Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / Did CERN just discover a new particle, using penguins?

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Did CERN just discover a new particle, using penguins? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

• 0:06
  Speaker 1: He or Hey, did you hear there was a big
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: discovery and it involved the word penguins? I didn't. Was
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: it at the South Pole? Actually it wasn't. Was it
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: about actual penguins? Not that either. Was it even about birds? No,
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: it wasn't. Let me guess something in particle physics. Yeah,
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: you got it. Yeah that makes sense. Name a discovery.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: What's a name that has absolutely nothing to do with
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: the actual discovery. But penguins is just so much fun
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: to say. Yeah, they're fun to look at too, they're
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: pretty cute birds. I am or Hammack, cartoonist and the
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist,
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: and I wish I could swim like penguin. Really, they're
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: so elegant underwater. I mean, they're this incredible animal that
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: just like waddle around so awkwardly on land. But then
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: you see them in the water and they look like birds. Right,
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: they fly through the water the way other birds fly
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: through the air. It's gorgeous. Yeah, but then you have
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: to walk like a penguin on land. As your wife
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: approved this wish fulfillment, Well, I wear a tuxedo around
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: the house all the time just to sort of like
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: break it in. Yeah, and you eat raw fish too,
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: But anyways, Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio, in which
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: we waddle our way around the unknown mysteries of the
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: universe trying to figure out what they mean. We talk
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: about the craziest little particles, We talk about the things
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: in deepest space. We talk about the hottest things and
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: the coldest things and everything in between. Because this podcast
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: is all about explaining the entire universe to you, that's right,
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: because there is a lot out there to discover and
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: to explore. There are many unknowns that we still don't
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: know anything about about, the big questions that are unanswered,
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: and a lot of new stuff out there particle those
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: planets and galaxies and tiny little fluctuations that we have
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: yet to explore. Oh you bet. On this podcast, we
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: think that we are at the beginning of our discovery
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: of the nature of the universe. We think that most
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: of the road, most of the big ideas about the
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: way the universe works, are in the future, and we
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: just hope to stick around and be here when some
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: of those big ideas are revealed, so we get to
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: figure out how the universe actually works. Yeah, because there
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: are people working on this. They're called physicists, and they're
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: trying to every day to figure out what we're all
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: made of and how it all works. And recently there
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: has been some pretty exciting results coming out of the
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: physics community. That's right. There was a big result announced
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: at CERTAIN just last week with a surprising value, so
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: I got people kind of excited. Yeah, it seems to
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: be a lot of interesting discoveries coming out of physics
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: these days. And these are from the folks at CERTAIN,
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: which are the ones who discovered the Higgs boson, and
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: you who are partly your employers, right, Daniel, that's right.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: I knew my research at CERTAIN. They don't pay my
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: salary at all, but I do use their collider smash
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: particle together and try to figure out what the smallest
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: thing is. But CERN is host to lots of different
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: kinds of experiments the kind that I work on smash
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: two protons together and like look for new heavy particles.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: Today we'll be hearing about a different kind of experiment
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: at CERN using the same accelerator. Yeah, it may involve
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: maybe a new particle. It may involve a new particle.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: You know. The fever dream of CERN is to discover
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: all sorts of new particles to crack open some of
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: the big questions about particle physics. You know, we have
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: like drilled down into the center of the adom and
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: revealed that protons and neutrons are made of quarks and
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: we have electrons whizzing around them. But there are so
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: many open questions about these particles. There's so many particles
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: we don't understand, and we don't understand why we have
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: the number we do and why they do the things
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: we do, and we feel like we're sort of in
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: the dark ages of particle physics where people will look
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: back in a hundred years and think, oh my gosh,
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: it was so obvious what was going on. But here
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: we are today sort of clueless on the forefront of
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: human ignorance, not really knowing how to make sense of it.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: So the goal at certain is to find a bunch
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: of new particles to sort of fill in the gaps
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: and give us the bigger picture so we can get
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: a sense for like what's going on. Yeah, and today's
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: discovery that we're going to talk about involves penguins somehow,
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: And just to be clear to our listeners, Daniel, it
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: didn't smash any or crack open any penguins right in
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: this experiment. No penguins were harmed in the making of
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: this podcast, episode four of the experiment it describes, absolutely not.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: We love penguins. In fact, that's why we name this
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: particular bit of physics after penguins, because they are just
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: so adorable so to be on the podcast, we'll be
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: asking the question, didcern just discover a new particle using penguins?
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: I'm picturing Daniel, penguins wearing white lap coats standing around
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: some giant machine, pressing buttons, checking clipboards. Am I right, Well,
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: I'm not surprised. That does sound like a cartoonists view
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: of the penguin particle collider. That sounds like a far
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: side strip. No, not at all. The way it involves
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: penguins is really just fanciful. You know, when we talk
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: about how particles interact with each other, we draw these
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: little diagrams that have lines, and the lines connect where
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: the particles interact, and they diverge when the particles go
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: in different directions. And you can make these diagrams simple
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: for a simple interaction, or complicated for like lots of
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: particles interacting. So you have these abstract sort of diagrams
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: to represent something physical, and you can look at them
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: and sort of like see something in them. There's sort
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: of like a Roschach test, you know, look at this
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: squally lines and tell me what you see. So there's
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: one particular sort of famous diagram which one theorist at
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: one point called a penguin diagram because to him it
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: sort of looked like a penguin. Yeah, I wish we
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: could somehow show this image to our listeners over this podcast,
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: because I can sort of see it. Maybe it looks
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: sort of like a square with a little round bottom
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: and two little feet. Maybe is that kind of what
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: they were thinking about? Oh? I think those feet are
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: supposed to be the beak. I think that's supposed to
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: be the face. So wait what, No, those are the
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: feet penguin. Where's the head then, well, it's a headless
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: because you cracked it open and your experiment. How's the
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: headless penguin eat raw fish? Then I don't want to
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: know where the fish goes. I don't know. You told
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: me you were the mad scientists here. I'm just podcasting
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: about it. I didn't do this experiment. I have no
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: responsibility for any miss. You only work in the same place, Daniel,
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: and eat lunch with the same physicists, and you know,
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: get paid to the same union feast. They do have
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: a suspicious amount of sushi, that's true. Maybe they're feeding
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: it to the penguins and those chicken wings on Chicken
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: Wings night. Maybe they're not chicken Oh my god. But yeah,
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: this is the news that came out recently, and several
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: listeners sent in the question asking us to explain it
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: and to talk about what happened and what did they discover. Yes,
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: certain does a good job of publicizing their discoveries, and
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: there's a lot of pressure leases and a lot of
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: coverage and a lot of articles quoting physicist saying this
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: is really important. And so a bunch of our listeners
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: wrote in and asked us to break it down for them.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: We heard from Jonathan Tindell, Margie Foster, Shane Barnfield, Kendall Edwards, Heisman,
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: Essen pre End, Shoe pass One, and Vlodomir. So thanks
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: to everybody who wrote to us and asked us to
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: break down this big discovery. We're very excited to talk
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: about it. And if you hear something in the world
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: of physics that you don't understand, please write to us.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: We will take it apart for you. Yeah, how to
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: penguins work? Or we will not take any penguins apart
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: for you. What's their magnetic polarity in the South Pole?
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: A spinning penguin? Alright, So these are some new results
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: coming out of CERN. And it involves also the Large
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: Hadron Collider, right, it does involve the Large Hadron Collider.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: This is our big tool for discovering new physics because
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: it's the way that we can give a lot of
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: energy to these particles. And when the particles have a
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: lot of energy, that let us access other kinds of
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: particles that normally we can't see because there's not enough
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: energy around to make them. Remember that in the early
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: universe things were hot and dense. There was much more
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: energy sort of per area, per volume, and so a
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: lot of these particles probably existed back then. But these
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: days the universe is sort of cold and slow and separated,
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: and so to create these weird particles, to find them
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: to give us clues as to how to crack the
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: big mysteries of particle physics. We have to recreate those conditions.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: We have to create a lot of energy density, So
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: we use the large hage On collider to smash protons
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: together to make that little blob of energy which can
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: give us a clue about what's going on. Yeah, because
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: from that blob of energy, basically anything that can come
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: out does come out eventually, right with some sort of probability,
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: Like from that blow of energy, other particles can come out,
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: and that sort of tells us what kinds of particles
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: the universe can make. Yeah, exactly. It's sort of amazing.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: You don't have to know what you're going to make
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: before you turn on the collider. You just get to
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: see like everything that's possible, and so you just got
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: to sort of watch and eventually everything will pop out.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: And the classic way to use the LC to discover
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: new particles is to do exactly that, to like make
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: some new particle and then see it turn into something else.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: And that's what we did. For example, with the Higgs boson.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: We have to crank up the energy of the particle
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: collider so there was enough energy to make Higgs bosons,
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: and then we could see them turn into other stuff,
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: and observe them in our detectors. That's sort of the
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: classic way. That's the direct way, like actually make it
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: in your colliders, like have it appear and be visible
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: to your detectors. But that's sort of difficult because then
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: you actually have to have enough energy to create these things. Yeah,
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: and so this new discovery uses sort of a different
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: way of discovering particles. Right, you're looking not at actually
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: making the particles you're looking for, but looking at their
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: effects on other particles. Yeah, we are limited by the
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: energy we can pour into the collider. And so for example,
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: if there's another particle that's just a little bit too
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: heavy for us to make it, then we can't make
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: it in the collider. It just doesn't appear when we
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: make those collisions. And so that really limits our ability
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: to find these things because it's not easy to crank
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: up the energy of the collider. To do that, you
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: need like a bigger ring, which means a bigger tunnel
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: or stronger magnets. All that stuff is expensive and very
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: hard to change. It's not like there's just like a
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: knob on the large change on collider. And I mean
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: we've already cranked this thing up to eleven. Right, doesn't
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: go any higher, So you need to build a new collider.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: Have you tried then? I think there's a twelveth setting
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: on that knob, but people are just too afraid. Well,
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: then not gonna let me in the control room because
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: I love to twiddle knobs and press buttons, and so
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: I'd go crazy in there. You're like a penguin just
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: slipping all the buttons. I've had some bad fish for
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: lunch and and making some bad decisions. But there is
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: this other trick we can use that you just mentioned
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: to try to see hints from other particles. Because if
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: you create the right conditions, these other big, heavy particles
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: that you don't have enough energy to actually make, they
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: can still influence what's going on. They can like appear momentarily.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: They can like pop out of the vacuum and nudge
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: some of the particles we can see and then disappear again. Yeah,
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: and so that tells you about that particle, right, You
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: see the effect of it, and so you can say, hey,
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: is that something either. Yeah, It's sort of like if
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: you go to the forest and look for unicorns. The
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: best thing to do is to like see a unicorn. Right, Okay,
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: you got a unicorn you're bringing home. Everybody believes in
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: your unicorn. But if instead, if you can't find unicorns
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: because they're too slippery or your canvas not good enough
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: for whatever, you might find evidence of unicorns. Maybe you
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: see their tracks, or you see how they're like, are
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: bothering the other horses or something. It's more indirect, but
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: you can convince yourselves that those unicorns exist without actually
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: seeing one. And that's what we're sort of doing here
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: with these really heavy particles. We can't actually make them,
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: but we hope this sort of appear in these fluctuations
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: and affect the particles that we can see. And if
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: we measure those effects really precisely, then we can deduce that, oh,
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: there is something weird and new and heavy there. But
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: how could you tell Daniel how different unicorns trucks are
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: from a regular horse, because the only difference is the horn. Well,
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: you know, sometimes a unicorn scratches a tree or something.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: You've got to be clever, you know, you could look
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: for rainbow poop. I hear that tell tale sign of unicorns, Yeah, exactly.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: I heard that sometimes penguins ride unicorns also, so you
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: could just like look for the penguins or you know,
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: track the fish. You know they're called narwhals, But that's
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: exactly it. It takes an extra cleverness. You have to
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: like find a way that these new particles might affect
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: the particles you are looking at in a unique way,
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: in a way that you can't explain the other way.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: And then you have to make really really precise measurements
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: of the particles that you're studying. And so because at
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: the LHC, we haven't found any new particles. You know,
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: we were hoping when we turn this thing on, find
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: the Higgs boson and then find like fifty five or
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: thousand or whatever new particles that we could study. We
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: haven't found those yet. It's been a bit disappointing, and
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: so our backup plan sort of is to find hints
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: of these new particles to reassure us that they are there,
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: even if they're above our energy range. I see, because somehow,
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: even if you're not creating the necessary amount of energy,
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: they could still somehow pop up or still somehow kind
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: of affect the probabilities of the other particles. What sort
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: of effect are we talking about? Well, we're talking about
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: how particles decay. So take a particle, for example, like
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: a B Mason, which is a combination of two weird corks.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: These particles decay and when they decay, they do it
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: by interacting with W bosons and Z bosons and other particles.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: So you draw a lot of these lines that describe
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: how the particles decay. But if there are other ways
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: for the decay, if they can decay by interacting with
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: these new weird heavy particles, then that will change how
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: often they decay and what they decay into. So if
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: you take, for example, these be masons and you measure
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: really carefully what they turn into sometimes this, sometimes that's
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: sometimes the other thing, and you compare that to what
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: you predict from your calculations. If there were no other
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: new heavy particles, then maybe you can see some discrepancies.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: I see all this time since the Higgs boson, you've
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: been running the LC smashing particles hopefully not birds, and
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: just kind of scene of things. Check out, you know,
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: if they match what your theory says that you should see. Yeah,
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: that's a good way to put it. One way to
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: find new particles is to like actually see them. The
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: other ways to look for little discrepancies, like is there
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: anything weird in the data at all? Anything we don't
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: understand because we can do these careful comparisons, and anything
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: that doesn't match up indicates that there's something new, there's
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: something we didn't expect, something exists in reality that doesn't
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: exist in our calculations, which means we need to change
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: our calculations by like adding a new particle or a
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: new force or you know, a new tiny little bird
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: that's affecting the experiments. All right, and apparently you have
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: found some sort of weird anomaly in the data, right, Yeah.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: Until recently, there were some hints there were some things
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: that were sort of tantalizing but not really significant enough
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: to make anybody believe they meant anything. We were looking
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: at the decay rates of these b masons and they
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: didn't look quite right, and we thought, maybe there are
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: some new particles, but you need really precise measurements, and
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: you know, we saw things decaying in one way and
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: they were expected to decay another way, but they were
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: kind of close also, and we spent a lot of
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: time assessing the uncertainties on these things to see like
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: do they overlap or not. And so there were some hints,
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: but they weren't really conclusive, and so people thought of
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: a more precise way, a more powerful way to test
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: these things. And that's the result that was released just
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: last week. It's pretty significant, you think it. Is it
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: tantalizing result or is it like a conclusive, wow, we
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: found something results. It's decidedly right in the middle or
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: right it's in a superposition of exciting and boring at
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: the same time. Yeah, exactly. We will look back later
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: and know whether this was the first hint of a
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: crazy new discovery that revolutionized physics, or it's just another
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: blip that turned out to be nothing. We will know
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: in the future. Right now, we don't know, but we
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: can have fun speculating. Right it could be the unicorn,
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: or it could just be a donkey maybe wandering through
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: the forest. Yeah, or like fifteen penguins in a trench coat.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: You know, any of those would be exciting, especially to
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: the donkey. All right, well, let's get into what they
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: actually found and measured and discovered and what it all means.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: But first let's take a quick break. All right, we're
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: talking about whether or not sar and found a new particle.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: Is it a new particle or a new force? Daniel, Well,
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: we don't know. I don't know. It's a new thing.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: It's a new thing. It's a new thing. To not
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: say what the thing is. It might be any We
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: just don't know. One of the disadvantages of discovering something
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: this way is that you don't really know what's causing it.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: You see something weird, it might be evidence that there's
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: something new, but you don't have as specific a handle
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: on it as if you actually made the thing directly
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: and could see it. De kay, all right, we'll step
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: us through. What did they actually find and what did
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: they measure? So this comes from an awesome experiment. It's
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: called LHC B and it's called lc BE because it
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: runs at the LHC and involves mostly these B corks. Now,
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: BE corks are the pair of top corks. Right, So
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: we have six corks in the standard model. There's the
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: up and the down. These are the ones that are
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: familiar to you because they make you up there in
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: the protons and neutrons. And there's a couple of weirder corks,
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: the charm and the strange cork, which are a little
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: bit heavier and it can make funny little particles. And
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: then the last generation, the last pairing are the bottom
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: cork and the top cork. Top cork only discovered the
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: Fermi lab in the bottom cork discovered in the seventies.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: But as usual, there's a controversy about what the call
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: this particle. The bottom cork. Half of the community calls
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: it the bottom cork as a member of the pair
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: top and bottom. The other half of the community calls
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: it the beauty cork because they call them the truth
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: and the beauty corks. Wait, there's a controversy in the
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: physics community about what to name these particles, and it's
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: been going on for twenty five years. Is that what
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: you're saying? Yeah, they just don't know how to make
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: these decisions. There are some people who measure these things
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: being produced and they call them bottoms, and the other community,
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: the one studying how these things decay, tend to call
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: them beauty corks. And those two are sort of different
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: communities and they don't get together that often, and so
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: they've just sort of like gone their own ways calling
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: the same particle with two different names. Is it like
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: a Europe versus U s thing. No, not even I
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: think maybe there's more Europeans saying beauty and more Americans
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: saying bottom. But there's definitely some Americans I've heard use
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: beauty and some Europeans use bottom. You just call them
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: beautiful bottoms. Why not. I like big corks, and I
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: cannot lie you go, you can be totally non pc
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: about the part goes in the standard model. Yeah, And
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: so l ah c B is an experiment that's dedicated
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: to studying this kind of cork, the bottom cork, the
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: be corry, the beauty cork, whatever you wanna call it.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: And it works kind of differently from the other experiments.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: The one that I work on Atlas, for example, it's
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: sort of like a big cylinder. It surrounds the collision
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: point and takes a picture of everything and that flies
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: out because we're hoping to make something at that collision
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: and then see what it turns into. This experiment is
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: a little bit different. There's still a collision point, is
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: still colliding protons on protons. They're not interested in what
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: happens in the actual collision. They're interested in what happens
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: to the stuff that flies out. Because when you have
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: these protons colliding, you also get like a huge shower
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: just sort of like junk particles out the front, and
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: because there's a lot of energy coming in both directions
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: and most of it just sort of like goes down
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: the beam pipe. So this experiment is different because it
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: doesn't surround the whole collision point with detectors. It just
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: captures some of that forward stuff and looks for these
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: bottom corks and watch them turn into other stuff, watch
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: them interact, watch them, kay, watch them do their thing. Well,
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: but this one is different, you're saying, Yeah, So that's
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: how this one is different. At LEAs and cms like
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: surround the collision point, this one just sort of like
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: forward stuff, like the stuff that spews out towards the
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: beam pipe. It takes a picture of that, and so
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: it's organized kind of differently. But the basics principles still applied.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: They can still find the tracks of particles, they can
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: still measure their energies. But what they're looking for is
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: not like did we make a new Higgs boson or
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: do we make a new heavy particle, But they're looking
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: to identify particles that have be corks in them and
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: watch those particles decay. But you're still watching the collisions though, right.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: These things are created from the collisions, but they're sort
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: of like secondary products of the collisions rather than the
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: primary products. You don't really care what created these be
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: masons or these be corks. You're just interested in watching
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: them decay. So they're made in the collider, but then
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: you sort of catch them where you channel them and
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: then you measure them. Yeah, exactly, So we're interested in
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: this case in this particle called a B plus mason.
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: Remember that quirks can combine in all sorts of ways,
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: but they have these weird things called color, sort of
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: the analogy of electric charge for the strong force, the
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: strong nuclear force. If you want to have a particle
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: that doesn't have an overall strong nuclear charge, we call
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: that without color, then you need to have the colors balance.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: So you can do that by having one cork and
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: an anti cork, where the cork is like red and
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: anti red, or green and anti green. You can also
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: do it by making triplets of these particles, like a
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: proton or a neutron has three quarks inside. This particle
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: we're discussing is a B plus mason. It has two quarks,
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: So you start with an up cork. I mean, you
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: have an anti beauty cork. I don't know what that is,
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: like an ugly cork combined to make this particle called
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: a B plus mason. So it's got two corks inside
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: of it. So you're making pairs of corks, and you
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: call those B plus masons because they're a different combination
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: of corks. And then you study what happens to those. Yeah,
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: when you have the original collision from the proton, all
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: these corks flyouts crazy energy, and the corks gathered together
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: into particles because they don't like to be by themselves.
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: If you're interested in that, we have a whole fun
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: podcast episode about why quarks can't be alone because the
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: strong nuclear charge is so weird. But yeah, you're right.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: We have these B plus masons that are made, and
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: then we watch and see what happens. And so in
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: particular here they're watching to see if these particles decay
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: into a kon and then two muans or a kon
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: and two electrons. And we think that that should happened
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: exactly the same rate that the universe shouldn't perform. U
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: wants two electrons. That the rate at which these two
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: things happen should be exactly equal because electrons have the
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: same I don't know energy as a mun or why
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: would the universe be exactly the same for both. We
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: don't know, and we don't even know why the muon exists.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: But the ELECTRONO muan are very very similar. They're almost
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: exactly the same particle, they have the same electric charge,
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: they interact with the weak force the same way. They're
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: basically cousins. Right then, Muan is basically just a slightly
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: heavier version of the electron. And in every other experiment
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: we see, the universe treats these leptons, the electron, the muan,
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: and the taw all the same. For example, the z boson,
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: which is a very important particle, decays into these things
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: in the case into each almost exactly the same rate.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: So we don't know why, but we have observed everywhere
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: else in particle physics that these things are treated universally,
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: that everywhere you're gonna have an electron, you can also
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: have a muan, and the same thing happens at the
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: same rate. And so it would be interesting and weird
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: in a surprise if this B plus Mason like to
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: dedicate the muans more often, or like to decay to
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: electrons more often. That would show a weird preference for
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: one kind of particle over the other, and maybe a
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: hint that something new is going on. Because the theory
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: says that they should be the same, like in the
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: math involved, that they should be exactly or at least
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: the math that you have says that you should see
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: the same results equally. Yes, the math that we have
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: says that should be almost exactly equal. And those listeners
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: who are really in the particle physics will know that
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: the ELECTRONO muant are not exactly the same, right. The
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: difference between them is the mass. The mulant is heavier
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: than the electron, and that does make some difference, but
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: they account for this in their measurements, and they know
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: how much the mass should affect the rate of which
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: this thing turns into mus and turns into electrons. And
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: what they're looking for is something more than that, a
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: bigger difference than that. So, yes, our calculations predict that
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: there should be a very very small, almost negligible difference
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: between the rate of decay to muans and two electrons.
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: And then we do the experiment and we measure very
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: carefully to see how often we see one versus the
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: other they see and you're checking to see if the
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: two are different by that small amount or if they're
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: different by more or less than what the theory predicts. Yeah,
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: and the thing that we're looking for is pretty rare,
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: Like it's not like B plus Masons like to decay
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: in this way. This is not of like a happy
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: way for them to decay. This is very weird. Like
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: if you have two million of these B plus Masons,
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: maybe one of them will decay in this way by
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: going to a kayon and a couple of lectons. So
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: you've gotta make a lot of these things because it's
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: very rare. Anyway, it's like a rare combination for it
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: to decay into. But if it happens, it should happen
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: at a certain you know rate. Compare meals on the
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: lecrons coming out. Yeah, and this is where the penguins
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: come in. If you draw the diagram for a B
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: plus Mazon decaying to a kon and two left ons,
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: then you make this series of lines that describe like
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: where the corks go and what's interacting with what, And
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: it sort of looks a little bit like a penguin
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: is at the top of the penguin is at the
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: bottom of the penguin. I'm not exactly sure anymore, but
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: it's a little penguin. Let's just say Daniel did as
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: a cartoonist, as a you know, professional and expert opinion,
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: this looks nothing like about Okay, I will defer to
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: your expert opinion on this one. But the way it
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: starts out, you have a B plus mason, which is
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: an upcork and an anti bottom and then that anti
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: bottom cork changes, it changes to an anti strange cork.
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: So when you get out of the end is an
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: up cork and an anti strange cork, which is how
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: you make the K plus Mazon. So B plus turns
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: into a K plus. But you can't just turn an
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: anti B cork into an anti escort. That's just like
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: changing the flavor of it. When you do that, you
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: have to like shoot off another little particle, so you
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: get this little loop which makes it upen and inside
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: their stuff is happening, and that's where the calculation is
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: or like how often do these little particles shoot off
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: and let this happen? What happens to those particles, why
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: do they sometimes turn into a pair of muance and
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: sometimes turn into a pair of electrons? And that's where
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: all the sort of nasty gory theoretical calculations have to happen.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: I guess maybe one question is why did you pick
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: this particular diagram and interaction to probe or to double
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: check that it's doing what the theory says. You know,
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: aren't there like a million or maybe infinite number of
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: interactions that could happen in a particle collision? White test
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: this one? Well, there was a whole argument between the
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: penguin community and the eagle community, and that's whole different
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: kind of diagram that people wanted to test. You have
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: an animal name for each diagram? No, I just totally
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: made that up. No, that's a good question. Why do
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: we choose this specific diagram? Well, the truth is, we
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: would be happy to see deviations anywhere, and personally, I
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: would prefer to see deviations not where we expect, not
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: where we're looking in the place where we expected to
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: see no deviations. It was just like a simple cross check,
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: because that would be like more of a surprise, is
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: that would be like, huh, you weren't even thinking about
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: finding a deviation here and here it is, and that's
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: the kind of discovery I'm hoping for, one that like
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: really rocks the foundations of physics and makes us rethink everything.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: You mean, like it's simpler interaction, like hey, you know,
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: an electron hitting up a positron or something something more basics,
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: something more basic, it would be more interesting or even
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: just something we didn't expect, because you know, there's a
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: lot of theorists out there who have ideas for what
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: new particles there might be. We go to the large
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: Hadron collider and we can create whatever is out there,
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: but we also like to have an idea for what
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: we might create. It makes it more powerful to find it.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: It is easier to see something if you know to
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: look for it than if you don't. Right, if you're
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: looking through a stack of hay and you know you're
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: looking for a needle, it's easier than if you're just
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: looking for anything that's not Hey. So people have very
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: specific ideas for what new particles there might be and
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: where we might see them, and so this is a
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: very rich area of research where lots of people have
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: come up with new ideas for why we might see
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: particles in this particular decay and also in the other
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: ones that involved be masons. And that's why we have
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: this whole experiment LHCb dedicated just to study in the
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: decays of particles that have be corks in them, because
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: people have identified lots of these weird decays that might
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: give us clues about new particles that are out there. Well,
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: can you explain it for us, Like why this particular one,
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: the supposedly penguin Lincoln one, why this one might be
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: especially useful for finding new particles. Yeah. Sure. And the
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: reason that bees are exciting is that they have sort
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: of a lot of mass. They are heavier particles than
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: the other ones, and that just gives them more options,
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: Like when they're decaying, there's more stuff that they can
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: turn into. Because they're heavier, they have like a bigger
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: budget for what they can do. And one thing they
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: might do, for example, is turned into this weird new
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: particle called a lepto cork. Lepto cork is a particle
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: that can talk to corks, and it can talk to leptons,
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: and that's very unusual because most of the particles can
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: either just talk to corks or to leptons, and like,
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: we don't have an idea in the standard model in
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: our theory physics for the relationship between quirks and leptons.
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: Like we see there are six corks. We see there
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: are six leftons. There's a lot of obvious similarities. Leptons
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: are like electrons, right right, electrons, muans, tows and all
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: the neutrinos. There's six of those, and there's six of
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: the corks. And there's a lot of obvious parallels and
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: similarities between these two sets of particles. But according to
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: our theory, they're totally different. And so it would be
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: exciting if we found a new particle that was sort
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: of like a combination of a cork and a lepton.
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: It would tell us something about how these two very
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: different kinds of particles are connected. It would give us
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: a clue to like put these two things together in
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: the same context, like an intermediary particle, like a link
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: in the evolutionary change. Yeah, the missing link particle, something
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: that's half unicorn half penguin. Again, there's already waiting for you,
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: ding it. Somebody took that parking spot already. And so
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: people have this idea that maybe the b cork instead
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: of just turning into a strange cork via the interactions
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: we know, these penguin dinagram might instead create this lepto cork.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: This is this new particle because bees are sort of
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: at the border there, or because this is kind of
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: a reaction that involves both leptons and courts. It involves
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: both leptons and quirks. And this is not the only
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: place you might see lepto corks. We might, for example,
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: create them directly at the Large Hadron Collider and we
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: study them. We looked for them. I actually worked on
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: exactly that research for a while, but we don't have
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: enough energy to see them if they do exist. So
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: this is like another way to maybe see hints of
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: lepto corks is to let them influence the way the
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: bees decay. Maybe they play a role in how these
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: bees turned into leptons. And they might prefer muans versus electrons.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: Because these lepto corks might for example, only talk to muans,
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: are only talk to electrons, they might not be willing
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: to interact with the other one. And so it would
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: make sense if these things sort of like broke this
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: lepton universality, if they preferred one kind of left onto another.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: All right, well, let's get into a little bit more
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: detail of what they actually measured and what it could
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: mean and whether or not it's a statistical fluke or
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: maybe actual unicorn poop. But first let's take another quick break.
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: All right, So, Danny, you're smashing particles at the large
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: Hattern collider. On every two million collisions or every two
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: million times that you make one of these pairs of cords,
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: sometimes they go into electrons and sometimes they become muans,
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: And that's what you're measuring, right, Like how often that
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: one and two million interaction becomes a pair of electrons
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: or para muons? And so what did they find? So
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: they had hints for a while that maybe things weren't
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: looking like they were going to be equal, but they
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: didn't really have enough data. You don't expect them to
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: be equal, right, you're just checking to see that the
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: difference is what you expected to be. Yeah, we expected
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: them to be equal if the standard model is correct.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: But we did some early measurements, preliminary studies on a
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: small amount of data, and things didn't look balanced. It
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: looked like they were preferring one to the other. Specifically,
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: it looks like it was preferring electrons to muans, Like
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: electron the case were happening more often than muans. So
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: everybody got really excited and thought, oh, maybe this is real.
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: Let's do a really careful study and will analyze our
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: full data set, will use every collision that we can,
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: and we'll get a really precise result. And when you
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: do this you have to be really careful not to
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: introduce bias into your answer. There's lots of different ways
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: to analyze these collisions, to look at the data that's
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: coming out, and if you know what the answer might be,
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: you might be tempted to, you know, like bias it
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: not in a conscious way, not in a way where
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: you're like, I'm gonna make up some false data. But
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: if you have to make a choice between one way
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: of doing things another way of doing things, you might,
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: you know, prefer to do one way if it leads
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: to an exciting result. Twiddle the knobs until you see
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: what you want to see. Yeah, and what we want
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: to do is measure how likely this is to be
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: a random fluctuation. And so to do that, we need
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: to make sure not to twiddle the knob because there's
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: almost always some way to twiddle the knobs to get
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: an interesting result, because if you do enough experiments, is
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: always one that's weird. And so we want to make
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: sure to be unbiased so that we're like really knowing
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: whether what we see is real. And to do that,
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: we institute a bunch of controls to make sure that
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: nobody is accidentally subconsciously twiddling those knobs. And the way
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: we do it is we make the data analysis blind,
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: so we like add a big random number to every collision,
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: so we don't actually know what they mean, and we
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: develop our analysis strategies and all the tools and all
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: the programs that we double check them, across check them,
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: and we don't like reveal what those random numbers are
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: until the very end, until we know what we're doing.
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: So it makes for like a big reveal at the end.
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: So it's almost like you corrupt the data on purpose
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: so that like what you see is not actually anything,
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: but then at the end you take out that plant
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: that see the corruption. It's like we're working with encrypted
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: data and then we type in the password and it
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: all becomes clear at the end, and that prevents us
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: from like sculpting the data are making choices that might
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: lead us down one path or the other. And this
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: can go in two directions. You know, it can be
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: biased towards repeating the results of previous experiments because like, hey,
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: those folks measured this thing, we should probably get a
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: number that agrees. And it could also be biased towards
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: seeing something new, like who I want to find something
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: new and win a Nobel prize. So it's important to
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: institute these controls because remember, of science is done by people,
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: and people make mistakes, and people have biases, and even
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: if they're not actively trying to corrupt these analyses and
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: nobody here is, of course, they can subconsciously make choices
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: that lead in one direction or another. So we protect
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: against that by sort of blinding them from the data.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: But I thought the experiment was being done by penguin.
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: Everyone knows they're totally impartial. No way you can buy
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: them with a fish or two. Man. The guys are cheap,
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: They have no integrity, bad math in penguins. Today you're
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: killing penguins and insulting them all in the same experiment then,
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: and I'm using them to learn about the universe. Your
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: craving nous knows no statistical bount so they made this
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: measurement and they got the number, and the result is
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: something like point eight four point eight four four exactly.
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: What this is the ratio between the muans and the electrons.
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: So what this means is that if you have a
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: thousand decays and go to electrons, you only have eight
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: hundred and forty five they go to muans. And that
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: sounds like a pretty big discrepancy. This is much bigger
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: than I thought. I thought we were going to be
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: seeing something like and we're gonna be wondering if it
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: really is close to one. But this thing is like
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: pretty far from balanced, Like point eight four is pretty
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: far away, and the uncertainties on that are pretty small.
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: They're pretty confident. This isn't just a statistical fluctuation. I see.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: But I thought you were expecting there to be not
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: the same, Or are you saying that you were expecting
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: them to be the same, or the theory says they
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: should be the same, and the theory says they should
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: be very very close to the same, very very close
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: to one. And we do a bunch of stuff to
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: remove any other sort of biases, like the way that
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: we see electrons versus the way we see muans or
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: the fact that the muan is slightly heavier by doing
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: a double ratio with another pair of decays, that helps
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: protect against making sure that there's no biases. So we
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: would expect this number to be exactly one if there
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: was lept On Universality, because everything else has been removed.
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: But instead we see it's like eighty five percent instead
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: of one, and so that's a pretty big difference. You
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: said the words leapt On Universality. What does that mean
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: is that like the Dipton University or it's a different
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: campus lept On Universality. That's just a way of saying
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: that the universe treats the electrons and the muans and
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: the towels the same way. You know, it's democratic that
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: these particles should all appear at the same rate when
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: you have a particle decaying. So that's what we're testing.
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: So then you measure these outcomes electrons versus muons, and
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: you found that one comes out more than the other,
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: which could mean something. And is it pretty conclusive or
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: are you still sort of in the initial stages where
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: it could maybe be a statistical fluke. It could still
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: be a statistical fluke, and there's a lot of discussion
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: about exactly what it means. You know, they spent a
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: lot of time doing a very careful analysis of the
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: uncertainty these and they can measure how likely they are
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: to see a result this far from one if it
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: was just a random chance, you know, because things do
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: happen that are random, and the experiment you do that
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: has quantum fluctuations and it can in principle give you
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: any answer. It's like having a room full of monkeys.
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: If you have enough monkeys and you let them go
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: for long enough, eventually one of them will start a
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: podcast or type out Hamlet or whatever. Right, And so
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: what you want to do is measure how likely is
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: it for the real answer to be one, but then
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: for random fluctuations to give you an answer that looks
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: like point eight five. So you can do the statistical
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: calculation and ask how often does that happen? And in
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: particle physics we tend to translate that into units of sigma,
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: like how far from the Gaussian mean are you? And
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: in this case there are about three sigma away, which
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: is pretty good. It means it's like one and one
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: thousand chance of the answer actually being one and having
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: just like weird fluctuations conspire to give them this result.
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: So it's the three sigma I know is pretty good,
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: but like this gold standard's supposed to be five sigma.
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: Gold standard is five stigma. We have this word in
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: particle physics for discovery, and you can't write a paper
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: with discovery in it unless you have five stigma. If
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: you have four sigma, you can call it observation. If
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: you have three sigma, you can call it evidence. So
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: there's all these words that translate the number of sigma
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: into the words that you can use, and six sigma
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: is like holy cattle or oh my god, or it
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: is the unicorn poop. And there's a reason that we
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: are skeptical that we have this standard of five stigma
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: because you might think, well, isn't one in a thousand
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: good enough? Like that seems like pretty unlikely that this
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: is a fluctuation. The problem is that we do a
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: lot of experiments. This is not the only measurement we've
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: made the large aging collider. It's not the only measurement
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: made at this experiment. It's not the only measurement made
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: with B plus masons at this experiment. So if you
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: do a thousand experiments, each of which have different statistical fluctuations,
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: then you would expect that one out of those thousands
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: we give you a false positive, even if those false
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: positives have a one in a thousand chance of happening.
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: If you do enough experiments, you will see these rare
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: false positives, and we do a lot. And also, you're
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: making big claims about the universe, so you want to
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: be super extra sure. One in a thousand is not
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: good enough to challenge our view of the universe. Yeah,
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: and particle physics tends to be very very conservative about
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: making claims. They would rather wait and make the discovery
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: in an extra couple of years or when they have
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: more data, than make a false discovery and claim to
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: discover something and then have it not be true because
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: people remember that. Remember when people thought we had neutrinos
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: going faster than the speed of light. A lot more
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: people remember that then basically anything else we've discovered, because
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: that was a big embarrassment, and so we try to
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: be very conservative and wait until we're really pretty sure.
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: That's why we have this kind of arbitrary standard of
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: five stigma. One in a hundred thousand chance of a
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: fluctuation before we sort of officially believe something. All right,
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: So you found something that might be possibly something that
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: tells you either something going on here, it's not what
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: the standard model predicts in physics, and so what's the
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: view of what could be happening. Like you mentioned that
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: maybe these the masons are transforming into a lepto quark
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: before they transform into the other particles. Yeah, so this
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: sort of the spectrum of possibilities from the most boring
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: to the craziest. The most boring explanation for this is
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: that somebody's made a mistake, you know, that it's just
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: wrong somewhere, that they forgot to account for something, or
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: they're not seeing something right. And so the best way
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: to check that is to do a completely different experiment
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: at a different accelerator, using a different detector and a
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: different group of people. And so there's a Japanese experiment
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: that's running, and they will give us a totally independent
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: measurement of exactly the same effect, and since it's in
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: the same universe, it should be the same number if
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: they did it correctly. And so currently the results from
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: the Japanese experiment don't agree with these results. Their number
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: is like, you know, close to one, but it has
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: a really big error bar. So actually does agree because
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: this new result is within air borros of the old one,
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: but the old one sees something a little bit larger
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: than one. So the most boring answer is somebody made
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: a mistake. It will get resolved in a few years
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: when they do more careful experiments. Well, I think the
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: problem is probably that you know, unicorns in Japan they
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: do tend to be a little bit different than unicorns
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: in Switzerland. I think either different kind of chocolate, and
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: I think that really affects their poop. No, I'm just kidding,
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: all right, So then what's the exciting possibilities that the
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: particles are transforming into these new kinds of particles called
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: lepto corks. Yeah, the more exciting possibility is that this
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: is a hint of something new. This is what we've
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: been waiting for the large age on collider. We've been
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: hoping to find some new physics, some clue that tells
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: us the secrets of the universe, that helps us understand
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: how all these particles fit together to explain the fundamental
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: nature of matter. And so this could be that moment
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: that cracks it open. It could be that this is
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: the sign of a lepto corep. But you know, there's
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: lots of other people out there with other ideas for
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: new particles that could explain this. One problem with this
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: discovery again is that we don't know exactly what it is.
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: It's sort of indirect so we can't see this new
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: particle and like measure its mass and see what it
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: turns into and see what it interacts with. We're only
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: seeing like the scratches on the trees and the shape
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: of the footprints in the ground. We're not actually seeing
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: the thing directly. So it opens the door for lots
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: of fun ideas, and I expect to see lots of
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: cool papers with exciting new theoretical ideas on the web
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: in the next few days as people get their like
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: intellectual juices flowing about what could explain this? All right,
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: I guess stay tuned. Maybe this is the first hint
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: of something that cracks open the standard model and hints
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: at new unicorn particles, or maybe Daniel run but we'll
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: find out. I think that these guys have done it
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: very careful analysis. I know these physicists and our colleagues,
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: and some of them my friends. They know what they're doing.
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: Way I thought you didn't know them, Daniel. Now they're
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: you're best friends. They're on a different experiment, but you know,
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: certain is a very friendly place. Wasted in the cafeteria
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: and eat ice cream and talk about whatever. And also
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: people move from the experiment to experiments. So some of
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: the folks on led c B used to work on
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: Atlas or in a pre this experiment with me. The
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: tight community, so we all do know each other. You
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: just place yourself on the PETA target list there, Daniel,
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: for experimenting with penguins, only virtual penguins, particle physics penguins.
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: But I have a lot of faith in these guys.
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: I think that this experimental result is probably correct. I
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: just don't know what it means, and I think it's
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: more exciting than the Muan g Mind is too result
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: that came out just afterwards, because the theoretical reference numbers
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: are better understood here, and there are other results from
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: beak work studies that give similar hints that something fishy
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: is going on with these penguin. The case, all right,
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: we'll stay tuned. Then we'll wait to see what other
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: people say about it, whether it confirms or whether it
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: points to something else going on. Yeah, and it's exciting
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: to see some new results coming out from certain and
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: to see the world of physics giving us hints about
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: how the universe actually works. And if you see a
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: study out there that you'd like to understand better, please
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: send it to us. We would love to break it
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: down and explain the universe to you. I hope that
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: was interesting and do you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us,
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: See you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: I Heart Radio or more podcast from my Heart Radio.
• 43:18
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