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How quarks were discovered? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:08
Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, tell me a good physics story. Oh you
0:11
Speaker 1: came to the right place. Okay, but don't tell me
0:13
Speaker 1: you said a story about amazing physics. I want something
0:15
Speaker 1: with drama, because like the universe isn't dramatic enough for you.
0:19
Speaker 1: I mean I want a story with like intrigue and
0:22
Speaker 1: sabotage and conflict and you know, people fighting and you know, revolutions. Oh,
0:27
Speaker 1: I see you want like Jason Bourne in a lab coat. Yeah,
0:30
Speaker 1: you know, don't you look like Matt Damon or Tom Cruise.
0:33
Speaker 1: You can make a movie called Thesis Impossible. All right,
0:37
Speaker 1: you asked for it. I have got a juicy story
0:39
Speaker 1: for you. Hi, I am more handmad cartoonist and the
0:58
Speaker 1: creator of PhD comment. Hi, I'm Daniel Whitson. I'm a
1:02
Speaker 1: particle physicist, and I like to imagine that my dramatic
1:04
Speaker 1: life would be well adapted to a telenovelt with a
1:07
Speaker 1: lot of twists and turns and evil twins. Twin particles.
1:11
Speaker 1: I guess there are twin particles and physics, there are
1:13
Speaker 1: twin that we don't know which ones are good and
1:15
Speaker 1: which ones we could be the evil twins, that's right,
1:18
Speaker 1: And lots of dramatic revelations that your advisor has other
1:22
Speaker 1: grad students you didn't even know about. Well, Welcome to
1:28
Speaker 1: our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explained the Universe, a production
1:31
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio, in which we take you on
1:33
Speaker 1: a tour of all the drama in the universe, the
1:36
Speaker 1: black holes, the neutron stars, that tiny particles, the discovery
1:40
Speaker 1: of those particles, and try to make you understand what
1:43
Speaker 1: scientists are thinking about, what people on the very forefront
1:47
Speaker 1: of human understanding are puzzling over today. Yeah, because we
1:50
Speaker 1: like to talk about all the amazing things out there
1:53
Speaker 1: to discover and all the things that we have discovered,
1:55
Speaker 1: and sometimes we like to talk about how we discovered
1:58
Speaker 1: these things, because you know, sometimes the store is pretty
2:01
Speaker 1: dramatic or you know, interesting, or tells us a little
2:04
Speaker 1: bit about how signs were. That's right, because you can
2:06
Speaker 1: look back at history and say, oh, if I had
2:08
Speaker 1: been around, I would have discovered the electron. Or it's
2:11
Speaker 1: pretty simple actually to figure out what the photon is,
2:13
Speaker 1: and it's a quantum mechanical object. But when you're standing there,
2:17
Speaker 1: I think you might be alone there, then yeah, I
2:20
Speaker 1: would sit around thinking, you know, I could have discovered
2:22
Speaker 1: the electronic Hey, Einstein when the Nobel Prize for interpreting
2:25
Speaker 1: other people's experiments that were already published. It's like, you know,
2:29
Speaker 1: sit around for an afternoon, read some papers, boom, Nobel Prize,
2:32
Speaker 1: Noel change the course of history. So if you know
2:35
Speaker 1: how to do it, if you know where to go,
2:37
Speaker 1: it's pretty straightforward. But when you're standing at the forefront
2:40
Speaker 1: of human ignorance and you don't know what the solution is,
2:42
Speaker 1: it's much more complicated. So I think it's really worthwhile
2:45
Speaker 1: rewinding our understanding and remembering, like what were people thinking
2:48
Speaker 1: at the moment, What were the questions they were asking,
2:51
Speaker 1: what was confusing, what was simple? What were the ideas
2:54
Speaker 1: of the time. I think what you're saying, Daniel, is
2:56
Speaker 1: that there's a fine line between a thought experiment and
3:00
Speaker 1: just making stuff that's right. And that's why I prefer
3:04
Speaker 1: to do real experiments in the collider and actually ask
3:07
Speaker 1: nature questions. All right, Well, today on the program will
3:10
Speaker 1: be continuing our series about how particles weren't discovered? You know,
3:14
Speaker 1: particles and things that matter and all the things in
3:16
Speaker 1: the universe are made out of How did we actually
3:19
Speaker 1: discover these things and know that they existed and know
3:21
Speaker 1: what they look like, and know how much they weigh
3:24
Speaker 1: and what they would like to wear in the morning.
3:27
Speaker 1: I don't even know how to respond to did that.
3:29
Speaker 1: I'm imagining a photon getting dressed or something. But but
3:32
Speaker 1: I think this is really fascinating because currently we have
3:35
Speaker 1: fantastic theoretical understanding of all the particles, how they fit together,
3:39
Speaker 1: what they are, and of course lots of outstanding questions.
3:42
Speaker 1: But there's a wonderful history there. Each particle is like
3:45
Speaker 1: a hard fought victory. Each one was like, how do
3:48
Speaker 1: we figure out that this particle is also there? And
3:51
Speaker 1: you know, in the end, our theory has to describe experiments.
3:54
Speaker 1: We've developed a theory in order to describe all the
3:57
Speaker 1: crazy experiments that we've seen that review of the existence
4:00
Speaker 1: of those partners. So it's a lot of fun to
4:03
Speaker 1: to sort of reimagine and understand how each one was discovered,
4:06
Speaker 1: because you know, I think that looking at history now
4:09
Speaker 1: and looking at it science now, it's kind of hard
4:10
Speaker 1: to believe sometimes that there was a time where we
4:13
Speaker 1: didn't know anything. We didn't know any of these things.
4:15
Speaker 1: We didn't know that electronic existed, or protons existent, or
4:18
Speaker 1: protons existed, or what they wore in the morning, and
4:21
Speaker 1: so it's it's kind of interesting to kind of put
4:23
Speaker 1: yourself in the mindset of the people who didn't know anything,
4:26
Speaker 1: but they discovered what actually reality is like absolutely, And
4:30
Speaker 1: it gives you another fun exercise, which is to imagine
4:33
Speaker 1: somebody in a hundred years, how would they look back
4:36
Speaker 1: at what we know now. They will have hopefully a
4:39
Speaker 1: grasp of, you know, the shape, the size of the
4:41
Speaker 1: universe and why it's accelerating, and maybe what the smallest
4:44
Speaker 1: particles are, and they'll look back at us and they'll
4:46
Speaker 1: be like, oh my gosh, those guys knew nothing about
4:48
Speaker 1: the universe. How did they even go to work? They
4:50
Speaker 1: were making stuff off on podcasts? And I like to
4:55
Speaker 1: think of, you know, human knowledge is one of these
4:57
Speaker 1: exponentially growing graphs, and at every point it seems like,
4:59
Speaker 1: why we know a hundred times what we knew fifty
5:02
Speaker 1: years ago, and then in fifty years we will again
5:05
Speaker 1: dwarf human knowledge. So I'm looking forward to that. Yeah,
5:08
Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to being dwarfed. There are positive exponential graphs,
5:11
Speaker 1: not just negative ones. So we've done this podcast episode
5:15
Speaker 1: on electrons and positrons and photons and muons, and so
5:20
Speaker 1: did they. On the program, we'll be asking the question
5:27
Speaker 1: our quarks discovered. Is this a quirky story, Daniel? You know,
5:31
Speaker 1: this is one of the most dramatic stories in all
5:34
Speaker 1: of particle physics. There really are crazy things in these stories.
5:38
Speaker 1: You know. There is sabotage, There are competing public announcements,
5:42
Speaker 1: There are arguments about how to name particles. There are
5:45
Speaker 1: stories about leaked information being slipped from one experiment to
5:49
Speaker 1: the other. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. No, there is real drama.
5:54
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm waiting for the six episode mini series
5:58
Speaker 1: on Netflix about this. Said of the murder explosions, Now
6:03
Speaker 1: we didn't get that far. That's right, Tiger Kings becomes
6:07
Speaker 1: particle kings. Oh, I see, like the true crime. That
6:12
Speaker 1: could be the new genre of Netflix true physics. But
6:16
Speaker 1: as usually, we were wondering how many people out there
6:19
Speaker 1: know the story of how courts were invented because you know,
6:23
Speaker 1: quarks and just a quick recap, there are the mini particles, Dad,
6:27
Speaker 1: everything else is kind of made out of most of
6:29
Speaker 1: everything else, protons and neutrons are made out of quarks,
6:32
Speaker 1: and so these are pretty fundamental particles, right, Daniel. They're
6:35
Speaker 1: not just like you know some novelty butts, right, They're
6:37
Speaker 1: not just some random thing you pick up in the
6:39
Speaker 1: store on the way home and then throw away unused.
6:42
Speaker 1: There are the things that make up me and you.
6:45
Speaker 1: I am made out of atoms, and those atoms have
6:47
Speaker 1: neutrons and protons at the center, and all those neutrons
6:50
Speaker 1: and protons are made of quarks. And all the matter
6:53
Speaker 1: that you've ever tasted and touched and tripped over or
6:57
Speaker 1: thrown at each other is made of quarks and electrons.
6:59
Speaker 1: So they're pretty important. So, as Daniel does, he went
7:02
Speaker 1: out into the streets and ask people if they knew
7:04
Speaker 1: how corks were discovered. Now, as usually, we'll think about
7:07
Speaker 1: it for a second, then put yourself a hundred years ago,
7:10
Speaker 1: and as yourself if you know how corks were discovered.
7:13
Speaker 1: Here's what people had to say. Some scientists in the
7:17
Speaker 1: colder found it. Uh. I don't actually don't know how
7:21
Speaker 1: they were discovered. You know, I've been learned about that.
7:25
Speaker 1: Was it m colectron cloud chamber or something. No, that's
7:29
Speaker 1: not the quirks. That's for something else, that's like positrons
7:32
Speaker 1: or something using a particle accelerator. I don't know all right,
7:37
Speaker 1: that's cool. I don't even know what they are, so
7:40
Speaker 1: I just discovered by the inclusion of items. I mean much,
7:46
Speaker 1: I don't I don't remember the name of the machine,
7:48
Speaker 1: but this clusion of particles, all right. Not a lot
7:51
Speaker 1: of deep knowledge of history of physics in the public, No,
7:54
Speaker 1: not so much. There's some pretty good answers here, like
7:57
Speaker 1: the guy who knows how positive arms were discus were
8:00
Speaker 1: in cloud chambers. And you know, people giving credit to
8:04
Speaker 1: the Hadron collider, which is, you know, not too far
8:06
Speaker 1: off the certainly we're discovered in collisions. Interesting, so you know,
8:10
Speaker 1: some knowledges. It seems like some people thought of courts
8:13
Speaker 1: were discovered recently, like the LHC. You know, this thing
8:16
Speaker 1: is twenty years old, tops and the quarks we've known
8:19
Speaker 1: about since the sixties and seventies, so it definitely was
8:21
Speaker 1: not the large Hadron Collider responsible for discovering corks. And
8:25
Speaker 1: I'm just curious here, how did you get these questions?
8:27
Speaker 1: Did you go out into the street before the pandemic
8:29
Speaker 1: or or during the pandemic? Do you have now like
8:31
Speaker 1: a six foot selfie stick with a microphone? I, shockingly,
8:36
Speaker 1: I actually work on these things kind of far in
8:38
Speaker 1: advance so that I'm prepared for a PANDAMA. I have
8:41
Speaker 1: a stockpile of questions. I have asked people on the street.
8:44
Speaker 1: I see you have a federal stockpile, the National Strategic Reserve,
8:48
Speaker 1: A random questions. All right, good, So people were still
8:52
Speaker 1: feeling optimistic about signs. All right, it seems like not
8:54
Speaker 1: a lot of people know the stories, and you're saying
8:56
Speaker 1: that it's full of drama and interesting twist and turns.
8:59
Speaker 1: So tell us story, Daniel said the scene. What was
9:01
Speaker 1: it like back then? And what year are we talking about?
9:03
Speaker 1: So let me take you back to seven, A dramatic world,
9:09
Speaker 1: A cold winter blew into Chicago. Now you have to
9:13
Speaker 1: sort of rewind back to before the clues were found
9:16
Speaker 1: for quarks, and back in seven, we actually had a
9:19
Speaker 1: pretty clear picture we thought of how the universe looked.
9:23
Speaker 1: We felt like we knew things were mandat of Adams
9:26
Speaker 1: and Adams were manat of some bits inside. Yeah, we
9:29
Speaker 1: knew there were atoms, and we knew those atoms had
9:31
Speaker 1: protons and neutrons and electrons. We also knew they were photons.
9:35
Speaker 1: And we felt like, hey, that's a pretty good picture
9:37
Speaker 1: of the universe. And I think a lot of people
9:39
Speaker 1: in physics felt like that might be it, Like maybe
9:42
Speaker 1: you know, we're coming up to the last end of
9:44
Speaker 1: the road and we're gonna answer all the questions, and
9:46
Speaker 1: that's going to give us a sort of last sense
9:49
Speaker 1: for what the universe has meant. There can't be anything
9:51
Speaker 1: smaller than these particles. These are it. These are the
9:54
Speaker 1: basic building blocks of life, the universe and everything in it.
9:57
Speaker 1: That's right, But of course there were a few lo threads, right,
10:01
Speaker 1: There are a few things which didn't quite fit into
10:03
Speaker 1: that picture. And that's a lesson. Right, every time there's
10:06
Speaker 1: a little loose thread, one thing that doesn't quite fit
10:10
Speaker 1: into the hole you wanted to, you should pull on
10:12
Speaker 1: that thread, you should mix that. Metaphor, until you figure
10:15
Speaker 1: out the secret of the universe, you should just ignore it,
10:17
Speaker 1: repress it. And some of those those threads were things
10:22
Speaker 1: like muans. Like remember we talked about how muans were discovered,
10:25
Speaker 1: and when they were first found, people were like, what, who,
10:28
Speaker 1: what are that? We don't need those muans. They're not
10:30
Speaker 1: part of the atoms. They're just particles that seemed to
10:33
Speaker 1: have been there, but they weren't part of regular matter exactly.
10:37
Speaker 1: That was the kind of clue we're talking about. And
10:39
Speaker 1: there were other particles like pions that were found in
10:42
Speaker 1: cosmic rays and people are like, hum, what are these
10:44
Speaker 1: particles about? We don't need them to build matter. Interesting,
10:48
Speaker 1: but they can't exist. Why do they even exist? What's
10:50
Speaker 1: the idea? And so you see them, but they're they're
10:53
Speaker 1: not part of most of things. So I guess that's
10:56
Speaker 1: a weird thing, right, It's a pretty weird thing, but
10:58
Speaker 1: it also gives you a clue. It gives you a
11:00
Speaker 1: clue for like what kind of particles can be out there?
11:04
Speaker 1: And in the end, remember, what you're looking for is
11:06
Speaker 1: an answer to the deepest question right to understand, like
11:09
Speaker 1: the nature of reality. So you want the full menu.
11:12
Speaker 1: And those few little threads then turned into I don't
11:15
Speaker 1: know what's the metaphor here, a whole rug, I suppose,
11:18
Speaker 1: or a whole pile of yarm, giant haystack, the giant
11:22
Speaker 1: haystack because originally we had these weird, unstable particles muans
11:25
Speaker 1: and pions just from looking them come down from the
11:28
Speaker 1: sky and cosmic rays. But then people built particle accelerators.
11:31
Speaker 1: They weren't satisfied just to sort of look at high
11:34
Speaker 1: energy particles that we already found in nature. They wanted
11:37
Speaker 1: to create their own collisions to explore these things with
11:39
Speaker 1: more control. So people build particle accept smash things in
11:43
Speaker 1: front of them, not just wait wait till they come
11:47
Speaker 1: reigining down. Yeah, you want to do it on your terms.
11:49
Speaker 1: You know, you want to have control. I want to say,
11:50
Speaker 1: I want to turn up the energy, I want to
11:52
Speaker 1: turn down the energy. I want to call this kind
11:54
Speaker 1: of particle that kind of particle, right, I want to
11:56
Speaker 1: see what it feels like when I stick my hand
11:57
Speaker 1: into it. I mean, that's a basic reiosity, right. Um.
12:01
Speaker 1: And so what they found when they built these accelerators
12:05
Speaker 1: was a whole lot of new particles. They found kaons
12:09
Speaker 1: and strange particles and all sorts of stuff. We talked
12:11
Speaker 1: a little bit about strange matter on the program recently.
12:15
Speaker 1: And this is an era we call the particle zoo
12:18
Speaker 1: because basically, every time they turned on the accelerator they
12:21
Speaker 1: found some new party. Did you guys have a theme
12:23
Speaker 1: song jingle like particles particle zoo ra Welcome to our
12:30
Speaker 1: particles Zoo. Yeah, so I guess you didn't have particle accelerators.
12:34
Speaker 1: But he thought, hey, let's see what else happened when
12:36
Speaker 1: things smashed together, because that's I guess that's what you
12:39
Speaker 1: knew was happening in the atmosphere. Yeah, we had a
12:41
Speaker 1: sense that these things needed more energy. Right, These unstable
12:45
Speaker 1: particles were heavier, meaning that they contained more energy, and
12:48
Speaker 1: then they decayed down to lighter particles. To to try
12:51
Speaker 1: to create new heavy particles, you want to create localized
12:55
Speaker 1: energy density. You want to smash two particles together, so
12:58
Speaker 1: you've got a little like blob of energy right there,
13:00
Speaker 1: maybe enough to create something new. And so that's what
13:03
Speaker 1: these first particle accelerators did was create these high energy
13:07
Speaker 1: density situations where you could create these new particles. And
13:10
Speaker 1: we found zillions and zillions of these because at this
13:13
Speaker 1: point you sort of new about equals mc square and
13:15
Speaker 1: then you knew that you know, things can matter can
13:18
Speaker 1: come from pure energy. That's right, you can create new matter.
13:21
Speaker 1: It's I mean, it's alchemy, right. People have been trying
13:22
Speaker 1: to do this for thousands of years, and we actually
13:25
Speaker 1: were able to do it. By smashing particles together at
13:28
Speaker 1: high energy. You can create new kinds of matter and
13:31
Speaker 1: that's exciting, right, like wow, Look, every time you turn
13:34
Speaker 1: it on, you create a new particle and then you
13:35
Speaker 1: get to name it after your puppy or whatever. But
13:37
Speaker 1: it's also continge name it after their puppy. I don't
13:41
Speaker 1: have a record of that. No, Back in that day,
13:43
Speaker 1: they were mostly naming them after Greek letters, so you
13:46
Speaker 1: got lots of you know, sigmas and theatas and upsilons
13:49
Speaker 1: and this kind of stuff. But it was also confusing.
13:52
Speaker 1: Maybe they named their puppies after it's probably lots of
13:55
Speaker 1: puppies named upsilon and data. But you know, once you're
13:59
Speaker 1: once you sort of your even satisfied you've created all
14:01
Speaker 1: these new particles, then you're looking at it and you're
14:03
Speaker 1: looking for patterns. You're like, Okay, why are there these
14:06
Speaker 1: particles and not other particles? What does this mean about
14:09
Speaker 1: the nature of the universe? Like how are they related? Yeah,
14:13
Speaker 1: because we don't want an answer that says, oh, there's
14:15
Speaker 1: ninety two different kind of fundamental particles, right, we suspect
14:19
Speaker 1: that the answer is a small number of particles. We
14:22
Speaker 1: want to explain the whole universe using a small set
14:25
Speaker 1: of pieces, right, like the legos. We want to build
14:28
Speaker 1: everything out of a small number of basic blocks seventy
14:32
Speaker 1: four And we often talk about how we had the
14:34
Speaker 1: periodic table of elements, and how that was kind of
14:37
Speaker 1: something that told us that when you have a lot
14:39
Speaker 1: of these things out there in the universe, there's probably
14:41
Speaker 1: some kind of pattern or some kind of underlying building
14:44
Speaker 1: block to them. Yeah, every time you see unexplained phenomena,
14:47
Speaker 1: weird patterns, trends you don't understand, it's probably an emergent
14:52
Speaker 1: phenomenon from the arrangement of smaller bits. Just like in
14:55
Speaker 1: the periodic table. You see all these patterns, and that
14:58
Speaker 1: tells you that there's something else go going on, And
15:00
Speaker 1: you're absolutely right. Every feature of the periodic table comes
15:03
Speaker 1: from how the electrons sit in their orbitals around the nucleus,
15:08
Speaker 1: and so people suspected They're like, well, maybe all these
15:11
Speaker 1: new crazy particles we found are reflective of something smaller,
15:15
Speaker 1: something tinier, and all these patterns that masters these particles
15:19
Speaker 1: in the way they interact come from how those little
15:22
Speaker 1: bits are fit together. That was sort of the nugget
15:24
Speaker 1: of the idea. And so they found a pattern, right,
15:27
Speaker 1: and all of these particles in the particle zoo, They're like,
15:30
Speaker 1: wait a minute, the lions are sort of like smaller
15:32
Speaker 1: versions of the elephants, and the zeros are sort of
15:35
Speaker 1: have four legs, just like the lines kind of thing. Yeah,
15:37
Speaker 1: so we had a decade of discovering new particles and
15:40
Speaker 1: then in nineteen sixty one, a theorist came up with
15:43
Speaker 1: an idea. He said, well, I noticed that if I
15:46
Speaker 1: categorize the particles in two ways, one by their electric
15:51
Speaker 1: charge and the other way by their strangeness. And remember,
15:55
Speaker 1: some of these particles are strange in the sense that
15:58
Speaker 1: they last a lot longer than you would expect. And
16:00
Speaker 1: you can listen to our whole podcast episode about strangeness.
16:03
Speaker 1: And so people postulated this new property of particles strangeness,
16:07
Speaker 1: and they give particles strangeness zero like the proton and
16:10
Speaker 1: the neutron, or strangeness one, or strangeness too, And then
16:13
Speaker 1: they just made a table and meaning like, it's strange
16:15
Speaker 1: because given how massive it is, how munched ways, it
16:19
Speaker 1: shouldn't be around this lng like kNs last a lot
16:22
Speaker 1: longer than you would expect, and the reason is that
16:24
Speaker 1: they have strangeness. Then the universe likes to preserve strangeness,
16:28
Speaker 1: so it tries to find a way for the kon
16:30
Speaker 1: to dec to keep the strangeness into the products, and
16:34
Speaker 1: that takes longer. It's a weaker interaction. But protons are
16:37
Speaker 1: pretty stable, and they're supposed to be stable, so they
16:39
Speaker 1: have zero strange protons have no Now we know that
16:42
Speaker 1: strangeness actually reflects the strange quarks inside of it, but
16:45
Speaker 1: at the time they didn't know. They were just like,
16:47
Speaker 1: this is a property, these particles, and a lot of
16:49
Speaker 1: particle physics, it's just like writing down properties we observe
16:53
Speaker 1: and wondering where they come from, and wondering if we
16:56
Speaker 1: can see patterns and then explain those patterns in terms
16:59
Speaker 1: of something deeper. And so at the time, you know,
17:01
Speaker 1: they knew the charge of these particles, they could measure that,
17:04
Speaker 1: and they had sort of invented this idea of strangeness
17:07
Speaker 1: just by observing how the particles decayed and labeling them
17:10
Speaker 1: strangeness one, strangeness zero. And then they noticed this pattern.
17:14
Speaker 1: They called it the eightfold way because they noticed that
17:17
Speaker 1: if you arrange the particles according to strangeness versus charge,
17:20
Speaker 1: that they formed these octagons, right, and they formed these
17:24
Speaker 1: triangles and all these really interesting geometric patterns. All right,
17:28
Speaker 1: So they found a bunch of particles and they found
17:31
Speaker 1: a pattern maybe a clue to what all these particles. Yeah,
17:36
Speaker 1: and they found these geometric patterns and that suggested to
17:38
Speaker 1: them that, like, you know, maybe there's something going on here,
17:41
Speaker 1: maybe there's a reason for all these patterns. And the
17:44
Speaker 1: theorist that came up with this eightfold way found a
17:46
Speaker 1: hole in those patterns, like there was one triangle that
17:49
Speaker 1: was missing a corner and said, okay, well, maybe there's
17:52
Speaker 1: a particle there. You would have to have this strangeness
17:55
Speaker 1: and this charge to be in that corner, and he
17:57
Speaker 1: predicted its existence and then they found it, like, oh,
18:00
Speaker 1: you were right, this new particle does exist. So that
18:03
Speaker 1: was the first clue that maybe this pattern really reflected
18:06
Speaker 1: something because it wasn't just imaginary, like they weren't just
18:11
Speaker 1: imagining things. You could actually find particles using these patterns. Yeah,
18:15
Speaker 1: just like with the periodic table. We started putting it
18:17
Speaker 1: together and we noticed some holes and we're like, where's
18:19
Speaker 1: this element number or whatever that we don't see in nature.
18:23
Speaker 1: It turns out, you know, it does exist. You can
18:25
Speaker 1: create it. It's just very unstable. In the same way,
18:28
Speaker 1: they were able to fill out these triangles and these
18:30
Speaker 1: octagons of the eightfold way. All right, Well, let's get
18:33
Speaker 1: into what this pattern actually meant or means and how
18:38
Speaker 1: it helped them make sense of the particle zoo as
18:41
Speaker 1: far as let's take a quick break, all right. You know,
18:56
Speaker 1: so they found a bunch of particles and they saw
18:58
Speaker 1: that there was some kind of pattern to the meaning
19:00
Speaker 1: that there is something going on here. Yeah. Yeah. Every
19:03
Speaker 1: time you see a pattern, that's your first clue because
19:05
Speaker 1: it lets you sort of play games with what's going
19:08
Speaker 1: on underneath. Right, you want to find some way to
19:11
Speaker 1: explain a very complicated set of things. You've observed ninety
19:15
Speaker 1: two different particles with all weird masses and behaviors in
19:19
Speaker 1: terms of a smaller set of objects, And so finding
19:22
Speaker 1: that pattern gave them a clue as to how to
19:24
Speaker 1: put that together. And so they came up with the
19:26
Speaker 1: idea that maybe there are even smaller particles that kind
19:30
Speaker 1: of put together to make these bigger parties. Yes, exactly,
19:33
Speaker 1: And that's sort of the idea that particle physicists are
19:35
Speaker 1: always looking to write, like everything is made of smaller bits.
19:38
Speaker 1: That's like the oldest idea in particle physics. And so
19:41
Speaker 1: they thought, well, we have all these particles, can we
19:43
Speaker 1: explain them in terms of smaller bits, right, They're like,
19:46
Speaker 1: we're particle physics. You only have particles, right, that's right,
19:50
Speaker 1: that's our hands. Like when you have a particle, everything
19:52
Speaker 1: looks like a particle. T that's our hammers. So everything's
19:55
Speaker 1: the nail exactly. And this idea actually came up independently
19:59
Speaker 1: by two different theorists, and they came up with the
20:02
Speaker 1: same idea that there could be these three little particles that,
20:06
Speaker 1: if you put them together in different combinations, explain all
20:09
Speaker 1: the particles that we see, but not all of them, right,
20:12
Speaker 1: Like some of them like the muan. Isn't the muon
20:14
Speaker 1: kind of like an electron, it can't be split. Yeah,
20:17
Speaker 1: they don't explain all those particles, like the muan is
20:20
Speaker 1: not made of quarks. But all those particles discovered, the
20:24
Speaker 1: particle zoo, the pions, the chons, the sigma particles, all
20:28
Speaker 1: those kind of particles. They could explain all these new
20:30
Speaker 1: ones in terms of these little basic particles. And so
20:35
Speaker 1: Murray Gelman came up with this idea and he called
20:37
Speaker 1: them quarks based on a word that he saw in
20:40
Speaker 1: a James Joyce novel. And at the same time another
20:44
Speaker 1: theorist named Zwag came up with exactly the same idea
20:48
Speaker 1: mathematically and published it. But he called them seeming mathematically
20:51
Speaker 1: like the mass predicted there would be three of these. Well,
20:54
Speaker 1: at the time, all these particles were only made out
20:56
Speaker 1: of these three quarks. Now we know that there were
20:58
Speaker 1: up quarks, down quirks, and strange corks. Right up and
21:01
Speaker 1: down is what you need to make the proton and
21:03
Speaker 1: the neutron. You add in strange to make all these
21:06
Speaker 1: other strange particles like the kon and the omega and
21:09
Speaker 1: the sigma particles. And so at the time they only
21:12
Speaker 1: needed three, and the particles they were creating only used
21:15
Speaker 1: those three lego pieces I see. But now we know
21:17
Speaker 1: there are more. Now we know there are more. Yeah,
21:19
Speaker 1: the stories was on and on sort of mathematically to
21:22
Speaker 1: explain the ones they had. They thought they were three,
21:25
Speaker 1: that's right. And they discovered that if you postulate the
21:27
Speaker 1: existence of these three particles, that you could put them
21:30
Speaker 1: together in pairs and triplets to explain all the particles
21:34
Speaker 1: that they were seeing. So it's like peeling back a
21:37
Speaker 1: layer of reality and saying, oh, all these things are
21:39
Speaker 1: just different ways to combine these basic building blocks. And
21:44
Speaker 1: not only could they explain all the particles that we
21:47
Speaker 1: had seen. They could show which particles we hadn't yet seen, Like, oh,
21:50
Speaker 1: nobody's tried this combination that would give you this particle
21:54
Speaker 1: and predicting it, and then we find it. And that's
21:56
Speaker 1: exactly what happened with this omega minus particle that we
21:58
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier. That's what they've They've found particles that were
22:02
Speaker 1: predicted by these acism quirks. Yeah, exactly, And so that's
22:06
Speaker 1: pretty convincing. And you know, if you ask me, I
22:08
Speaker 1: would have believed it. Like at that point, I would
22:09
Speaker 1: have been sold on this quirk idea. I would have
22:12
Speaker 1: been like, well, this, this explains it. It describes all
22:15
Speaker 1: the particles we see. It simplifies things and old together.
22:19
Speaker 1: But you hadn't seen them. I guess they were just
22:21
Speaker 1: sort of like an idea that seems to predict things,
22:24
Speaker 1: but you hadn't directly seen them. Yeah, and so most
22:27
Speaker 1: physicists were like, all right, that's a cute idea, but
22:30
Speaker 1: is it an idea or is it real? Right? Is
22:33
Speaker 1: that what's actually happening inside these particles or is it
22:36
Speaker 1: just a nice thing you can calculate in your mind.
22:39
Speaker 1: And the sort of deep philosophical question there about whether
22:42
Speaker 1: any of our theories are more than just ideas we
22:44
Speaker 1: calculate in our mind, and whether we actually see anything directly.
22:48
Speaker 1: But physicists were skeptical. I guess they're like aces. I'm
22:52
Speaker 1: not I'm not sure I would call that a name. Yeah,
22:55
Speaker 1: And I don't know the history of why quarks took
22:57
Speaker 1: off instead of aces. Actually like aces better than quarks works.
23:00
Speaker 1: It's kind of a weird Quirks sounds like yogurt, you know,
23:03
Speaker 1: I think yogurt sounds like quarks. There is a yogurt
23:08
Speaker 1: called corks that I guess why would you call them as?
23:12
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's it's a positive thing, you know,
23:13
Speaker 1: it's celebratory in some way, or it's like, hey, look
23:16
Speaker 1: we found a little list bit. It's like the number
23:18
Speaker 1: one particle. I don't know, it's it's in a nice
23:20
Speaker 1: spot somewhere in my brain, I see. But maybe Gilman
23:22
Speaker 1: was barely thinking like, hey, these are weird odd and
23:26
Speaker 1: you let's find an award that's kind of weird odd
23:28
Speaker 1: And perhaps perhaps and I guess the field liked his
23:31
Speaker 1: idea better because quarks is what we call them. Really,
23:35
Speaker 1: it was totally just a name popularity. Con I don't
23:37
Speaker 1: I've done something really try to figure out, like why
23:40
Speaker 1: Quirks took off. It might not just be a name popularity.
23:42
Speaker 1: I think Gelmont had a larger personality and was more
23:45
Speaker 1: famous and influential, and so, you know, it's a bit
23:48
Speaker 1: of a political thing. Doesn't it depend on who published first? Yeah,
23:51
Speaker 1: but you know it was just about the same time.
23:53
Speaker 1: But sometimes like the second counts, right, the minute counts.
23:57
Speaker 1: I think that's ridiculous. But we'll hear a story later
24:00
Speaker 1: on in this program about two discoveries announced on the
24:03
Speaker 1: same day. All right, so they were theoretical and some
24:06
Speaker 1: people didn't believe them. But then what happened? How did
24:08
Speaker 1: we say, hey, look, quarts are real. So then we
24:11
Speaker 1: got some actual evidence because they did some experiments, and
24:13
Speaker 1: experimentalist said, well, if these things are real, we should
24:16
Speaker 1: be able to see them, meaning we should be able
24:19
Speaker 1: to like take a proton and shoot particles at it
24:22
Speaker 1: and see this internal structure. I mean, if protons are
24:25
Speaker 1: not just like tiny perfect dots or perfectly smooth, if
24:29
Speaker 1: they're actually made of three like hard nuggets bound together,
24:33
Speaker 1: we should be able to see them. If we shoot
24:35
Speaker 1: electrons adament with high enough internet and what made them
24:38
Speaker 1: think that the proton was deconstructible or breakable but not
24:42
Speaker 1: the electron. Oh boy, that's a good question. Um, we
24:45
Speaker 1: don't know if the electron is deconstructible. We are doing
24:48
Speaker 1: experiments to try to figure that. We had a podcast
24:51
Speaker 1: episode about whether the electron has stuffed inside it. I
24:53
Speaker 1: guess the short answer is, we don't know, and we're
24:55
Speaker 1: trying to see if the electron has stuff inside of it.
24:57
Speaker 1: We've never seen any evidence. They're just like, hey, let's
24:59
Speaker 1: match these two things together and see what happened. Yeah,
25:01
Speaker 1: but the theory went that the proton was built out
25:03
Speaker 1: of quirks, and so that's what they were testing. The
25:05
Speaker 1: suggestion was you could maybe see these things inside protons.
25:09
Speaker 1: Nobody suspected that electrons were made out of quirks, And
25:12
Speaker 1: we know today that the electron doesn't feel a strong
25:14
Speaker 1: force and so it can't be made out of quarks.
25:17
Speaker 1: We don't know why and what the difference is not
25:19
Speaker 1: the whole other podcast episode, But anyway, they used electrons
25:23
Speaker 1: because they're cheap and fast and small to shoot at
25:26
Speaker 1: protons to try to see what was inside. Because, like
25:29
Speaker 1: I guess, protons are heavier. Protons are much heavier than
25:32
Speaker 1: the electrons, and the idea was that maybe they had
25:36
Speaker 1: this structure. And so you shoot electrons at a proton,
25:40
Speaker 1: it will bounce off. But if you shoot it high
25:42
Speaker 1: enough energy, then it can get to break it. They
25:45
Speaker 1: have to break it. It can get between those bonds. Right.
25:48
Speaker 1: A proton we now know is made it of quarks
25:50
Speaker 1: that are held together by really strong bonds. But if
25:53
Speaker 1: you shoot at it with electrons that have energy more
25:55
Speaker 1: than the energy those bonds, then those bonds are sort
25:58
Speaker 1: of irrelevant and you can bounce off the individual corks, right,
26:02
Speaker 1: And and so they did that. They shot the proton
26:04
Speaker 1: with the revolver in the library, and they found that
26:07
Speaker 1: the proton split into three. Yeah, they found not necessarily
26:11
Speaker 1: that it's split into three, because remember these corks can't
26:13
Speaker 1: be alone, and so if you break up a proton,
26:15
Speaker 1: it just the corks inside of it just form a
26:17
Speaker 1: new proton and new other particles. But what they found
26:20
Speaker 1: was that there were three sort of hard centers in
26:23
Speaker 1: the proton, three places where if you hit it just right,
26:26
Speaker 1: you would bounce back at a great angle rather than
26:28
Speaker 1: passing through. Oh, they were looking at the bounce rate. Yeah,
26:30
Speaker 1: they were looking at the bounce rate and the bounce
26:32
Speaker 1: angles essentially, And so if the proton is a totally
26:36
Speaker 1: solid sphere, then you'll always sort of get the same angles.
26:39
Speaker 1: Whereas if the proton is mostly transparent with three hard
26:43
Speaker 1: nuggets in it, then often you'll just go your electron
26:46
Speaker 1: will go right through it, and sometimes it'll bounce. But
26:50
Speaker 1: how did they know there was three of them? Like,
26:52
Speaker 1: can you could they actually aim electrons with the You
26:57
Speaker 1: can't aim, it's all statistical. You can't aim an individual
27:00
Speaker 1: a cork, but you can count how many hard centers
27:02
Speaker 1: there are by how often you get a hard bounce back.
27:05
Speaker 1: And you know, this is very similar to the way
27:07
Speaker 1: the nucleus of the atom was discovered back in the
27:10
Speaker 1: day or in the turn of the century, before we
27:12
Speaker 1: even knew that the atom had an electron with the
27:14
Speaker 1: nucleus in it. Rutherford discovered the nucleus in this exact
27:17
Speaker 1: same way. He shot particles at nuclei and found that
27:21
Speaker 1: mostly they went through, but occasionally they bounced right back,
27:24
Speaker 1: and that's how he discovered the nucleus. Is we're still
27:27
Speaker 1: not convinced they saw these hard centers nucod centers and
27:31
Speaker 1: physics are still like, yeah, I don't know if that's
27:32
Speaker 1: those are Its amazing with me. I don't understand what
27:35
Speaker 1: physicists were thinking at the time, Like you had this
27:37
Speaker 1: beautiful idea of these tiny particles that explained this big
27:41
Speaker 1: mystery that had been going on for twenty years about
27:43
Speaker 1: the particle zoo, and then you have this evidence that
27:46
Speaker 1: these particles really were made out of smaller particles, and
27:49
Speaker 1: still physicists were like, I don't know, And I think
27:52
Speaker 1: part of it is that they couldn't see the corks
27:55
Speaker 1: on their own, right, They couldn't like create independent, standalone
27:59
Speaker 1: corks and study them, like with all the other parts.
28:01
Speaker 1: They're only looking at X rays and not at you know,
28:04
Speaker 1: holding the bones in their hands. Yeah, and you know, quarks,
28:07
Speaker 1: you can't see them by themselves. They can never be
28:09
Speaker 1: on their own. They're always tightly bound into these in
28:12
Speaker 1: combinations of other corks, into other particles. So maybe that's
28:15
Speaker 1: what motivated this skepticism. But you know, I would have
28:18
Speaker 1: been I would have been on that train long before this.
28:21
Speaker 1: He would have been wearing the cork hat. Yeah, all right,
28:24
Speaker 1: So it sounds like it was still sort of an idea,
28:26
Speaker 1: maybe a little unproven. People were unconvinced. But then something
28:30
Speaker 1: amazing happened, and so let's get into that. But first
28:33
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break, all right, Daniel, tell me
28:48
Speaker 1: about the November Revolution. It sounds like the October Revolution.
28:52
Speaker 1: This happened a month later, or this is a totally
28:55
Speaker 1: different thing. I know, it sounds like something that should
28:57
Speaker 1: have happened at you know, at the Alamo or some thing.
29:00
Speaker 1: But this is a revolution with stars and you know,
29:04
Speaker 1: and as far as i'm where, nobody died on this revolution.
29:07
Speaker 1: But this is sort of the day that physics changed
29:10
Speaker 1: its mind. We went from like, corks are an idea,
29:12
Speaker 1: two corks are a real thing, and there's an actual date.
29:15
Speaker 1: There's an actual date. Yeah, and that's because that's the
29:18
Speaker 1: date of the dueling press conferences that are the end
29:21
Speaker 1: of this story. Yeah. And the idea was, if corks
29:25
Speaker 1: are real, maybe there are more of them, Like we
29:28
Speaker 1: only needed three up, down and strange to explain all
29:31
Speaker 1: the particles that we've seen before. But how do we
29:34
Speaker 1: know there aren't more corks like a fourth cork? Or
29:37
Speaker 1: now we know there are six corks and there are
29:40
Speaker 1: actually some theorists that said, you know, it's weird to
29:42
Speaker 1: have three because the up and down are sort of
29:45
Speaker 1: a pair. They go together. What about the strange cork? Like,
29:48
Speaker 1: where is its partner? And you can associate the down
29:51
Speaker 1: cork and the strange cork they have the same electric charge.
29:55
Speaker 1: Where's the partner of the upcord? Right? Where is the
29:57
Speaker 1: version of the upcork that has its electric m You
30:00
Speaker 1: mean the Catholics weren't like, three sounds good to me.
30:03
Speaker 1: It sounds like a trinity to me. Yeah, there there
30:07
Speaker 1: are reasons three seems nice. But also if you have
30:09
Speaker 1: corks at pair off, it's weird to have an odd number.
30:12
Speaker 1: And so they predicted this fourth cork. They said, well,
30:15
Speaker 1: we predicted another cork out there, and they called it Charm,
30:18
Speaker 1: and this cork would be a heavy version of the
30:21
Speaker 1: up cork. So the way the up and the down
30:23
Speaker 1: are a pair, this cork, the Charm and the strange
30:26
Speaker 1: would be a pair. So this pair, the Charm and
30:28
Speaker 1: Strange are like the heavy version of the up and down.
30:32
Speaker 1: There was a fourth beatle missing there, like, yeah, there
30:36
Speaker 1: was a fourth needle. And this sold some complicated theoretical problems,
30:39
Speaker 1: like people are trying to do some calculations, and the
30:41
Speaker 1: calculations didn't work unless you had this other cork also
30:45
Speaker 1: in the calculations. So sort of the first clue maybe
30:47
Speaker 1: the universe made more sense mad if you had another
30:50
Speaker 1: one yes math and so then then people went off
30:54
Speaker 1: to look for it. So then November tenth, nineteen four,
30:57
Speaker 1: people were like, I didn't know what was coming. And
31:00
Speaker 1: then people went off to look for it, and there
31:01
Speaker 1: was a guide and my team named Sam Ting. He
31:04
Speaker 1: had an idea for how to look for it. It
31:05
Speaker 1: was a very nice experiment, very clean. He was shooting
31:09
Speaker 1: protons at a target and he was hoping to create
31:12
Speaker 1: essentially this cork and its anti cork. He was hoping
31:15
Speaker 1: if you smash protons into his target, then occasionally you
31:18
Speaker 1: create a charm cork and an anti charm cork into
31:21
Speaker 1: this new particle, and then he could see that new party.
31:24
Speaker 1: And it was a very nice experiment, except it had
31:27
Speaker 1: one weakness, which is that it was sort of slow,
31:30
Speaker 1: like it wasn't making a lot of these every day.
31:33
Speaker 1: It was going to take him like a year, year
31:35
Speaker 1: and a half to get enough of these things where
31:38
Speaker 1: he could claim discovery. Because in particle physics you have
31:40
Speaker 1: to do things a lot, and then from the sort
31:43
Speaker 1: of the statistics, then you say, hey, look that bump
31:45
Speaker 1: in the data looks is probably a particle exactly. And
31:49
Speaker 1: so he ran his experiment and he was cranking it up,
31:52
Speaker 1: and his bump was building up and up and up
31:54
Speaker 1: and up. Now, meanwhile, on the other side of the
31:58
Speaker 1: country at Stanford, there's a guy named Bert Richter, and
32:02
Speaker 1: Bert Richter had access to a much more powerful machine.
32:05
Speaker 1: This is a collider that would smash electrons and positrons
32:09
Speaker 1: against each other. And this thing was capable of discovering
32:11
Speaker 1: a new particle in like an hour. But the problem
32:14
Speaker 1: was he'd have to tune it to exactly the right energy.
32:17
Speaker 1: Like if you knew exactly the energy you needed to
32:19
Speaker 1: create this new particle and you tuned the beams, boom,
32:22
Speaker 1: you could produce like a hundred of them in an
32:24
Speaker 1: hour and be done. But you had to know how
32:27
Speaker 1: to tune the beams. If you didn't know where to look,
32:30
Speaker 1: it could be you know, you could be searching forever.
32:32
Speaker 1: Like Stanford had a huge microscope, but they just didn't
32:34
Speaker 1: know where to look. Yeah, had a huge microscope, but
32:36
Speaker 1: they were searching a beach, right and they had to
32:38
Speaker 1: like put here, put it here, put it here. If
32:40
Speaker 1: they knew where to look for this new particle, they
32:42
Speaker 1: could prove it existed right away. Something maybe had a
32:44
Speaker 1: giant sifter which was slow, but you know, it would
32:48
Speaker 1: cover a wider ring exactly. And so they were racing
32:51
Speaker 1: and bert Richter and his team did these scans. They
32:53
Speaker 1: started low energies and they scanned up and they didn't
32:56
Speaker 1: see anything. And then they scanned down and they scanned
32:59
Speaker 1: back up and they didn't see anything. They didn't see anything.
33:01
Speaker 1: And meanwhile, Sam Ting is accumulating this data and he
33:05
Speaker 1: knows exactly where Bert Richter needs to look, but he
33:07
Speaker 1: doesn't want to tell him because if bert Richter finds
33:10
Speaker 1: out this one piece of information, then he can scoop
33:13
Speaker 1: him in just a day. So these two guys across
33:16
Speaker 1: the United States, they knew what each of them were
33:19
Speaker 1: doing and what they could do. They knew what the
33:21
Speaker 1: other one could do. There's a lot of controversy about
33:24
Speaker 1: exactly what they knew about each other's experiments and with
33:27
Speaker 1: the connections between them. And there's also lots of crazy
33:30
Speaker 1: stories here, Like I've heard stories that Sam Ting was
33:33
Speaker 1: so desperate to get time to run his experiment, that
33:37
Speaker 1: he actually sabotaged other experiments that were using the same word.
33:41
Speaker 1: They had to share time with them, and there are
33:44
Speaker 1: stories that the other experiments kept having these weird electronics
33:48
Speaker 1: problems and every time they would come in after a night,
33:51
Speaker 1: their electronics were fried. So finally installed a video camera
33:54
Speaker 1: and they're like, what's going on? And the story goes
33:57
Speaker 1: that Sam tinge would come in every evening and piss on.
34:04
Speaker 1: This is the story. Their story is. There's video evidence.
34:08
Speaker 1: I have never seen this video. This is pre internet.
34:12
Speaker 1: I do not know if this story is true. What
34:14
Speaker 1: do you smell it? Would would they be able to
34:16
Speaker 1: tell that somebody was doing this. It's an interesting story
34:18
Speaker 1: and it actually reveals something I think about the time
34:21
Speaker 1: because at the time field of particle physics was dominated
34:24
Speaker 1: by white American dudes mostly, and Sam ting is a
34:28
Speaker 1: Chinese guy. He's at M I T, but he's sort
34:30
Speaker 1: of an outsider and so this, you know, maybe shades
34:34
Speaker 1: of racism in this story. It's not clear whether this
34:36
Speaker 1: story is true, but it's a story that exists and
34:39
Speaker 1: is out there, and it sort of is the flavor
34:41
Speaker 1: of the time. Because Sam ting finally accumulated enough data.
34:45
Speaker 1: He's planning to announce his result. He's, you know, calls
34:48
Speaker 1: the press conference for the next day, and this is
34:51
Speaker 1: like November t right, And meanwhile at slack on November ten,
34:56
Speaker 1: they figure out exactly where to look, and they figure
34:59
Speaker 1: it out or they figured from Sam. We don't know,
35:01
Speaker 1: Like there are stories that maybe there was a leak.
35:04
Speaker 1: Sam certainly didn't tell them, but somehow they knew exactly
35:06
Speaker 1: where did they look? They turned, They turned the collider there,
35:10
Speaker 1: they ran the experiment, they got the plot, they wrote
35:13
Speaker 1: the paper the same day. It is all one day.
35:17
Speaker 1: Next day. They also call it press currently at the
35:20
Speaker 1: same time, now November the same time, So you have
35:24
Speaker 1: to press conferences two parts of the country making announcements
35:27
Speaker 1: of the same discovery at the same moment. But Sam
35:30
Speaker 1: was in Eastern Times and he wins, I don't know,
35:36
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's down to the minute, a
35:38
Speaker 1: suspicious you know, like they've been looking for years and
35:41
Speaker 1: then suddenly, the day before this guy is about to
35:43
Speaker 1: go public, they find the right parameters. And so they
35:46
Speaker 1: didn't talk to each other, and so they gave the
35:49
Speaker 1: particles different names, like Sam called it the j particle
35:54
Speaker 1: and the guys a slack called it the side particle
35:56
Speaker 1: is Greek letter. And so we had the same particle
35:59
Speaker 1: discovery announced by two different groups on the same day,
36:02
Speaker 1: and so and you told me they called the official
36:04
Speaker 1: name for this particle is the J side particle. Yeah,
36:07
Speaker 1: we never resolved this dispute, like people still argue about it.
36:10
Speaker 1: There are people in the J camp, people in the
36:12
Speaker 1: side camp, but the official name is J slash SI,
36:15
Speaker 1: which is like such a cop out. And to this
36:17
Speaker 1: day there are people bitter that it's not called the
36:19
Speaker 1: SI slash J probably probably, and people who think it
36:22
Speaker 1: should just be the J particle, and people who think
36:24
Speaker 1: it should just be the side particle. They should just
36:27
Speaker 1: call it off and call it something. But they did
36:29
Speaker 1: give them the Nobel Prize for this, the nineteen Nobel Prize,
36:33
Speaker 1: and they shared it, all right. That's that's a good,
36:36
Speaker 1: happy ending for everybody. They were all happy. Probably, No,
36:39
Speaker 1: I think there's still a lot of grumpiness in the
36:41
Speaker 1: field over this. But the end of the story is
36:44
Speaker 1: that this is what really led people to believe that
36:47
Speaker 1: corks are real, because we predicted a new one and
36:51
Speaker 1: then found it, and that told us that corks are
36:53
Speaker 1: not just like an idea for how to explain all
36:56
Speaker 1: the particles we've seen so far. They really are sort
36:59
Speaker 1: of a more basic fundamental building block of the universe.
37:03
Speaker 1: And they saw it on its own, or they saw
37:04
Speaker 1: it kind of in the same way of hitting something
37:07
Speaker 1: inside of something else. Can't see the charm cork by itself,
37:10
Speaker 1: but they were able to create a particle which is
37:13
Speaker 1: made of just charm corks. So it's a charm cork
37:15
Speaker 1: and an anti charm cork put together. That's the jape
37:18
Speaker 1: side park. I see that the should just end the
37:22
Speaker 1: controversy and not call it a name. Just call it
37:25
Speaker 1: the charm the charm cork particle. Somebody else wanted to
37:30
Speaker 1: call it ortho charmonium, like a yeah, seriously, that was
37:35
Speaker 1: the technical proposal. Charming, forget it, forget it. Let's not
37:40
Speaker 1: leave this up to physicists exactly exactly. That's what happens
37:44
Speaker 1: when you leave it up to the physicist, right. But
37:45
Speaker 1: I guess that what you're saying is the point is
37:47
Speaker 1: that course are real, and that's how they were discovered. Yeah,
37:51
Speaker 1: it was a sort of slow accumulation of evidence. People
37:54
Speaker 1: were not convinced for a while, but then seeing them
37:56
Speaker 1: inside the proton discovering that there was a new one,
38:00
Speaker 1: and finding it actually out there in reality, like it's real.
38:04
Speaker 1: That's really what convinced people. And since then we've thought
38:06
Speaker 1: of corks as real and we've gone on to find
38:08
Speaker 1: someone that's right. There are now six corks, that's right.
38:11
Speaker 1: Just after the charm cork was discovered, just a few
38:13
Speaker 1: years later they discovered the bottom cork. That was the
38:16
Speaker 1: fifth one. And you know, we don't like odd numbers
38:19
Speaker 1: of quirks, and so then people thought, well, there must
38:21
Speaker 1: be another one that goes along with the bottom cork,
38:23
Speaker 1: and so they called it the top cork. And and
38:28
Speaker 1: there was actually competing ames for those two. Also there's
38:30
Speaker 1: a whole camp of people who wanted to call them
38:32
Speaker 1: the truth and beauty corks instead of top and bottom. Wow,
38:36
Speaker 1: even more confusing. But the top cork took a long
38:41
Speaker 1: time to discover. We'll do a whole podcast episode about that.
38:44
Speaker 1: They were also dueling press conferences for that discovery. Well,
38:48
Speaker 1: I guess you know, there's all sort of points to
38:49
Speaker 1: how science has made you know, first it starts off
38:52
Speaker 1: with just looking at what's out there, and then people
38:57
Speaker 1: reading these papers and thinking about what it could be,
39:00
Speaker 1: and then it involves then more people than taking those
39:02
Speaker 1: ideas and proving them right. Yeah, I think that's ah,
39:05
Speaker 1: it's a wonderful process. And I love how you can
39:07
Speaker 1: sort of see that happen many times in science. You
39:10
Speaker 1: go from like all the stuff around us to the
39:13
Speaker 1: periodic table, and then from the periodic table down to protons,
39:17
Speaker 1: neutrons and electrons, and then you know, you get an
39:20
Speaker 1: idea that there are other particles out there, and then
39:23
Speaker 1: you boil that list down to basic quirks and the
39:26
Speaker 1: hope is the the the idea is that maybe we
39:29
Speaker 1: can do that again. And now we have this new
39:31
Speaker 1: list of particles, all these quirks and all these leptons.
39:35
Speaker 1: We don't understand what the patterns are there. We don't understand,
39:38
Speaker 1: you know, why we have all of them. Were sort
39:40
Speaker 1: of at the the new particle Zoo. It's like the
39:42
Speaker 1: cork and lepton zoo. We don't understand it, and we're
39:46
Speaker 1: looking for that new idea, the one that will maybe
39:49
Speaker 1: explain how these particles are made out of even smaller
39:52
Speaker 1: ones and they have to subside the mini and farm.
39:58
Speaker 1: Maybe acens will come back, right, I guess, but we
40:00
Speaker 1: should probably come deuces now smaller. I think that has
40:05
Speaker 1: another meaning. Maybe we should avoid I don't think I
40:07
Speaker 1: want to drop a douce some particle physics, but you could, Daniel.
40:11
Speaker 1: If you're the discoverer, you get to name it. Tell
40:15
Speaker 1: me about your deepest scientific goals. Well, I want to
40:18
Speaker 1: drop a deuce on the field. I want to call
40:20
Speaker 1: it the poop particle that I could finally align my
40:24
Speaker 1: research with my wife's research. There you go, alright, family,
40:27
Speaker 1: white sand unity, that's what size it's all about. Yeah,
40:31
Speaker 1: but you know we're far from that. We don't have
40:33
Speaker 1: any ideas for what could be underlying the quarks. We
40:37
Speaker 1: don't know your question earlier. Our electrons also made out
40:41
Speaker 1: of smaller things. We know they're not made out of quarks.
40:43
Speaker 1: We don't know why. We don't know any connections are
40:45
Speaker 1: The one thing we do know is that there are
40:48
Speaker 1: not more quarks out there. Really know that there are six.
40:51
Speaker 1: And that's it. That's it, that's it, that's the end
40:53
Speaker 1: of the story. We don't know why six. You're for sure,
40:55
Speaker 1: for real, for sure, for really because more would violate
40:58
Speaker 1: the laws of physics or what Because we have ways
41:01
Speaker 1: to tell how many quarks there are, and that's from
41:05
Speaker 1: how they talk to the higgs boson. Interesting, the higgs
41:08
Speaker 1: boson talks to all the particles that have mass. So
41:11
Speaker 1: if there were more quirks and there are no more
41:14
Speaker 1: ways to talk to the higgs boson, well, if there
41:16
Speaker 1: were more quirks, we would be making the higgs boson
41:19
Speaker 1: more often at colliders. So by the rate at which
41:22
Speaker 1: we make higgs boson is how often we make one,
41:24
Speaker 1: we can tell how many quarks there are out there.
41:27
Speaker 1: It's a really powerful, subtle argument. Well, you know, I
41:30
Speaker 1: wouldn't put it past nature to still have an ace. Obviously,
41:35
Speaker 1: maybe nature will drop a deuce on the field. I mean,
41:38
Speaker 1: maill poop all over your theories as usually. All right, Well,
41:42
Speaker 1: that was a pretty interesting history, and it's almos exciting
41:45
Speaker 1: to put your head in the minds of these scientists
41:47
Speaker 1: who were at the forefront, staring at the big unknown
41:50
Speaker 1: and trying to make sense of all the weird things
41:52
Speaker 1: that we find in nature. That's right, and what seems
41:54
Speaker 1: obvious to us now was confusing and bewildering at the time.
41:58
Speaker 1: And there were lots of other excellent nations and competing
42:00
Speaker 1: ideas that we now no longer recall. And so while
42:04
Speaker 1: history seems like a linear story, there are lots of
42:07
Speaker 1: twists and turns and false starts, even inside quirks and quarks,
42:11
Speaker 1: lots of aces indidios. All right, well, thank you for
42:15
Speaker 1: joining us, see you next time. Thanks for tuning in
42:25
Speaker 1: before you still have a question after listening to all
42:28
Speaker 1: these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to
42:31
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