What do Quarks taste like?

Quarks have flavor and color but what do they taste and look like? 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Jorgey, would you say that you have good taste in movies?
I don't know if I have good taste in movies,
but I feel like I like what I like. But
does that mean that you think those movies like taste good?
I mean doesn't mean to have good taste in movies?
You mean like if I ate a movie? Yeah, exactly.
Like are certain movies like delicious or like, you know,
hard to swallow? I think some plotlines are definitely hard

(00:29):
to swallow. Yeah, But it's kind of an interesting question
that you ask me. Were you still of asking me, like,
how can a movie taste? Or how can somebody have
good taste in music? Yeah? Exactly? Like why do we
use the word taste to describe how we choose art
or clothing or you know, living room furniture. It's not
like you're gonna eat that stuff. Well, it's probably just
kind of a poetic analogy, you know, Right, it's a

(00:52):
little bit of poetry. Right, We're saying, here's something we
can't really describe, and we're gonna related to something we
can describe. Hi am r hammade cartoonists and the creator

(01:17):
of PhD Comics. Hi I'm Daniel, I'm a particle physicist.
I smash stuff together at their large hay drawn collider
to try to figure out what the world is made
out of. And you are a listener with really good
taste because you are listening to our podcast, Daniel and
Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio,
the most delicious podcast in the whole universe. But seriously,

(01:40):
our goal on this podcast really is to take the
universe and slice it into bite sized pieces so you
can chew them one at a time and really digest
each one, bite size installments of knowledge for your ears
taste buds. Yeah, exactly. We want you to really be
able to incorporate these ideas into your brain. Right, this
is something you don't just swallow it like a pill.

(02:01):
We want you to really, you know, take some time,
chew it, enjoy it, gave understand like the top notes
and the back notes and the I don't even know
what I'm talking about here when it comes to names
of their various tastes. Take your your phone or whatever
you're using to listen to this and kind of swirl
it around a little bit, you know, let this podcast
arrate a little bit. Hey, I think this podcast has
legs for tasting. That's what they say about wine. You

(02:23):
swirl it around and you look to see if it
has legs. I don't drink that much wine. Well, I'm
also complimenting your legs, Orge, it did shape them this morning.
What I didn't want to hear that nobody wanted to
hear that nobody wants to be Well, maybe some people
out there do want a mental image of Jorge shaving
his legs. But I think the point is that there
are words that physicists use sometimes describe physical phenomenon that

(02:47):
is kind of weird to use, right, It's kind of um,
it's kind of like they they're used for other things
in the English language. Yeah, And we've talked about that
a few times on this podcast. Recently, we did a
whole podcast about Spin, in which you rightly insisted that
we should have called it like spin, because it's not spin.
It's like spin. But there's an important point there that

(03:10):
we're sort of extrapolating. We're saying, here's something weird and unknown,
but it's sort of similar in interesting ways to this
thing we do know, and so let's give it that
name so we can associate these two ideas in our head. Yeah,
I am a grumpy person when it comes to nomenclature,
to naming things. I'll take that mantle. I've heard you
do this yourself about your own work. What do you

(03:30):
mean Sometimes you introduce your comic and if somebody, if
you don't get that flash of recognition, you say, oh,
PhD comics. It's like Dilbert but for academia. Yeah, and yeah,
I think analogies are useful in the English language, and
that's why I use the word like, you know, but
we relean on these heavily in physics. I mean, when

(03:52):
we talk about things being particles, metaphors are analogies metaphors, Yeah,
and I would admit that we often use metaphors when
we should be using analogies. But that's basically all we do.
You know, in physics, we try to describe the unknown.
And what can you do when you describe the unknown
accept related to the known? Right, So you're like, what
is a particle? Like, it's kind of like a little

(04:12):
spinning ball. Oh, it's kind of like a wave. You know,
how does this thing work? It's kind of like this
other thing and uh, And that's the job of physics
is to say here's all these weird, disparate phenomena. Can
we describe them using similar ideas? So this this, you know,
there's a good intention there. It's not like physics is
trying to deceive people by saying this has spin and
this is a particle and this as this flavor. We're

(04:34):
doing our best to try to connect these things to
ideas that are already in your head to make them
easier to understand. And so today on the podcast, we'll
be talking about what do quarks taste like? That's right,
what do quarks taste like? And what do they look like?
Because in particle physics, we describe corks as having flavor,

(04:57):
and we also describe them as having color, and so
you might be wondering, like, what how does a tiny
little particle have like a color or a flavor? Like
can you taste one particle at a time? What does
that really mean? These guys being literal, are they being metaphorical?
Are they being analogical? What's the word there? Yeah, poetic?
You know, wrong? Perhaps there you go, and we will

(05:20):
be open to the possibility that physics has taken too
many liberties in bending the English language to describe what
we've learned. Yeah. So, and there are a lot of
examples like this in physics, right, especially particle physics, because
you're dealing with some pretty weird and unknown things. Yeah,
we basically always have to do that when we're describing
these tiny, little weird things we call particles. Um, we're

(05:42):
always relying on things that we understand, even the whole
idea of a field, you know, like that we talked
about quantum fields and electromagnetic fields. You know, you're relying
on your your understanding of of of how these things work. Um,
you know, a field in general, it's like I imagine,
like a field of weed or field of asked, you know,
like thinking about how things change over a plane. Um.

(06:04):
So everything we do basically is some sort of poetic
or non poetic extension of the English language. They were
in particular talking about corks, right, because corks have both color, flavor,
and spin, But they actually don't have neither color, flavor
nor spin. They have like flavor, like color and like spin.

(06:24):
There you go, Yeah, there you go, podcast done, podcast over. No,
we're gonna dig into exactly what that means. But I
was curious what people thought, um, So I went around
the camp as a uc irvine, and I asked people first.
I asked them, hey, have you heard of a cork?
And most people you'll you'll hear their responses. But if
they hadn't, I asked them, what would you believe me

(06:44):
if I told you that these tiny particles had flavor
or color? But if they had heard of them? You
would ask them if they knew that they have flavors?
That's right, if they if they had heard of them.
I asked them if they knew about cork flavor and color,
And if they hadn't, I said, would you believe me
if I told you that they had flavors and colors?
This is like a multipart question here, all right? Yeah?
Otherwise it was just too too short of conversation. Have

(07:07):
you heard of corks? No? All right, well there you go.
Those of you listening, maybe take a second to think
about if somebody approach you on the street and ask
you what a corks taste like or what's their flavor
or color? What would you answer? Here's what people had
to say, Um, have you heard of quarks? Do you
know what corks are? I've heard of them. Um, they're
supposed to have colors and flavors. Do you know what

(07:28):
cork colors and flavors mean? U? Cork is a delightful
like yogurty kind of a thing. So that's the first
thing that I thought of. What the question is, do
you know what cork flavors are? Wow? You're not talking
strawberry blueberry for the yogurt um. I have heard of
cork flavors. Yes, I have heard of corks. Another thing,

(07:48):
don't know what they are. Did you know that quarks
come in different colors and flavors? No? I wish I
could say yes, but I don't have heard of them.
But no, quirky people. Did you know that quirks, the
fundamental particles, come in different flavors and colors? I had
also heard out, but I can't believe I did not.
All right, great, Yeah, they're one of the parts of

(08:12):
protons and neutrons. Right. Do you know that they come
in different colors and flavors? Can you explain that? Do
they really taste and look different? No, it's just the
way that it's described. There's up and down, and I
don't really understand too much how that works. I would
have a hard time believing that because as far as
I know, we don't really see the quantum quantum mechanical
side of the world, so I don't know how that

(08:33):
would work exactly. All right, A pretty delicious set of
answers there, that's right. Yeah. Um. I was amazed to
learn that there actually is a European yogurt product called
cork that does come in various flavors. Is that true?
That is true? I verified that via Google. Well, technically
that yogurt probably does have a lot of quarks in it.

(08:54):
That's true. We should relabel everything in the grocery store
as mostly quarks, quirks and electrons. Is that going to
be a part of the physics food company? Quirks and electrons? Yum, yum, yum.
That's right. You can put out you can have a
pattern for pretty much anything, and you would dominate the
entire global economy. That's true. And that's something I think
most people haven't really gotten their minds around the fact
that everything they eat is just made out of the

(09:16):
same particles, and it's made out of the same particles
in basically the same numbers. You know, you have a
spoonful of yogurt, and you have a spoonful of I
don't know. What's something healthy um ice cream or lentils
or whatever. Then it has the same particles in it,
they're just arranged differently. So the thingness that you're eating,
the the yumminess or the grossness, comes entirely from how

(09:37):
those particles are put together, not what they're actually made
out of, which endlessly fascinates me. A bit of a digression, sorry,
but onto the topic of quarks being tasty, Maybe we
should um first remind people what a quirk is and
where it sits in the sort of hierarchy of particles,
and then dig into their flavors and colors. All right, Yeah,
so let's bring it down for people, or remind them

(09:59):
what is a quirk, Daniel. It's a delicious European yogurt apparently,
all right, And what flavors does it come in? And
what color is this? It comes in strawberry and blueberry. Now,
a quirk is, as far as we know, a fundamental particle, right,
So if you look at the stuff around you, then
you know stuff is made out of atoms, elements of
the periodic table. You dig into those atoms of course,

(10:21):
as a nucleus surrounded by electrons and inside the nucleus
are protons and neutrons, right, protons being positively charged and
neutrons being neutral. But inside the protons and neutrons are
these particles we call quarks, and there's either two up
quarks and a down or two down quirks and and up,
and that gives you protons and neutrons. So even the
smallest level, everything is made out of these little pieces

(10:44):
that are arranged differently. The same basic building blocks can
give you protons or neutrons. It's just sort of different
numbers of the stuff and arranged differently. Because I think
most of us learned about the atom in high school, right,
and we learned that there's a little nucleus with protons
and neutrons and then electrons flying around them. Um. But
the thing you're saying is that those things inside the

(11:06):
nucleus are not actually things. We're just kind of configurations
of smaller things. Yeah, well, there are things in the
same level that you're a thing, right, You're a thing,
and you're configurations of smaller things, and those smaller things
a configuration of smaller things, and on and on and
on until we don't know when in the end everything
is made out of these particles, and there really are
the fundamental building blocks of like all the matter you
you've seen, all the matter you've tasted, all the things

(11:28):
you see in the night sky. You know those stars
out there, and they're made mostly out of quirks. Um.
The planet under your feet is made mostly out of quarks.
Your hand that you're looking at right now is made
mostly out of corks. The brain you're using to hear
this podcast is made mostly out of quirks, but two
quirks in particular, up corks and down corks. And they are,
as far as you know, the fundamental in the sense

(11:49):
that you as far as you know, you can't split
them any further, or they're not made out of even
smaller things themselves. That's right, as far as we know.
But that's mostly because we don't have enough power to
break them for there. And you know, there's an interesting
bit of history here that for a long time people
thought protons and neutrons were fundamental particles. They were the
smallest things we had found yet. And then people came

(12:10):
up with an idea that there might be particles inside
the protons and neutrons, and you know, they call them quirks.
But inside the field there was a debate for a
long time about whether corks were real, like, you know,
are they really there or is it just something we
use in our calculations that helps us figure out how
the math works. And there's sort of a lively debate
for a while until you know, we actually saw quirks
by breaking over the proton and interacting with them directly. Right,

(12:33):
But you you don't actually see the courts, right like,
you don't detect the corks. You detect what they turn
into or what they break into. That's right. Quirks by themselves, um,
don't hang out very long. They have such powerful forces,
the strong nuclear force, that they gather other stuff around
them very very quickly. So you almost never see In fact,
you never see a free cork, a naked cork just

(12:55):
by itself. It very quickly just grabs energy out of
the vacuum and dresses itself up. They're very shy. Who
wants a bunch of physics to see them naked? I mean,
I think a lot of people can really I won't
answer that question. I'm not qualified to speak to that question.
But so you've never seen a cord by itself you
mostly see the bits of it, but from your theory
you can piece together that at some point in that

(13:17):
shower of stuff there a cork existed. Yeah, exactly. And
also on the other side, remember we're colliding protons, so
when we start out, we collide protons, but protons are
basically just bags of quarks, and we speed them up
so much. That's actually interacting are the corks inside the
proton Because the energy of the cork, the energy the

(13:37):
corks have when they're moving in the beams, is much
much bigger than the energy that's holding the proton together.
So you can basically just disregard that. So on one hand,
you can think of the large Hadron collider as a
proton collider, but really we think of it as a
cork collider because it's colliding these bags of corks against
each other. So while we've never like individually seen a
cork by itself, we have a lot of pretty direct

(13:59):
evidence that they do this. You're telling me you even
name your own machines wrong, like your your machine should
have been called the large Cork. We need you, man,
I keep telling you we need you on these committees
for the naming because somebody services are available for for
a feed ten. I'll put you in the budget next time.
Namer that's my name, or scientist what you just named

(14:24):
yourself the namer? If you're that good, if you're gonna
be I mean, it's direct. I like it. It's simple.
But if you're gonna go for like I'm in charge
of naming stuff for physics, you've got to be a
little more creative than that, right, his grand namingus. It's
simple and direct, that's what I keep But I keep
telling you guys, you need to be not poetic the

(14:45):
namer of particles. No poetic flourishes allowed here. Huh. Well,
so let's get into what a court taste like or
what a court looks like. But first let's take a
quick break. Alright, So we're digging into courts today, and

(15:11):
in particular this idea that a cork has flavor. That's okay,
flavor flavor where's blinging and wraps. It gets even funnier
than that because there are other corks out there, right,
And those corks are heavier, so they're just like the
up cork and the down cork, but they have more mass,
and so we often refer to those other corks as

(15:33):
heavy flavor. And I remember in grad school telling my
friends who are like biologists or you know, political science
grad students, when I was working on I said, I'm
working on a heavy flavor and to them that totally
sounded like a rap group heavy flavor. Yeah, I'm gonna
drop some heavy flavor on you today. Man. There is
a well known YouTuber who wraps and things about physics.
You've heard of him? Met him? I've met him. But

(15:56):
have you heard of him? Yeah? Isn't it a woman? No? No,
it's like there's a lot of acapella songs about physics.
Oh yes, um, I have heard of him. Acapella science.
He's fantastic. There's another there's a famous rap about the
LHC that was done by a a young graduate student.
She's also pretty good. So this turns out there's a
whole community of physics rappers out there. Yeah, that's what

(16:17):
exactly what the world needs. But back to the topic
of quirks. The idea of flavors is that there's more
than just the up cork and the down cork. Those exist,
those make the proton of the neutron, but sometimes you
can also make these other corks. They're called charm and strange,
top and bottom. And the thing that's interesting about the
other corks is that they're very similar to the up

(16:37):
cork and the down cork. They're like copies of those corks.
They're just heavier. So is that kind of what happened
that at first you only had two quarks up and down,
and then you discovered more corks, so you have to
come up with other names. Yes, exactly. The first thing
up in the down and then they found the strange cork,
and after that they found the charm cork, and then

(16:59):
the bottom and then top cork. Because I wonder if
physicists thought that there were only two, so they went
with up and down, and then they're like, wait, there's
another one. What do we call this one? Side? Left, right, front, back? No,
it it actually did happen that way. Um, there were
these particles that were kind of weird, so they called
them strange particles very creatively. And then when they discovered

(17:21):
that the reason they were strange was that they included
a new kind of cork, they called that the strange cork.
And then there was one that was just particularly charming,
and you're like, let's call this one the charm cork.
So we were saying that every particle, every cork has
like two cousins or two versions of it. The down
cork aligns with the strange cork. So then when they thought, well,

(17:42):
there must be a fourth cork to balance it out,
they needed to make it somehow like above the strange
cork the way like the way up is above the down.
So they were like, well, what's you know, sort of
in that category, but you know higher. So they went
for charm. And you know, this is where the poetry.
They were like grasping for some sort of relationship to

(18:02):
try to describe these weird particles using you know, English,
and so they did their best, and they came up
with charm. They thought, charm is too strange. The way
up is to down. I can see that in like
an S A T question, you know, up to down
strangest to obviously charm. That's exactly what we did. Yes,

(18:25):
somebody was doing the S A T. And that's how
we needed particles. And then when they found another one
and it aligned again with the down cork, they called
it the bottom, which is not a great moment of creativity, right,
But once they called it the bottom. Then they had
to call the other one the top, and if you
find another one will be the lower and the under exactly.
I know. Interestingly, we've actually proven that there are only

(18:47):
three different flavors of corks. So when we say flavor,
of course that's what we mean. We mean either this
first group up and down, or the second group charming, strange,
or the third group top and bottom. So there are
three flavors of cork, and they're not strawberry, blueberry and
vanilla there you know, that first group, the second group,
in the third group. Okay, So the idea is that

(19:08):
first you only had to up and down, and you
discovered more and so suddenly you needed you needed a
name that tells you that separates all of these different
versions of the courts. Yeah, and probably somebody was like,
what can we do? How can we name it? Maybe
they like went down for ice cream and they were
looking at all the different flavors and they were thinking,
all these things are all similar, but each is a
little different, you know, And so I think they were

(19:31):
grasping for something poetic there. They were trying to describe
how these particles have relationships, but they're each a little
tweaked version of the other one. And so you know, flavor.
It's not a perfect description, but it's not terrible either.
Well it's weird because it's not really a quality. It's
not really a measurable quality, right, or quantity. It's just
it's just like a category. It's like it's it's basically

(19:53):
another word for category or another word for um types. Type. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
It's trying to describe basically the type of type or
the relationships between these three types, right, saying we have
these three types of things, what's the relationship between them?
And you know, to make it even more complicated, there's
actually sort of like dueling ways to talk about this.

(20:15):
Some people say, oh, there's three flavors of corks. Other
people say there's three families of corks or three generations
of corks, because they think that, you know, the cousin
analogy works better than like the ice cream flavor analogy.
So there's there's debate even within the physics community about
how good you got to name things. I think the

(20:36):
fact that nobody can agree on how to call them
pretty much settles the fact that we didn't do a
great job naming them. But I guess what I'm saying
is it's not a property that's like on a spectrum,
you know, like a you know, like a real flavor sweet.
You can have something really really sweet or less sweet
and everything in between. But a flavor for quarks it's
not really it's really more like strawberry or blueberry. It's quantized. Right,

(20:58):
You're right. You can't be halfway between one type or
the other. You can't be half up down and half
top bottom, right, that's not possible. You're either one or
the other. Well, I guess. But then the question is
do they have flavor? Like is there something about corks
and they're different flavors that is maybe analogous to real flavor.
I don't think so. I think it's a bit of

(21:20):
a stretch. I mean, corks do have flavor in the
sense that they taste like stuff, Like the last thing
you ate was made of quarks, and I hope it
tasted good. But corks themselves, you know, they have no
inherent flavor in that sense, and this quality that we
call flavor has, you know, only the most tenuous relationship
with the quality that you and I think of its flavor. Okay,

(21:41):
so it's not like it's something about the way they
react to other things, or it's not something related to
how how other particles feel them. It's just sort of
a name they use for like when you go to
the ice cream store and there are different types of
things to choose from. Yeah, exactly. And again I think
it's trying to show that they're part of a larger category,

(22:02):
but there are different elements in that category that they're
all sold under the same freezer. Yes, exactly. Basically great.
I think they're all sort of here altogether, and you
can order one of them. Yeah, that's about sums it up.
Quarks are all different varieties of frozen treats, all right,
So that's flavors. And so let's get into what color
quarks are, because apparently quarks also have color in addition

(22:24):
to spin, which they have neither of. But first let's
take a quick break. Quarks also have colors. You guys
give colors to quirks, And so this one you're telling

(22:46):
me is a little bit more more than just poetic. Yeah,
I think this one really does convey something about how
the property works. The relationships that hasn't really makes the
more sense if you think about in terms of color,
and this relates to how the quirks interact with each other.
I remember that these corks are bound together inside a
proton or inside a neutron, And you might ask, like

(23:07):
what holds them together? And you're probably familiar with thinking
about electromagnetism, Like electrons are negative and protons are positive,
and so they feel these forces. That's will hold the
atoms together. Well, what holds a proton and neutron together
is a totally different force. It's the strong nuclear force, right,
and so, and the strong nuclear force is one of
the four frontamental forces. Right, there's other big forces that

(23:30):
make particles push and pull on each other. That's right.
We have gravity, we have electromagnetism, we have the strong
nuclear force, and we have the weak nuclear force. And
actually we've already combined the weak nuclear force with electromagnetism.
So you can think of it as three sometimes. But
strong is is its own? Yeah, um, strong is it?
All this time? I've been saying for you're like decades

(23:52):
behind the time, man, you should like talk to a
particle in I think I read that in a book
that we wrote, Daniel. I think I added a footnote
with that caveat somewhere in that book. Um, yes, it's
called the electroc Week because it turns out that the
weak nuclear force and electromagnetism are really just two sides
of the same coin. That's fascinating. It actually has connected

(24:13):
to the Higgs boson, which is also really interesting, but
we'll talk about that on another podcast. But the strong
nuclear force stands apart because first of all, it's really strong,
but also has this really weird property, unlike electromagnetism, which
can be like positive or negative. So there's two different
charges there. Um, the strong nuclear force has three different charges, right,

(24:34):
And I just want to add a footnote here that
I actually agree with the naming criteria you have here
and that you called it the strong nuclear force because
it's strong. Like that's a that's simplicity I can stand behind.
All Right, I'll let people know that this one has
your seal of approval, The NAMERA has approved it. Not
official yet, you're still the unofficial namer. Right, let's not

(24:55):
jump the gun. But yeah, I'm working on it. I'm
getting the paperwork through. Um. Yes, this wrong nuclear force
has these three different kinds of charges, and you might
be thinking three that's weird, like this positive and negative?
What else could there be? Not zero? Right? But there's
three different non zero charges, and so instead of having
just sort of one axis with positive and negative, you

(25:17):
have to have sort of a weirder image in your
mind because there's three different directions you can go from
zero instead of two. And by charges you mean like
you know, if it's if it's the electromagnetic force, you know,
if I'm minus in your minus, we're going to repel
each other. Right, So it's kind of like what the
terms would never happened? Man, that would never happen? Which

(25:37):
part that you were both negative when we're repelling each other,
because I'm pretty sure we're pretty negative. Suppose well, as
long as one of us is positive, it will all
work out. Um, But yes, exactly, two negatives repel each
other and too positives repel each other. But if so,
it's it's kind of like a label, you know, like
it determines what this force is going to do to

(25:58):
the two of us. Yes, exactly, it's just like a
label and an electromagnetism. There's two possible labels, positive or negative,
and as you said, um, the same labels repel and
opposite labels attract, but in Quinn, in the strong nuclear force,
there are three different labels, and the math is kind
of weird. Like if you have um particles that have

(26:19):
all three labels and you bring them together, they cancel out,
just like if you have an electromagnetism, you have a
positive and negative, you bring them together, they cancel out
to zero. In in the strong nuclear force, you need
one of each of these three different charges to bring
them together to get zero. So quarks. When it comes
to the strong nuclear force, then you can be one

(26:41):
of three things. And these three things are called color.
That's right, we call them color. We call them red, green,
and blue. And the idea is that that not having
a color is called white, right, or colorless. The idea
is that if you add red, green, and blue together,
you get white. And so it's try to describe the
mathematics of that, right, this weird business where you need

(27:04):
one of each of the three things together to cancel
it all out to get back to zero. The other
thing that's like that in our world is color. But wait,
let's like a step back and maybe let me understand
this a little bit. So if I'm, for example, if
I'm one kind of strong charge. Like if I'm red
and you're blue, what does that mean between the two
of us, are were going to repel each other or
attract each other? We're definitely gonna attract each other. Okay,

(27:26):
what if I'm like blue and you're green, then we'll
attract each other? Like what are the rules there between
the three? Right? And I see where you're going that
you want to make this comparison with electrons and protons
and understand this, Like in terms of attraction and repulsion,
that makes sense. But the strong force is just a
different kind of beast. It's so powerful that anytime two
corks get near each other, any two colored objects, the

(27:48):
energy between them generates more quarks and gluons and other
colored stuff until they can combine to get something color neutral.
And it's different from electromagnetism in another important way. See
the particle that carries the electromagnetic force, the photon. It's neutral, right,
It doesn't carry a charge itself, So the electron it
can emit a photon and still be negatively charged. It

(28:09):
doesn't change the charge of the electron to emit that
photon because the photon is neutral. But the particle that
carries a strong force, the gluon. It's not neutral. It
carries two different colors. So what does that mean. It
means that if a red cork emits a gluon, it
changes the color of the cork. So it's like if
an electron emits a photon and then becomes an anti

(28:31):
electron or something else with a different charge anyway, So
for for the color force, it's not as simple as
saying two red corks can attract or repel. What happens
is that is that they interact like crazy, changing colors
and shooting gluons everywhere until there's the right combination like
red plus green plus blue to become color neutral or white.
That's the only way the strong force is happy, the

(28:52):
only way you can chill out. But you're saying something
weird happens when you when there's a you know, there's
three of us, and I think this is a safer
work podcast here, So let's get into what happens the
analogies for three. We're not advocating any of these arrangements
in your personal life, right, what are you doing there?

(29:12):
Or hey, you're using an analogy to get people to
understand it. Right, you're like making trying to avoid this
is children listen to this podcast. You're trying to avoid
a very obvious and useful analogy. So let's say there's
three kids who want to play together, and they're all
different charges. You're saying something weird happens, like all the

(29:35):
kids will want to attract each other because they're all
different and together together, they have no charge, just like
if a proton and electron attract each other and they
form a bound state, then from the outside they have
no charge, Like that's hydrogen. Hydrogen has no net electric charge.
If you bring together a red cork, a blue cork,
and a green cork, that together they have no charge,

(29:56):
no color charge. And that's what a proton and a
neutron are. Their color lists, but they have colored things
inside them. But those things cancel out, so a pleasant
a minded you saying cancels out to like if I
get a proton and an electron together, they they add
up to zero. Basically they become nobody wants to be
attracted or repelled by the Exactly, they're like a married couple.

(30:19):
They're invisible in the dating scene. And in the same
way if for color, if you bring together one of
each of the charges, except now there's three red, green,
and blue. Then you get something which has no colored charge. Right,
it's colorless. It doesn't. It's neutral from the point of
view of the strong nuclear force. Okay, but what if
I just get a red and a blue together. What

(30:39):
happens then? Then it still has a charge which charge
red and blue. Yeah, it's a combination of red and blue,
and it will will be a glue on Those things
will emit a gluon, and gluons carry two different colors.
The map gets pretty hairy, but they will attract a
green cork, and if they can successfully attract a green cork,
then it will be neutral. So they like being in threes. Yes,

(31:00):
because the strong nuclear force is so powerful that nature
tries to make everything have no net color because things,
because it's so powerful than anything that has color automatically
just like creates particles out of the vacuum to balance
that color out. Because there's so much energy in the
strong nuclear force. And that's why we can't see quirks
on their own, because they have a cork color and

(31:22):
there's so much energy in that color, in that that
colored field that it pulls um new corks out of
the vacuum to balance it out. So that's what happens.
If I get a red and a blue together, like
a green will magically appear, not magically scientifically, poetically, a
green will disappear. Yeah, the energy of their interaction will

(31:43):
get converted into the mass of another cork, and then
it will be complete. And then it will be complete. Yeah,
and then it'll stop generating new particles out of the
vacuum because that it will be colorless. But there's another way.
There's another way you can be colorless. Like if you're
a red cork, then if you meet up with an
anti red cork, Like you know, corks have anti particles,

(32:04):
right quarks and antiquarks, well, antiquarks have anti color. So
red and anti red together make white, and then what
happens to them They disappear or what you know? They
can form bound states. And we have particles that have
just two corks in them. They're called like pions. Pions
are examples of like an up cork and an anti
up cork bound together. That only works if that cork

(32:27):
is like green and the other one is anti green
or blue and anti blue or red and anti red.
I thought antimatter when you touch it would matter if
they annihilate and explode. It can yeah, but it can
also form bound states. This book we read is totally wrong.
Daniel turns out there's a whole field behind that, right,
just scratch the surface um in the same way that

(32:48):
you know, like positive negative charges can annihilate, but they
can also form bound states like hydrogen right, just the
same way. Like two things that feel gravity, like the
Earth and the Moon feel gravity towards each other, but
they don't necessarily automatically crash because there's so much energy
in the Moon's orbit that it's stable. Right, So even
even though there are there are forces between them that

(33:08):
want to pull the Earth and the Moon together, the
Moon is in a stable orbit. In the same way
electrons can be in a stable orbit around a proton
even though there's a force pulling them together. And up
corks and anti upcorks can form stable particles together. Well,
I think the point is that you're that you're trying
to make is that because when you have three cores
of the different flavors and you bring them together, they

(33:29):
sort of cancel each other out. That's sort of like
different colors. You're saying, that's sort of like when you
get color, like real like a like a red light
and a blue light and a green light, you're going
to see that as a white light exactly exactly it's
it should work the same. I mean, I'm not an
expert on color. I defer to you as the artist. Um,
but that's the idea that the math of cork color,

(33:51):
the way they add up, is very similar to the
math of these real color, the colors of light. And
so that's why they named it color. Not because these
corks actually look like anything. Red corks are not redder
than than green corks, but that the math of how
color works when you put them together is very similar
to the math of or how we think about how
light adds up the color of light. Okay, so that

(34:13):
does seem um more appropriately poetic maybe is the word
for it, but I mean it is still it is
still I would say a little suspicious to name a
phenomenon in physics using an analogy from another phenomenon in physics,
which is how light of different frequencies mixed together and

(34:36):
get processed by our eyeballs. You know what I mean,
I know what you mean. Yeah, absolutely, But I think
this one there was some poetry there I really do
appreciate because when I was learning about this for the
first time as a graduate student, the analogy of color
really did help me understand it. I thought, oh, it
really is light color. That's pretty cool, and so it
helped me understand it. And then I went further and
I thought, well, maybe there is a deeper connection, because

(34:58):
sometimes when being are similar in the mathematical structure mimics
each other, then there really is a deeper connection. Like
with spin, right, we talked about how intrinsic spin is
really another kind of orbital angular momentum um. There really
is a connection there, But in this case, I don't
think there is. I don't think there's really anything any
connection between quirk color and photon frequency that makes any sense.

(35:22):
It's just a helpful guide for building the construct in
your mind, because I think that the combination of red, green,
and blue to make white is really just a human
perception thing, right, Like, like if you actually take a
photon that's red and a photon that's green and a
photon that's blue, they're not gonna suddenly become another photon
that's white. Color because there is no white frequency. That's right. Yeah,

(35:43):
it's uh, it's a product of like of how your
eyes sees color, right, all right, So then that means
quarks do sort of have a color. They don't really
have a flavor flavor, but they do sort of have
some something that is sort of like color. Yeah, exactly.
And it's so weird and so odd that it really
is helpful to draw on something familiar, to say, this
new property of of particles we've never seen before is

(36:07):
weird and bizarre and strange, but we have something familiar,
um that you can use to base your understanding on.
And I think that's pretty helpful. So those are quarks
and flavors. Now here's a question though, Can you have
a red raspberry? Like technically you could have a like
a red cork. Can be different flavors, Yes, that's true.

(36:29):
You can have red top corks or red upcorks or
red charmp corks. For sure. You can have red raspberry
or red blueberry. I mean I were totally mixing enough
a red strawberry, I don't know a red blueberry cord. Well,
they have blue raspberry, right, That's a thing I never
understood that I mean, there are red blackberries and black

(36:49):
raspberries and black and red blackberries, and I don't know.
I mean we should get on the biologists because they
can name those berries pretty confusingly. Also, well, I think
the the overall conclusion is that scientists maybe should have
been charged with namean things not without adult supervision at least. Right. Well,
I hope that there's that question for the people who
wrote in with that UM asking for that explanation. Yeah.

(37:11):
I think people were reading about corks and seeing this
thing with flower flavors and colors and wondering what does
that really mean? And I think on the whole it's
confusing if you don't understand the technical aspect of it,
because it makes people think of the familiar flavor and
color that that they have in their mind already. But
once you dig into a little bit, you start to
appreciate UM. If you if you think of it as

(37:31):
just sort of a placeholder or a guide for how
to think about this, you can appreciate what the physicists
we're trying to do. But on the whole, I think
these physics words borrowed from other concepts are more confusing
than they are helpful for the for the beginning student
or the person just reading about a topic. So that's
the lesson. If physics confuses you, take a class um.

(37:52):
Maybe pop won't confuse you as much. All right, everyone,
And if you have a question about particles or the
universe or something else really weird and strange and you'd
like us to explain it to you and show you
how maybe physicists are not totally insane and crazy, write
us and ask us to explain your question to feedback
at Daniel and Jorge dot com and promise we'll answer
with charm and strange. Some days our conversation goes up

(38:15):
and sometimes it goes down. All right, Thanks for tuning in,
See you next time. Before you still have a question
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(38:37):
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