Can we see what's inside the electron?

Daniel and Kelly explore the nature of of matter and whether we can crack it open without spending billions on bigger colliders

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
What's the point of building bigger and bigger colliders other
than the obvious fun and awesomeness of it all. It's
a machine that opens up the sub atomic world. It's
not just because we like to see things go boom,
though of course we do, but because we want to
know what happens when you pull things apart. What's inside me,
what's inside you, what's inside everything. At the root of

(00:30):
it all is a desire to dig as deep as
we can into the very nature of matter, to hope
to reveal its inner workings and understand how it all
comes together to make our amazing, crazy and delicious world.
Is the universe made of quarks and leptons and dark matter?
Or is it made of strings or shmings or bada bings?
Right now we don't know. We might never know, or

(00:53):
one day and we might build a collider powerful enough
to show us the universe's fundamental lego bricks. Then we
can turned to the philosophers and ask them, hey, so
what does this mean? Dude? But what if we don't
get the billions to build a bigger collider? Is that
the only way forward? Can we find some other clever
way to get this information through the universe's back door.

(01:14):
That's what we're going to talk about on today's episode.
Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, brought to you
by all the tiny particles that make it possible.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Hello. I'm Kelly leader Smith. I'm a parasitologist who also
studies space, and I'm wondering if today we're going to
be talking about something that Daniel studies staring his day job.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and my job
is to play with taxpayer funded billion dollar toys.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
Ooh, my job usually involves playing with fish bomb and
I think your job might be better.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
I hope nobody I've ever paid a billion dollars for
fish vomit.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
There are some important questions that can get answered with
a lot of fish vomit. But yeah, probably not a
billion dollars worth. I'll give you that. Maybe a million
dollars worth. So you work at the LAC and we're
going to be talking about research happening at the LAC.
Is the thing that we're talking about today? Is this
a question that you were working on or what does
your lab do exactly? Daniel?

Speaker 1 (02:24):
Mostly I take naps, in my office. Isn't that enough?

Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, I'm sure everyone feels great about where their taxpayer
dollars are going right now.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
Yeah, it's a fair question. What is Daniel actually do
all day? We should have a whole episode where I
talk about my research, But very briefly, in the last
ten years or so, I was looking for dark matter
at the Large Hadron Collider, smashing particles together, hoping to
make dark matter particles which would leave an invisible signature
which is really hard to pick out, and using machine

(02:53):
learning to try to filter those patterns out from all
of the noise, which is a fun challenge. But then
dark matter sort of became too popular at the Large
Hadron Collider and everybody was doing it, and there wasn't
a whole lot of opportunity to like do new clever stuff.
So more recently I've pivoted to looking for weird, unexpected stuff. Like,
we know that dark matter is out there, we should

(03:14):
be able to see at the collider, so let's go
look for it. That makes sense. But what would be
even more exciting to me is to find something that
nobody expected, a discovery that makes people go, what, that's impossible,
or that's crazy or huh, how could that even be
something that nobody expected? And that's hard to do because
you sort of have to have an idea for what
you're looking for in order to go looking for it.

(03:37):
But we use some cool machine learning tools, anomaly detection
and all sorts of other algorithms to try to make
mathematical what we're looking for, what we're not looking for,
and to figure out clever ways to look for it.
So that's one of the things that I'm focusing on
more recently, is looking for anomalies.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
It's always so interesting to me the way the questions
that we ask are influenced by things like, well, what
are other people asking? And too many people are asking this,
and so I'm going to move on to something else.
And there's a lot of like social and funding things
that go into the decision about what to study. I
guess it makes sense. We're all humans doing work.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of that. But I think
people also underestimate how personal science is. Like people ask
questions because those are their personal questions, and we all
benefit from that, like the fact that some people are
weirdly into fish guts, you know, we learn cool stuff
about the universe. Because of that, and because some people

(04:31):
want to stay up late looking into telescopes or get
their socks wet in the rainforest counting spiders. Because different
people enjoy different kinds of activities and have different questions,
we get to learn about all lots of different kinds
of science. And so you know, there's no like magic
sorting hat that tells people what science to do. They
just follow their instincts and also, you know, look for

(04:51):
opportunities for sure. But I think it really reflects the
sort of breadth of human curiosity, all the different kinds
of science that we have, and I think that's all
wonderful and delicious.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
I absolutely agree limitless human curiosity. You can be interested
in fish, vomits, leeches, or dark matter or anything in between,
and even chemistry.

Speaker 1 (05:13):
Don't go that far. You know, I was going to
say dark matter fish vomit, Like maybe dark fish's vomit
up dark matter vomit. That would be pretty awesome. That
would be like where our research overlaps.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
Oh my gosh. Yes, I hope somebody will fund the
intersection of our research interests. Let's write to the NSF
and find out.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
But more broadly, There's something really cool about the Large
A Drunk Collider, which is that it lets you do
lots of different kinds of things. People have the idea
that the Large A Drunk Collider is like an experiment
that I do and then somebody else get the turn
they do an experiment. In reality, it's the same experiment.
It's just running twenty four to seven collecting very very
general data, and people can ask different kinds of questions
about it. People can be like, hey, dude, we find

(05:52):
a new particle. People can be like, hey, are the
particles we've seen do they behave the way we expected?
Or also like is is there anything weird in the data?
You can ask all these different kinds of questions with
the same data from the same setup, and so it's
very general and very powerful in that way, which I
love because it lets you pivot easily from different kinds
of questions.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
So, what is the experiment that's constantly running in the LHC.
And I'm always going to call it Hadron and embarrass myself.
So I'm just going to call it the LHC to
avoid that.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
What's embarrassing about saying Hadron is it because it's so
close to another word you're afraid of saying.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
Yeah it is.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
That's not family friendly.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
You called out Wienersmith.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
It's true, the large Wienersmith collider. Yeah, what is the experiment? Essentially,
it's just a big camera around a collision point. You
smash particles together, and then you try to capture all
the debris that comes out to get it's much information
about the collision and the aftermath, so you can piece
together what happened because you can't see the actual collision directly,

(06:56):
Like when the quarks annihilate, you don't get to see
that happen. You just get to see what they turn into.
So we have these layers of detectors around the collision
point to take information about those particles so we can
reconstruct their trajectories and their energies and their angles and
all sorts of stuff and figure out what happened. And
we just do that for every collision, no matter what.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
And is it like today we're just running electrons through there,
or it's like whatever particles happen to be in there
we're going to run into, or you know, is there
like a certain combination. What do you start with?

Speaker 1 (07:24):
Yeah, we just go outside and take a scoop of stuff,
toss it in the collider and see what happened.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
It's like, oh my gosh, you're like biologists.

Speaker 1 (07:31):
We're colliding fish bombit today. No, the collider is very
sensitive and very carefully tuned, so you have to put
the right stuff in and tune it. Most of the
time it runs protons, and so you just start from hydrogen.
You kick off the electrons, you give them energy, and
you separate them using their charges. You have pure protons
and you collide those. The previous collider I worked at
in Chicago, the Tepatron, collided protons and anti protons, so

(07:54):
you have to make a source of anti protons a
whole other factory. That was too complicated. So for the
next collider, the Large Hadron Collider is just protons and protons,
but sometimes we do other stuff. Sometimes we put lead
in there or gold atoms and smash them together because
you can ask all sorts of interesting questions when you
have like zillions of protons smashing together. It's called heavy

(08:16):
ion physics. So yeah, the Large Adron collider is pretty flexible.
You can collide other kinds of stuff, not just protons,
probably not fish guts though.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
That's disappointing, but I guess we'll keep talking about physics anyway.
And so is it like you know, Fridays or the
gold days, or just somebody like gets a grant and
that's the day you do the gold ions or whatever instead.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
No, it's like ninety five percent protons. That's the main physics.
And then occasionally we'll do a run with gold or
with lead or something else, but it's mostly just proton
proton physics. That's the bread and butter. The large Adron collider,
and it's decided some very high level of committees ascerned.
It is like a collection of dozens of countries, and
so everything's decided by committees that take forever, and so
it's very bureaucratic. Even the way we publish a paper

(08:57):
is very bureaucratic. We have five thousand authors on a
paper and everybody gets to read it and comment on it.
So you know, you put a paper through and somebody's
like add a comma, and somebody else is like remove
that comments. We also know add that comment, put that comments.
It's very slow and frustrating, but it's also wonderful to
work with people from all over the world.

Speaker 2 (09:14):
You have a very nuanced viewpoint on it. That's great.
I do get frustrated by those bureaucracy, like who cares
about the comma, Let's just get the paper done. But
on the other hand, I'm sure you get lots of
great ideas you wouldn't have gotten otherwise and it was
just two people working together on the paper.

Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yeah, but the particle collider is very powerful and it
lets you do things like look for new kind of
particles directly. But also I think this underappreciated, is that
there are indirect ways to discover new particles without actually
seeing them. And that's the thing I want to talk
about today. How we can use that potentially to see
inside particles, to learn about what's going on inside the

(09:47):
particles we think might be fundamental.

Speaker 2 (09:50):
All right, well, and today we're going to be talking
about how can we see what's inside the electron? And
we asked our amazing listeners, who are always insightful, to
tell us what they think the answer is to how
can we see inside an electron? So let's go ahead
and hear. What they had to say is that in order.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
To see things at that scale, we would need a
solar system sized particle collider. If we wanted to try
to see inside of it, we'd probably have to smash
other particles into it, and we just have to smash
them together block we do everything else. To see inside
an electron, we would need to probe it with something

(10:26):
that has a wavelength that's smaller than the electron.

Speaker 3 (10:30):
I thought that we couldn't. I thought electrons a fundamental
and there's nothing in there.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
Because we could crash them together with high energy particle physics,
can we actually see inside of an electrons? You can't
smash electrons together, so maybe you do it with neutrinos.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
We might only be able just to look at the
outside of it, and there might not be anything different
on the inside.

Speaker 1 (10:52):
I think that electrons are fundamental particles.

Speaker 3 (10:56):
By colliding it with other electrons or other particles and
seeing what comes.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
Out, it's various quantum states. When probed multiple times with
perhaps light, will generate some sort of semblance of a structure.

Speaker 1 (11:10):
With a very powerful microscope and a lot of imagination,
get some pliers and a set of thirty weight ball bearings.
It's all about ball bearings nowadays.

Speaker 3 (11:21):
Okay, I'm pretty certain Daniel's job is smashing particles together
and seeing their guts when they pop out. So that's
my guess. Or maybe the answer is math, but that's
not nearly as exciting.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
I'm imagining something like X ray crystallography, like Rosalind Franklin
saw the structure of DNA, but much much more sensitive.
I mean electron microscope. It's right there in the name.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
Wait wait wait wait wait, I see where this is going.

Speaker 3 (11:50):
Are you asking for more funds to build an even
larger particle collider?

Speaker 1 (11:54):
As far as I know, there's not an insight of
the electron to see.

Speaker 4 (12:00):
You like collide electrons together and when they hit each other,
they like four minutees a big explosion, like a big
like a big electronic explosion, and when and when that happens,

(12:20):
it will there's like a giant microscope over it, and
there's like somebody looking through the microscope and they like
see what comes out of the explosion.

Speaker 1 (12:32):
M magnets. Thanks to everybody who's sent in these answers.
If you would like to play for future episodes, don't
be shy. Write to us two questions at Danielandkelly dot org.
We want to hear from you and we want your
voice on the podcast. I love that so many people
said smash them together. These are particle physicists and folks
after my heart.

Speaker 2 (12:53):
They've been listening to you. I think they've been listening
to the show for a while. I like the one
person who said it involves ball. I think a lot
of really great scientific questions involve ball bearings. That was
a good guess.

Speaker 1 (13:04):
If you don't know, use some ball bearings, right. They
can't hurt.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
No, no, no, and they're always fun to play with,
although I always lose them.

Speaker 1 (13:12):
But these folks are basically right on the direct approach,
smash it together, see what comes out. If you have
enough energy, you can break the electron open. You know.
That's basically the short answer, and they're right, But nobody
got the indirect answer. The more subtle, the clever, the
back door way to maybe see what's inside the electron
without actually breaking it open, which I'm very excited to
talk about.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
And I'm very excited to hear the explanation because I
looked at the outline and I was like, I have
never heard about this before, so this will be exciting
and new for me. Let's start from the very beginning.
You know, we're all made of molecules. Molecules are made
of atoms. Give me some more detail, what background do
we need?

Speaker 1 (13:45):
Yeah? Yeah, And I just love this question because I
love like looking at the stuff around us and wondering,
like how it comes together? What's the recipe for my coffee?
What's the recipe for those fish guts? How do we
end up in this universe? You know? And to me,
unraveling with things are made of is really like looking
at the matrix, you know, finding the source code for
the universe. It's something really deeply satisfying. So it's no

(14:07):
surprise that I am a particle physicist instead of like
a rainforest spider ologist. But I hope other people out
there also find that exciting. And we get to live
in a time when we have unraveled so much of nature.
You know, thousands of years ago people were like, I
don't know, maybe there's four kinds of stuff, who knows.
But you know, we figured out what used to summarize, like, Okay,
we're made of molecules, we're made of atoms. That took

(14:29):
us thousands of years to figure out. It's just like
obvious high school chemistry by now. But it's also hugely
revealing about the way our universe works, you know, and
it tells you something already really powerful, which is that
you have a huge complexity of stuff, right, Like how
many different kinds of things are out there in the universe?
Ice cream and blueberries and mushrooms and fish guts and planets,

(14:51):
so many things. Maybe infinite numbers of kinds of things.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
Definitely a huge number, even white chocolate unfortunately, but yeah,
there's a lot of stuff out.

Speaker 1 (14:59):
There, hey said fish cuts, Okay, don't be redundant. The
amazing thing is that you can build all of that
with like one hundred atoms, right, It's kind of incredible.
You put those hundred items together in different ways, and
you get lava, or you get kittens, or you get hamsters,
or you get whatever. It's incredible that this huge complexity
is built out of simplicity, and the complexity comes from

(15:21):
the arrangements of the stuff. I think that says something
really deep and powerful about the nature of our universe.
And so I want to dig deeper, but I want
to past for a moment and like appreciate how far
we've come, even just when we get to the atom, right,
because the universe could have been different. It could have
been that like everything's made of its own kind of
particle and there isn't simplicity, or as you get lower,
there's more and more kinds of stuff. And so I'm

(15:43):
grateful that we live in the universe where as you
dig deeper, things seem to get simpler. And it's tantalizing
because it tells you like, ooh, maybe keep going. There's
a really simple hints they're waiting for you. It's all
forty two.

Speaker 2 (15:55):
And as someone who studies behavior, I also think it's
awesome that we live in a time where you can
get a bunch of nations together to agree that we're
interested in the fundamental nature of the universe and we're
going to invest in something like the LHC. It's just
I don't know. I think it's an amazing time to
live for a lot of different reasons.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
Yeah, it is, And so for anybody out there who
happens to be in the US Congress, for example, I
think funding for particle physics is great for lots of reasons.
One is the huge return on investment in terms of
transforming the nature of society economically and militarily and all
that stuff. But also just for the sheer knowledge, you know,
like it's worth it anyway, Let's dig deeper. So we

(16:33):
have molecules. Molecules are atoms, is like roughly one hundred
kinds of atoms. Inside the atom, of course, is the
nucleus and then electrons. Nucleus is made of protons and neutrons,
and so now we have structure inside the atom, right,
and don't take that for granted. There's an amazing correlation
between the structure of the atom and the behavior of
the atom. All this complexity we're talking about, all the

(16:56):
fascinating different behavior like why are metals metallic, and why
something's active and something's inactive. That all comes from the
structure of the atom. And you could almost have guessed
it if you looked at the periodic table you said, oh,
look at these different kinds of atoms. Why there are
so many different ones, and why are there patterns here?
You could have guessed that it comes from internal structure.
That the atoms weren't themselves fundamental, meaning they weren't just

(17:19):
made of their own stuff. They were made of something smaller.
So we had a very strong clue already when you
look at the periodic table that there was more structure
deep down, and it's amazing that when we dig in
we find that structure and we're then able to explain
all of those patterns we saw, right, It's incredible.

Speaker 2 (17:34):
I feel like you just said that chemistry is important,
and I'm feeling a little uncomfortable. But we talked about this.
There was a listener question about why is carbon so
important for life forms and that did come out of
a long discussion about, you know, what we can learn
from the periodic, So it's important even if it's chemistry.

Speaker 1 (17:50):
Now I would say it's redundant. All you need to
know is the structure of the atom, and chemistry you
should just follow naturally from that if you knew what
you were doing.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
It's always about physics.

Speaker 1 (18:00):
Exactly anyway. So now let's dig inside the nucleus. Right,
we have the protons and the neutrons. Protons and neutrons
we know are made of smaller particles. They're made of quarks,
and the mass of the proton is fascinating, you know,
like basically the proton is the mass of hydrogen. That's
what the hydrogen is, basically just a proton. So fix
that in your mind is like the unit, and in
particle physics we use units of GeV giga electron volts

(18:23):
to talk about mass. It really is GeV divided by
the speed of light squared, but we just set the
speed of light to equal one because otherwise it's such
a pain in the butt. Anyways, So the proton has
a certain mass. And if you dig into the proton
and you ask, like, well, the proton is made of
the quarks. Does that mean I can get the proton
mass by adding up the mass of the quarks the
way you feel like if you take your car apart,

(18:45):
the mass of the car is equal to the mass
of the parts of the car, right, Well, that's not
true for the proton, and this is going to be
very important later. The proton's mass is made of things
with much much smaller mass. Like you add up the
mass of the quarks that make up the proton, you
get like a few percent of its mass. So where
do the rest of its mass come from? Or? Remember

(19:06):
mass is not stuff, right, Mass is internal stored energy,
and there's a lot of energy between those quarks holding
those quarks together, and that energy inside the proton contributes
to the proton's mass. The same way, like shining a
photon into a box of mirrors makes that box more massive,
even though what you've added hasn't added any actual mass

(19:27):
on its own. So the proton is pretty massive, but
it's made of very low mass stuff, and a lot
of its mass doesn't come from the mass of the
things that's made out.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
Of this mass is internal stored energy thing. I remember
you blew my mind when we were talking about that
in the Where does Energy Come From? Episode? So if
folks want a bit of a deeper dive into that concept,
they should check out that episode.

Speaker 1 (19:48):
Yeah, exactly, So we've zoomed it now inside the protons
and neutrons, and protons and neutrons both made of quarks,
just different arrangements. You got upcorks and down quarks and
two upcorks in it. Down makes one of them to
down quarks and up and makes the other one. Honestly,
I don't even remember which is which. I can never
keep that straight, but you can look it up.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
I don't bother memorizing stuff like that either.

Speaker 1 (20:12):
I often remember this stuff, but I feel like if
you confuse it too many times early on when you're
learning it, then it's forever scrambled in your brain, and
I will never be able to snangle them and always
have to look it up.

Speaker 2 (20:22):
And this is why I'm never going to try to
say hadrawn, because I've gotten it totally confused. If there
are some people in my life where I said their
name wrong so many times, I will never be constantly
I'm going to say it right where I'm just like, hey,
I've known you for five years. I don't want to
mess it up now that we're face to face.

Speaker 1 (20:38):
You remember my name though, right?

Speaker 2 (20:39):
Hey?

Speaker 1 (20:39):
You putting you on the spot.

Speaker 2 (20:42):
It's Whitson right.

Speaker 1 (20:49):
In French they call me Wittissan. I was actually one
time waiting for an aployment at a bank in France
and they came out and said Monsieur Wisson and I
was like, that's not me, and calling him and calling him.
I was like, who is this moron? We're going for
your appointment already.

Speaker 2 (21:04):
Your whole never would come with me, oh.

Speaker 1 (21:06):
Exact, oh simla. Anyway, I go to.

Speaker 2 (21:11):
Doctor's appointments, including to the like obgyn, where you think
that people would be comfortable saying the word wiener. It's
always like when they call people out from the waiting
room it's like, oh, uh, you know, miss Smith, Miss Jordan,
Miss god Luski, uh Kelly, would they get to me?
And nobody wants to try to say Wiener Smith, even

(21:32):
at the Obgyn. But anyway, that's all right, I go
buy anything. It's all fine.

Speaker 1 (21:36):
Maybe they think you're Bird Simpson, you're playing a brank
on them.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
Yeah, maybe nobody would actually do that. We did one
We went to go pick up our turkey for Thanksgiving
it Whole Foods, and they called to the back, the
wiener Smiths are here for their turkey. And then fifteen
minutes later we hadn't gotten the turkey, and I was like, hey,
could you call them in the back and see what's up.
They called back and they said, what about the turkey
for the Wienersmith's. And I heard the person on the
walkie talkie go, oh oh gosh, you were serious. So

(22:04):
then we got our turkey. All right, I've gotten us
off track, daniell get us back on track.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
Please, that's right. So we're zooming inside of matter inside
your frozen turkey. You have molecules and atoms, and those
are made of protons and neutrons and electrons, and the
protons and neutrons are made of quarks. So we've zoomed
all the way down, and everything that you've ever tasted
or eaten or thrown at your family members on Thanksgiving
is made of quarks and electrons, right down to this

(22:31):
very basic Two kinds of quarks and one kind of
electron can make basically everything. So the particle physicists cookbook
has three ingredients. And the most amazing thing, the most
mind blowing to me, is that everything in the universe
is made of the same ratio of that stuff. It's
like one proton to one neutron to one electron, which
means the same numbers of quarks and electrons in everything.

(22:51):
It's just the arrangement of stuff. But you know, we're
never satisfied just knowing that it's not like that's the answer,
and so we're always interested in the question of like,
is there something deeper? Is there something inside the electron?
Is there something inside the quarks? And we haven't talked
about it today and probably won't, But obviously there's a
huge chunk of the universe dark matter that's not made
of quarks and leptons, So we know there's other kinds

(23:12):
of matter out there. Definitely not the end of the story.

Speaker 2 (23:16):
Well, and you said leptons, which we haven't talked about yet.
What is elepton? Is a lepton like a quark, but
it jumps a lot. I'm stretched.

Speaker 1 (23:26):
No, it's a particle that's slept in. No electon, Sorry
for the terminology. There's a category of particles that the
electron belongs in, and the electron has cousins the muon
and the towel that make up the other leptons. But
we can also do say quarks and electrons because that's
what makes up the matter that we are made out of.
There are other quarks out there, and there are other
versions of the electron out there, the muon and the towel,

(23:48):
but our kind of matter is made out of two quarks,
the up and the down, and the electron.

Speaker 2 (23:52):
Got it, Okay, So after the break, we're going to
talk about why we think that digging into the electron
is worth it doing. Do we have any evidence to
suggest there's something else making that up? And we'll discuss
that after the break and we're back. Okay. So we've

(24:23):
dug into protons and neutrons. We know that there's quarks
that are making them up. Do we have any indication
that if we dig farther into electrons we will find
that electrons are made up out of something.

Speaker 1 (24:35):
We have no really direct smoking gun, right. What we
do have is a sort of history and some hints
that encourage us. Recall when we were talking about the
periodic table. We saw all these patterns in the periodic
table and we were wondering, could that be explained by
internal structure? Could these actually all be made out of
smaller bits? And the patterns come from how those bits
arrange themselves and come together naturally, from the different ways

(24:58):
that they can click together, or whatever. And now we
know the answer is yes. So we can also look
at the current list of particles that we don't know
what's inside and ask are there patterns there? Are there
unexplained phenomena, things that seem suggestive that maybe these are
built out of the same smaller bits. The answer to
that is, oh, yeah, absolutely, there are huge, obvious, screaming

(25:20):
patterns that suggest very strongly this is not the final answer.

Speaker 2 (25:25):
And if you were to find something fundamental making up electrons,
what would you name it?

Speaker 1 (25:32):
The white son? Of course?

Speaker 2 (25:35):
The what toll exactly?

Speaker 1 (25:39):
So yeah, I hope I'm around to do that, and
I suspect the particle physics community would overrule me, and
that happens occasionally, you get overruled, like the electron discovered
by JJ Thompson. He didn't call it the electron. He
wanted to call them corpuscules, like little bits of matter.
But people are like, yeah, no, we're going to go
with electron.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
I mean, as long as they don't name it like
A or B, like what was it Jupiter's rings? It
needs to be something exciting. But okay, all right, so
tell me more about these tantalizing patterns.

Speaker 1 (26:07):
Yes, So we mentioned earlier that there's more than just
the electron, right, the electron has cousins. There's the muon
in the towel, so there's three kinds of electrons. The
electron also has a partner, the new trino, which isn't
part of our matter, but it's part of the universe.
It's something the universe can do. So in total, there
are six of these lepton particles, the electron, muon, TAW,

(26:28):
and then the three neutrinos that correspond to them. So
that's interesting and you might ask like, well, why are
there three these particles are all so closely related that
muon is just a little heavier than the electron. The
toaw is even heavier. It feels like you patterns in
the periodic table. There's like three columns of these particles.
So that's already very interesting and suggestive. It makes you wonder, like,

(26:49):
are there three ways to click together their internal bits?
And this is how it happens, three ways for some
string inside of it to vibrate. And that's just one
of the really interesting patterns. That whole pattern of like
six particles three pairs of two is also reflected in
the quarks. We talked about the quarks the up and
the down. That's one doublet of quarks up and the

(27:10):
down go together. There's a copy of that doublet the
charm and the strange, very similar to the up and
the down, but heavier. And then there's another copy of
that doublet the top and the bottom. So all in
all the quarks have six and it breaks into these
three columns of two particles exactly the same way the
leptons do. So you have this structure which is interesting

(27:31):
and suggestive, and then you have it repeated in another
set of particles. The amazing thing is that the quarks
and leptons are very different. The quarks feel the strong force,
the leptons don't. The quarks make up the nucleus, the
leptons make up the stuff that orbits around it. We
don't actually know what the relationship is between quarks and leptons,
yet there's this very strong symmetry between them. It's like

(27:51):
if you go into a suburban street and you see,
like all the houses on the left have this one
floor plan, all the houses on the right have this
other floor plan, but they're similar. You might be like, oh, okay,
well this is obviously built by one company and they
got two floor plans, right, it's the same deal. It's
like the universe can do this or it could do that,
and probably they're built out of the same bits, you know, Like,
for example, the charge of the proton is plus one

(28:14):
and the charge of the electron is minus one. Those
two things cancel exactly. For that to happen, there has
to be some relationship between the quarks and leftons. Can't
just be chance that the quarks add up to make
plus one and the electron adds up to make minus one.
So there's definitely some connection there. But we don't know
what it is. So all of this to me are
very obvious clues. And in one hundred years, when we

(28:36):
know what's inside the electron and the quarks, people will
be like, God, it was so obvious. How did you
not see it? Right? But right now we don't know.
We know that we have these patterns, and it could
be that the universe is just this way, that all
this stuff is fundamental and the universe has made it
of these complex bits with these weird patterns, and there
is no explanation, but I refuse to believe it. I

(28:57):
think that everything out there should be explained.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
So if we've got you know, three different kinds of neutrinos,
they've got up and down quarks, charm and strange and
top and bottom charm and strange was a good naming thing.
When we break the electron into its component parts, do
we expect there to be two parts then, to match
with what we're seeing with the neutrinos.

Speaker 1 (29:17):
Yeah, good question. We don't know. There could be made
of two things, could we have three things? Could just
be made of itself. Whatever is down there is going
to be very different from what we've seen before. And
you know, when we saw the proton, it was made
out of three things. And it's interesting it's made of
three things because of the way the strong force works.
There's three colors, and one way to get a balance
is to have all three colors, you know. It's not

(29:39):
just like a plus charge and a minus charge is red, green, blue,
and if you have a red, green, and a blue,
it comes together to make a color neutral object, which
is stable. So one reason why the proton is made
out of three is for that reason, because of the
structure of that force. So we don't know what force
is holding together the quarks or the electrons, and that's
what would determine how many pieces there are and how

(30:01):
they interact, you know. And so it could be that
the electron is fundamental. It's just made of itself, and
when the coders of our simulation put together the universe,
they started with electrons and that's it, and there's just
nothing else inside. But it could also be that it's
made of smaller stuff. The frustrating thing is that you
can never prove that something is fundamental, right. You can

(30:23):
prove it's not by breaking it open and seeing what's inside.
But all you can do is not to discover that
it is made of something. That doesn't prove that it
is fundamental, right, just shows that, well, maybe it's fundamental,
or maybe it's stuff that's so small you can't see,
or it's bound together so tightly you can't break it open,
so you can never actually prove that it's fundamental.

Speaker 2 (30:45):
The universe can be very frustrating that way.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
And it might also be this is really philosophical, that
there's nothing fundamental, like maybe the electron is made of
something else, Schma electrons and those are made of something else,
but electrons and those are made of something else, is
made of something else. And your instinct is, well, there's
got to be something at the bottom, right, it's got
to be a bedrock layer of reality. And maybe but

(31:07):
that's just a philosophical hunch, you know, we have no
evidence that there is. There are theories out there in
philosophy that the universe could just be an infinite ladder
of particles with no bottom, right, it just goes on forever,
which would be great for particle physics because like infinite funding, right,
just keep.

Speaker 2 (31:24):
Digging infinite nobels. Yeah, there go, there you go.

Speaker 1 (31:28):
But that could be our reality, right, it's possible, but
there also could be a bedrock, and that's what I
hope for. I hope that we get someday to some
set of particles that's so simple, so basic, so obvious
and beautiful that we think, okay, this must be it.
It would make sense for the universe to have this
beats fundamental, because it'd be very unsatisfying if the answer

(31:49):
is what we have today. The answer is, well, there
are twelve matter particles and there are five forced particles,
and that's just it. They're seventeen and that's the basic
elements of the universe, and that's what we start from.
And like, really, come on, it's got to be simpler
than that. We have this tendency towards simplicity, and I
just hope that the march continues, but there's no guarantees, so.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
I gotta be honest. Before you and I started talking regularly,
I also held out hope that they were like simple, beautiful,
elegant answers. And then you told me about the weak force.
That was the moment for me where I'm like, I
don't think any of this is gonna make sense. We're
just gonna have to keep buddling our way through. But
hopefully I'm wrong.

Speaker 1 (32:27):
So I ruined your view of particle physics. Used to
think of it as like a shining cathedral of simplicity
and beauty, and then you're like, man, this is a
mess that's.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
All held together with zip ties and duct tape in there.
I don't know what's going on, but it is.

Speaker 1 (32:40):
Yeah, But you know, at least now we understand why
the weak force is a mess. They used to just
be like, gosh, this is kind of ugly, and now
we see, oh, it was beautiful and it was shattered
by the Higgs boson in this precise way, and that's
at least satisfying, and we can explain it, and we
can hark back to an earlier day in the universe
before it all got messed up. Something satisfying there, and

(33:01):
I hope we get that kind of explanation.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
All right, sounds good. I'm sure the more I learn,
the more satisfied I'll become. That's so nice of you,
You know, you make a strong effort to be interested
in biology. We're both supporting each other here. So let's
talk about the methods that are currently being used to
try to break electrons into smaller pieces. If that's a
thing that exists.

Speaker 1 (33:22):
Yeah, all right, So the most obvious thing is what
the listener suggested, which is like, hey, let's smash it open, right,
Take two electrons or an electron and a positron, doesn't
really matter, point them at each other, give them a
lot of energy, and bounce them off each other. See
what happens. Like This method works also for things like toasters. Right,
want to know what's inside your toaster? Take two toasters,

(33:44):
throw them at each other at really high speeds. You're
gonna have a shower of stuff that comes out, and
you can sift through the debris and be like, oh
look there's two springs and there's two handles, and oh okay,
this must be what the toaster is made out of.

Speaker 2 (33:55):
An ouch just should have unplugged it first.

Speaker 1 (33:58):
That's a long extension cord. And there's something fundamentally different
about the way it happens or quantum particles, but the
spirit is the same. I mean, if you smash two
toasters together, you're not destroying parts of the toaster and
converting their math into energy and trains meeting them into
something else. The bits that come out of the toaster
collision are the same bits that went into the toaster collision.

(34:20):
In a quantum collision, you can annihilate the particles like
eve an electron and a positron. They can annihilate into
a photon and then turn into something else. Crazy. What
comes out isn't always what went in, right, So you're
not always learning about what's inside the electron if you
annihilate it.

Speaker 2 (34:35):
So, say you smashed two toasters into each other, and
you expected to see like screws and springs and stuff
like that. We don't even know what we should expect
to see when you break the electron. And so if
you know, things we had never seen before came out
of the toaster, like fish cuts, fish guts, exactly, how
would we even know what to do with that? And so, like,
how do we know what to look for or how
to measure it if we've never seen it before?

Speaker 1 (34:57):
Yeah, good question. It would be amazing if we discover
this fish all the way down.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
I'm skeptical.

Speaker 1 (35:04):
The simplest version of what we do is that we
start at low energy and we know what we expect
to see. Like, if you shoot two electrons at each
other at fairly low energy, they're going to bounce off
each other in a way that's similar to what happens
if you shoot two baseballs at each other. They're going
to bounce off, and you can calculate the angles they're
going to come out at and the energy. And they're
quantum particles, so you can't predict an individual one, but

(35:27):
you can predict the distribution. And so if you have
what we call elastic scattering, which means you're not breaking
the particles open, you know, changing the configuration they're just
bouncing off each other is very predictable. So you start
with that and you see the distributions you expect, the
angles that you expect, you're like, okay, that's cool. And
then you increase the energy, and like with baseballs, at
some point when you increase the energy, you're going to

(35:49):
get what we call an inelastic collision, which means the
baseballs shatter or they stick together, or something else happens. Right,
And it's an energy threshold because the baseball's help together
with energy, right, it's bound together. And if you have
a high enough energy, you can break those bonds. If
you don't, you don't, So below some energy threshold, you're
not probing inside the baseball. You're probing the baseball behavior itself,

(36:13):
but above some energy, it's inelastic, and then the distribution changes. Yeah,
maybe a baseball comes out, but first of all, it's mangled.
It looks different, and the angles look very different. Like
if you collide to baseballs and they stick together, they
don't come back out at you in the same way.
Or imagine if you're doing it, like you throw a
baseball at a wall, and if you throw it low energy,
it bounces off, it doesn't break the wall. Throw it

(36:35):
high enough energy, baseball just doesn't come back right. It
just goes through the wall. So that's very different. And
so that's what you look for to see. If you're
probing inside a particle, you shoot it at higher, higher
and energy, and you look for deviations from the distributions
you would expect from elastic scattering to see that you're
starting to do inelastic scattering. You're starting to probe maybe

(36:56):
what's inside the particles instead of probing the particles as
a whole.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
We found an energy at which we can shoot electrons
at each other where it looks like we're transitioning from
elastic to inelastic scattering.

Speaker 1 (37:07):
Unfortunately not yet, but This is exactly how we discovered
the structure of the proton. We shot electrons and protons
at each other, and a low energy they bounce off
elastic scattering. At higher energy, you start to destroy the proton,
and what's happening is the electron is now interacting with
the quarks inside of it, and so at some energy
you start to just get like shrapnel from the proton

(37:29):
and it's definitely not elastic scattering, so you can tell
you're doing inelastic scattering. For people who want to learn
more about these experiments, they're fascinating and amazing. They're called
deep in elastic scattering, so you can google that. And
if you get to high enough energy, you actually start
to see elastic scattering from the things inside the proton.
And that's, for example, how we know we have three

(37:50):
quarks inside the proton, because you shoot electrons at the
proton and you start to get elastic scattering as if
there are three tight little dots of objects that you're
interacting with. Because at high enough energy, the bonds of
the quarks are irrelevant. If your energy of your probe
is larger than the energy of the bonds between the quarks,
you're just shooting it at three quarks and sometimes they

(38:11):
bounce off and exactly the way you would expect from
elastic scattering between electrons and quarks. So it's this incredibly
beautiful transition from elastic to inelastic to then three times
elastic scattering. It's really amazing.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
That must have been so cool to realize that you,
instead of a proton, now have three other things that
have popped out and be like the answer is three.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
That sounds really cool to me.

Speaker 1 (38:32):
It is really cool, but for a while people didn't
believe it. They're like, okay, well that's cool and that's clever,
but that's just mathematics, Like is that real. And for
a long time people call these partons like parts of
the proton, and nobody believes that they were like actually
physically real things inside the proton until somebody predicted, like, okay,
well if these things are real, these quarks are real,

(38:53):
they should be able to do other things also, like
make other states bound together. And somebody predicted one of
these states. And the day they saw this in the experiment,
is this new state made of just these quarks together.
That's when everybody started to believe Okay, quarks are real.
It's called the October Revolution. It was a very yeah,
absolutely in physics. And a guy I worked with tells

(39:15):
a story about his father who's also a particle physicist,
getting a phone call that day in October and like
leaping out of the shower naked and dripping wet because
he knew he was going to be exciting news to
take that phone call. So sometimes there is drama in
particle physics. And so that's what we saw for the
inside the proton. We know the proton has structure, and
that's how we know, and we can try the same
thing shooting electrons at each other. But so far we've

(39:36):
seen no structure.

Speaker 2 (39:37):
And have we gone up to what you would consider
to be very very very high energies doing these experiments, Well.

Speaker 1 (39:43):
We've done the highest we can, right. The large hadron
collider is the highest energy collisions of protons and protons,
and before that we had a high energy electron collider.
You know, we built these things as large as we can.
The limitation is just money, Like, there's no fundamental limitation
to building a bigger collidse. We know how to do it.
It just costs a lot of cash. You got to

(40:03):
build a tunnel, you got magnets, you got little accelerating modules.
We could, in principle build one that circumnavigates the moon
or you know, the galaxy or whatever. You just cost
a zillion dollars, and even I think that's probably not
a good way to spend to your cash. But it's
awesome sort of to think that, like we could just
buy this knowledge of the universe, Like it's out there,

(40:25):
we're in the candy store, we have the money in
our pockets. We're just like, hmmm, I feel like that
Snickers bar is too much money.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
Maybe we should figure out what causes cancer.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
Yeah, exactly, save some kids from dying. Exactly. So one
approach is like, just build bigger colliders. But the problem
is we don't know how big it has to be,
Like until you see the inside of the electron, you
have no idea. Is it right beyond our capability if
we build it a little bit bigger we see it,
or is it going to require a solar system sized
collider or a galaxy sized colider or use black holes

(40:55):
or just like a revolution in collider technology, so we
don't need to make them so big and expensive something
are working on that, So it's an exploration game the
same way. You don't know when you land on an
alien planet is going to be all dust and rubble?
Or are the aliens waiting for us? And you want
to land on as many planets as possible. We don't
know when we build a collider, are we about to
see inside the electron? Or is this thing way too

(41:16):
small and we're not going to see anything. You just
don't know, all right.

Speaker 2 (41:19):
Well, so we've talked about direct methods of trying to
figure out if electrons are made of smaller parts. Next,
you are going to tell us about the indirect method
that you queued up for us as a super exciting
thing earlier in the episode, And when we get back
from the break, we're going to learn all about it.

(41:50):
We're back and during the break I asked Daniel if
the indirect method required bigger colliders, and he said the
answer is no, which means maybe this could be the
key with existing technologies for figuring it out exactly. I'm
super excited. How do we do this indirectly?

Speaker 1 (42:03):
Yeah? So, particle physicists loves smashing stuff together and they
love making bigger and bigger colliders, and that's all fun
and everybody would prefer to do it's a direct way.
It's the most fun, it's the most obvious, it's the cleanest,
the data is beautiful. But hey, it's expensive, and you know,
it's hard to build new colliders, and so we also
try to be resourceful and we try to find other
ways to discover things without having to build the collider

(42:25):
to make them directly. So we have these indirect methods
of discovering things. Essentially, if we can see the influence
of some new particle, for example, on the particles we
already are able to make in the collider, even if
we don't have enough energy to make that new particle,
that can still influence the particles we have. So for example,
before we discovered the top quark, we were pretty sure
it was there, and we're pretty sure we knew where

(42:46):
it was, like how much mass it had because of
the way it influenced the particles we were able to
make at the lower energy colliders. So we can play
this indirect game of seeing the influence of new particles
out there on the particles we see to discover new
particles without like having the energy to make them, but
we can also do something similar to see inside the
electron using a very clever trick of studying the Higgs boson.

(43:11):
So you remember, the Higgs boson is the particle it
messes up the weak force, but also it gives mass
to all the particles, like it gives mass to the electron,
for example, by interacting with it. So without the Higgs boson,
the electron would have no mass. It would be a
speed of light, massless particle, similar to the photon, but
with charge. Of course, once you have the Higgs boson
in the universe, the Higgs and the electron interact, and

(43:34):
so the electron that we see is not the pure electron.
It's the electron interacting with the Higgs field, and that
interaction is sort of like a big pulsing ball. The
energy is sliding back and forth between the electron field
and Higgs field, back and forth constantly, and that basically
counts as internal stored mass of this thing, this thing
which is a combination of the electron in the Higgs field.

(43:56):
We talked in the Charge episode about how fields are
coupled together sloshes back and forth between them. That's what's
happening with the electron field and the Higgs field. So
the thing that we see is not really a pure electron.
What we call the electron is actually a combination of
the electron field and the Higgs field, and that thing
has energy inside of it because of this interaction, and
that's where the electrons mass comes from. Still with me,

(44:18):
So I'm.

Speaker 2 (44:19):
Trying to connect what you just said and thinking about
what we were talking about before. So is this interaction
going to give us more energy than you would get
if you were just smashing electrons together. No, that's not
what we're going for. We're just expecting the interactions to
be different in a way that is formative.

Speaker 1 (44:35):
Yeah, exactly. You can't use that as a source of
fuel to like push things further or anything. But what's
really fascinating is that the electron has a different mass
than the muon. For example, right, muon is the cousin
of the electron. Muon has a lot more mass, interacts
much more strongly with the Higgs boson, and so the
Higgs boson interacts with the muon more intensely. So the

(44:55):
muon has more mass. And that's really interesting because it
means that by studying the interaction between the Higgs boson
and a particle, you can understand how much mass it
should have. Like if you knew the strength of the
interaction between the Higgs boson the electron, you could predict
the electrons mass. You'd be like, Okay, I know how
much these two fields couple together, so I can calculate

(45:18):
how that little pulsling ball of energy should be and
I can predict the electrons mass. Right, And the same way,
you know, Okay, the muon interacts more strongly with the Higgs,
so we should have a higher mass. And the top
quark crazy interaction with the Higgs. Huge mass for the
top quark. Top quark is like two hundred times the
mass of the proton, which is much more massive than
the electron. So enormous variations in the amount that the

(45:39):
Higgs boson interacts with this stuff. So say you knew
how the Higgs boson interacts with these particles, you could
predict their mass, and then you went out and you
measured their mass, and what if you saw a discrepancy.
What if the Higgs boson interacts with the electron and
it should give it a mass of like zero point one.
But you go out and you measure the mass and
it's point five where it's ten point zero, then you'd

(46:01):
be like, hold on a second, the electron has more
mass than it's getting from the Higgs boson. We think
the Higgs boson is giving the electron a certain amount
of mass, but we can go out and measure it
in the universe it has more mass than that. What
could that mean. Well, we've seen that before, haven't we.
The proton is made of three quarks, and those quarks
get their mass from the Higgs boson, But the proton

(46:23):
gets most of its mass not from the Higgs boson,
but from the interaction of the quarks, and so in
a similar way, if you measure the mass of the
electron and it's heavier than you can explain with the
Higgs boson, that means that it's got some energy inside
of it, some bonds that are holding its bits together.
That its mass is not just coming from the Higgs boson.

(46:44):
Its mass is coming from the interaction of the things
inside of it, which means there are things inside of it. Haha,
look at that, ha ha.

Speaker 2 (46:53):
But that doesn't tell us how many things are inside
of it, or the nature of the things inside of it.

Speaker 1 (46:57):
Don't throw cold water on our discovery. Oh my god,
we just had an aha moment. We revealed something about
the universe, and now you're not sad.

Speaker 2 (47:04):
Now I'm excited. I'm excited. I'm just trying to figure
out how excited.

Speaker 1 (47:07):
I should be. No, you're totally right. The indirect method
is not as exciting as the direct method. It tells
us that there is something inside of it, and you
can tell us something about the nature of those bonds.
But you're right, it doesn't tell us what it is.
It doesn't show it to us, It doesn't give it
to us to play with.

Speaker 2 (47:21):
But has this been done?

Speaker 1 (47:22):
So this is what we're working on. And this is
something we can do with a large hadron collider because
we can study the interaction of the Higgs boson in
various particles. Who The way we do that is by
measuring how often the Higgs boson turns into those particles.
Like you create a Higgs boson, does it turn into
a pair of bottom quarks or a pair of top quarks,
or a pair of electrons or a pair of muons.
The rate at which it interacts with these particles determines

(47:44):
how often it turns into those particles, so electrons very
very low mass, low interaction with the higgs, very rare.
To see higgs turn into electrons very difficult, but you
run the collider long enough, you'll see it and you'll
be able to measure that, and then we can compare
that to the mass of the higgs. So we don't
have that number yet because the higgs decase to electrons
very very very rarely because they're so light. But we're

(48:06):
starting to be able to measure that for other particles.
So we've measured it for the top cork and for
the bottom cork, and those numbers are as we expect.
So the higgs boson de case to the top cork
in a way that suggests that all of its mass
comes from the higgs boson. I mean, you would have
heard about it already if we discovered something inside the quarks.
So far the number is don't indicate that there's anything

(48:27):
inside the top cork or the bottom cork. We haven't
been able to probe the other particles because they're lower
masks and therefore the higgs the case to them more rarely.
But that is something we can do, and we have
ten more years to run this collider and get all
that data and analyze these things. And I just think
it's cool that we have sort of these backdoor methods
to be like, well, let's look to see if we
can figure out if there is something there before we

(48:48):
actually build the collider to break it open and show
it to us.

Speaker 2 (48:52):
Yeah. So say you had an electron a muon what
is a tau town?

Speaker 4 (48:56):
Good?

Speaker 2 (48:57):
Right? Towh man, it was so cool question stuff.

Speaker 1 (49:01):
I'm rounding you up to any of plus.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
All right, thank you? Great? Oh yeah, okay, So you've
got these three things and you interact them with the
Higgs if the answer for their mass differs in some
predictable way, like you know, one is always twenty five
percent higher than the other, and then the other one
is another twenty five percent beyond that, could you guess
how many there were in there, like you know, there's
probably three, and then there's an additional one in this

(49:24):
one and an additional one in that one, Like could
you get a handle on like the relative numbers of
things that way?

Speaker 1 (49:29):
Yeah, that's exactly the game we'd love to play. You know,
look at these things, look for patterns, look for clues.
If we saw this, there would be instantly a zillion
theories explaining it, you know, to match all those numbers,
which would be really fun. And you know, we need
that kind of inspiration. We need this kind of data
to give us a clue to come up with these ideas.
There are lots of theories of electron compositeness, you know,

(49:51):
things that could be inside the electron, but nobody's any
idea if any of them are true. Maybe the most
famous is string theory. String theory says all the particles
are just string oscillating in different ways, which is cool
and very beautiful, but strings are so tiny that we
could never see them with a direct method, like we
would need a ridiculous collider to see strings. And you know,

(50:12):
not everything that's inside the electron could be seen even
with this indirect method, because it has to couple to
the Higgs boson. In order for this to work, it
has to directly get its mass from the Higgs boson
the constituents of the electron. It could be that the
constituous electron don't get their mass from the Higgs boson,
and the electron itself is some like effective approximate description

(50:33):
of it, and it gets its mass directly from the
Higgs boson, unlike the proton, for example. So there are
ways that this could fail, but it's an exciting way
to see inside the electron anyway.

Speaker 2 (50:43):
So is this the kind of thing where, like tomorrow,
the news could be saying, oh my gosh, using the
indirect method, we are now sure that the electron is
made up of stuff. You said something about a decade's
worth of data. Is this the kind of thing where
we're gonna need ten years to figure it out? To
see a signature, We're gonna.

Speaker 1 (50:56):
Need a while. This is hard. You're measuring something that's
very very rarely happens, and then you want to measure
very precisely, which means you need a bunch of examples.
But this is what we're good at, you know, we
are good at using machine learning to extract this information
from the data to get the most juice out of
the dollars that we have spent on it. And you know,
this is what particle physicists do. We're blocked by this wall,

(51:17):
so let's see if we can find a way around it.
And I'm impressed with the cleverness. I mean, I didn't
come over this. Yeah, somebody else thought of this, and
it just goes to show you the ingenuity of humanity.
You know, there are questions we have, and we will
always push to find the answers, even if it seems
impossible or impractical or ridiculously expensive, we will find a
way to get there.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
So you said that the LEDC right now mostly has
protons shooting around. So are we even collecting the right
kind of data to use the indirect method right now
or is that happening at like a different collider.

Speaker 1 (51:46):
No, proton shooting around is a good way to make
Higgs bosons. One thing that LEDC is really good at
is making Higgs bosons. It was built to discover the Higgs,
but it was also built to discover lots of different
versions of the Higgs, because we didn't know in advance
how much mass the Higgs would have, and so exactly
the best way to make it. So proton collider is
really good at discovering things you don't know much about,

(52:08):
because it can make lots of different kinds of things.
Now that we know more about the Higgs boson, people
are talking about making a Higgs factory, which is a
machine that makes zillions and zillions of higgs. It's like
perfect for making higgs, and it does it by colliding
muons actually, so you make beams of muons because muons
interact with the higgs more than the electrons do. This
is a good way to make lots of higgs. It's

(52:30):
really hard to make muon beams because muons don't last
very long that the k back into electrons. But people
have figured that out. So that's one thing on the
docket for the next colliders. Maybe make a big muon
collider higgs factory so you can study these things incredible detail.
So that'd be exciting, but of course you know that
cost a few bill Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:47):
I would like to make a discovery there where people
can say, like, well, we need to make more Wienersmiths,
make more higgs. Like that's a person and that's just
so great that his name has become, you know, used
in that way. But anyway, maybe one day they'll be
wanting to make more Wienersmiths, but maybe not.

Speaker 1 (53:02):
Maybe one day, And I hope that in a one
hundred years or a thousand years, people know more about
the structure of matter and they can talk about the
fundamental bits and you can smoke banana peels on the
roof and talk about why the universe is made out
of squiggly ons and what that even means and why
are the two of them? And you know, to me,
these are fun philosophical questions and we don't even get
to ask them yet because we don't know what those

(53:22):
answers are. And I hope to live long enough to
see some of that.

Speaker 2 (53:26):
Yeah, but it's cool that we live in a time
where you can devise the experiments to ask these questions
that we've gotten this far down the ladder. So I'm excited.

Speaker 1 (53:33):
The ancient Greece would be very impressed.

Speaker 2 (53:35):
I hope, I think so. Yeah. I mean, even though
this isn't about fish cuts or fish vomit, I still
think this.

Speaker 1 (53:39):
Is very cool in a way. It is about fish
cuts because it's about all of us.

Speaker 2 (53:44):
That's aw man. That was poetic, really poetics modern days.

Speaker 5 (53:50):
Saga over here, all right, all right, thanks everyone for
going on this journey with us into the dark heart
of matter and understanding what makes up our uni and
what we know about it.

Speaker 2 (54:01):
And if you have a question about the universe, you
can send it to us at Questions at Daniel and
Kelly dot org. We look forward to hearing from you.
Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by Iheartreading. We
would love to hear from you, We really would.

Speaker 1 (54:21):
We want to know what questions you have about this
Extraordinary Universe.

Speaker 2 (54:26):
We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions
for future shows. If you contact us, we will get
back to you.

Speaker 1 (54:32):
We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us
at Questions at Danielankelly.

Speaker 2 (54:38):
Dot org, or you can find us on social media.
We have accounts on x, Instagram, Blue Sky and on
all of those platforms. You can find us at d
and kuniverse.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
Don't be shy, write to us