How quarks were discovered?

One day in November 1974 that changed particle physics forever.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Daniel, tell me a good physics story. Oh you
came to the right place. Okay, but don't tell me
you said a story about amazing physics. I want something
with drama, because like the universe isn't dramatic enough for you.
I mean I want a story with like intrigue and
sabotage and conflict and you know, people fighting and you know, revolutions. Oh,
I see you want like Jason Bourne in a lab coat. Yeah,

(00:30):
you know, don't you look like Matt Damon or Tom Cruise.
You can make a movie called Thesis Impossible. All right,
you asked for it. I have got a juicy story
for you. Hi, I am more handmad cartoonist and the

(00:58):
creator of PhD comment. Hi, I'm Daniel Whitson. I'm a
particle physicist, and I like to imagine that my dramatic
life would be well adapted to a telenovelt with a
lot of twists and turns and evil twins. Twin particles.
I guess there are twin particles and physics, there are
twin that we don't know which ones are good and
which ones we could be the evil twins, that's right,

(01:18):
And lots of dramatic revelations that your advisor has other
grad students you didn't even know about. Well, Welcome to
our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explained the Universe, a production
of I Heart Radio, in which we take you on
a tour of all the drama in the universe, the
black holes, the neutron stars, that tiny particles, the discovery

(01:40):
of those particles, and try to make you understand what
scientists are thinking about, what people on the very forefront
of human understanding are puzzling over today. Yeah, because we
like to talk about all the amazing things out there
to discover and all the things that we have discovered,
and sometimes we like to talk about how we discovered
these things, because you know, sometimes the store is pretty

(02:01):
dramatic or you know, interesting, or tells us a little
bit about how signs were. That's right, because you can
look back at history and say, oh, if I had
been around, I would have discovered the electron. Or it's
pretty simple actually to figure out what the photon is,
and it's a quantum mechanical object. But when you're standing there,
I think you might be alone there, then yeah, I
would sit around thinking, you know, I could have discovered

(02:22):
the electronic Hey, Einstein when the Nobel Prize for interpreting
other people's experiments that were already published. It's like, you know,
sit around for an afternoon, read some papers, boom, Nobel Prize,
Noel change the course of history. So if you know
how to do it, if you know where to go,
it's pretty straightforward. But when you're standing at the forefront
of human ignorance and you don't know what the solution is,

(02:42):
it's much more complicated. So I think it's really worthwhile
rewinding our understanding and remembering, like what were people thinking
at the moment, What were the questions they were asking,
what was confusing, what was simple? What were the ideas
of the time. I think what you're saying, Daniel, is
that there's a fine line between a thought experiment and
just making stuff that's right. And that's why I prefer

(03:04):
to do real experiments in the collider and actually ask
nature questions. All right, Well, today on the program will
be continuing our series about how particles weren't discovered? You know,
particles and things that matter and all the things in
the universe are made out of How did we actually
discover these things and know that they existed and know
what they look like, and know how much they weigh

(03:24):
and what they would like to wear in the morning.
I don't even know how to respond to did that.
I'm imagining a photon getting dressed or something. But but
I think this is really fascinating because currently we have
fantastic theoretical understanding of all the particles, how they fit together,
what they are, and of course lots of outstanding questions.
But there's a wonderful history there. Each particle is like

(03:45):
a hard fought victory. Each one was like, how do
we figure out that this particle is also there? And
you know, in the end, our theory has to describe experiments.
We've developed a theory in order to describe all the
crazy experiments that we've seen that review of the existence
of those partners. So it's a lot of fun to
to sort of reimagine and understand how each one was discovered,

(04:06):
because you know, I think that looking at history now
and looking at it science now, it's kind of hard
to believe sometimes that there was a time where we
didn't know anything. We didn't know any of these things.
We didn't know that electronic existed, or protons existent, or
protons existed, or what they wore in the morning, and
so it's it's kind of interesting to kind of put
yourself in the mindset of the people who didn't know anything,
but they discovered what actually reality is like absolutely, And

(04:30):
it gives you another fun exercise, which is to imagine
somebody in a hundred years, how would they look back
at what we know now. They will have hopefully a
grasp of, you know, the shape, the size of the
universe and why it's accelerating, and maybe what the smallest
particles are, and they'll look back at us and they'll
be like, oh my gosh, those guys knew nothing about
the universe. How did they even go to work? They

(04:50):
were making stuff off on podcasts? And I like to
think of, you know, human knowledge is one of these
exponentially growing graphs, and at every point it seems like,
why we know a hundred times what we knew fifty
years ago, and then in fifty years we will again
dwarf human knowledge. So I'm looking forward to that. Yeah,
I'm looking forward to being dwarfed. There are positive exponential graphs,

(05:11):
not just negative ones. So we've done this podcast episode
on electrons and positrons and photons and muons, and so
did they. On the program, we'll be asking the question
our quarks discovered. Is this a quirky story, Daniel? You know,

(05:31):
this is one of the most dramatic stories in all
of particle physics. There really are crazy things in these stories.
You know. There is sabotage, There are competing public announcements,
There are arguments about how to name particles. There are
stories about leaked information being slipped from one experiment to
the other. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. No, there is real drama.

(05:54):
I mean, I'm waiting for the six episode mini series
on Netflix about this. Said of the murder explosions, Now
we didn't get that far. That's right, Tiger Kings becomes
particle kings. Oh, I see, like the true crime. That
could be the new genre of Netflix true physics. But

(06:16):
as usually, we were wondering how many people out there
know the story of how courts were invented because you know,
quarks and just a quick recap, there are the mini particles, Dad,
everything else is kind of made out of most of
everything else, protons and neutrons are made out of quarks,
and so these are pretty fundamental particles, right, Daniel. They're
not just like you know some novelty butts, right, They're

(06:37):
not just some random thing you pick up in the
store on the way home and then throw away unused.
There are the things that make up me and you.
I am made out of atoms, and those atoms have
neutrons and protons at the center, and all those neutrons
and protons are made of quarks. And all the matter
that you've ever tasted and touched and tripped over or
thrown at each other is made of quarks and electrons.

(06:59):
So they're pretty important. So, as Daniel does, he went
out into the streets and ask people if they knew
how corks were discovered. Now, as usually, we'll think about
it for a second, then put yourself a hundred years ago,
and as yourself if you know how corks were discovered.
Here's what people had to say. Some scientists in the
colder found it. Uh. I don't actually don't know how

(07:21):
they were discovered. You know, I've been learned about that.
Was it m colectron cloud chamber or something. No, that's
not the quirks. That's for something else, that's like positrons
or something using a particle accelerator. I don't know all right,
that's cool. I don't even know what they are, so
I just discovered by the inclusion of items. I mean much,

(07:46):
I don't I don't remember the name of the machine,
but this clusion of particles, all right. Not a lot
of deep knowledge of history of physics in the public, No,
not so much. There's some pretty good answers here, like
the guy who knows how positive arms were discus were
in cloud chambers. And you know, people giving credit to
the Hadron collider, which is, you know, not too far

(08:06):
off the certainly we're discovered in collisions. Interesting, so you know,
some knowledges. It seems like some people thought of courts
were discovered recently, like the LHC. You know, this thing
is twenty years old, tops and the quarks we've known
about since the sixties and seventies, so it definitely was
not the large Hadron Collider responsible for discovering corks. And
I'm just curious here, how did you get these questions?

(08:27):
Did you go out into the street before the pandemic
or or during the pandemic? Do you have now like
a six foot selfie stick with a microphone? I, shockingly,
I actually work on these things kind of far in
advance so that I'm prepared for a PANDAMA. I have
a stockpile of questions. I have asked people on the street.
I see you have a federal stockpile, the National Strategic Reserve,

(08:48):
A random questions. All right, good, So people were still
feeling optimistic about signs. All right, it seems like not
a lot of people know the stories, and you're saying
that it's full of drama and interesting twist and turns.
So tell us story, Daniel said the scene. What was
it like back then? And what year are we talking about?
So let me take you back to seven, A dramatic world,

(09:09):
A cold winter blew into Chicago. Now you have to
sort of rewind back to before the clues were found
for quarks, and back in seven, we actually had a
pretty clear picture we thought of how the universe looked.
We felt like we knew things were mandat of Adams
and Adams were manat of some bits inside. Yeah, we

(09:29):
knew there were atoms, and we knew those atoms had
protons and neutrons and electrons. We also knew they were photons.
And we felt like, hey, that's a pretty good picture
of the universe. And I think a lot of people
in physics felt like that might be it, Like maybe
you know, we're coming up to the last end of
the road and we're gonna answer all the questions, and
that's going to give us a sort of last sense

(09:49):
for what the universe has meant. There can't be anything
smaller than these particles. These are it. These are the
basic building blocks of life, the universe and everything in it.
That's right, But of course there were a few lo threads, right,
There are a few things which didn't quite fit into
that picture. And that's a lesson. Right, every time there's
a little loose thread, one thing that doesn't quite fit

(10:10):
into the hole you wanted to, you should pull on
that thread, you should mix that. Metaphor, until you figure
out the secret of the universe, you should just ignore it,
repress it. And some of those those threads were things
like muans. Like remember we talked about how muans were discovered,
and when they were first found, people were like, what, who,
what are that? We don't need those muans. They're not

(10:30):
part of the atoms. They're just particles that seemed to
have been there, but they weren't part of regular matter exactly.
That was the kind of clue we're talking about. And
there were other particles like pions that were found in
cosmic rays and people are like, hum, what are these
particles about? We don't need them to build matter. Interesting,
but they can't exist. Why do they even exist? What's

(10:50):
the idea? And so you see them, but they're they're
not part of most of things. So I guess that's
a weird thing, right, It's a pretty weird thing, but
it also gives you a clue. It gives you a
clue for like what kind of particles can be out there?
And in the end, remember, what you're looking for is
an answer to the deepest question right to understand, like
the nature of reality. So you want the full menu.

(11:12):
And those few little threads then turned into I don't
know what's the metaphor here, a whole rug, I suppose,
or a whole pile of yarm, giant haystack, the giant
haystack because originally we had these weird, unstable particles muans
and pions just from looking them come down from the
sky and cosmic rays. But then people built particle accelerators.
They weren't satisfied just to sort of look at high

(11:34):
energy particles that we already found in nature. They wanted
to create their own collisions to explore these things with
more control. So people build particle accept smash things in
front of them, not just wait wait till they come
reigining down. Yeah, you want to do it on your terms.
You know, you want to have control. I want to say,
I want to turn up the energy, I want to
turn down the energy. I want to call this kind
of particle that kind of particle, right, I want to

(11:56):
see what it feels like when I stick my hand
into it. I mean, that's a basic reiosity, right. Um.
And so what they found when they built these accelerators
was a whole lot of new particles. They found kaons
and strange particles and all sorts of stuff. We talked
a little bit about strange matter on the program recently.
And this is an era we call the particle zoo

(12:18):
because basically, every time they turned on the accelerator they
found some new party. Did you guys have a theme
song jingle like particles particle zoo ra Welcome to our
particles Zoo. Yeah, so I guess you didn't have particle accelerators.
But he thought, hey, let's see what else happened when
things smashed together, because that's I guess that's what you

(12:39):
knew was happening in the atmosphere. Yeah, we had a
sense that these things needed more energy. Right, These unstable
particles were heavier, meaning that they contained more energy, and
then they decayed down to lighter particles. To to try
to create new heavy particles, you want to create localized
energy density. You want to smash two particles together, so
you've got a little like blob of energy right there,

(13:00):
maybe enough to create something new. And so that's what
these first particle accelerators did was create these high energy
density situations where you could create these new particles. And
we found zillions and zillions of these because at this
point you sort of new about equals mc square and
then you knew that you know, things can matter can
come from pure energy. That's right, you can create new matter.

(13:21):
It's I mean, it's alchemy, right. People have been trying
to do this for thousands of years, and we actually
were able to do it. By smashing particles together at
high energy. You can create new kinds of matter and
that's exciting, right, like wow, Look, every time you turn
it on, you create a new particle and then you
get to name it after your puppy or whatever. But
it's also continge name it after their puppy. I don't

(13:41):
have a record of that. No, Back in that day,
they were mostly naming them after Greek letters, so you
got lots of you know, sigmas and theatas and upsilons
and this kind of stuff. But it was also confusing.
Maybe they named their puppies after it's probably lots of
puppies named upsilon and data. But you know, once you're
once you sort of your even satisfied you've created all
these new particles, then you're looking at it and you're

(14:03):
looking for patterns. You're like, Okay, why are there these
particles and not other particles? What does this mean about
the nature of the universe? Like how are they related? Yeah,
because we don't want an answer that says, oh, there's
ninety two different kind of fundamental particles, right, we suspect
that the answer is a small number of particles. We
want to explain the whole universe using a small set

(14:25):
of pieces, right, like the legos. We want to build
everything out of a small number of basic blocks seventy
four And we often talk about how we had the
periodic table of elements, and how that was kind of
something that told us that when you have a lot
of these things out there in the universe, there's probably
some kind of pattern or some kind of underlying building
block to them. Yeah, every time you see unexplained phenomena,

(14:47):
weird patterns, trends you don't understand, it's probably an emergent
phenomenon from the arrangement of smaller bits. Just like in
the periodic table. You see all these patterns, and that
tells you that there's something else go going on, And
you're absolutely right. Every feature of the periodic table comes
from how the electrons sit in their orbitals around the nucleus,

(15:08):
and so people suspected They're like, well, maybe all these
new crazy particles we found are reflective of something smaller,
something tinier, and all these patterns that masters these particles
in the way they interact come from how those little
bits are fit together. That was sort of the nugget
of the idea. And so they found a pattern, right,
and all of these particles in the particle zoo, They're like,

(15:30):
wait a minute, the lions are sort of like smaller
versions of the elephants, and the zeros are sort of
have four legs, just like the lines kind of thing. Yeah,
so we had a decade of discovering new particles and
then in nineteen sixty one, a theorist came up with
an idea. He said, well, I noticed that if I
categorize the particles in two ways, one by their electric

(15:51):
charge and the other way by their strangeness. And remember,
some of these particles are strange in the sense that
they last a lot longer than you would expect. And
you can listen to our whole podcast episode about strangeness.
And so people postulated this new property of particles strangeness,
and they give particles strangeness zero like the proton and
the neutron, or strangeness one, or strangeness too, And then

(16:13):
they just made a table and meaning like, it's strange
because given how massive it is, how munched ways, it
shouldn't be around this lng like kNs last a lot
longer than you would expect, and the reason is that
they have strangeness. Then the universe likes to preserve strangeness,
so it tries to find a way for the kon
to dec to keep the strangeness into the products, and

(16:34):
that takes longer. It's a weaker interaction. But protons are
pretty stable, and they're supposed to be stable, so they
have zero strange protons have no Now we know that
strangeness actually reflects the strange quarks inside of it, but
at the time they didn't know. They were just like,
this is a property, these particles, and a lot of
particle physics, it's just like writing down properties we observe
and wondering where they come from, and wondering if we

(16:56):
can see patterns and then explain those patterns in terms
of something deeper. And so at the time, you know,
they knew the charge of these particles, they could measure that,
and they had sort of invented this idea of strangeness
just by observing how the particles decayed and labeling them
strangeness one, strangeness zero. And then they noticed this pattern.
They called it the eightfold way because they noticed that

(17:17):
if you arrange the particles according to strangeness versus charge,
that they formed these octagons, right, and they formed these
triangles and all these really interesting geometric patterns. All right,
So they found a bunch of particles and they found
a pattern maybe a clue to what all these particles. Yeah,
and they found these geometric patterns and that suggested to

(17:38):
them that, like, you know, maybe there's something going on here,
maybe there's a reason for all these patterns. And the
theorist that came up with this eightfold way found a
hole in those patterns, like there was one triangle that
was missing a corner and said, okay, well, maybe there's
a particle there. You would have to have this strangeness
and this charge to be in that corner, and he
predicted its existence and then they found it, like, oh,

(18:00):
you were right, this new particle does exist. So that
was the first clue that maybe this pattern really reflected
something because it wasn't just imaginary, like they weren't just
imagining things. You could actually find particles using these patterns. Yeah,
just like with the periodic table. We started putting it
together and we noticed some holes and we're like, where's
this element number or whatever that we don't see in nature.

(18:23):
It turns out, you know, it does exist. You can
create it. It's just very unstable. In the same way,
they were able to fill out these triangles and these
octagons of the eightfold way. All right, Well, let's get
into what this pattern actually meant or means and how
it helped them make sense of the particle zoo as
far as let's take a quick break, all right. You know,

(18:56):
so they found a bunch of particles and they saw
that there was some kind of pattern to the meaning
that there is something going on here. Yeah. Yeah. Every
time you see a pattern, that's your first clue because
it lets you sort of play games with what's going
on underneath. Right, you want to find some way to
explain a very complicated set of things. You've observed ninety
two different particles with all weird masses and behaviors in

(19:19):
terms of a smaller set of objects, And so finding
that pattern gave them a clue as to how to
put that together. And so they came up with the
idea that maybe there are even smaller particles that kind
of put together to make these bigger parties. Yes, exactly,
And that's sort of the idea that particle physicists are
always looking to write, like everything is made of smaller bits.
That's like the oldest idea in particle physics. And so

(19:41):
they thought, well, we have all these particles, can we
explain them in terms of smaller bits, right, They're like,
we're particle physics. You only have particles, right, that's right,
that's our hands. Like when you have a particle, everything
looks like a particle. T that's our hammers. So everything's
the nail exactly. And this idea actually came up independently
by two different theorists, and they came up with the

(20:02):
same idea that there could be these three little particles that,
if you put them together in different combinations, explain all
the particles that we see, but not all of them, right,
Like some of them like the muan. Isn't the muon
kind of like an electron, it can't be split. Yeah,
they don't explain all those particles, like the muan is
not made of quarks. But all those particles discovered, the

(20:24):
particle zoo, the pions, the chons, the sigma particles, all
those kind of particles. They could explain all these new
ones in terms of these little basic particles. And so
Murray Gelman came up with this idea and he called
them quarks based on a word that he saw in
a James Joyce novel. And at the same time another

(20:44):
theorist named Zwag came up with exactly the same idea
mathematically and published it. But he called them seeming mathematically
like the mass predicted there would be three of these. Well,
at the time, all these particles were only made out
of these three quarks. Now we know that there were
up quarks, down quirks, and strange corks. Right up and
down is what you need to make the proton and
the neutron. You add in strange to make all these

(21:06):
other strange particles like the kon and the omega and
the sigma particles. And so at the time they only
needed three, and the particles they were creating only used
those three lego pieces I see. But now we know
there are more. Now we know there are more. Yeah,
the stories was on and on sort of mathematically to
explain the ones they had. They thought they were three,
that's right. And they discovered that if you postulate the

(21:27):
existence of these three particles, that you could put them
together in pairs and triplets to explain all the particles
that they were seeing. So it's like peeling back a
layer of reality and saying, oh, all these things are
just different ways to combine these basic building blocks. And
not only could they explain all the particles that we
had seen. They could show which particles we hadn't yet seen, Like, oh,

(21:50):
nobody's tried this combination that would give you this particle
and predicting it, and then we find it. And that's
exactly what happened with this omega minus particle that we
mentioned earlier. That's what they've They've found particles that were
predicted by these acism quirks. Yeah, exactly, And so that's
pretty convincing. And you know, if you ask me, I
would have believed it. Like at that point, I would
have been sold on this quirk idea. I would have

(22:12):
been like, well, this, this explains it. It describes all
the particles we see. It simplifies things and old together.
But you hadn't seen them. I guess they were just
sort of like an idea that seems to predict things,
but you hadn't directly seen them. Yeah, and so most
physicists were like, all right, that's a cute idea, but
is it an idea or is it real? Right? Is

(22:33):
that what's actually happening inside these particles or is it
just a nice thing you can calculate in your mind.
And the sort of deep philosophical question there about whether
any of our theories are more than just ideas we
calculate in our mind, and whether we actually see anything directly.
But physicists were skeptical. I guess they're like aces. I'm
not I'm not sure I would call that a name. Yeah,

(22:55):
And I don't know the history of why quarks took
off instead of aces. Actually like aces better than quarks works.
It's kind of a weird Quirks sounds like yogurt, you know,
I think yogurt sounds like quarks. There is a yogurt
called corks that I guess why would you call them as?
I don't know. It's it's a positive thing, you know,
it's celebratory in some way, or it's like, hey, look

(23:16):
we found a little list bit. It's like the number
one particle. I don't know, it's it's in a nice
spot somewhere in my brain, I see. But maybe Gilman
was barely thinking like, hey, these are weird odd and
you let's find an award that's kind of weird odd
And perhaps perhaps and I guess the field liked his
idea better because quarks is what we call them. Really,
it was totally just a name popularity. Con I don't

(23:37):
I've done something really try to figure out, like why
Quirks took off. It might not just be a name popularity.
I think Gelmont had a larger personality and was more
famous and influential, and so, you know, it's a bit
of a political thing. Doesn't it depend on who published first? Yeah,
but you know it was just about the same time.
But sometimes like the second counts, right, the minute counts.
I think that's ridiculous. But we'll hear a story later

(24:00):
on in this program about two discoveries announced on the
same day. All right, so they were theoretical and some
people didn't believe them. But then what happened? How did
we say, hey, look, quarts are real. So then we
got some actual evidence because they did some experiments, and
experimentalist said, well, if these things are real, we should
be able to see them, meaning we should be able
to like take a proton and shoot particles at it

(24:22):
and see this internal structure. I mean, if protons are
not just like tiny perfect dots or perfectly smooth, if
they're actually made of three like hard nuggets bound together,
we should be able to see them. If we shoot
electrons adament with high enough internet and what made them
think that the proton was deconstructible or breakable but not
the electron. Oh boy, that's a good question. Um, we

(24:45):
don't know if the electron is deconstructible. We are doing
experiments to try to figure that. We had a podcast
episode about whether the electron has stuffed inside it. I
guess the short answer is, we don't know, and we're
trying to see if the electron has stuff inside of it.
We've never seen any evidence. They're just like, hey, let's
match these two things together and see what happened. Yeah,
but the theory went that the proton was built out
of quirks, and so that's what they were testing. The

(25:05):
suggestion was you could maybe see these things inside protons.
Nobody suspected that electrons were made out of quirks, And
we know today that the electron doesn't feel a strong
force and so it can't be made out of quarks.
We don't know why and what the difference is not
the whole other podcast episode, But anyway, they used electrons
because they're cheap and fast and small to shoot at

(25:26):
protons to try to see what was inside. Because, like
I guess, protons are heavier. Protons are much heavier than
the electrons, and the idea was that maybe they had
this structure. And so you shoot electrons at a proton,
it will bounce off. But if you shoot it high
enough energy, then it can get to break it. They
have to break it. It can get between those bonds. Right.

(25:48):
A proton we now know is made it of quarks
that are held together by really strong bonds. But if
you shoot at it with electrons that have energy more
than the energy those bonds, then those bonds are sort
of irrelevant and you can bounce off the individual corks, right,
And and so they did that. They shot the proton
with the revolver in the library, and they found that
the proton split into three. Yeah, they found not necessarily

(26:11):
that it's split into three, because remember these corks can't
be alone, and so if you break up a proton,
it just the corks inside of it just form a
new proton and new other particles. But what they found
was that there were three sort of hard centers in
the proton, three places where if you hit it just right,
you would bounce back at a great angle rather than
passing through. Oh, they were looking at the bounce rate. Yeah,
they were looking at the bounce rate and the bounce

(26:32):
angles essentially, And so if the proton is a totally
solid sphere, then you'll always sort of get the same angles.
Whereas if the proton is mostly transparent with three hard
nuggets in it, then often you'll just go your electron
will go right through it, and sometimes it'll bounce. But
how did they know there was three of them? Like,

(26:52):
can you could they actually aim electrons with the You
can't aim, it's all statistical. You can't aim an individual
a cork, but you can count how many hard centers
there are by how often you get a hard bounce back.
And you know, this is very similar to the way
the nucleus of the atom was discovered back in the
day or in the turn of the century, before we
even knew that the atom had an electron with the

(27:14):
nucleus in it. Rutherford discovered the nucleus in this exact
same way. He shot particles at nuclei and found that
mostly they went through, but occasionally they bounced right back,
and that's how he discovered the nucleus. Is we're still
not convinced they saw these hard centers nucod centers and
physics are still like, yeah, I don't know if that's
those are Its amazing with me. I don't understand what

(27:35):
physicists were thinking at the time, Like you had this
beautiful idea of these tiny particles that explained this big
mystery that had been going on for twenty years about
the particle zoo, and then you have this evidence that
these particles really were made out of smaller particles, and
still physicists were like, I don't know, And I think
part of it is that they couldn't see the corks

(27:55):
on their own, right, They couldn't like create independent, standalone
corks and study them, like with all the other parts.
They're only looking at X rays and not at you know,
holding the bones in their hands. Yeah, and you know, quarks,
you can't see them by themselves. They can never be
on their own. They're always tightly bound into these in
combinations of other corks, into other particles. So maybe that's

(28:15):
what motivated this skepticism. But you know, I would have
been I would have been on that train long before this.
He would have been wearing the cork hat. Yeah, all right,
So it sounds like it was still sort of an idea,
maybe a little unproven. People were unconvinced. But then something
amazing happened, and so let's get into that. But first
let's take a quick break, all right, Daniel, tell me

(28:48):
about the November Revolution. It sounds like the October Revolution.
This happened a month later, or this is a totally
different thing. I know, it sounds like something that should
have happened at you know, at the Alamo or some thing.
But this is a revolution with stars and you know,
and as far as i'm where, nobody died on this revolution.
But this is sort of the day that physics changed

(29:10):
its mind. We went from like, corks are an idea,
two corks are a real thing, and there's an actual date.
There's an actual date. Yeah, and that's because that's the
date of the dueling press conferences that are the end
of this story. Yeah. And the idea was, if corks
are real, maybe there are more of them, Like we
only needed three up, down and strange to explain all

(29:31):
the particles that we've seen before. But how do we
know there aren't more corks like a fourth cork? Or
now we know there are six corks and there are
actually some theorists that said, you know, it's weird to
have three because the up and down are sort of
a pair. They go together. What about the strange cork? Like,
where is its partner? And you can associate the down
cork and the strange cork they have the same electric charge.

(29:55):
Where's the partner of the upcord? Right? Where is the
version of the upcork that has its electric m You
mean the Catholics weren't like, three sounds good to me.
It sounds like a trinity to me. Yeah, there there
are reasons three seems nice. But also if you have
corks at pair off, it's weird to have an odd number.
And so they predicted this fourth cork. They said, well,

(30:15):
we predicted another cork out there, and they called it Charm,
and this cork would be a heavy version of the
up cork. So the way the up and the down
are a pair, this cork, the Charm and the strange
would be a pair. So this pair, the Charm and
Strange are like the heavy version of the up and down.
There was a fourth beatle missing there, like, yeah, there

(30:36):
was a fourth needle. And this sold some complicated theoretical problems,
like people are trying to do some calculations, and the
calculations didn't work unless you had this other cork also
in the calculations. So sort of the first clue maybe
the universe made more sense mad if you had another
one yes math and so then then people went off
to look for it. So then November tenth, nineteen four,

(30:57):
people were like, I didn't know what was coming. And
then people went off to look for it, and there
was a guide and my team named Sam Ting. He
had an idea for how to look for it. It
was a very nice experiment, very clean. He was shooting
protons at a target and he was hoping to create
essentially this cork and its anti cork. He was hoping
if you smash protons into his target, then occasionally you

(31:18):
create a charm cork and an anti charm cork into
this new particle, and then he could see that new party.
And it was a very nice experiment, except it had
one weakness, which is that it was sort of slow,
like it wasn't making a lot of these every day.
It was going to take him like a year, year
and a half to get enough of these things where
he could claim discovery. Because in particle physics you have

(31:40):
to do things a lot, and then from the sort
of the statistics, then you say, hey, look that bump
in the data looks is probably a particle exactly. And
so he ran his experiment and he was cranking it up,
and his bump was building up and up and up
and up. Now, meanwhile, on the other side of the
country at Stanford, there's a guy named Bert Richter, and

(32:02):
Bert Richter had access to a much more powerful machine.
This is a collider that would smash electrons and positrons
against each other. And this thing was capable of discovering
a new particle in like an hour. But the problem
was he'd have to tune it to exactly the right energy.
Like if you knew exactly the energy you needed to
create this new particle and you tuned the beams, boom,

(32:22):
you could produce like a hundred of them in an
hour and be done. But you had to know how
to tune the beams. If you didn't know where to look,
it could be you know, you could be searching forever.
Like Stanford had a huge microscope, but they just didn't
know where to look. Yeah, had a huge microscope, but
they were searching a beach, right and they had to
like put here, put it here, put it here. If
they knew where to look for this new particle, they
could prove it existed right away. Something maybe had a

(32:44):
giant sifter which was slow, but you know, it would
cover a wider ring exactly. And so they were racing
and bert Richter and his team did these scans. They
started low energies and they scanned up and they didn't
see anything. And then they scanned down and they scanned
back up and they didn't see anything. They didn't see anything.
And meanwhile, Sam Ting is accumulating this data and he

(33:05):
knows exactly where Bert Richter needs to look, but he
doesn't want to tell him because if bert Richter finds
out this one piece of information, then he can scoop
him in just a day. So these two guys across
the United States, they knew what each of them were
doing and what they could do. They knew what the
other one could do. There's a lot of controversy about
exactly what they knew about each other's experiments and with

(33:27):
the connections between them. And there's also lots of crazy
stories here, Like I've heard stories that Sam Ting was
so desperate to get time to run his experiment, that
he actually sabotaged other experiments that were using the same word.
They had to share time with them, and there are
stories that the other experiments kept having these weird electronics

(33:48):
problems and every time they would come in after a night,
their electronics were fried. So finally installed a video camera
and they're like, what's going on? And the story goes
that Sam tinge would come in every evening and piss on.
This is the story. Their story is. There's video evidence.

(34:08):
I have never seen this video. This is pre internet.
I do not know if this story is true. What
do you smell it? Would would they be able to
tell that somebody was doing this. It's an interesting story
and it actually reveals something I think about the time
because at the time field of particle physics was dominated
by white American dudes mostly, and Sam ting is a
Chinese guy. He's at M I T, but he's sort

(34:30):
of an outsider and so this, you know, maybe shades
of racism in this story. It's not clear whether this
story is true, but it's a story that exists and
is out there, and it sort of is the flavor
of the time. Because Sam ting finally accumulated enough data.
He's planning to announce his result. He's, you know, calls
the press conference for the next day, and this is

(34:51):
like November t right, And meanwhile at slack on November ten,
they figure out exactly where to look, and they figure
it out or they figured from Sam. We don't know,
Like there are stories that maybe there was a leak.
Sam certainly didn't tell them, but somehow they knew exactly
where did they look? They turned, They turned the collider there,
they ran the experiment, they got the plot, they wrote

(35:13):
the paper the same day. It is all one day.
Next day. They also call it press currently at the
same time, now November the same time, So you have
to press conferences two parts of the country making announcements
of the same discovery at the same moment. But Sam
was in Eastern Times and he wins, I don't know,

(35:36):
I don't know if it's down to the minute, a
suspicious you know, like they've been looking for years and
then suddenly, the day before this guy is about to
go public, they find the right parameters. And so they
didn't talk to each other, and so they gave the
particles different names, like Sam called it the j particle
and the guys a slack called it the side particle

(35:56):
is Greek letter. And so we had the same particle
discovery announced by two different groups on the same day,
and so and you told me they called the official
name for this particle is the J side particle. Yeah,
we never resolved this dispute, like people still argue about it.
There are people in the J camp, people in the
side camp, but the official name is J slash SI,
which is like such a cop out. And to this

(36:17):
day there are people bitter that it's not called the
SI slash J probably probably, and people who think it
should just be the J particle, and people who think
it should just be the side particle. They should just
call it off and call it something. But they did
give them the Nobel Prize for this, the nineteen Nobel Prize,
and they shared it, all right. That's that's a good,
happy ending for everybody. They were all happy. Probably, No,

(36:39):
I think there's still a lot of grumpiness in the
field over this. But the end of the story is
that this is what really led people to believe that
corks are real, because we predicted a new one and
then found it, and that told us that corks are
not just like an idea for how to explain all
the particles we've seen so far. They really are sort

(36:59):
of a more basic fundamental building block of the universe.
And they saw it on its own, or they saw
it kind of in the same way of hitting something
inside of something else. Can't see the charm cork by itself,
but they were able to create a particle which is
made of just charm corks. So it's a charm cork
and an anti charm cork put together. That's the jape
side park. I see that the should just end the

(37:22):
controversy and not call it a name. Just call it
the charm the charm cork particle. Somebody else wanted to
call it ortho charmonium, like a yeah, seriously, that was
the technical proposal. Charming, forget it, forget it. Let's not
leave this up to physicists exactly exactly. That's what happens

(37:44):
when you leave it up to the physicist, right. But
I guess that what you're saying is the point is
that course are real, and that's how they were discovered. Yeah,
it was a sort of slow accumulation of evidence. People
were not convinced for a while, but then seeing them
inside the proton discovering that there was a new one,
and finding it actually out there in reality, like it's real.
That's really what convinced people. And since then we've thought

(38:06):
of corks as real and we've gone on to find
someone that's right. There are now six corks, that's right.
Just after the charm cork was discovered, just a few
years later they discovered the bottom cork. That was the
fifth one. And you know, we don't like odd numbers
of quirks, and so then people thought, well, there must
be another one that goes along with the bottom cork,
and so they called it the top cork. And and

(38:28):
there was actually competing ames for those two. Also there's
a whole camp of people who wanted to call them
the truth and beauty corks instead of top and bottom. Wow,
even more confusing. But the top cork took a long
time to discover. We'll do a whole podcast episode about that.
They were also dueling press conferences for that discovery. Well,

(38:48):
I guess you know, there's all sort of points to
how science has made you know, first it starts off
with just looking at what's out there, and then people
reading these papers and thinking about what it could be,
and then it involves then more people than taking those
ideas and proving them right. Yeah, I think that's ah,
it's a wonderful process. And I love how you can
sort of see that happen many times in science. You

(39:10):
go from like all the stuff around us to the
periodic table, and then from the periodic table down to protons,
neutrons and electrons, and then you know, you get an
idea that there are other particles out there, and then
you boil that list down to basic quirks and the
hope is the the the idea is that maybe we
can do that again. And now we have this new

(39:31):
list of particles, all these quirks and all these leptons.
We don't understand what the patterns are there. We don't understand,
you know, why we have all of them. Were sort
of at the the new particle Zoo. It's like the
cork and lepton zoo. We don't understand it, and we're
looking for that new idea, the one that will maybe
explain how these particles are made out of even smaller

(39:52):
ones and they have to subside the mini and farm.
Maybe acens will come back, right, I guess, but we
should probably come deuces now smaller. I think that has
another meaning. Maybe we should avoid I don't think I
want to drop a douce some particle physics, but you could, Daniel.
If you're the discoverer, you get to name it. Tell

(40:15):
me about your deepest scientific goals. Well, I want to
drop a deuce on the field. I want to call
it the poop particle that I could finally align my
research with my wife's research. There you go, alright, family,
white sand unity, that's what size it's all about. Yeah,
but you know we're far from that. We don't have
any ideas for what could be underlying the quarks. We

(40:37):
don't know your question earlier. Our electrons also made out
of smaller things. We know they're not made out of quarks.
We don't know why. We don't know any connections are
The one thing we do know is that there are
not more quarks out there. Really know that there are six.
And that's it. That's it, that's it, that's the end
of the story. We don't know why six. You're for sure,
for real, for sure, for really because more would violate

(40:58):
the laws of physics or what Because we have ways
to tell how many quarks there are, and that's from
how they talk to the higgs boson. Interesting, the higgs
boson talks to all the particles that have mass. So
if there were more quirks and there are no more
ways to talk to the higgs boson, well, if there
were more quirks, we would be making the higgs boson

(41:19):
more often at colliders. So by the rate at which
we make higgs boson is how often we make one,
we can tell how many quarks there are out there.
It's a really powerful, subtle argument. Well, you know, I
wouldn't put it past nature to still have an ace. Obviously,
maybe nature will drop a deuce on the field. I mean,
maill poop all over your theories as usually. All right, Well,

(41:42):
that was a pretty interesting history, and it's almos exciting
to put your head in the minds of these scientists
who were at the forefront, staring at the big unknown
and trying to make sense of all the weird things
that we find in nature. That's right, and what seems
obvious to us now was confusing and bewildering at the time.
And there were lots of other excellent nations and competing
ideas that we now no longer recall. And so while

(42:04):
history seems like a linear story, there are lots of
twists and turns and false starts, even inside quirks and quarks,
lots of aces indidios. All right, well, thank you for
joining us, see you next time. Thanks for tuning in

(42:25):
before you still have a question after listening to all
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(42:47):
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