October 21, 2025 • 44 mins
Daniel and Kelly answer listener questions about how pinworms know it's nighttime, how quarks contribute to mass, and why eating too many carrots makes your skin yellow.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey everyone, Daniel here with a quick note that my
new book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? Is coming out soon
November fourth, and I'd love if you considered pre ordering it.
The book imagines the arrival of aliens and what it
would be like to try to make mental contact and
download their understanding of the universe. Do we have Physics
in common with the Aliens? If you like how the
podcast asks deep physics questions and dabbles in philosophy, you'll
(00:27):
enjoy the book, which also features cute cartoons of aliens
from my friend Andy Warner. Find it anywhere or check
out the book website www dot Alienspeakphysics dot com. Okay,
on to today's episode.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
How do the pinworms know that it's night when they
lurk in a place with so little light?
Speaker 1 (00:54):
If I upgraded my quirks to top quark class, what
I automatically get we had a bigger mass.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
If you eat certain foods, your skin will change you.
Why does that happen? Do we have any clue?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Whatever questions keep you up at night, and Daniel and
Kelly's answer will make it all right.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I've never
had pinworms.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Hi. I'm Kelly, I'm a biologist, and I'm not sure
Daniel can be sure that he's never had pinworms.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Welcome to the episode where we dig deep into Daniel's condition.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
All right, So, Daniel, my question for you today is
what was the most surprising thing about parenting?
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Wow? Great question. I think one of the most surprising
things about parenting for me was how the gross quickly
becomes monotonous and every day you like wiping somebody else's
feces off of your hands or face, it's just like,
you know, it's just another Tuesday.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yep. Oh, I totally agree. The first time my daughter,
like projectile pooped and it was on the wall and
on me, I was like, oh my gosh, this is
so gross. And then by like the fifth time, I
was like, I got some more laundry to do today,
and it was like it was like nothing whatever.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Yeah, And when you have visitors and they see the
inside of your actual day to day routine and they're like, whoa,
it gives you a taste for like how far you've
drifted from societal norms.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
But you pretty quickly get back to normal expectations. You know,
when your kids get past the age where you have
to wipe your butt, you very quickly return to I
would prefer to not wipe people's butts if I could
avoid it, Although I think taking care of each other
is one of the best things that humans can do.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
I agree, But if my sixteen year old pooped on me,
it would be a pretty big memory, and I can't
remember all the time she did it when she was young.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Right, yeah, things change, things change exactly.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
It would stand out now, that's right, that's right. How
about you? What is one of your most surprising discoveries
about parenting?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
So it also has to do with hygiene, and it's
how far our species has come with hygiene, because there's
so many things that kids don't do naturally that you
would expect they would want to do naturally, like wash
their hands, like wash their hands or take a shower.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
But doctors weren't washing their hands until like one hundred
and fifty years ago.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I know. No culture has played such a huge role
in keeping us healthy, and it's amazing and it really
hit home for me when I was a parent. But
I think that one of the things that surprised me
in particular is the number of times I've had to
say the phrase get your hand out of your butt,
and which leads us into question one, because kids sticking
(03:54):
their hands in their butts is how they transmit pinworms
and why this is probably the most common worm infection
in the United States.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
All right, so get ready to get itchy everyone.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
That's right. So we have an amazing Discord community, and
you can join us by going to Danielandkelly dot org
and clicking on the link to our Discord channel. And
Julian on Discord had this question that he wanted to
share with us, and let.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Me add another shout out to our Discord community. If
you want to reach us, you can write us questions
at questions at Daniel and Kelly dot org. But the
Discord community is also a lot of fun. You can
ask your questions there. There's lots of folks chatting and discussing,
sharing recent articles, talking about science. If you can't get
enough Daniel and Kelly and science, come join us on
(04:39):
Discord and be part of the inner synctum.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
And I'd just like to shout out to our moderators,
who are the best moderators on the whole entire internet.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
I'm sure, Oh, yes, absolutely, they win all the awards
they do.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Hey, Daniel and Kelly, this is Julian in Houston. As
the parent of a small child. I've had pinworms on
my mind a bit in the past couple of years,
and I think I heard on a previous episode you
mentioned the pinworms tend to come out at night to
lay their eggs and cause itchymut. So my question is,
how do pinworms know it's nighttime to come out and
cause ITCHI mut Thanks so much and I look forward
(05:12):
to hearing the answer.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
So Kelly, tell us what is a pinworm?
Speaker 2 (05:18):
A pinworm is a little worm. When it's an adult,
it's about the size of a staple, so they're tiny.
About forty million people in the United States probably have
pinworm right now, and a billion people worldwide. I think
I said a moment ago that pinworms are the most
common worm infection that's in the US, where we don't
have a lot of other kinds of worm infections. They're
very common in children, and they're also kind of common
(05:40):
in people in long term care facilities.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
All right, so let's estimate what fraction of our audience
have pinworms right now as they're listening to this. We're
talking forty million people. That's like fifteen percent of the US.
Is it not evenly distributed because you're saying it's like
children and old folks homes.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah, So if you have children and they are let's
say preschool or elementary school age, there's a pretty good
chance they have or have had pinworms, and there's a
decent chance they gave it to you, although it does
seem like adults become more resistant, and so even if
your kids have it, you're not definitely going to get it.
But doctors will often prescribe medication to an entire family
(06:21):
if anyone in it gets the parasites, because it is
pretty pretty easy to transmit.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
So maybe like one in ten of our listeners right
now have pinworms. Maybe the pinworms are listening to this episode.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
So if I have to remember our demographics from the
last time we did a survey, we have a lot
of men over fifty or sixty and they are highly
unlikely to have pinworms, And so I don't know about
one in ten. It depends on how many of our
current listeners have young kids. But there's a good chance
that you have either had it at some point in
your life or if you have kids, you have it now.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
All right, So tell us what do these guys look like.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
So they're in kind of nematodes. So these are cylindrical worms.
They have no segments, so don't think about an earth work.
Think about just kind of like a hard outer case
and a very tiny worm. They kind of come to
an end, which is why they're called pinworms. As I
mentioned before, they're like the size of a staple when
they're adults. Oh, I see, and you might remember that
a few months ago we talked about geo helmets, or
(07:15):
we call them the dirt worms. These are nematods that
you find in the dirt. This is another kind of nematode,
so they're kind of related to the dirt worms we
were talking about earlier.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
So you're using this phrase nematod, and it sounds like
it describes a category of worm. What is a nematod.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Nematoda is a whole phylum of worms that have this
like hard outer cuticle. Some of them live in the soil,
some of them are commensal with plants, and some of
them are parasitic.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Yeah, if I had to guess, if somebody just asked
me what a nematoad was, it sounds to me like
some sort of miniature Japanese frog. That's great, like it
might be served in a weird sushi or something very
high end sushi.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
I mean, that's completely wrong. That is very cute, very cute.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
So I'm imagining that the life style with these guys
is not very cute. So tell us about it, and
everyone finish that snack you're having before you.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Listen to this, or go wash your hands. So the
infection route is what's called fecal oral or poop to mouth.
Good start.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
That's an actual phrase people use.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
I've heard it said in my community more than once.
I don't know if it shows up in any textbooks, but.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Poop mouth, all right, So tell us about it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
The idea here is that you accidentally eat the eggs.
So you accidentally consume an egg, it hatches in your
body and when it gets to the intestine, the males
and the females will find each other and they'll mate,
and then the males die.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Inside you instant having a party inside you. Oh my gosh,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
You might not be dating. But the worms inside you
might be so someone's find in love in that body
of you are So.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
That's good news.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
I guess.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I don't know, all right. So they start out as eggs,
you end up in your mouth. We'll get into that
in a minute, I imagine. Yep, they hatch, they mate
inside you, and they have little babies. Oh no, eggs,
I guess.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Well, So the female starts producing eggs. The male, after
reproducing dies and gets digested, and so you'll never see
the male.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
The female her eggs. She starts making eggs. They start
maturing a little bit inside of her. Then she moves
down farther into your intestine, and when she is ready
to lay those eggs at night, she will come out.
She will crawl out of your anis.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
One's anis. Excuse me, one's anis?
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Crawl out of one's anis. And on the CDC website
it cracks me up because it says anis and then
in parentheses butthole just in case you are sure as
so crawls out your butthole. And the female needs oxygen
to stimulate the release of eggs, and apparently in some
cases she has what's called a prolapsed uterus, which essentially
(10:01):
just means that her uterus sort of comes out of
her body and expels the eggs. And I guess in
some cases they've observed the eggs going airborne. This expulsion
happens so violently.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
This is much less cute than miniature Japanese frogs. I
vote for miniature Japanese frogs. We should have that instead.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Well, you know you don't.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Get to juice, all right, But I have an actual
sides question. Okay, how do the eggs survive in my
digestive track, Like you're dropping them in stomach acid and
they're surviving.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
So in this case, they're still inside of their mom.
She doesn't expel them until she gets outside of the body.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
But the eggs I've consumed, right, The mom herself was
born from an egg that I swallowed.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Right, yes, And your digestive juices helped it escape from
the egg that it was living in. Oh wow, And
then it's tough cuticle protects it from your.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Juices, all right. So she comes out the enis does
her little oxygen.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Dance, yes, and she will lay her eggs in the
perianal region, and then often she will die and we'll
talk about what happens. If she doesn't die as a symptom,
that's bad. But most of the time she dies. And
the eggs are sticky, and so they stick to your butt,
and they also kind of make you itch because now
(11:11):
there's like some sticky stuff in your butt, and that's
not great. And kids are likely to stick their hands
in their butts, which is what I learned as a mom,
is that they're always sticking their hands in their butts.
And so they stick their hands in their butts and
then they get it underneath their fingernails or on their fingers.
And then because they're scratched, because it's itch that's right,
that's right.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Don't make it sound so weird. They're itchy, so they're scratching.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Yeah, okay, they're itchy. So they're scratching. They're humans. And
then these grubby little creatures we call children go around
and touch things, you know. They put their fingers in
their mouths, they put their fingers in your mouth, they
put their fingers on the kitchen table, and in that way,
these sticky eggs get to lots of different places, and
when they get consumed, then you're back up at the start.
Of the cycle that we talked about, where your stomach
(11:56):
juices will open up the eggs and the process will
start again.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
So this is the story I use to convince my
kids to keep their fingers out of their mouth. So,
you know, kids like to chew on their nails or whatever.
And anytime I see my kids chewing on their nails,
I just make this wiggly fingers hand gesture and it
recalls for them the story I told them about pinworms,
and they go, oh, They're immediately grossed out by what
might be under their fingernails, and they stop. So this
(12:21):
has been an effective parenting technique.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Fantastic. Now you have your kids ever had pinworms that
you know of?
Speaker 1 (12:27):
I don't think I should be discussing my kids medical
history on the podcast. Let's keep it abstract.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Okay, have you ever had pinworms?
Speaker 4 (12:37):
No?
Speaker 1 (12:38):
I have not personally ever had pinworms to my knowledge.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Right, So that's the thing. Most who No, not to
my knowledge. But I've had periods of itchiness where I
wondered if maybe maybe I had it. Anytime there's a
little itch, I think good worms.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
And now everyone listening to this podcast is suddenly feel
and itchy.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
That's right right. I mean the females lay like ten
thousand eggs.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
Oh my god, how tiny are these? Can you not
see them?
Speaker 2 (13:04):
You can't see them. They're teeny tiny.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
You can't even see them when you lay ten thousand
of them, Like, it doesn't look like a little blob
or a smear or something.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
No, it's teeny tiny. I mean if you put it,
you don't have to put it under a super high
powered microscope to see it, but you do need a
microscope to see it. You know, they're kind of clear,
they're not very big. These eggs can survive for two
to three weeks, like out on a counter or something.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
But the way that you find out if someone is
infected is called the Scotch tape test.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
No, no, no, no, no, where at the Scotch tape? Kelly,
where around the black hole?
Speaker 2 (13:41):
The physicist that comes in with the black hole joke, Yes,
around the black hole. Yeah. So, so the females come
out at night to lay their eggs, which is going
to get us to the listener's question in just a minute.
But they lay their eggs at night in particular, and
so in the morning right when they wake up, before
they've you know, used the restroom or wiped or anything.
(14:02):
You take a piece of tape and you sort of
pat it around the perianal region and then you stick
it on a glass slide and you put it under
a microscope, so you can see those eggs. Sometimes you
even catch the mom because she's just sort of died
and she's still there, and so you'll see a worm
and those you can see. So sometimes you do know
that someone's infected because you find one of the mom
(14:22):
worms and you're like, oh, shoot, well we've got worms.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yikes, yikes.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
So then the listener asked, how does the mom know
that it's nighttime and she should come out and do
her dance? Why doesn't she come out during the day?
Speaker 2 (14:35):
All right, great question. I didn't know the answer, and
I asked the American Society of Parasitologists Facebook page, which
has like fifteen thousand followers, and I was like, all right, team,
how do we know that pinworms know that it's nighttime?
Because I looked through a bunch of medical books about
parasitic diseases and they all said pinworms come out at night.
(14:58):
Some of them would say that the pinworms were detecting
our drop in body temperature when we sleep. Oh, and
then others would say they might be detecting a drop
in body temperature, but they wouldn't say it definitively, And
none of them included an inline reference that I could
check for the study that showed that they're responding to
body temperature, because they could also be responding to like,
(15:21):
you know, you're not moving for a couple hours.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
So there's the question of how the worms know it's
night to come out. But how do we know they
only come out at night? And why do they only
come out at night? Do they come out at night
because that's the best time to lay the eggs while
we're asleep, or do they need the darker environment or what?
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yes, I think the answer at the end of the
day is we don't know. Because the American Society of Parasitologists,
when I asked them, the best answer I got was
from my friend Brandon, who said they have little watches
and that's how they know it's nighttime. I thank you, Brandon.
But anyway, as far as I could tell, we haven't
done studies to figure out one why it's nighttime, or
(16:01):
two to confirm that they're actually queuing in on temperature.
I think we suspect that that's the cue that they're using,
but we haven't ruled out other possible cues. And as
to why they do it at night, it could be
possible that while people are sleeping is a time when
you are less likely to have a bellel movement. And
this parasite doesn't pass in feces, it passes on fingers.
(16:22):
And the reason that we know that it happens at
night is because if you do the Scotch tape test
in the morning, you get a bunch of eggs. If
you do it at other times of day, you don't
get a bunch of eggs. And you would expect if
they were laying randomly throughout the day, the Scotch tape
test would give you eggs at just about any time
of day.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Fascinating. So Julian's question is really at the forefront of science.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Yeah, that's right. I encourage any young people out there
to search for this answer. I don't know what it
would take to answer this question. I think pinworms are
pretty host specific, and so like Ancherobius vermicularis, which is
the species that humans have, I don't know you might
be able to do it in some other mammalians species
do the experiments, But I don't know. Maybe you'd have
to heat people up and cool them down and see
(17:04):
what their worms were doing, or ask them to stay still,
or mess with some hormones that are associated with sleep
that maybe the pinworms are queuing in on. But anyway,
inquiring minds want to know, but we don't know the
answer as far as I can tell.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Well, if you've always been interested in black holes and
this podcast has peaked your interest in biology, maybe this
is the perfect crossover topic for you.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Could be all right, Julian, thank you so much for
this question and for joining us on discord. Did we
scratch your itch? Please don't give us worms?
Speaker 3 (17:36):
Hey, y'all, yes, you absolutely scratched my itch. I think
my favorite part was hearing about the violently explosive egg laying.
Also how small the eggs actually are, as I always
assume that you'd be able to see them in the
poop or something like that. I'm also glad to hear
Kelly give a we don't know answer, and I hope
Daniel Guest to drop on it depends soon. Thank you
(17:58):
so much for your answer, and my kid will one
day figure out the answer, though hopefully not by catching pinworms.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
All right, we're back and we're answering questions from listeners
because your curiosity literally powers science. If people didn't want
to know the answer to these questions, we would not
get to do it. So we want to hear what
you wonder about the universe. Right to us two questions
at Danielankelly dot org. Our next question comes from a
lawyer in the UK. Rebecca wants to know about top quarks.
Speaker 5 (18:47):
If I weigh fifty five kilograms on the basis that
my protons are upquarks and down cork, how much would
I weigh if my protons were made of top quarks?
And why is there a different if any All.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Right, this is a really fun question about what it
might be like to have top quarks in your life.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
I can imagine there being a new diet fad where
people say, oh, I've created a thing that turns your
bottom quarks to top quarks and that's how you're going
to lose ten pounds. So you better not say this works.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Yeah, I don't recommend no, no, definitely, no particle physics
inspired diets do not fall for that.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Oh, there's got to be some quantum something, something diet
out there that people have tried out.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Well, you can have quark, right, Quark is some German
yogurt like product, and that sounds kind of quantumy, but
it's not any more quantum than anything else. I mean, literally,
everything is quantum because we're all made of quantum particles. Right,
So your diet is already quantum.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
That's right, all right? Well, so mass is a concept
I understand biologically. Let's go ahead and understand it physically.
Where does mass come from?
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Yeah, so Rebecca wants to know what would happen if
you built your protons out of top quarks. We got
to understand mass for that. So your mass mostly comes
from the stuff you're made out of. Right, The mass
of Kelly is very close to the mass of all
of Kelly's parts added up. You are not much more
than the sum of your parts. I mean, intellectually, of
(20:16):
course you are. Personally you are. When it comes to
a mass point of view, you're mostly your chunks added up.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Thank you for pulling me out of the depression black hole.
I was inevitably going to slide into.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
And that's where our intuitive sense of mass comes from. Right,
Like stuff is made of smaller stuff, and the mass
of the bigger stuff is the sum of the mass
of the smaller stuff. Like you weigh a cat made
out of legos, and then you take it apart and
you weigh the legos, you get the same answer. Right,
that's where our intuition comes from.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Cats are way less fun when you take them apart,
and also.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
When you make them out of legos, they're not as cozy. Yeah,
And so you're made out of your atoms, and your
atoms are made of protons and neutrons and electrons, and
we can mostly ignore the electrons because an electron weighs
almost one two thousands of a proton, so they're basically
irrelevant when it comes to what you're made out of.
So mostly you're made out of your protons and your neutrons.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Sorry electrons, all right, So then where does the mass
from a proton and a neutron come from?
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Right? And so Rebecca is referring to upquarks and down
quarks because that's what makes up protons and neutrons. Protons
and neutrons are just different combinations of the same two bits,
which is awesome and amazing and also requires them to
have these weird charges. Like to make a proton, you
add two quarks that have a charge two thirds and
another quark that has a charge negative one third, So
(21:38):
plus two thirds plus two thirds gives you four thirds
minus a third gives you three thirds. Or charger one
that's a proton neutron is one quark with a charge
two thirds and two quarks with a charge negative one third,
so you get plus two minus one minus one zero.
It's amazing how you can build these things out of
the same building blocks, right, That's something sort of cool.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
We're talking the other day about whether or not the
universe is like beautiful and sort of meets the expectation
of our esthetic preferences, and I got to say, there's
something about plus two thirds and negative one third charges
that's not aesthetically pleasing to me. But I like that
You no.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
What I thought you were going to go the other direction. Tweet.
That's beautiful showing how you can build two very different
things out of the same pieces. It's like when you
see somebody build something incredible out of legos, You're like, Wow,
that's awesome that you can do it out of the
same bits. That's something simple and organomic about it. That
appeals to my aesthetic.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
And I guess that's why this question about whether or
not physics and math meet our definitions of beauty is
so hard, because what's beautiful to some person is you know,
maybe not beautiful to others, and we don't even have
the same definition of beauty.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Yeah, that's true. And I can also get rid of
the one thirds easily if I just redefine the electron
mass to be negative three, then the upquarks and down
quarks have charge plus two and minus one. And you
know it's just because of Ben Franklin that the quarks
have charge one third. There's no absolute scale there.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Why is it Ben Franklin's fault that the charge is
negative one third? We're getting way off track here, But
what is Ben? Was Ben Franklin around when we were
figuring this stuff out?
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Well, Ben Franklin, you know, the best president of the
United States. He helped to find the direction of the currents,
and so the direction that we later discovered was caused
by electrons he called negative.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Was Ben Franklin ever a president?
Speaker 1 (23:22):
No, he was not a president. That's an internet joke.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Oh, I did that one right over my head. All right, Look,
this isn't a history podcast, Daniel, Let's get back on track,
all right.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Anyways, so your protons and neutrons are made out of
upquarks and down quarks. But this is where our intuition
breaks down. You might imagine that the mass of the
proton is just the mass of the quarks it's made
out of, added up, the way the mass of the
lego cat is the mass of the legos. But it's
not true because mass is not just the stuff you're
made out of. Mass is a measure of your internal
(23:54):
stored energy, which is a much weirder and more astract concept.
The universe is not required to be intuitive, right, or
to make any sense to us at all. It's amazing
we can't understand any of it. But like to give
you a sense for what I'm talking about. If you
have a box made of mirrors and you shine a
photon in there and then slam the door. So now
(24:15):
the photon is bouncing around inside of it, and I
ask you, well, what was the mass of the box before?
And after you'd say, well, you've just added a photon.
Photons have no mass. You've put a zero mass thing
in the box, so it has the same mass before
and after, And you would be wrong because now that
photon is trapped in the box, it's internal stored energy
of the box. So the box gained some mass by
(24:37):
e equals mc squared.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Wait a minute, Wait a minute. The other day you
were telling me that energy doesn't have I thought you
were saying that energy doesn't have mass, and people get
confused about equals mc squared. Doesn't imply that photons have mass.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Photons do not have mass. Okay, photons do not have mass,
But what is mass anyway? Mass is internal stored energy.
Photons have no internal stored energy. But you can capture
a photon same way that for example, if you absorb
a photon you lay in the sun, you absorb photons,
you gain mass because those photons energy gets converted into
(25:11):
other kinds of energy in your body, and any internal
stored energy, that's what mass is.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
So can we get a short answer for how do
you define energy then? Or is that another philosophical side road?
So if you've got if you've got a photon in
a box and now you have more energy, what does
that imply that energy is?
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Then?
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Well, yeah, we don't really know what energy is if
you want to go like really deep and fundamental. It's
not even something that's conserved in the universe, which makes
it even harder to define. But we have categories. There's
energy of motion, which is what a photon has. A
photon is pure energy of motion. Is also internal stored energy,
which is what mass is. So we have these examples,
and we know that in many situations that some of
(25:56):
these two things is conserved that you can convert one
kind into another and back and forth they slosh back
and forth. There's also potential energy, which is just energy
of like configuration. You know, if you have a ball
on a shelf in a gravitational field, then it has
energy stored. Like you can make a gravitational battery just
by lifting concrete blocks up to the top of a building,
(26:17):
and like that has energy in it, and you can
recover that energy by like dropping those rocks, and then
it turns into kinetic energy and you can have that
spin a wheel which then generates electricity, for example. So
there's lots of different forms of energy, but mass is
a measure of your internal stored energy, which is really
weird because me and what we're talking about is the
inertial mass of the object, right, Like, how hard is
(26:40):
it to accelerate it? And if you shine a light
into a box and then slam the door, you need
to give it a bigger push to accelerate it to
the same velocity.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Okay, all right, So you've got that photon in a
box and you switch one of the quarks to up
and now you have two or no, you've got three
quarks in there.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
So photons that you're talking about, photons and protons. Oh,
I was talking about photons, which.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
Have no mass, but they have quarks.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
No, no, no, protons have quarks, photons, photons. I was using
photons because they have no mass, which it makes it
especially obvious that when they add mass to the box,
it's not because they have stuff to them. It's because
you now have internal stored energy. You've captured their energy.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Okay, got it.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
So let's return to the proton, which is a good idea.
Where does the mass of the proton come from? It
does get some contribution from the mass of the quarks,
like those little lego pieces, but those masses are really
really tiny, like they're about one thousands or two thousands
of the mass of the proton. Most of the mass
of the proton comes from the energy of those quarks,
the binding of them into a proton. There's a lot
(27:51):
of energy stored in there. And we know there's a
lot of energy in protons because there's a lot of
energy in the nucleus. It's the strong nuclear force. This
is what fission and fusion and deal with, and that's
why they're so powerful. And so most of the mass
of the proton doesn't come from the bits it's made
out of. It comes from the binding energy. And the
mass of the quarks themselves does come from the Higgs boson.
(28:13):
But so most of your mass comes from the binding
energy of quarks inside protons, not from the Higgs boson,
which gives those quarks mass.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
So, to imagine what this experiment would look like, if
you wanted to switch your quarks from down to up,
you would need a bunch of energy to break that
bond and switch it, and then you don't even really
have protons anymore.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yeah, you wouldn't have protons anymore. So a proton is
defined as this combination of up and down quarks, and
you can have other combinations, like you can replace one
of the up quarks with a charm, or you can
replace the down with a strange and we've done all those.
We've seen those particles. We call them other weird things,
delta's and omegas. You can have three strange quarks. It's
all sorts of different combinations. These particles can be neutral
(28:57):
in triplets. It's meaning like their color charges are all balanced.
And so we've made every possible combination we can make,
but most of them are not stable. Like even the
neutron is not stable. The neutron will decay to the proton.
The proton is the stable one. It's the lowest energy
state of all of these things. So you can make
other particles out of quarks, but they wouldn't be stable,
(29:18):
and they wouldn't be protons. But let's say you did.
Let's say you took a proton and you made the
top quark version of it, whatever you call it, and
you make it like top top bottom, which is an
analog of like up up down number one. It would
already be a lot more massive because the quarks themselves
are much more massive, Like a top quark has the
(29:38):
mass of one hundred and seventy five protons, right, So
the upcork has the mass of like a thousands of
the proton, and the top cork has the mass of
like almost two hundred protons, So it's a huge ratio.
Nobody understands this. By the way, why is the top
quark so much heavier than the upqork. Nobody knows. It's
just this incredible heavy grand papa of a particle. Nobody
(30:01):
knows why it's so much more massive, if.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
We could take a quick step back, So up and
down quarks are different than top and bottom quarks. And
what are top and bottom quarks again?
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Yeah, top and bottom quarks are the heavy versions of them.
They're up and down quarks which we use to make
the proton and neutron. And then, for some reason that's
a mystery to us, there are other heavier versions of them.
The charm and the strange are just like the up
and the down, but they're heavier. The top and the
bottom are just like the up and the down in
terms of like electric charges and weak charges and behavior
(30:31):
and stuff like this, but even heavier, and the top
and the bottom are like the grandma and grandpa of
these things. They're much much heavier than they up and
the down okay, and that's why I think Rebecca was
asking you about this, because they feel like different flavors
of the same particle. In fact, we call this field
flavor physics because if top quark and bottom quark feel
like different flavors, and people who study this we call
(30:52):
them heavy flavor physicists, which makes them sound much cooler
and hip hoppier than they actually are.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
That does sound way cool? Yeah, yeah, they have big
necklaces and stuff. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
So if you replace the upquorks with top quarks and
the down quarks with bottom quarks you already just from
the stuff you're made out of, just from the quarks,
would increase the mass of this new version of the
proton by a factor of hundreds, right, So, like a
particle made out of a top top bottom would have
a mass just from the quarks of like three hundred
(31:27):
and fifty five protons. And that doesn't even account for
the binding energy, which is most of the mass of
the proton. So now this new particle you're building, what
would be the binding energy this thing? How much binding
energy is required to bring two top quarks and a
bottom cork together. We don't know. We can't do that
calculation because quantum physics in the strong force is too hard,
(31:50):
Like we can barely calculate what the mass of the
proton is. It's like not an easy thing to calculate
because the strong force is so strong that every time
you try to do a calculation, there's gluons, and those
gluons make more gluons, and those gluons make more gluons,
and those gluons stick to each other and interact with
each other. It gets very complicated, and all the tricks
we can use for other weaker forces don't work because
(32:11):
the approximations break down. So we can't make that prediction.
I don't know the answer to that. Nobody knows the
answer to that. But I can tell you that that particle,
if you made it, it wouldn't be a proton, and
it wouldn't be stable. Right. Top quarks are not stable,
bottom quarks are not stable. No combinations of these quarks
are stable except for the proton, And so this top
(32:31):
top bottom thing that Rebecca wants to build would definitely
not be stable. So if you're designing some like super
massive version of humanity and you made it out of
these things, it would last for like ten to the
negative twenty three seconds before decayed into something else. Probably
you would end up with protons.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
You know, I gotta admit I misunderstood Rebecca's question initially.
So what she says is the proton is made of
up and down quirks, which are light. I thought she
was asking if we instead of having up up down,
what if it was all up up up, How would
that change the mass? But now, oh, and I thought
maybe top was another way of referring to up, because
it's because up it's on top. But now now it
(33:06):
is all clear.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
The top is just another example of particle physicists being
brilliant at naming things. You know, top and bottom is
like an analogy to up and down. Don't ask me
why charm and strange are called charm and strange. It
breaks the pattern.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
But I'm sure my confusion with the question reveals how
clear you guys are with your naming.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
You know, there's a whole group of physicists who reject
the names top and bottom, and they call them truth
and beauty. And so there's a whole group of people
who say, we don't do flavor physics, we do beauty physics.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
Oh wow, do you guys like get really heated? Do
guys and gals get really heated at conferences about this
kind of stuff?
Speaker 1 (33:43):
More snide and snarky than heated.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
But yeah, we're all just human beings after all, all.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Right, Rebecca. So the answer your question is, if you
tried to put Rebecca together with top quirks, you would
be very very massive, at least hundreds of times more massive,
probably much much more, and you would also decay very
quickly down to protonic.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Rebecca, sounds like a bad idea, Rebecca, I don't recommend it.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
No, let us know how it works. I'm curious. Maybe
you'll discover something awesome.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
We don't want to lose a listener, all right, Rebecca,
what do you think?
Speaker 5 (34:16):
Daniel N Kelly, thank you so much for giving me
the extra time and your indulgence responding to your answer.
Don't think I didn't notice the terminology drift from a
barrister to lawyer, and I know that you have spared
yourself having to explain to all of your viewers that
in the UK, barristers don't actually make coffee. Anyway, back
(34:40):
to the quirky cork question. Thank you very much Daniel
for explaining the difference between the ups and the tops
and the downs and the bottoms, which now actually makes
good sense to me. However, it strikes me that there
is research to be had because it doesn't explain why
(35:01):
people gain weight over the winter months, specifically in the
holiday season. And I wonder if there is a moment
in time, possibly due to reduced photons in the atmosphere
at that time of year, that in fact all of
the fields do a switcheraroo and my protons are comprised
(35:25):
of top bottom rather than up down, and that accounts
for the weight gain. I think that there is money
to be had in researching this. What do you think?
Speaker 2 (35:57):
All right? Sorry? Next question is from Robert noted that
on an episode I made a mistake by joking about
something that actually happens. Let's hear Robert's question who.
Speaker 4 (36:09):
In one of the podcasts for Passing Months, Kelly made
a random side comment about how it'd be cool if
he didn't carrots turn the orange, which, as it turns out,
actually does. I don't really understand how though, so I'd
love it if you can look into why and do
some sort of segment about krotinemia beta caroteenes and all that.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Thanks, all right, Kelly being called out by our audience.
I wonder if this is a physics inspired listener that
would be juicy.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
I don't know, but I would like all listeners to
call me out. At least I assume you'd like us
both be called out if you if you catch us
making a mistake, please correct us. We want to get
this stuff right. And you know, lots of times knowledge
is moving quickly and we might not be all caught up.
But in this case, this is something that I got wrong.
We've known this for a long time. I think I
(36:57):
knew it, but I've since forgotten.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
And so well, let's dig in and marinate in your wrongness.
What exactly did you say? And exactly how.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
This is my favorite thing to do? Uh so, so
I said, I think I made some joke about like,
wouldn't it be funny if you turned orange when you
ate carrots? And this is called caratinemia. And it's not
called caratinemia because you ate carrots. It's called caratinemia because
(37:26):
of the carotene that you find in a lot of
different kinds of fruits and veggies.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
And are carrots called carrots because of beta carotene or
is it just a totally random connection.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
I'm gonna bet that carrots had a name long before
we knew what carotene was.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Well, Google tells me that the word originates from a
Greek word, which is derived from an Indo European word
for horn or head. So it has to do with
the shape of the top of the carrot.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
Okay, Well, and caratene is not spelled C A R
R O T E ny, It's just got one R.
So maybe it's just a coincidence. So anyway, around World
War One and World War Two, actually caratinemia I'm going
to slow down and stumble every time I have to
say it was actually moderately common because there were some
(38:14):
food shortages and lots of people kept eating large quantities
of the same fruits or of veggies, and lots of
different kinds of fruits and vegetables not just carrots have
carotene in them.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
What's an example of something that's not a carrot but
has a lot of bit of carotene in it?
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Apricots, mangoes, oranges, green beans, et cetera. Lots of different
fruits and vegetables have it.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
So these are all sort of orangey stuff until you
got the green beans.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Yeah, they don't have to be orange. And if you remember,
we were talking about krotenoids when we were talking about flamingoes,
and we were talking about how flamingoes extract the krotenoids
from the food that they eat and they use that
to make themselves pink, and they're not always eating pink foods.
It has to do with how your body sort of
converts and deals with these products. So in our body,
(39:01):
when we consume carotenoids in our liver, we convert some
of those carotenoids into vitamin A using a particular kind
of enzyme that we have, and then we go ahead
and we use that vitamin A to help us with
things like vision and the functioning of our immune system.
But if you have too much vitamin A, it can
be toxic. So no matter how much beta caroteen we consume,
(39:24):
our bodies only convert a small amount of it to
vitamin a.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Is that because we only need a certain amount of
vitamin A, our body is not capable of converting more
or why is it rejected?
Speaker 2 (39:33):
We only need a certain amount, and if you have
too much, it becomes toxic, and so our body sort
of protects us from that toxicity by only converting some
amount of it well into vitamin A. Yeah, go us,
go us. But our body still has it, and it
binds to fat, and if you accumulate enough of it,
sometimes you can actually see those accumulations in our hands
(39:55):
and in the soles of our feet. So when you
get caratinemia kerosinemia, see how fast I said it, I'm
really good. So when you get keratinemia, you mostly can
see like a yellowish tint in your souls and in
your hands. You don't tend to get it in your
eyes because your eyes don't have the right kind of
stuff for the carotenoids to bind to. And this is
(40:16):
one of the ways that you tell the difference between
if somebody has jaundice, which is a liver problem, versus keratinemia.
If their eyes aren't yellow, they probably don't have jaundice.
But anyway, so it tends to build up. And you
could also get licopenia, which is when you have too
many tomatoes, which has a different kind of carotenoid called lycopene.
I eat a lot of tomatoes, which, yeah, well are
(40:40):
you yellow?
Speaker 1 (40:41):
Everyone's a little yellow, right, I.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
Get well, you're not noticeably yellow, and you don't have
yellow hands, so you have probably haven't eaten too much.
In general, this condition isn't dangerous, and you know we
think that in general. Like you, if you become orange
or yellowy, the solution is to just change your diet,
stop eating that stuff. Eventually your body will extract the
kerotene and you will go back to your normal tone.
(41:05):
But I did find a paper that said, you know,
this problem is almost never associated with poor health. Quote. However,
a man who allegedly ate six to seven pounds of
carrots weekly was found to have constipation, hyper keratinemia, increase
liver enzymes, and possible vitamin A toxicity. So you can
overdo it, guys. Your body tries to save us. But
(41:26):
if you're eating six to seven pounds of carrots weekly,
you might have some problems.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Is this a carrot farmer or what's the story with
this guy?
Speaker 2 (41:35):
That's all I could find. I don't know. Man, moderations,
that's right, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
Throw in some tomatoes, dude, geez.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
That's right. Have a little leycopenia to go with your caratinymia.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
Wow, this is fascinating, and so can people google to
get like pictures of people with kerotinemia that look crazy orange?
Is it impressive or is it sort of underwhelming?
Speaker 2 (41:59):
It's kind of under not super impressive, And that's a
fairly safe Google search as far as I can tell,
I don't remember seeing anything.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
More than pinworms.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
I'm guessing yeah, yeah, I don't recommend actually looking up
pinworms pictures of pinworms. But anyway, that's the answer that
I have for Robert.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
And so is there anything else that if you eat it,
you will turn that color? Can I turn purple by
eating enough eggplant?
Speaker 2 (42:25):
I don't know about eggplant in particular, but any of
those plants, be they fruit or vegetables that have a
lot of carotenoids, you risk your body storing them in
your in your body as something that will make you yellowy.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
So well, as a kid, I enjoyed having a blue
tongue after eating blueberries. It's something really cool about that.
But like, you are what you eat, and you get
that color. That's super cool. So it's kind of cool
to like turn orange after eating carros. It feels like
cartoony biology, but real it does.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Yeah, and I like that you can do this without
yourself too much.
Speaker 5 (43:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
Yeah, and it is so sort of counterintuitive that if
you eat too many green beans you could turn yellow
or orange. But it is weird.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
Yeah, well it depends, right, because it's biology.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
That's right, that's right. But unlike physics, I had a
clear answer. And so let's see what Robert thinks of
our clear answer. And Robert pick a team biology. Ooh no,
I'm just kidding. You don't have to do that. Can't
we all just get on you started it.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
I say, after tossing so many bos.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
All right, that's right.
Speaker 4 (43:34):
That is super interesting. I would not have expected it
to be a lipid binding process. Wonder if that means
if a person got liposuction procedure, if the adiposse would
also come out more yellowish. Super cool regardless, So thank
you for so much for ixporing my question. And as
my degrees are social work, psychology, and sexuality, I'm gonna
have to abstain from your biology and physics rivalry. I
think all science is great, nothing more human than one
(43:56):
to understand.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
All right, thank you Robert for writing it, and thanks to
everybody who's saying and your questions. We really do love
hearing from you. Write to us Questions at Daniel and
Kelly dot org.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
Looking forward to hearing your questions. Thanks. Daniel and Kelly's
Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to
hear from you.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
We really would. We want to know what questions you
have about this Extraordinary Universe.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions
for future shows. If you contact us, we will get
back to you.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us
at Questions at Danielankelly.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Dot org, or you can find us on social media.
We have accounts on x, Instagram, Blue Sky and on
all of those platforms. You can find us at d
and kuniverse.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
Don't be shy, write to us
Hey everyone, Daniel here with a quick note that my
new book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? Is coming out soon
November fourth, and I'd love if you considered pre ordering it.
The book imagines the arrival of aliens and what it
would be like to try to make mental contact and
download their understanding of the universe. Do we have Physics
in common with the Aliens? If you like how the
podcast asks deep physics questions and dabbles in philosophy, you'll
(00:27):
enjoy the book, which also features cute cartoons of aliens
from my friend Andy Warner. Find it anywhere or check
out the book website www dot Alienspeakphysics dot com. Okay,
on to today's episode.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
How do the pinworms know that it's night when they
lurk in a place with so little light?
Speaker 1 (00:54):
If I upgraded my quirks to top quark class, what
I automatically get we had a bigger mass.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
If you eat certain foods, your skin will change you.
Why does that happen? Do we have any clue?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Whatever questions keep you up at night, and Daniel and
Kelly's answer will make it all right.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I've never
had pinworms.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Hi. I'm Kelly, I'm a biologist, and I'm not sure
Daniel can be sure that he's never had pinworms.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Welcome to the episode where we dig deep into Daniel's condition.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
All right, So, Daniel, my question for you today is
what was the most surprising thing about parenting?
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Wow? Great question. I think one of the most surprising
things about parenting for me was how the gross quickly
becomes monotonous and every day you like wiping somebody else's
feces off of your hands or face, it's just like,
you know, it's just another Tuesday.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yep. Oh, I totally agree. The first time my daughter,
like projectile pooped and it was on the wall and
on me, I was like, oh my gosh, this is
so gross. And then by like the fifth time, I
was like, I got some more laundry to do today,
and it was like it was like nothing whatever.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Yeah, And when you have visitors and they see the
inside of your actual day to day routine and they're like, whoa,
it gives you a taste for like how far you've
drifted from societal norms.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
But you pretty quickly get back to normal expectations. You know,
when your kids get past the age where you have
to wipe your butt, you very quickly return to I
would prefer to not wipe people's butts if I could
avoid it, Although I think taking care of each other
is one of the best things that humans can do.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
I agree, But if my sixteen year old pooped on me,
it would be a pretty big memory, and I can't
remember all the time she did it when she was young.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Right, yeah, things change, things change exactly.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
It would stand out now, that's right, that's right. How
about you? What is one of your most surprising discoveries
about parenting?
Speaker 2 (03:14):
So it also has to do with hygiene, and it's
how far our species has come with hygiene, because there's
so many things that kids don't do naturally that you
would expect they would want to do naturally, like wash
their hands, like wash their hands or take a shower.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
But doctors weren't washing their hands until like one hundred
and fifty years ago.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I know. No culture has played such a huge role
in keeping us healthy, and it's amazing and it really
hit home for me when I was a parent. But
I think that one of the things that surprised me
in particular is the number of times I've had to
say the phrase get your hand out of your butt,
and which leads us into question one, because kids sticking
(03:54):
their hands in their butts is how they transmit pinworms
and why this is probably the most common worm infection
in the United States.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
All right, so get ready to get itchy everyone.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
That's right. So we have an amazing Discord community, and
you can join us by going to Danielandkelly dot org
and clicking on the link to our Discord channel. And
Julian on Discord had this question that he wanted to
share with us, and let.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Me add another shout out to our Discord community. If
you want to reach us, you can write us questions
at questions at Daniel and Kelly dot org. But the
Discord community is also a lot of fun. You can
ask your questions there. There's lots of folks chatting and discussing,
sharing recent articles, talking about science. If you can't get
enough Daniel and Kelly and science, come join us on
(04:39):
Discord and be part of the inner synctum.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
And I'd just like to shout out to our moderators,
who are the best moderators on the whole entire internet.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
I'm sure, Oh, yes, absolutely, they win all the awards
they do.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Hey, Daniel and Kelly, this is Julian in Houston. As
the parent of a small child. I've had pinworms on
my mind a bit in the past couple of years,
and I think I heard on a previous episode you
mentioned the pinworms tend to come out at night to
lay their eggs and cause itchymut. So my question is,
how do pinworms know it's nighttime to come out and
cause ITCHI mut Thanks so much and I look forward
(05:12):
to hearing the answer.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
So Kelly, tell us what is a pinworm?
Speaker 2 (05:18):
A pinworm is a little worm. When it's an adult,
it's about the size of a staple, so they're tiny.
About forty million people in the United States probably have
pinworm right now, and a billion people worldwide. I think
I said a moment ago that pinworms are the most
common worm infection that's in the US, where we don't
have a lot of other kinds of worm infections. They're
very common in children, and they're also kind of common
(05:40):
in people in long term care facilities.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
All right, so let's estimate what fraction of our audience
have pinworms right now as they're listening to this. We're
talking forty million people. That's like fifteen percent of the US.
Is it not evenly distributed because you're saying it's like
children and old folks homes.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah, So if you have children and they are let's
say preschool or elementary school age, there's a pretty good
chance they have or have had pinworms, and there's a
decent chance they gave it to you, although it does
seem like adults become more resistant, and so even if
your kids have it, you're not definitely going to get it.
But doctors will often prescribe medication to an entire family
(06:21):
if anyone in it gets the parasites, because it is
pretty pretty easy to transmit.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
So maybe like one in ten of our listeners right
now have pinworms. Maybe the pinworms are listening to this episode.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
So if I have to remember our demographics from the
last time we did a survey, we have a lot
of men over fifty or sixty and they are highly
unlikely to have pinworms, And so I don't know about
one in ten. It depends on how many of our
current listeners have young kids. But there's a good chance
that you have either had it at some point in
your life or if you have kids, you have it now.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
All right, So tell us what do these guys look like.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
So they're in kind of nematodes. So these are cylindrical worms.
They have no segments, so don't think about an earth work.
Think about just kind of like a hard outer case
and a very tiny worm. They kind of come to
an end, which is why they're called pinworms. As I
mentioned before, they're like the size of a staple when
they're adults. Oh, I see, and you might remember that
a few months ago we talked about geo helmets, or
(07:15):
we call them the dirt worms. These are nematods that
you find in the dirt. This is another kind of nematode,
so they're kind of related to the dirt worms we
were talking about earlier.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
So you're using this phrase nematod, and it sounds like
it describes a category of worm. What is a nematod.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Nematoda is a whole phylum of worms that have this
like hard outer cuticle. Some of them live in the soil,
some of them are commensal with plants, and some of
them are parasitic.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Yeah, if I had to guess, if somebody just asked
me what a nematoad was, it sounds to me like
some sort of miniature Japanese frog. That's great, like it
might be served in a weird sushi or something very
high end sushi.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
I mean, that's completely wrong. That is very cute, very cute.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
So I'm imagining that the life style with these guys
is not very cute. So tell us about it, and
everyone finish that snack you're having before you.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Listen to this, or go wash your hands. So the
infection route is what's called fecal oral or poop to mouth.
Good start.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
That's an actual phrase people use.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
I've heard it said in my community more than once.
I don't know if it shows up in any textbooks, but.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Poop mouth, all right, So tell us about it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
The idea here is that you accidentally eat the eggs.
So you accidentally consume an egg, it hatches in your
body and when it gets to the intestine, the males
and the females will find each other and they'll mate,
and then the males die.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Inside you instant having a party inside you. Oh my gosh,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
You might not be dating. But the worms inside you
might be so someone's find in love in that body
of you are So.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
That's good news.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
I guess.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I don't know, all right. So they start out as eggs,
you end up in your mouth. We'll get into that
in a minute, I imagine. Yep, they hatch, they mate
inside you, and they have little babies. Oh no, eggs,
I guess.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Well, So the female starts producing eggs. The male, after
reproducing dies and gets digested, and so you'll never see
the male.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
The female her eggs. She starts making eggs. They start
maturing a little bit inside of her. Then she moves
down farther into your intestine, and when she is ready
to lay those eggs at night, she will come out.
She will crawl out of your anis.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
One's anis. Excuse me, one's anis?
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Crawl out of one's anis. And on the CDC website
it cracks me up because it says anis and then
in parentheses butthole just in case you are sure as
so crawls out your butthole. And the female needs oxygen
to stimulate the release of eggs, and apparently in some
cases she has what's called a prolapsed uterus, which essentially
(10:01):
just means that her uterus sort of comes out of
her body and expels the eggs. And I guess in
some cases they've observed the eggs going airborne. This expulsion
happens so violently.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
This is much less cute than miniature Japanese frogs. I
vote for miniature Japanese frogs. We should have that instead.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Well, you know you don't.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Get to juice, all right, But I have an actual
sides question. Okay, how do the eggs survive in my
digestive track, Like you're dropping them in stomach acid and
they're surviving.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
So in this case, they're still inside of their mom.
She doesn't expel them until she gets outside of the body.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
But the eggs I've consumed, right, The mom herself was
born from an egg that I swallowed.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Right, yes, And your digestive juices helped it escape from
the egg that it was living in. Oh wow, And
then it's tough cuticle protects it from your.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Juices, all right. So she comes out the enis does
her little oxygen.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Dance, yes, and she will lay her eggs in the
perianal region, and then often she will die and we'll
talk about what happens. If she doesn't die as a symptom,
that's bad. But most of the time she dies. And
the eggs are sticky, and so they stick to your butt,
and they also kind of make you itch because now
(11:11):
there's like some sticky stuff in your butt, and that's
not great. And kids are likely to stick their hands
in their butts, which is what I learned as a mom,
is that they're always sticking their hands in their butts.
And so they stick their hands in their butts and
then they get it underneath their fingernails or on their fingers.
And then because they're scratched, because it's itch that's right,
that's right.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Don't make it sound so weird. They're itchy, so they're scratching.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Yeah, okay, they're itchy. So they're scratching. They're humans. And
then these grubby little creatures we call children go around
and touch things, you know. They put their fingers in
their mouths, they put their fingers in your mouth, they
put their fingers on the kitchen table, and in that way,
these sticky eggs get to lots of different places, and
when they get consumed, then you're back up at the start.
Of the cycle that we talked about, where your stomach
(11:56):
juices will open up the eggs and the process will
start again.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
So this is the story I use to convince my
kids to keep their fingers out of their mouth. So,
you know, kids like to chew on their nails or whatever.
And anytime I see my kids chewing on their nails,
I just make this wiggly fingers hand gesture and it
recalls for them the story I told them about pinworms,
and they go, oh, They're immediately grossed out by what
might be under their fingernails, and they stop. So this
(12:21):
has been an effective parenting technique.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Fantastic. Now you have your kids ever had pinworms that
you know of?
Speaker 1 (12:27):
I don't think I should be discussing my kids medical
history on the podcast. Let's keep it abstract.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Okay, have you ever had pinworms?
Speaker 4 (12:37):
No?
Speaker 1 (12:38):
I have not personally ever had pinworms to my knowledge.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
Right, So that's the thing. Most who No, not to
my knowledge. But I've had periods of itchiness where I
wondered if maybe maybe I had it. Anytime there's a
little itch, I think good worms.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
And now everyone listening to this podcast is suddenly feel
and itchy.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
That's right right. I mean the females lay like ten
thousand eggs.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
Oh my god, how tiny are these? Can you not
see them?
Speaker 2 (13:04):
You can't see them. They're teeny tiny.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
You can't even see them when you lay ten thousand
of them, Like, it doesn't look like a little blob
or a smear or something.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
No, it's teeny tiny. I mean if you put it,
you don't have to put it under a super high
powered microscope to see it, but you do need a
microscope to see it. You know, they're kind of clear,
they're not very big. These eggs can survive for two
to three weeks, like out on a counter or something.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
But the way that you find out if someone is
infected is called the Scotch tape test.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
No, no, no, no, no, where at the Scotch tape? Kelly,
where around the black hole?
Speaker 2 (13:41):
The physicist that comes in with the black hole joke, Yes,
around the black hole. Yeah. So, so the females come
out at night to lay their eggs, which is going
to get us to the listener's question in just a minute.
But they lay their eggs at night in particular, and
so in the morning right when they wake up, before
they've you know, used the restroom or wiped or anything.
(14:02):
You take a piece of tape and you sort of
pat it around the perianal region and then you stick
it on a glass slide and you put it under
a microscope, so you can see those eggs. Sometimes you
even catch the mom because she's just sort of died
and she's still there, and so you'll see a worm
and those you can see. So sometimes you do know
that someone's infected because you find one of the mom
(14:22):
worms and you're like, oh, shoot, well we've got worms.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yikes, yikes.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
So then the listener asked, how does the mom know
that it's nighttime and she should come out and do
her dance? Why doesn't she come out during the day?
Speaker 2 (14:35):
All right, great question. I didn't know the answer, and
I asked the American Society of Parasitologists Facebook page, which
has like fifteen thousand followers, and I was like, all right, team,
how do we know that pinworms know that it's nighttime?
Because I looked through a bunch of medical books about
parasitic diseases and they all said pinworms come out at night.
(14:58):
Some of them would say that the pinworms were detecting
our drop in body temperature when we sleep. Oh, and
then others would say they might be detecting a drop
in body temperature, but they wouldn't say it definitively, And
none of them included an inline reference that I could
check for the study that showed that they're responding to
body temperature, because they could also be responding to like,
(15:21):
you know, you're not moving for a couple hours.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
So there's the question of how the worms know it's
night to come out. But how do we know they
only come out at night? And why do they only
come out at night? Do they come out at night
because that's the best time to lay the eggs while
we're asleep, or do they need the darker environment or what?
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yes, I think the answer at the end of the
day is we don't know. Because the American Society of Parasitologists,
when I asked them, the best answer I got was
from my friend Brandon, who said they have little watches
and that's how they know it's nighttime. I thank you, Brandon.
But anyway, as far as I could tell, we haven't
done studies to figure out one why it's nighttime, or
(16:01):
two to confirm that they're actually queuing in on temperature.
I think we suspect that that's the cue that they're using,
but we haven't ruled out other possible cues. And as
to why they do it at night, it could be
possible that while people are sleeping is a time when
you are less likely to have a bellel movement. And
this parasite doesn't pass in feces, it passes on fingers.
(16:22):
And the reason that we know that it happens at
night is because if you do the Scotch tape test
in the morning, you get a bunch of eggs. If
you do it at other times of day, you don't
get a bunch of eggs. And you would expect if
they were laying randomly throughout the day, the Scotch tape
test would give you eggs at just about any time
of day.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Fascinating. So Julian's question is really at the forefront of science.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Yeah, that's right. I encourage any young people out there
to search for this answer. I don't know what it
would take to answer this question. I think pinworms are
pretty host specific, and so like Ancherobius vermicularis, which is
the species that humans have, I don't know you might
be able to do it in some other mammalians species
do the experiments, But I don't know. Maybe you'd have
to heat people up and cool them down and see
(17:04):
what their worms were doing, or ask them to stay still,
or mess with some hormones that are associated with sleep
that maybe the pinworms are queuing in on. But anyway,
inquiring minds want to know, but we don't know the
answer as far as I can tell.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Well, if you've always been interested in black holes and
this podcast has peaked your interest in biology, maybe this
is the perfect crossover topic for you.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Could be all right, Julian, thank you so much for
this question and for joining us on discord. Did we
scratch your itch? Please don't give us worms?
Speaker 3 (17:36):
Hey, y'all, yes, you absolutely scratched my itch. I think
my favorite part was hearing about the violently explosive egg laying.
Also how small the eggs actually are, as I always
assume that you'd be able to see them in the
poop or something like that. I'm also glad to hear
Kelly give a we don't know answer, and I hope
Daniel Guest to drop on it depends soon. Thank you
(17:58):
so much for your answer, and my kid will one
day figure out the answer, though hopefully not by catching pinworms.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
All right, we're back and we're answering questions from listeners
because your curiosity literally powers science. If people didn't want
to know the answer to these questions, we would not
get to do it. So we want to hear what
you wonder about the universe. Right to us two questions
at Danielankelly dot org. Our next question comes from a
lawyer in the UK. Rebecca wants to know about top quarks.
Speaker 5 (18:47):
If I weigh fifty five kilograms on the basis that
my protons are upquarks and down cork, how much would
I weigh if my protons were made of top quarks?
And why is there a different if any All.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Right, this is a really fun question about what it
might be like to have top quarks in your life.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
I can imagine there being a new diet fad where
people say, oh, I've created a thing that turns your
bottom quarks to top quarks and that's how you're going
to lose ten pounds. So you better not say this works.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Yeah, I don't recommend no, no, definitely, no particle physics
inspired diets do not fall for that.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Oh, there's got to be some quantum something, something diet
out there that people have tried out.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Well, you can have quark, right, Quark is some German
yogurt like product, and that sounds kind of quantumy, but
it's not any more quantum than anything else. I mean, literally,
everything is quantum because we're all made of quantum particles. Right,
So your diet is already quantum.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
That's right, all right? Well, so mass is a concept
I understand biologically. Let's go ahead and understand it physically.
Where does mass come from?
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Yeah, so Rebecca wants to know what would happen if
you built your protons out of top quarks. We got
to understand mass for that. So your mass mostly comes
from the stuff you're made out of. Right, The mass
of Kelly is very close to the mass of all
of Kelly's parts added up. You are not much more
than the sum of your parts. I mean, intellectually, of
(20:16):
course you are. Personally you are. When it comes to
a mass point of view, you're mostly your chunks added up.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Thank you for pulling me out of the depression black hole.
I was inevitably going to slide into.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
And that's where our intuitive sense of mass comes from. Right,
Like stuff is made of smaller stuff, and the mass
of the bigger stuff is the sum of the mass
of the smaller stuff. Like you weigh a cat made
out of legos, and then you take it apart and
you weigh the legos, you get the same answer. Right,
that's where our intuition comes from.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Cats are way less fun when you take them apart,
and also.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
When you make them out of legos, they're not as cozy. Yeah,
And so you're made out of your atoms, and your
atoms are made of protons and neutrons and electrons, and
we can mostly ignore the electrons because an electron weighs
almost one two thousands of a proton, so they're basically
irrelevant when it comes to what you're made out of.
So mostly you're made out of your protons and your neutrons.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Sorry electrons, all right, So then where does the mass
from a proton and a neutron come from?
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Right? And so Rebecca is referring to upquarks and down
quarks because that's what makes up protons and neutrons. Protons
and neutrons are just different combinations of the same two bits,
which is awesome and amazing and also requires them to
have these weird charges. Like to make a proton, you
add two quarks that have a charge two thirds and
another quark that has a charge negative one third, So
(21:38):
plus two thirds plus two thirds gives you four thirds
minus a third gives you three thirds. Or charger one
that's a proton neutron is one quark with a charge
two thirds and two quarks with a charge negative one third,
so you get plus two minus one minus one zero.
It's amazing how you can build these things out of
the same building blocks, right, That's something sort of cool.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
We're talking the other day about whether or not the
universe is like beautiful and sort of meets the expectation
of our esthetic preferences, and I got to say, there's
something about plus two thirds and negative one third charges
that's not aesthetically pleasing to me. But I like that
You no.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
What I thought you were going to go the other direction. Tweet.
That's beautiful showing how you can build two very different
things out of the same pieces. It's like when you
see somebody build something incredible out of legos, You're like, Wow,
that's awesome that you can do it out of the
same bits. That's something simple and organomic about it. That
appeals to my aesthetic.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
And I guess that's why this question about whether or
not physics and math meet our definitions of beauty is
so hard, because what's beautiful to some person is you know,
maybe not beautiful to others, and we don't even have
the same definition of beauty.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Yeah, that's true. And I can also get rid of
the one thirds easily if I just redefine the electron
mass to be negative three, then the upquarks and down
quarks have charge plus two and minus one. And you
know it's just because of Ben Franklin that the quarks
have charge one third. There's no absolute scale there.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Why is it Ben Franklin's fault that the charge is
negative one third? We're getting way off track here, But
what is Ben? Was Ben Franklin around when we were
figuring this stuff out?
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Well, Ben Franklin, you know, the best president of the
United States. He helped to find the direction of the currents,
and so the direction that we later discovered was caused
by electrons he called negative.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Was Ben Franklin ever a president?
Speaker 1 (23:22):
No, he was not a president. That's an internet joke.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Oh, I did that one right over my head. All right, Look,
this isn't a history podcast, Daniel, Let's get back on track,
all right.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Anyways, so your protons and neutrons are made out of
upquarks and down quarks. But this is where our intuition
breaks down. You might imagine that the mass of the
proton is just the mass of the quarks it's made
out of, added up, the way the mass of the
lego cat is the mass of the legos. But it's
not true because mass is not just the stuff you're
made out of. Mass is a measure of your internal
(23:54):
stored energy, which is a much weirder and more astract concept.
The universe is not required to be intuitive, right, or
to make any sense to us at all. It's amazing
we can't understand any of it. But like to give
you a sense for what I'm talking about. If you
have a box made of mirrors and you shine a
photon in there and then slam the door. So now
(24:15):
the photon is bouncing around inside of it, and I
ask you, well, what was the mass of the box before?
And after you'd say, well, you've just added a photon.
Photons have no mass. You've put a zero mass thing
in the box, so it has the same mass before
and after, And you would be wrong because now that
photon is trapped in the box, it's internal stored energy
of the box. So the box gained some mass by
(24:37):
e equals mc squared.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Wait a minute, Wait a minute. The other day you
were telling me that energy doesn't have I thought you
were saying that energy doesn't have mass, and people get
confused about equals mc squared. Doesn't imply that photons have mass.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Photons do not have mass. Okay, photons do not have mass,
But what is mass anyway? Mass is internal stored energy.
Photons have no internal stored energy. But you can capture
a photon same way that for example, if you absorb
a photon you lay in the sun, you absorb photons,
you gain mass because those photons energy gets converted into
(25:11):
other kinds of energy in your body, and any internal
stored energy, that's what mass is.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
So can we get a short answer for how do
you define energy then? Or is that another philosophical side road?
So if you've got if you've got a photon in
a box and now you have more energy, what does
that imply that energy is?
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Then?
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Well, yeah, we don't really know what energy is if
you want to go like really deep and fundamental. It's
not even something that's conserved in the universe, which makes
it even harder to define. But we have categories. There's
energy of motion, which is what a photon has. A
photon is pure energy of motion. Is also internal stored energy,
which is what mass is. So we have these examples,
and we know that in many situations that some of
(25:56):
these two things is conserved that you can convert one
kind into another and back and forth they slosh back
and forth. There's also potential energy, which is just energy
of like configuration. You know, if you have a ball
on a shelf in a gravitational field, then it has
energy stored. Like you can make a gravitational battery just
by lifting concrete blocks up to the top of a building,
(26:17):
and like that has energy in it, and you can
recover that energy by like dropping those rocks, and then
it turns into kinetic energy and you can have that
spin a wheel which then generates electricity, for example. So
there's lots of different forms of energy, but mass is
a measure of your internal stored energy, which is really
weird because me and what we're talking about is the
inertial mass of the object, right, Like, how hard is
(26:40):
it to accelerate it? And if you shine a light
into a box and then slam the door, you need
to give it a bigger push to accelerate it to
the same velocity.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Okay, all right, So you've got that photon in a
box and you switch one of the quarks to up
and now you have two or no, you've got three
quarks in there.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
So photons that you're talking about, photons and protons. Oh,
I was talking about photons, which.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
Have no mass, but they have quarks.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
No, no, no, protons have quarks, photons, photons. I was using
photons because they have no mass, which it makes it
especially obvious that when they add mass to the box,
it's not because they have stuff to them. It's because
you now have internal stored energy. You've captured their energy.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Okay, got it.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
So let's return to the proton, which is a good idea.
Where does the mass of the proton come from? It
does get some contribution from the mass of the quarks,
like those little lego pieces, but those masses are really
really tiny, like they're about one thousands or two thousands
of the mass of the proton. Most of the mass
of the proton comes from the energy of those quarks,
the binding of them into a proton. There's a lot
(27:51):
of energy stored in there. And we know there's a
lot of energy in protons because there's a lot of
energy in the nucleus. It's the strong nuclear force. This
is what fission and fusion and deal with, and that's
why they're so powerful. And so most of the mass
of the proton doesn't come from the bits it's made
out of. It comes from the binding energy. And the
mass of the quarks themselves does come from the Higgs boson.
(28:13):
But so most of your mass comes from the binding
energy of quarks inside protons, not from the Higgs boson,
which gives those quarks mass.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
So, to imagine what this experiment would look like, if
you wanted to switch your quarks from down to up,
you would need a bunch of energy to break that
bond and switch it, and then you don't even really
have protons anymore.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yeah, you wouldn't have protons anymore. So a proton is
defined as this combination of up and down quarks, and
you can have other combinations, like you can replace one
of the up quarks with a charm, or you can
replace the down with a strange and we've done all those.
We've seen those particles. We call them other weird things,
delta's and omegas. You can have three strange quarks. It's
all sorts of different combinations. These particles can be neutral
(28:57):
in triplets. It's meaning like their color charges are all balanced.
And so we've made every possible combination we can make,
but most of them are not stable. Like even the
neutron is not stable. The neutron will decay to the proton.
The proton is the stable one. It's the lowest energy
state of all of these things. So you can make
other particles out of quarks, but they wouldn't be stable,
(29:18):
and they wouldn't be protons. But let's say you did.
Let's say you took a proton and you made the
top quark version of it, whatever you call it, and
you make it like top top bottom, which is an
analog of like up up down number one. It would
already be a lot more massive because the quarks themselves
are much more massive, Like a top quark has the
(29:38):
mass of one hundred and seventy five protons, right, So
the upcork has the mass of like a thousands of
the proton, and the top cork has the mass of
like almost two hundred protons, So it's a huge ratio.
Nobody understands this. By the way, why is the top
quark so much heavier than the upqork. Nobody knows. It's
just this incredible heavy grand papa of a particle. Nobody
(30:01):
knows why it's so much more massive, if.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
We could take a quick step back, So up and
down quarks are different than top and bottom quarks. And
what are top and bottom quarks again?
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Yeah, top and bottom quarks are the heavy versions of them.
They're up and down quarks which we use to make
the proton and neutron. And then, for some reason that's
a mystery to us, there are other heavier versions of them.
The charm and the strange are just like the up
and the down, but they're heavier. The top and the
bottom are just like the up and the down in
terms of like electric charges and weak charges and behavior
(30:31):
and stuff like this, but even heavier, and the top
and the bottom are like the grandma and grandpa of
these things. They're much much heavier than they up and
the down okay, and that's why I think Rebecca was
asking you about this, because they feel like different flavors
of the same particle. In fact, we call this field
flavor physics because if top quark and bottom quark feel
like different flavors, and people who study this we call
(30:52):
them heavy flavor physicists, which makes them sound much cooler
and hip hoppier than they actually are.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
That does sound way cool? Yeah, yeah, they have big
necklaces and stuff. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
So if you replace the upquorks with top quarks and
the down quarks with bottom quarks you already just from
the stuff you're made out of, just from the quarks,
would increase the mass of this new version of the
proton by a factor of hundreds, right, So, like a
particle made out of a top top bottom would have
a mass just from the quarks of like three hundred
(31:27):
and fifty five protons. And that doesn't even account for
the binding energy, which is most of the mass of
the proton. So now this new particle you're building, what
would be the binding energy this thing? How much binding
energy is required to bring two top quarks and a
bottom cork together. We don't know. We can't do that
calculation because quantum physics in the strong force is too hard,
(31:50):
Like we can barely calculate what the mass of the
proton is. It's like not an easy thing to calculate
because the strong force is so strong that every time
you try to do a calculation, there's gluons, and those
gluons make more gluons, and those gluons make more gluons,
and those gluons stick to each other and interact with
each other. It gets very complicated, and all the tricks
we can use for other weaker forces don't work because
(32:11):
the approximations break down. So we can't make that prediction.
I don't know the answer to that. Nobody knows the
answer to that. But I can tell you that that particle,
if you made it, it wouldn't be a proton, and
it wouldn't be stable. Right. Top quarks are not stable,
bottom quarks are not stable. No combinations of these quarks
are stable except for the proton, And so this top
(32:31):
top bottom thing that Rebecca wants to build would definitely
not be stable. So if you're designing some like super
massive version of humanity and you made it out of
these things, it would last for like ten to the
negative twenty three seconds before decayed into something else. Probably
you would end up with protons.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
You know, I gotta admit I misunderstood Rebecca's question initially.
So what she says is the proton is made of
up and down quirks, which are light. I thought she
was asking if we instead of having up up down,
what if it was all up up up, How would
that change the mass? But now, oh, and I thought
maybe top was another way of referring to up, because
it's because up it's on top. But now now it
(33:06):
is all clear.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
The top is just another example of particle physicists being
brilliant at naming things. You know, top and bottom is
like an analogy to up and down. Don't ask me
why charm and strange are called charm and strange. It
breaks the pattern.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
But I'm sure my confusion with the question reveals how
clear you guys are with your naming.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
You know, there's a whole group of physicists who reject
the names top and bottom, and they call them truth
and beauty. And so there's a whole group of people
who say, we don't do flavor physics, we do beauty physics.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
Oh wow, do you guys like get really heated? Do
guys and gals get really heated at conferences about this
kind of stuff?
Speaker 1 (33:43):
More snide and snarky than heated.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
But yeah, we're all just human beings after all, all.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Right, Rebecca. So the answer your question is, if you
tried to put Rebecca together with top quirks, you would
be very very massive, at least hundreds of times more massive,
probably much much more, and you would also decay very
quickly down to protonic.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Rebecca, sounds like a bad idea, Rebecca, I don't recommend it.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
No, let us know how it works. I'm curious. Maybe
you'll discover something awesome.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
We don't want to lose a listener, all right, Rebecca,
what do you think?
Speaker 5 (34:16):
Daniel N Kelly, thank you so much for giving me
the extra time and your indulgence responding to your answer.
Don't think I didn't notice the terminology drift from a
barrister to lawyer, and I know that you have spared
yourself having to explain to all of your viewers that
in the UK, barristers don't actually make coffee. Anyway, back
(34:40):
to the quirky cork question. Thank you very much Daniel
for explaining the difference between the ups and the tops
and the downs and the bottoms, which now actually makes
good sense to me. However, it strikes me that there
is research to be had because it doesn't explain why
(35:01):
people gain weight over the winter months, specifically in the
holiday season. And I wonder if there is a moment
in time, possibly due to reduced photons in the atmosphere
at that time of year, that in fact all of
the fields do a switcheraroo and my protons are comprised
(35:25):
of top bottom rather than up down, and that accounts
for the weight gain. I think that there is money
to be had in researching this. What do you think?
Speaker 2 (35:57):
All right? Sorry? Next question is from Robert noted that
on an episode I made a mistake by joking about
something that actually happens. Let's hear Robert's question who.
Speaker 4 (36:09):
In one of the podcasts for Passing Months, Kelly made
a random side comment about how it'd be cool if
he didn't carrots turn the orange, which, as it turns out,
actually does. I don't really understand how though, so I'd
love it if you can look into why and do
some sort of segment about krotinemia beta caroteenes and all that.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Thanks, all right, Kelly being called out by our audience.
I wonder if this is a physics inspired listener that
would be juicy.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
I don't know, but I would like all listeners to
call me out. At least I assume you'd like us
both be called out if you if you catch us
making a mistake, please correct us. We want to get
this stuff right. And you know, lots of times knowledge
is moving quickly and we might not be all caught up.
But in this case, this is something that I got wrong.
We've known this for a long time. I think I
(36:57):
knew it, but I've since forgotten.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
And so well, let's dig in and marinate in your wrongness.
What exactly did you say? And exactly how.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
This is my favorite thing to do? Uh so, so
I said, I think I made some joke about like,
wouldn't it be funny if you turned orange when you
ate carrots? And this is called caratinemia. And it's not
called caratinemia because you ate carrots. It's called caratinemia because
(37:26):
of the carotene that you find in a lot of
different kinds of fruits and veggies.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
And are carrots called carrots because of beta carotene or
is it just a totally random connection.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
I'm gonna bet that carrots had a name long before
we knew what carotene was.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Well, Google tells me that the word originates from a
Greek word, which is derived from an Indo European word
for horn or head. So it has to do with
the shape of the top of the carrot.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
Okay, Well, and caratene is not spelled C A R
R O T E ny, It's just got one R.
So maybe it's just a coincidence. So anyway, around World
War One and World War Two, actually caratinemia I'm going
to slow down and stumble every time I have to
say it was actually moderately common because there were some
(38:14):
food shortages and lots of people kept eating large quantities
of the same fruits or of veggies, and lots of
different kinds of fruits and vegetables not just carrots have
carotene in them.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
What's an example of something that's not a carrot but
has a lot of bit of carotene in it?
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Apricots, mangoes, oranges, green beans, et cetera. Lots of different
fruits and vegetables have it.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
So these are all sort of orangey stuff until you
got the green beans.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Yeah, they don't have to be orange. And if you remember,
we were talking about krotenoids when we were talking about flamingoes,
and we were talking about how flamingoes extract the krotenoids
from the food that they eat and they use that
to make themselves pink, and they're not always eating pink foods.
It has to do with how your body sort of
converts and deals with these products. So in our body,
(39:01):
when we consume carotenoids in our liver, we convert some
of those carotenoids into vitamin A using a particular kind
of enzyme that we have, and then we go ahead
and we use that vitamin A to help us with
things like vision and the functioning of our immune system.
But if you have too much vitamin A, it can
be toxic. So no matter how much beta caroteen we consume,
(39:24):
our bodies only convert a small amount of it to
vitamin a.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Is that because we only need a certain amount of
vitamin A, our body is not capable of converting more
or why is it rejected?
Speaker 2 (39:33):
We only need a certain amount, and if you have
too much, it becomes toxic, and so our body sort
of protects us from that toxicity by only converting some
amount of it well into vitamin A. Yeah, go us,
go us. But our body still has it, and it
binds to fat, and if you accumulate enough of it,
sometimes you can actually see those accumulations in our hands
(39:55):
and in the soles of our feet. So when you
get caratinemia kerosinemia, see how fast I said it, I'm
really good. So when you get keratinemia, you mostly can
see like a yellowish tint in your souls and in
your hands. You don't tend to get it in your
eyes because your eyes don't have the right kind of
stuff for the carotenoids to bind to. And this is
(40:16):
one of the ways that you tell the difference between
if somebody has jaundice, which is a liver problem, versus keratinemia.
If their eyes aren't yellow, they probably don't have jaundice.
But anyway, so it tends to build up. And you
could also get licopenia, which is when you have too
many tomatoes, which has a different kind of carotenoid called lycopene.
I eat a lot of tomatoes, which, yeah, well are
(40:40):
you yellow?
Speaker 1 (40:41):
Everyone's a little yellow, right, I.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
Get well, you're not noticeably yellow, and you don't have
yellow hands, so you have probably haven't eaten too much.
In general, this condition isn't dangerous, and you know we
think that in general. Like you, if you become orange
or yellowy, the solution is to just change your diet,
stop eating that stuff. Eventually your body will extract the
kerotene and you will go back to your normal tone.
(41:05):
But I did find a paper that said, you know,
this problem is almost never associated with poor health. Quote. However,
a man who allegedly ate six to seven pounds of
carrots weekly was found to have constipation, hyper keratinemia, increase
liver enzymes, and possible vitamin A toxicity. So you can
overdo it, guys. Your body tries to save us. But
(41:26):
if you're eating six to seven pounds of carrots weekly,
you might have some problems.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Is this a carrot farmer or what's the story with
this guy?
Speaker 2 (41:35):
That's all I could find. I don't know. Man, moderations,
that's right, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
Throw in some tomatoes, dude, geez.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
That's right. Have a little leycopenia to go with your caratinymia.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
Wow, this is fascinating, and so can people google to
get like pictures of people with kerotinemia that look crazy orange?
Is it impressive or is it sort of underwhelming?
Speaker 2 (41:59):
It's kind of under not super impressive, And that's a
fairly safe Google search as far as I can tell,
I don't remember seeing anything.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
More than pinworms.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
I'm guessing yeah, yeah, I don't recommend actually looking up
pinworms pictures of pinworms. But anyway, that's the answer that
I have for Robert.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
And so is there anything else that if you eat it,
you will turn that color? Can I turn purple by
eating enough eggplant?
Speaker 2 (42:25):
I don't know about eggplant in particular, but any of
those plants, be they fruit or vegetables that have a
lot of carotenoids, you risk your body storing them in
your in your body as something that will make you yellowy.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
So well, as a kid, I enjoyed having a blue
tongue after eating blueberries. It's something really cool about that.
But like, you are what you eat, and you get
that color. That's super cool. So it's kind of cool
to like turn orange after eating carros. It feels like
cartoony biology, but real it does.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Yeah, and I like that you can do this without
yourself too much.
Speaker 5 (43:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
Yeah, and it is so sort of counterintuitive that if
you eat too many green beans you could turn yellow
or orange. But it is weird.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
Yeah, well it depends, right, because it's biology.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
That's right, that's right. But unlike physics, I had a
clear answer. And so let's see what Robert thinks of
our clear answer. And Robert pick a team biology. Ooh no,
I'm just kidding. You don't have to do that. Can't
we all just get on you started it.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
I say, after tossing so many bos.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
All right, that's right.
Speaker 4 (43:34):
That is super interesting. I would not have expected it
to be a lipid binding process. Wonder if that means
if a person got liposuction procedure, if the adiposse would
also come out more yellowish. Super cool regardless, So thank
you for so much for ixporing my question. And as
my degrees are social work, psychology, and sexuality, I'm gonna
have to abstain from your biology and physics rivalry. I
think all science is great, nothing more human than one
(43:56):
to understand.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
All right, thank you Robert for writing it, and thanks to
everybody who's saying and your questions. We really do love
hearing from you. Write to us Questions at Daniel and
Kelly dot org.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
Looking forward to hearing your questions. Thanks. Daniel and Kelly's
Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to
hear from you.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
We really would. We want to know what questions you
have about this Extraordinary Universe.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions
for future shows. If you contact us, we will get
back to you.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us
at Questions at Danielankelly.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Dot org, or you can find us on social media.
We have accounts on x, Instagram, Blue Sky and on
all of those platforms. You can find us at d
and kuniverse.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
Don't be shy, write to us
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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