: were like trying to span completely the space of possible
4:57
Speaker 1: universes we could live in. Yeah, so everything we see
5:00
Speaker 1: around us is made out of those little tiny bit
5:03
Speaker 1: quirks and electrons. But it turns out that that's not
5:07
Speaker 1: all there is in the universe. There's a big part
5:11
Speaker 1: of the universe that we can't see. Yeah, and that
5:13
Speaker 1: makes us worry that maybe we've been led down the
5:17
Speaker 1: rose Garden path a little bit. Maybe our success in
5:20
Speaker 1: describing the kind of matter that we are made out of,
5:23
Speaker 1: me and you and hamsters and ice cream and lava
5:25
Speaker 1: has led us to over generalize and to imagine that
5:28
Speaker 1: that's the same pattern that applies to everything in the universe,
5:32
Speaker 1: but maybe it's not so to the on the podcast
5:34
Speaker 1: will be asking a really fundamental question. We'll be asking,
5:43
Speaker 1: can you have matter that's not made out of particles? Whoa? Whoa?
5:49
Speaker 1: You just put me out of a job. Man, What
5:51
Speaker 1: do you mean your job is not to explain things? Well,
5:55
Speaker 1: you know, if of the matter in the universe is
5:58
Speaker 1: the kind of matter that's made out of part nicles
6:00
Speaker 1: and eighty five percent of it is something else, that
6:03
Speaker 1: maybe of the physicists should not be particle physicists. Well,
6:07
Speaker 1: I guess what you mean is that we know that
6:09
Speaker 1: the regular matter that we know about, you know, things
6:12
Speaker 1: made out of electrons and courts and protons and neutrons,
6:15
Speaker 1: only accounts for fifteen percent of the matter in the universe. Yeah,
6:20
Speaker 1: it's percent of the matter of the universe and five
6:22
Speaker 1: percent of the energy of the universe, because two thirds
6:25
Speaker 1: of the energy in the universe is this other thing
6:27
Speaker 1: called dark energy. Yeah, but there's a whole eighty five
6:30
Speaker 1: percent of matter in the universe that is not like
6:34
Speaker 1: the stuff we know about. That's exactly right, And we're
6:37
Speaker 1: spending a lot of time trying to figure out what
6:38
Speaker 1: it is made out of. Is it this particle is
6:40
Speaker 1: at that particle, but sometimes people wonder maybe it's not
6:43
Speaker 1: a particle at all. Yeah, and that's crazy to think
6:46
Speaker 1: about that. Maybe there are things that are not made
6:49
Speaker 1: out of a little bit. What does that even mean?
6:51
Speaker 1: What does that even mean? And that's why you have
6:52
Speaker 1: to go back to the Greeks and wonder, like, well,
6:55
Speaker 1: what are the ideas that we left, you know, more
6:56
Speaker 1: than a hundred years ago on the side of the highway,
6:59
Speaker 1: once we decided that everything was actually made out of
7:01
Speaker 1: atoms and smaller bits. But to sort of go back
7:04
Speaker 1: to that original grab bag of ideas and consider other alternatives. Yeah,
7:08
Speaker 1: like maybe you could have matter that's not made out
7:11
Speaker 1: of particles, like things that have mass but not constituent
7:15
Speaker 1: little pieces that what non particle matter would mean. Yeah, well,
7:18
Speaker 1: we need to be open to other ideas. We don't
7:21
Speaker 1: know what kind of things could be in the universe.
7:23
Speaker 1: Particles is a kind of a Boner's idea, So we
7:25
Speaker 1: just need to be like open to brand new ideas.
7:28
Speaker 1: Maybe it's made out of totally smooth stuff that isn't
7:31
Speaker 1: broken into little bits, or maybe it's made out of
7:33
Speaker 1: something else where. The particles aren't as discreet. You know,
7:36
Speaker 1: they're not counted by integers but by real numbers. All right,
7:40
Speaker 1: So this is a pretty mind blowing question, and as
7:42
Speaker 1: usual people wondering how many people out there I thought
7:45
Speaker 1: about this question or might even have ideas about whether
7:49
Speaker 1: it's possible. So, as usual, Daniel went out there into
7:51
Speaker 1: the Internet and ask listeners if they thought that matter
7:55
Speaker 1: could be made not out of particles. That's right, So
7:58
Speaker 1: thank you to everybody who participated in this exercise in speculation.
8:03
Speaker 1: If you would like to similarly speculate for our podcast,
8:06
Speaker 1: please write to us two questions at Daniel and Jorge
8:10
Speaker 1: dot com. So think about it for a second. Do
8:11
Speaker 1: you think you can have matter that's not made out
8:14
Speaker 1: of particles? Here's what people had to say. So, I
8:16
Speaker 1: think that we don't actually know if dark matter is
8:20
Speaker 1: made of particles, so dark matter may not be made
8:23
Speaker 1: of particles. And also if there's something that makes up
8:27
Speaker 1: the particles understandard model, then probably the particles themselves are
8:35
Speaker 1: not made of particles. Well, nobody really knows what dark
8:39
Speaker 1: matter is, so I guess that might be something that's
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Speaker 1: not a particle. The only other thing I can think
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Speaker 1: of is something like strange matter. My initial assumption is
8:49
Speaker 1: that baryonic matta has to be made of particles, maybe
8:53
Speaker 1: I think, but maybe not like dark matter, because as
8:58
Speaker 1: I understanding, we have no idea. We have no idea.
9:01
Speaker 1: By the book, I'd say that all matter that we
9:04
Speaker 1: deal with on a regular basis is made of particles
9:08
Speaker 1: like quirks and protons and electrons. But maybe dark matter
9:15
Speaker 1: if you really consider that matter, dark matter, and dark energy.
9:21
Speaker 1: So far, all of the matter we know these metal
9:24
Speaker 1: particles actually feels but let's not get into that. We
9:27
Speaker 1: think that the dark matter should also be metal particles,
9:31
Speaker 1: but we haven't found any of that kind yet. So nope,
9:35
Speaker 1: I don't think there is any matter that's not metal particles.
9:38
Speaker 1: Matter by definition is a group of particles, So there
9:43
Speaker 1: cannot be any matter and not made of particles. All right,
9:46
Speaker 1: some pretty technical answers there. We have a pretty educated audience,
9:51
Speaker 1: Yes we do. Good job listeners. A lot of folks
9:54
Speaker 1: are keen in on this question of dark matter, so
9:56
Speaker 1: good job. Yeah, and they even talk about pretty cool
10:00
Speaker 1: neat like strange matter is that a thing. Strange matter
10:04
Speaker 1: is a thing. It's matter made out of strange quarks.
10:06
Speaker 1: We had a whole podcast about that and strange stars
10:08
Speaker 1: that might be filled with strange matter. It's pretty awesome,
10:11
Speaker 1: but it's definitely made of quarks, which means it's made
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Speaker 1: of particles. Even strange matter is made out of works
10:17
Speaker 1: made out of little strange particles. It's pretty strange. So
10:20
Speaker 1: I guess the question is, can you have matter that's
10:22
Speaker 1: not made out of particles? And so um maybe steps
10:26
Speaker 1: through here, Daniel. Is everything we know about made out
10:29
Speaker 1: of particles so far, so far, everything that we've been
10:31
Speaker 1: able to understand has been made out of particles. So
10:34
Speaker 1: set aside dark energy, and set aside dark matter, and
10:38
Speaker 1: focus on just the five percent of the universe that
10:40
Speaker 1: science has been studying for the last few hundred years.
10:44
Speaker 1: That portion of it, the stuff that's made out of atoms,
10:47
Speaker 1: All of that is made out of particles. Right, So
10:50
Speaker 1: I made out of atoms, and you're made out of atoms,
10:52
Speaker 1: and stars are made out of atoms, and gas and
10:55
Speaker 1: dust and and everything that we see and all that
10:58
Speaker 1: stuff we're familiar with that's all made out of atoms.
11:01
Speaker 1: And then you break those atoms apart, and you have
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Speaker 1: protons and neutrons and electrons flying around them. Break those
11:08
Speaker 1: protons and neutrons apart, and inside them you have corks.
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Speaker 1: And that's as far as we've gotten. But everything that
11:14
Speaker 1: we know, everything you've ever eaten, everything you've ever stepped on,
11:17
Speaker 1: everything your little brother ever through it, you across the room,
11:20
Speaker 1: has been made out of atoms, which means it's been
11:22
Speaker 1: made out of particles. Yeah, all the stuff you can
11:25
Speaker 1: see and touch, And it's even more amazing that even
11:28
Speaker 1: the act of touching something is also made out of particles,
11:32
Speaker 1: Like forces are also made out of particles. Yeah. The
11:34
Speaker 1: way particles talk to each other is with forces. And
11:38
Speaker 1: you can think about the way that happens in two ways.
11:40
Speaker 1: One is having fields. You know these fields that every
11:43
Speaker 1: particle has, like an electron has an electric field. But
11:46
Speaker 1: another way to think about those fields is in terms
11:48
Speaker 1: of particles. Like what happens when two electrons get close
11:51
Speaker 1: to each other is they exchange photons. They shoot photons
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Speaker 1: at each other. A changing electric field is a photon.
11:57
Speaker 1: Of photon is a way of carrying information and about
12:00
Speaker 1: an electric field, for example, And so even your fridge
12:03
Speaker 1: magnet uses photons to communicate when it moves and everything.
12:07
Speaker 1: All particles shoot other particles at each other to push
12:11
Speaker 1: to pull, to do any kind of communication. So it
12:14
Speaker 1: really is a particle universe. I was just wondering, is
12:17
Speaker 1: even energy made out of particles? Is energy made out
12:19
Speaker 1: of particles? While that's an awesome question, you can imagine
12:22
Speaker 1: it to be made out of particles in some context,
12:25
Speaker 1: like light is a form of energy, and that's definitely
12:28
Speaker 1: made of particles. When you think about heat, for example,
12:30
Speaker 1: that's the vibration in you know, the crystal lattice of
12:34
Speaker 1: a solid. We talked about how you can think about
12:36
Speaker 1: that in terms of virtual particles like phonons and rotons,
12:40
Speaker 1: and so in lots of cases, you can understand energy
12:43
Speaker 1: in terms of particles, usually when it's discreete usually when
12:46
Speaker 1: it's like quantized, and that usually happens when something is
12:49
Speaker 1: confined or contained in some way, it's in a solid
12:52
Speaker 1: or it's in a system. When things are just flying
12:55
Speaker 1: out in space, just raw energy that it's harder sometimes
12:58
Speaker 1: to think about in terms of particles. So I guess
13:01
Speaker 1: energy doesn't have to be made out of particles, that
13:03
Speaker 1: it can be any value. I'm trying to think about
13:06
Speaker 1: an example of energy that isn't quantized, where it could
13:10
Speaker 1: be any value, and I suppose you could think about
13:12
Speaker 1: like an individual photon photon flying through space. It is
13:16
Speaker 1: a particle, but it can have an arbitrary amount of energy,
13:20
Speaker 1: all right, But you can only have one or two photons,
13:22
Speaker 1: so that's still a particle. But another example is dark energy.
13:26
Speaker 1: Dark energies most of the energy in the universe, and
13:29
Speaker 1: we have no idea what it is. It might be
13:30
Speaker 1: some new kind of field, might have a particle associated
13:33
Speaker 1: with it, but we really just don't know. So it's
13:36
Speaker 1: kind of strange then that you can have energy and
13:40
Speaker 1: that's not made out of particles, but then once it
13:43
Speaker 1: gets transformed into mass, then it does then to clustering
13:47
Speaker 1: little bits. Yeah, And one thing to realize is that
13:50
Speaker 1: particles is sort of something we do. It's a way
13:52
Speaker 1: that we have to understand the universe. It's like something
13:56
Speaker 1: we have done to organize our understanding, the experiments you've done,
14:00
Speaker 1: and our thoughts about the way things work. There might
14:03
Speaker 1: be other ways to think about the universe to explain
14:05
Speaker 1: the phenomena we've seen, not using particles as sort of
14:08
Speaker 1: a mental picture. If you talk to people in philosophy,
14:11
Speaker 1: you know, they recognize that what we're doing in particle
14:14
Speaker 1: physics is sort of building mental models which may or
14:16
Speaker 1: may not reflect what's actually happening deep down in the universe.
14:20
Speaker 1: I see, it just sort of looks like particles to us.
14:23
Speaker 1: But maybe if you drill down even deeper, maybe you
14:26
Speaker 1: could even get rid of this idea. Yeah, And there's
14:29
Speaker 1: actually divide in the field about whether particles are the
14:32
Speaker 1: more fundamental thing or whether fields are the more fundamental thing.
14:36
Speaker 1: Like on one hand, people say, well, particles, they're just
14:38
Speaker 1: like excitations of a field. The real fundamental thing in
14:41
Speaker 1: the universe are these quantum fields that feel space. And
14:45
Speaker 1: what is a particle? It's just like a place where
14:47
Speaker 1: that field is wiggling a little bit, a little bit
14:49
Speaker 1: of energy in that field. As you were saying, other
14:52
Speaker 1: people say, no, no, no no, fields, you don't see them
14:54
Speaker 1: ever directly. They're not the real thing. It's particles that
14:57
Speaker 1: are real and fields are just another way to to
15:00
Speaker 1: talk about virtual particles. So this sort of a division,
15:03
Speaker 1: like what is the most fundamental thing in the universe?
15:05
Speaker 1: Is it fields or is it particles? So I guess
15:08
Speaker 1: if you ask the field people, then they will tell
15:10
Speaker 1: you that most of the matter in the universe is
15:13
Speaker 1: not made out of particles. It's made out of fields,
15:15
Speaker 1: which are not quant Yeah, they would say that, you know,
15:17
Speaker 1: particles is just a special case of a field. The
15:20
Speaker 1: real thing in the universe is fields, and sometimes you
15:22
Speaker 1: get energy in them, and then energy can move around
15:25
Speaker 1: and like discrete units ensure you can call that a
15:28
Speaker 1: particle if you like to. But I really just like
15:31
Speaker 1: to think about the whole field. Why focus on the
15:33
Speaker 1: one individual particle? And we started from the particle picture
15:36
Speaker 1: because we found particles, like you know, J. J. Thompson
15:39
Speaker 1: more than years ago, we found this electron started to
15:42
Speaker 1: think about things made out of tiny little bits of
15:45
Speaker 1: sort of a natural ideas, definitely a more natural idea
15:48
Speaker 1: than imagining that everything which is like an excited state
15:51
Speaker 1: of fields that fill the universe. And so yeah, a
15:53
Speaker 1: person who thinks that fields of the fundamental thing in
15:56
Speaker 1: the universe would say, particles, they're just like, you know,
15:59
Speaker 1: they're a step along in the way. There's nothing real
16:01
Speaker 1: about them. So well, I guess is that how you
16:04
Speaker 1: would define it? Is like when a field gets excited
16:07
Speaker 1: and wiggles and it sort of gets a little bit
16:09
Speaker 1: of a bump there. Well, this is the deep, dark,
16:11
Speaker 1: dirty secret of particle physics, which is that if you ask,
16:15
Speaker 1: like five particle physicists what is a particle, you might
16:18
Speaker 1: get five different answers. Right, So nobody even really agrees
16:21
Speaker 1: on what it means to be a particle. You know,
16:25
Speaker 1: you have the experimental people who say, well, I don't
16:27
Speaker 1: know what you want to think about them theoretically, but
16:29
Speaker 1: I know that I shoot one at another one, and
16:31
Speaker 1: I can measure how they bounce off each other. So
16:33
Speaker 1: it's this thing in my experiment. Somebody else might say, yeah,
16:37
Speaker 1: it's just an excited state of these quantum fields that
16:40
Speaker 1: I use in my calculations. And a mathematician might say, well,
16:44
Speaker 1: I can use this group theory to describe the transformation
16:47
Speaker 1: from one thing to another place in space. So really,
16:50
Speaker 1: particles are like a physical manifestation of a mathematical construct,
16:55
Speaker 1: you know, or a string theorist might say, a particles,
16:58
Speaker 1: that's way too big. You need to do much deeper
17:01
Speaker 1: and think about like the tiny vibrating strings that make
17:04
Speaker 1: up everything in the universe, including particles, including fields. And
17:08
Speaker 1: so nobody even really agrees about what a particle is.
17:11
Speaker 1: And it could be that they're all right, right, Like,
17:14
Speaker 1: it could be it's not that they're all wrong, or
17:16
Speaker 1: that one of them is right and the rest of wrong.
17:18
Speaker 1: It could be that you know, a particles, all of
17:20
Speaker 1: these interesting things. Yeah, I think most likely they're all
17:23
Speaker 1: right and they're all wrong. You know, particles are definitely
17:26
Speaker 1: something weird, and why we're struggling is because there's something
17:30
Speaker 1: new to us. They're not like anything we've experienced before.
17:33
Speaker 1: And what we're doing all the time and physics is
17:35
Speaker 1: trying to describe the unknown in terms of the known,
17:38
Speaker 1: and so we're making analogies where maybe it's like a string,
17:42
Speaker 1: maybe it's like a tiny little grain of matter, maybe
17:46
Speaker 1: it's like waves in the ocean, and all of these
17:48
Speaker 1: analogies fail because particles or whatever it is that makes
17:52
Speaker 1: up the universe are fundamentally different from anything we know.
17:55
Speaker 1: And so you know, they're all like successful in one
17:57
Speaker 1: respect and unsuccessful in an another. And if we ever
18:01
Speaker 1: do gain a true deep understanding of the nature of
18:04
Speaker 1: the universe at its lowest scale, we're going to discover
18:06
Speaker 1: why that is. Like, oh, it's this other weird thing.
18:09
Speaker 1: And sometimes it does look like a particle, and sometimes
18:11
Speaker 1: it does look like a field, and sometimes it does
18:14
Speaker 1: look like a string. Sometimes it does look like something
18:16
Speaker 1: that's none of those things. So I look forward to
18:19
Speaker 1: the day that we have a deeper understanding of the
18:21
Speaker 1: nature of the universe and we discover how all of
18:24
Speaker 1: these ideas fit together into that larger picture. Yeah, and
18:27
Speaker 1: you might be right and wrong at the same time.
18:30
Speaker 1: It sounds like a pretty indefensible position. I'll be quantum right.
18:34
Speaker 1: All right, Well, let's get into whether or not matter
18:36
Speaker 1: can be made out of not particles and whether or
18:40
Speaker 1: not we know that any such matter exists. But first
18:43
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break. All right, we're asking the question, Daniel,
18:59
Speaker 1: whether not matter cannot be made out of particle This
19:03
Speaker 1: is a really strange question to ask Grammatically, I guess,
19:07
Speaker 1: can matter be made out of non particles? Or can
19:11
Speaker 1: matter and not be made out of particles? It's a
19:14
Speaker 1: strange grammatical conundrum. How we're going to answer the science
19:17
Speaker 1: question If we can't even get past the grammar question, right, Well,
19:20
Speaker 1: we can just say we're right and wrong. It's both
19:24
Speaker 1: grammatical and ungrammatically. We span the space of all possible answers. Yeah, now,
19:29
Speaker 1: this is a really fun idea. I like to think
19:30
Speaker 1: about it as non particle matter or not particle matter.
19:34
Speaker 1: But it's actually a phrase for it now in the
19:36
Speaker 1: theoretical physics community, they call it unparticle matter. And how
19:41
Speaker 1: is that different than non particle matter? I don't know.
19:44
Speaker 1: I think it's just fun to use the word. And
19:47
Speaker 1: it sounds like the opposite, or like it's anti in
19:49
Speaker 1: another way, different from anti matter. I see you sound hipper,
19:54
Speaker 1: you know, when they make the science fiction movie about it,
19:56
Speaker 1: I think the focus groups are gonna think that's got
19:58
Speaker 1: like more of an edge to it. It's like conscious uncoupling.
20:02
Speaker 1: It just sounds you know, more inspired or trendy. Yeah,
20:05
Speaker 1: or it's just more mysterious. But it's a fun idea
20:08
Speaker 1: and it's something people have been thinking about for like
20:10
Speaker 1: the last and fifteen years seriously, Like, can we figure
20:13
Speaker 1: out a way to talk about matter so that it's
20:16
Speaker 1: not made out of particles? I guess maybe a first
20:18
Speaker 1: question is what would make something qualify as matter in
20:22
Speaker 1: the first place? Is it that it has mass or
20:25
Speaker 1: that it feels gravity? What would be the specific definition there?
20:28
Speaker 1: Boy man, this is a deep episode. If we're going
20:30
Speaker 1: to talk about what matter even means, I think it
20:32
Speaker 1: needs to be some sort of localization of energy. And
20:36
Speaker 1: you know, I would say mass, because usually that implies
20:38
Speaker 1: having a mass, but a photon, for example, is a particle.
20:41
Speaker 1: I don't know if you would actually call a photon
20:43
Speaker 1: to be part of matter, but it has energy and
20:45
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's a localization of energy that moves
20:48
Speaker 1: through the universe. It's consistent, it's discrete, it transformed in
20:51
Speaker 1: ways that makes sense. But here I think we're trying
20:54
Speaker 1: to talk about matter in the sense of things that
20:55
Speaker 1: have mass, because really this is motivated by not understand
21:00
Speaker 1: ending where most of the mass in the universe is
21:02
Speaker 1: coming from, what it's made out of. So I think
21:04
Speaker 1: we should talk about, you know, stuff, things that have
21:07
Speaker 1: mass to them, that have substance, that have gravitational energy.
21:11
Speaker 1: So I guess that would be a good definition. Is
21:13
Speaker 1: that it feels gravity or are you talking about like
21:16
Speaker 1: whether it's hard to move or to push it or both? Yeah? Both.
21:20
Speaker 1: I mean, I think we can accept Einstein's equivalence principle
21:23
Speaker 1: and suggest that inertia and gravitational energy are related. And
21:28
Speaker 1: so we're looking for how to build some stuff something
21:30
Speaker 1: that has mass to it that changes the shape of
21:33
Speaker 1: space around it, but it is somehow not made out
21:35
Speaker 1: of tiny little particles like a blob. When you look
21:39
Speaker 1: at it closer, it doesn't resolve into little bits, like
21:42
Speaker 1: it's just stuff that's there, but it has mass exactly.
21:45
Speaker 1: And the technical phrase for this is that it's scale invariant,
21:48
Speaker 1: and what that means is that as you zoom in,
21:51
Speaker 1: it never looks different, like you look at matter under
21:54
Speaker 1: the microscope. And if you imagine cranking of a microscope,
21:57
Speaker 1: you have some super powerful one. You could crank it
22:00
Speaker 1: up really powerfully. You would eventually see that the cookie
22:03
Speaker 1: or whatever it is that's under your microscope is not smooth,
22:06
Speaker 1: but it's made out of tiny little bits. You can
22:08
Speaker 1: actually see the shape of the atoms and the crystal
22:11
Speaker 1: lattice that formed them. But non particle matter or unparticle matter,
22:15
Speaker 1: whatever this is, this blob would always look the same
22:18
Speaker 1: under your microscope, no matter how much you zoomed in.
22:20
Speaker 1: It would always look kind of fuzzy, I guess, like
22:23
Speaker 1: a liquid. It would always look kind of smooth. If
22:25
Speaker 1: you like mathematics, you can think of this as related
22:27
Speaker 1: to fractals. You know, fractals are these patterns which have
22:31
Speaker 1: structure to them. They're not totally smooth, but as you
22:34
Speaker 1: zoom in you just see more and more of the
22:36
Speaker 1: same structure. It's not like you zoom in past a
22:39
Speaker 1: certain scale and then that's it. You found, like the
22:41
Speaker 1: base lego unit it's made out of As you zoom in,
22:44
Speaker 1: you just keep seeing more and more structure. All right,
22:47
Speaker 1: So then what are some ideas for this, Like theoretically,
22:51
Speaker 1: what are some possibilities for having matter that's not made
22:54
Speaker 1: out of particles? So in two thousand and seven there
22:57
Speaker 1: was this guy at Harvard, Howard George, I is a
22:59
Speaker 1: famous particle of exist He had an idea theoretically for
23:02
Speaker 1: how you could like build this thing out of weird fields.
23:05
Speaker 1: So you take fields which are like the things that
23:08
Speaker 1: fill space currently. You know, we have the electromagnetic field.
23:11
Speaker 1: We have fields for all the particles, the quarks and
23:14
Speaker 1: the electrons. He said, what if we have a new field,
23:16
Speaker 1: but the energy in this field is sort of different,
23:19
Speaker 1: and that it doesn't come together to make a particle.
23:22
Speaker 1: It never sort of coalesces into these discrete units with
23:25
Speaker 1: fixed mass that you can treat as particles. So he
23:28
Speaker 1: wrote this paper and he called it un particles, and
23:31
Speaker 1: it sort of set the theoretical world on fire for
23:33
Speaker 1: a few years. Really what does that mean? He burned
23:36
Speaker 1: down the house, people freaked out, and also was his
23:40
Speaker 1: far made out of particles? Well, theoretical physics can be
23:43
Speaker 1: a little bit driven by fads. You know, somebody gets
23:46
Speaker 1: an idea that people are excited about it, so other
23:48
Speaker 1: people write papers and like, oh, that's exciting, and then
23:51
Speaker 1: they write papers and the whole community sort of like
23:53
Speaker 1: moves off in a new direction for a while because
23:55
Speaker 1: they think, oh, somebody's cracked open a new idea we
23:58
Speaker 1: can build on and we can come up with something new,
24:01
Speaker 1: because you know, they're in a little bit stuck, like
24:04
Speaker 1: particle physics has not figured out what the universe has
24:06
Speaker 1: made out of. We've been sort of going in circles
24:08
Speaker 1: a little bit for the last ten or twenty years.
24:10
Speaker 1: Their folks out there who think everything we're doing is wrong,
24:13
Speaker 1: we're barking up the wrong tree. And so anytime somebody
24:16
Speaker 1: comes up with something that seems really fresh, something novel,
24:19
Speaker 1: that's like creates a whole new area where you can play,
24:22
Speaker 1: like a new kind of toy to add to your
24:24
Speaker 1: mathematical toolkit. Then it's fun. And so people started writing papers,
24:28
Speaker 1: and they were like hundreds of papers written about un
24:30
Speaker 1: particles for a few years. Were they interesting or uninteresting?
24:35
Speaker 1: They were pretty interesting, and they built on each other,
24:37
Speaker 1: you know. They had unparticles and they had on resonances
24:41
Speaker 1: and unmatter and un protons. Basically they attacked an unto
24:45
Speaker 1: everything and everybody got a paper out of it. It
24:48
Speaker 1: was like the I mac and iPad of the nineties.
24:52
Speaker 1: Crazy exactly, the I particle. All right, well, what's the
24:56
Speaker 1: basic idea? Is it like like a field that can
25:00
Speaker 1: wiggle in any way, it doesn't have to wiggle and
25:02
Speaker 1: little clumps. Yeah, exactly. And these are still quantum fields,
25:06
Speaker 1: and so they should still have discrete units of energy
25:09
Speaker 1: in them, and so you still have blobs of energy
25:12
Speaker 1: that move around in the field. But you can't call
25:14
Speaker 1: them particles because they don't have definite masses. Like all
25:18
Speaker 1: the particles are we familiar with. We don't really know
25:20
Speaker 1: what a particle is. But one thing we do know
25:22
Speaker 1: is that particles all have the same mass. Like an
25:24
Speaker 1: electron here is an electron there. Every electron has exactly
25:28
Speaker 1: the same mass, and that's sort of like the identity
25:31
Speaker 1: of the electron. So what makes the electron different, for example,
25:34
Speaker 1: from the muan, which is very closely related but has
25:37
Speaker 1: more mass. It's what makes the up and the charm
25:39
Speaker 1: and the top corks different, that they have different masses.
25:43
Speaker 1: And so for particles they have a fixed mass. That's
25:45
Speaker 1: something everybody can agree on. These unparticles, they are little
25:50
Speaker 1: wiggles in some new field that they don't have a
25:52
Speaker 1: definite mass. You can have one of any mass, and
25:55
Speaker 1: the mass of an individual one of these unparticles can
25:59
Speaker 1: change as it was around And is that theoretically possible?
26:03
Speaker 1: Like does it work with the math? Like can you
26:05
Speaker 1: make us such a feel that has varying anything and
26:09
Speaker 1: still sort of fit or play with the other fields
26:13
Speaker 1: in your physics equations? Yeah, and that's what they got
26:16
Speaker 1: so excited about because Howard georgia I sort of figured
26:18
Speaker 1: out the fundamental theoretical basis for this. He put together
26:21
Speaker 1: a field that exactly had those properties that had either
26:25
Speaker 1: particles with varying mass or you can also think about
26:28
Speaker 1: it as like particles with all possible masses, like a
26:31
Speaker 1: spectrum of masses instead of having discrete masses like this
26:34
Speaker 1: number and that number have a whole different set of masses.
26:38
Speaker 1: And so yeah, he figured out like the fundamental theoretical
26:41
Speaker 1: mechanics of how to make that work, how to do
26:43
Speaker 1: the calculations, and think about like, well, can unparticles interact
26:47
Speaker 1: with particles? What does that look like? What does the
26:49
Speaker 1: force look like where it's admitted by a particle and
26:52
Speaker 1: then absorbed by an unparticle. And so he sort of
26:55
Speaker 1: laid the groundwork, and everybody else went off scurrying to
26:58
Speaker 1: follow up on it and build other ideas on top
27:00
Speaker 1: of it. Everyone's like, Wow, that's unbelievable. But you know,
27:05
Speaker 1: I guess it's sort of almost feels like a more
27:08
Speaker 1: natural idea. Like when I think of a field or
27:11
Speaker 1: a field of energy, it sort of makes sense that
27:13
Speaker 1: it can wiggle anyway at once, it can have any value.
27:16
Speaker 1: It's almost like the weird part is that regular quantum
27:20
Speaker 1: fields behave with particles. Why would feel that premious? The
27:24
Speaker 1: entire universe be constrained to only have, you know, bumps
27:28
Speaker 1: that look like electrons, and all of them should look
27:30
Speaker 1: the same. Why couldn't you have electrons of different masses? Yeah? Absolutely.
27:34
Speaker 1: I got two things to say to that. One is,
27:37
Speaker 1: I totally agree particles are a weird idea, And I imagine,
27:40
Speaker 1: you know, what was it like when Democratus proposed that
27:43
Speaker 1: the universe was made out of Adams thousands of years ago.
27:47
Speaker 1: Did the Greeks hear that idea and they think that's bonkers, man,
27:50
Speaker 1: that's ridiculous and just sort of discarded because it seems
27:52
Speaker 1: so weird and so counter to their experience. Right, And
27:56
Speaker 1: so you're right, particles are weird. But the second thing
27:59
Speaker 1: I have to say to that is that the universe
28:01
Speaker 1: is weird. Right. A lot of times we've discovered things
28:04
Speaker 1: in the universe that don't make sense to us, that
28:05
Speaker 1: don't seem natural. We shouldn't just be on the lookout
28:08
Speaker 1: for natural solutions to our questions, because the reason we're
28:12
Speaker 1: doing sciences have a rigorous way to figure out what
28:15
Speaker 1: the actual answers are, regardless of whether they're what we
28:18
Speaker 1: expected or even really know how to understand. So we've
28:21
Speaker 1: got to open our minds all sorts of different kinds
28:23
Speaker 1: of ideas. It might be particles, it might be unparticles,
28:26
Speaker 1: it might be something totally different. Are you saying the
28:29
Speaker 1: universe is unnatural? It's unexpected on universe that would be
28:34
Speaker 1: too unun in one word, the universe exactly that cancels
28:39
Speaker 1: out to just the verse Yeah, we're dropping verses here,
28:43
Speaker 1: folks were freestyle and physics, right, we are the eminem
28:47
Speaker 1: of physics here the d n J and yeah, so
28:51
Speaker 1: we had this new theoretical tool and nobody really understood, like, well,
28:55
Speaker 1: what does it mean and what would it be like?
28:57
Speaker 1: Can we figure out if these things are real? And
29:00
Speaker 1: so then it sort of moved over to the experimental
29:02
Speaker 1: side of the question. People started trying to play with like, well,
29:04
Speaker 1: how would we find these things? What would they look like?
29:07
Speaker 1: I can isolate them with experiments, and so that was
29:10
Speaker 1: a lot of fun to think about. All right, well,
29:12
Speaker 1: let's get into this idea of a particle matter and
29:16
Speaker 1: whether or not it can even exist and whether we
29:19
Speaker 1: have even any evidence that it can or does exist.
29:23
Speaker 1: But first let's take another quick break. All right, we're
29:38
Speaker 1: talking about matter that is not made out of particles.
29:41
Speaker 1: Is that even possible? Could you have matter out their
29:44
Speaker 1: fields of energy that can take any former shape or
29:48
Speaker 1: any level of matterness? And if it even exists, Daniel,
29:54
Speaker 1: does it even exist? We have any clues about whether
29:57
Speaker 1: it exists or how could we even look for matter
29:59
Speaker 1: that doesn't looked like particles? Yeah, we don't have a
30:01
Speaker 1: lot of clues that it does exist, except that we
30:04
Speaker 1: have a big unsolved mystery, right, And that's what a
30:08
Speaker 1: lot of our listeners were referring to in the questions
30:10
Speaker 1: on the street, and that's this question of dark matter.
30:14
Speaker 1: You know, we know that the matter we've been studying
30:17
Speaker 1: for hundreds of years is made out of particles, and
30:19
Speaker 1: it's very well explained in terms of particles. And so
30:22
Speaker 1: this particle picture of the universe has been sort of
30:24
Speaker 1: like transcendent. It's like taken over the way we think
30:27
Speaker 1: about physics and the universe and everything. But remember that
30:30
Speaker 1: it just describes the tiny little slice of the pie.
30:34
Speaker 1: And we've made this mistake many times in the history
30:37
Speaker 1: of science of over generalizing, of understanding one thing and
30:40
Speaker 1: then assuming that everything is the same way. I mean,
30:43
Speaker 1: even the original discovery of particles that happened. Remember J. J. Thompson.
30:47
Speaker 1: He discovered the electron and he thought, oh, well, maybe
30:49
Speaker 1: this is the only particle. Maybe everything is just made
30:52
Speaker 1: out of electrons. And that seems ridiculous to us. Now
30:55
Speaker 1: we know there's lots of particles, and now I'll have
30:57
Speaker 1: to come together. But that was just an example of
30:59
Speaker 1: over general line thing. And it's the same over generalization
31:02
Speaker 1: to say, look, we have all these particles. They describe
31:04
Speaker 1: five percent of the universe. Maybe they describe everything. It
31:07
Speaker 1: just seems like a really sort of leveraged bet. And
31:10
Speaker 1: the other chunk of the universe is dark matter. We've
31:13
Speaker 1: tried to describe in terms of particles and figure out
31:16
Speaker 1: what that particle is, but so far we've failed over
31:19
Speaker 1: and over and over and over again. We're well past
31:22
Speaker 1: the point where we thought we would figure out what
31:24
Speaker 1: the dark matter particle would be. So it's a good
31:27
Speaker 1: idea to think about other kind of matter that dark
31:29
Speaker 1: matter might be. Yeah, I guess there's a whole bunch
31:33
Speaker 1: of matter out there in the universe that doesn't seem
31:35
Speaker 1: to play with our kind of matter. So is that
31:37
Speaker 1: sort of a clue. Does the theory sort of suggested?
31:40
Speaker 1: Maybe a reason that we haven't seen it with our
31:42
Speaker 1: particles is the fact that it's not made out of particles. Yeah, exactly.
31:46
Speaker 1: That is definitely one explanation, and you know, we shouldn't
31:48
Speaker 1: poop on it too much. Like there is a theory
31:51
Speaker 1: of dark matter made out of particles, which still works.
31:54
Speaker 1: It makes sense and and it's very well tested, but
31:57
Speaker 1: we haven't found that particle. Yet and remember what we
32:00
Speaker 1: know about dark matter. We know that there's a lot
32:02
Speaker 1: of it, right of the matter in the universe and
32:06
Speaker 1: all the energy and the universe is dark matter. So
32:09
Speaker 1: we know that it creates gravity, and it holds galaxies together,
32:13
Speaker 1: and it's shaped the whole structure and formation of the
32:16
Speaker 1: shape of the universe. We also know a lot about
32:18
Speaker 1: like it's temperature. We know that it flows through the universe,
32:21
Speaker 1: but it's not moving really really fast because I would
32:24
Speaker 1: change the whole structure of the universe if it flowed
32:26
Speaker 1: around and got really smooth. And we know that it
32:29
Speaker 1: sort of acts like this fluid. It's like a fluid
32:31
Speaker 1: with no pressure, with no viscosity, because we think it
32:34
Speaker 1: doesn't like bump into itself. So we have this picture
32:37
Speaker 1: which explains everything we see if dark matter was made
32:41
Speaker 1: out of a massive little particle. But we can't seem
32:44
Speaker 1: to find that particle. We keep doing experiments looking for
32:47
Speaker 1: that particle, you know, experiments like waiting for dark matter
32:51
Speaker 1: to bump into a big, heavy, quiet blob of xenon underground,
32:56
Speaker 1: or creating dark matter and colliders, or waiting for dark
32:59
Speaker 1: matter to mash into itself and give off a tiny
33:01
Speaker 1: little flash of light, and we haven't ever seen any
33:04
Speaker 1: of those things. And all the theories we had about
33:07
Speaker 1: this dark matter particle, a lot of them predicted we
33:09
Speaker 1: would have seen it by now. So we're sort of
33:12
Speaker 1: trying to get more creative about the kind of particle
33:14
Speaker 1: it could be that explains all this stuff and all
33:17
Speaker 1: hangs together. But a definitely an important idea to keep
33:20
Speaker 1: considering is that maybe it's not a particle at all, right,
33:23
Speaker 1: but maybe you know, just because we haven't seen it
33:26
Speaker 1: or interactive with it, doesn't mean that it's not made
33:29
Speaker 1: out of particles, right like it, it could be a particle.
33:31
Speaker 1: It's just a particle that doesn't like our kind of
33:34
Speaker 1: particle or that doesn't field all the other forces. Absolutely,
33:37
Speaker 1: it's still very much could be a particle. It could
33:40
Speaker 1: just be a particle that feels and no other forces
33:43
Speaker 1: other than gravity and so basically just ignores us. You know,
33:46
Speaker 1: we have this great question on the podcast last week
33:48
Speaker 1: or so, somebody said, what would you do if you
33:50
Speaker 1: had a box of dark matter? And I said, you know,
33:52
Speaker 1: I would shoot particles at it because I would want
33:54
Speaker 1: to see do those particles bounce back at all? And Essentially,
33:57
Speaker 1: that's the way of trying to like probe it, trying
33:59
Speaker 1: to like zoom me in on what it is. Because
34:01
Speaker 1: shooting tiny particles that's something is sort of like using
34:04
Speaker 1: a microscope to study it. That's what the most powerful
34:07
Speaker 1: microscopes are anyway. They're like scanning electron microscopes. They shoot
34:12
Speaker 1: little beams of particles. It's something to try to understand
34:15
Speaker 1: the shape of its surface based on how things bounce
34:17
Speaker 1: off of it. And that's how the original particles were discovered, right, Like,
34:20
Speaker 1: how did we figure out that matter had nuclei in it?
34:24
Speaker 1: Rutherford shot particles at something and saw that occasionally they
34:27
Speaker 1: bounced back. So that's how you sort of like zoom
34:29
Speaker 1: in on something and understand its nature. So we're trying
34:33
Speaker 1: to do that with dark matter, but we haven't sort
34:34
Speaker 1: of found anything that bounces back. It hasn't interacted with
34:38
Speaker 1: our particles yet. But yeah, it could still just be
34:41
Speaker 1: sort of a snobbish particle that ignores all of our particles.
34:45
Speaker 1: In your theory, Daniel, that's not particle. Maybe it just
34:49
Speaker 1: doesn't want to interact because the pandemic, you know, it's
34:51
Speaker 1: just following good social distancing. Socially responsible particle. Yeah, but
34:57
Speaker 1: the other explanation is that maybe it's not made out
35:00
Speaker 1: of particles. And the reason that you know, this imagined
35:03
Speaker 1: experiment where you're shooting a beam of particles at a
35:05
Speaker 1: blob of dark matter, the reason that you don't see
35:08
Speaker 1: anything is because it's made out of this field. Dark
35:11
Speaker 1: matter is made out of this field of unparticles, and
35:14
Speaker 1: so there aren't like these discrete units, these lego bricks,
35:17
Speaker 1: which if you shoot particles at the right energy you
35:20
Speaker 1: sort of find the gaps between them, because in the
35:23
Speaker 1: un particle field, there are no gaps between them. There's
35:25
Speaker 1: like an infinite number of kinds of unparticles in there,
35:29
Speaker 1: all with different masses and sort of like filling it
35:31
Speaker 1: up and to make a sort of a smooth, continuous
35:34
Speaker 1: shape that you can't probe using particles. Wait, so how
35:36
Speaker 1: would dark matter being not made out of particles explain
35:40
Speaker 1: why we can't interact with it? Like, wouldn't there still
35:43
Speaker 1: be energy and mass there for our particles to bump into.
35:48
Speaker 1: Or are you saying that it's kind of like it
35:50
Speaker 1: could be there and there could be energy and mass,
35:52
Speaker 1: but it's so kind of spread out and smooth that
35:56
Speaker 1: our particles don't really know what to do with it. Yeah,
35:58
Speaker 1: it has to do with the other interaction that this
36:00
Speaker 1: stuff has. Because remember, while dark matter has energy and
36:03
Speaker 1: mass and so it feels gravity, that's basically something that's
36:06
Speaker 1: negligible of the particle level, Like the gravitational pull of
36:10
Speaker 1: dark matter on any particle is basically zero. And because
36:13
Speaker 1: particles have such small masses and gravity is so weak
36:17
Speaker 1: that we can't even understand like the gravitational effect on
36:19
Speaker 1: a single particle. And also we don't even have a
36:22
Speaker 1: theory of gravity that works for particles. Our theory of
36:25
Speaker 1: gravity only works for sort of like larger objects. We
36:27
Speaker 1: have no quantum theory of gravity, so you can't really
36:30
Speaker 1: interact with dark matter on the particle level using gravity,
36:34
Speaker 1: which is the only way we know how to interact
36:36
Speaker 1: with dark matter. So all of these studies where we're
36:38
Speaker 1: trying to probe the nature of dark matter are assuming
36:41
Speaker 1: or hoping that there's some other kind of interaction, there's
36:44
Speaker 1: some new interaction between the particles were shooting at the
36:47
Speaker 1: dark matter and the dark matter itself. And so if
36:51
Speaker 1: that's not true, if there's no interaction, that doesn't really matter.
36:53
Speaker 1: If it's particles or unparticles or zoom particles or zim particles.
36:57
Speaker 1: You just can't probe it using particles if it doesn't
37:00
Speaker 1: interact with those particles at all. So it's kind of
37:03
Speaker 1: two things. That could be an unparticle and it could
37:05
Speaker 1: also separately just be ignoring us. There's almost like two
37:10
Speaker 1: problems there, yeah, exactly, and we we sort of set
37:12
Speaker 1: aside the is it just ignoring us one because if
37:14
Speaker 1: that's the case, the whole field is hopeless. Like if
37:17
Speaker 1: dark matter is something new particle or un that just
37:21
Speaker 1: has no interactions with us other than gravity, will never
37:24
Speaker 1: really figure out what it's made out of because gravity
37:27
Speaker 1: is just so weak it's so difficult to use as
37:29
Speaker 1: an instrumental tool to understand what dark matter is made
37:32
Speaker 1: out of that this question of like what dark matter
37:35
Speaker 1: is made out of is basically hopeless. So we sort
37:37
Speaker 1: of set that aside because it's impossible, and we say,
37:39
Speaker 1: let's assume dark matter has some kind of way to
37:42
Speaker 1: interact with us, and let's try to look forward that
37:45
Speaker 1: way to interact and then use that to figure out
37:47
Speaker 1: is it made out of this kind of particle or
37:49
Speaker 1: that kind of particle or an unparticle. Well, I feel
37:53
Speaker 1: like maybe you're sort of saying that maybe there's stuff
37:55
Speaker 1: out there that could just be like pure energy almost right,
37:59
Speaker 1: because energy also sort of has mass, right, energy is mass?
38:04
Speaker 1: Energy does bend space like mass does. And are you
38:07
Speaker 1: saying that maybe this on particle matter is basically just
38:11
Speaker 1: like a buzz of energy or localized energy. Yeah, exactly,
38:14
Speaker 1: It's more smooth and continuous than localized. If you like
38:17
Speaker 1: to think about particles, you can imagine as made out
38:20
Speaker 1: of lots of particles, all of different sizes, and so
38:23
Speaker 1: that no matter how you zoom in, it always sort
38:25
Speaker 1: of looks the same. But you can't really like break
38:28
Speaker 1: off a piece and say here, I have one of them, right,
38:31
Speaker 1: The mass of the particles themselves sort of always changing,
38:34
Speaker 1: and so yeah, it could be that dark matter is
38:36
Speaker 1: made out of this new, weird kind of stuff that
38:38
Speaker 1: can't be broken off into these separate lego pieces, but
38:41
Speaker 1: instead is made out of these like weird kinds of
38:44
Speaker 1: bits of stuff that are constantly changing what their mass is. Wow,
38:49
Speaker 1: it's undecided. It's difficult to grapple with. And I can't
38:53
Speaker 1: tell if that's because we've spend so much time thinking
38:56
Speaker 1: about the universe has made of particles that it's hard
38:58
Speaker 1: to think about something made of anything different, or if
39:02
Speaker 1: it's just because it's difficult to think about mathematically cool,
39:05
Speaker 1: Well all right, well, so where is the field right now?
39:08
Speaker 1: Like you said, it was popular back in the early
39:11
Speaker 1: two thousand's and there was a lot of buzz and
39:14
Speaker 1: a lot of people were blown away. But where is
39:16
Speaker 1: it now? Do we have any progress or results? I
39:19
Speaker 1: guess you could say we have some un results. People
39:21
Speaker 1: have figured out how unparticles could be made in colliders.
39:25
Speaker 1: So you smash two protons together, and if those protons
39:29
Speaker 1: have some interaction with this unparticle field, then it could
39:33
Speaker 1: deposit some of that energy into that field. And you know,
39:36
Speaker 1: particle colliders were used to making new particles. In this case,
39:39
Speaker 1: we'd be depositing the energy into the unparticle field. Make
39:42
Speaker 1: this like you know, localized blob of stuff which you
39:45
Speaker 1: can't call a particle, but you might still sort of
39:48
Speaker 1: get a clue that it exists in our detector in
39:52
Speaker 1: the same way that you can see invisible stuff in
39:54
Speaker 1: our detector. Because it bounces off of visible stuff. You
39:57
Speaker 1: might like create some particle and some un particles and
40:01
Speaker 1: they shoot off in opposite directions, and by seeing the particles,
40:04
Speaker 1: you can infer by a conservation of momentum that the
40:07
Speaker 1: particles must have been there. So people figured out a
40:10
Speaker 1: way that this could be produced in colliders and you
40:13
Speaker 1: might be able to get a clue that it had happened,
40:15
Speaker 1: even if you can't see the unparticles directly. And we
40:18
Speaker 1: looked for them and we didn't see them, so so
40:21
Speaker 1: far there's no experimental evidence that particles are a thing
40:24
Speaker 1: or that they exist at all. And theoretically the field
40:28
Speaker 1: sort of moved on. There was this like big flurry
40:30
Speaker 1: of papers in two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight,
40:32
Speaker 1: two thousand nine, and then everybody sort of got tired
40:35
Speaker 1: of the idea and they moved on to some new idea,
40:38
Speaker 1: and there haven't really been a lot of papers about
40:39
Speaker 1: it recently. I guess you would expect to see it
40:42
Speaker 1: in a collider, like if you collide to particles and
40:45
Speaker 1: some energy just kind of magically disappears, right or like
40:49
Speaker 1: you know, if energy disappeared in varying quantities, because I
40:53
Speaker 1: think right now, when you smash particles you always get
40:56
Speaker 1: kind of these discrete or you can account for everything,
40:59
Speaker 1: and everything seems to fall into these neat boxes. But
41:02
Speaker 1: if you found it, you know, energy sort of disappeared
41:05
Speaker 1: at weird grates, then you may be like, oh, maybe
41:07
Speaker 1: there is a field out there that can absorb these
41:10
Speaker 1: varying energies. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so we're looking
41:14
Speaker 1: for is something out there which is invisible, right, but
41:17
Speaker 1: absorbs our energies to the energies you say, seems to disappear,
41:20
Speaker 1: and it would operate differently from other fields that we
41:23
Speaker 1: know about their invisible, like neutrinos or or other things
41:26
Speaker 1: where we know energy can disappear into because as you say,
41:29
Speaker 1: those are particles and so they're discrete in a certain way,
41:32
Speaker 1: and sort of the statistical spectrum of what these results
41:34
Speaker 1: would look like is different for un particles and for neutrinos,
41:38
Speaker 1: just for that reason. All right, Well, it sounds like
41:42
Speaker 1: we have no evidence for un particle matter, but we
41:46
Speaker 1: can completely rule it out yet, right, that's right, we
41:48
Speaker 1: can't completely rule it out. And I think theoretically it's
41:51
Speaker 1: a great exercise. It's the kind of thing we should
41:53
Speaker 1: be doing, stretching our minds and making sure that we're
41:56
Speaker 1: not too focused on one sort of category of ideas.
41:59
Speaker 1: It could be that we look back on physics and
42:01
Speaker 1: a hundred years and say, man, those guys spend a
42:04
Speaker 1: lot of time going down, you know, a wild goose
42:06
Speaker 1: chase and looking for the wrong thing before somebody sort
42:09
Speaker 1: of pulled their head out of the stand and said,
42:10
Speaker 1: hold on a second, what about this other idea we
42:13
Speaker 1: haven't thought about in a couple hundred years. Has anybody
42:15
Speaker 1: really worked on that? Yeah, but that's kind of how
42:17
Speaker 1: science works, right, Like you have to you know, follow
42:21
Speaker 1: your gut for a while, sometimes in one direction, before
42:24
Speaker 1: you either find out that it's a dead end or
42:26
Speaker 1: that you were onto the right thing. Yeah. Absolutely, And
42:29
Speaker 1: that's why sort of at the highest level, science needs
42:31
Speaker 1: to have diversity of ideas. You know, we need people
42:34
Speaker 1: following the hottest, sexiest, best idea we have so far,
42:37
Speaker 1: but we also need people nurturing crazy ideas, stuff of
42:41
Speaker 1: the fringe, stuff which might eventually become something mainstream and
42:45
Speaker 1: really useful, but today is sort of like, I don't know,
42:48
Speaker 1: what does that really work? And so that's why it's
42:50
Speaker 1: important to sort of have breadth in our ideas as
42:52
Speaker 1: well as depth of exploration. Yeah, well my money is
42:56
Speaker 1: still on sucks Daniel, Although I have a new theory
43:00
Speaker 1: on socks or non socks. Socks. Yeah, next time I
43:04
Speaker 1: tell my kids to put socks on, they're gonna say,
43:06
Speaker 1: I'm already wearing in socks. What do you need? There?
43:09
Speaker 1: You go, it's the original sock. All right. Well, that
43:13
Speaker 1: was pretty interesting and it sort of makes you question
43:17
Speaker 1: the nature of matter in existence itself, you know, like
43:20
Speaker 1: what we think of as things we know and what
43:23
Speaker 1: we know what they're made out of, could not be
43:25
Speaker 1: true for maybe the rest of the universe. We are
43:27
Speaker 1: still just in a small corner of it. Yeah, And
43:30
Speaker 1: that's the exciting thing about exploring the universe is the
43:32
Speaker 1: surprises is discovering the universe works differently from the way
43:36
Speaker 1: you expected that. There's a whole new way of thinking
43:39
Speaker 1: about the very nature of matter and how the universe
43:41
Speaker 1: is put together. That's in our future. Maybe it's five
43:45
Speaker 1: years from now, maybe it's fifty years from now, but
43:47
Speaker 1: eventually we will figure this out and we'll have a
43:49
Speaker 1: new way of thinking about our place in the universe.
43:52
Speaker 1: It's like many people who don't wear socks, You're like, what,
43:54
Speaker 1: how's that even possible? Don't your shoes smell after a while?
43:59
Speaker 1: Who knows. Yeah, we're in southern California, sandal wearing people.
44:02
Speaker 1: We don't even buy socks. You go all right, Well,
44:07
Speaker 1: thanks for joining us. We hope you enjoyed that. See
44:10
Speaker 1: you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel
44:20
Speaker 1: and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I
44:23
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Or more podcast from my heart Radio, visit
44:27
Speaker 1: the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
44:30
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows.