Listener Questions #7

Daniel and Kelly answer questions about the Big Bang, figs and Higgs!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
What if another universe shared our Big Bang? Why do
figs have a waspy tang?

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Could the Higgs make the Big Bang? Relte? Why is
dark chocolate so much better than white?

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Biology? Physics, archaeology, forestry, and today fortunately no chemistry.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Whatever question keeps you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's
answer will make it all right.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Welcome to another Listener's Questions episode on Daniel and Kelly's
Extraordinary Universe. Hello, I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I'm a parasitologist who

(00:51):
loves questions.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist with a deep voice.
That's even deeper because I was shouting at a UCI
basketball game on Saturday.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Oh, and you said you were sick. Recently, There's been
a lot of things happening to your voice.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
So I hope you enjoy an extra baritone version of
the podcast today.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
It'll be fun. I just spent four hours on my
tractor this morning plowing our roads. So what is the
most exciting power tool you've ever used, Daniel.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Other than the large hadron collider. That's a power tool,
isn't it.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:26):
Thirty three kilometers around accelerates protons to nearly the speed
of light, but it can't cut through a two by four.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
Yeah, okay, but I guess you win. I was feeling
pretty cool about my tractor, but now I think you win.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
I want a particle beam to melt the snow off
my sidewalk. No, that's a collective tool. What power tool
have I personally used that's most impressive? Hmm, that's a
good question. We have like a cool machine shop here
at UCI, so we have some pre impressive power tools
that can, like you know, put rivets into stuff. Or
we have the metal cutting bandsaw, which terrifies me. Oh

(02:02):
my gosh, every time I go near that thing. I'm wondering,
is today the day I lose a finger?

Speaker 1 (02:07):
Wait, because you're using it? Or do you just mean,
like even walking by it freaks you out?

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Even walking near it? You know, I've seen enough videos
of somebody like tripping and putting their hand out and
then zoom and then it's gone.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
In our place, we try to buy the like safest
power tools. Have you seen the videos where like it's
a table saw and they put a like hot dog
into the blade and it immediately stops and everything disappears.
So like everything we have at our property is like
the safest version. Like our tractor is low to the ground.
It's got double tires so that it's less like lit
a flip over. Does an electro fishing boat count as

(02:39):
a power tool, because now I'm thinking that maybe that's
cooler than a tractor.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
I don't even know what that is. Electro fishing boat.
It fishes electrically.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
It puts an electrical current in the water to stun
the fish, and then you catch them in a net
and you put them in a live well, so it's
that flowing water that's well oxygenated. People who work in
fisheries use these to survey a different population. And once
we were stunning the water and a fish got past
the people with the net, and I thought, I would
like save the day because we really wanted to catch
this fish. So I reached in to get it and

(03:09):
I forgot.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
I was like, you made a shocking discovery.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
I made a shocking discovery. That's right. That's why it's
probably not smart for me to use big power tools,
but I use them anyway.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
I am awed by the power of these tools and
amazed that people used to build whole civilizations without them.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
Yes, Oh, that's so amazing. Yeah, when I think about
the Pyramids, like, I know, that's like a cliche example,
but holy crow.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Well, people have lots of questions about how the Pyramids
were built. We know it wasn't ancient aliens. We know
humans have been in genius and modern day humans are
ingenious about thinking about the universe and asking questions about it.
And we love on this podcast hearing about your questions,
not just answering the questions in my mind or in
Kelly's mind, but answering the questions on the tips of

(03:54):
everybody's tongues.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
All right, so let's start to me. This is a
very exciting day because we have questions from a lot
of different countries represented, well, almost a few different countries represented.
So let's start with Brazil, and let's hear Marcella's question.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
Hello, Daniel and Kelly, how are you doing. My name
is Marcella. I am from Brazil and I was talking
with a friend about the Big Bang and if we
were to reproduce it using the exact same seed, so
the particles would interact in the exact same way, moved
in the same exact directions, would that create a clone universe?

(04:32):
Or is there no such thing. I'm very curious about this.
Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to hearing from
you on the podcast.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
All right, Daniel, So let's start with what is the
Big Bang? To make sure we're all on the same page,
because I feel like this is one of those topics
that I hear about and I seem to remember you
telling me that the popular conception of this idea is
like totally not right. So let's make sure we're all
on the same page.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
Yeah. It's amazing to me and kind of endlessly frustrating
that this incredible concept in science that's been so talked
about is still so widely misunderstood. That like, the mental
image most scientists have of the Big Bang is very
different from the mental image in the public's mind. And
I had a long conversation with Zach about this when
we talked about one of his recent books on cosmology

(05:21):
about this discrepancy and how these things go awry. But briefly,
most people, when they think about the Big Bang, imagine
a tiny dot of matter in empty space, and then
an explosion of all that stuff flying out, filling out
that once empty space and zooming through the universe and
then fourteen billion years later, things are still flying out.

(05:42):
That's what people imagine. And I wonder, when Marcella is
talking about a single seat to reproduce the Big Bang,
the particles flying in various directions, if this is what
she's imagining, because in contrast, the scientific view of the
Big Bang is quite different. There's no dot in empty space,
and also wasn't the beginning of the universe. The Big
Bang is a time thirteen point six billion years ago

(06:05):
when the universe was very hot and very dense. But crucially,
there was not a dot in empty space. It was
filled with this hot dance matter. It was everywhere. The
whole universe was filled with hot, dense stuff. There was
no empty space. It also wasn't the beginning of the universe.
It's just the earliest moment we can think about, or
we can describe with our laws of physics. So ditch

(06:26):
the idea of a hot danse dot exploding into space
and imagine a whole universe filled with hot, dense matter.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
Okay, yeah, I think that differs significantly from what I
was told when I first heard about the Big Bang.
All right, so let's take the scenario that you just
laid out for us. If everything was exactly the same
as it was about fourteen billion years ago, and then
you hit play and you started it again, would you
get the exact same thing.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yeah, this is such a great question, and I think
it's so important philosophically because it makes us wonder about
whether the life we're living is random or determined. And
if it's determined, is that mean I'm just a robot
and I was predetermined to say this thing on the
podcast and to make these dumb jokes, And so I'm
not responsible for all my terrible humor.

Speaker 1 (07:13):
You're not getting out of it. It's your responsibility.

Speaker 2 (07:16):
That was my philosophical backdoor. Anyway, It's a fascinating question
and one that's been debated for a long time in physics,
and in classical physics, the answer is yes, the past
perfectly predicts the future. It determines the future. The classical
way to think about this is like a billiard ball.
If you shoot the cue ball at the eighth ball,
and you do it again and again with exactly the

(07:37):
same setup, you should get the same answer. Because the
laws of physics tell you exactly how momentum travels and
exactly how that bounce happens, and even at the microscopic scale,
if you think about the atoms. As long as you're
talking about classical physics, then the past completely predicts the future.
There is no wiggle room at all. The universe is
like a clock. It's like a big mechanism, and the

(07:59):
current state addicts the future, and the current state can
be predicted by the past. So if you have two
universes with the same setup and you just hit play,
as you say, they should end up fourteen billion years
later with exactly the same mushroom over here and the
same blueberry over there. If the universe is governed by
classical physics.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
And the same Daniel on a podcast like all the
way to those details like no free will at all.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
No free will at all if the universe is governed
by classical physics, because otherwise where can it creep in? Right,
You either have to add some sort of dualistic thing
where you have like, yes, the universe is controlled by
classical physics, but there's a special thing where people get
to make decisions, and there's this like an unexplained force
somehow where my brain decides how neurons fire and how

(08:43):
my hand moves. You know, there's no room at all
for wiggles in classical physics. Right, you throw the ball
the same way twice, it will fly the same way
twice if you've captured all of those details. And that's
tremendously difficult, like to imagine setting up a whole universe
with every particle moving in exactly the same direction. But
you know, it's a philosophical question, so we get to
be unrealistic in practice. If you are building universes, it's

(09:07):
going to be very, very difficult to have exactly the
same starting conditions. But that's what Marcella is asking about,
because she's not interested in is it hard to make
two universes start the same way? She's interested in if
you do what happens, and yes, you get exactly the
same Daniel on the same podcast, not liking chemistry or
with a growing interest in biology.

Speaker 1 (09:26):
Oh good, good answer, and hating white chocolate. So I
really don't want to lose hope that there's free will
out there, and so I'm going to cling to my
knowledge that general relativity and quantum mechanics don't always agree.
So probably at a different scale, this deterministic stuff breaks
down and so what happens if you're thinking about the

(09:46):
quantum realm.

Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah, so then people say, oh, okay, well, the universe
is not classical. There's quantum mechanics, and electrons don't obey
these rules of classical physics. They aren't like billiard balls.
And as you zoom down to the microphysics of the universe,
there are different set of rules and quantum mechanics dot
dot dot randomness, dot dot dot free will. But there's
a lot that's being lost in those dot dot dots.

(10:07):
And there's important subtlety about quantum mechanics which is deterministic
also just in a different way that I really want
people to understand. So quantum mechanics does not say that
if you shoot an electron at some experimental setup, you'll
get the same answer twice, even if the initial conditions
are the same, which is different from classical physics. Classical

(10:27):
physics says throw a baseball the same way twice, you
get exactly the same trajectory. Quantum mechanics says you throw
an electron at a wall, you don't always get the
same outcome. But quantum mechanics does say you always get
the same probability distribution of possible outcomes that is deterministic.
So quantum mechanics is not like, hey, the universe is random.

(10:48):
Do anything you like, folks. Right, there are still rules,
it's just the rules don't govern the individual outcomes. Instead,
they govern the probability of various outcomes. So if you'd
like to think about two options, if an electron can
go left or right, and quantum mechanics is very specific
about the odds of going left or the odds of
going right.

Speaker 1 (11:07):
But once you have many, many, many of these sort
of decision points where it goes left or right, things
can get very different between for example, the moment the
Big Bang happened, and now like we wouldn't necessarily have
Daniel with a deep voice on the show today if
we started everything again from the exact same materials.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
Yeah, and that's exactly where it gets messy, these decision points, right, Like,
if we throw electrons at the wall, quantum mechanics says
they have the same probability. But then you're suggesting, Okay,
now let's ask where the electrons are, let's observe them.
They end up in different places. And we duck into
this recently with Scott on our listener questions episode. But
it's interesting to play another philosophical game and say, well,

(11:46):
what if we don't ever ask, like, take your universe,
make it quantum mechanical, started from the same initial conditions,
run it forward fourteen billion years, but never make an observation,
then those two universes are this same quantum mechanically. They
have the same probabilities distribution of outcomes because nobody's ever
collapsed those wave functions, and so because you never made

(12:09):
any choices, quantum mechanics is completely deterministic about the probability
distributions of the various outcomes fourteen billion years later. And
so if you let the universe stay quantum mechanical, you
never collapse it into classical physics or make observations, then
the deterministic of quantum mechanics says, the answer is that
you get the same universe, the same quantum mechanical universe.

(12:31):
Or if you like to think about many worlds version
of quantum mechanics, you get the same set of possible
universes in the future if you haven't picked one at
any moment, and you're making that face because you're wondering, like,
how is it possible to not pick one. Doesn't the
universe force you to do that?

Speaker 1 (12:47):
Well, that's one of the things that I'm wondering, But
I could see this on multiple levels, I think. Right, Okay,
So if the electron can go left or right, and
you know, say, getting from fourteen billion years ago to now,
that has to happen, you know, a trillion time. Why
during those trillion times in a quantum mechanical universe, would
the electron always make exactly the same decision as it
made initially. Why wouldn't each time it would be a

(13:11):
separate coin flip to make the decision and you could
end up somewhere else. Why does observing it mess that up?

Speaker 2 (13:18):
Because there is no coin flip until you observe it.
Like if you shoot electrons through this double slit experiment
but there is no screen, then the electron could have
gone through the left or could have gone through the right.
You don't know. Even after the experiment is over, you
haven't collapsed the wave function, the probability still remains. And
if it only ever interacts with quantum objects and influences

(13:40):
those that, then those probabilities are just propagated. Say, for example,
we have our double slit experiment, the electron could have
gone through the left or the right, and that I
don't have a screen. Instead, downstream I have two more
double slit experiments which capture electrons that went left, to
capture electrons that went right, and does another split. Now
I have four possible outcomes for the elector and could

(14:00):
goone left, left, left, right, right, left or right right,
and all the four possibilities exist now downstream from that,
at another set of experiments, Now I have eight possible
outcomes right now, say I do this for fourteen billion years, right,
I have a huge number of possible outcomes for this electron.
And because I never had a screen, I allowed all

(14:22):
those possibilities to propagate forwards. And if I start from
the same initial conditions, I will always have the same
possible set of outcomes for that electron. Same thing for
the whole universe. If there's no screen. Now, how can
you avoid having a screen?

Speaker 4 (14:37):
Right?

Speaker 2 (14:37):
Because electrons will hit something, and the universe has planets
in it and there are people in it and whatever.
And this is where we don't know the answer, because
we don't understand the distinction between quantum things which don't
force the collapse of the wave function and can happily
allow superpositions to propagate in classical things like my eyeball
or your brain that do force individual outcomes. Because I

(14:58):
can't be in a superposition. I can't be Daniel who
saw the electron on the left side and Daniel who
saw the electron on the right side simultaneously. I'm a
classical thing. And this is where we don't have a
philosophical answer to the question of why does the wave
function collapse sometimes and how does an observation work? We
don't know. So to answer Marcella's question, like, if you
start from the same quantum state I mean, the same probabilities,

(15:22):
same undetermined reality, and you let that propagate forward, you
would get a clone of the universe's quantum states today,
which includes all the uncertainties and all the unknowns, because
quantum mechanics is deterministic about the probabilities. Right, But you
were right, the collapse can't be cloned. If people do
experiments and there are observations in those universes, then those

(15:44):
will be individual coin flips, and those are drawn from
those probability distributions, but they are fundamentally random, and so
they will go different ways. Like a ball bouncing down
one of those games, it's going to end up in
a different slot, and that's going to cascade down the road.
So if you have quantum mechanics and you have collapsing
wave functions, that it's essentially impossible to end up with

(16:04):
the same universe twice fourteen billion years later starting from
the initial conditions. But if you never collapse the wave function,
then you get the same quantum mechanical probabilities for all
those various outcomes.

Speaker 1 (16:15):
All right, that was trippy, but I think I followed it.
Let's see what Marcella thinks.

Speaker 3 (16:21):
Hey, Daniel and Kelly, thank you so much for answering
my question. It was very trippy. Indeed, I think I
prefer classical physics. I don't really understand it that deeply,
as I am a psychology major, but I feel like
it wraps around my head a little bit easier than
quantum physics. Quantum physics is a whole different realm. But

(16:46):
it was very interesting to listen to you guys discussing
it and learn a little bit more about this. I
will have to take this to my friend now, with
whom I had this conversation in the beginning, and we're
going to discuss and if I have any further questions,
I will definitely send it your way. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (17:04):
Guys. All right, we are back and we're zooming out
from the whole universe and the Big Bang, and now

(17:26):
we're going to answer our some questions about the gooey
treats that we all eat.

Speaker 1 (17:30):
And we're talking about wasps, which makes me very happy.
So we have a question from Petrie. Let's go ahead
and listen.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
Hello.

Speaker 5 (17:38):
My name is Petrie and I'm from Waterloo, Canada, and
I recently learned a little bit about figs and wasps.
And my question is am I really eating dissolved wasp
carcasses when I eat figs? Thank you?

Speaker 2 (17:54):
So I'm very excited to hear your answer to this
question because just the other day at dinner, as I
was enjoying fig one of my son's friends said to me, Hey,
you know you're eating wasp babies, right, And I thought
to myself, that is a very cool little popsie fact.
I wonder if it's true or if Kelly would throw
cold water on it. Petrie and I are both very

(18:14):
curious to know whether or not we're eating wasp babies.

Speaker 1 (18:17):
Well, this is a question about biology, so the answer
has to be it depends, because nature's never that easy.
Let's dig into the biology here. So first of all,
there's over seven hundred and fifty species of fig trees,
and almost all of them have their own wasp that
pollinates them, and so there's a lot of different kinds

(18:39):
of these and so the answer that you're going to
get in the end depends on what species of fig
it is that you're eating and how it was cultivated.

Speaker 2 (18:45):
All right, First, I have some questions. Yeah, okay, seven
hundred and fifty species of figs. I've had like three
different kinds of figs, like the black figs and the
tiger figs. Are there a lot more figs out there
that I should learn to enjoy? Or are these all
like invisible variations on bloe?

Speaker 1 (19:01):
There are people who forage on wild figs, and they
would tell you that each one is its own unique
flavor escapade that you should go on. And so.

Speaker 2 (19:11):
I like flavor escapades. That sounds great, It does.

Speaker 1 (19:13):
Sound great, but I can't say that I have tried them.
I've just tried, like, you know, the typical figs that
you get yeah, okay, but the biology is trippy. Okay,
So because they're seven hundred and fifty different species, this
works in a lot of different ways, and so I'm
just going to give you like an overview of how
it works a lot of the time, but if you
dig into a particular system, the details probably different. All right,
So here's the deal, right.

Speaker 2 (19:33):
So give us a background on like what it means
for a wasp to pollinate a fig, because I'm familiar
with like bees and pollen a little bit, but like
tell us how it works for figs and why they
have to use wasps.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
Okay, all right, So figs, So usually you think of
flowers getting pollinated. A fig is a flower, but instead
of it opening outwards, it actually kind of closes in
on itself and it's got a little tiny hole at
the bottom called the osteole, and and it's ready to
be pollinated. It secretes a smell that attracts the wasps

(20:05):
that pollinate it.

Speaker 2 (20:06):
All right. So usually for fruit, you have like a
flower and then it's pollinated and then you get the
fruit laders, like you'll see cherry trees bloom and then
later you have cherries. But you're saying figs are the
blooms themselves.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
Yes, and then they ripe it.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
Wow yeah, wow, Okay, fascinating plants are nuts. Nuts are plants.
It's amazing.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
Oh my gosh. This is deep. So there's this little
hole at the bottom, and when it's ready to get pollinated,
it attracts the wasp. And the hole is so small
that when the female wasp, and it's always a female
in this case, when the female wasp goes in there,
she has to like squeeze in and her wings fall
off and sometimes part of her antennae fall off. She's

(20:46):
really like wedging herself in there because she's.

Speaker 2 (20:49):
So desperate to eat this smelly thing.

Speaker 1 (20:51):
To lay her eggs in the smelly thing.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
Oh, to lay her eggs in my delicious tree.

Speaker 1 (20:56):
Yeah. Yeah. This is just the beginning of the gross
pyramid or the gross ice, if you will. So she
wiggles her way to the inside of the fruit. And
if you've opened up a fig, you've maybe noticed that
the inside has a little bit of an open space,
and so she gets to that open space. And you
might have also noticed that when you open up a
fig often there's lots of little seeds in there. So
the good news is that when you bite into a

(21:16):
seed and you feel something crunchy, it is the seed.
It's not the wasp, So like, don't start panicking already.
So the mom gets in there and all of the
little like projections and the inside of the fig are
as I understand it. They're like ovaries, and so they
can either get pollinated, and the wasp has pollen on her,
and we'll get to how she got that pollen on

(21:37):
her towards the end of the story. But she's got pollen,
and so in some of those little ovaries she deposits
her egg and then induces the fig to make a
gall where her offspring will develop.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
Tamika, what a gall? What's a gall?

Speaker 1 (21:50):
Oh? Man? I love galling insects. We need to get
my friends. Got Egan on the show one day to
talk about galling insects because he freaks out because they're
so great.

Speaker 2 (21:57):
Gallic is different from galic Gaalic is like French.

Speaker 1 (21:59):
Right, yeah, right, this is gall Gall. A plant is
manipulated into producing a compartment in which an insect will grow,
and that compartment is called a gall. Yikes, And they
take lots of different crazy forms, some of them are
super fuzzy. Some of them have spikes. This is not
in the figs. This is in like oaks and stuff.
But here it's just a tiny little compartment that the

(22:19):
insect grows in.

Speaker 2 (22:21):
So the fig manipulates the wasp to crawl in, and
the wasp manipulates the fig to make a little nest
for its baby.

Speaker 1 (22:27):
Yes, while it is also depositing pollen. There's all of
these little like projections in the gall Some of them
are the right height for eggs to get laid in,
and some of them are not, and those get pollen
on them. And so you get some insect babies inside
of these projections, and then in some of them you
just get the production of like seeds. Is that making
sense so far?

Speaker 2 (22:46):
Yeah? Absolutely? Okay, right, so they're like sharing this thing,
like you grow some of your babies and I'll grow
some of my babies. So basically figs and wasps are
like siblings that grow up together.

Speaker 1 (22:55):
This is a mutualism, so they both benefit. The listener
should let us know if you want a whole show
on this, because I would love an excuse to read
about the evolution of like how this came into being.
But that is not the question I was asked to answer.
So we're going to stay on focus.

Speaker 2 (23:08):
I want a whole show in this, depending on how
gross this gets and whether this ruins figs for me
in the end.

Speaker 1 (23:13):
All right, stick with me, Stick with me. Okay. So
the mom, when she's done pollinating and laying her eggs,
dies and that's usually the wasp that people are talking
about you eating. And the good news is at the
point where this process is happening, the fig is not
usually ripe enough that you would pick it and eat it.
So the mom dies and then the mom essentially gets

(23:34):
digested by the fig, so it releases this enzyme I
think it's called fiking ficin, and it digests the mom,
and I think it just uses that protein for like
its own stuff.

Speaker 2 (23:44):
So the fig eats the wasp.

Speaker 1 (23:46):
So the fig eats the wasp.

Speaker 2 (23:48):
Wow, what amazing.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
There's other wasps in there, right, because you've just created
a bunch of goals, right, And so those gulls hatch
and the males come out first, and often more than
one female wasp gets in and lays her eggs. Sometimes
it's only one, but the males come out first. And
the reason it's important to know if it was one
or more moms is because what those males do is

(24:09):
they open up the gulls that contain the females and
they start impregnating those females.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
Which might be their sisters, which might be.

Speaker 1 (24:15):
Their sisters, and often it is their sisters.

Speaker 2 (24:18):
And so gross problematic, wasp men problematic, that's right.

Speaker 1 (24:22):
Work on that wasps, work on it. So the females
get impregnated, and then the males, having done that job,
start chewing their way out of the fig to create
exit holes for the females.

Speaker 2 (24:33):
I'm losing track of who's eating who here.

Speaker 1 (24:35):
Oh, you know, there's a lot of bags and forth right.
It's a mutualism. It's give and take. And so the
males they start chewing these exit holes for the females
who have wings, and they manage to get out. A
lot of times the males like chew these exit holes
and then they get like picked off by ants that
are like waiting on the outside of the fig to
eat these other insects. Because nature is just mean, and
so the males are like sacrificial. Some of them never

(24:57):
get out of the fig. A lot of them that
get out of the they get eaten by ants. And
while they are being consumed by ants, that gives the
females a chance to go off.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
Is this the whole job of the males to dig
the women out and pregnate them and then let them
miscave the wasp or do they have a life cycle
outside of the wasp.

Speaker 1 (25:12):
Well, that's it, that's it. Yeah, they impregnate the females,
they help them get out, then they sacrifice themselves and die.
That's it.

Speaker 2 (25:18):
So if you're a male wasp, your whole existence is
inside a fig. Your fig is your universe. Yes, that's crazy.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
And so if you are eating a wasp in a fig,
I think you're probably eating the males m that get
left behind in there. So the females they get impregnated,
and before they go out and leave to go find
another fig, the fig that they're in starts producing pollen,
and the females go and they collect the pollen. They've

(25:46):
got like a little compartment and they collect the pollen,
they hold onto it, and then they go off in
search of another fig.

Speaker 2 (25:52):
Why did they do that? They just do that to
be nice to the fig, or there's a benefit to them.

Speaker 1 (25:56):
This is why I would love to have a whole
show on this. But the quick answer that I found
when I did a little bit of research was that
when females get into a fig and they lay their
eggs but they don't do any pollinating, the fig trees
are more likely to drop that fig. So it's like
they're punishing the wasp for not pollinating it. But there's

(26:18):
got to be some cheating. So, like, you know, if
two fig wasps get into a fig and one pollinates
and one doesn't, then how do you punish the one
that didn't pollinate?

Speaker 2 (26:27):
Wow?

Speaker 1 (26:28):
And so I'd love an excuse to read more about it,
but it sounds like there's some punishment going to like
maintain this mutualism. There's consequences if you don't play along.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
Mutualism is that the grown up word for symbiosis that
I learned as a young biologist.

Speaker 1 (26:40):
So symbiosis means a long term interaction between two organisms.
Sometimes it can be bad or sometimes it can be good.
And so mutualism is when it is good. When a
symbiosis is good for both partners.

Speaker 2 (26:52):
I see, even though they eat each other, the fig
eats the wasp, the wasps eats the fig, it's good
for both of them.

Speaker 1 (26:57):
It's good for both of them, that's right, right. That's
like a general overview of how it works. And so
now let's get into the specifics. So figs have been
cultivated by humans for something like eleven thousand years.

Speaker 2 (27:09):
Wow, how do we know that?

Speaker 1 (27:10):
We know that because we have found figs and archaeological
digs and it looks like it's been going on for
about eleven thousand years.

Speaker 2 (27:17):
Figs and archaeological digs like remnants of fossilized figs, or
like depictions of people eating figs or what does that mean?

Speaker 1 (27:25):
I think it's remnants of fossilized figs.

Speaker 2 (27:28):
Wow. Incredible.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
But again, if we did a whole hour on this,
I'd be happy to find a lot more. All right,
And here's where we really get out of my area
of expertise, and this is in how plants reproduce. But
here is my best guess at answering the question. Okay,
so through that process of cultivation, we have come up
with some figs that don't produce seeds at all. So
you've had seedless watermelon. Probably this is sort of the

(27:51):
same idea. I think what's happening is you like pull
a branch off, and then you stick a branch in
the ground and it'll just start like propagating that way,
and so those fruits will still ripen, you can still
eat them. And if they don't have seeds, then they
didn't need a wasp. And so a lot of the
figs that you eat in grocery stores have been propagated

(28:11):
that way and have never encountered a wasp.

Speaker 2 (28:14):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
There are also some figs that you can induce to
ripen by spraying them with plant hormones, and even though
the wasp wasn't there, it will go ahead and ripen
and then you can eat it.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
So figs in the wild originally had this complex dance
with wasps to evolve and propagate, and that gives us
natural selection and all the kind of useful stuff. But
humans have intervened and been cultivating figs and taking them
out of their sort of natural cycle which might exclude
the wasps. Is that what I'm understanding.

Speaker 1 (28:45):
Yes, And it wouldn't surprise me if in those seven
hundred and fifty fig species there were some that had
dropped the wasp and get pollinated in some other way,
because plants are just kind of crazy. But yes, in general,
you need the wasp. But when we took this system
and cultivated it as many cases as we can, we
try to cut that wasp out. And that wasp also
has environmental conditions that can't live under. So when it

(29:06):
gets too cold, for example, and you're growing a fig
too far north, then you probably don't have that wasp
at all because the wasps can't survive, but you could
still get fig fruits.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
So it sounds like I'm unlikely to be eating wasps
if I'm eating like cultivated figs that I'm buying in
the grocery store. Whereas if I have a fig tree
just like out in my backyard and I'm eating bows,
am I more likely to be eating wasps?

Speaker 1 (29:28):
Depends on where you live. I think it was the
common fig and we took it from Turkey the country
to California. We didn't bring the wasp with us. Initially,
the fig trees weren't doing what they thought they should
be doing, and so we ended up figuring out what
was going on, and then we brought the wasp over.
And so there's some parts in California where the wasp
can survive and the wasp does its thing, maybe even

(29:51):
in Irvine. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (29:53):
Irvine probably has a law against it somehow.

Speaker 1 (29:55):
Glad to know. It's a bureaucratic sort of city. But
if you go farther north, probably aren't the wasps. There's
other ways of like injecting the pollen in and pollinating
without the wasps. But I believe that figs from like
Turkey in southern California, you've got the wasps, and so
they might be in there. But I think it depends
on like the species, depends on where you are. It's

(30:15):
really complicated. So the answer I think is it depends.
I heard in a couple different sources that dried figs
tend to come from Turkey, where you do get the
wasp pollination, and so the dried figs are maybe more
likely to have wasps in them than a fresh fig
from northern California or something. The answer is, it depends
what happened to your fig?

Speaker 2 (30:36):
All right? Well, my last question then is can I tell, like,
if I bite into a fig, can I tell if
as a wasp? But it's a crunch. Differently, I mean,
should I notice? Does it matter?

Speaker 4 (30:45):
No?

Speaker 1 (30:45):
I would not think too hard about it. They're like
teeny tiny I mean, if you've looked at like a
seed in a fig, those are super tiny. I you know,
imagine something like living inside of one of those or
something like really tiny. I mean, if you looked really close,
you put it under a microscope, maybe you would see
some remnants. But just pop the thing in your mouth,
put some goat cheese on it and some honey, smile,
and don't think about the wasps that have brought you

(31:07):
this amazing fruit.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
I think you're right actually that the smaller the insect,
the less gross. It is. Like, if I imagine a
wasp basically filling out the inside of the fig, and
I'm biting the figure, I'm basically eating an entire wasp.
That's super gross. Yeah, but I know that everything I
eat is covered in all sorts of microbes and mites
and little critters All the time. As I'm speaking, I'm
probably consuming some tiny flies or whatever, and I'm honestly

(31:31):
grossed out by that. So I'll just shrink those wasps
in my mind until I don't worry about eating them.

Speaker 1 (31:37):
I think the FDA, for a bunch of different kinds
of foods, has criteria for how many like insects or
insect parts are allowed to be in there, like per
gram because insects are, like, they're just really hard to avoid.
I think a lot of us are eating insects, whether
we mean to or not, whether we're vegan or not.

Speaker 2 (31:53):
Cockroach legs and everything.

Speaker 1 (31:55):
Ugh, No, I don't want to think about that. Cockroaches
do creep me out. You found my kryptonite.

Speaker 2 (32:00):
What about tiny littlelady bad ones, super tiny microscopic cockroaches.

Speaker 1 (32:05):
Yeah, if they're so small that I can't see them,
I'll eat them. That's fine.

Speaker 2 (32:10):
We'll do a blind taste test one day. I'll sprinkle
tiny cockroaches into a platter of hummus and mix it
in and see if you can tell.

Speaker 1 (32:16):
I am not inviting you to parties anymore. But I've
been writing parasitologists to ask them if they infect themselves
with parasites, and one of them did tell me that
they mixed some beetles in with hummus so that they
wouldn't know that they were eating the beetle that was
infected by a tapeworm when they tried to infect themselves
with the tapeworm. And I was like, wow, So anyway,
hummus will always be for me. I guess the food

(32:36):
that you hide things in.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
There's got to be a Beatles joke. There is there
a Beatles song that sounds like it's about insects.

Speaker 1 (32:44):
Here comes the infection, It's a stretch. Here comes the
wasp in your hummus. Yeah, I don't know. I don't
really like the beetles.

Speaker 2 (32:59):
So lucy in the hummus with cockroaches. That's the Beatles
song you never heard before.

Speaker 1 (33:04):
Oh all right, Petrie, did we answer your question? My friend?

Speaker 4 (33:10):
Hello, Daniel and Kelly, thank you very much for answering
my question on the podcast. And I would like to
say that your answer was very thorough and detailed and
much more explicit than I bargained for, and I thought
it was absolutely fantastic.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (33:44):
All right, Daniel, let's bring on the Funk.

Speaker 2 (33:49):
We are zooming back out from tiny microscopic things that
might gross you out to imagining the fate of the
whole universe as controlled by tiny microscopic particles. See all
the connections we're making today. Next, we're answering a question
from Tim Funk about the Higgs Boson and the Big Bang.

Speaker 6 (34:08):
As I was listening to listener questions, episode fifty eight
about the Higgs fields collapse.

Speaker 1 (34:12):
It made me wonder, could a Higgs field collapse be
just like the Big Bang? Thanks? All right, so this
is great. We've got a bit of a Big Bang
theme going on. So we've already talked about what the
Big Bang is. What has happened since the Big Bang? Daniel,
It's been a while.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah, that's been a while. A lot of stuff has happened.
Let's summarize the whole history of the universe. I think
it's important to understand what's happened since the Big Bang
in order to answer this question, because we'll see that
the Higgs field collapse can be considered it's just like
one more stage in the history of the universe. So
we talked about the Big Bang as starting from this

(34:49):
moment when the universe was very hot and was very dense.
And what happens next is that the universe expands, it
spreads out. You get new space created everywhere between in
these particles, and what that means is that the universe
is getting more sparse, right, it's getting less dense. So
the universe goes from more dense to less dense. So
we get a universe that starts out young, hot and dense,

(35:13):
and as it expands it cools and becomes old, cold
and sparse. Right, And this is actually fascinating how the
different parts of the universe react as the universe expands.
Like matter, when the universe expands, just becomes more dilute
because you have like more volume and the same amount
of stuff. You don't get more protons made, you just

(35:33):
have more space, and so the proton density goes down.
Same thing is true for photons. You have the same
number of photons, more volume, so lower density of photons.
But photons also get red shifted. They get stretched into
longer wavelengths as the universe expands, which means they lose energy.

(35:54):
So the energy density of photons goes down faster than
the energy density of matter. Matter loses energy density because
you know, space is expanding, but photons lose energy density faster,
which is really interesting, not just because hey, if you're
a nerd, this is cool, but because it tells us
something about dark matter. We can measure the energy density

(36:15):
of dark matter over time, and we see that it
decreases the same way as matter, not the same way
as photons, which is one reason why we think dark
matter is matter. People say, oh, it's just a fudge
factor in galactic rotations, but like man, it plays a
crucial role in the whole history of the universe in
so many ways.

Speaker 1 (36:32):
Does dark energy respond the same way as photons, then.

Speaker 2 (36:35):
Dark energy does its own super weird third thing, which
is that it doesn't get diluted at all. It is
constant density. You double the volume of space, you double
the dark energy. It's weird. It's just like an inherent
property of space we don't understand at all. But as
the universe expands the amount of dark energy increases because
the density is constant, totally weird and crazy.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
We got to add that to our episode list.

Speaker 2 (37:01):
It's fascinating. And so what's happening quantum mechanically is think
of the universe as space filled with quantum mechanical fields,
and you have like electron fields and photon fields, et cetera.
And as the universe is expanding, these fields are losing energy,
and so they go from being like totally filled with energy,
like an ocean of frothing energy inside these fields, to

(37:22):
being mostly empty, with little blips of energy here and there.
And so it's at that point we can start to
talk about particles. It's like take the ocean and drain it,
and now you have a bunch of drops left over
on the bottom. Those you can call particles. Doesn't really
make sense to talk about particles before that. It's just
a big frothing ocean. And so the universe cools, and
these fields deplete, and they lower with their energy density,

(37:44):
and they go down, down, down, down down. They never
actually get all the way to zero, right, they get
down to some sort of quantum minimum energy. No field
and quantum mechanics can actually have zero energy because of uncertainty.

Speaker 1 (37:56):
I follow you there, now, can you tell what the
Higgs field is?

Speaker 2 (38:01):
Right? So what role does the Higgs field play in
the sort of evolution of the universe and its future?
So all these fields we talked about are similar in
one really important way, which is that they want to
relax to zero, right. They want to go down to
zero energy density. That's sort of the most relaxed state.
And as the universe is expanding and cooling things relaxing,

(38:22):
they head down to zero particles and never get all
the way to zero, but they all head down to zero.
The Higgs field is different. It's weird in this one
particular way, which is that it doesn't relax to zero.
It relaxes to some non zero state. It's like if
you had a guitar and you plucked all the strings
and they all relaxed back down to like not vibrating

(38:43):
at all, but one of them relax down to like vibrating,
or relax down to being bent. Actually is a better analogy,
because the Higgs field relaxes not down to non zero
kinetic energy, but non zero potential energy. So like if
one of your guitar strings after you pluck it, it
relaxes down to a position which is not straight but
a little bit bent. That would be weird, right. That's

(39:03):
the Higgs field. So as the universe cools, all the
fields go to zero or close to it, except for
the Higgs field, which gets like stuck in this higher
energy state. And that's what Tim is asking about. He's
asking about if that field could collapse, if that field
could eventually decay all the way to zero, because we
don't understand the Higgs field well enough. It's pretty new

(39:24):
that we even know it it's a thing, and that
we're measuring all of its properties to know if it's
stuck in that state and stable or just sort of
temporarily paused there and eventually going to relax down to zero.
Like when I say it prefers to relax at a
non zero state, that's a hypothesis based on what we've
seen so far. We don't actually understand the field well

(39:45):
enough to know long term where it will eventually relax.

Speaker 1 (39:49):
And we don't know why it stays at the non
zero state for as long as we've been watching it, right,
that's also a mystery.

Speaker 2 (39:57):
Yeah, well, we can describe it mathematically. We can constru
dructive field that has those properties. You just have to
give it sort of a weird potential energy form. But
then the question is like, well, well why does that
field exist? Yeah, that we don't know. This is just
descriptive so it's possible to accommodate mathematically, but that doesn't
answer the philosophical question of why the universe is this way.
But if the Higgs field does collapse, it means the

(40:18):
whole universe changes in its fundamental nature, because the Higgs
field is why particles have mass. For example, electrons have mass,
and quarks have mass and all this kind of stuff,
and that only happens if the Higgs field has that energy.
If the Higgs field collapses down to zero, those particles
lose their mass. Electrons suddenly massless. Now they start moving
like photon. They move at the speed of light, same

(40:40):
with quarks. So every atom unbounds right, all matter in
the universe would explode and travel outwards at the speed
of light. It would be catastrophic for life as we
know it. The universe would go on, it would just
have very different nature. The effective laws of physics that
we're used to would be totally different.

Speaker 1 (41:00):
But to stick with Tim's question real quick, how would
that be qualitatively different than the Big Bang?

Speaker 2 (41:05):
Yeah? So Tim's question is would the Higgs field collapse
be like the Big Bang? Well, I mean it would
be big, and it would be dramatic, and in some
sense it makes a lot of sense to think of
it as part of the Big Bang, not just like
the Big Bang, but sort of like a natural extension
of the Big Bang, because the Big Bang, again, is

(41:27):
not just like a moment in time, it's the expansion
of the universe. In some sense, the universe is still
big banging because the universe started out very hot and
dense and the expansion that follows is what we call
the Big Bang. So the Big Bang is still kind
of happening, and if the Higgs field collapses, that's sort
of like the natural next step, Like the Big Bang

(41:47):
is all these quantum fields gradually relaxing down to zero.
The Higgs field got stuck for a while, but if
it collapses down to zero, if it's not actually stable,
then that's just like you know, episode seven of the
Big Bang. So it's not a lot like the initial
stages of the Big Bang, where everything was very hot
and very dense and a very very high temperature, so

(42:09):
hot we can't even really imagine it. It's more like
the end game of the Big Bang, the closing chapters,
when things are finally relaxing closer to zero.

Speaker 1 (42:18):
So just so people like me can sleep at night,
we don't necessarily know that the Higgs field is going
to go to zero. It's just if it did, it
would be bad. But it's not necessarily going to happen
because we just don't know.

Speaker 2 (42:29):
It's not necessarily going to happen. We don't know. We're
making measurements right now with the particle colliders to try
to understand the Higgs field and better, so we can
get a better handle on the chances that it could collapse.
We don't really know it. On the other hand, you
might ask, well, what could trigger its collapse? Like if
the Higgs field is stuck in this state and that's metastable,
it's like it could stay there, or it could get

(42:52):
knocked off, you know, sort of like a ball balanced
on the top of a hill. It could veer off,
or it could just hang out there if nothing touches it. Well,
one thing that could trigger it are very high energy
particle collisions creating moments of energy density. Who knows right,
that could trigger the Higgs field to collapse. So you know, yes,
we are trying to study it so that you can
sleep better at night. But you know, as with all experiments,

(43:15):
there are existential risks here, and those experiments could potentially
maybe possibly dot dot dot. The lawyer Shay insists, I
had a bunch of qualifiers here trigger the Higgs field collapse.

Speaker 1 (43:26):
I thought that you got into this field because you
didn't want to do anything catastrophic. You've somehow managed to
up maybe do something even more catastrophic than anyone has
ever done before.

Speaker 2 (43:36):
Yeah, I know, I know the irony is not lost
on me. But the good news is if the Higgs
field does collapse, that collapse would propagate out at the
speed of light, and so it all happened very quickly.
There'd be no long, slow biological torture where you're eating
from the inside out by wasps like some sort of
weird fig You would just stop existing instantaneously and you

(43:57):
wouldn't even know it.

Speaker 1 (43:58):
If the wasps are bringing about the end of days,
we've got a chance to fight back, But it sounds
like we don't have a chance with your end of
day's scenario.

Speaker 2 (44:06):
Maybe we just need to evolve wasps that can fight
the Higgs field or prop it up, right, yea, some
sort of mutualism there between the Higgs and the wasps.
Problem solved, Yeah, exactly. I mean they're focused on the figs.
It's just like one letter off to be focused on
the Higgs.

Speaker 1 (44:20):
Oh my gosh, Wait, doesn't Higgs have two g's.

Speaker 2 (44:25):
Yes, Higgs's have a little bit.

Speaker 1 (44:27):
Farther off, but it's close. This is why I think
interdisciplinary discussions are so important, you know, because we're solving
everything here.

Speaker 2 (44:33):
That's right. Nobody's ever had a podcast about the Higgs
figs before we're breaking new grounds.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
Oh my gosh, Higgs liked figs. There's got to be
a biography or a biographer we could ask.

Speaker 2 (44:46):
Somebody must know the answer that question.

Speaker 1 (44:48):
Is Higgs still alive.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
Unfortunately, Higgs died in April of twenty twenty four, so
that question, if it's not already answered, we will never
know the answer.

Speaker 1 (44:56):
To the mysteries abound. All right, Well, well, Tim, have
we answered your question? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (45:04):
I think I got it.

Speaker 6 (45:05):
It did raise more questions that I'll say for another day.
I really appreciate the reminder that the Big Bang continues
to be not the greatest choice of names, and that
carries along a lot of misconceptions by using those particular words. Otherwise,
I think I'm calmly reassured that if death by Higgs collapse,
whatever happened, is probably the best way for us to go.

Speaker 2 (45:25):
Thanks all right, Thank you everybody for asking these questions,
for writing in, and for powering this whole show with
your curiosity. You know, the reason we do this is
because you are curious about the universe, because you desperately
want answers to how the universe works, how the guy
and creepy bits of biology work and how the fundamental
particles in the universe can affect everything on the grandest scale.

(45:47):
And we'd love to hear more from you. Please do
send us your questions to questions at Danielankelly dot org.
Everybody gets an answer.

Speaker 1 (45:54):
Thanks for listening. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced
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Speaker 2 (46:09):
We want to know what questions you have about this
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Speaker 1 (46:14):
We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions
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