The most promising particle physics anomalies

Daniel talks to Harry Cliff, author of the new book "Space Oddities", about the most intriguing unexplained particle physics experiments and what they might mean. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hey, Daniel, when they operate a big complicated machine like
the large Hadron Collider, Like, what's the worst that can happen?

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Ooh, other than pressing the wrong button and destroying a
ten billion dollars science experiment?

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Can it get worse than that?

Speaker 2 (00:21):
I guess you could make a black hole that destroys
the world.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
And now is that the absolute worst?

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Actually? No, the absolute worst is if the whole thing
runs perfectly and nothing interesting happens.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
What's wrong with that?

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Well, then we'll have spent like ten billion dollars and
learn nothing.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
And that's worse than destroying the whole planet.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
Yes, learning nothing is worse. Destroying the planet would be
a great outcome. We'd learned so much.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
Yeah, we learned not to get physicists ten billion dollars.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
You can make that decision from inside the black hole.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
No, it'd already have been too late. We would learn
our lesson for a brief second before we all die.

Speaker 3 (01:13):
Hi.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
I'm jorheam a cartoonists and the author of Oliver's Great
Big Universe.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist at professor at
UC Irvine, and I'm desperate to discover something before I retire.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
Before you retire, or before you destroy the world.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
One and the same.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
Wait, I thought it would destroy the world. You would
learn a lot, but then you would be retired.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Exactly. I want to go out with a bang, learn something,
and retire all on the same day.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
You know you can do that on your own. You
don't have to involve the rest of us.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
I'm not so selfish. I want to include everybody.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
It would be preferable if you don't destroy the world
in your little personal curiosity quest.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
Some people just don't know what they want until they
get it. Isn't that what Steve Jobs said?

Speaker 1 (01:56):
Well, I definitely know I don't want to die in
a black hole.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
Waituntil Apple releases a souit per slickt black hole that
nobody can resist.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
Oh I see is that the new I Die two
point zero?

Speaker 2 (02:07):
Yes? Better than the Eyehole. I don't know what that's for.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
Yeah, I want neither of those, please, but anyways, Welcome
to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a
production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
In which we try to widen the gap between the
moment we understand the universe and the moment we all perish.
We want everybody out there to understand the nature of
this crazy, beautiful, bizarre reality, and we want to enjoy
that understanding as long as possible before our eventual demise.
We hope that this podcast helps you bridge that gap,
and until we do gain that final understanding of nature,

(02:41):
we can fill you in on everything we do and
do not understand along the way.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
That's right, because it is a mysterious and confounding universe
full of interesting phenomena that we are still discovering and
learning about every day. Everyday, scientists are making new discoveries
about how things work, how they don't work, and what
is and isn't they.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
And remember that research is exploration. When you think back
to the story of scientific discovery, it seems like a
very linear path. We discovered A then B THN, c THN, D, so,
E and F were obvious right well back in the day,
they weren't so obvious. There were lots of hints in
various directions, and the path forward was not clear. Here
we are on the forefront of human understanding or ignorance,

(03:22):
and we don't know which direction science will take us.
We don't know which hint will turn out to unravel
our entire understanding of the universe, and which will turn
out to just have been a loose cable.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
And which one will hopefully not destroy the world. I
mean that's always a good thing, right.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
I mean that's the secondary consideration. But yes, I.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
Think Daniel, each episode you sound more and more like
a superhero villain.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
I'm working on my mad scientist cackle. I haven't had
a protect it yet.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
Are they going to make the large hydron collider now
be activated by like a snap of your fingers. You
have to put on like a glove and you have
to snap your fingers to be activated.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
Yeah, is that the plan? Yeah? We hired a whole
team from Marvel to help us design the interface.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
Oh there you go. So that mean you wear capes
as well.

Speaker 2 (04:07):
It's a reverse the usual. Often marvels hiring scientists to
be advisors on their films, but we're actually hiring the
Marvel folks to tell us how to make our installations
look super slick.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
I have to make it more exciting for people. What
would be nice if this podcast made some of that
Marvel money, You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yes, that's exactly the plan. This is step one.

Speaker 1 (04:25):
Right now, we're just making DC money, which is not
a lot.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
But particle physics isn't all about the Benjamins. It's about
the discoveries. It's about those moments when you force the
universe to reveal the way it actually works. And the
most delicious moments are the ones when we understand the
universe is quite different from how we expected it.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
Yes, you said, science is all about exploration and following
ideas and maybe promising directions, and sometimes you discover that
things don't quite work the way you thought.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
Sometimes those discoveries are clear and dramatic, like when we
found the Higgs boson, and everybody can see the very,
very persuasive peak in our data. Sometimes, though, the discoveries
begin with little hints, little things in our data that
don't quite make sense, little clues that maybe some big
discovery is just over the horizon.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
Yeah, although sometimes it seems like the horizon is getting
farther and farther away. I mean, when was the Higgs
boson discovered? It was a while though, right over ten years?

Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah, twenty twelve.

Speaker 1 (05:22):
Wow, time flies. That was a huge discovery. The whole
world got very excited about that. But since then, there
haven't been any new, big discoveries from the big collider there, right.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Yeah, that's right, because research is exploration. We didn't know
if there were tons and tons of new particles waiting
for us around the corner, or if it was mostly
just dust and rubble to be discovered. And the new
particles are around more and more corners, if they even exist.
That's the joy and disappointment of exploration.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
So how's all that dust and rubble looking dusty and rubbing?

Speaker 2 (05:54):
It gets hard to choke it down after a while,
I'll be honest.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
Yeah, it's hard to swallow dust and rubble.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
I mean, you always prefer to make exciting discoveries. When
they landed the rovers on Mars, I'm sure they were
hoping to find little squishy creatures under some of those rocks.
But you know, they've also just found dust and rubble.
Doesn't mean we're not going to keep looking.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
But as you mentioned, science is about exploration, and so
right now, even though you've only found dust and rubble
for the last twelve years, there are maybe interesting things
that you've discovered or noticed about the universe that maybe
give you some excitement about continuing to explore.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
That's right, because before we make a big discovery, we
often have hints that point us in that direction. Before
we've discovered how neutrinos can change from one kind into another,
we saw weird things in our measurements of neutrinos in
the sky. So particle physicists are always on the lookout
for the next anomaly, the next discrepancy, the next thing
we don't understand, because it might be a hint for

(06:52):
the next big discovery.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
So to be on the program, we'll be tagling the
question what are the most promising particle physics anomalies?

Speaker 4 (07:04):
Now?

Speaker 1 (07:04):
These are anomalies, right, not anemonies anominees.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
These are not our enemies either.

Speaker 1 (07:11):
Yeah, and we're not going to do this anonymously.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
That's right, or according to memory?

Speaker 1 (07:16):
Okay, you push the grammar there too far. I'm not
sure what the connection there.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
Is anomalies and memories homomonies. My momides, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
Yeah, yeah, I think I think we've finished this upun
thread here.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
The thing about anomalies is that they're indirect. They're just
something we don't understand about our data. So explanations could
be wow, something super exciting we're about to discover, or
it could be. Oops, turns out we didn't calibrate things correctly.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
So what's the picture here? You're assorting third data, you're
finding mostly dust and rubble, but sometimes in the dust
and rubble you're like, maybe there's a little bit of
rubble here. Looks a little bit different than it should look.

Speaker 2 (07:53):
Like, Yeah, exactly. It's a promising sign that maybe there's
something exciting there, but you need more data. It's sort
of like pictures of UFOs, like, oh, that would be
exciting if it really is a UFO, but the pictures
too fuzzy to really know. What you got to do
is get more data, crisper photos, more sensor information, something
like that.

Speaker 1 (08:12):
Oh boy, did you just compare particle physics to UFO spotting?

Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yes, absolutely, enthusiastically.

Speaker 1 (08:19):
An area fifty two is cern area fifty two for
the big Large Hadron collider conspiracy.

Speaker 2 (08:25):
I may or may not have signed an NDA prohibiting
me from answering that.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
Question, prohibiting you from having a podcast where you talk about.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
It for hours and hours, maybe or maybe not. I
think theas it's probably no. It sounds like no, no comment.
The other thing about anomalies is that sometimes they go away.
You know, all of our data is statistical. We can
never tell from one collision to the next whether there
was a new particle or a Higgs boson or just
something boring like protons glancing off of each other, and

(08:53):
so all of our data is statistical, which means there
are always little random wobbles. Sometimes those random wobbles can
look like a new particle or a UFO, and then
we gather more data and they just go away.

Speaker 1 (09:04):
Well, as usually, we were wondering how many people out
there had thought about particle physics anomalies and what they
might mean, or which ones are the most promising.

Speaker 2 (09:12):
Thanks very much to everybody who answers questions for the
audience participation segment of the podcast. We'd love to hear
your voice on the pod. Write me to Questions at
Danielandhorgney dot com to sign up. So think about it
for a second. What do you think are the most
promising particle physics anomalies? Not aneminees, here's what people have
to say.

Speaker 5 (09:32):
I don't think it's possible to have an unexplained result
in a particle physics experiment because the theoretical physicists set
it all up and tell the experimental physicists where to
find it. So don't think it's going to be a particle.

(09:53):
I'm just wondering if maybe that bit where general relativity
does and quite fit quantum theory. What if, say Isaac
Newton was right all along and it is all about gravity,
and you've just left gravity out of the formulae and

(10:14):
the calculations because you don't think it's big enough. But
what if that proves Albert Einstein was wrong when he
said that Newton was not wrong but limited. He rewrote Newton.
What if Newton gets his revenge and Einstein's wrong? That

(10:36):
might make the nine o'clock news.

Speaker 6 (10:39):
The only thing that comes to mind is the very
high energy cosmic rays that strike the upper atmosphere and
result in a shower of particles, some of which reach
the ground, and that baseball energy particle is coming from
a blazer.

Speaker 3 (10:55):
I'm not aware of any specific unexplained particle experiment results,
but I guess in general terms the issue for particle
physicists to work through there would be is this unexpected
result something that can be explained by things that physicists
are generally already aware of, or is it something new

(11:15):
that they've discovered.

Speaker 5 (11:16):
Well, I don't know that many experiments, but maybe the
penguin diagram and then has a cool name too.

Speaker 7 (11:25):
I don't know much about particles experiment results and what
might be a real discovery, But if you could find
a way to entangle my son's socks in the laundry
so that when I find one, I always know where
the other one is, that would be really helpful.

Speaker 1 (11:40):
Thanks byy.

Speaker 4 (11:41):
I'm only aware of one unexplained particle result. It was
something to do with muons, either missing muons or many muons,
and either way, I'm hopeful that it spurs a discovery
of something smaller or some behavior that we're not expecting,
because that always opens up new questions and new avenues
for learning.

Speaker 8 (12:00):
Guessing something like doc motel particle or a graviton something
of that nature. Other than not no idea.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
Well, like asked that before answering that I would need
to learn what are the unexplained particle experiment results that
have been generated?

Speaker 2 (12:19):
Please walk me through.

Speaker 1 (12:20):
That, all right? Mostly clear, I've known you what you're
talking about.

Speaker 2 (12:26):
That surprised me a little bit because particle physics anomalies
are often in the news and they're often like way overhyped.
I get emails from listeners asking me about some news
story that says that we're on the brink of a
complete revolution in particle physics because of some weird lips
somebody saw on their computer screen.

Speaker 1 (12:43):
I guess it depends where you're getting your news. Is
it from the UFO newsletter? There?

Speaker 2 (12:49):
No, you see this stuff covered in pretty mainstream press.
Sometimes the scientists are excited about their little anomaly and
they tell the PR people, and then by the time
it gets to science dot org they've transformed it into clear.

Speaker 1 (13:01):
Well, didn't sound like any of our listeners here that
recorded their answer new of any physics anomaly, So maybe
the question should have been, do you know of any
particle physics anomalies?

Speaker 2 (13:11):
We have covered a few on the podcast because there
are a few out there, a few areas where we
might be on the verge of discovering something new or
it could just go away when we gather more data.

Speaker 1 (13:21):
M All right, well, let's jump into the subject. Daniel,
what do you describe as an anomaly? How do you
know if something is anomalous?

Speaker 2 (13:28):
Something is an anomaly if it's a deviation from what
we expect, and what we expect usually is disappointment. So
we have a theory of particles, the standard model, that
has a bunch of particles in it and a bunch
of forces in it, and we can use that to
predict what we would see in experiments. So, for example,
if we smash protons together, the standard model tells us
how often they'll bounce off at this angle, how often

(13:50):
they'll bounce off at that angle, how often they'll make
a Z boson or a W boson or a top quark.
And we do a bunch of measurements and then we
compare them to the predictions from our theory. And when
things are bang on that's not anomalousts. And when there's
any difference there, when what we see in our experiments
collisions or cosmic rays or other kinds of experiments is
different from what the theory predicted, that tells us that

(14:12):
maybe there's something new going on, there's something happening in
the universe that's not captured by our theory.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
Well, I guess it's a sort of an interesting dance
between theory and experiment. Like, for example, if something is
a theory and you expect it to be why did
you expect it to be if you didn't prove it
already before, or is this about extending the theory to
new phenomenon or to new situations.

Speaker 2 (14:33):
Yeah, exactly, it's about extending the theory. Like the theory
may have worked well for all previous experiments, but now
we're in new territory. That's what we mean by exploration.
When you turn a collider on it new energies, for example,
you're creating conditions you haven't seen before. So maybe your
theory is going to break down. Maybe there's a new
particle that's going to be revealed that you need to
then incorporate into your theory. Maybe there's a new force

(14:55):
that's so weak you haven't seen it before, but at
very high energies it reveals itself. That's why we do
these experiments, hoping to force the universe to tell us
how things work.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
I guess that's why in science you just call everything
a theory, right, because you always leave yourself open to
the possibility that your theory is wrong. The more you
explore the universe or the more different situations you go
out during test.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yeah, exactly. The point of the standard model is not
to say this is definitive. This is how the universe works.
It's a working project. It describes everything we know so far.
It's like our current hypothesis. But we're always hoping to
update it.

Speaker 1 (15:31):
Right, right, And that's why you called it the standard model,
unequivocally the way things are. That's why you called it that, right, That's.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
Why I called it that. Yeah, it was named in
a paper that came out a few years before I
was born. But I'll totally take the blame for it
being called the standard model.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
Well, you're continuing to use it that you're complicit.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
I think I heard you say it. Also, are you complicit?

Speaker 1 (15:54):
How I said it?

Speaker 2 (15:56):
You just called it the standard model, although derisively of course.

Speaker 1 (16:00):
I said, that's why you call it this standard model.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
Anyway, it's a standard model, but it's also changed over time.

Speaker 7 (16:09):
Right.

Speaker 2 (16:09):
We added neutrino masses to the standard model. So there's
actually a big argument about what exactly is the standard model,
which means it's not exactly standard. But the point is
that we have a theory, we're developing it, we're testing
it by doing these experiments, either by pushing to new
energies or by looking out in space or creating conditions
we've never explored before. We're hoping that one of those

(16:30):
has an anomaly, a discrepancy from our prediction that shows
us that there's something new in the universe that we
need to describe with our theory.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
And this generally falls into sort of the different ways
that you discover something, not just in signs, but in
particular in particle physics. You can either look for things
directly or indirectly, right.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
Yeah, the direct way is the most convincing and the
most exciting. Like if you can actually create this new
particle so it exists in the universe in your experiment,
then you can sort of see it. I mean, we
never actually see these things very directly, but we can
see evidence of it. It was there, It left traces
of the particles that decayed into That's how we discover
the Higgs boson. That's how we discovered the top quark.

(17:09):
We have a bunch of episodes about the discovery of
each of these particles that tells you the story about
how it was seeing, how it became convinced that it
was there.

Speaker 1 (17:16):
Meaning like you think that it's there in a particular spot,
you go look for it there in that spot and
then you find it yeah, or.

Speaker 2 (17:24):
We're not sure exactly. We say it's somewhere in this
territory and then we look around and we find it
within that range. Like the Higgs boson, we didn't know
in advance how heavy it would be, how much mass
it had. There was a huge range of ideas, so
we had to go out and scan that whole range.
But we found it in that range and we were
able to measure it, and that's what we call it
direct measurement, even though some parts of those measurements, of

(17:44):
course are indirect.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
So then what is indirect discovery?

Speaker 2 (17:48):
So the distinction between a direct discovery and indirect is
a little bit fuzzy because you know everything is in
the end indirect, but some measurements are more indirect than others. Like,
for example, if you don't have enough energy to actually
create the particle to exist in your experiment, but you
can still interact with the fields that are out there
that could make that particle, then that's more indirect because

(18:09):
you're never actually creating the particle, but the fields themselves
can still influence your experiment, Like if your protons interact
with those fields and it changes how they behave. Then
you don't see those fields directly, but you see the
influence of the fields on the particles that you are studying.

Speaker 1 (18:25):
That's not indirect man, Like you're not looking for it,
but you see some anomaly, which is sort of the
topic of our discussion here.

Speaker 2 (18:32):
Yeah, that's exactly right. But we use these indirect measurements
as a way to like catch some new thing, something
we're not looking for. Like, very very precise measurements of
the particles we do know can sometimes reveal anomalies, which
are clues that there's something out there influencing those particles.
So that's why we sometimes make very very precise measurements
of the particles we already know about, so we can

(18:52):
look for little deviations that would tell us there's something
there we weren't looking for directly.

Speaker 1 (18:57):
So for example, like we've discovered the Higgs boson and
we sort of know where to find and what looks
like and how it comes out. But maybe if you
generate a whole bunch of Higgs bosons at one after
the other, maybe in doing that you can discover something
weird that happens that you didn't think about before, that
happens related to the Higgs boson.

Speaker 2 (19:17):
And that's exactly what we're doing right now. We discovered
the Higgs boson ten years ago, and since then we've
made huge numbers of them, piles and piles of Higgs bosons.
We've been studying them, looking for anomalies, looking to see
if the Higgs boson behaves in any weird new ways,
because if it does, we'll need some other element of
our theory to explain that. It will be a hint
that there's something else beyond the Higgs boson for us

(19:38):
to discover.

Speaker 1 (19:39):
Like instead of digging a hole in the field looking
for something, you're maybe looking closer at the rock until
you discover something that maybe you didn't.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
Expect, yeah, exactly. Or if you're looking for like weird
new animals in the forest, like you suspect maybe Bigfoot
is out there, you don't know how to look for
big Foot directly, then you can look for other signs,
you know, you like, look to see if there's any
weird scratches on all the tra or if any neighborhood
pets are missing, you like, make measurements of the things
that you can to look for weirdness, any deviation from

(20:06):
the ways trees and pets normally behave would give you
a clue that there's something out there in the forest
to discover.

Speaker 1 (20:12):
Like you would study maybe cats and pay attention to cats,
and you think, well, if there's no bigfoot, then cats
should behave this way. And if you find that cats,
you know, avoid a certain area of forest for example,
or get really skittish if you put on a gorilla
suit or something, then you know, oh, maybe there's some
evidence here or an anomaly that tells you maybe there's

(20:34):
a bigfoot exactly.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
And the tricky thing there is that there could be
multiple explanations. Your cats could be scared of you in
a goerrilla costume because there's a big foot in the forest,
or just because you look scary in a gorilla costume.
So the thing about indirect measurements is that they can
give you a hint of for lots of new things,
but also they're frustratingly indirect.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, if only you could just ask the cats, right,
All right, Well, let's get into what are some famous
anomalies that have led to this discoveries in science, and
then let's get to the most exciting and promising ones
in physics today. We'll dig into that, but first let's
take a quick break.

Speaker 2 (21:21):
All right.

Speaker 1 (21:22):
We're talking about the most promising particle physics anomalies, the
weirdest things out there that might point to the most
exciting new discoveries in the future. And we've talked about
what an anomaly is, Daniel. What are some examples of
anomalies and physics that have led to very interesting discoveries.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
Well, one of the most famous, of course, is the
measurement of how galaxies rotate. People thought they understood how
galaxy spun and how much mass there was in a galaxy,
and they went out there to check to say, hey,
are stars rotating at the speeds we expect around the
center of galaxies? And it turns out they weren't. They
were rotating much much faster than people expected, and that
was an anomaly. It was a discrepancy from what people

(22:02):
predicted and expected. And to explain that, of course, is
the whole idea of dark matter still to be resolved
and understood in detail at the particle level. But maybe
one of the biggest anomalies we've ever seen in physics.

Speaker 1 (22:14):
Mmm. And wasn't that done by a grad student or
something like it's some lowly gratudent and good assign the
task of like, yeah, I just check the galaxy rotations
and then that gratsuand was like, wait a minute.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
There's some hints early on in the century from France
Swiki and then Vera Rubin really did the most detailed
analysis of galactic rotation curves, so she gets most of
the credit, although she was overlooked for the Nobel Prize.
Of course, what not a great track record on the
Nobel Prize for assigning credit to women.

Speaker 1 (22:42):
M And that trying to be a huge discovery, right,
I mean we found that there's five times more dark
matter then there's regular matter in the universe. I mean
it's like five times everything that we know about that exists.

Speaker 2 (22:52):
Yeah, exactly. And this is why we go out and
make really precise measurements of things we think we already understand,
because they can reveal things hiding under the surface, things
waiting to be discovered.

Speaker 1 (23:04):
Mmmm. What's another famous anomaly.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
Well, people tried to understand how many neutrinos are coming
to Earth. So they built a big detector underground to
measure the rate of neutrinos, and they compared that to
their prediction for how many neutrinos are being made by
the Sun and how many should arrive on Earth. And
they discovered they were seeing way fewer neutrinos than they expected,
and for decades people didn't understand this. Then it turns
out that's because neutrinos can change their type as they

(23:30):
fly between the Sun and here if electron neutrinos can
turn into mew on neutrinos and town neutrinos, which those
detectors were not spotting. That was a huge discovery which
started from an anomaly. Mmm.

Speaker 1 (23:41):
And did that person get credit?

Speaker 2 (23:43):
Those guys won the Nobel Prize? Yes, old white dudes
always get credit.

Speaker 1 (23:46):
Emphasis und the word guys.

Speaker 7 (23:48):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (23:48):
Funny how that worried? All right, Well, let's pivot now
to maybe some of them was current exciting anomalies. What
are some of the things that scientists have found and
make them go huh.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
There's a bunch of stuff going on that we don't understand.
There are weird particles we see in cosmic rays from space.
There are bizarre things going on with muons and their
magnetic moments. There's all sorts of confusion about how the
universe is expanding, there's always like five or ten of
these things going on. Sometimes they fade away as we
get more data, but some of these have persisted for

(24:17):
a few years.

Speaker 1 (24:20):
Well, to take a deeper dive into this topic of
anomalies and audities out there in space, Daniel, you talked
to another particle physicists.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
That's right. I had a lot of fun talking with
Harry Cliff. He's a particle physicist who works on a
different experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. It's called LHCb
B for studying bottom quarks, though he prefers to call
them beauty quarks. And he just came out with a
new book called Space Oddities, which is a really accessible
and fun tour through some of these anomalies in particle physics.

Speaker 1 (24:49):
Isn't that the title is like a David Bowie song
or something.

Speaker 2 (24:52):
Not an expert, but I hope he's publishing. How it's
cleared the rights?

Speaker 1 (24:55):
Yeah, otherwise you're going to have an anomal lawsuit there.
All right, Well, here is Daniel's conversation with particle physicist
Harry Cliff.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
Okay, so then it's my great pleasure to welcome to
the podcast, doctor Harry Cliff, He's a colleague of mine
and also the author of the new book Space Oddities,
an excellent and fun exploration of a bunch of really
weird stuff we see in particle physics right now, Harry,
thanks very much for joining us today.

Speaker 9 (25:21):
Well, thanks for having on the podcast.

Speaker 2 (25:23):
Yeah, well, I really enjoyed reading your book. I love
thinking about all the weird stuff that we're seeing and
all the funky stuff on the horizons of the frontiers
of physics, in the things that might lead to the
next big breakthrough. Tell me what exactly inspired you to
write this book right now?

Speaker 9 (25:39):
The idea really came out of my own research.

Speaker 10 (25:41):
So I work, like you on the Large Hadron Collider,
this big particle accelerator outside Geneva. So I work on
an experiment called LHCb, which is one of the four
main detectors spased around the ring. And the B in
LHCb stands for Beauty, which is the name of one
of the quarks. So these six fundamental particles, two of
which make up nuclear material in ordinary atoms, and the

(26:03):
Bee quark is the heaviest negatively charged quark. It is
the fifth heaviest overall, so it's quite an exotic thing.

Speaker 2 (26:09):
Let me just interrupt you to orient our listeners because
on the podcast we often refer to this as the
bottom quirk, but you're calling it the beauty quirk. Is
that just because you don't like saying the word bottom
in your research?

Speaker 10 (26:20):
I think so that the history of this is that
when the B and the T quarks were proposed, there
were some people that tried to call them beauty and truth,
and I think this was sort of to mirror charm and.

Speaker 9 (26:31):
Strange, which are the two second generation quarks.

Speaker 10 (26:34):
But physicists, I think Broady decided that was a bit
too poetic, so they plumped for the more prosaic top
and bottom.

Speaker 9 (26:39):
So most physicists call them top and bottom. But there's
this weird.

Speaker 10 (26:42):
Thing in what we call flavor physics that we prefer
to be known as beauty physicists and bottom physicists. So
for us it's beauty, but yeah, most other physicists call
it the bottom cork.

Speaker 9 (26:50):
But they are the same.

Speaker 2 (26:51):
Thing, right, because I did my PhD on the top quirk,
and we had no issues calling ourselves top quark physicists
or top physicists. But I can see how bottom physicis.

Speaker 9 (27:00):
Les positive yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:02):
Anyway, so you were working on the beauty quarks and
you saw some weird stuff tell us.

Speaker 10 (27:07):
Yeah, So these quarks are really interesting to study because
they're very heavy. They can decay to a very wide
range of different standard model particles. So when they're created,
they live for a really tiny fraction of a second,
about one and a half trillions of a second. That's
long enough them to fly a little distance in your
detector because they're going at the speed of light, and
then they decay, and there are certain very rare decay

(27:27):
modes of these quarks. So basically that means that let's
say you had a million of these beauty quarks created
in your experiment, only around one of them would decay.

Speaker 9 (27:35):
In one of these very rare ways.

Speaker 10 (27:37):
And these rare decays are very interesting because basically, in
our current theory of particle physics, the way these decays
happen involves lots of complicated interactions of heavy particles, which
makes them very suppressed. But if there is say a
new force of nature that exists, which may be very weak,
it can actually contribute to this decay process, and it

(27:57):
can alter the measured properties of these decay so it
might change, for example, how often the decays happen. It
might change the angles the particles that come out of
these beauty cork decays emerge at. So the basic game
we play is you make very very precise measurements of
these beautyquark decays. You compare them to hopefully a precise
theoretical prediction using the standard model of particle physics, and

(28:18):
if you see a difference, that can be an indirect
clue that something new, something beyond our current understanding, is
altering these decays, and that kind of gives you an
inkling to the existence of, say a new force or
some new heavy particle that we haven't seen before. So
that's the sort of general the game we play lh
to be broadly speaking, And for the last ten years,
starting in about twenty fourteen, we've been seeing these anomalies

(28:40):
in these very rare decays, so basically measurements that weren't
lining up with the prediction of the standard model, and
in some cases these were how often these decays was
happening was different from what was predicted. Sometimes it was
the angles. And what was intriguing about this is over time,
more and more of these anomalies emerged, and they seem
to paint a coherent picture. So it looked like these

(29:01):
were all coming from some new fundamental interactions. So the
most common explanations involved, broadly speaking, some kind of new force,
and that got theorists very, very excited, and there was
a lot of theoretical work pursuing this, and then a
lot of experimental work. So I kind of came into
this area, I suppose about a year after this picture
started to emerge in twenty fifteen, and spent several years

(29:22):
of my career making other measurements that might give us
some more clues as to what was going on. So
that was really how I got interested in the whole
subject of anomalies and the way that anomalies can sometimes
lead us to a big breakthrough in our understanding of
the universe.

Speaker 9 (29:36):
And that's what the book Space obviously is about.

Speaker 10 (29:38):
It's essentially about, you know, how anomalies shape physics and
cosmology through history, and focusing on five particularly big anomalies
that have been doing the rounds in physics and cosmology
in the last decade or so.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
And when you're working on an anomaly at that when
you see something you don't understand tell us about what
that's like. I mean, you're on the forefront of knowledge.
You're like potentially standing, you know, one step away from
some big revolution in our understanding. When you were working
on that, you have that sense of like this could
be historic. You know that we could be writing books
about these discoveries in twenty years. We could be telling

(30:11):
people about them, you know the way. I think like
we pour over Einstein's notebooks now and you know, sort
of stand over his shoulder. I wonder for the people
making discoveries if they sort of like feel like the
ghosts of the future paying attention to the sandwich they
had that day in this Smithsonian. You know, like, was
there that moment of excitement for you when you're working

(30:31):
on this and you didn't yet know how it came out?
Because across the ring we were all very excited. We
were like waiting with bated breath to see if this
was real.

Speaker 1 (30:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (30:38):
I mean, there were several moments that are really exciting.
There was one in Mark twenty twenty one when some
of my colleagues who are working on one of these
anomalies updated their measurement with using all the data that
we'd recorded at LHCb up to that point, and I
wasn't directly involved in the analysis, but I was a
sort of inside observer, I suppose watching this whole process,
and there was this really exciting moment where they what

(30:59):
you call unblinded their data. So this is common practice
in physics nowadays, which is that you perform your analysis
blind in the sense that you can't look at the
result until you've completely fixed your analysis procedure, you've done
all your systematic studies, basically all the remains in the paper.
Is essentially to put in the answer at the end,
and the idea of doing this is you prevent yourself
from biasing yourself or massaging the results one way or another,

(31:22):
subconsciously or consciously. As a result of this, you have
this moment where the result gets unscrambled and you see
for the first time, you know what is actually happening here.
And when that result was revealed in March twenty one,
this anomaly had grown beyond this slightly arbitrary threshold known
as three sigma, which is essentially where the experimental measurement
is more than three standard deviations or three uncertainties away

(31:45):
from your theory prediction and that is for some reason,
conventionally in physics regarded as evidence. So at this point
there's a sort of one in a few hundred chance
that this would be a sort of random statistical fluke.
It starts to look more convince more compelling as a
real sign of new physics. So that was a really
exciting moment, and you had this sense particularly that period

(32:07):
in early twenty one. You had this result from LHCb,
and then about a month later, another anomaly was confirmed
by an experiment at Fermilab who were looking at the
magnetism of a party called a muon, and that again
sort of perhaps was interpreted as being evidence of some
new force. So you had these kind of compiling results
that were sort of suggesting that we were on the

(32:27):
brink or something really exciting. And personally, I mean, my
moment came a little bit later, and you know, all
these measurements are sort of small contributions to an overall pitchure.
There isn't like one moment where you go, you know,
we've discovered something. And while I was working on a
set of measurements with a student, they were less sensitive
than the big one that came out in March, but Nonetheless,
it was sort of we had this moment where we're
on This was during sort of COVID time, so we

(32:48):
weren't together, we were on zoom. We unblinded our measurements,
and again our measurements lined up with the anomalies that
everyone else had been seeing. So there was a real
sense then of like, wow, you know, maybe there's something
really going on here. So yeah, it was a very
very exciting time, and you did feel like you were
in amongst a.

Speaker 9 (33:03):
Process that could turn into something really big.

Speaker 2 (33:06):
Yeah, and this is sort of like the joy and
the frustration of some of these precision measurements. Right, you're
looking for something weird, something different, something that's not predicted
by your theory, and you're sensitive to a whole broad
range of stuff. But because you're sensitive to a whole
broad range of stuff, it could be anything, right. It
could be new particles, it could be new forces. It
could also be like, wow, your cable wasn't plugged in correctly,

(33:29):
And so that's you know, as you say in your book,
the unglamorous work of measuring some quantity or another to
increasing number of decimal places can seem like a nerdy obsession.
But this is also the kind of work that can
really lead to exciting discoveries.

Speaker 9 (33:42):
Yeah, it can, but you always have to be really careful.

Speaker 10 (33:45):
And I think more often than not, when you get
an anomaly like this, I mean, there's usually sort of
boring explanations for an anomaly. It's usually that it's a
statistical wobble, you know, just basically bad luck in the data.
And we saw that the LHC about ten years ago
when there was this famous bump that was seen about
both ATLAS and CMS, so people interpreted as evidence for

(34:06):
some new particle outside the standard model.

Speaker 9 (34:08):
And it was this crazy period.

Speaker 10 (34:10):
I think it was announced just before Christmas twenty fifteen,
and by Christmas there were already something like two hundred
papers that had been published by theorists trying to explain
what this little bump in a graph was. And lo
and behold, you know, six months later, when more data
was added, this bump just had melted away and it
was just basically neither experiment done anything wrong. It was
just a statistical wobble. And these things come and go,

(34:30):
So that's one explanation. Sometimes it's as you say, it's
a cable that's not plugged in properly, so some kind
of experimental mistake that you just didn't realize was there.
And sometimes actually it's also the theoretical prediction may not
be totally solid, and this is maybe a sort of
idea that's hard to get your head around because you
kind of think, well, if you have a theory, surely
you can just work out what the consequences of it are.

Speaker 9 (34:51):
But that's not necessarily the case. Sometimes it's particularly.

Speaker 10 (34:54):
In particle physics when you're dealing with the theory of
quarks and gluons, particularly, which are very important at the
life Chadron collider. Those kinds of effects are very hard
to calculate, so you might have a prediction for what
you expect to see, but that prediction comes with its
own set of uncertainties and assumptions that could bias it.
So you kind of have to eliminate all three of
those possibilities before you can say, well, this is really

(35:15):
the sign of something genuinely new.

Speaker 2 (35:18):
All right, So finding oddities in our data is a
good way to make discoveries and also maybe just to
find our own mistakes. And in the book you highlight
a few of them. Let's dig into the first one.
Which has to do with one of my favorite and
craziest experiments, a balloon experiment looking for stuff from space.
Tell us about the ANITA experiment in what it's are.

Speaker 10 (35:38):
So ANITA is a really cool experiment. Essentially, what it is,
it's this giant radio antenna. So it looks a bit
like a huge tannoid system with all these white, gleaming
horns that stick off it, and it's launched into the
Antarctic stratosphere on a huge NASA balloon. So this is
this incredible thing which is made of gossamer thin polyethylene

(35:59):
filled with helium, and when it gets up to its
full altitude up in the stratosphere, it's the size of
a football stadium. So this vast kind of you know,
translucent orb underneath which hangs on a little cable this
radio antenna, And what ANITA is looking for is radio signals.

Speaker 9 (36:14):
Coming out from the Antarctic ice sheet.

Speaker 10 (36:16):
And essentially the reason they're doing this is they're using
Antarctica effectively as a giant detector. They're looking for. Particularly,
ANITA is looking for high energy neutrinos. So these are
neutrinos that are produced by really violent, extreme objects out
there in the distant parts of the cosmos, they come in,
they hit the Antarctic ice, and when they hit the
ice they convert into electric charged particles. That creates a

(36:40):
wave of radio signal that comes up out of the ice.
And then by detecting these radio blasts, you can then
essentially infer how energetic this neutrino was and sometimes also
what direction it came from. So essentially as a wave
of looking for these really really high engeneutrinos using Antarctica
as a giant detector.

Speaker 2 (36:57):
I love the ingenuity of these experiments. So like we
need a mile cube of ice. You can't build that,
but let's just go like find it out there and
take advantage of it. To me, this is like part
of the real, you know, experimental cleverness of this field. People.
Sometimes I think imagine that the theorists are the only
ones being creative, but you know, it takes real creativity
and ingenuity to come up with these ways to force

(37:18):
the universe to reveal something to you. I love these experiments,
and I'm also terrified and in awe of people who
build their detector and then send it up on a
balloon hoping that it works. And it comes back and
they get data from it, like, oh my gosh, how terrifying.

Speaker 10 (37:33):
Yeah, I mean I spoke to the scientists who work
on ANITA, and you know, the environment they're working out
there in Antarctica is also really strange. There at this
place called McMurdo, which is a US research based on
the edge of the Antarctic constant, just on the edge
of the ice sheet, and they're.

Speaker 9 (37:46):
Working in these pretty difficult conditions.

Speaker 10 (37:47):
You're out there at the balloon station in very low temperatures,
working in this hangar, and then there's this moment where
you take your instrument out onto the ice and it's
attached the balloon and you're kind of watching with bated breath.

Speaker 9 (37:59):
Is it all going to go off? Is it going
to switch on?

Speaker 10 (38:01):
In these very low temperatures, Like there's always a danger
that your computer just doesn't boot up.

Speaker 9 (38:05):
And then this thing's launched into the air.

Speaker 10 (38:07):
And then they describe watching this sort of radio antenna
getting small and small and disappearing, and they're sort of
vanishing into the distance and communicating with it while it
was still within line of sight to check it it's
all working. So you're out there in this environment for
a whole month, so you're readeddicating. It's not a job
where you just go to the office and come home.
You're really like immersed in this place for a long
period of time, and you're away from your friends and family.

(38:27):
So it's also I think the length that people go
to to find out about the universe is really impressive.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
Yeah, every tiny little piece of knowledge you read about
on your phone for like four seconds, it's like somebody
dedicating their life to figuring out like why spiders, you know,
live in these little nests in the ringforest, or how
high energy neutrinos make it through the ice. So in
this case, Anita is looking, you're saying, for super high
energy neutrinos hitting the ice and then the radio waves
bouncing back up into the atmosphere for us to record.

(38:55):
And so what did they see that was weird?

Speaker 10 (38:57):
So they didn't see the neutrinos they were hoping to see,
but what they did see were high energy cosmic rays.
So these are essentially electrically charged particles like protons or
heavy nuclei that come in and hit the ice and
they will also produce these sort of radio signals. But
what was weird was that in amongst all the cosmic
rays signals that they saw, they saw too that appeared

(39:19):
to have come from below.

Speaker 9 (39:21):
In other words, these looked.

Speaker 10 (39:23):
Like particles that had come from underneath the Antarctic ice
sheet and burst up into the atmosphere. And such a
thing should not be possible because when you have very
high energy particles, they would only be able to travel
a very short distance through the Earth before being absorbed
by the rock at the solid interior of the Earth.
So essentially, they had these two events where you had
these upward going very high energy particles, and there was

(39:45):
no particle that we know about that could produce such
an effect.

Speaker 2 (39:50):
Why couldn't it be a neutrino. We're always hearing that
neutrinos can pass through a light year of lead without issue.
Why can't they pass through the Earth and then interact
in the.

Speaker 10 (39:57):
Ice Basically because neutrinios are very weak interacting and the
reason for that is they only interact with ordinary matter
through the weak force. Now, the reason the weak force
is weak is because the particle that communicates the weak force,
which is the well the w and the z bosons,
they're very heavy, so they have a mass of between
eighty and ninety gv, so that's sort of about one
hundred times the mass of the proton. So they're very

(40:19):
heavy particles, and as a result, essentially the heaviness of
those particles is what makes the weak force weak, because
it's impossible for a low engineutray to actually create a
real what we call a real Worz boson. Instead, it
has to sort of basically send a little bit of
energy through the W and z fields, but it's off
resonance and it's all a bit of a mess, and
so as a result, that force is very short ranged

(40:41):
and very weak. But when you have a really high
energy nutrino of the type that Anita is looking for,
these are so energetic. When they collide with stuff in
the physical material of the Earth, they can create a
real w and Z boson. They have enough energy to
make a real particle. So the weak force stops being
weak and it becomes strong. For a low energinetry in
the Earth is like transparent thing which they just go

(41:01):
straight through. For heinagineutrino, though, it's a solid object and
they can't get through it. So not even a neutrino
could explain this kind of weird signal that Anita had
been seeing.

Speaker 2 (41:12):
So we saw these weird signals that look like they're
coming through the earth. What could these things be?

Speaker 10 (41:17):
You get an anomally like this, and then theorists go
to town and they come up with all kinds of explanations.
There were various ideas that went around. One was that
this was an exotic type of neutrinos, something called a
sterile neutrino. So steril neutrinos appear in quite a lot
of extensions of the standard model. They're essentially even more
antisocial neutrinos, So the neutrinos that don't even interact through

(41:39):
the weak fource, so they're essentially totally decoupled from ordinary matter.
The only way they can interact is gravitationally. But in
some theories, these steril neutrinos can mix with the ordinary neutrinos.
So essentially what happens is you imagine one of these
steril neutrinos that goes through the Earth with lots of energy,
but because it's a sterilic can just go straight through
the Earth. That's fine, and then just by chance, when
it gets close to the surface, it oscillates and converts

(42:01):
into a normal neutrino, and then suddenly it sees the
ice and it crashes into it creates this radio burst.
So it sort of gets through the Earth kind of
disguised in this invisible form and then turns into something
visible just as by luck when it gets to the surface.
So that was one possibility. Another possibility is that was
some sort of supersymmetric particle traveling through the Earth. Other

(42:22):
ideas that there was dark matter that was accumulating inside
the Earth and annihilating and producing various exotic particles. One
of the most crazy ideas, well crazy sounding, was this
there was actually evidence of a universe made of antimatter
where time goes backwards, which comes from a theory there
was an attempt to sort of solve various cosmological problems,

(42:43):
essentially to do with the Big Bang, where at the
Big Bang there's two universes produced, one made of matter
which goes forward in time, and one made of antimatter
that goes backward in time. So I mean, all kinds
of explanations for these things. There's also the mundane explanation.
So one group of theorists suggested that actually, maybe what
you're seeing here is not new physics, but effectively ice

(43:04):
formations that are interfering with your measurements.

Speaker 9 (43:07):
So the way you.

Speaker 10 (43:08):
Tell the direction the particles come in is essentially you
get this radio burst that it's like a kind of
wiggly line on a celloscope. It looks a bit like that,
and from the phase of that signal, so whether it
kind of goes up then down or it goes down
then up, you can tell whether it came directly from
the ice or whether it was reflected. So the particles
that come from above, their radio signals are reflected back up.

(43:30):
The ones from below they have this unreflected profile. But
people suggested, well, maybe there are these subsurface features in
the ice, so like subglacial lakes or layers of compacted
snow that could create multiple reflections that would make something
look like it came from below, when actually it had
some kind of complicated bouncing around in.

Speaker 9 (43:46):
The ice before it came back up again.

Speaker 10 (43:48):
So they proposed, well, what we actually need to do
is a survey of Antarctica and look for new sub
ice features that could explain this signal.

Speaker 9 (43:55):
Now, the experiment said, well.

Speaker 10 (43:57):
Actually, where we saw these two events, there's no evident
for interesting features underneath the ice, So we don't think
that's an explanation. So we don't know whether it's exciting
new physics or whether it is just something to do
with ice.

Speaker 2 (44:09):
And so help us understand why it's so hard to
tell these various explanations apart. I mean they sound like
totally different stories about what's happening. Is it just because
we have such limited information. We don't have like the
ice completely instrumented, We don't have like a picture of
this interaction. I think people are probably used to imagining
their minds particle experiments leading to these spectacular traces where

(44:29):
you have all these particles you can sort of see
what happened. Or do we have just less information about this?
Why can't we look at this and say, oh, here's
what it is and here's what it isn't.

Speaker 10 (44:38):
Well, I mean essentially, all that Anita sees is this
radio signal. It's essentially hearing this radio chairup with a
particular profile, and you have to then work out what
you've seen based on that, and there are various bits
of information. You know the shape of the profile, whether
it's inverted or not inverted, that tells you whether it's
reflected or not reflected. But you don't have any other information,
so you don't have a track, you don't have you know,

(44:59):
images of part article interactions. You're really just going off
a relatively small amount of information, and there's many ways
that you can produce that signal that you know. In
terms of all the new physics explanations, ultimately what they
boil down to is, at some point in charge particle
gets produced that interacts with the ice. So actually, whether
it's a steril neutrino, whether it's dark matter, whether it's

(45:19):
an anti matter universe, they would all basically look the same.

Speaker 9 (45:22):
You wouldn't be able to turn the part.

Speaker 10 (45:23):
You would then need other experiments to go out and
look for Well, okay, if it's the sterei on neutrino,
we would expect to see this in other places, so
let's go and look for it there.

Speaker 9 (45:31):
So this would only be one clue.

Speaker 10 (45:32):
It's like you've seen, you know, one footprint in the
mud in the jungle when you're hunting for an animal.
You don't necessarily know what animal it came from just
from this one depression in the soul. You've got to
get more evidence. So it would be a clue, but
not convincing or not. It wouldn't tell you ultimately what
caused it.

Speaker 2 (45:47):
Necessarily, personally, I find it kind of frustrating that we're
doing particle physics in an era where a single observation
can't make a discoveries. You say, it's like seeing a
footprint or a tuft of hair or something you haven't
like identified the actual animal. And I think back on
in the days, you know, like when the positron was discovered,
or you know, a cosmic rays or you know, the
neutral current or whatever, where they saw something weird in

(46:09):
their data and it was obvious that it was something new,
that there was no other explanation other than a new particle.
Why can't we do that anymore? Are we just passed
the days of single event discovery because our experiments are
so complex and our data are so indirect or do
you think that's still something we could do?

Speaker 10 (46:25):
I mean, if you go back to the positron discovery,
that's a great story because you know, you have Carl
Anderson with his cloud chamber and he sees this one
track going through his cloud chamber which is.

Speaker 9 (46:34):
Bending the wrong ways.

Speaker 10 (46:35):
You know, it looks like a positively charged electron. And
on the basis of this one photograph that he's taken
of one track he discovers antimatter.

Speaker 2 (46:43):
One day's experiment, one photograph, one Nobel price. It's a
great ratio.

Speaker 10 (46:48):
I suspect he probably did a few more days experimenting
than just the one photo.

Speaker 9 (46:51):
But yeah, I mean relatively speaking.

Speaker 10 (46:53):
But I think the reason that was accepted quite quickly
is because it was expected. Durrak had predicted the existence
of the positron based on theory, so people were primed
to see this thing. So I think that's partly why
it was accepted. But also, you know, with this one image,
there was no other way of explaining this. How do
you get a positively charged track that looks like an electron, Well,
there's nothing that can do that, and he had ways

(47:15):
of knowing that it wasn't electron going the opposite direction,
for example, are tricking you. So when there are no
other explanations, I think you can make a discovery based
on a single measurement. So often though, I think nowadays
in particle physics we're looking for really subtle effects, and
you're often talking about if we go back to the
LHC and the beauty quark anomalies. You're measuring some quantity
to end decimal places and trying to compare it with

(47:36):
your theory, and that measurement is kind of fraught with
all kinds of potential systematic effects that you have to
take into account. It's so rare that you just have
this kind of thing that appears and it's, oh my god,
you know that must be a new particle.

Speaker 9 (47:47):
I suppose you know.

Speaker 10 (47:48):
The closest became recently was the discovery of the Higgs boson,
but that's still required two years of data taking and
then you see a bump. But at that point when
you saw the bump again, because the Higgs was expected,
people are pretty ready to say, okay, even at the
time they didn't say, this is a Higgs boson, but
you know it's a Higgs like particle, and you know,
gradually build more evidence.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
But even in that case, there's no event you can
look at and say, okay, this proves to me there's
the Higgs. Each one like could be Higgs or could
be background. They're all sitting on top of a huge
background spectrum, and so in the end it's all statistical
and indirect, right, there's no like, hey, look we found it,
let's buy our ticket to Sweden, which is frustrating, but
you know, it also gives us power to discover all

(48:27):
sorts of other stuff. I suppose.

Speaker 10 (48:29):
Actually the counterexample thinking about it is gravitational wave discovery
in twenty fifteen.

Speaker 9 (48:34):
So that was one event.

Speaker 10 (48:36):
Albeit they had to extract it from you know, their data,
using these the template techniques and all the rest of it,
but that was one signal, and they were prepared to
say we've discovered gravitational waves on the basis of one interaction.
That wasn't sort of you know, having to sample vast
numbers of you know things.

Speaker 9 (48:51):
It does still happen, all right, But again I guess that.

Speaker 10 (48:54):
That's helped by the fact that, again, you expected to
see that, so you kind of knew what you should see,
and you then you see the thing you.

Speaker 9 (48:59):
Expect and you oh, yes, okay, that's what that is.
That's gravitational waves.

Speaker 2 (49:03):
All right. Well, that's really exciting, and I hope that
what they have found in the ice in Antarctica is
something new and weird and not just new layers of
ice down there in Antarctica. I want to dig into
some more of these anomalies. But first we have to
take a quick break. Okay, we're back and I'm talking

(49:30):
to doctor Harry Cliff about his fun new books Space Oddities,
which tells us all about weird things that we are
seeing in particle physics experiments that could be the hint
of something new. Tell us about the muon G minus
two experiment and what they are seeing.

Speaker 9 (49:44):
So yeah, muon G minus two is a very impressive experiment.

Speaker 10 (49:46):
So essentially what they're trying to measure is how magnetic
an exotic particle called a muon is.

Speaker 9 (49:53):
So muon is essentially a heavy version of the electron.

Speaker 10 (49:56):
It's got a negative charge, it's about two hundred times
more mass than an electron, and they're quite unstable. They
only live for a millionth of a second or so
before they decay into neutrinos and an electron usually. Now,
the reason that measuring the magnetism of the mue is
interesting is that it's sensitive to the existence of new
quantum fields in the vacuum that we haven't seen before.

(50:19):
So to sort of introduce that ode of a quantum
field for people who aren't familiar in particle physics, actually
we don't think of particles as being the fundamental ingredients
of the universe. We actually think of particles as being
manifestations of something more fundamental, which are these quantum fields
that permeate all of space. So, for example, like an electron,
we actually think of an electron as a little vibration

(50:40):
in something called the electron field that fills the whole universe.
And that means that if you take a little bit
of empty space and you know, you look at it
really hard, what you see.

Speaker 9 (50:49):
Is actually is not empty. Even when you get rid
of all the particles.

Speaker 10 (50:52):
There are these fields that are still there, and we
know about seventeen of.

Speaker 9 (50:55):
Them at the moment.

Speaker 10 (50:56):
There's you know, the quarks, the electons, the Higgs boson,
and the force particles, glue on photons and so on.
So these fields are always there, and there are certain
properties of particles that are particularly sensitive to what is
sitting around them in the vacuum. So essentially, you think
about a muon, you have your muon, it's sitting in
the vacuum. It actually interacts with all these quantum fields

(51:17):
that are sitting there all the time, and what you
actually measure is not the magnetism of the muon. It's
on its own, but the magnetism of the muon plus
all its interactions with these seventeen quantum fields, and they
can be really quite complicated, these sort of interactions back
and forth between each other.

Speaker 2 (51:31):
I think that's really helpful the way you're putting it.
We're measuring these properties of the particles, but really they're
showing us the interactions of the fields. Like even the
mass of the muon is that way right. The muon
itself doesn't have a mass. It's the interaction of the
muon and the Higgs field that changes how the muon
field oscillates and the sort of standing waves of its vibrations,

(51:51):
and we measure that as the mass of the muon, But
it tells us about the Higgs field, And so you're saying,
measuring the magnetic moment of the muon also tells us
about the other fields that could be out there. So
it's a great example of this like indirect probe of
all the stuff we might not know about.

Speaker 9 (52:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 10 (52:05):
And so the mun's magnetism was sort of measured back
in the nineties, but then in two thousand there was
an experiment at brook Haven near New York, where they
measured the muon's magnetism and it came out three sigma
away from the predictions of the Standard Model. So you
had this tantalizing anomaly that was seemed to be evidence
that there was something else in the vacuum, something beyond

(52:26):
the Standard Model that was altering its magnetism. So this
could be the clue to something really new and exciting.
The problem was that the experiment shut down wasn't taking
any more data. So how do you kind of resolve
this mystery? Is it really new physics or is it
something else or statistical effect, what have you. So some
of the people who worked on that original Brookhaven experiment
decided they were going to build a new and improved

(52:47):
version of this muon G minus two experiment, and this
involved essentially rebuilding the entire thing from scratch at Fermilab
near Chicago.

Speaker 9 (52:55):
But I mean in terms of the lengths they go to.

Speaker 10 (52:57):
The only bit of the old experiment they recycled it
was this superconducting magnetic ring. So essentially the way the
experiment works is you fire muons into this magnetic ring.
They go around the ring and as they go through
this magnetic field, their magnetic moment processes, so it kind
of wobbles about in the magnetic field. When the muons decay,
you can essentially measure the speed of the wobble depending

(53:18):
on how much energy the particles that are produced come
out at You get this kind of wiggle plot essentially.
But this big ring, it's like, you know, thirty meters across,
very expensive. They couldn't afford to get a new one
from scratch. They had this whole thing shipped from Long
Island down the Atlantic Coastline, round Florida, through Hurrican Alley,
up the Mississippi River and then over then closed lags
of freeways to get this huge thing to Fermilab. So

(53:40):
it's insane kind of like length that people go to. Again,
so this whole process took a decade. They bring the
new ring to Fermi Lab, they install it, they rebuild
the entire experiment from scratch, taking real incredible care to
measure every effect down to the sort of decimal place,
characterize the magnetic feel beautifully. And then in twenty twenty
one they announced their first measurement of the new magnetism

(54:03):
there and again there's this dramatic moment where they unblind
their results, and the big question is is this thing
going to land on top of the old measurement and
confirmed anomally or is it going to land on top
of the theoretical prediction. And what happens is it lands
bang on top of the Brookhaven results. So this confirms
the anomaly. It grows to over four sigma, and it's
potentially really really exciting. It looks like this is evidence

(54:24):
for new physics. But so often with these anomaly stories,
there's a sting in the tale, which is that this case,
the very same day that the new experiment published their result,
a group of theorists produced a new prediction of the
magnetism of the new one, and this prediction came out
much closer to the experimental measurement. So essentially you had

(54:44):
these two predictions. One that was performed by this big
consortium of over one hundred theorists working together, and then
this new technique using something technically called lattice QCD, using
big supercomputers. And so you have these two rival ways
of addicting theoretically the same thing that we're giving different answers.
And in one case there's a whacking great anomaly in

(55:05):
new physics. In the other case, there's not much to see.

Speaker 2 (55:07):
Essentially, this is another example of what you were talking
about earlier how it can be actually hard to know
what our theory predicts. Just because we have a theory
doesn't mean we know exactly how it predicts and experiments
result will turn out. Right. So here we have two
different groups using the same theory but getting different predictions,
right because the calculations themselves are so hard to do.

Speaker 9 (55:26):
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 10 (55:27):
And in this case it all comes down to again
quarks and gluons, which.

Speaker 9 (55:31):
Are they are a real pain in the art basically.

Speaker 10 (55:36):
Because the theory that describes them is very, very difficult
to make calculations with the theory of what called quantum
chromo dynamics, so we said that the nuance magnetism is
affected by everything that's in the vacuum. Where there are
quarks and gluon fields in the vacuum, they affect the magnetism,
and it's been very difficult historically to calculate this term.

Speaker 9 (55:52):
So the way it was done earlier.

Speaker 10 (55:54):
Previously was essentially to use experimental data where you have
colliders that find electrons and anti electrons, electrons and positrons
at each other and then they produce particles made of
quarks and gluons. And you can take this collider data
and you can essentially say, well, an electronic positron annihilating
to make quarks and gluons is basically the same as
a muon interacting with clarks and gluons. You just kind

(56:16):
of flip the process on its side effectively, So you
can take this data and then you can use a
recipe to translate it into a prediction for the effect
of quarks.

Speaker 9 (56:24):
And gluons on the muon.

Speaker 10 (56:26):
And that was how it was done, and this gave
you this four sigma anomaly.

Speaker 2 (56:30):
That's very clever. That's like saying, we don't know how
to do this calculation, but we can make the universe
do this calculation and then extract that information and insert
it into our calculation, sort of like using the universe
as a computer. And that's pretty awesome.

Speaker 9 (56:42):
Yeah, exactly, Yeah, just take it from nature.

Speaker 10 (56:44):
That was sort of an accepted, you know, very authority
tested method. But this new approach was using this technique
called lattice QCD, which I'm not going to pretend to understand,
but it's basically a way of calculating these sorts of
effects from first principles using the equations of the strong interaction,
where you break space and time up into this lattice
of points and you solve the equations on these lattice

(57:04):
points and you get your prediction.

Speaker 9 (57:06):
And they'd sort of made a.

Speaker 10 (57:07):
Breakthrough in this method and how to sort of apply
it to the case of the muon and came up
with a new calculation of this extra term in the calculation,
and this shifted the result basically towards the experimental measurement.
And so the big debate now is which of these
two methods is right, you know, is it the experimentally
driven one or is it the theoretically driven one, to
put it in broad terms, And that is still unresolved.

(57:29):
We don't know yet which is right. The big sort
of drama in this story now is basically theorists having
to sort of juke it out and figure out what's
the right way of doing this and hopefully eventually get
to a point where both of these methods converge on
the same answer and we can kind of agree how
magnetic mworanes really ought to be.

Speaker 2 (57:46):
This is very frustrating for an experimentalist because I feel
like we've done our job. We forced the universe to
reveal the answer here, and we just need to know
what it's supposed to be right, and the things like
can't get their house in order and figure out like
what we were supposed to have measured. It's like, you know,
get it together, folks. But in this scenario, is there

(58:07):
something we expect? You were saying, this is a great
way to probe other fields. What other kind of fields
might be out there that could be giving this effect?
Is this the kind of thing that's predicted by various
theories with.

Speaker 10 (58:19):
Only nominally there are quite a lot of potential explanations
on the market. So some involve supersymmetry, which is something
that we've been looking for at the LHC for the
last decade and have so far found no evidence for.
But you know, it's so supersymmetry. Supersymmetric particles interacting essentially
with the muon in the vacuum could produce an effect
like this. Another possible A popular set of explanations involves

(58:43):
what are known as dark forces, which sounds rather sinister,
but these are essentially the idea that dark matter may
not just be one particle like you know, it's often
assumed it's like it's a whimp or it's an axion,
But perhaps dark matter as a sector is quite rich
and there are more than just as in the atomic sector,
there are multiple particles interacting with forces. Maybe the dark

(59:04):
sector involves multiple particles with its own set of forces.
So there is one idea is this is actually evidence
of some kind of dark force field that allows dark
matter particles to interact with each other. That's subtly again
altering the way that the muon behaves. So the honest
answer is we don't know which of these is right yet.
But again this would be a clue. So if this
anomaly was confirmed and the theorists agree on some calculation

(59:28):
that gives this anomaly some high significance, you would then
know for pretty well certain there is something new out
there to find, and you can make various arguments to say, well,
the MW one has this certain mass, so we kind
of know the energy scale that the new physics ought
to show up at.

Speaker 9 (59:43):
So it kind of gives experiments.

Speaker 10 (59:45):
Like the LHC a target where we might expect, you know, say,
is find a new particle in the GeV range, for example,
and then you go and search for particular signatures. So
it wouldn't be the discovery of a particular new particle,
but it would tell you there is a new particle
there to be found in that would drive an experimental
effort to actually figure out what this thing is.

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
Do you think it's important that we have a theoretical
idea for what we're looking for before we discover it.
You said something in your book which struck me. You said, quote,
finding ourselves an unknown territory without a theoretical map to
guide us has bewildered and disheartened many personally. I feel like, personally,
I don't feel disheartened by not having a theoretical map.
I feel excited. I'm like, Ooh, let's go out and

(01:00:25):
explore this territory. Because my personal scientific fantasy is to
find something unexpected, something that makes people go, what that's impossible,
you know, because those are the moments that unravel everything
we thought we understand about the universe, you know, the
photoelectric effect, the black body spectrum, this kind of stuff.
Why do you feel like people are bewildered or disheartened
by not having theoretical guidance, not having like tips for

(01:00:48):
where to go look and what we might see.

Speaker 10 (01:00:50):
I mean, personally, I agree with you. So I think,
actually this moment is really exciting. The idea that we're
exploring the universe as we find it empirically observationally.

Speaker 9 (01:00:58):
That's a great place to be.

Speaker 10 (01:01:00):
And I would love like you to see something new
and unexpected that no one had.

Speaker 9 (01:01:03):
Predicted, because that's where you make the biggest progress.

Speaker 10 (01:01:06):
But I think it's fair to say that if you
went back fifteen years before the Large Hadron Collider, there
was this great sense of anticipation in terms of what
we were going to find, and there were these very
clearly defined targets for what people were going to look for,
and great optimism that some of them would show up.
So the Higgs was one of them, and that did
obligingly show up for us, But there was good reasons
to think it would because of all the success of
the Standard Model decades beforehand. But then things like supersymmetry

(01:01:29):
or extramensions of space there was a lot of work
going into and lots of predictions and lots of experimental searches,
and none of them turned up. So I think that
did leave people who had invested a lot of time
and effort into exploring those ideas feeling pretty dispirited. But
it sort of depends which angle you're coming at it from,
I think, and it is a sort of change that
I think looking at the history of particle physics particularly,

(01:01:52):
there has been a change in the last ten years.
I think it's probably the biggest impact in a way
of the LHC is sort of a shift from this
theoretically led era back into one that is experimentally driven.
If you went back to the middle of the twentieth century,
that was a period where particle physics was really experimentally driven.
You had all these particles appearing in cloud chambers and
bubble chambers and collider experiments that no one really knew

(01:02:13):
what was going on or understood, and that forced a
theoretical effort to sort of make sense of this crazy
zoo of particles, and out of that comes the quark
model and then later the Standard Model. But since the
Standard Model was established in the seventies, I think it's
fair to say, broadly speaking, most of the story of
particle physics has been a series of confirmations.

Speaker 9 (01:02:31):
Of predictions of the standard model. It's the great triumph
of what Winberg.

Speaker 10 (01:02:34):
And Glashow and others did, which they predicted the existence
of the Wnz bosons. They were found in the eighties.
The Higgs boson was found in twenty twelve. The other
quarks that were sort of predicted were discovered. So it
was really a series of like, yep, tick, and now
in twenty twelve we ticked the lark's box, and now
we're like, Okay, there isn't a guide anymore. We filled
in all the boxes, but we know there's more out there,

(01:02:56):
but we don't necessarily know where to go next. There's
been an adjustment have gone through and shifting from that
era where you sort of knew what you were looking
for and you expected to find it, to one where
you don't really know any more what you're looking for
and you're just going out and exploring and trying to
design experiments and searches that are broad enough that they
can capture even the things that you didn't necessarily predict
ahead of time.

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
Yeah, I feel like there's sort of a pendulum that
swings between you know, philosophy and botany, and in the
philosophical eras it's like, you know, we know how this
all works, and we can predict it, and we know
what you should do and how to look for it.
And then we swing into the botany ERAa, where we're like, well,
we have no idea what's going on. We're just taking
data and describing all the weird stuff that we're seeing
out there in the universe. And I feel like mostly

(01:03:37):
we've been in the philosophy era, and it's exciting to
me to swing into the botany area where you know,
as you say, experimentalists are on the forefront and we
can go out and discover weird new stuff that nobody understands.
To me, that's really exciting.

Speaker 9 (01:03:49):
So we talking about botany, I mean just this historical aside.

Speaker 10 (01:03:52):
The same reaction came in the thirties when things like
the mewon and the padrons were being discovered, where people
like Fermi said all these new parts articles of period.
People were quite dismayed by it because they were like,
it didn't fit into this neat theoreist or picture.

Speaker 9 (01:04:04):
And I think it was firm who.

Speaker 10 (01:04:05):
Said, you know, if I could remember the name of
all these particles, I would have been a botanist.

Speaker 9 (01:04:11):
So it's not the first time.

Speaker 2 (01:04:12):
He says they're dismissively. But to me, that's very exciting.

Speaker 9 (01:04:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
Yeah, So tell me how excited are people on the ground.
I mean, you've done a great job of laying out
these anomalies in your book and also giving us the
caveats not over selling it. But you know, the people
working on this stuff who are really seeing the details,
are they excited? Are they betting that this is new physics?
Or are they skeptical and jaded from all the anomalies
that have come and gone.

Speaker 9 (01:04:37):
I think it depends on who you speak to.

Speaker 10 (01:04:38):
I mean, I think broadly speaking, I think it's fair
to say that experimentalists tend to be more cautious.

Speaker 9 (01:04:43):
I don't know if jaded is the right word, but certainly
more cautious.

Speaker 10 (01:04:46):
And theorists are are a bit more enthusiastic, and you know,
and new and lomly turns up and they're like, amazing, great,
and they kind of write loads of papers about what
could explain this thing, and there's nothing wrong with that.
I think that's sort of two different approaches to the
same thing. And I think, you know, as experiment because
you do have to be more cautious because you're claiming to,
you know, measure what nature is actually doing, and you
don't want to be biasing your results based on some

(01:05:08):
presupposition of what you're expecting to see, whereas in theory,
you know, you come up with an explanation, there's no
harm done. Really, I mean, if it doesn't turn out
to be true, that's that's sort of fine. But it
depends on the anomaly. It depends on who you talk to.
But like with me on G minus two, I think
if you speak to Lattice QCD theorists, they will say, well,
there's nothing to see here because it's you know, the
Lattice says that there's no anomaly. If you speak to

(01:05:30):
other theorists who worked on the other method, they'll tell you, oh, no,
this method solid and there's new physics. So I think
it really depends where you're coming from. I think the
one anomaly in the book that I found the most
compelling and where I think a lot of the field
also believes this is something is actually not a particle
physics anomaly, but one in cosmology which is anomally called

(01:05:52):
the Hubble tension, which is essentially there's disagreement over how
fast the universe is expanding or ought to be expanding.
So you have these two methods of measuring this, one
which involves looking at stuff we can see in the sky,
so galaxies, measuring their distances and their speeds, and then
you measure the expansion rate of the universe from that data.
Another way that evolves looking at the light from the

(01:06:14):
Big Bang, determining the properties of the early universe, and
then using the standard cosmological model to run the clock
forward and predict from that early data what the expansion
rate should be.

Speaker 7 (01:06:25):
Now.

Speaker 10 (01:06:25):
And these two numbers do not agree with each other
by over five sigma. Now, so this is a pretty
gold plated anomaly, and at least it would be in
particle physics terms. But in that case, you know, there's
been this long argument for a decade now about what
is going on, and lots of people trying to find
mistakes in how we measure distances, for example in the
local universe or drilling into the cosmic microwave background data

(01:06:47):
that's used for this prediction. And after a decade of
scouring the data and multiple different ways of measuring the
same things, no one's found a problem, really, not nothing
that can explain the size of the anomaly that you're seeing.

Speaker 9 (01:07:00):
So I think more and.

Speaker 10 (01:07:00):
More of the field is now coalescing around the belief
that this is actually genuinely something profound that we don't understand.
The difficulty there, I think, and this comes back to
the point we were talking about earlier, is there isn't
any ready made theoretical explanation for what's causing this. There
is sort of various things that can help relieve the
tension a bit, but none of them solve it. So

(01:07:21):
it's not like there's one sort of new thing where
you say, oh, it's dark energy like you had with
the accelerated universe in the nineties.

Speaker 9 (01:07:27):
It looks like to explain this thing you need new.

Speaker 10 (01:07:30):
Physics, multiple different periods in the universe's history, of different types.
And I think that makes people uncomfortable because this principle
of Ocham's raiser, if you see something new, there should
be some really simple explanation that just ah, right, yeah,
you know, that's the answer, Whereas in this case it
seems very difficult to do that. And I think it's
meant that it has taken time for this anomaly to
really kind of be accepted as a genuine effect, because

(01:07:51):
it is hard to explain.

Speaker 2 (01:07:53):
Well, tell me a little bit about how you thought
about presenting anomalies to the public, because your audience are
people who can't really go through the details and question
your arguments necessarily, and so there's a responsibility when you're
presenting this stuff to the public. You want to make
it sound exciting. You're selling a book, after all, but
you also want to be responsible and you don't want

(01:08:14):
to overhype stuff. And you tell in your book a
story of sort of a disastrous example of this, you know,
the BICEP two result. You said, quote, I can't think
of a more disastrous example of scientific hubris than the
sorry story of Bicep two, which I thought was, you know,
harsh but fair. How did you strike a balance in
your book?

Speaker 10 (01:08:32):
Yeah, And I think the way I try to put
this across is that anomalies potentially can be revolutionary. They
can give you this amazing new insight to something you
never understood before, but they can also lead you astray.
And so at the beginning of the book, I actually
kind of have a whole chapter basically on how anomalies
can trick you and how you can all go horribly wrong.
I mean, so with the BICEP two example, that was

(01:08:52):
this discovery in twenty fourteen where a telescope at the
South Pole found evidence for gravitational way from inflation. So
this period of exponential expansion that cosmologists believed happened in
the very first instant of the Big Bang, and this
was presented to the world before it was peer reviewed,
this big press conference, and you know, this announcement that

(01:09:13):
you know, essentially we'd heard the bee of the Big Bang,
that we'd proven cosmic inflation, that we probe quantum gravity,
you know, all this talk about Nobel prizes.

Speaker 9 (01:09:21):
And then within about.

Speaker 10 (01:09:22):
A month or two, the whole thing was undiscovered as
it was realized that they'd taken a key bit of
data from a PowerPoint presentation by the Plank Spacecraft collaboration,
which was used to basically take into account the effect
of dust contaminating their observations of the cosmic microwave background,
and they misinterpreted this slide effectively, and when this was

(01:09:42):
taken into account, the whole signal literally turned to.

Speaker 9 (01:09:46):
Dust, so it disappeared.

Speaker 10 (01:09:48):
So I think that the problem with what byStep two
did was not necessarily that they made a mistake, because
mistakes happened.

Speaker 9 (01:09:54):
That can happen, but it's the way it was communicated.

Speaker 10 (01:09:56):
I think that it was they called a press conference,
they made a big deal out of it, and before
it had been really thoroughly checked by external peer reviewers.
I think that was what weren't wrong there. So in
the book, you know, all of the anomalies, I talk
about the reason their anomalies and not discoveries is because
none of them are confirmed. And I go through each
of them and say, well, you know, here's the exciting explanation,
here's the boring explanation, and I think it hopefully gives

(01:10:17):
readers a balanced view of, you know, what the story
is with each of them. But the other way, I
think that whether or not any of them actually turn
into a new physics discovery, I think there's huge excitement
just in the process of drilling into these things, and
you know, learning about the experiments that people do, the
lengths they go to to measure these quantities, the emotional
rollercoaster people go through, you know, when they think they're

(01:10:38):
seeing something and then they realize they haven't. One of
the stories I tell in the book is my own
research so we talked about this at the beginning of
the podcast, where we thought collectively in our area of
particle physics that we were seeing signs of something genuinely exciting.
And what happened as I was writing the book, in fact,
was that we discovered in some of our measurements there
was a hidden or a missed background that we had

(01:10:58):
not properly understood. And this was a real moment of
you know, horror, essentially, when you realize that you put
measurements out into the world that have an error in them,
and when this was corrected, a set of the anomalies disappeared,
and essentially that you know, once you're corrected for this effect,
it agree with the standard model. So what I look
like you're on the brink of discovering something really big.
You realize, oh, actually it's the opposite. You've made a

(01:11:19):
pretty spectacular Cocker.

Speaker 2 (01:11:20):
Said, trombone sound here.

Speaker 10 (01:11:22):
Yeah, yeah, So I think it's important to see that
that's how science works. You know, when you're working at
the edge of your understanding, you're in real danger of
making mistakes because you're in territory that you don't know
where you're stepping. You know, your foothold is not secure,
and you may take as much care as you can
where there's always a chance that you put a foot wrong,
but gradually you know sciences self correcting. These mistakes are eventually,

(01:11:45):
sometimes quite quickly found out, and even when the anomalies
go away, you learn something new. So you may learn
about how to make calculations with a standard model, for example,
or you may learn about particular types of background processes
that you didn't understand, and that allows you when you
do another experiment or you make another prediction in the future,
you're on much more solid grounds. So these anomalies are

(01:12:06):
kind of a grindstone where you're sharpening your scientific tools.
Even when they don't lead to a big breakthrough, they
are kind of equipping you for the next steps.

Speaker 2 (01:12:14):
Yeah, well, let's hope that they lead to new anomalies
that actually do turn out to be new particles. That's
a lot more fun.

Speaker 9 (01:12:20):
Yeah, wonderful.

Speaker 2 (01:12:22):
Well, thanks very much for coming to talk to us
about all the exciting hints on the edge of the
particle physics frontier that might be the revolution in our
understanding about the universe. And I encourage everyone to check
out Harry's new book space oddities everywhere books are sold. Harry,
thanks very much for joining us today on the podcast.

Speaker 9 (01:12:38):
Thanks for having me. Great talking to you.

Speaker 1 (01:12:41):
All right, an interesting conversation. What's your takeaway from all
of those oddities out there?

Speaker 2 (01:12:46):
I think they're all exciting, but I'm not one hundred
percent convinced that any of them really mean a new discovery,
a new deep understanding of the universe.

Speaker 1 (01:12:55):
Wait, what you're skeptical of a scientist saying, hey, let's
go explore the.

Speaker 2 (01:13:00):
No I think it's great to explore the unknown. One
thing I really like about Harry's book is that he
tells you why they're potentially exciting, but he also gives
you a realistic sense for why they might have prosaic explanations.
It might just be that the ice in Antarctica is
not as simple as we thought, or that the calculations
of the Standard Model are harder to do than we
expect it, so we're not sure exactly what to compare
it to. So stay tuned, is the final answer.

Speaker 1 (01:13:23):
So these oddities are maybe not so odd.

Speaker 2 (01:13:26):
We might mean that we learned something deeper about the universe,
or we might just learn about the ice in Antarctica.
Either way, we're going to learn something.

Speaker 1 (01:13:33):
Yeah, and hopefully not destroy the planet, right right, hopefully
hopefully question mark dot dot dot great and this is
the part where you cackle with Danny Great. Hey, Niseth,
can we cut off his funding now? Please? Thank you?

(01:13:54):
All right, Well, another interesting reminder. There are still lots
of discover out there, at least a lot of data
and a lot of sciences stiff through to look for
things that we maybe didn't expect because the history of
science is that it's always surprising us.

Speaker 2 (01:14:07):
It's always surprising, and it's always fantastic.

Speaker 1 (01:14:10):
It's stay tuned, and that's what we shouldn't destroyed. No comment,
All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for
joining us. See you next time.

Speaker 2 (01:14:21):
For more science and curiosity, come find us on social
media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter,
disc Org, Instant and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and
remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your

(01:14:44):
favorite shows.