Why is strange matter so strange?

Find out why strange matter is so strange with daniel and jorge

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Are you worried that something out there in space might
kill us all every day? Man? You mean like aliens.
We haven't even started the podcast yet and we're already
talking about aliens. Actually, this one time, I was not
talking about aliens. There are other things out there in
space that can kill us. Yeah, there are other things
out there that could end humanity. Oh, I see what

(00:32):
you mean, like a killer meteor. I'm thinking about something
much much stranger. Him or Hamdack, cartoonists and the creator

(00:55):
of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist,
and I'm sometimes described as a strange personality. But well
of their podcast, Daniel and Jorge explain this Strange Universe,
a production of I Heart Radio That's right, in which
we go out there on mental journeys into the universe
and bring home the strange, the bonkers, the crazy, but
the real and pipe it directly into your brain. That's right.

(01:18):
We'd like to think about and talk about all the
amazing things that are out there in space, out there
in the far reaches of the universe, and also right
here in front of us, in the small things around
us that are sort of normal for the universe. But
if you, if you as humans sort of think about it,
they're kind of strange. We like to peel back the
layer of reality that you encounter in your everyday life

(01:39):
and reveal to you that the universe is far weirder,
far more amazing, far more beautiful, far more nasty, and
far more strange than you might have imagined, and potentially
far more dangerous than you thought. Definitely more dangerous. There's
a lot of stuff out there that could Oh man,
what out there can't kill? You? Love the fourth dimension,

(02:03):
it's all you need. Um. It's amazing to me how
many like new ideas in physics end up being potentially deadly,
like oh, it turns out the Higgs Boson field might collapse,
ending the universe, or wow, the universe says this massive expansion,
which could isolate us from all other sorts of um
galaxies out there. It's incredible that none of these new
ideas and physics like provide coziness or warmth or like,

(02:28):
you know, I think it's strange to know that you're
not surprised anymore. I mean, by now you should know
that every time you uncover, you lift the rock, there's
something there I can kill all of humanity. Maybe maybe
you should stop. Maybe maybe it says something about the
fragility of our experience that anything that tells us that
our situation is not typical or not unique, and that

(02:50):
most of the universe is different shows us how most
of the universe is inhospitable to human life and coziness.
I think it says more about the fragility of physics funding,
because if you included in every proposal like, hey, we
want to discover this, but we might end up the
story humanity, then somehow conveniently that doesn't get mentioned. Or

(03:10):
maybe we should use that as clickbit in our physics funding,
like or you know, a black hole might eat the
Earth and that is the birth of a super villain.
Right there, ladies and gentlemen, Daniel has now officially become
mad Scientists villain in the bottom. Oh boy, that's you.
You've practiced that. I feel that just sort of bubbled

(03:33):
up out of me, you know, like the moment of
birth of me as a super villain. I'll put my
cape on. Wait, villains work cape only with the big lapels.
If that's just a giant lapels. All right, I'm turning
my collar up and being prepared to plan for the
end of humanity. Popping the collar. All right, Well, there
are a lot of things out there in the universe
and a lot of stuff that we haven't discovered that yet, right,

(03:56):
and a lot of that might be weird or it
might be kind of dangerous for humanity, for the sort
of unstable existence of the universe. Yeah, and this is
sort of a different dimension of weirdness. Like we're used
to the fact that things out there far away in
space might be different. There are stars and black holes
and weird stuff out there that doesn't happen here. But

(04:17):
there's another kind of direction of weirdness, which is like
what can matter do? Like, can matter do things that
we're not familiar with? Can inform weird new stable states
that we haven't seen yet because we haven't created the conditions.
You know, imagine if we lived on a planet, for example,
that never had had iron on it because it just
wasn't iron from nearby supernovas, and somebody showed up both

(04:39):
like iron, Like, whoa, that's interesting, We've never seen that.
Like a new kind of matter, Yeah, a new kind
of matter. What if you could rearrange the lego pieces
of the universe into new amazing kinds of stuff, because
it's incredible, like the diversity of different kinds of things
you can make with the same lego pieces, right, the
same building blocks you can make you know, helium and

(05:01):
hydrogen and iron and ice cream and hamsters and all
of that stuff. So there must be new weird kinds
of stuff out there we haven't discovered. And so that's
totally possible, Like it's possible that there's a matter that
that can be made that we haven't made here on
Earth you've ever seen. Yeah, it's totally possible. And you know,
there's sort of two branches there. One it's like, take

(05:21):
the matter and annihilated to try to make new fundamental particles.
That's the kind of thing I work on by smashing
particles together at the LHC. But a whole other question
is like, don't smash the particles, just rearrange them trying
to build up new stuff, you know, trying to put
them together into new combinations and see if you can
make weird new kinds of matter. And you know that's
legos with reality. Yeah, the deepest legos ever, the most

(05:47):
universal set of legos ever. Well to be on the podcast,
we'll be talking about one such possible kind, possible or
real kind of matter out there um that could potentially
exist and which could potentially be maybe interesting and or
deadly or dangerous to the universe. I think deadly definitely

(06:07):
means interesting. You can't be interesting or deadly. Deadly definitely interesting. Unlike. Yeah,
I'm totally not interested in dying, so that is not
interesting to me. You're not interested in things that might
kill you. If I'm like, hey, Jorge, it is a
huge boulder about to fall and you fall in your house,
you'd be like, not interested. I rather just tell me

(06:27):
get out of your house. You know, you don't have
to explain to me what's happening, what's coming towards me. Summurise, summurise, summerise, Right, yeah,
too long, didn't read Now you're dead? All right. I'll
start my emails at the top with get out of
your house. Yeah, priority, priority, get out and let me
explain to you why that's fair. That's barrels start with

(06:49):
a call to action. Yeah, so there's as very interesting
kind of matter out there that is theoretical, Daniel, it's
for for real, Well, that's the question, you know, we don't. No,
it's currently theoretical, but it might be real. It might
be out there in the universe right now, waiting to
gobble us up and destroy your house. Wow. Well, if

(07:09):
it is possible, it is definitely going to be very strange,
and so to be. On the podcast, we'll be asking
the question what is strange matter? Daniel? This sounds really
strange to me. It's maybe the one time physicists have
given something an appropriate name, like like, you guys, you

(07:33):
guys saw this or thought about it, and you're like, whoa,
that's strange. That's basically summarized the history of particle physics
between the nineteen and nine sixties. Yeah, why wasn't everything
else named strange? Why why is this particular one? I
guess we'll get into it. We'll get into it. Yeah,
But like, unless you think I'm stranger, you're strange. We're
made of normal matter. People discovered new kinds of matter,

(07:53):
which to them was strange, So strange sort of means
not normal. Yeah, I mean, what does strange mean to you? Horror? Like, Hey,
I'm gonna make you some strange ice cream. Expect me
like favor ice cream. I feel like I'm not gonna
like it. I feel right away that it's gonna be
like garlic with cilantro. That's probably fair. And if I

(08:14):
offered you a bowl of strange matter, I wouldn't recommend
you actually eat it, all right, So, um, but we're wondering,
as usual, if this is something that people have heard
about or read about maybe or even the thought about
possibly existing out there in the in the universe. And so,
as usual, Daniel went out there into the streets to
ask perfect strangers if they had ever heard of strange
matter or it's I guess related cousin strange lets. That's right.

(08:38):
And here's what folks around campus had to say when
I accosted them with this strange question. No, no, that
sounds it sounds cool. What do you think it might
be tendom? Guess um, I think of the dark matter
when you say that stuff we don't really know much about.
Maybe it's not solid liquid or gas. No no, no, no, no,

(09:01):
that's guess what I'm matter that doesn't behave like the
matter that we already understand. No, no, no, I think
strange only like scientific thing that I know about. It
isn't a cork, isn't there a strange quirk. All right,
I guess that that shouldn't be too strange. And nobody
had heard about strange matter. It is strange. But I

(09:23):
like how these answers are all like no, no, no,
there's not like m let me think about No, there's
like no, there's no subtlety here. Didn't tickle anybody's brain
or make them think about something else or give them
a hint of something. It's like, maybe there hasn't been
a lot of clickbait about this, or no nova specials
about strange matter. It hasn't really penetrated the culturals. Like guys,

(09:46):
nobody's worried about it. So everybody, um, listen to this
podcast episode and prepare your strange a matter of proof bunker.
Do you think maybe people were suspicious of you, like
maybe they thought you were pranking them, like, because it
does sound sort of sound like something NG out of
I don't know, fifties sci fi like strange Matter. I
don't know. I asked them this question just after I
asked them the question about which physics adventure they would like,

(10:09):
which we did recently on the podcast. So I think
you know they were primed to think in a fun
way to expand their minds. There was just no reaction there.
There's just there's wrung Nobell. This is like if I
picked two random words, you know, have you heard of
dragon souffla, and they'd be like, what, No, I don't
know what that is and I don't even want to know, Teach,
I don't even wanted to know. It's excellent with garlic

(10:32):
ice cream, by the way, dragon soufla the scoop of
garlic ice cream on the side, I feel like this
is really close to stranger things, Like really stranger things
are made would be made out of strange matter. I
don't know what the upside down is made of, but yeah,
but actually maybe the upside down is where every up
cork is a down cork and every down cork is
an upcourt. Oh wow, Daniel, you totally call them. Yeah,

(10:54):
that that's would be why it's called the upside down.
I know exactly. It's actually a physics reason for something,
all right, So let's get into this strange topic and Daniels,
so they explained to us what is strange matter? Right,
So we have a few different concepts. We want to
tease a part on the show. I want to strange matter,
and then later we'll talk about strange lits and strange stars.

(11:16):
But when particle physicists talk about strange matter, what they
mean is any matter containing this one particular cork, which
is called a strange cork. Now, you and I don't
have any strange quirks in us, or at least not
any real strange quirks. Like you and I are made
of protons and neutrons and electrons. And remember that inside
the protons and neutrons we have two kinds of quirks,

(11:38):
up quirks and down corks. This would be matter made
out of like protons and neutrons, but in which the
courts inside of him are all this kind of cork,
which is a strange cork. That's right. We now know
that in the universe there are six kinds of corks
up down charms, strange top bottom, and protons and neutrons
are made out of three upquirks and down quirks mixed

(11:59):
together there. And you can put these lego pieces together
to make lots of different kind of particles. You can
put the up quorks together to make pions. You can
do all sorts of crazy stuff. But if you add
a strange cork. If you used the strange cork lego,
then we call it strange matter. Oh, I see, And
why was that cork called strange? Was it like the
strange cousin that nobody could figure out or what was it?

(12:21):
Is there something particularly strange about this as opposed to
like a charm cork or a top cork. Yeah, well,
it comes from the early history of particle physics. We
first were trying to figure out, like, what are all
the kind of particles that are out there? We knew
protons and neutrons and electrons, and then people started building
particle colliders, and in particle colliders they would smash stuff
together and they could get more energy. And the thing

(12:43):
about the strange cork is that it's heavier than these
other corks. It's more massive, so cost more energy to make.
So this is the first time they could ever make it,
and they made these particles that had strange quirks in them,
though at the time they didn't know they were strange quirks.
And these particles were a little weird. There were chaons
and sigma particles, and they had sort of strange behaviors

(13:03):
compared to protons and neutrons, and specifically the thing that
was strange about these particles is that they lived longer
than anyone expected for such heavy particles. Remember, usually heavy
particles decay down very quickly to lighter particles. These new
particles strangely stuck around a bit longer than anyone expected

(13:24):
before decaying. Oh wait, so they made stuff that made
out of strange matter. Like they made strange matter and
they're like, well, what this is weird? Yeah, they we
do this all the time at particle colliders. It's not
that unusual now. I mean, it's still strange in its behavior.
But like, we smash particles together and we get kaons out.
Kon is a combination of an upcork and a strange cork,

(13:46):
or a down cork and a strange cork. Wait, what
do you mean, Like if they pair together, they form
a special particle. Yeah. Like we talked in our podcast
about how quirks can never be by themselves, and so
they either have to be like with an antiquork, or
you need triple see neither pairs of corks or triplets.
If you get like an up and a strange to
pair together, you call that a kon. If you get

(14:07):
like two ups and a strange together, that's a sigma particle.
If you mix up the kinds of the basic particles,
and so that's possible. You can mix like a two
up corks and a strange cork and they'll be happy together.
They will be happy together, but not for very long.
These particles are all unstable because they have this strange
cork in them, and the strange cork is heavy and
it decays, so sometimes it will decay to a down cork.

(14:30):
And so these particles are energy or something and spit
out some energy precisely um. And so these particles are
very short lived. They're very strange. They have weird behaviors.
They some of them switch back and forth from one
kind to another. But they're all very unstable. But we
make this all the time. Every collision we make at
the Large Hadron Collider, every twenty five nano seconds, we're
producing some strange quirks and so therefore some strange matter,

(14:54):
but it never lasts for very long. These particles are normal,
no longer strange. They just have the name strange from
kind of back when you didn't you couldn't figure figure
them out. Yeah, and it was really kind of an
exciting time and particle physics. Sometimes I wonder if they
were having more fun back then than here, because back
then they were every time they do you want to
make physics great again, Daniel, Yes, I want to make
physics great again. Now, every time they turned on the

(15:16):
collider they discovered a new particle because they were able
to get these little quirks to fit together in a
new way. Because you've got three different quirks now up
down in strange they didn't have the energy to make
any of the other heavier ones. There's a lot of
different combinations, and so there's a lot of particles to discover,
and they didn't have any idea what was going on.
So every time he turned it on, you're like, oh

(15:36):
my gosh, here's another particle. Oh, here's another particle. And
then and they called it the Era of the Particle
Zoo because they were just like, every time you turn
this thing on, new particles popped out. And then finally somebody,
it took like twenty years. Finally somebody in the sixties
was like, you know what, this would all make sense
if you had three basic particles and all this spectrum

(15:57):
of particles. All this zoo of particles were just rearrangements
of those three and he was able to explain all
of those in terms of these basic idea. These quarks
up and down in the strange and that's like and
the charm one to write, not the charm yet we
hadn't seen the charm, so we only ever made particles
with the up, down and strange. And that's like a
real moment of insight. Oh I see. But um, so

(16:21):
they discovered all three quarks at the same time, like up,
down and strange at the same time. Where did they
know about the up and down? And then they discovered
the strange. They didn't know about the up and down,
like as a real thing. It was sort of like
developing as an idea. And then somebody said, you know,
if you have these three particles inside, then it explains
all of this that's happening. There are a lot of

(16:41):
different ways to try to explain. It's like everybody's looking
at this huge list of particles, and remember the game
and particle physics is simplified is describe everything we see
in the universe in terms of the smallest set of
building blocks. Were always trying to peel back one layer
of reality. So this is a huge success is to say, oh,
I have some new idea for an even smaller particle
that explains all the weirdness we're seeing. I guess my

(17:04):
question is why wasn't why we're in the up and
downs called weird and bizarre? Well, because they're part of
me and you. They're normal, they're every day, they're they're
all around us. Right. Oh, they saw that that regular
matter that we're familiar with is made out of just
ups and downs, these other versions of normal matter, which
which which is strange? And they found that the what

(17:25):
that the common ingredient was this strange cork. Yeah, And
there's this property called strangeness, which is turns out to
be just like related to how many strange corks you
have in you. Strangeness, yeah, is related to how many
strange corks are in a particle. And some forces conserve

(17:46):
strangeness and some forces don't conserve strangeness. And so it
was a real puzzle for a while, but it was
all put together just by understanding that there are three
kinds of quirks and you can put them together in
lots of different ways to make this incredible variety of particles.
Then strange matter is just anything that has a strange
quirk in it, or that is made entirely out of
strange court. That's right. It's anything that has at least

(18:10):
one strange cork in it. And you can make matter
out of just strange quirks. In fact, the guy who
proposed this, the guy who had this idea um you know,
of quirks, he stood up at a conference and he
proposed this and he predicted, He said, if my idea
is correct, then there should also be this particle that's
pure strange quirks. And he predicted how you would find
it and how heavy it would be before he was seen,

(18:32):
and he was right. So that's pretty awesome, he called
his shot. Yeah, so that's strange matter. And so I
have a lot of opinions about the way you guys
name things as usual, but nice. We'll get into what
happens to this kind of matter and whether or not
it actually is something we should worry about destroying the
universe or not. But first let's take a quick break,

(19:04):
all right. I know, so strange matter you're telling me,
is just any kind of matter that is that has
a little bit of or is made with this particular
core called the strange cork. And so that's that's what
makes it strange. Like, if you had this court, then
you are you automatically strangely? Do you behave strangely or did?
That's just the name you get, that's just the name

(19:26):
you get. And whether you consider these particles to be
behaving strangely just depends really on your perspective. It's totally subjective.
But at the time when these particles were found, they
did things other particles weren't doing. You know, they had
weird decay patterns, they would turn into each other, they
would slash back and forth from one particle to another. Uh,
they were a little weird. Some of these particles, for example,

(19:46):
violate some conservation laws that we hadn't seen other particles violate,
like CP violation, charts parody violation was seen in the
Chaon system. And so these particles are a little strange. Yeah,
they're strange from normal matter, which is us, yes, which
and we are made of just up and down corks
or vanilla and chocolate corks. But you know what we

(20:07):
don't know is what else can this strange cork do?
Can it can it create other weirder kinds of matter
that we haven't seen here on Earth? We haven't even
created in particle colliders that could do bizarre stuff we
haven't anticipated. Oh you mean, like can we if you
were to sort of be more creative with this strange cork,

(20:27):
what else could you make with it? Yeah? Or if
you had really weird conditions like the center of a
neutron star or you know, the Big Bang or very
high energy particle collisions, could you make new kinds of
matter with strange quirks that we haven't seen before that
have completely different properties? And that's what people talk about
when they talk about strange lits. It sounds sort of cute, right, like, um,

(20:49):
you know something you would name for your pet or
something like, you know, strange lito or something strange geno
or something, but it's actually quite potentially potentially quite scary
and dangerous. It's cute and years great. A lot of
things fall in that category. It's like the Bundy from
my depathon. But so that's what um, So, that's what
a strange lit is. It's a kind of strange matter.

(21:11):
It's a kind of strange matter in a particular configuration.
That we haven't seen before. Oh so I see, so
it's hypothetical. So far, it's hypothetical. Nobody's ever seen strange
lists before. Strange matter we create all the time in
particle collisions. Strange lists are a hypothetical new combination of
quarks that we've never observed but could potentially end us.

(21:33):
And it comes from this sort of idea of maybe
forming an entirely new kind of matter. We're talking earlier
about how quirks are usually bound into triplets, you know,
like up up down or up down down. That's what
gives you protons and neutrons, or sometimes into pairs. But
the idea is that maybe quarks, if you squeeze them enough,
if you compress them enough, like in the center of

(21:55):
really danse stars, they might form some new kind of
matter where it's not just pair or triplets, but like
you know, thirty or fifty or a hundred or a
million quarks could form some sort of like mega particle
and it all behaves is one or does it just
behave like a big blob? It behaves like one big blob,
but it's like in one big bound state. So this

(22:15):
is what they call quark matter. Oh, I see you
mean like it's stable, like it doesn't just break apart
right away, like it stays in that blob. Nobody really knows,
and it's really hard to calculate these things, and it's
completely hypothetical, and they don't think it's stable unless here's
the key, unless you add strange quirks to it. So
you make a big blob of cork matter, and if

(22:36):
you have some strange quirks in it, it could end
up in this configuration that is actually very stable. So
it could be like an enormous blob like essentially a
single particle like the size of a star um that's
totally stable. So you call it a particle because it's
quarks bound together. Yeah, and you know, proton is three
quarks bound together, and a kon is two quarks bound together.

(22:58):
And so if instead of just having a pile of neutrons,
if you squeeze them enough so they become like one
big particle, so that the bonds between the corks are
sort of equivalent anywhere across the particle, then you think
of it like, you know, I think of it like
one big particle at least. And you're saying that the
secret ingredient would need to be strange particles at quarks.
Like without the strange quarks, you couldn't have this heaven. Yeah,

(23:21):
you need the strange quirks to make this sort of
theoretical matter happen. And so that's what strangelets are. They're
this weird new combination of up quarks, down corks and
strange quirks in this way that's not like bound inside
one little particle, but potentially can grow. Right It's not
just three quirks. It could be five, it could be
a hundred, it could be ten million corks. It could

(23:42):
be tended the ten. It's like a special recipe because
you told me, you said earlier, the sigma particles are
also up down and strange, but there's like a like
a near recipe for the sigma particle. Exactly Sigma particles,
one kind of sigma particle is up down stream. But
this would be a new configuration of them that that

(24:02):
doesn't decay right away. Yeah, it wouldn't just be three.
You could be three or six or a billion, and
it doesn't decay right away. And it's it's the kind
of thing and you can only make it in very
high energy, high density configurations like the inside of a
neutron star or you know, particle collisions. And again it's theoretical.
Nobody knows if you could actually make this stuff, but

(24:23):
the numbers, the calculations we do suggest that it might
be possible. Okay, so um, so it's a hypothetical type
of matter which might be super stable, very stable, and
maybe even contagious. Yeah, that's the amazing thing is number one.
It's super stable. And the reason for that is sort
of interesting. It's like you could combine just up quirks

(24:44):
and down quirks this way, squeeze them together to make
something really dense, but it wouldn't be very stable. And
if you add strange quirks, it becomes stable for this
weird reason because the particles don't like to sort of
share spots. Like you know how electrons when you have
them are atom they fill up different orbitals. You add
another electron, they don't just sit on top of each other.

(25:05):
That's because they're fermions and they don't like to be
in the same quantum state. There are rules that say
that you to two of these can be at the
same spot. Yeah, so you can't add another electron in
the same spot, but you could add another different kind
of particle, like you could have a muon orbiting your proton,
and it's okay if it's in the same energy levels

(25:25):
the electron, because they're not the same kind of particle.
And so what why why are these strange lots so interesting?
Are they just because there's theoretical and they could be
they could exist? Well, I mean everybody's interested in like
new kinds of matter. I mean, who doesn't like sit
around on a Saturday afternoon one or new kinds of matter? Right,
I mean everybody does that, right? Um. No, Theoretically they're interesting,

(25:46):
like could you make this new hyper stable kind of matter?
And in this case, the matter is extra stable because
the strange quirks can fill in the sort of lower
energy levels that the up corks and down corks can't
because they're a different kind of particle. And it's fascinating
because it could grow, like if they encounter a new
kind of matter, it could spread this sort of strange littleness.

(26:08):
What what do you mean, like how could it? It
would turn like I'm made out of up and down.
Course you're saying if I touch one of these blobs
of strange lead matter. It would somehow turn some of
my up and ups and down corks into strange corks,
and you become bizarro Jorge or you know, strange strange
warhe Yeah, then the comberbat horn more strange? Is that

(26:32):
your voice? Yeah? So you know the only thing that
prevents you from being a strange lid is that you
don't have strange quirks in you. Um, but any of
the down quirks in your body could get converted to
strange quirks. They just need some energy. They could get upgraded.
They could get yeah, literally upgraded to strange quirks. And
that might happen if I touched some of this strange

(26:54):
lad matter. Yeah, and nobody knows. Again, does strange that
matter exists and if so, what properties as a have?
But in some versions of this theory, then yeah, it
adds to itself. When it encounters other kinds of matter,
it converts that matter into strange lit matter like collapses
it because strange that matter is more stable than other
kinds of matter. So you can imagine sort of like

(27:17):
our normal kind of matter just sort of like waiting
to turn into strangelets. And as soon as you get
one nearby, like crystallizes, Like if you put a drop
of sugar into sugar water, it'll form a huge crystal
around it. It's like a seed that spreads its pattern.
And what would happen to me if I touched this
strangelet matter? Would I just automatically sort of get blobified

(27:40):
and then absorbed into the bigger blob or would it
still be me except I would be sort of strange
and have superpowers. I'm usually the one has unanswerable philosophical questions.
But would you still be you? Well, you become very
dense because strange matter is extraordinarily dense. It's much denser
than like the content of a neutron star. So the

(28:02):
original Jorge particles would be, you know, condensed to something
like the size of a tiny little drop. And whether
you would still feel like you, I don't know. You
might feel more like Benedict commer Batch. I suppose more
like Paul run and Admin. It sounds like you get smaller, Yeah,
you would get smaller. Maybe that's what the pim particle is, Daniel.

(28:25):
Maybe it's a strange particle. Yeah, that makes everything contest
all right, Well, now you need to write to Marvel
and get credit for that one. So we're even then
I'll take half of those profits. We are just rolling
the movies advice here. So you're saying that you could
maybe create protons and neutrons out of this strange matter
and then you could still have atoms and stuff. We
don't think you would have like atoms inside of it.

(28:47):
There's no like division between the particles. You don't get
protons and neutrons. It's like this, just the morgue. Yeah,
I think it probably would be the end of Jorge exactly.
So I wouldn't recommend it. Now, you tell me. All right,
let's get into whether or not this is real and
whether it can happen, and whether we should be worried
about this coming here and absorbing us and obliterating us

(29:10):
and turning us into a strange live matter. But first
let's take another quick break. All right, Daniel, it is
strange matter. Well, we know a strange matter is real,

(29:32):
But are these strange lids that might absorb things and
destroy everything? Is that real? Should we be worried about it? Well,
we don't know if it's real. We can't say that
it's not. We've never seen it before. But it's sort
of theoretically makes some sense, so it's worth taking seriously.
I'm not suggesting you, like change the way you live
your life, but it could be that there are a

(29:54):
lot of these strangers out there and we just haven't
seen them yet. Oh I see, you can't disprove it,
so therefore you've got to consider it like aliens. It's
just like aliens are like me being mistaken by Benedict
comber Back. It could happen. It could happen, and there
are a lot of times in physics that were in
this scenario where we haven't really looked, so we don't
know if it's there. And then the more we look,

(30:16):
the more we can say, if it's there, it's rare.
And then once we've looked, like really exhaustively, we can say, well,
either it doesn't exist or it's super duper rare. And
we're in that situation with a lot of particles like
magnetic monopoles that we talked about on the project, but
in this case we've only sort of recently begun to
figure out, like how to look for strangelets. It doesn't

(30:37):
happen in normal occurrences. It sounds like it's it sounds
like it only happens in the core of like super
dance stars or high energy collisions, and and it like it.
Even if you created some here on Earth, it might
be difficult to sustain, right, because we're not inside of
an nuentrance star. You don't need to be inside a
dense environment to sustain it, just to create it. Just
like you can make heavy metals and the inside of

(30:59):
the Sun, and then when they blow up, there's still
those heavy metals, right, iron lanes here on Earth. It
doesn't just fall apart into protons and neutrons. Right. It's stable.
And that's the thing with this stuff is that it's
it's there. Once you make it, it's there, and anything
it touches it will grow and add onto it because
it's more stable than this other kind of matter. So
like collapses normal matter into strange lit matter. Oh, it's

(31:23):
more stable than regular matter. It's more stable. It's like
a lower estate. So what you're saying that if you
create something the large hadron collider and it touches the
walls of the collider, it can just grow and grow
and swallow up the whole earth. That's exactly what I'm
saying and is that Daniel interesting or qute to you?

(31:44):
Does that sound like a like a fun, fuzzy outcome
for the huge human race. I think it would be
pretty spectacular but pretty cool to see on screen. It's
not something we are worried about. Me. We took it seriously,
We thought about it, we did the calculations, and just
like whether the LHC will create black holes, we're not
worried about it because the same kind of collisions are

(32:04):
happening all the time right now in the atmosphere, really
high energy particles smashing into other particles from cosmic rays.
So we think if that was likely to happen um at,
the LHC would have already happened in the atmosphere, and
we don't see that. So we don't think the LFC
is powerful enough to create strangelets if they do exist.
You don't think. We don't think, but you know, keep

(32:26):
your ears open. But you're saying, but a scenario might
be that you do create these things and it does
sort of like spread and swallow up and suddenly the
whole earth is just a giant ball of strange cords,
you know, floating around like a blob, not even that
giant because it would collapse into a very very dense matter,

(32:46):
so like all the mass of the Earth would get
turned into strangelets, would be like the size of a grapefruit.
And then it would just sit there in place of
the Earth and still go around the Sun and the
Moon would still go around this blob, but we wouldn't
be would be all sorts, this one little ball of energy. Yeah,
we'd be living our strangest life. Um, And that's one scenario.

(33:08):
Like if we actually made strange that's on Earth, but
not something we're worried about. And you know, we've been
turned We turned this thing on years ago. We've been
doing collisions every seconds for almost a decade, so not
something to worry about. But it's possible that you're still here,
don't worry. If you're listening to this podcast, then your
final word. But it's possible that there are other scenarios

(33:32):
out there in the universe that are capable of making strangelets,
like the core of a neutron star. We haven't made
it here because maybe we don't have enough energy, but
there are places with enough energy to make this strange
lit matter. If it's real, if it's actually a thing
that can happen in our universe. We think it's possible
to make them in the core of neutron stars, where
it's very very dense, remember neutron stars, or places where

(33:54):
it's had a gravitational collapse, it's stopped burning, is no
more m forces or pressure pushing out, so it's like
really densely packed, and all the protons and electrons have
gotten squeezed together and converted into neutrons. If you push
even further, then we think that maybe the core of
that could turn into a strangelet which would then spread
and take over the entire star. Oh, it would go

(34:16):
from like a neutron star to a strangelet star. Yeah,
to us, they call it a strange star. And we
can look at stars and try to tell if that's happened.
Like we've seen some neutron stars, and we can look
at them and look at the sort of radiation from them,
and so far, all the neutron stars we've seen look
like they're just normal, vanilla, amazingly crazy weird neutron stars

(34:38):
that they haven't converted to strange stars. And you know,
this depends on our understanding of how what this would
look like from really far away using on the X rays.
But so far it seems like it hasn't happened. And
you know, if the calculations are correct, then it's the
kind of thing that should happen to neutron stars eventually.
So if we haven't seen one ever turn into a
strange star, then maybe it's not possible. Maybe it's not possible. Yeah,

(35:01):
maybe it's just a strange dream. Maybe it's just a
strange idea from afternoon physicist who didn't have enough coffee.
Or strange lets, Yes, strange lets. Could they be like
inside of a black hole or something? Well, actually, that's
the only thing you can do to save yourself from strange.
That's like if you saw a blob of strange that's
heading here, there's almost nothing you can do to like
divert it or you know, prevented, because anything that touches

(35:23):
it just makes it bigger. Um. But if you could
somehow funnel it into a black hole, yeah, then you'd
be safe. But then you have to worry about the
black hole. Yes, yes, then you have to worry about
the black hole. It's like you got a rabbit problem,
so you put a bunch of wolves on your property
and wolf problem. But hey, I like these long term
physics solutions. It's all about putting out one by your

(35:48):
long term with another fire. But even if we're not
making them inside neutron stars, it might be that they're
out there anyway. There could be what we call primordial strangelets.
Primordial strange it are things that were made in the
Big Bang because the densest, craziest, hottest party in the universe,
of course, was the verse very first few moments when

(36:08):
things were really hot and crazy, and it could be
that a few strangets were made back then and they're
still floating around. Emily might not see them. We wouldn't
see them. They don't like glow or anything. But one
of them could just like bump into the Earth and
then the whole earth becomes a strangelet. The whole Earth
becomes a strangelet. And of course that hasn't happened yet,
and we've never seen a planet disappear, and we've been

(36:29):
watching for a while, and you know, so that tells
you something about how unlikely it is. But we just
don't know. And there's some people do calculations and they
suggest that there are more strangelets out there than stars
in the universe. But you know, I don't know, that's
like physicists having way too many cups of coffee and
they're like, dude, even that's strange for us. But you know,

(36:53):
it's important to sort of stretch your mental muscles to
think about all the ways that the universe could be
toticipate these things, and to think about how to protect yourself,
you know, fund this proposal to build a shield against
strange matter, or we might all die. Well. I think
it's pretty interesting still to just think about the idea
that that there are kinds of matter that we haven't

(37:15):
touched upon, you know, like there are maybe there are
strange ways to arrange the legos of the universe, and
ways that are sort of like cool and interesting and
might be maybe even solve all all of our problems.
There definitely are. And you know, another direction of this
research is just to make new elements, you know, use
up quirks and down corks and combine protons and neutrons
and a way to make heavier and heavier elements. And

(37:37):
I having kept up with it, but you know, they're
up into the teens or maybe evento the hundred twenties
and the periodic table, and so there's a lot of
really fascinating ways to combine things together to make new
kinds of goo. There's a lot of different directions to go,
and we've only explored, you know, a little bit. And
so it's another one of these angles where you realize
that we have a tiny little slice of the past

(38:00):
will experiences that humans can have in this universe. There's
all sorts of different kind of stuff out there waiting
for us to discover it or for us to invent right, yeah,
and then for it to destroy us hopefully not all right, Well,
I hope you enjoyed this strange trip down into the
little legos of the universe and think to think about

(38:21):
all different ways in which normal and strange that you
can assemble the universe together. And remember that this is
mostly a mental exercise. We're wondering how can matter fit together,
what kind of things can be in the universe, And
for us, it's just interesting and fascinating to think about
all the ways that this can happen. It's not something
we worry about. I do not think you need to

(38:43):
worry about strange that's destroying your house, But Yeah, So
next time we'll get into charm matter, Daniel or we will.
Actually we're gonna do an episode about how the charm
cork was discovered. That pretty crazy story. All right, Well,
thanks for joining us. We hope you enjoyed that. See
you next time. Yea, before you still have a question

(39:07):
after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line.
We'd love to hear from you. You can find us
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and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I
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(39:30):
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