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August 25, 2020 43 mins

Does dark matter feel the Higgs? Can particles be black holes? What would happen if the Earth froze?

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Daniel. People often ask me what is the target
range for our podcast in terms of age. I like
to think of it like nine years to years old. Wow,
that's a big range. Do we really have nine year
old listeners? Oh? We do. We even get questions from
six year old You know, kids are masters of curiosity? Wow,

(00:28):
they have actual masters and curiosity. They're born with it.
But it only goes up to ninety nine. What happens
if you turn a hundred? Does the audio automatically cut off?
I think if you live to be a hundred, we
should be asking you question. Maybe should make it nine
to nine hundred and ninety nine, just in case, you know,
aliens might live longer than us. That's true. I look

(00:50):
forward to meeting a thousand year old and I'll let
the marketing team know to find some ads suited for
nine hundred year old listeners. I hi am jorheamat cartoonist

(01:13):
and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm
a particle physicist, and I wish I had the wisdom
of a nine year old, but not the body of
a nine year old. Well, maybe the you know, cybernetically
enhanced body that would be pretty awesome, yeah, or maybe
the wisdom of living inside of a computer for nine
years that would probably seem like nine million years. But

(01:36):
welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explained the Universe,
a production of I Heart Radio, in which we take
you on a tour of all the incredible and crazy
and bonker stuff in our universe. We drilled down to
the tiny particles to reveal the truth about the universe,
and we zoom out to the entire universe to share
with you the scope of the scale, the wonder, the drama,
the violence, all the incredible things that are out there,

(01:58):
the things that we understand and and the things that
scientists are still trying to figure out, and the things
that you are curious about. That's right. We take it
to the forefront of science and human knowledge and talk
about questions a lot. We talked about questions that scientists
are asking right now and also questions that regular people
like those of you listening might be asking yourselves. And

(02:19):
sometimes those questions are one and the same exactly, And
I think a lot of people don't realize that science
is pushed forward by scientists asking their own personal questions,
like the reason one scientist ends up in biology or
in physics is because those are the questions they personally
want answered. And so science really is all about personal questions.

(02:39):
What do you want to know about the universe? Are
you saying? Scientists are people to scientists by people, for people,
and of people. It's all about people wanting to know
the answer to some one individual burning question. And you
know as well as I do that by the time
you get to your PhD, you're so narrowly focused on
one tiny little sliver of human knowledge that it has

(02:59):
to be Really you're driving curiosity the thing that you
want to figure out. That's right. It's your inalienable right
to ask if there are aliens out there and to
spend your life trying to figure it out. But of
course it's not just scientists who are curious. Everybody out
there is curious about the universe, especially people listening to
this podcast. And so we don't want to just talk

(03:21):
about the questions that scientists are asking of the universe.
We want to answer your questions as well. Yeah, so
to be on the program, we'll be tackling listener questions
Number twelve, The dirty doesn't the dark matter doesn't? We

(03:41):
have a child's question on the program today, so let's
try to keep it clean. I think that I read
through the questions Daniel, and I feel like the nine
year old question is the most sophisticated one year. I
told you children ask amazing questions. You know, just last
week we got a letter from a six year old
and he asked a long list of really hard particle
physics questions that I thought were sophisticated for an adult. Wow. Well,

(04:05):
I feel so good knowing that we're helping to educate
six year old in bad puns and bad jokes. I
feel like you know that kid is getting an early start.
His hardest question was how does Jorge manage to eat
so many bananas? They're gross? No? I made that one up. Well,
we have a lot of amazing questions here from listeners

(04:27):
of our program, questions related to dark matter and the
Higgs boson and black holes, and also questions about tectonic
plates in our planet, which tetonics. That's not a rock group,
is it's it's like an actual science thing. No, I
think isn't a transformer and or a transformer? Yeah? Good
be maybe hold on, maybe it's a rock group of transformers.

(04:50):
Do they have bands and transformers. Let me think they
had construction vehicles, they had dinosaur transformers. Maybe maybe, yeah,
maybe they need a rock band or transformer. Maybe there's
could be one transformer that transforms into an electric guitar. Right,
Oh man, somebody out there Mattel is scrolling down these ideas,
I hope. And also banana. We haven't had fruit transformers either.

(05:12):
All right, well, let's jump right into our awesome questions
from listeners, and our first question comes from a nine
year old Dylan wrote to us but an awesome question
about dark about dark matter and the Higgs boson. Nim
from London, and my question is could the Higgs boson
interact with dark match? Thanks? Wow, that's amazing. That is

(05:34):
such a simple question, and yet I feel like it
blows my mind at the same time. It is. It's
a great question. Yeah, and he's got a wonderful accent,
of course, and it's a really deep question. And we're
gonna have to talk about a lot of really interesting
facets about dark matter and the Higgs boson to unravel
this particular one. All right, So Dnon's question was does
dark matter interact with the Higgs field and the Higgs boson,

(06:00):
and I guess it's one and the same thing. Yeah,
I remember that interacting with the Higgs field means essentially
exchanging Higgs bosons with stuff, and so you can think
about them together. But broadly, remember the Higgs field is
the thing that fills the universe. And you can create
a Higgs boson if you put enough energy into the
Higgs field. That's how we discovered it at certain by
smashing particles together and making enough energy in the Higgs

(06:21):
field to create a Higgs boson. But you can interact
with the Higgs field even if you don't have that
much energy around, because you can just exchange virtual Higgs bosons, right,
And so, just to recap for people who might not
know or our need to the program, the Higgs field
is one of the quantum fields that fill the universe,
and it's the one that specifically gives us mass, gives
the other particles mass. That's exactly right. It's everywhere. Every

(06:43):
piece of space we think has a bunch of different
quantum fields in it. There are fields for every particle.
There's the electron field, their fields for the photon, there's
fields for the corks. There's this whole big set of fields,
and the Higgs field is the most recently discovered one,
and it interacts with other fields, and it interacts in
a way that makes particles move differently. It makes particles

(07:04):
move as if they had mass, right, Like, if you
push in a particle, it might take you a little
bit a bit of time before it can accelerate. That's
kind of the definition of mass almost. Yeah, and we
have two ideas of mass, but here we're talking about
inertial mass. Just as you said, it means you have
to push a particle to get it going, and you
have to pull on it essentially to slow it down.
And what he's doing with this question is really interesting

(07:25):
because I feel like he's mashing together these two huge
concepts that were in separate parts of my brain. And
his question is like, are these two things related? Do
they interact with each other? And so he asked if
the Higgs boson interacts with dark matter, and so just
reacap again for folks. Dark matter is this big part
of the universe that's out there the nobody knows what
it is. Yeah, we discovered in the last few decades

(07:45):
that most of the stuff that's in the universe. The
matter is not the kind of matter that we're familiar
with that makes up me and you and gas and
stars and hamsters and bananas. It's this other, weird, invisible
kind of matter that we can see only because of
it's gravitational effects. It makes galaxies spin faster, it changes
the whole structure of the universe. We're really pretty sure

(08:07):
it's there. But the thing that's tough about dark matter
is that it's really hard to see because it doesn't
interact in any way we've detected so far except through gravity.
So we're looking for dark matter and we're trying to
figure out if there's any way to interact with it.
And that's what makes this such a great question. It's like, well,
could we use the Higgs boson or the Higgs field

(08:27):
somehow to interact with dark matter? Because dark matter doesn't
interact with light or electromagnetic forces, so you can't see
it and touch it, but it does interact through gravity,
which makes you think, like, does dark matter half mass?
I guess I never I've never thought about that question, Daniel,
Is that true? Does dark matter half mass? Dark matter
definitely has mass because it creates gravity. Like that's why

(08:49):
we call it matter. It's not dark energy, it's dark matter.
It's dark matter because it's some stuff. We know that
it's there because the gravity that it generates, and so
it has some sort of energy density, some sort of
mass that creates that. And our best model currently of
dark matter is some slow moving massive particle. So absolutely
it makes perfect sense for dark matter to have mass

(09:12):
so that it creates gravity. I guess if it dark
matter didn't have mass, it would be zipping around at
the speed of light, right, that's right. All massless things
move at the speed of light, and we know that
dark matter is slow. But also if dark matter didn't
have mass, it wouldn't create the kind of effects that
we see. That is that we see gravitational effects that
are out there, these things that hold galaxies together even

(09:34):
though they're spinning and change the whole shape and structure
of the universe. That means that there's some gravity out
there and we can't see the mass that's creating that gravity.
And so that's what dark matter is. It's really a
description of the missing mass, the mass necessary to create
the gravity that we do see. So it's perfectly natural
to think that dark matter does have mass, and that's

(09:55):
why it's such a great idea to think, oh, maybe
we could talk to dark matter through the Higgs boson,
because that gives some particles mass, right, And again I
guess interacting with gravity is different than interacting with the
Higgs field, right, It's not necessarily the same thing. It's
not like inertial mass is not the same thing. It's
gravitational mass, that's right, And there are different ways to

(10:16):
get inertial mass. So there's a few things to disentangle.
Their Gravitational mass means you're creating gravity, like I have mass,
and you have mass, and the Earth has mass and
the Sun has mass. So we each have our own
gravitational field or we bend space, which changes the way
the things move around us. So that's the force of gravity.

(10:36):
It means that you have gravitas. It means you're so
important you have an impact on the universe, right, you're
not insignificant. So that's one concept that's like, you know,
mass as a sort of the charge of gravity. How
strong is your gravitational force will? It depends on your mass.
Then there's this other concept of mass that we just
talked about recently, which is this inertial mass, which is

(10:58):
how much force does it take to at you moving.
That's the mass that appears in F equals M A
relates force and acceleration. You have a really big mass
that takes a big force to accelerate you. That's why,
for example, even though you have the same gravitational force
on the Earth as the Earth does on you, you
feel the Earth's gravity much more strongly because your mass

(11:19):
is smaller, so you have a larger acceleration for the
same force. So inertial mass is this separate concept from
gravitational mass. Although numerically everything seems to have exactly the
same gravitational and inertial masses, like, we've never measured any discrepancy, right, Yeah,
We've talked about that kind of mystery in an early
episode about you know, you have inertial mass and you

(11:40):
have your gravitational mass, and they seem to be exactly
the same, but theoretically and mathematically they don't have to
be the same. That's right. The mass that appears in
the gravitation formula M doesn't have to be the same
mass as the one that appears in F equals M A.
But we measure them and they are exactly the same.
And that's a whole other fascinating puzzle. We actually talked

(12:01):
about that in our fun book, which came about a
few years ago. That amazing puzzle. I just think I
have no idea what we wrote Danniel in our book,
We have no idea. Well that you should read it
some time. It's pretty funny. It's partially resolved by general relativity,
but it's still a really deep interesting question in physics.
But it's also relevant to today's question about whether or

(12:22):
not dark matter talks to the Higgs boson, whether you
can interact with dark matter using the Higgs boson right,
Because I guess, is it possible for something to have
a gravitational mass but not inertial mass? Is that even possible?
We've never seen that happen, and general relativity suggests that
it's probably not possible. There's some weird little threads there
to think about, like photons have energy but no mass,

(12:46):
and general relativity tells us that space curves in response
to energy density, not necessarily mass. But usually those two
things are identical, like for every particle, for every object,
the inertial mass and the gravitational matter us are one
and the same, so we just think of it as
the mass. But I guess maybe the point is that
we know dark matter has gravitational mass because that's how

(13:09):
we see it, and we also know it that has
inertial mass, because otherwise it would be zipping around. That's right.
We think we know something about the speed of dark matter.
We talked on the program before about how if dark
matter was really really low mass, but it was very
very light, then it would move really fast and that
would change the structure of the universe. The universe would
be smoother. We think dark matter is slow moving and cold,

(13:31):
and that's why we got the structure that we have
today that amplified all sorts of little quantum fluctuations in
the early universe to be the weird, amazing, beautiful structures
in today's universe. So I guess that the point is
that we know for sure then the dark matter interacts
with the Higgs because it has inertial mass. Not quite.
We know that it has inertial mass, but there are
other ways to get inertial mass what not through the Higgs,

(13:55):
not through the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is a
special trick that we use to get mass to all
the particles that we know quarks and leptons, etcetera. And
we had to use that trick because all these particles
interact with the weak force. Quarks and leptons and even neutrinos,
all these particles interact with the weak force, and the
weak force is really weird. It doesn't left particles just

(14:18):
have a mass that breaks like a special symmetry, a
property of the weak force that it likes to protect.
And so that's why the Higgs boson is such a
clever idea. It's not just like, hey, here's a field.
It's a special mathematical trick that lets you interact with
these particles in a way that so that they move
like they had mass without actually giving them any mass,

(14:40):
like deep down. So the Higgs is this way you
can give particles mass if they have weak interactions. What
because every other particle that we know about has weak interactions.
Every matter particle that we know about has weak interactions,
that's right, So it falls under this weak symmetry. And
so the Higgs was created. Who break this symmetry. We

(15:01):
call it the particle that breaks electro weak symmetry. So
every particle that feels the weak force, this weakest of
forces that we know about that's mediated by those W
and Z particles, needs the Higgs boson in order to
give it mass, because without the Higgs boson, they wouldn't
have mass. If there was no Higgs boson, they wouldn't
have mass. And if the Higgs Boson field collapsed, all

(15:23):
those particles their masses would go to zero. We talked
about how the Higgs boson could destroy the universe if
the field collapsed to some lower value. So, yeah, they
get mass because the energy in the Higgs Boson field. Okay,
But then I guess the caveat is then if something
doesn't feel the weak force, it doesn't need the Higgs field.
That's right. If something doesn't feel the weak force, it
can't talk to the Higgs boson, and it doesn't even

(15:45):
need the Higgs boson. It could just have a mass.
You could just put it in there. You can just
have inertial mass. You can just have inherent inertial mass.
That's right. And remember one time we talked about like
what is the real mass of the electron and we
talked about it in the context of renormal station that
the electron itself has no mass, but we add up
mass to the electron through these interactions from the Higgs boson.

(16:07):
It's not like a core property of the electron itself.
It's like the electron when you consider it with all
of its like quantum fluctuations and interactions with the Higgs boson.
But these other particles, dark matter particles could just have
a mass inherent to that. What I feel like, you
just took the Higgs field down and not like I
thought it was like super fundamental to the universe. But really,

(16:29):
when we say that the Higgs field give its particles mass,
you really just have to say all the particles that
we've know about so far, yeah, yeah, like you have
to count it. Right. It gives mass to all the
particles that feel the weak force, but there might be
particles that don't. That's right, and we think that dark
matter doesn't feel the weak force because if it did,
we would have seen it already. We have really sensitive

(16:50):
detectors looking for dark matter interacting with normal matter, and
if dark matter could feel the z for example, if
you could use the z boson to talk to protons,
then we think we would have seen that already. We've
been running those experiments for decades. So we think that
dark matter does not feel the weak force, or we
would have seen it, and so very likely it gets
its mass in some way other than the Higgs boson. Now,

(17:12):
there's always some crazy theory out there, there variations of
supersymmetry that have loopholes that allow the dark matter to
talk to the Higgs boson, or sometimes these theories have
a special extra higgs boson, a dark higgs boson that
gives mass to the dark matter particles. Yea, the dark
higgs boson. Wow, that is a plot twist for a

(17:34):
telenovella I've I've ever heard, or the name of the
band in the Transformers movie. We're dark higgs Bosons. We're
to rock you out and give you mass. You don't
feel the weak force, that's right. So we don't know.
We don't think that the Higgs boson gives mass to
dark matter particles, because otherwise it probably would mean that

(17:56):
dark matter particles feel the weak force, and we're pretty
sure that's not true. But you know, we're not sure
about anything when it comes to dark matter. Oh man,
I feel like nine year old Dylan just took down
the Higgs field good job, Dylan, A good job Daling.
What an awesome question. You just destroyed the Higgs field
and it made it seem inadequate for our universe. Yeah,

(18:17):
it's a great question. And unfortunately, you know, asking whether
or not you could discover dark matter through the Higgs
boson it's really just the same thing as asking whether
dark matter feels the weak force, and the answer to
that it's probably not, probably not, but we don't know,
So stay tuned. That's right, and hey, build an awesome
dark matter detector out of your legos, Dylan and prove
us wrong. Yeah, or or wait a few years and

(18:39):
and then actually make the discovery, build your own particle collider.
I foresee. Great, thanks for Dylon, keep at it doing.
All right, Well, that's an awesome question and in a
mind blowing answer, And so let's get to some of
these other great questions about black holes and ticonic plates.
But first let's take a quick break, all right, Daniel,

(19:10):
you and an annual just blew my mind about the
Higgs field in the first twenty minutes of this. So
let's get to some of these other amazing questions. The
next question is from John from Norway and he has
a question about articles and black holes. Hi guys, John
from postion norwhere listening to one of your episodes about
black holes. You talked about how on the density of

(19:32):
energy is high enough in a volume of space a
black hole is formed. Then why is it that a
point particle that has some energy to it, like an electron,
does not turn into a black hole. It has energy
that is concentrated into a point, so it should have
infinitely dense energy concentration. What time I missing here? Please explain?

(19:54):
All right, Thank you, John, awesome question. The question is
can you make a black hole with the thing? Go particle?
Because I guess particles are point masses, so technically they
have infinite density. So does that mean that every particle
is a black hole? I'm as confused as John here. Yeah,
it's a great question. It's basically like, why isn't every

(20:15):
electron a black hole? We're all black holes? Is that
what we're saying? Everything is a black hole? Everything that
feels a week forced me. I feel like you have
to add caveats now all over the place. I love
this question, and it's this sort of a genre of
questions here we get, which is like why isn't X
a black hole? You know, like, why didn't the Big
Bang just turn into a black hole? Why wasn't the
early universe filled with black holes? Or how do we

(20:38):
know there aren't black holes out there in the atmosphere.
Somebody asked me, what's the smallest possible black hole that
could be hiding in my basement? Did you answer, because
there probably is a minimum kidding black hole in their basement?
I did answer. I did answer. Yeah, you could have
a black hole the size of a grain of sand

(20:58):
and you wouldn't even really notice it. Oh wow, And
it wouldn't grow or would it just evaporate right away? Yeah,
it would grow, and so then you would eventually notice it.
But you know, until then, while it's small and tiny,
you wouldn't notice it. So there's fodder for a horror
movie right there. For a few milliseconds, you you could
be unaware of a black hole before you you get
sucked into it. And that's right, Your life and fantasy

(21:19):
could continue unaltered for a few more moments before it
comes crashing down, all right. So the question is, if
particles are point masses, don't they have infinite density? And
if they do, shouldn't they be sort of a black
hole in and of themselves. What's the answer, Daniel. The
answer is that John has poked a really really good
hole in two of our really important theories, general relativity

(21:41):
and quantum mechanics. Mostly quantum mechanics though. And he's right
that if you applied what we said before on the podcast,
that we treat particles as point masses, and you turn
around and use general relativity on that and says, well,
a point mass has infinite density and so it should
be a black hole, then yes, all particles would be
black holes. But they aren't. And so what that tells

(22:04):
us is that there's a problem in those theories. And
you know, you can't just always take these theories and
apply them to crazy extreme situations because we don't think
they hold up in every single circumstance. He's poked a
whole into our theories. He's shine the light on a
part of the theory that we know already we don't
understand very well, which is what happens in really strong

(22:26):
gravity situations for quantum objects, because we just don't have
a theory that describes gravity on a quantum scale. We
know how to describe gravity for really big stuff, even
for really heavy stuff, even for really massive stuff, but
for really small stuff on the quantum scale, we don't
know how to combine gravity with quantum mechanics and answer

(22:46):
these questions. We just don't even really have a theory
that makes predictions, right, And it's mostly about scale, right,
Like when you get down to the quantum levels, scales
like of a single particle, then you know, our theories
about gravity that work on like a galactic scale don't
necessarily work at those small scales, that's right. And because
gravity is so weak, it's very hard to test, like

(23:09):
how do you do experiments that test the gravitational pull
between two protons? Right? The gravity between two protons is
really tiny because protons way almost nothing, have almost zero mass,
and they have all these other forces that are always
getting in the way. So it's very difficult to probe
gravity on the quantum scale. I guess the question is
more like, you know, if you have a particle and

(23:29):
it's a point particle and I get really really close
to it, at some point, do I get sucked into it?
Kind of like is there a black hole at the
center of every single particle out there? I don't think
that there's a black hole the center of every single
particle out there. It would really change the behavior of
those particles. But I think it is interesting to think
about the extreme of these theories, Like when we talk

(23:50):
about these particles as point particles, do we really mean
physically that there's a dot there infinite density? Of course
not right, it's an approximation. We make it our theories
because it's convenient. We don't think that there's an actual
dot of infinite density there. We talked about on the
podcast before, like how small is a particle? What does
the size of a particle even mean? And we don't

(24:12):
even really have a good answer for that, Like what
do you mean the size of the particle? Is it
the width of the quantum wave that describes where it is?
Is it where it pushes back on things? You know,
where it's forcing your probe back? And so there isn't
really even from like philosophically speaking, a great definition for
the size of a particle. So you can't actually talk

(24:32):
about the density of it because you need volume to
talk about density. Yeah, exactly, so, but I guess you
know from a distance, like if we're talking on a
large scale you do treat them as point particles in
the math and in the just practically speaking, but once
you get down to that small level, then it gets fuzzy. Yeah,
we treat them as point particles because it doesn't really matter,

(24:52):
doesn't change any of the calculations. It's just sort of convenient.
But that's because we're not doing calculations where it makes
a difference. And then when it does make a diference,
when you're getting really really close, then we can't treat
them as point particles anymore. And then it gets really fuzzy,
and it depends exactly on the question you're asking, like
are you poking at this electron with a photon or
with the w moson or with the z boson or

(25:13):
with the Higgs boson. You'll get a different sort of
response from it based on how you're poking it. So
there's not like a concept of the electrons size itself.
So that's one thing is like the limitation of our
understanding of these things as point particles or not. So Unfortunately,
we talked about them as point particles even though you
know physically that doesn't make any sense. But we also

(25:34):
don't have a better way to think about Well, maybe
a good way to approach this question is to, like,
let's ignore quantum mechanics for a second. You know, like
let's say let's just see plantum mechanics doesn't exist, and
we still lived in a classical world and there are
point particles like an electron is really is a point
of with a certain mask to it. Wouldn't there be

(25:55):
a black hole sort of at some point as you
get closer to that point. Yes, if you could isolate
mass in a very very small region and we remove
quantum mechanics from the universe, then general relativity tells us
that that would be a black hole. Like in general relativity,
there is no minimum mass for a black hole. A
black hole can have any arbitrary mass down to like

(26:18):
really infinitesimal values. There's no minimum in general relativity. Yeah,
Like if you could take the mass of a single
electron or a proton or a court and put it
in a point, then it would form a black hole.
It would be a black hole. Yes, And if your
universe was nothing but point particles with masses, then it
would be nothing but black holes. Man, all black holes
all the time. Yeah, Or think about it the other way,

(26:41):
that means quantum mechanics is saving us and just being
a universal black holes, right, all right, So then if
quantum mechanics didn't exist, every particle, every point mass would
be a black hole like you know, electron, if you
get close enough down next to it at some point
you would see a little event horizon exactly. But then

(27:02):
now let's put back in quantum mechanics. And the problem
is that, I like how you just like, you know,
you're flipping the quantum mechanics knob on the universe here.
We're just like you're just like willy nilly, like turning
things on and off and expecting us to make sense
of it. What happens if I do this? What happens
if I do that? Don't do anything more rocking your
brain here, You're gonna break things, man. And I just

(27:25):
walk into the control room at the Universe stud flipping
and you're like, what exactly what if our universe really
is a simulation and you got to visit it one day,
would you just be flipping these switches just to see
what happens. Let's see what happens. Let's answer John's question
from Norway, and we'll find out. We'll just see what happens,
oops destroyed the universe. I guess that's the answer. I
guess what I mean. It's like, if you suddenly turn

(27:47):
on quantum mechanics, then you wouldn't be able to see
that event horizon around that electron, because that event horizon
would be sort of within the fuzziness that quantum mechanics introduces, exactly.
So you turn quantum mechanics back on, and then you
can't allow the electron to be a point particle anymore,
because quantum mechanics says you can't know the location of

(28:08):
a bunch of energy that precisely. It is an inherent
fuzziness there. So if you replace the point particle with
the quantum mechanical blob that has some uncertainty in its
location um, and we take sort of the size of
that distribution to be the Compton wavelength of the object, right,
We just sort of like proportional to the width of

(28:28):
its wave function, the thing that tells you where to
find it. It's not a great definition for the size
of the object, but it's it's one that we can use,
and a lot of times in physics we don't have
great answers. We just use the best one that we
can find, and we just remember that there's like a
lot of asterisks associated with it, like this is probably,
you know, not correct, but it's also less wrong than

(28:49):
anything else we can imagine. That's what we aim for
in this podcast. Let's be less wrong than all the
other podcasts. Well, you know, John is asking his personal
curiosity question about the unif ears, And when you're the
first human to like adventure into intellectual territory, you don't
always have the tools you need to really get an answer,
so you just like do the best you can. You say, well,

(29:09):
let's see what happens if we bang on it with
this and try to answer it with this, do we
get a reasonable answer? And if not, does it inspire
something better? And so this is the way you push
forward on human knowledge, Right, you give the least wrong
answer you can. Yeah, So I guess the the answer
then is that the roould be a meaning black hole
around every particle. But quantum mechanics, like the blobbiness, the
fuzziness of quantum mechanics kind of smushes that out, like

(29:32):
it's the fuzziness is bigger than where you would find
the black hole around every particle. Yeah, and they actually
converge in a really interesting way because the size of
the black hole is dependent on the mass of the particle.
So it gets bigger as a particle gets more massive,
but then this wavelength of the particle gets smaller as
it gets more massive. So you can set them equal

(29:53):
to find the minimum mass of a black hole generated
by a quantum object. So we said early or if
no quantum mechanics, there is no minimum. Once you turn
quantum mechanics on, you get a minimum mass for a
black hole. Interesting meaning like, if I have a massive
enough particle, it would are you saying it would make
a black hole? I'm massive enough particle, Yes, but this

(30:14):
minimum mass is twenty one micrograms, which is like much
much heavier than any particle we've ever seen. You know, Electrons,
for example, are like ten to the mine is twenty
four ms. But here we're talking micrograms, like the massive
grain of salt. Oh. I see, so if there was
a particle with the mass of a grain of salt,

(30:36):
it would be a black hole. Yes, salt tents are
all black holes. You heard it here first, as in,
don't put salt on your food, you'll turn into a
black hole. That's right. Every time you shake that salt canister,
you're pouring black holes into your food. Yeah, that's why
it salt is salty. Yeah, that's what black holes taste like. Yeah, exactly,

(30:58):
We've answered the ancient philosophical question what does the black
hole taste like? And why does salt taste salty? Also,
all at one, that's right, that's right. That's the black
hole flavor theorem, invented by Jorge Chamont and John from Norway.
We're gonna share the credit, right all right? So um, okay,
So I guess yester then is a particle can be

(31:19):
a black hole, but it would have to be super heavy.
That's right. And all of this is probably wrong because
we just don't have a quantum theory of gravity here.
What we're doing is reusing two theories, general relativity and
quantum mechanics, both of which we know fail in this regime,
and we're trying to like combine them in an awkward
way and use both of them to kind of agree

(31:40):
on a black hole particle mass. So this is probably wrong,
but it's the best answer we can give today. Right,
we need to throw some salt over our shoulder and
just too, wishes luck. Yes, and that's actually the other
caveat which is it might be possible to make black
holes out of electrons or protons. The key thing there
is not just to increase mass up to like a

(32:01):
grain of salt, but to increase the energy, because remember,
gravity is in response to energy density, not just mass.
And so that's what we do with the Large Hadron collider,
for example, we smash protons together at very high energy,
and that's why we think there's a possibility that we
could one day create a mini black hole out of
particles because we've used the energy of the proton to

(32:23):
like ramp it up to black holes. Did you just
admit that you're trying to make black holes the Large
Hadron Collider? I am a d P hoping we make
black holes to the large Yes, a d That would
be fascinating. We would get to study them. They are
also a hundred percent safe. Wow. All right, well, I
guess that answer is John's question. The answer is, yes,

(32:45):
you can make a particle be a black hole, but
it's almost unrealistically heavy or unrealistically fast or what are
we saying, or you have to elbow your way into
the universe. Control room and turn off quantumic are flipping
switches not recommended, by the way. Well, if it ever happens,

(33:06):
I'll bring you along, Daniel, and you can restrain me. No,
I'm the one who likes to press big red buttons.
Like every time I'm in the control room with the
LHC is that big red button and I'm just like
desperate to touch it and push it and feel the click.
All right, well let's get into our last question, which
is about tectonic plates. But first let's take a quick break.

(33:39):
Al Right. I know, I'm not sure my mind can
handle anymore mind blowing. Here we've discovered that the Higgs
boson may not interact with dark matter, and that parkles
can be black holes. What else we have here today? Well,
let's bring it back down to Earth. Here's a question
from Canada. Hello, Daniel and Horrey. My name is Hard Jock.
I'm from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and my question for you

(34:02):
is what would happen to life on Earth and the
landscape of the Earth if the Earth was no longer
tectonically active. I look forward to your answer. Thank you,
awesome question, Thank you, her dread. It's a tricky question.
She's saying, what would happen to the Earth and to
us and to life on it if suddenly we didn't
have tectonic activity in our mantle, in the in the

(34:26):
Earth's crust. Do you think she's worried about an earthquake
and hoping tectonic stop, or she's like writing a science
fiction novel in which the Earth freezes. No, but it's
a fun question. And I like these what if questions
because they make us think about how fragile our existence is.
We're dependent on so many different processes happening in exactly
the right way all the time for life to continue

(34:47):
as we know it. So it's fun to imagine, like
how life would be different if just one of those
things went away. So again, maybe to refresh people, what
does the tectonic activity? What does tectonic mean for us?
It means essentially that the Earth is still in motion.
It's not just a frozen ball of rock. But we're
sitting on top of the crust, which is sitting on
top of essentially liquid rock, and so these big pieces

(35:09):
of land that we still sit on, that we stand on,
are floating around and and changing. You know, if you
look back at the history of the Earth over millions
of years. You can see the continents moving like floating,
as if there were, you know, on a pool of
hot lava. We're not on solid ground, yeah, we are
not in solid ground. In fact, most of the Earth
is molten, right, and there's activity down there. There's all

(35:30):
sorts of stuff swirling around. And that's good because it
means that we have things like magnetic field that we
think are generated by the motion of all that hot
swirling metal inside the Earth, and so the Earth is
not just a frozen cold ball. It's like it's hot
and it's active and this stuff going on down there.
And we talked about how if because we have a

(35:51):
magnetic field, we have kind of a shield against cosmic
rays which would strip our atmosphere and basically kill us
right pretty quickly. Yes, space is filled with death bullets
from the Sun, and if you don't have great shielding,
then you get cancer and diet really quick. And the
Earth has an awesome literal force field, which is its
magnetic field, because these particles are charged, and charged particles

(36:14):
bend when they hit a magnetic field and so basically
just deflects most of this space radiation, which is good
because otherwise we'd all get cancer made all right, So
then that's what tectonic means. It means that, you know,
the plates of the Earth's cross are still moving around
kind of a molten core. And so the question is
what would happen if that stopped? Like I guess, first

(36:35):
of all, what would cause it to stop? Yeah, it
would be pretty hard to stop. Like if you are
a cartoon villain and you want to stop you know,
the motion of the Earth. That would be pretty difficult
because it's at an enormous amount of energy. How much
energy is stored in like a cubic mile of liquid
iron A lot, right, but we have a lot more

(36:55):
than one cubic mile of liquid iron. So it's just
an incredibly vast amount of energy. Oh, I see, you
were saying a lot of the tectonics come from just
having stored energy inside of the Earth. It's not you know,
like if the Earth got cooler and cold and frozen,
wouldn't we still have some motion? Or would we will

(37:16):
we then turn into a solid ball of rock. Now
that is the future of the Earth. We think that
in a billion or two years, the Earth will cool
and it's internals will stop moving as much, and our
magnetic field will dim and our tectonics will stop. And
that's in fact what happened to Mars. Mars is smaller
than the Earth, and so it cooled faster, and so

(37:38):
we think that it's essentially frozen on the inside, and
it's magnetic field, which it once had is gone, and
it has no more plate tectonics. So plate tectonics are
sort of like a feature of a younger planet. It
tells us that we're still like hot, we're still young,
and yes, exactly, hot and flowing. We're still hot. And
so one question ask is like, what happened ends when

(38:00):
play tectonic stoff? The other one is like, how does
that happen? What makes it happen? And to make it happen,
you have to basically cool the Earth, which means waiting
a billion and a half years, or developing some awesome
technology that sucks all the heat out of the center
of the Earth, or maybe to prevent it, we could
inject energy into the earth. Yes, exactly, we could keep
the youth. We could inject botox effectively into the Earth

(38:23):
and keep it young and prevent those you know, tectonic wrinkles,
you know. The tectonic wrinkles essentially are a way that
the Earth gives off some of this energy, burns some
of this energy. And so if you like try to
freeze the crust of the Earth without cooling it in
the inside, and that would like build up somehow, and
then where would that heat all go, and so that

(38:43):
could be pretty devastating. I see, well, I thought that
a lot of like the moltenness and the meltiness and
the heat and the energy inside the Earth was due
to gravity and like the pressure of all this rock,
you know, being compressed down there at the center. So
are you saying that we we could freeze that or
maybe are you saying that it wouldn't be enough for
just from gravitational pressure to keep the magnetic field going. Yeah,

(39:06):
it's not enough. Eventually we will cool Like you're right,
a lot of it comes from gravitational pressure. There's also
a little bit of heat that comes from vision, just
like heavy stuff in the center of the Earth decaying
and giving off energy. But you know, we're not dense
enough to cause fusion life happens in the sun to
stay hot and so over a long time, eventually we
will cool. Like gravity compressed the Earth to a certain density,

(39:30):
but you know, the Earth pushes it back. It has
a certain rigidity to it, and so we will not
gravitationally collapse to anything more dense. It'll just eventually cool
and become, you know, much colder. All right, So I
guess then the answer to the question what would happen
if tectonics stop? The answer is nothing good. We we
get fried by the sun mcnetic field collapses. We get

(39:53):
fried by the Sun, but it's unlikely to happen for
another one and a half billion years. Yeah, and I
wouldn't say nothing good. I mean, living here in southern
California where we're always thinking about earthquakes, there is one
upside to freezing the Earth is that, hey, no more earthquakes. Right,
earthquakes are caused by tectonic activity. We get fried, but
we wouldn't have to worry. We wouldn't have to get

(40:14):
earthquake insurance, is what you're saying. That's right. And this
way we get fried from above instead of from below.
Because if there's no tectonic activity in the Earth is cold,
that means also no volcanoes, right, So no like devastating
lava flows and super volcanoes. You've seen that movie where
a super volcano comes up from underneath Los Angeles and
basically kills everybody but the good looking actors. Wow, is

(40:36):
that the one with the mega shark in it or
that swims through magna? I want to see that one.
I think there's a Robomega shark too, I believe. I mean,
I wouldn't know. I don't watch these kinds of movies,
but yeah, and it transforms into an electric guitar, right,
so that on the good side, you would have no
more earthquakes and you would have normal volcanoes. But yeah,

(40:58):
you would also you would have no more athetic field
and then you would have no more mountains because remember
that mountains like the Himalayas, these are caused by tectonic
plates ramming into each other and forcing dirt up and
up and up, and then mountains are sort of worn
down by rain and wind and all that stuff. And
so if you have no more tectonic activity, you don't

(41:19):
have any fresh mountains. Wait, are you saying that we're
still making mountains today? The Earth is still like making
fresh mountains? Yeah, I think the Himalayas get higher every
year because India is basically ramming into the rest of
Asia and causing the Himalayas, and so that's still going on.
A lot of mountains are getting softer and softer because
you know that tectonic activity has ceased for whatever reason,

(41:40):
and then the rain wears them down. But yeah, there's
still some fresh, sharp mountains out there. Well that's the
reason I haven't climbed Mount Everest, to be honest, because
it's just gonna get taller. You're waiting for it to
be waiting for the peak to peak. Yeah, that's right,
because if you climb it this year, then next year
comes somebody say, well, you didn't climb the real not everything.

(42:01):
You missed a centimeter. I want to I want to
climate a peak peakness. Okay, all right, I'll sign you
up to climate everything about two million years when point
seven billion years, I guess that would be all right. Well,
thank you for Dran, and thank you to everyone who
submitted a question. We had tons of questions, right Daniel,
We do, and we love them and we answer every email. So,

(42:22):
if you have personal curiosity about the university, if this
is something that you were just dying to know, the
answer to then, hey, become a scientist or just email us.
That's probably easier. And if you're a year old alien,
we definitely want to hear from you because we have questions.
That's right, how did you stay so young? And lava
botox obviously, Daniel answer that's right. All right, Well, thanks

(42:45):
for joining us, see you next time. Thanks for listening,
and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is
a production I Heart Radio. For more podcast for my
Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio Apple Apple Podcasts,

(43:06):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
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