August 17, 2021 • 48 mins
Daniel and Jorge reveal that the Large Hadron Collider has found much more than just the Higgs boson!
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Daniel, how much does it cost to discover a
new particle? Well, I'm sorry to say that, like everything else,
the prices seem to be going up and up. Oh,
you mean, like with inflation. I think there's more than
that going on. I mean, the electron was really cheap
to discover in the eighteen hundreds, but then the top
corps probably cost a billion dollars or so a billion
(00:28):
dollars to discover one particle. A billion dollars is cheap.
These days, the Higgs boson probably cost more than ten
billion dollars and billion. That's like super fancy caviar probably
tastes just as bad, Daniel. Cavire isn't about the flavor,
it's about the glamour. Well, that's also true about particle physics.
I mean, it's all ball gowns and tuxedos in the
(00:48):
control room at CERN. I see, that's why it costs
ten billion dollars. It's the dress code that's killing you.
At least you have a dress code. I thought physics
just war. You know, boxer shorts and T shirts. It's
a T shirt with a tuxedo printed on it. Hi
(01:17):
am or handmade cartoonists and the creator of PhD Comics. Hi,
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who's never discovered a
new particle. Oh yet, Well, technically, Dan, don't you discover
new particles all the time? Like you know this oxygen
molecule and breathing right now? Is it's technically new to me?
That's true. Each individual particle has its own wonderful spirit
(01:39):
and personality. But we're more interested in new types of particles,
new things that nobody in the world has ever seen before,
things that can blow our minds and teach us something
new about the universe. Well, welcome to this new type
of podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explained the Universe, a prolection
of I Heart Radio, in which we sort through all
the amazing and crazy stuff in this universe. The stuff
(01:59):
made of oxygen, the stuff made of carbon, the stuff
made of nitrogen, and the stuff made of things we
don't even yet understand. The rest of the universe, whatever
it's made out of, we tackle it. We asked the
big questions and we try to explain all of it
to you. Because there is a lot of stuff in
the universe, actually, maybe an infinite amount of stuff. Right
there might be an infinite number of particles, and there
(02:19):
might even be an infinite number of kinds of particles.
We have no idea. We're looking at an ice cube
and we don't know if it's the whole cube or
just the tip of the iceberg. That's right, everything is
made out of stuff, and we are made out of stuff,
and we are also constantly trying to discover what this
stuff is made out of and how it works and
how it's put together, and what are the rules that
tell the stuff what it can and cannot do. It
(02:41):
feels like if we could pull apart everything in the
universe into its tying these little bits and understand those rules,
we will have revealed something true, something fundamental, something deep
in the source code of the universe. And like looking
at those rules and understanding that basic set of particles
would finally tell us how the universe is really put together.
I guess it's pretty amazing that, you know, there's all
this stuff in the universe and us little humans on
(03:04):
this little rock floating in space and sort of figured
out that this stuff has kind of rules and types
of stuff to it, right, Like it's not just random
and there's only a certain number of kinds of stuff
that out there, and that kind of stuff has certain
rules about how it can put together and how it
interacts with itself. Yeah, And the incredible thing is that
there's a pretty small number of particles, like the particles
(03:26):
that make up me and you. It's just really three
of them, is the upcord, the down cord, and the electron.
But you can put those particles together in so many
different ways to get an incredible variety of things. So
as you look at into the universe and you see
all these weird things, you know, from bananas to comets
to planets to neutron stars, you know that all those
things are made of the same basic particles, just put
(03:48):
together in different ways. And it's sort of incredible, like philosophically,
that the universe even works that way, that you could
take all this incredible complexity and boil it down to
relative simplicity of the at the lowest level. Even caviar
Daniel's caviar made out of regular particles or really expensive particles.
It tastes like it's made out of some other weird,
(04:08):
kind of gross particles. I take it you're not a
fan of the caviar. Not a fan of tiny little
salty fish eggs exploding in my mouth. You don't even
really understand how that's the thing. Maybe you haven't bought
the expensive kind, You've only had the cheap kind. You've
only had the electrons of I should just keep spending
more money on caviar until I like it. Yeah, that's
a good idea. It's all about the cracker. Like, if
you have the right cracker, you can put anything on it, caviar,
(04:31):
higgs bosons. It doesn't matter if you have the right cracker.
It's all good. Higgs boson exploded in your mouth. That
would be kind of troublesome, wouldn't it. I don't know.
It might be salty, might be delicious. It would already
cost a lot of money, that's right, At ten billion
dollars per particle. I don't think I could even taste it.
But yeah, we are all made out of stuff, and
that stuff in one sense, it feels like it's made
out of a small number of kinds of stuff, you know,
(04:53):
like you said, quarks and electrons. But at the same time,
it seems like the universe is full of all kinds
of particles and possibly, as you said, maybe an infinite
number of different kinds of particles. Yeah, we sort of
took a left turn there at some point in history.
Like for a long time we were taking this stuff
around us, and we were figuring out that it was
made of a simpler set of stuff, you know, like
all the crazy stuff in the universe is made out
(05:15):
of elements, and then oh, it turns out those elements
are just made out of protons and neutrons and electrons,
and oh wow, look the protons and neutrons are made
out of quarks. We were getting simpler and simpler and simpler.
But then at some point we discovered a bunch of
other weird stuff, other weird particles that you don't need
to make up ordinary matter, things we've talked about in
the podcast, like muans and tows and other kinds of quarks.
(05:37):
And it's sort of puzzling, like why those particles exist.
You don't need them to make bananas, so why do
they exist in the universe. But if we systematically discover
all of them, we might get some sort of like
glimpse at the larger pattern and figure out what is
really going on in the universe. Yeah, it's kind of humbling,
I guess to think that, you know, we are basically
masters of our We think we're masters of our universe.
(05:58):
But really we're just made out of a small corner
of the particle, you know, table and even matter and
even stuff is just a small part of the the
whole universe, right, Most of the universe is energy. Yeah,
that's true. A huge fraction of the universe is just energy,
and we are made out of sort of the lightest stuff.
Like all these other heavy particles, they don't last for
(06:19):
very long, and they fall apart really quickly, and they
decay into lighter and lighter particles. So the reason the
electron lives forever while the muon doesn't is that the
electron is the lightest thing. It can't turn into anything lighter,
whereas the muan can decay into the electron. So everything
is made out of these lightest particles. It's sort of
like if everything was just made out of hydrogen or
hydrogen and helium. Instead, we're made out of a much
(06:41):
more complex set of stuff. And so in the same
way for particles, we want to understand, like what are
those other heavier particles and what can they do? It
would be cool if we were made out of helium
and we all float around, right technically, or I guess
if everything else was made out of hydrogen, which just
fall to the bottom. I'm actually on the all helium
diet right now. I'm trying to lose uh. It works. Actually,
(07:01):
I just keep inflating this balloon and I keep losing weight.
It's amazing you're in the helio diet exactly. If I
got a big enough balloon, I'll be literally waitless, but
your voice will be really high pitched, and this podcast
would be a totally different experience, right. That's right, Eleven
and the Chipmunks present the Universe, Daniel and the Chipmunks.
(07:23):
But you know, we are sort of asking this question
all the time of what kinds of particles are out there,
and what kinds of particles can exist and do exist,
and what are they for? And so scientists are hard
at work at it. And one of the biggest places
to do that, to search for new particles, is a
place that you were work at, right, Daniel. That's right
at the Large Hadron Collider, which is not just one
(07:44):
of the biggest places to do particle physics, it's like
one of the biggest science experiments ever in terms of
money spent, and like actual physical size is an incredible accomplishment.
It's sort of like the Golden gate Bridge of particle physics.
You know. I stand at the Golden gate Bridge sometimes
and I'm like, wow, look what humanity can accomplish when
we all work together. And the Large Hadron Collider is
(08:04):
similar to that. It's an incredible feed not just of physics,
but also of engineering and organization and also politics that
all these different countries from all over the world came
together to build this incredible device that's helping us peer
into the very very core of matter. Yeah, it's a
big science experiment, although I thought the biggest science experiment
was caviar Daniel like, how much can you get people
(08:25):
to pay for something that's salty and crunchy? Are you're
thinking of the Large Caviart Collider, I think, which is
still being constructed somewhere in Russia. Yeah, the Large the
other LC. Yeah, they collide money and Higgs to get
new kinds of profits. But yeah, the LC is the
biggest science experiment ever and also one of the most expensive.
(08:46):
You said earlier that it caused about ten billion dollars
just to find the Higgs boson. But the LC is
a larger project than that, right, Like, it's looking for
other things, and it costs a lot more than ten
billion dollars. Ten billion dollars is about the cost of
the project. It depends on little bit exactly how you
do the accounting. But you know, it costs like a
billion dollars to build the tunnel, and a couple of
billion dollars to make those magnets, and then billions more
(09:08):
to build the detectors and actual bean pipe and all
that stuff. So altogether the whole project is a little
bit more than ten billion dollars. And you're right. While
many people think about the Higgs boson when they think
about the large age On collider, it's actually a much
broader science experiment. We were hoping when we turn this
thing on, not just to find the Higgs boson, though
we're happy to have done so, but to also find
(09:28):
all sorts of other crazy stuff that might have been
out there. Because remember, these experiments are like exploration. We
don't know what we're going to find until we turn
the machine on. That's why we build it, and so
it's always a bit of a gamble. Yeah. Well, although
I think the Higgs Boson sort of put it on
the map, right, Like, I feel like probably very few
people had heard of the L A C before the
(09:48):
big discovery of the Higgs Boson about ten years ago,
that's right, that's when it made it onto the a
list of particle physics experiments. Before that, it wasn't even
getting invited to those caveat parties. Is there an a
list went up through about the Well, you know, there
are bragging rights for who has the most powerful collider
in the world, And for a long time the Americans
dominated it, and then the Europeans took over in the nineties,
(10:11):
and then the Americans stole the lead back in the
early two thousands, and now the Europeans have had it
for a while. And you know, it's not just enough
to have the most powerful collider in the world. You
have to find something new. You have to make a
big discovery that leads to a Nobel Prize. And so
you're right that seeing the Higgs Boson really put the
L A C on the map. That's what I mean,
Daniel to de list, I meant, like the discovery list.
(10:31):
It's a good thing. Yeah, But anyways, I guess a
big question is besides the l A C, what else
has the Large Hadron Collider discovered? Like, I know, you
set out to find lots of different particles and the
big one was the Higgs boson. But I bet people
don't know that the l AC is looking and has
discovered a lot more particles than that. Yeah, we can
do lots of really interesting physics with the l A T.
(10:54):
It's not just for the Higgs boson. So to be
on the podcast, we'll be asking the question how many
particles has a large Hadron Collider discovered? I think probably
a lot of a lot of people maybe get confused.
They probably associate the age in the l C with
the Higgs boson. What do you think? Commercial? There you go,
(11:18):
the long Higgs Boson commercial. Man, I can't skip this ad.
What's going on? Click? Click click, click click The lofty
higgs Boson commercial? Good because you know, if I was
the Higgs boson and I wanted to make a splash,
the LC has been a big part of that, right, Yeah,
that's true. The LC has been a good part of
the Higgs boson marketing campaign. Who was hiding for fifty
years while people were trying to look forward? But finally
(11:39):
allowed itself to be discovered in t So, as usual'll
be wondering how many people out there and have thought
about what other particles that l a C has discovered.
So Daniel went out there into the wilds of the
internet to ask how many particles has the l a
C discovered? And if you are a denizen of the
wilds of the Internet, and you wouldn't mind me knocking
on your virtual door to ask you for six questions
(12:00):
that you haven't prepared for, please write to us two
questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. We want to
hear from you, and we think you'll have fun. Do
you always start the day not not joke, the physics
not not joke. I didn't, but now I will. We'll
have the brainstorm, all right. Well, here's what people had
to say. I know of only one particle that the
LHC has discovered, which is the Higgs boat on, but
(12:21):
I cannot imagine that's the only one it has discovered. Ever,
would be quite an expensive machine who would only have
discovered this one particle? But maybe that's actually the case.
So my answer to is only one. I don't know
the number, but for sure it needs to be more,
(12:43):
and I like to be more. I think it's time
to build a new, bigger particle collider, hopefully here in US.
LHC must be the large Hadron collider. Hadron is a
particle and you're colliding them together, so maybe you're smashing
(13:03):
it up into smaller particles. I have no idea. Maybe three,
maybe seven. I think the LHC has discovered only one particle.
That would be the Higgs boson. I hope I'm not
terribly off. I'm going to guess that the l a
C has maybe discovered seven new particles. I know the
most or the most recent particles that I know of
(13:25):
that was discovered at the allergacy is the Higgs in
I think, so I would say the number of new
particles the allgacy has discovered is one. All right, there's
a broad range here. Some people say one that you've
only had a one hit wonder the l a C.
And some people have a certain number, like maybe seven
(13:47):
or a few. A couple of people said seven. I
wonder where that number came from. I don't know, but
I think if you just ask people to pick a
number between one and ten, something like fifty of them
say seven, So I think it's de bias there. Yeah. Wow,
like we have an internal die, you know. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
we are bad random number generators. But there's some fun
answers here. Some people give the large hage On collider
(14:07):
credit for discovering the top cork that was actually discovered
by the fermulab Tevatron, the previous record holder for the
highest energy collider right the other d listen, yeah exactly,
and I do like the person who supports building a new,
bigger collider here in the United States, thank you very much,
right to your congress person, or hey, cut us a
check for twenty billion dollars. Technically it could happen, right,
(14:30):
Like if someone like Basis suddenly, instead of going to space,
wanted to discover a new particle, they could totally make
that happen. Wow, that's true. I never even thought about
emailing Jeff Bezos and asking him to spend twenty billion
dollars on a particle collider. But I'm doing that just
as soon as we're finished here. Yeah, he probably just
has to reach into his pocket and pull out some chain.
But you're right. The larger point is that the only
(14:50):
thing preventing us from building a bigger collider and discovering
more particles is money, Like we know how to do it.
It's just kind of expensive because you have to dig
these big tunnels and pay for really fancy magnets to
bend the particles around in a circle. But the only
limitation is money, which is understandable. These things are expensive.
Sometimes it's frustrating though, because it feels like we could
(15:11):
just be buying knowledge about the universe, like we just
lay out some cash, boom, the universe will reveal some
secrets to us. I think the question is why does
the universe charge so much? Like why can't the universe
just give us these things for free? Like is it
trying to sell caviare you know? Like it's I feel
like it's maybe overpricing it a little. Do we have
it like another universe We can maybe get a competitive
(15:31):
bid off. Yeah, we should negotiate with the universe. I
don't know. I think we treat these things with value
because we pay more for them, right, Like if you
buy expensive shoes, then you're gonna think they're better shoes.
And so we think the Higgs boson is super important
because we spent so much on it. You just admitted
that you're using the caviare strategy here to overvalue physics knowledge.
(15:53):
But you know, we've also talked in the podcast about
physics discoveries made with very cheap materials, like the whole
two dimensionals here. That's something somebody discovered using literally scotch
tape and a pencil. So you can totally discover things
using you know, five dollars worth of materials, but some
things do cost billions keeping price gouging humanity. That's right.
(16:13):
We only spend ten bucks on the collider. The rest
we're spending on caviare and ball gowns and T shirts
with taxed those printing on them. But I guess you
know it does cost a lot of money. I know
it's expensive and maybe so maybe step us through this,
like what's going on at the l h C. How
does it work and why does it require so much
infrastructure to make discoveries? Yea, So the basic idea of
the large hay Drunk collider, like the reason to the
(16:35):
Large hay Drunk Collider, is a window into the universe.
The whole strategy for using it to discover new particles
is to rely on Einstein's famous equation E equals mc squared,
where E is energy and M is mass. And the
goal is that we are looking for particles with a
lot of mass. The particles that we see around us
electrons and quarks. These are the lowest mass particles. As
(16:58):
we talked about before, they're the stable ones. It's like
the bottom rung of the ladder. Everything sort of like
shakes down to the bottom rung of the ladder, the
way like boulders tend to roll downhill and settle in
the bottom of a valley. But we're interested in what
the other rungs of the ladder are. Are there heavier
particles out there? What are the heaviest particles? And we
are limited in seeing those by the energy we can
use to create them. So E equals mc square. It
(17:21):
means if you want to create a particle with mass m,
you need to put in as much energy as mc
square to create it. So what we do with a
large hadron collider is smash particles together, very low mass
particles like protons, with a huge amount of energy, so
we can turn that energy into the mass of some
new kind of particle. Right. I guess what's interesting is
that you're trying to make these particles. Like you're trying
(17:44):
to discover particles that are out there, and you're doing
that by trying to make them Like you're not sort
of like breaking things apart and seeing what's there. You're
really trying to sort of create conditions where they pop
out of the vacuum, out of the nothingness. Yeah, it's alchemy.
We are turning one kind of matter, are like normal
everyday protons, into something new. It's not like we're taking
the protons apart and looking for weird things in them.
(18:07):
Sometimes these weird particles are called sub atomic, which is
a little confusing because it implies that they're like inside
the atom, but they're not. You can smash two protons
together and make something totally new, which is not like
a combination of the bits of the proton. And the
reason you can do that is that you turn the
protons into pure energy and then back from energy into
(18:28):
a new kind of mass. So, as you say, we're
making something new, so we're discovering it, not in the
sense that like it's sitting there waiting for us to
find it. It's sitting there on the list of possibilities,
waiting for us to bring the ingredients, which is energy
around so that nature can make it for us. Right,
It's like you're discovering it in the sense of like
going to a new restaurant, taking the menu, and then
(18:50):
like discovering new dishes that could be made for you.
That's right. We're like, oh, if we have enough money
in our wallet, then we can afford this really expensive
cavi are right, And so we are pouring energy into
the climer because it allows us to look deeper, deeper
onto nature's menu, so we can see what particles can
be made. The amazing thing about the particle collider is
that it's quantum mechanical, which means that when you smash
(19:13):
these particles together, you don't know what's going to happen.
You can predict the kinds of things that might happen,
but for a given collision, you have no idea what
might happen. Is like a list of possibilities. The cool thing, though,
is that if you do it often enough, eventually you'll
see everything on that list of possibilities. So you like
exploring this menu of possibilities what nature might do just
by doing the same collision over and over and over again. Right,
(19:36):
I do that Sometimes I just go to restaurant and
I order randomly from the menu, over and over and
over and over, and eventually you try everything on the
menu and also gain a lot of it. That's exactly
what we're doing here. We're just going to the restaurant
with our eyes closed, putting our fingers on the menu.
And that's our strategy for ordering everything. You're going to
the cosmic diner and taking that greasy menu and and
(19:57):
just putting your finger anywhere on it. If we knew
what was on the list already, we could look for
it more intelligently. You know, we could design experiments that
put in exactly the right amount of energy to make
that particle we know is already there. We can do
that kind of thing. But if when you don't know
what is there, then you have to just sort of
poke around blindly, hoping something new appears when you put
your finger on it, hoping you get a good dish.
(20:19):
All right, well, let's get into how you actually see
these particles at the large hydron collider, and let's get
into what other particles they have found. But first let's
take a quick break. All right, we're talking about what
(20:43):
else has a large hydron collider the l a C
discovered and Daniel, technically this is not a sponsored podcast episode, right,
We're not being paid by the LHC. Here. I'm not
a shill for big science. I mean I am, but
I'm not getting paid to do it. Well, technically, you're
paying the l a C to do your work like that.
That's how it works, the collaboration and scientists have to
like pay into it to use the facility and to
(21:05):
get access to the data. Yeah, I mean, I'm not
paying personally out of like my kids, Picky Bank. We're
using government research funds. And so it's the US government,
just like it's the German government and the Italian government
and the British government. All these governments are paying to
support this international facility for scientists to use. And so
in the end it's all of us, right, it's all
taxpayer money. Though. It's me and you and everybody down
(21:28):
the street chipping in a few cents so that we
can learn something new about the universe. Right. Well, and
then technically Basis is chipping more than we are, so
I think he pays zero taxes. Actually, so we're paying
more than he is. I think he pays from when
he buys that yacht, I think he's paying more taxes
than I ever will in my life. But we're talking
about how the LC works, and so you slash all
(21:50):
known particles like protons together, and out of that ball
of energy that gets made in that collision, new things
come out. And you're doing that over and over and over,
trying to find what else the universe can make and
what else will pop out. That's right. We sift through
all these collisions looking for something new, something that's not
what we've seen before. We're very familiar with the old particles.
(22:10):
We've been doing this for decades, and so what we're
looking for is an anomaly, something surprising, something different, a
new kind of thing that hasn't been seen before. Right,
would you be surprised if like a cow like appeared
out of your collider. We often use the example of
pink elephants, you know, like when we turn on the
collider and we don't know what could come out. It
could be pink elephants, it could be the Higgs boson,
it could be nothing. You really don't know, Oh, I said,
(22:32):
you've thought about this, you know, large mammal appearance just
in case and of course, you know, you have to
balance the charge, and so you would have a pink
elephant and an anti pink elephant created together like a
great elephant. What would be the opposite of a pink elephant,
a great mammoth maybe I don't know, maybe a blue
ant a blue and you and we'll have to develop
a mammoth collider to investigate that one. But then need
(22:54):
they touch each other? It's bad news, it's bad news. Yeah.
So then you collect these and every once in a
while new particles come out, but they don't last very long, right,
Like you're looking for things that don't just pop out
and sit there on your counter. They disappear or changing
to other things quickly. That's right. We are creating high
energy density. We're pushing things up the ladder and they
exist very briefly and then they fall apart back into
(23:16):
low mass stable particles, the kinds of things that you
and I are made out of. And you know, this
is just what the universe does. You gather a bunch
of energy together, it likes to spread it out. So
we create these new heavy particles like a top cork
or a Higgs boson. They last in that state. We
know they exist, but they're only there for like ten
to the minus twenty seconds. It's like the briefest moment
(23:36):
in the sun before they decay back into lighter stuff, right,
Because often you don't even detect the particles you're looking for,
like the Higgs boson, And it's not like you had
a detector that detected the Higgs boson. It's like you
detect the things that the Higgs boson the case into
and then you piece it back like, oh, this must
have been the Higgs boson that existed there in the
middle for ten to the minus twenty seconds. That's right. Technically,
(23:58):
we've never seen a Higgs boson. I mean they last
so briefly. We have no detector capable of seeing it directly.
All we can do is see what it turns into.
As you say, it's like coming to a street corner
and seeing the remnants of a car accident and figuring
out what must have happened, but not actually seeing the
collision itself. And so in the case of the Higgs boson,
for example, the Higgs likes to turn into a pair
(24:19):
of photons or a pair of bottom corks, and those
photons and bottom corks have particular configurations and energy to
tell us that they must have come from a Higgs boson.
So we can never actually be sure for any given
collision what it came from, but we can make statistical
arguments and say, oh, this one is more likely to
be from a Higgs than from something else. That would
also give you the same sort of signature in our detectors.
(24:41):
And so that's what you do. You're colliding protons hoping
to get new particles. And so the question we started
off was was what has the NHD discovered in those collisions.
Now we know the big one was the Higgs boson,
which was discovered almost ten years ago, So tell us
about that discovery and like sort of the specifics of
how it was found. Yeah, so they Higgs boson is
something we suspected was there. We looked at the patterns
(25:03):
of all the particles and we said, this just doesn't
make sense. And a guy named Peter Higgs realized that
it would make much more sense, like it mathematically just
clicked together beautifully if there was another particle. It's like
if you have a jigsaw puzzle and there's a piece missing,
you look at it, you can see the shape you're like,
there must be one, and so you hunt around under
the table looking for that particular piece. It's much easier
(25:24):
to find a piece if you know what you're looking
for and you suspect it exists. So we already had
the idea that the Higgs boson might exist and how
it would be created and what it would look like
in our detector. And we have a whole fun podcast
episode about the journey to find the Higgs, so long saga,
lots of drama, lots of politics. But we ended up
finding at the large Hdon collider in exactly that way
that we talked about. It turns into two photons. So
(25:47):
the Higgs boson is this little particle and it decays
in this complicated way that ends up giving two photons,
one in one direction and one in the other direction.
And we surround these collisions with all sorts of layers
of detector. Is that tell us what came out of
those collisions. So we saw a lot of these events
with two photons, one photon one way and the other
photon going in the other direction. When you add up
(26:09):
their energy, the energy of those two photons, it comes
up to a certain number, and that's the mass of
the Higgs boson, and so we saw a lot of
these particular kinds of collisions that led to this pattern
of photons that all added up to the same number
for the mass of the Higgs, and we thought that
must be it. Right, It's like you saw the footprint
of the Higgs boson in these two photons, right, yeah, exactly.
(26:31):
We can't see the Higgs itself. Because I think that's
one thing that's interesting about this is that you kind
of have to have an idea of what you're looking for, right.
You can't just like turn this on and then see
what happens because there's so much stuff coming out and
it's all probabilistic, So you kind of need to know
what you're looking for, or you need to know about
what size of a footprint you're looking for, or what
would the footprint look like, sort of in other to
(26:51):
actually discover these footprints, you just put your finger on.
A really interesting and sort of hot headed debate in
the field right now, Like a lot of people think
that you're right that you need to know what you're
looking for because these signals are subtle and you can't
see things directly, so you need to know like well
how to look for things in order to anticipate them
and discover them. And that's probably true for really subtle
signals like the Higgs boson. If we didn't know to
(27:13):
look for the Higgs boson, we might not have seen it,
because in the end, the signal is kind of subtle.
It's like this little bump. There's lots of other ways
to make the same signature that we see for the Higgs.
But other people i e. Me and some folks that
work with I think it might be possible to discover
something we don't anticipate. That not knowing what's out there
doesn't mean that we can't see it. We need to
be sort of more clever about how to look for
(27:34):
things to be ready for surprises. But we think that
using some new techniques from like machine learning and anomaly detection,
it might be possible to figure out if there's something
new in our data, even if we don't know exactly
what to look for. But you're right, it's more difficult
and it would need to be a more obvious signal.
But I guess what I mean is you sort of
need to know even for something where you're detecting anomalies.
You sort of need to know what's normal so that
(27:56):
you can tell what's an anomaly. Right, You need to
have sort of an idea of what you might discover,
or at least sort of like a good picture, and
then you can tell if something is off of that
or different than that. Yes, it's all about understanding what
the current theory predicts so we can find deviations from it.
And that's what was exciting, for example, about those muon
G minus two experiments that were recently done at fer
(28:16):
Me Lab, is that they had a really detailed prediction
for what they expected to see when the muon wobbled
around in a circle, and then they saw something different.
They don't know what it is, and they don't need
to know what it is, but they know they see
something different, which requires some new kind of particle. So
that's an example of how you might see that there
is something out there new to discover without knowing exactly
what it is, seeing a deviation from what you expect.
(28:39):
And so that was the Higgs boson. That was a
huge deal a while ago, and because it is such
a fundamental particle in our model of particle physics, right,
like it's the particle that sort of explains the masses
of the other particles, and it's sort of in a way,
sort of holds the universe together. Yeah. Absolutely, And it's
even more deeply important than that. It completes this longer
project of bringing together electricity and magnetism and the weak force.
(29:04):
You know, James Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism more than
a hundred years ago, and then in the sixties somebody
else brought together the weak force into a single force,
the electroweak force, and it's all beautiful and mathematical, but
didn't really work because it was missing a piece, and
Higgs Boson was that piece. So finding that tells us
not just how particles get their mass, but also that
(29:25):
the weak force and electromagnetism are just two sides of
the same coin. It's really an incredible triumph. That's like
over a hundred years of theoretical progress. Yeah, that's pretty cool.
That's what I tell the Higgs all the time, is
I tell you complete me. So that's what maybe the
last fundamental particle that humans have discovered, right, I don't
think we've found other fundamental particles there or at at
(29:47):
the head large tender and collider or anywhere, right, and
we have been looking. We have been looking, and we
had high hopes, but you're right, we haven't found anything else.
You know, when we turned on the Large Hadron Collider,
we were able to explore new energy ranges. Like the
previous collider went up to two trillion electron volts that's
like two thousand times the energy inside the mass of
(30:09):
a proton, and the Large Hadron Collider goes up to
fourteen terra electron volts, so like it's seven times as
much energy as the old collider, and that means it's
like seven times the territories, seven times the new menus.
You know, you're going in and out and you get
like the secret, secret, secret, secret menus. That's really exciting
(30:30):
from like an explorational point of view. It's like simultaneously
landing on seven new Earth like planets and seeing if
there's life on. There's a huge territory that's that nobody
had explored before, so the possibilities were huge. We could
have seen nothing, right, you could be there's just nothing
there because the only the Higgs boson, or we could
have seen like a crazy number of particles flying out
(30:51):
of the machine. Probably not pink elephants, but the possibility
was that we could have seen dozens of new particles
that it tells all sorts of crazy stories about the universe. Unfore,
originally we didn't. All we saw in terms of fundamental
particles was the Higgs boson. It's almost like you've got
a bigger table in a way, not just access to
the bigger many, but it's like you've got a bigger
table and you told the universe all right, you know,
(31:11):
surprise me, and it just kind of brought more of
the same thing. That's right. We went to the all
you can eat buffet and it just kept serving as
mac and cheese. You didn't get a Higgs animal style.
You know, maybe we made a mistake, we filled up
on bread or something. I don't know what the problem was.
But we were hoping to find gravitons. There's no like secret,
secret crap buffet table in the back or anything. If
(31:32):
it is, it's still a secret because we haven't found it.
We had lots of ideas also of what we might
have seen. You know, we might have seen gravitons. We
don't understand how gravity works is a quantum theory, and
some people think that every time you feel gravity, it's
because you're passing little quantum particles back and forth called gravitons.
And if that is true, there was a chance we
could have seen those the l h C and we
(31:53):
looked for them but didn't see them. And there are
lots of other really fun theories supersymmetry and heavier corks
and all sorts of weird you leftons. There's no shortage
of ideas coming from the theoretical community about what we
might have seen. But of course we didn't see any
of those either. Right, You had sort of ideas about
how the universe might work, you know, given all the theory,
and so you needed some experimental confirmation to make those
(32:15):
theories kind of solid, right, like to show that supersymmetry
was right or plantum gravitational physics was right. You needed
to find sort of weird new particles in that space
that we're looking for, but you didn't. Yeah, but we didn't.
It's just like with the Higgs boson. These things come
from theoretical motivation, people looking at the theory and saying,
you know, this would make more sense if we changed
(32:35):
it in this way, if we added this piece and
then experimentalists go out and look for and say, well,
is it there, is your idea corresponding to the real
structures of the universe, or is it just sort of
like a nice, pretty bit of math in your head.
Because there's an important difference, right, We're not just interested
in exploring the insides of our head. We want to
know what the structures of the actual universe are, and
so to do that we need to do these experiments.
(32:57):
But our job is not just to like go off
and check the box because some theoretical ideas. I think
we're also capable of discovering unanticipated stuff, of finding weird
new stuff out there that no theorist has predicted, that
nobody anticipated. That blows up all of our ideas about
the universe. That hasn't happened either, But I hold out hope. Yeah.
You always talk about the scenario where you do an
(33:17):
experiment and you look at the data and then you
see something and you're like, what are that? Like? Which
many did that one come from? Yes, and that's happened
in history, right, Like who ordered that is a literal thing.
Somebody said when they saw that the muan had been discovered,
because nobody expected the muan to be there. It's not
something we thought might be on the menu. It's just
something that God delivered and we're like, huh, I didn't
order this, it's just sitting here in front of me.
(33:39):
And so I fantasized about that, you know, sort of
a scientific way, Like you know, my dream scenario is
finding something weird that everybody scratches their head over. Because
you and I talked about on the podcast all the time,
how we know there are basic things about the universe
we don't understand, and what we need is a clue,
something that points us in the right direction to think
about new ideas. And so a totally weird, new anticipated
(34:00):
discovery would be a great clue in that direction. Cool, Well,
we are standing by for you to discover new fundamental
particles or to confirm fundamental new theories. But in the meantime,
the LC has been busy that it has made a
lot of discoveries, and maybe it's found more particles than
most people think. So let's get into that. But first
let's take another quick break. All right, we're talking about
(34:33):
the L A C And ordering things off of the
universe menu at the what the Cosmic Diner I think
that is an actual diner, probably somewhere in America. They
probably don't serve caviar, though they still higgs Boson animal style.
So we made the big higgs Boson discovery, and we
don't have any sort of thing that fundamental yet since then,
But the LC has been busy discovering more particles, right, actually,
(34:56):
a surprisingly large number of new particles. That's right. The
higgs Boson is like the glamour front person of the
particle discoveries. But we've been hard at work and we
found all sorts of crazy stuff out there that you
probably haven't even heard of unless you listen to this podcast, right,
that's right. We have talked about a couple of these
discoveries on the podcast, and so those of you out
(35:18):
there who follow it might not be surprised. But honestly,
I was even surprised when I counted up all the discoveries.
The numbers sort of shocked me. How many particles has
the l AC discovered? Fifty nine more particles than just
the higgs Boson. WHOA fifty nine. It's a lot of particles.
There are that many particles. There are that many particles
exactly because there's other ways to discover particles than finding
(35:41):
new fundamental particles, We can find new ways to put
the old particles together. Oh I see. These are not
like fundamental like building blocks of the universe we think,
but just sort of like when you arrange particles in
a different way, they sort of become new particles, right,
They act like a new kind of particle, exactly, Like
the proton is not a fundamental particle, right, it's made
(36:01):
out of quarks. You put two up corks and a
down cork together and you get a proton. And that's
really interesting. It's amazing, and the fact that it even
works is something we don't fully understand because it involves
is very complex and very powerful force called the strong
nuclear force. You know, quarks have these weird things called colors,
and they exchange gluons back and forth. It's a crazy system.
(36:22):
And so one thing we can do with the large
hadron colliders figure out, like, are there other ways to
combine quirks to make new kinds of particles? Can we
shake corks together and build out new things like new
kinds of protons? Maybe? Right? Basically, what you're making like
new kinds of protons because when the collisions happen. Remember
we're colliding protons and protons at the Large Hadron Collider.
(36:43):
But again, protons are not fundamental particles. So what actually
happens when these protons come near each other is not
that like one proton smashes into another one and they
totally annihilate. When you're at that energy, the fact that
these corks are bound together into a proton, it's sort
of irrelevant because the corks have so much more energy
individually than the bonds between them, So it's sort of
(37:04):
like what you're doing is shooting together like a triple
beam of quarks in one direction and the triple beam
of quirks in the other direction. So then what happens
when they collide is that the corks themselves are interacting.
Now you have six corks, and you can mix the match,
and you can make all sorts of weird, crazy stuff,
And because there's so much energy there, you can even
pop new corks out of the vacuum and make all
sorts of new weird combinations. I think it's these combinations
(37:27):
that really tell you or let you explore or know
more about the basic particles, right and how they're put together,
Because They all sort of depend on the rules of
quarks and gluons exactly, and we are trying to understand
those rules. We want to know how quirks push against
each other, how gluons pull on each other, and it's
something that's very difficult to grapple with. This whole field
(37:48):
of the strong and nuclear force is very difficult because
the force is so strong, and so it's very hard
to do calculations because things get out of hand very quickly.
One reason is that the strong force is we eard
in a really super interesting way. If you take two
corks and you start to pull them apart, you might
expect that the strong force would get weaker as they
(38:08):
get further apart from each other. That's the case with gravity,
right like as you get further from the Earth, your
gravity gets weaker. That's the case with electricity. Like take
two electrons. They will repel each other, but as you
move them further apart, they start to repel each other
less and less. The opposite is true with corks. As
you move them further apart, the force between them get
stronger and stronger. And that's what makes it really hard
(38:30):
to do these calculations because you can almost never like
neglect another particle. In the case of gravity and electromagnetism,
you can make lots of simplifying assumptions because as things
get far away, you can basically ignore them. You can
never do that with the strong force. As things get
further away, they become more important. And so these calculations
are a big mess. They're really really hard to do. So,
(38:50):
as you say, by understanding how these particles are fitting together,
we're trying to understand what the rules are of how
they fit together, not something we still understand, right. I
think maybe something that people haven't thought about is that
quarks can combine in ways that are other than the proton, Right,
isn't that a little weird to think about that? You know,
like course could make protons that which make up you
and me and part of what makes you and me,
(39:12):
but it can also kind of fit together in different ways.
It is cool, but it's sort of the beauty of
the universe. And we see that same sort of thing
happening in other places, like the fact that you can
take protons and neutrons and electrons and you can fit
them to together to make helium or calcium or neon
or uranium. Those elements are all so totally different, but
(39:33):
they're made of the same building blocks. So there's something
really deep about the fact that the same building blocks
can be arranged to make completely different things with totally
different properties. And so the same is true at this
deeper level that you can take quarks, you can put
them together and make a proton or a neutron, or
you can do all sorts of other things, like you
combine just two corks together. That's like a pion is
(39:54):
made out of just two corks, or a row mason
is made out of just two quirks. So these things
are really like let those and you can combine them
to make all sorts of stuff. The thing is that
we don't understand exactly how those rules work, So it's
very hard to predict which combination of quirks fit together
to make a nice particle, and which combination of quirks
aren't stable will just like fly apart instantaneously. Really you
can't predict that. You have to kind of look for
(40:16):
them in a way, right, because you found at least
fifty nine different ways in which quarts can be put together,
that's right, fifty nine new ways. I mean we have
lots and lots of ways for quirks to fit together.
There was this period in the early sixties called the
particle Zoo, and people were building bigger and bigger colliders
and finding new particles all the time. You know, the
pion k on all these particles. These are the particles
(40:37):
that give us the clue about quirks. In the first place,
we discovered all these crazy particles, we didn't understand them,
and then people understood, oh, all these weird new particles
are built out of the same building blocks. They're all
just built out of these little lego pieces called quarks.
As as you say, we still don't really quite understand
how to predict what else the quarks can do. So
it's very interesting to find those, to go out and
(40:58):
actually look for them and see, look, this weird combination works.
That weird combination works. So that's been a big industry
at the large dron collider is making new combination of
quirks to help reveal how these particles do fit together,
what the rules are. And I guess maybe what's also
interesting is that these new kinds of arrangements of quirks,
they're not common, right, like most of the corks together
(41:21):
that we see our protons and neutrons. But these new
kinds of other protons and arrangements, they're not common and
they don't last very long. Right, Yeah, just like the
Higgs boson and the top corks. These things are not stable.
They don't last for very long. They're a little bit
more stable and depends exactly than the details. Some of
them might even last, you know, like a million or
a billion of a second. But you're right, you don't
(41:42):
find them in nature. You can't like go drill into
the earth to find these things. You have to create
them in high energy density environments. You have to pour
energy into one spot, so the quirks have enough energy
to make these weird massive combinations. And so each of
these sell you a little bit more about how corks
and gluons can come together, which kind of tells you
more about the rules of the universe. All right, So
(42:02):
then maybe tell us also besides these composite particles, what
else has the LC been discovering. Yes, so we haven't
found more particles, but what we have done are more
detailed studies of the particles that we do know. For example,
we're really interesting questions like exactly how much does the
top cork way, Like, the top cork is a weird cork,
(42:24):
it's just like the up cork, except it's much much
much more massive. It's super duper massive, and we'd like
to understand exactly how massive is it. It's exact mass
controls a lot about how things work in particle physics.
So one thing we're doing is measuring that very very
precisely to see if the mass that it has makes
sense with some of our other calculations. So that's an
(42:46):
example of the kind of thing we do. It's like
a precision study of the particles we do know, so
that we can anticipate anything weird. We can look for
deviations and anomalies like we were talking about earlier, right,
because we have this model of the universe, the standard
model of stuff and matter, but you know, we think
it's the kind of the right one, but there might
be others, or we we just want to make double
extra sure that it's the right model of the universe. Yeah,
(43:08):
I would actually say we're sure it's not the right
model of the universe. I mean, it works pretty well,
it's kind of pretty, but we know it's not correct.
Like there are things about it which just can't be right,
and we're looking for are the cracks in it? We're
looking for hints as to that deeper, more fundamental, more
true model. And so one way to do that is
to say, well, I think there's a new particle out there,
(43:29):
let's go look and find it. Another way to do
that is to just test the wazoo out of it
and say, like, well, let's really see if it's correct.
Let's see if we can find some deviations. So we
have done stuff like that, and you know, at the
Large Hadron Collider we talked about in the podcast, once
they found this weird particle that uses Penguin diagrams and
decays really strangely. Sometimes the decays to muan is more
(43:50):
often than it decays to electrons, which is not what
we expected. And that's a sign that maybe there's some
new heavy particle very briefly appearing and messing things up.
So that's the kind of thing we can do. Instead
of looking directly for new heavy particles created at the collider,
we're looking for like their subtle influence on the particles
that we do know. We're looking at those cracks. You
might sort of look into those cracks and find new
particles there, right exactly. And that's the kind of thing
(44:13):
that I'm excited about. As you said very intelligently earlier,
if you want to find something new that you don't expect,
you need to understand what you do expect very very well.
And so that's basically what we're doing is fleshing out
exactly what we expect and double checking that we're seeing
what we expect. I'm always hoping that we don't see
what we expect, that we see something weird and new
in the data that we can't explain with our current theory,
(44:33):
but so far not yet, not yet, but maybe in
the future. So maybe tell us now, what can we
expect in the future from the l a C. And
I think part of it is that maybe you're changing
the name due to an upgrade, right, Yeah, Well, we
are going to be running the l C for like
another ten years. You know, you pour billions of dollars
into this machine. You want to get everything you can
out of it. So we'll be running the Large hGe
(44:54):
On Collider for at least another ten years, and we'll
be looking for these really subtle hints like the longer
you run your collision, and the more you can see
really really rare things, or the more you can see
very small deviations from what you expected, those alleviations might
be nice clues that point us in the right direction.
So we're gonna be doing this for another ten years
or so really checking out all the details. Likely will
(45:15):
also discover a bunch more of these new combinations of quarks,
ways to put them together to make weird stuff that
give us an idea for how quarks and luons work together.
And it's possible that we could discover some new fundamental particles,
some graviton, or some proof of supersymmetry. I think the
chances of that really get less and less likely the
longer we go on without having seen it, because one
(45:38):
thing we can't do with the large hage On collider
is increase the energy. Like the energy is fixed by
the size of the tunnel and the strength of the magnets,
so we can run it for a long long time,
but we can't like boost it up to any higher energy.
And that's really I think what we would need to
find a new fundamental particle, a new like really heavy,
new kind of particle. But if you do a fine
(45:58):
one another one. Then that makes it the two fundamental
particles for the price of one, and that has your
per particle cost, making it more of a deal. That's right, exactly,
and we would love to deliver that deal for taxpayers
around the world. And you talked about changing the name.
We are actually talking about new versions of the large
Hadron Collider, and so for example, people are talking about
(46:19):
the v l h C and the very Large Hadron Collider,
which really is a thing, but we don't know if
that's going to be built there where it would be built.
It's going to cost a lot of money, and so
there's a lot of politics involved in figuring out who's
going to pay for that thing and exactly where to
put it. Right, I think you had a better name
for it though earlier. You should call it the test
the Wazoo out of it Particle Collider. That's the informal
(46:42):
working name on all the documents internally. Yeah, I mean
you can gain new particles wazoos. The particle was zoo.
All right. Well, I think we'll stay tuned to see
what else you discover in the next ten years. And
I think it was something that a lot of listeners
might not know, which is pretty cool. It's that you
can actually go to the l a C. You know,
once things open up, hopefully after this pandemic, that you
can actually go there and they'll give you a tour
(47:03):
of the facilities, and you can go to their gift
shop and look around and see scientists at work and
eating at the cafeteria. You can buy yourself a Higgs Boson.
It's less than ten billion dollars. Diesel caviar there too,
and T shirts. No caviar, but yes, T shirts. Well,
it is in Switzerland, so they might have carrier maybe.
I think there's a lot of caviar eating in Switzerland.
(47:24):
Not that much at certain just chocolate and coffee. Yeah,
but you can come and visit. There's a really nice
science center, so come check it out. It's a beautiful spot.
It's also nestled between two sets of mountains and there's
fields of sunflowers or if you like skiing, it's right
next to the Alps, so it's a gorgeous spot. If
you have the opportunity to visit, I totally encourage you.
And we were not at all sponsored by Switzerland or
(47:46):
the large Shadrin Collider. Just by listeners like you, who
in the end are the ones footing the bill for
this whole endeavor. Thank you very much everyone for paying
your taxes. Thank you, Jeff Basins. All right, well that's
pretty cool, so stay tuned and we help you joined that.
Thanks for joining us, See you next time. Thanks for listening,
(48:11):
and remember that. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio. For More podcast for
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah,
Hey, Daniel, how much does it cost to discover a
new particle? Well, I'm sorry to say that, like everything else,
the prices seem to be going up and up. Oh,
you mean, like with inflation. I think there's more than
that going on. I mean, the electron was really cheap
to discover in the eighteen hundreds, but then the top
corps probably cost a billion dollars or so a billion
(00:28):
dollars to discover one particle. A billion dollars is cheap.
These days, the Higgs boson probably cost more than ten
billion dollars and billion. That's like super fancy caviar probably
tastes just as bad, Daniel. Cavire isn't about the flavor,
it's about the glamour. Well, that's also true about particle physics.
I mean, it's all ball gowns and tuxedos in the
(00:48):
control room at CERN. I see, that's why it costs
ten billion dollars. It's the dress code that's killing you.
At least you have a dress code. I thought physics
just war. You know, boxer shorts and T shirts. It's
a T shirt with a tuxedo printed on it. Hi
(01:17):
am or handmade cartoonists and the creator of PhD Comics. Hi,
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who's never discovered a
new particle. Oh yet, Well, technically, Dan, don't you discover
new particles all the time? Like you know this oxygen
molecule and breathing right now? Is it's technically new to me?
That's true. Each individual particle has its own wonderful spirit
(01:39):
and personality. But we're more interested in new types of particles,
new things that nobody in the world has ever seen before,
things that can blow our minds and teach us something
new about the universe. Well, welcome to this new type
of podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explained the Universe, a prolection
of I Heart Radio, in which we sort through all
the amazing and crazy stuff in this universe. The stuff
(01:59):
made of oxygen, the stuff made of carbon, the stuff
made of nitrogen, and the stuff made of things we
don't even yet understand. The rest of the universe, whatever
it's made out of, we tackle it. We asked the
big questions and we try to explain all of it
to you. Because there is a lot of stuff in
the universe, actually, maybe an infinite amount of stuff. Right
there might be an infinite number of particles, and there
(02:19):
might even be an infinite number of kinds of particles.
We have no idea. We're looking at an ice cube
and we don't know if it's the whole cube or
just the tip of the iceberg. That's right, everything is
made out of stuff, and we are made out of stuff,
and we are also constantly trying to discover what this
stuff is made out of and how it works and
how it's put together, and what are the rules that
tell the stuff what it can and cannot do. It
(02:41):
feels like if we could pull apart everything in the
universe into its tying these little bits and understand those rules,
we will have revealed something true, something fundamental, something deep
in the source code of the universe. And like looking
at those rules and understanding that basic set of particles
would finally tell us how the universe is really put together.
I guess it's pretty amazing that, you know, there's all
this stuff in the universe and us little humans on
(03:04):
this little rock floating in space and sort of figured
out that this stuff has kind of rules and types
of stuff to it, right, Like it's not just random
and there's only a certain number of kinds of stuff
that out there, and that kind of stuff has certain
rules about how it can put together and how it
interacts with itself. Yeah, And the incredible thing is that
there's a pretty small number of particles, like the particles
(03:26):
that make up me and you. It's just really three
of them, is the upcord, the down cord, and the electron.
But you can put those particles together in so many
different ways to get an incredible variety of things. So
as you look at into the universe and you see
all these weird things, you know, from bananas to comets
to planets to neutron stars, you know that all those
things are made of the same basic particles, just put
(03:48):
together in different ways. And it's sort of incredible, like philosophically,
that the universe even works that way, that you could
take all this incredible complexity and boil it down to
relative simplicity of the at the lowest level. Even caviar
Daniel's caviar made out of regular particles or really expensive particles.
It tastes like it's made out of some other weird,
(04:08):
kind of gross particles. I take it you're not a
fan of the caviar. Not a fan of tiny little
salty fish eggs exploding in my mouth. You don't even
really understand how that's the thing. Maybe you haven't bought
the expensive kind, You've only had the cheap kind. You've
only had the electrons of I should just keep spending
more money on caviar until I like it. Yeah, that's
a good idea. It's all about the cracker. Like, if
you have the right cracker, you can put anything on it, caviar,
(04:31):
higgs bosons. It doesn't matter if you have the right cracker.
It's all good. Higgs boson exploded in your mouth. That
would be kind of troublesome, wouldn't it. I don't know.
It might be salty, might be delicious. It would already
cost a lot of money, that's right, At ten billion
dollars per particle. I don't think I could even taste it.
But yeah, we are all made out of stuff, and
that stuff in one sense, it feels like it's made
out of a small number of kinds of stuff, you know,
(04:53):
like you said, quarks and electrons. But at the same time,
it seems like the universe is full of all kinds
of particles and possibly, as you said, maybe an infinite
number of different kinds of particles. Yeah, we sort of
took a left turn there at some point in history.
Like for a long time we were taking this stuff
around us, and we were figuring out that it was
made of a simpler set of stuff, you know, like
all the crazy stuff in the universe is made out
(05:15):
of elements, and then oh, it turns out those elements
are just made out of protons and neutrons and electrons,
and oh wow, look the protons and neutrons are made
out of quarks. We were getting simpler and simpler and simpler.
But then at some point we discovered a bunch of
other weird stuff, other weird particles that you don't need
to make up ordinary matter, things we've talked about in
the podcast, like muans and tows and other kinds of quarks.
(05:37):
And it's sort of puzzling, like why those particles exist.
You don't need them to make bananas, so why do
they exist in the universe. But if we systematically discover
all of them, we might get some sort of like
glimpse at the larger pattern and figure out what is
really going on in the universe. Yeah, it's kind of humbling,
I guess to think that, you know, we are basically
masters of our We think we're masters of our universe.
(05:58):
But really we're just made out of a small corner
of the particle, you know, table and even matter and
even stuff is just a small part of the the
whole universe, right, Most of the universe is energy. Yeah,
that's true. A huge fraction of the universe is just energy,
and we are made out of sort of the lightest stuff.
Like all these other heavy particles, they don't last for
(06:19):
very long, and they fall apart really quickly, and they
decay into lighter and lighter particles. So the reason the
electron lives forever while the muon doesn't is that the
electron is the lightest thing. It can't turn into anything lighter,
whereas the muan can decay into the electron. So everything
is made out of these lightest particles. It's sort of
like if everything was just made out of hydrogen or
hydrogen and helium. Instead, we're made out of a much
(06:41):
more complex set of stuff. And so in the same
way for particles, we want to understand, like what are
those other heavier particles and what can they do? It
would be cool if we were made out of helium
and we all float around, right technically, or I guess
if everything else was made out of hydrogen, which just
fall to the bottom. I'm actually on the all helium
diet right now. I'm trying to lose uh. It works. Actually,
(07:01):
I just keep inflating this balloon and I keep losing weight.
It's amazing you're in the helio diet exactly. If I
got a big enough balloon, I'll be literally waitless, but
your voice will be really high pitched, and this podcast
would be a totally different experience, right. That's right, Eleven
and the Chipmunks present the Universe, Daniel and the Chipmunks.
(07:23):
But you know, we are sort of asking this question
all the time of what kinds of particles are out there,
and what kinds of particles can exist and do exist,
and what are they for? And so scientists are hard
at work at it. And one of the biggest places
to do that, to search for new particles, is a
place that you were work at, right, Daniel. That's right
at the Large Hadron Collider, which is not just one
(07:44):
of the biggest places to do particle physics, it's like
one of the biggest science experiments ever in terms of
money spent, and like actual physical size is an incredible accomplishment.
It's sort of like the Golden gate Bridge of particle physics.
You know. I stand at the Golden gate Bridge sometimes
and I'm like, wow, look what humanity can accomplish when
we all work together. And the Large Hadron Collider is
(08:04):
similar to that. It's an incredible feed not just of physics,
but also of engineering and organization and also politics that
all these different countries from all over the world came
together to build this incredible device that's helping us peer
into the very very core of matter. Yeah, it's a
big science experiment, although I thought the biggest science experiment
was caviar Daniel like, how much can you get people
(08:25):
to pay for something that's salty and crunchy? Are you're
thinking of the Large Caviart Collider, I think, which is
still being constructed somewhere in Russia. Yeah, the Large the
other LC. Yeah, they collide money and Higgs to get
new kinds of profits. But yeah, the LC is the
biggest science experiment ever and also one of the most expensive.
(08:46):
You said earlier that it caused about ten billion dollars
just to find the Higgs boson. But the LC is
a larger project than that, right, Like, it's looking for
other things, and it costs a lot more than ten
billion dollars. Ten billion dollars is about the cost of
the project. It depends on little bit exactly how you
do the accounting. But you know, it costs like a
billion dollars to build the tunnel, and a couple of
billion dollars to make those magnets, and then billions more
(09:08):
to build the detectors and actual bean pipe and all
that stuff. So altogether the whole project is a little
bit more than ten billion dollars. And you're right. While
many people think about the Higgs boson when they think
about the large age On collider, it's actually a much
broader science experiment. We were hoping when we turn this
thing on, not just to find the Higgs boson, though
we're happy to have done so, but to also find
(09:28):
all sorts of other crazy stuff that might have been
out there. Because remember, these experiments are like exploration. We
don't know what we're going to find until we turn
the machine on. That's why we build it, and so
it's always a bit of a gamble. Yeah. Well, although
I think the Higgs Boson sort of put it on
the map, right, Like, I feel like probably very few
people had heard of the L A C before the
(09:48):
big discovery of the Higgs Boson about ten years ago,
that's right, that's when it made it onto the a
list of particle physics experiments. Before that, it wasn't even
getting invited to those caveat parties. Is there an a
list went up through about the Well, you know, there
are bragging rights for who has the most powerful collider
in the world, And for a long time the Americans
dominated it, and then the Europeans took over in the nineties,
(10:11):
and then the Americans stole the lead back in the
early two thousands, and now the Europeans have had it
for a while. And you know, it's not just enough
to have the most powerful collider in the world. You
have to find something new. You have to make a
big discovery that leads to a Nobel Prize. And so
you're right that seeing the Higgs Boson really put the
L A C on the map. That's what I mean,
Daniel to de list, I meant, like the discovery list.
(10:31):
It's a good thing. Yeah, But anyways, I guess a
big question is besides the l A C, what else
has the Large Hadron Collider discovered? Like, I know, you
set out to find lots of different particles and the
big one was the Higgs boson. But I bet people
don't know that the l AC is looking and has
discovered a lot more particles than that. Yeah, we can
do lots of really interesting physics with the l A T.
(10:54):
It's not just for the Higgs boson. So to be
on the podcast, we'll be asking the question how many
particles has a large Hadron Collider discovered? I think probably
a lot of a lot of people maybe get confused.
They probably associate the age in the l C with
the Higgs boson. What do you think? Commercial? There you go,
(11:18):
the long Higgs Boson commercial. Man, I can't skip this ad.
What's going on? Click? Click click, click click The lofty
higgs Boson commercial? Good because you know, if I was
the Higgs boson and I wanted to make a splash,
the LC has been a big part of that, right, Yeah,
that's true. The LC has been a good part of
the Higgs boson marketing campaign. Who was hiding for fifty
years while people were trying to look forward? But finally
(11:39):
allowed itself to be discovered in t So, as usual'll
be wondering how many people out there and have thought
about what other particles that l a C has discovered.
So Daniel went out there into the wilds of the
internet to ask how many particles has the l a
C discovered? And if you are a denizen of the
wilds of the Internet, and you wouldn't mind me knocking
on your virtual door to ask you for six questions
(12:00):
that you haven't prepared for, please write to us two
questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. We want to
hear from you, and we think you'll have fun. Do
you always start the day not not joke, the physics
not not joke. I didn't, but now I will. We'll
have the brainstorm, all right. Well, here's what people had
to say. I know of only one particle that the
LHC has discovered, which is the Higgs boat on, but
(12:21):
I cannot imagine that's the only one it has discovered. Ever,
would be quite an expensive machine who would only have
discovered this one particle? But maybe that's actually the case.
So my answer to is only one. I don't know
the number, but for sure it needs to be more,
(12:43):
and I like to be more. I think it's time
to build a new, bigger particle collider, hopefully here in US.
LHC must be the large Hadron collider. Hadron is a
particle and you're colliding them together, so maybe you're smashing
(13:03):
it up into smaller particles. I have no idea. Maybe three,
maybe seven. I think the LHC has discovered only one particle.
That would be the Higgs boson. I hope I'm not
terribly off. I'm going to guess that the l a
C has maybe discovered seven new particles. I know the
most or the most recent particles that I know of
(13:25):
that was discovered at the allergacy is the Higgs in
I think, so I would say the number of new
particles the allgacy has discovered is one. All right, there's
a broad range here. Some people say one that you've
only had a one hit wonder the l a C.
And some people have a certain number, like maybe seven
(13:47):
or a few. A couple of people said seven. I
wonder where that number came from. I don't know, but
I think if you just ask people to pick a
number between one and ten, something like fifty of them
say seven, So I think it's de bias there. Yeah. Wow,
like we have an internal die, you know. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
we are bad random number generators. But there's some fun
answers here. Some people give the large hage On collider
(14:07):
credit for discovering the top cork that was actually discovered
by the fermulab Tevatron, the previous record holder for the
highest energy collider right the other d listen, yeah exactly,
and I do like the person who supports building a new,
bigger collider here in the United States, thank you very much,
right to your congress person, or hey, cut us a
check for twenty billion dollars. Technically it could happen, right,
(14:30):
Like if someone like Basis suddenly, instead of going to space,
wanted to discover a new particle, they could totally make
that happen. Wow, that's true. I never even thought about
emailing Jeff Bezos and asking him to spend twenty billion
dollars on a particle collider. But I'm doing that just
as soon as we're finished here. Yeah, he probably just
has to reach into his pocket and pull out some chain.
But you're right. The larger point is that the only
(14:50):
thing preventing us from building a bigger collider and discovering
more particles is money, Like we know how to do it.
It's just kind of expensive because you have to dig
these big tunnels and pay for really fancy magnets to
bend the particles around in a circle. But the only
limitation is money, which is understandable. These things are expensive.
Sometimes it's frustrating though, because it feels like we could
(15:11):
just be buying knowledge about the universe, like we just
lay out some cash, boom, the universe will reveal some
secrets to us. I think the question is why does
the universe charge so much? Like why can't the universe
just give us these things for free? Like is it
trying to sell caviare you know? Like it's I feel
like it's maybe overpricing it a little. Do we have
it like another universe We can maybe get a competitive
(15:31):
bid off. Yeah, we should negotiate with the universe. I
don't know. I think we treat these things with value
because we pay more for them, right, Like if you
buy expensive shoes, then you're gonna think they're better shoes.
And so we think the Higgs boson is super important
because we spent so much on it. You just admitted
that you're using the caviare strategy here to overvalue physics knowledge.
(15:53):
But you know, we've also talked in the podcast about
physics discoveries made with very cheap materials, like the whole
two dimensionals here. That's something somebody discovered using literally scotch
tape and a pencil. So you can totally discover things
using you know, five dollars worth of materials, but some
things do cost billions keeping price gouging humanity. That's right.
(16:13):
We only spend ten bucks on the collider. The rest
we're spending on caviare and ball gowns and T shirts
with taxed those printing on them. But I guess you
know it does cost a lot of money. I know
it's expensive and maybe so maybe step us through this,
like what's going on at the l h C. How
does it work and why does it require so much
infrastructure to make discoveries? Yea, So the basic idea of
the large hay Drunk collider, like the reason to the
(16:35):
Large hay Drunk Collider, is a window into the universe.
The whole strategy for using it to discover new particles
is to rely on Einstein's famous equation E equals mc squared,
where E is energy and M is mass. And the
goal is that we are looking for particles with a
lot of mass. The particles that we see around us
electrons and quarks. These are the lowest mass particles. As
(16:58):
we talked about before, they're the stable ones. It's like
the bottom rung of the ladder. Everything sort of like
shakes down to the bottom rung of the ladder, the
way like boulders tend to roll downhill and settle in
the bottom of a valley. But we're interested in what
the other rungs of the ladder are. Are there heavier
particles out there? What are the heaviest particles? And we
are limited in seeing those by the energy we can
use to create them. So E equals mc square. It
(17:21):
means if you want to create a particle with mass m,
you need to put in as much energy as mc
square to create it. So what we do with a
large hadron collider is smash particles together, very low mass
particles like protons, with a huge amount of energy, so
we can turn that energy into the mass of some
new kind of particle. Right. I guess what's interesting is
that you're trying to make these particles. Like you're trying
(17:44):
to discover particles that are out there, and you're doing
that by trying to make them Like you're not sort
of like breaking things apart and seeing what's there. You're
really trying to sort of create conditions where they pop
out of the vacuum, out of the nothingness. Yeah, it's alchemy.
We are turning one kind of matter, are like normal
everyday protons, into something new. It's not like we're taking
the protons apart and looking for weird things in them.
(18:07):
Sometimes these weird particles are called sub atomic, which is
a little confusing because it implies that they're like inside
the atom, but they're not. You can smash two protons
together and make something totally new, which is not like
a combination of the bits of the proton. And the
reason you can do that is that you turn the
protons into pure energy and then back from energy into
(18:28):
a new kind of mass. So, as you say, we're
making something new, so we're discovering it, not in the
sense that like it's sitting there waiting for us to
find it. It's sitting there on the list of possibilities,
waiting for us to bring the ingredients, which is energy
around so that nature can make it for us. Right,
It's like you're discovering it in the sense of like
going to a new restaurant, taking the menu, and then
(18:50):
like discovering new dishes that could be made for you.
That's right. We're like, oh, if we have enough money
in our wallet, then we can afford this really expensive
cavi are right, And so we are pouring energy into
the climer because it allows us to look deeper, deeper
onto nature's menu, so we can see what particles can
be made. The amazing thing about the particle collider is
that it's quantum mechanical, which means that when you smash
(19:13):
these particles together, you don't know what's going to happen.
You can predict the kinds of things that might happen,
but for a given collision, you have no idea what
might happen. Is like a list of possibilities. The cool thing, though,
is that if you do it often enough, eventually you'll
see everything on that list of possibilities. So you like
exploring this menu of possibilities what nature might do just
by doing the same collision over and over and over again. Right,
(19:36):
I do that Sometimes I just go to restaurant and
I order randomly from the menu, over and over and
over and over, and eventually you try everything on the
menu and also gain a lot of it. That's exactly
what we're doing here. We're just going to the restaurant
with our eyes closed, putting our fingers on the menu.
And that's our strategy for ordering everything. You're going to
the cosmic diner and taking that greasy menu and and
(19:57):
just putting your finger anywhere on it. If we knew
what was on the list already, we could look for
it more intelligently. You know, we could design experiments that
put in exactly the right amount of energy to make
that particle we know is already there. We can do
that kind of thing. But if when you don't know
what is there, then you have to just sort of
poke around blindly, hoping something new appears when you put
your finger on it, hoping you get a good dish.
(20:19):
All right, well, let's get into how you actually see
these particles at the large hydron collider, and let's get
into what other particles they have found. But first let's
take a quick break. All right, we're talking about what
(20:43):
else has a large hydron collider the l a C
discovered and Daniel, technically this is not a sponsored podcast episode, right,
We're not being paid by the LHC. Here. I'm not
a shill for big science. I mean I am, but
I'm not getting paid to do it. Well, technically, you're
paying the l a C to do your work like that.
That's how it works, the collaboration and scientists have to
like pay into it to use the facility and to
(21:05):
get access to the data. Yeah, I mean, I'm not
paying personally out of like my kids, Picky Bank. We're
using government research funds. And so it's the US government,
just like it's the German government and the Italian government
and the British government. All these governments are paying to
support this international facility for scientists to use. And so
in the end it's all of us, right, it's all
taxpayer money. Though. It's me and you and everybody down
(21:28):
the street chipping in a few cents so that we
can learn something new about the universe. Right. Well, and
then technically Basis is chipping more than we are, so
I think he pays zero taxes. Actually, so we're paying
more than he is. I think he pays from when
he buys that yacht, I think he's paying more taxes
than I ever will in my life. But we're talking
about how the LC works, and so you slash all
(21:50):
known particles like protons together, and out of that ball
of energy that gets made in that collision, new things
come out. And you're doing that over and over and over,
trying to find what else the universe can make and
what else will pop out. That's right. We sift through
all these collisions looking for something new, something that's not
what we've seen before. We're very familiar with the old particles.
(22:10):
We've been doing this for decades, and so what we're
looking for is an anomaly, something surprising, something different, a
new kind of thing that hasn't been seen before. Right,
would you be surprised if like a cow like appeared
out of your collider. We often use the example of
pink elephants, you know, like when we turn on the
collider and we don't know what could come out. It
could be pink elephants, it could be the Higgs boson,
it could be nothing. You really don't know, Oh, I said,
(22:32):
you've thought about this, you know, large mammal appearance just
in case and of course, you know, you have to
balance the charge, and so you would have a pink
elephant and an anti pink elephant created together like a
great elephant. What would be the opposite of a pink elephant,
a great mammoth maybe I don't know, maybe a blue
ant a blue and you and we'll have to develop
a mammoth collider to investigate that one. But then need
(22:54):
they touch each other? It's bad news, it's bad news. Yeah.
So then you collect these and every once in a
while new particles come out, but they don't last very long, right,
Like you're looking for things that don't just pop out
and sit there on your counter. They disappear or changing
to other things quickly. That's right. We are creating high
energy density. We're pushing things up the ladder and they
exist very briefly and then they fall apart back into
(23:16):
low mass stable particles, the kinds of things that you
and I are made out of. And you know, this
is just what the universe does. You gather a bunch
of energy together, it likes to spread it out. So
we create these new heavy particles like a top cork
or a Higgs boson. They last in that state. We
know they exist, but they're only there for like ten
to the minus twenty seconds. It's like the briefest moment
(23:36):
in the sun before they decay back into lighter stuff, right,
Because often you don't even detect the particles you're looking for,
like the Higgs boson, And it's not like you had
a detector that detected the Higgs boson. It's like you
detect the things that the Higgs boson the case into
and then you piece it back like, oh, this must
have been the Higgs boson that existed there in the
middle for ten to the minus twenty seconds. That's right. Technically,
(23:58):
we've never seen a Higgs boson. I mean they last
so briefly. We have no detector capable of seeing it directly.
All we can do is see what it turns into.
As you say, it's like coming to a street corner
and seeing the remnants of a car accident and figuring
out what must have happened, but not actually seeing the
collision itself. And so in the case of the Higgs boson,
for example, the Higgs likes to turn into a pair
(24:19):
of photons or a pair of bottom corks, and those
photons and bottom corks have particular configurations and energy to
tell us that they must have come from a Higgs boson.
So we can never actually be sure for any given
collision what it came from, but we can make statistical
arguments and say, oh, this one is more likely to
be from a Higgs than from something else. That would
also give you the same sort of signature in our detectors.
(24:41):
And so that's what you do. You're colliding protons hoping
to get new particles. And so the question we started
off was was what has the NHD discovered in those collisions.
Now we know the big one was the Higgs boson,
which was discovered almost ten years ago, So tell us
about that discovery and like sort of the specifics of
how it was found. Yeah, so they Higgs boson is
something we suspected was there. We looked at the patterns
(25:03):
of all the particles and we said, this just doesn't
make sense. And a guy named Peter Higgs realized that
it would make much more sense, like it mathematically just
clicked together beautifully if there was another particle. It's like
if you have a jigsaw puzzle and there's a piece missing,
you look at it, you can see the shape you're like,
there must be one, and so you hunt around under
the table looking for that particular piece. It's much easier
(25:24):
to find a piece if you know what you're looking
for and you suspect it exists. So we already had
the idea that the Higgs boson might exist and how
it would be created and what it would look like
in our detector. And we have a whole fun podcast
episode about the journey to find the Higgs, so long saga,
lots of drama, lots of politics. But we ended up
finding at the large Hdon collider in exactly that way
that we talked about. It turns into two photons. So
(25:47):
the Higgs boson is this little particle and it decays
in this complicated way that ends up giving two photons,
one in one direction and one in the other direction.
And we surround these collisions with all sorts of layers
of detector. Is that tell us what came out of
those collisions. So we saw a lot of these events
with two photons, one photon one way and the other
photon going in the other direction. When you add up
(26:09):
their energy, the energy of those two photons, it comes
up to a certain number, and that's the mass of
the Higgs boson, and so we saw a lot of
these particular kinds of collisions that led to this pattern
of photons that all added up to the same number
for the mass of the Higgs, and we thought that
must be it. Right, It's like you saw the footprint
of the Higgs boson in these two photons, right, yeah, exactly.
(26:31):
We can't see the Higgs itself. Because I think that's
one thing that's interesting about this is that you kind
of have to have an idea of what you're looking for, right.
You can't just like turn this on and then see
what happens because there's so much stuff coming out and
it's all probabilistic, So you kind of need to know
what you're looking for, or you need to know about
what size of a footprint you're looking for, or what
would the footprint look like, sort of in other to
(26:51):
actually discover these footprints, you just put your finger on.
A really interesting and sort of hot headed debate in
the field right now, Like a lot of people think
that you're right that you need to know what you're
looking for because these signals are subtle and you can't
see things directly, so you need to know like well
how to look for things in order to anticipate them
and discover them. And that's probably true for really subtle
signals like the Higgs boson. If we didn't know to
(27:13):
look for the Higgs boson, we might not have seen it,
because in the end, the signal is kind of subtle.
It's like this little bump. There's lots of other ways
to make the same signature that we see for the Higgs.
But other people i e. Me and some folks that
work with I think it might be possible to discover
something we don't anticipate. That not knowing what's out there
doesn't mean that we can't see it. We need to
be sort of more clever about how to look for
(27:34):
things to be ready for surprises. But we think that
using some new techniques from like machine learning and anomaly detection,
it might be possible to figure out if there's something
new in our data, even if we don't know exactly
what to look for. But you're right, it's more difficult
and it would need to be a more obvious signal.
But I guess what I mean is you sort of
need to know even for something where you're detecting anomalies.
You sort of need to know what's normal so that
(27:56):
you can tell what's an anomaly. Right, You need to
have sort of an idea of what you might discover,
or at least sort of like a good picture, and
then you can tell if something is off of that
or different than that. Yes, it's all about understanding what
the current theory predicts so we can find deviations from it.
And that's what was exciting, for example, about those muon
G minus two experiments that were recently done at fer
(28:16):
Me Lab, is that they had a really detailed prediction
for what they expected to see when the muon wobbled
around in a circle, and then they saw something different.
They don't know what it is, and they don't need
to know what it is, but they know they see
something different, which requires some new kind of particle. So
that's an example of how you might see that there
is something out there new to discover without knowing exactly
what it is, seeing a deviation from what you expect.
(28:39):
And so that was the Higgs boson. That was a
huge deal a while ago, and because it is such
a fundamental particle in our model of particle physics, right,
like it's the particle that sort of explains the masses
of the other particles, and it's sort of in a way,
sort of holds the universe together. Yeah. Absolutely, And it's
even more deeply important than that. It completes this longer
project of bringing together electricity and magnetism and the weak force.
(29:04):
You know, James Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism more than
a hundred years ago, and then in the sixties somebody
else brought together the weak force into a single force,
the electroweak force, and it's all beautiful and mathematical, but
didn't really work because it was missing a piece, and
Higgs Boson was that piece. So finding that tells us
not just how particles get their mass, but also that
(29:25):
the weak force and electromagnetism are just two sides of
the same coin. It's really an incredible triumph. That's like
over a hundred years of theoretical progress. Yeah, that's pretty cool.
That's what I tell the Higgs all the time, is
I tell you complete me. So that's what maybe the
last fundamental particle that humans have discovered, right, I don't
think we've found other fundamental particles there or at at
(29:47):
the head large tender and collider or anywhere, right, and
we have been looking. We have been looking, and we
had high hopes, but you're right, we haven't found anything else.
You know, when we turned on the Large Hadron Collider,
we were able to explore new energy ranges. Like the
previous collider went up to two trillion electron volts that's
like two thousand times the energy inside the mass of
(30:09):
a proton, and the Large Hadron Collider goes up to
fourteen terra electron volts, so like it's seven times as
much energy as the old collider, and that means it's
like seven times the territories, seven times the new menus.
You know, you're going in and out and you get
like the secret, secret, secret, secret menus. That's really exciting
(30:30):
from like an explorational point of view. It's like simultaneously
landing on seven new Earth like planets and seeing if
there's life on. There's a huge territory that's that nobody
had explored before, so the possibilities were huge. We could
have seen nothing, right, you could be there's just nothing
there because the only the Higgs boson, or we could
have seen like a crazy number of particles flying out
(30:51):
of the machine. Probably not pink elephants, but the possibility
was that we could have seen dozens of new particles
that it tells all sorts of crazy stories about the universe. Unfore,
originally we didn't. All we saw in terms of fundamental
particles was the Higgs boson. It's almost like you've got
a bigger table in a way, not just access to
the bigger many, but it's like you've got a bigger
table and you told the universe all right, you know,
(31:11):
surprise me, and it just kind of brought more of
the same thing. That's right. We went to the all
you can eat buffet and it just kept serving as
mac and cheese. You didn't get a Higgs animal style.
You know, maybe we made a mistake, we filled up
on bread or something. I don't know what the problem was.
But we were hoping to find gravitons. There's no like secret,
secret crap buffet table in the back or anything. If
(31:32):
it is, it's still a secret because we haven't found it.
We had lots of ideas also of what we might
have seen. You know, we might have seen gravitons. We
don't understand how gravity works is a quantum theory, and
some people think that every time you feel gravity, it's
because you're passing little quantum particles back and forth called gravitons.
And if that is true, there was a chance we
could have seen those the l h C and we
(31:53):
looked for them but didn't see them. And there are
lots of other really fun theories supersymmetry and heavier corks
and all sorts of weird you leftons. There's no shortage
of ideas coming from the theoretical community about what we
might have seen. But of course we didn't see any
of those either. Right, You had sort of ideas about
how the universe might work, you know, given all the theory,
and so you needed some experimental confirmation to make those
(32:15):
theories kind of solid, right, like to show that supersymmetry
was right or plantum gravitational physics was right. You needed
to find sort of weird new particles in that space
that we're looking for, but you didn't. Yeah, but we didn't.
It's just like with the Higgs boson. These things come
from theoretical motivation, people looking at the theory and saying,
you know, this would make more sense if we changed
(32:35):
it in this way, if we added this piece and
then experimentalists go out and look for and say, well,
is it there, is your idea corresponding to the real
structures of the universe, or is it just sort of
like a nice, pretty bit of math in your head.
Because there's an important difference, right, We're not just interested
in exploring the insides of our head. We want to
know what the structures of the actual universe are, and
so to do that we need to do these experiments.
(32:57):
But our job is not just to like go off
and check the box because some theoretical ideas. I think
we're also capable of discovering unanticipated stuff, of finding weird
new stuff out there that no theorist has predicted, that
nobody anticipated. That blows up all of our ideas about
the universe. That hasn't happened either, But I hold out hope. Yeah.
You always talk about the scenario where you do an
(33:17):
experiment and you look at the data and then you
see something and you're like, what are that? Like? Which
many did that one come from? Yes, and that's happened
in history, right, Like who ordered that is a literal thing.
Somebody said when they saw that the muan had been discovered,
because nobody expected the muan to be there. It's not
something we thought might be on the menu. It's just
something that God delivered and we're like, huh, I didn't
order this, it's just sitting here in front of me.
(33:39):
And so I fantasized about that, you know, sort of
a scientific way, Like you know, my dream scenario is
finding something weird that everybody scratches their head over. Because
you and I talked about on the podcast all the time,
how we know there are basic things about the universe
we don't understand, and what we need is a clue,
something that points us in the right direction to think
about new ideas. And so a totally weird, new anticipated
(34:00):
discovery would be a great clue in that direction. Cool, Well,
we are standing by for you to discover new fundamental
particles or to confirm fundamental new theories. But in the meantime,
the LC has been busy that it has made a
lot of discoveries, and maybe it's found more particles than
most people think. So let's get into that. But first
let's take another quick break. All right, we're talking about
(34:33):
the L A C And ordering things off of the
universe menu at the what the Cosmic Diner I think
that is an actual diner, probably somewhere in America. They
probably don't serve caviar, though they still higgs Boson animal style.
So we made the big higgs Boson discovery, and we
don't have any sort of thing that fundamental yet since then,
But the LC has been busy discovering more particles, right, actually,
(34:56):
a surprisingly large number of new particles. That's right. The
higgs Boson is like the glamour front person of the
particle discoveries. But we've been hard at work and we
found all sorts of crazy stuff out there that you
probably haven't even heard of unless you listen to this podcast, right,
that's right. We have talked about a couple of these
discoveries on the podcast, and so those of you out
(35:18):
there who follow it might not be surprised. But honestly,
I was even surprised when I counted up all the discoveries.
The numbers sort of shocked me. How many particles has
the l AC discovered? Fifty nine more particles than just
the higgs Boson. WHOA fifty nine. It's a lot of particles.
There are that many particles. There are that many particles
exactly because there's other ways to discover particles than finding
(35:41):
new fundamental particles, We can find new ways to put
the old particles together. Oh I see. These are not
like fundamental like building blocks of the universe we think,
but just sort of like when you arrange particles in
a different way, they sort of become new particles, right,
They act like a new kind of particle, exactly, Like
the proton is not a fundamental particle, right, it's made
(36:01):
out of quarks. You put two up corks and a
down cork together and you get a proton. And that's
really interesting. It's amazing, and the fact that it even
works is something we don't fully understand because it involves
is very complex and very powerful force called the strong
nuclear force. You know, quarks have these weird things called colors,
and they exchange gluons back and forth. It's a crazy system.
(36:22):
And so one thing we can do with the large
hadron colliders figure out, like, are there other ways to
combine quirks to make new kinds of particles? Can we
shake corks together and build out new things like new
kinds of protons? Maybe? Right? Basically, what you're making like
new kinds of protons because when the collisions happen. Remember
we're colliding protons and protons at the Large Hadron Collider.
(36:43):
But again, protons are not fundamental particles. So what actually
happens when these protons come near each other is not
that like one proton smashes into another one and they
totally annihilate. When you're at that energy, the fact that
these corks are bound together into a proton, it's sort
of irrelevant because the corks have so much more energy
individually than the bonds between them, So it's sort of
(37:04):
like what you're doing is shooting together like a triple
beam of quarks in one direction and the triple beam
of quirks in the other direction. So then what happens
when they collide is that the corks themselves are interacting.
Now you have six corks, and you can mix the match,
and you can make all sorts of weird, crazy stuff,
And because there's so much energy there, you can even
pop new corks out of the vacuum and make all
sorts of new weird combinations. I think it's these combinations
(37:27):
that really tell you or let you explore or know
more about the basic particles, right and how they're put together,
Because They all sort of depend on the rules of
quarks and gluons exactly, and we are trying to understand
those rules. We want to know how quirks push against
each other, how gluons pull on each other, and it's
something that's very difficult to grapple with. This whole field
(37:48):
of the strong and nuclear force is very difficult because
the force is so strong, and so it's very hard
to do calculations because things get out of hand very quickly.
One reason is that the strong force is we eard
in a really super interesting way. If you take two
corks and you start to pull them apart, you might
expect that the strong force would get weaker as they
(38:08):
get further apart from each other. That's the case with gravity,
right like as you get further from the Earth, your
gravity gets weaker. That's the case with electricity. Like take
two electrons. They will repel each other, but as you
move them further apart, they start to repel each other
less and less. The opposite is true with corks. As
you move them further apart, the force between them get
stronger and stronger. And that's what makes it really hard
(38:30):
to do these calculations because you can almost never like
neglect another particle. In the case of gravity and electromagnetism,
you can make lots of simplifying assumptions because as things
get far away, you can basically ignore them. You can
never do that with the strong force. As things get
further away, they become more important. And so these calculations
are a big mess. They're really really hard to do. So,
(38:50):
as you say, by understanding how these particles are fitting together,
we're trying to understand what the rules are of how
they fit together, not something we still understand, right. I
think maybe something that people haven't thought about is that
quarks can combine in ways that are other than the proton, Right,
isn't that a little weird to think about that? You know,
like course could make protons that which make up you
and me and part of what makes you and me,
(39:12):
but it can also kind of fit together in different ways.
It is cool, but it's sort of the beauty of
the universe. And we see that same sort of thing
happening in other places, like the fact that you can
take protons and neutrons and electrons and you can fit
them to together to make helium or calcium or neon
or uranium. Those elements are all so totally different, but
(39:33):
they're made of the same building blocks. So there's something
really deep about the fact that the same building blocks
can be arranged to make completely different things with totally
different properties. And so the same is true at this
deeper level that you can take quarks, you can put
them together and make a proton or a neutron, or
you can do all sorts of other things, like you
combine just two corks together. That's like a pion is
(39:54):
made out of just two corks, or a row mason
is made out of just two quirks. So these things
are really like let those and you can combine them
to make all sorts of stuff. The thing is that
we don't understand exactly how those rules work, So it's
very hard to predict which combination of quirks fit together
to make a nice particle, and which combination of quirks
aren't stable will just like fly apart instantaneously. Really you
can't predict that. You have to kind of look for
(40:16):
them in a way, right, because you found at least
fifty nine different ways in which quarts can be put together,
that's right, fifty nine new ways. I mean we have
lots and lots of ways for quirks to fit together.
There was this period in the early sixties called the
particle Zoo, and people were building bigger and bigger colliders
and finding new particles all the time. You know, the
pion k on all these particles. These are the particles
(40:37):
that give us the clue about quirks. In the first place,
we discovered all these crazy particles, we didn't understand them,
and then people understood, oh, all these weird new particles
are built out of the same building blocks. They're all
just built out of these little lego pieces called quarks.
As as you say, we still don't really quite understand
how to predict what else the quarks can do. So
it's very interesting to find those, to go out and
(40:58):
actually look for them and see, look, this weird combination works.
That weird combination works. So that's been a big industry
at the large dron collider is making new combination of
quirks to help reveal how these particles do fit together,
what the rules are. And I guess maybe what's also
interesting is that these new kinds of arrangements of quirks,
they're not common, right, like most of the corks together
(41:21):
that we see our protons and neutrons. But these new
kinds of other protons and arrangements, they're not common and
they don't last very long. Right, Yeah, just like the
Higgs boson and the top corks. These things are not stable.
They don't last for very long. They're a little bit
more stable and depends exactly than the details. Some of
them might even last, you know, like a million or
a billion of a second. But you're right, you don't
(41:42):
find them in nature. You can't like go drill into
the earth to find these things. You have to create
them in high energy density environments. You have to pour
energy into one spot, so the quirks have enough energy
to make these weird massive combinations. And so each of
these sell you a little bit more about how corks
and gluons can come together, which kind of tells you
more about the rules of the universe. All right, So
(42:02):
then maybe tell us also besides these composite particles, what
else has the LC been discovering. Yes, so we haven't
found more particles, but what we have done are more
detailed studies of the particles that we do know. For example,
we're really interesting questions like exactly how much does the
top cork way, Like, the top cork is a weird cork,
(42:24):
it's just like the up cork, except it's much much
much more massive. It's super duper massive, and we'd like
to understand exactly how massive is it. It's exact mass
controls a lot about how things work in particle physics.
So one thing we're doing is measuring that very very
precisely to see if the mass that it has makes
sense with some of our other calculations. So that's an
(42:46):
example of the kind of thing we do. It's like
a precision study of the particles we do know, so
that we can anticipate anything weird. We can look for
deviations and anomalies like we were talking about earlier, right,
because we have this model of the universe, the standard
model of stuff and matter, but you know, we think
it's the kind of the right one, but there might
be others, or we we just want to make double
extra sure that it's the right model of the universe. Yeah,
(43:08):
I would actually say we're sure it's not the right
model of the universe. I mean, it works pretty well,
it's kind of pretty, but we know it's not correct.
Like there are things about it which just can't be right,
and we're looking for are the cracks in it? We're
looking for hints as to that deeper, more fundamental, more
true model. And so one way to do that is
to say, well, I think there's a new particle out there,
(43:29):
let's go look and find it. Another way to do
that is to just test the wazoo out of it
and say, like, well, let's really see if it's correct.
Let's see if we can find some deviations. So we
have done stuff like that, and you know, at the
Large Hadron Collider we talked about in the podcast, once
they found this weird particle that uses Penguin diagrams and
decays really strangely. Sometimes the decays to muan is more
(43:50):
often than it decays to electrons, which is not what
we expected. And that's a sign that maybe there's some
new heavy particle very briefly appearing and messing things up.
So that's the kind of thing we can do. Instead
of looking directly for new heavy particles created at the collider,
we're looking for like their subtle influence on the particles
that we do know. We're looking at those cracks. You
might sort of look into those cracks and find new
particles there, right exactly. And that's the kind of thing
(44:13):
that I'm excited about. As you said very intelligently earlier,
if you want to find something new that you don't expect,
you need to understand what you do expect very very well.
And so that's basically what we're doing is fleshing out
exactly what we expect and double checking that we're seeing
what we expect. I'm always hoping that we don't see
what we expect, that we see something weird and new
in the data that we can't explain with our current theory,
(44:33):
but so far not yet, not yet, but maybe in
the future. So maybe tell us now, what can we
expect in the future from the l a C. And
I think part of it is that maybe you're changing
the name due to an upgrade, right, Yeah, Well, we
are going to be running the l C for like
another ten years. You know, you pour billions of dollars
into this machine. You want to get everything you can
out of it. So we'll be running the Large hGe
(44:54):
On Collider for at least another ten years, and we'll
be looking for these really subtle hints like the longer
you run your collision, and the more you can see
really really rare things, or the more you can see
very small deviations from what you expected, those alleviations might
be nice clues that point us in the right direction.
So we're gonna be doing this for another ten years
or so really checking out all the details. Likely will
(45:15):
also discover a bunch more of these new combinations of quarks,
ways to put them together to make weird stuff that
give us an idea for how quarks and luons work together.
And it's possible that we could discover some new fundamental particles,
some graviton, or some proof of supersymmetry. I think the
chances of that really get less and less likely the
longer we go on without having seen it, because one
(45:38):
thing we can't do with the large hage On collider
is increase the energy. Like the energy is fixed by
the size of the tunnel and the strength of the magnets,
so we can run it for a long long time,
but we can't like boost it up to any higher energy.
And that's really I think what we would need to
find a new fundamental particle, a new like really heavy,
new kind of particle. But if you do a fine
(45:58):
one another one. Then that makes it the two fundamental
particles for the price of one, and that has your
per particle cost, making it more of a deal. That's right, exactly,
and we would love to deliver that deal for taxpayers
around the world. And you talked about changing the name.
We are actually talking about new versions of the large
Hadron Collider, and so for example, people are talking about
(46:19):
the v l h C and the very Large Hadron Collider,
which really is a thing, but we don't know if
that's going to be built there where it would be built.
It's going to cost a lot of money, and so
there's a lot of politics involved in figuring out who's
going to pay for that thing and exactly where to
put it. Right, I think you had a better name
for it though earlier. You should call it the test
the Wazoo out of it Particle Collider. That's the informal
(46:42):
working name on all the documents internally. Yeah, I mean
you can gain new particles wazoos. The particle was zoo.
All right. Well, I think we'll stay tuned to see
what else you discover in the next ten years. And
I think it was something that a lot of listeners
might not know, which is pretty cool. It's that you
can actually go to the l a C. You know,
once things open up, hopefully after this pandemic, that you
can actually go there and they'll give you a tour
(47:03):
of the facilities, and you can go to their gift
shop and look around and see scientists at work and
eating at the cafeteria. You can buy yourself a Higgs Boson.
It's less than ten billion dollars. Diesel caviar there too,
and T shirts. No caviar, but yes, T shirts. Well,
it is in Switzerland, so they might have carrier maybe.
I think there's a lot of caviar eating in Switzerland.
(47:24):
Not that much at certain just chocolate and coffee. Yeah,
but you can come and visit. There's a really nice
science center, so come check it out. It's a beautiful spot.
It's also nestled between two sets of mountains and there's
fields of sunflowers or if you like skiing, it's right
next to the Alps, so it's a gorgeous spot. If
you have the opportunity to visit, I totally encourage you.
And we were not at all sponsored by Switzerland or
(47:46):
the large Shadrin Collider. Just by listeners like you, who
in the end are the ones footing the bill for
this whole endeavor. Thank you very much everyone for paying
your taxes. Thank you, Jeff Basins. All right, well that's
pretty cool, so stay tuned and we help you joined that.
Thanks for joining us, See you next time. Thanks for listening,
(48:11):
and remember that. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio. For More podcast for
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah,
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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