October 11, 2018 • 31 mins
What's the smallest piece of matter? Is there one?
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Everything that we know about in the universe, all the stars, galaxies,
gas and dust out there. You me, hamsters, hamsters, flamingos.
Tell me that it's just three things. Yeah, that's crazy.
You have all this complexity, not because the world itself
is complex, but the world is made out of a
small number of simple things, and it's the arrangement of
(00:27):
that stuff that gives a complexity. It's just three things
arranged in a bazillion different ways. Hi, I'm Jorge and
I'm Daniel, and this is Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.
(00:47):
Our podcast about the universe and everything in it, in
which we try to take the whole universe, break it
into tiny pieces and insert them one at a time
into your brain, bit by bit. Today on the program,
we're gonna ask question what is the universe made out of? Right?
Sort of like, can you take the universe and break
(01:07):
that into tiny bits? And how far can you go?
And why do we even think that's possible? And why
is it like that? And what are those tiny little bits?
And why do they have such silly names. It's something
I like to think about, is how long have people
been asking this question? Clearly the Greeks thought about it,
they wrote about it. You know, they had crazy ideas
that were totally off base, but they thought about it.
(01:29):
To them, it was an important question. Yeah. And even
before that, I was reading you know, it's ancient cultures,
even before the Greeks had this question and they had
ideas about what the things were made out of. Well,
I wonder, you know, like the folks, for example, who
did those cave paintings in France thirty five thousand years ago.
They were capable of symbolic thinking, probably logic, definitely music.
Did they have these deep questions about this world they
(01:50):
found themselves in that made little sense to them? Yeah? Well,
I think it's crazy just to think about why even
ask the question, like what makes us think that the
universe is made out of stuff? You know? Like what
does it mean to even ask that question? Yeah? I
think it comes from a desire to organize. Like you
see stuff around you, right, I mean you see logs
(02:11):
and water and air and people, and you notice all
this stuff, and then you might wonder like, well this
stuff is kind of like that other stuff, and is
there some way I can organize it? Right? So I
think the first principle there is like looking for patterns,
looking for forum for reasons why you can understand why
this stuff is here. Yeah, and can I like take
(02:31):
some of this and mix it with some of that
and get something new or something different. Yeah, it's a
sort of a natural idea. But as usually, we went
out into the street and we asked you. We asked you,
what do you think the universe is made out of?
The deepest level of matters so far? Here's what you
had to say. What is everything made out of at
the smallest scale? Uh? On the smallest scale, I think
(02:55):
electrons are the smallest that I know of. I haven't
taking physics is like junior year from well, I guess
from my classes it would be like the atoms. Atoms?
Is it atoms? Um? It's made out of quarks and stuff? Right,
the quarks freak. I feel like I should know this.
I'm a chem major. Al Right, I think we got
(03:17):
our answer. I think we're done with this podcast. It's
Adams basically atoms and maybe something else. Yeah, everybody seems
to know about the atom. I think basically everyone's physics
education stops at high school. Basically most people unless you
go on to study physics it's like high school physics.
What do you remember is atoms? But that's not even physics, man,
that's chemistry. Atoms are chemistry, how they interact and stuff.
(03:38):
But it's fascinating that one of the deepest questions in physics, right,
what is the universe made out of? Is mostly answered
so far by chemistry. Like most of the progress we've
made is chemistry. What chemistry used to be kind of physics, right,
I mean it used to all just be natural sciences, right,
Like these distinctions are kind of recent. Yeah, I mean
it all used to be philosophy, right, all of it
(03:59):
grew out of posophy, That's what it all just used
to be thinking, you know, like love of thinking? What's
your job, Dad, I'm a thinker. I'm a lover of
think all day. So, but I think it's it's interesting
that you know, a huge part of the answer this
question what is the world made out of? Is answered
by what people said Adams. You know that you can
(04:21):
even take the stuff around you and break it into
a fairly small number of bits then explain all of it.
And this idea can I like you said, it goes
back to the Greeks, like the Greeks positive, They wondered, like,
is everything made out of tiny little bits? Yeah? I
think that gives the Greeks way too much credibly. I mean,
I think there was a Greek democratus who had a
lot of ideas, one of which was this one, which
(04:43):
happened to be correct. Um. I think he had a
lot of other crazy ideas which were not correct. And
it's not like this idea was you know, took the
Greeks by storm and had a lot of consensus. You know,
sort of like if a thousand monkeys are typing on typewriters,
one of them will predict a correct theory of physics
and you can look back later and say, Wow, this
monkey was a genius. But that doesn't make all monkeys geniuses.
(05:05):
I'm saying. They kind of spread a lot of intellectual
ideas of the board there, you know, and yeah, one
of them stuck and turned out to be sort of true.
But doesn't mean they necessarily need to get credit for it.
But they sort of try to categorize these little bits, right,
Like they had ideas that there were five or four
kinds of stuff that the rest of the stuff was
made of, right, like earth, air, water, fire, and I
(05:26):
think that those are really two separate ideas that now
we've kind of combined. I mean, one idea was there's
a few basic kinds of stuff and everything is made
out of those, Right, That's a really fascinating idea. The
other idea that everything is made out of small pieces,
you know, the atoms bits of stuff. That's a totally
different idea, Like stuff can be made out of a
(05:48):
small number of other stuff like earth, fire, wind, But
those things don't necessarily need to be in little bits. Yeah,
they could be, you know, earth and fire and water
could be um elemental on their own. They could be
it can't be divided into little pieces that could be
like perfectly smooth no matter how much you zoom in,
they could always just be themselves. Right. There's this other
(06:08):
idea that if you zoom in on stuff, it turns
out it's made out of little building blocks. That's a
different idea. And now we have kind of both of them, right,
we have both of them. Were like, oh, it turns
out stuff it's made out of little building blocks, and
there's a few kinds of them. Right, But I guess
the question is what is that building? Blog are thinking
is a species is evolved on that, right, Like maybe
we used to think we were made out of little
(06:29):
bits of dust and then we got smaller into atoms,
and we've been getting smaller and smaller, right, Yeah, absolutely,
And um, I think it's incredible, as I was saying earlier,
and I can't stop talking about this because I think
it's underrated as a sort of human intellectual achievement that
you can boil down everything you've ever eaten or sat
on or tripped over or any human is ever interacted
(06:51):
with in terms of just the atoms, right, the hundred
basic building blocks. I mean, you go from like almost
infinite complexity down to just a hundred things. It's blows
my mind that that's even possible, Like why does the
universe work that way? Right? Right? And if you need
a reminder of your high school physics, so atoms are
the ones in the periodic table of elements like carbon, iron, oxygen,
(07:13):
those are atoms. Yeah, And not that long ago people
thought that that's the that's the universe. Everything you see
is made out of these hundred little things, right Yeah.
And as impressive as that was, right, um, I think
some people were wondering, why are there these patterns, right, like, yeah,
you have these hundred basic things and maybe that's it,
but maybe there are things inside those, like maybe those
(07:35):
things are made out of even smaller things. And the
clues we had there is that if you look at
the periodic table of the elements, it's not just a
hundred different things that are totally separate from each other.
There are patterns like things near each other in the
periodic table act in similar ways, which suggests that they're
made out of some smaller bits and that small changes
(07:55):
and how you assemble them make different atoms. Right, It's
like they had all these different elements and then they
started to characterize their property. They started to measure how
they reacted to different things and how much they weighed,
and it turned out, to their surprise that you can
put them like on a table, you can order them
in a certain way. Yeah, and I love when a
huge advance in science comes from something that's basic. It's
(08:17):
like how you write it on a piece of paper.
The first person to make the periodic tables, like, let's
organize our knowledge in this way. Oh my gosh, that
makes this obvious that there's a gap here and that
there's a pattern here. Right, Sometimes notation or just the
way you write things can lead to huge advances, right,
And I think that's just an extension of what we
were talking about earlier. Right. You know, why do people
(08:38):
even ever wonder how the universe was made? It's because
they looked at stuff and they wanted to understand it,
and they look for patterns and they organized it, and
then they wondered, you know, these things are similar. It's
the same logic that you just described applied to the
periodic table. You know, these things are gases and they're active,
and these things are really inactive, and these guys are
metallic and all that stuff. Why are there those patterns?
(08:58):
Why are they sing similarly each other and different from others?
Because patterns tell you that there are rules, right, Like
there's some kind of underlying order, we certainly hope, so
otherwise physics would be impossible. Um, and yeah, patterns are
the clues, right, said, like why is this like this?
It could have been different, So why is it in
this way? Why are these things all similar and they're
(09:19):
all different from those things are the opposite of those things? Right?
And then you use those patterns as as clues, as
as hints to say, you know, what could be inside here,
what's making these things act in this way? Like that's
the goal of signs, right, yeah, exactly, And it could
just be there is no answer. It is just the
way it is, right, That's that's possible. You know, at
(09:40):
some point we could run up against the wall. We said, like,
the universe is this way and there is no explanation,
and some people like that. I think that's a cop out,
like we could have stopped the periodic. They must be like, Okay,
that's it. The universe is made out of these hundred
things and that's all we know. Yeah, and nobody asks
any more questions. Yeah, exactly. That doesn't seem to be
(10:00):
very scientific. You know, I don't know if you know
about the anthropic principle, but that's the kind of argument
behind the anthropic principle. You know that the universe is
the way it is and some things are just randomly set,
and um, there's no point in asking any more questions,
so go away, please slam. I see, But I feel
like what's the point of science. It's to look for explanations,
So never give up, right, just keep looking and and
(10:22):
eventually you're going to find the reason and we did that,
and turns out everything in the periodic table is made
out of smaller bits and and not just that, but
the complexity goes down right. You you can explain all
the crazy stuff in your environment, the huge numbers of
things in terms of just a hundred building blocks. You
can explain those hundred building blocks in terms of a
smaller number of smaller particles, not a larger number. But
(10:45):
that that wasn't necessarily the case, right, Like what helped
scientists at the time think that there was such a
thing as atoms, like that there was a minimal bit
of the stuff we call carbon. Yeah, that's a great question,
and again the answer is chemistry. People were noticing, oh,
if you mix these things together, you need equal proportions
of this or this happens in ratios of three to two.
(11:06):
And a guy named Dalton who came up with this idea,
he's like, hmm. Turns out that there are these exact ratios,
and so it made sense then that things were made
out of these tiny pieces that they were then reorganizing
and fitting together. That was the first indirect piece of evidence,
because like, if carbon was let's say, infinitely divisible, you
wouldn't have these kind of exact ratios in chemical reactions, right, exactly, right, Yeah,
(11:30):
you could mix it with something else and you just
get a blend. Like you need the idea of a
unit of this stuff in order to explain these ratios
in chemical reactions. Yeah, exactly. I hadn't thought about that. Yes,
So that was the first clue, and then people discovered
the first particles um. It was actually with J. J. Thompson.
He discovered the electron um. He was looking at cathode
(11:51):
ray tubes, which at the time was just this weird thing.
Cathode ray tubes are what used to be in television's.
They shoot these electrons from one side or the other
and they would make these glowing like raise inside them.
At the time, it's just like this weird effect people
who show inside shows and you know, magic shows and stuff.
Nobody understood it. But he started looking into it and
he discovered, oh, these razors actually made out of tiny
(12:12):
little particles um. He called them. He didn't call them
particles though, he called them corpus scules. And I'm really
glad that that name did not stick because it's an
ugly and hard to say. We should just go back
to that. I mean, why, why why wouldn't you want
to be of course, course corpuscule physics, because you can't
even say it. And that's exactly why. You see. It's
a mouthful, isn't that. One of my favorite things about
(12:34):
that discovery though, is that he discovered this one particle
and then immediately he thought maybe everything in the world
is built out of my corpus scules. He like generalized
to infinity. He's like, oh, I found one particle. This
is the particle that answers all the questions. Right, of course,
not everything is built out of electrons. I guess why
wouldn't he make that deep right? Like why would some
things be made out of little things? And why would
(12:56):
some other things not be made out of little things? Yeah?
Well he I guess he couldn't imagine that there might
be other kinds of particles out there also, and he
was hoping that his discovery was at the root of
all knowledge, right, which I guess is part of the
scientific fantasy for everybody. So we can forgive it. And
you know, he is the first guy to discover a particle,
so you know, credit to him. So he he thought, well,
(13:16):
what if everything's made out of little things. And then
we had the periodic table, and then we've ordered it
and we got the table, and then people started noticing patterns,
and that's when people thought, maybe these things are made
out of something else. Yeah, that started to be a
pretty compelling idea because you have all these elements of
periodic table. They're organized in that way. They nicely slot
into the periodic table that way and um. And then
(13:38):
people started busting the atoms open to see what's inside.
And he was Rutherford who first did that. He's like,
let's shoot a beam of radiation at some some matter
and see what comes out. And so he was the
first one to really break the atom open and to
see that there was that the atomant wasn't just like
a continuous blob that had a hard center, this nucleus
(13:58):
um of something inside of it. Oh, this is the
what is it? The gold X ray experiment gold foil
gold foil shot radiation at a really thin sheet of
gold foil, and he figured it would just go right
through and he was going to measure, like, you know,
how much you got bent whatever. But occasionally when he
shot at the gold foil um, some radiation would bounce
right back, directly back, and he said famously that it's
(14:20):
like shooting a bullet at a piece of tissue paper
and having it reflect back in your face. Right, made
no sense if you thought of the tissue was just
like smooth and continuous. It made a lot more sense
if you thought of it is like a chain link fence, right,
a bunch of really condensed little points with big gaps
in between, and occasionally you hit one of those points.
And that's when we realized that matter is not continuous
(14:43):
like a jelly, but actually like little thoughts that are
kind of arranged together, right, these little thoughts, and the
atom itself has this tiny little hardcore the nucleus. Adams
are hardcore. I totally set you up without even realizing.
I'm glad we don't live in a soft core world,
you know. Now we're now we're vying into um, not
(15:08):
say for chemistry. Not on that note. Let's take a
quick break. So that's kind of amazing that they came
up with this idea of the atomic nucleus and protons
(15:31):
and electrons without actually like seeing this stuff, right, just
from seeing the effects of it inexperiments. Yeah, but that
was the last time you could really see things. I
mean when you're talking about like visualizing, these things are
so tiny, so small that they're really impossible to see
directly in any sort of way. And the only kind
of seeing you can do is indirect. Right. You have
(15:52):
like an idea of what it looks like, You do
an experiment, You think about the result of the experiment
based if if your idea is correct, and you see
the results. So even today, when we're smashing protons together
at the large hit On collider, we have these huge
detectors that take pictures of the collisions, but we can't
see the particles directly. You know, they're they're too small
and things happen too fast, and so direct imaging is
(16:15):
is all but impossible at this scale. But these days
we can see atoms, right, Yeah, but depends what you
mean by seeing, right, you need to see an atom.
You need to bounce electrons off of it in order
to see its shape. And so that's is that really seeing?
I mean, you're again you're using you're bouncing particles off
of it, you're making measurements, and you're translating that into
an image later. I don't know if you know if
(16:36):
that really counts as seeing, but that's a whole different
philosophical discussion. They're smaller than the wavelength of light, so
you it's hard to say you're seeing it. Yeah, I
think it's it's reasonable to say you're seeing it, but
it requires you expand slightly your whole definition of what
it means to see something. Okay, so well let's break
it down for the listener then, So everything around you,
the universe that you can see in touch and smells,
(16:57):
made out of atoms, and atoms are made out of
an atomic nuclei with electrons flying around it. And then
the nucleus is made out of more things, right, right, exactly,
So the atoms are made out of protons and neutrons
and electrons. Protons and neutrons in the nucleus. The electrons,
we think so far, are just made of themselves. There's
nothing inside the electron. The electrons are just tiny dots
(17:19):
um as far as we know that we could be wrong.
We're probably all wrong, But as far as we know,
electrons are not made out of anything else inside the nucleus. However,
the proton and the neutron, these we already know are
made out of tinier stuff. And so the proton and
the neutron are both made out of corks. And there's
two kinds of corks that you need to make the
proton and the neutron is the up cork and the
(17:41):
down cork. Take two upcorks and down and you get
a proton, or two down corks and up and you
get a neutron. How do we know electrons are not
made out of smaller things maybe like electron quarks or something, Yeah,
little electronitos or something. Well, we don't know. All we
can say is that we've tried to look inside them
and we haven't seen anything yet. I mean, like, how
(18:02):
would you even how would you even look inside of
an electron? The same way we looked inside the atom
and saw that it had a nucleus, right, we saw
that it was made out of smaller pieces. You shoot
particles at it and you try to resolve some structure.
You say, oh, if I shoot at this part of
the electron, it bounces straight back. If I shoot at
this part, it goes right through. And so then you
can tell of the electron has some structure to it. Yeah,
(18:23):
But in order to see that structure, you have to
poke it with a fine enough needle, which means a
high enough energy particle. And so far, so far. Tune
in next week for the final story of the electron. Right, Um,
so far we haven't been able to break the electron
into pieces or to use a needle that's fine enough
to understand that there's more stuff here in the electron
(18:46):
than there. So far we it only looks like a
point to us. You imagine you have you're looking at
the Earth from space right using Google Earth. You know,
can you tell that the town is made out of
tiny houses? Will you keep zooming in and zooming in
and as long as you have more resolution, you can see, oh,
the town is made of houses, and houses made of rooms,
and rooms are made of furniture. But that's only if
you actually have that resolution. So for the electron, we've
(19:08):
zoomed in as far as we can and we can't
see anything smaller. But we haven't zoomed in all the way.
Build bigger colliders and zoom in further and maybe we'll
find something like you zoom in and it still acts
like like just one thing exactly. There's no weirdness about
the way it acts at different scales like there's no
texture there, that's right. There's no texture to the electron
so far, right exactly. But that's that's purely limited by
(19:32):
how powerful our microscopes are, how powerful our particle accelerators are,
which are modern day microscopes. But for the proteon and
the neutron, there is texture there, like there's actually a
little bits inside of it that you can see, yeah, exactly,
and we we can break them up, and we can
interact with those little bits, and we can measure them
and study them. So those are up corks and down corks,
(19:52):
and we know that if you rear, if you arrange
up corks and down corks in one way, you get
a proton. You arrange another way, you get a neutron.
And so that means that everything in the periodic table
can be made out of up corks, down corks, and electrons. Right,
So mixtures of those three things make every atom, which
makes anything that anybody's ever eaten. It's to me, it's
(20:13):
incredible that all this complexity of stuff around us can
be described in just three particles. So what do we
even still talk about protons? I mean, a proton is
just you're saying, it's just the word for arrangement A
of these two quarks and a neutron is just arrangement
number B of the quarks, you know. Yeah, Well, sometimes
arrangements can be interesting. For example, Jorge is a particular
(20:35):
arrangement of protons and neutrons in Pasadena. Right, I think
you'd like to be referred to as Jorge and not
individually talk to your protons, right, yeah, don't talk to
my protons. Talk to me like I'm a person. Eyes
up here, e's up here, Daniel. Um. Yeah, Well, it
turns out that the corks are not just like hanging
out near each other and we call it a proton.
(20:57):
They are tightly bound together. They are held really firm together.
They move like a single thing. Unless you have a
huge amount of energy to look inside, to zoom in
to see that texture, to break it up, you're just
going to see a proton as a proton, even if
it's made out of three corks. It's like three tiny
lego pieces jam together so hard that you need an
expert to pride them apart. Well, this is a perfect
(21:18):
point to take a break. But yeah, that's a really
cool point you're making just just now, which is that
everything that we know about in the universe. It's just
three things arranged in a bazillion different ways. That's all
(21:41):
we are. We're just electrons, up courts and down course. Yeah,
it's all about the arrangements. And you know, there's a
lot of information in the arrangements. You know, if I
rearranged all of your particles into it just a puddle
on the floor, you would not be the same person.
So who you are is your arrangements, you know, it's
not just the elements that make you. You know, I
(22:01):
like to joke with my friends that if you ask
the particle physicists to write a cookbook, it will only
have three ingredients in every single recipe, right up quirks,
down quirks, and electrons, and every recipe would just say mix. No,
that's exactly the point, And all the hard work is
in the arrangements, right Who you are is not just upquorks,
down quirks, and electrons. It's your particular arrangement of those
(22:23):
and assembling those and into the particular thing that makes
you you. Right. And so that's the answer, is that
the things that we see around us in the universe
are not defined by the particles that make them up,
but by the arrangements of those particles. And so if
the whole goal of particle physics or asking this question
is to get some deep inside into the universe, then
that's it. You know, that the universe. Um, that the
(22:45):
complexity in the universe comes from arrangements. That's fascinating to me. Well,
I feel like this point is is kind of maybe
hard to grasp, So I was just thinking that, um,
maybe the way to really grasp it is that imagine
if it wasn't just three particles. Let let's say everything
in the u of Earth was made out of just
one particle, like particle Bob, and everything you me television, Like,
(23:08):
imagine if it was just one particle and everything you
see around you was just different arrangements of Bob, you know.
And that might still be the case. Right, We could
discover that the electron, the upcork, and the downcourt and
all the other particles, which by the way, we haven't
even talked about yet, are made out of one kind
of tiniest little particle. That could be the answer. Yea, yeah,
but it's not that different from three, right, Like three
(23:30):
is still fascinating, Like it's not just Bob. It's like Bob,
Sue and Mary everything. You know, it's just Bos, Sue
and Mary doing different things, and then you get this incredible,
amazing complexity, right. Yeah, And as you say, it could
have been different. It could have been that everything is
made out of its own thing and either that it
was made out of particles or not. You know, you
could have a world where every kind of thing, every
(23:52):
kind of person is made out of a different kind
of particles. You know, you have like three particles and
air particles and cat particles, and that's why cats are
so weird exactly. That's a huge clue about the universe.
You know that the universe at its core is kind
of simple, and to me, that gives me a lot
of motivation. It tells me we can understand it. It
can be boiled down into a simple explanation. It would
(24:15):
be disappointing, if, you know, if you said, oh, I
want to understand the whole universe, and the explanation for
the universe was like a five million page long document.
I had to describe all these complicated things. It's just
Bob su very mix. Yeah, and it's all sort of
emergent phenomena, right, it's the consequences of this small set
of rules. It's like the game Go right. I love
(24:36):
that game because there's a very small number of pieces,
just black and white. It's a very small number of
rules for how you play, but the number of games
you can play is incredible. It's much more complicated than
Chess and UH and all of the gameplay. All the
complexity arises from how you arrange the pieces on the board,
not from having like a million different kinds of pieces
(24:56):
and special rules and cards you can draw. I think
you should talk to all physicists, like the American Physical
Society or the World Physics Congress and just convinced them
to rename the electron the up cork and the down cork, Bob,
Sue and Mary Like. I feel like that would happen
to tremendous impact on like people's understanding. The point you
(25:17):
make is interesting because it seems like it hasn't seeped
into everyday knowledge. Like the people we talked to on
the street, everybody knew about atoms. All know about atoms,
but almost nobody could even name the kind of particles
of his inside the atom, or anything deeper than that.
That's what I'm saying, yes, you're saying it's a marketing failure.
It's a branding problem Bob and Mary, and I bet
in three years you would ask people on the street
(25:39):
what is the universe made off? And people be like, Bob,
su would Mary exactly? And then you would get a
one cent royalty every time that happened. But that's really
your that's your secret plan here. Everything is branding. So
that's where we are as a human species. Right. First
we didn't know what thing for made up. Then we
made up stuff like earth, fire and wind, and then
we figure out Adams electrons, protons, and that's what we're
(25:59):
down to. And you're saying there could be more. We
could still break things down, possibly even further. That's right.
And as far as we know, the up cork, the
down cork, and the electron are not made of anything
smaller as far as we know. But that's only because
we have a limited capacity to look. You know, our
little zoom in knob is maxed out and we haven't
seen anything yet, but we have lots of hints that
(26:22):
they probably they are made out of something smaller. And
those hints are just like the hints we had. We
were looking at the periodic table a hundred years ago,
or when people are just looking at stuff around them
a thousand years ago. Oh, you mean like there's a
pattern between Bob Shu and Mary. You're saying like there's
suspiciously something going on there. Yeah, there's a lot of
unexplained patterns and phenomena that we don't understand. And one
(26:44):
of our greatest strategies for figuring out what's inside up cork,
down cork and electron is expanding the table. Is saying like,
let's make a new periodic table this time of the
fundamental particles, because there are other kinds of particles out there.
It's not just the upcork the down cork in the electron.
When we smash particles together, sometimes we make other kinds
of quarks and other kinds of electrons. You mean, like
(27:06):
sometimes a Peter will pop out or a Fred will
pop out, Yeah, or a fat Albert or something like that, exactly,
because some of these particles are big and heavy. Oh,
I see, But do you only need box when married
to make stuff? But there are other particles out there. Yeah,
So one question is what is the stuff around us
made out of? That's definitely, you know, a corkdown cork electron.
(27:27):
Another question is what kinds of stuff can there be? Right,
because remember we're fourteen billion years into the universe, when
the universe is kind of cold and dispersed and everything
is spread out a lot earlier, you know, when things
were hot and dense, it could have been that other
kinds of stuff was dominant, that there was enough energy
to make heavier particles and they were flying around all
the time. And so we don't just want an answer
(27:50):
for today, you know, we want to answer for a
general answer when it tells us deep things about the
universe itself, not just what is it like now, you
mean back then when things were more hardcore. Exactly what
you're saying is that right now, everything's made out of
Bob should marry. But maybe at some point in the
universe things were made out of other kinds of particles. Yeah,
(28:11):
maybe the particles up corkdown cork and electron and Bob
should mary weren't as common, and more common were other
particles um that we can create now in particle colliders
and study to get a clue to like what the
possibilities are. And so that's the strategies like let's try
to make all the different kind of particles that are possible,
and that gives us a better handle on the patterns.
(28:31):
You know, you can see more of the pattern. You're
like putting together the weave, and you get more and
more stitches and you get an idea for how it's
fitting together, and that gives you more clues to figure
out like what could be underlying all of that, meaning
like maybe we'll find out that Bob, su and Mary
are made out of even small things like Tito ari
and and then yeah, if if you have to ask me,
(28:57):
I'm almost positive these particles know of are made of
smaller ones. That this is not the final answer. That's
your bed, that's your that's what you think absolutely. I mean,
it's just at the limit of current resolution. It's like,
you know J. J. Thompson saying everything is made out
of what I know, everything is made out of the electron.
It's it's ridiculous. It's so much hubris to say we
found the answer and we're probably done. There's so many
(29:18):
unexplained patterns, and you know, we can get into that
in a whole other podcast episode about all these hints
and the new particles that might be out there, but
it just doesn't make sense to me. If this is
the final story, Well, I guess we'll find out what
physicists can do it, you know, if we'll find out
what what kind of stuff they're made out of. Oh, physicists,
we can do it. You're made out of the right stuff,
(29:39):
that's right. Yeah, yeah, And so that's why we're trying
to tear these particles apart to see even deeper. And
you know, what would it mean if the universe is
made out of one kind of thing, Well, that would
tell you something really fundamental, that would say, like, look,
this is the basic element of reality, and everything else
that's around you that's an emergent phenomenon. That's just like
a way they're organized, or a rain stuff. You know,
(30:01):
it's like hurricanes and blenders. They're not basic elements of
the universe. They're just happened to be arrangements of basic elements.
And we want to know what's at the core, you know,
what defines the nature of reality itself. And so that's
the sort of the long term journey we're on, and
you know, we're pretty far along it, but we have
no idea what fraction of the way we have yet
to go. You know, are there five more layers of particles?
(30:23):
Are there a thousand more layers of particles? Is there
just one more layer of particle? We don't know. It
would be amazing to one day look at your neighbor,
you know, or people across the world and just say
to them like, hey, you and I were made of
the same thing. We're made out of this thing. That's right,
all right, Well, thank you very much, guys. I hope
you enjoyed this podcast. Yeah, thanks everyone for listening, and
(30:44):
thanks to all the up corks, down corks and electrons
inside you. And if you're called bobs who are merry,
We're sorry and we don't owe you any money, and
or you're welcome. Do you have a question you wish
(31:05):
we would cover, send it to us. We'd love to
hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge One Word, or email
us to feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Everything that we know about in the universe, all the stars, galaxies,
gas and dust out there. You me, hamsters, hamsters, flamingos.
Tell me that it's just three things. Yeah, that's crazy.
You have all this complexity, not because the world itself
is complex, but the world is made out of a
small number of simple things, and it's the arrangement of
(00:27):
that stuff that gives a complexity. It's just three things
arranged in a bazillion different ways. Hi, I'm Jorge and
I'm Daniel, and this is Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.
(00:47):
Our podcast about the universe and everything in it, in
which we try to take the whole universe, break it
into tiny pieces and insert them one at a time
into your brain, bit by bit. Today on the program,
we're gonna ask question what is the universe made out of? Right?
Sort of like, can you take the universe and break
(01:07):
that into tiny bits? And how far can you go?
And why do we even think that's possible? And why
is it like that? And what are those tiny little bits?
And why do they have such silly names. It's something
I like to think about, is how long have people
been asking this question? Clearly the Greeks thought about it,
they wrote about it. You know, they had crazy ideas
that were totally off base, but they thought about it.
(01:29):
To them, it was an important question. Yeah. And even
before that, I was reading you know, it's ancient cultures,
even before the Greeks had this question and they had
ideas about what the things were made out of. Well,
I wonder, you know, like the folks, for example, who
did those cave paintings in France thirty five thousand years ago.
They were capable of symbolic thinking, probably logic, definitely music.
Did they have these deep questions about this world they
(01:50):
found themselves in that made little sense to them? Yeah? Well,
I think it's crazy just to think about why even
ask the question, like what makes us think that the
universe is made out of stuff? You know? Like what
does it mean to even ask that question? Yeah? I
think it comes from a desire to organize. Like you
see stuff around you, right, I mean you see logs
(02:11):
and water and air and people, and you notice all
this stuff, and then you might wonder like, well this
stuff is kind of like that other stuff, and is
there some way I can organize it? Right? So I
think the first principle there is like looking for patterns,
looking for forum for reasons why you can understand why
this stuff is here. Yeah, and can I like take
(02:31):
some of this and mix it with some of that
and get something new or something different. Yeah, it's a
sort of a natural idea. But as usually, we went
out into the street and we asked you. We asked you,
what do you think the universe is made out of?
The deepest level of matters so far? Here's what you
had to say. What is everything made out of at
the smallest scale? Uh? On the smallest scale, I think
(02:55):
electrons are the smallest that I know of. I haven't
taking physics is like junior year from well, I guess
from my classes it would be like the atoms. Atoms?
Is it atoms? Um? It's made out of quarks and stuff? Right,
the quarks freak. I feel like I should know this.
I'm a chem major. Al Right, I think we got
(03:17):
our answer. I think we're done with this podcast. It's
Adams basically atoms and maybe something else. Yeah, everybody seems
to know about the atom. I think basically everyone's physics
education stops at high school. Basically most people unless you
go on to study physics it's like high school physics.
What do you remember is atoms? But that's not even physics, man,
that's chemistry. Atoms are chemistry, how they interact and stuff.
(03:38):
But it's fascinating that one of the deepest questions in physics, right,
what is the universe made out of? Is mostly answered
so far by chemistry. Like most of the progress we've
made is chemistry. What chemistry used to be kind of physics, right,
I mean it used to all just be natural sciences, right,
Like these distinctions are kind of recent. Yeah, I mean
it all used to be philosophy, right, all of it
(03:59):
grew out of posophy, That's what it all just used
to be thinking, you know, like love of thinking? What's
your job, Dad, I'm a thinker. I'm a lover of
think all day. So, but I think it's it's interesting
that you know, a huge part of the answer this
question what is the world made out of? Is answered
by what people said Adams. You know that you can
(04:21):
even take the stuff around you and break it into
a fairly small number of bits then explain all of it.
And this idea can I like you said, it goes
back to the Greeks, like the Greeks positive, They wondered, like,
is everything made out of tiny little bits? Yeah? I
think that gives the Greeks way too much credibly. I mean,
I think there was a Greek democratus who had a
lot of ideas, one of which was this one, which
(04:43):
happened to be correct. Um. I think he had a
lot of other crazy ideas which were not correct. And
it's not like this idea was you know, took the
Greeks by storm and had a lot of consensus. You know,
sort of like if a thousand monkeys are typing on typewriters,
one of them will predict a correct theory of physics
and you can look back later and say, Wow, this
monkey was a genius. But that doesn't make all monkeys geniuses.
(05:05):
I'm saying. They kind of spread a lot of intellectual
ideas of the board there, you know, and yeah, one
of them stuck and turned out to be sort of true.
But doesn't mean they necessarily need to get credit for it.
But they sort of try to categorize these little bits, right,
Like they had ideas that there were five or four
kinds of stuff that the rest of the stuff was
made of, right, like earth, air, water, fire, and I
(05:26):
think that those are really two separate ideas that now
we've kind of combined. I mean, one idea was there's
a few basic kinds of stuff and everything is made
out of those, Right, That's a really fascinating idea. The
other idea that everything is made out of small pieces,
you know, the atoms bits of stuff. That's a totally
different idea, Like stuff can be made out of a
(05:48):
small number of other stuff like earth, fire, wind, But
those things don't necessarily need to be in little bits. Yeah,
they could be, you know, earth and fire and water
could be um elemental on their own. They could be
it can't be divided into little pieces that could be
like perfectly smooth no matter how much you zoom in,
they could always just be themselves. Right. There's this other
(06:08):
idea that if you zoom in on stuff, it turns
out it's made out of little building blocks. That's a
different idea. And now we have kind of both of them, right,
we have both of them. Were like, oh, it turns
out stuff it's made out of little building blocks, and
there's a few kinds of them. Right, But I guess
the question is what is that building? Blog are thinking
is a species is evolved on that, right, Like maybe
we used to think we were made out of little
(06:29):
bits of dust and then we got smaller into atoms,
and we've been getting smaller and smaller, right, Yeah, absolutely,
And um, I think it's incredible, as I was saying earlier,
and I can't stop talking about this because I think
it's underrated as a sort of human intellectual achievement that
you can boil down everything you've ever eaten or sat
on or tripped over or any human is ever interacted
(06:51):
with in terms of just the atoms, right, the hundred
basic building blocks. I mean, you go from like almost
infinite complexity down to just a hundred things. It's blows
my mind that that's even possible, Like why does the
universe work that way? Right? Right? And if you need
a reminder of your high school physics, so atoms are
the ones in the periodic table of elements like carbon, iron, oxygen,
(07:13):
those are atoms. Yeah, And not that long ago people
thought that that's the that's the universe. Everything you see
is made out of these hundred little things, right Yeah.
And as impressive as that was, right, um, I think
some people were wondering, why are there these patterns, right, like, yeah,
you have these hundred basic things and maybe that's it,
but maybe there are things inside those, like maybe those
(07:35):
things are made out of even smaller things. And the
clues we had there is that if you look at
the periodic table of the elements, it's not just a
hundred different things that are totally separate from each other.
There are patterns like things near each other in the
periodic table act in similar ways, which suggests that they're
made out of some smaller bits and that small changes
(07:55):
and how you assemble them make different atoms. Right, It's
like they had all these different elements and then they
started to characterize their property. They started to measure how
they reacted to different things and how much they weighed,
and it turned out, to their surprise that you can
put them like on a table, you can order them
in a certain way. Yeah, and I love when a
huge advance in science comes from something that's basic. It's
(08:17):
like how you write it on a piece of paper.
The first person to make the periodic tables, like, let's
organize our knowledge in this way. Oh my gosh, that
makes this obvious that there's a gap here and that
there's a pattern here. Right, Sometimes notation or just the
way you write things can lead to huge advances, right,
And I think that's just an extension of what we
were talking about earlier. Right. You know, why do people
(08:38):
even ever wonder how the universe was made? It's because
they looked at stuff and they wanted to understand it,
and they look for patterns and they organized it, and
then they wondered, you know, these things are similar. It's
the same logic that you just described applied to the
periodic table. You know, these things are gases and they're active,
and these things are really inactive, and these guys are
metallic and all that stuff. Why are there those patterns?
(08:58):
Why are they sing similarly each other and different from others?
Because patterns tell you that there are rules, right, Like
there's some kind of underlying order, we certainly hope, so
otherwise physics would be impossible. Um, and yeah, patterns are
the clues, right, said, like why is this like this?
It could have been different, So why is it in
this way? Why are these things all similar and they're
(09:19):
all different from those things are the opposite of those things? Right?
And then you use those patterns as as clues, as
as hints to say, you know, what could be inside here,
what's making these things act in this way? Like that's
the goal of signs, right, yeah, exactly, And it could
just be there is no answer. It is just the
way it is, right, That's that's possible. You know, at
(09:40):
some point we could run up against the wall. We said, like,
the universe is this way and there is no explanation,
and some people like that. I think that's a cop out,
like we could have stopped the periodic. They must be like, Okay,
that's it. The universe is made out of these hundred
things and that's all we know. Yeah, and nobody asks
any more questions. Yeah, exactly. That doesn't seem to be
(10:00):
very scientific. You know, I don't know if you know
about the anthropic principle, but that's the kind of argument
behind the anthropic principle. You know that the universe is
the way it is and some things are just randomly set,
and um, there's no point in asking any more questions,
so go away, please slam. I see, But I feel
like what's the point of science. It's to look for explanations,
So never give up, right, just keep looking and and
(10:22):
eventually you're going to find the reason and we did that,
and turns out everything in the periodic table is made
out of smaller bits and and not just that, but
the complexity goes down right. You you can explain all
the crazy stuff in your environment, the huge numbers of
things in terms of just a hundred building blocks. You
can explain those hundred building blocks in terms of a
smaller number of smaller particles, not a larger number. But
(10:45):
that that wasn't necessarily the case, right, Like what helped
scientists at the time think that there was such a
thing as atoms, like that there was a minimal bit
of the stuff we call carbon. Yeah, that's a great question,
and again the answer is chemistry. People were noticing, oh,
if you mix these things together, you need equal proportions
of this or this happens in ratios of three to two.
(11:06):
And a guy named Dalton who came up with this idea,
he's like, hmm. Turns out that there are these exact ratios,
and so it made sense then that things were made
out of these tiny pieces that they were then reorganizing
and fitting together. That was the first indirect piece of evidence,
because like, if carbon was let's say, infinitely divisible, you
wouldn't have these kind of exact ratios in chemical reactions, right, exactly, right, Yeah,
(11:30):
you could mix it with something else and you just
get a blend. Like you need the idea of a
unit of this stuff in order to explain these ratios
in chemical reactions. Yeah, exactly. I hadn't thought about that. Yes,
So that was the first clue, and then people discovered
the first particles um. It was actually with J. J. Thompson.
He discovered the electron um. He was looking at cathode
(11:51):
ray tubes, which at the time was just this weird thing.
Cathode ray tubes are what used to be in television's.
They shoot these electrons from one side or the other
and they would make these glowing like raise inside them.
At the time, it's just like this weird effect people
who show inside shows and you know, magic shows and stuff.
Nobody understood it. But he started looking into it and
he discovered, oh, these razors actually made out of tiny
(12:12):
little particles um. He called them. He didn't call them
particles though, he called them corpus scules. And I'm really
glad that that name did not stick because it's an
ugly and hard to say. We should just go back
to that. I mean, why, why why wouldn't you want
to be of course, course corpuscule physics, because you can't
even say it. And that's exactly why. You see. It's
a mouthful, isn't that. One of my favorite things about
(12:34):
that discovery though, is that he discovered this one particle
and then immediately he thought maybe everything in the world
is built out of my corpus scules. He like generalized
to infinity. He's like, oh, I found one particle. This
is the particle that answers all the questions. Right, of course,
not everything is built out of electrons. I guess why
wouldn't he make that deep right? Like why would some
things be made out of little things? And why would
(12:56):
some other things not be made out of little things? Yeah?
Well he I guess he couldn't imagine that there might
be other kinds of particles out there also, and he
was hoping that his discovery was at the root of
all knowledge, right, which I guess is part of the
scientific fantasy for everybody. So we can forgive it. And
you know, he is the first guy to discover a particle,
so you know, credit to him. So he he thought, well,
(13:16):
what if everything's made out of little things. And then
we had the periodic table, and then we've ordered it
and we got the table, and then people started noticing patterns,
and that's when people thought, maybe these things are made
out of something else. Yeah, that started to be a
pretty compelling idea because you have all these elements of
periodic table. They're organized in that way. They nicely slot
into the periodic table that way and um. And then
(13:38):
people started busting the atoms open to see what's inside.
And he was Rutherford who first did that. He's like,
let's shoot a beam of radiation at some some matter
and see what comes out. And so he was the
first one to really break the atom open and to
see that there was that the atomant wasn't just like
a continuous blob that had a hard center, this nucleus
(13:58):
um of something inside of it. Oh, this is the
what is it? The gold X ray experiment gold foil
gold foil shot radiation at a really thin sheet of
gold foil, and he figured it would just go right
through and he was going to measure, like, you know,
how much you got bent whatever. But occasionally when he
shot at the gold foil um, some radiation would bounce
right back, directly back, and he said famously that it's
(14:20):
like shooting a bullet at a piece of tissue paper
and having it reflect back in your face. Right, made
no sense if you thought of the tissue was just
like smooth and continuous. It made a lot more sense
if you thought of it is like a chain link fence, right,
a bunch of really condensed little points with big gaps
in between, and occasionally you hit one of those points.
And that's when we realized that matter is not continuous
(14:43):
like a jelly, but actually like little thoughts that are
kind of arranged together, right, these little thoughts, and the
atom itself has this tiny little hardcore the nucleus. Adams
are hardcore. I totally set you up without even realizing.
I'm glad we don't live in a soft core world,
you know. Now we're now we're vying into um, not
(15:08):
say for chemistry. Not on that note. Let's take a
quick break. So that's kind of amazing that they came
up with this idea of the atomic nucleus and protons
(15:31):
and electrons without actually like seeing this stuff, right, just
from seeing the effects of it inexperiments. Yeah, but that
was the last time you could really see things. I
mean when you're talking about like visualizing, these things are
so tiny, so small that they're really impossible to see
directly in any sort of way. And the only kind
of seeing you can do is indirect. Right. You have
(15:52):
like an idea of what it looks like, You do
an experiment, You think about the result of the experiment
based if if your idea is correct, and you see
the results. So even today, when we're smashing protons together
at the large hit On collider, we have these huge
detectors that take pictures of the collisions, but we can't
see the particles directly. You know, they're they're too small
and things happen too fast, and so direct imaging is
(16:15):
is all but impossible at this scale. But these days
we can see atoms, right, Yeah, but depends what you
mean by seeing, right, you need to see an atom.
You need to bounce electrons off of it in order
to see its shape. And so that's is that really seeing?
I mean, you're again you're using you're bouncing particles off
of it, you're making measurements, and you're translating that into
an image later. I don't know if you know if
(16:36):
that really counts as seeing, but that's a whole different
philosophical discussion. They're smaller than the wavelength of light, so
you it's hard to say you're seeing it. Yeah, I
think it's it's reasonable to say you're seeing it, but
it requires you expand slightly your whole definition of what
it means to see something. Okay, so well let's break
it down for the listener then, So everything around you,
the universe that you can see in touch and smells,
(16:57):
made out of atoms, and atoms are made out of
an atomic nuclei with electrons flying around it. And then
the nucleus is made out of more things, right, right, exactly,
So the atoms are made out of protons and neutrons
and electrons. Protons and neutrons in the nucleus. The electrons,
we think so far, are just made of themselves. There's
nothing inside the electron. The electrons are just tiny dots
(17:19):
um as far as we know that we could be wrong.
We're probably all wrong, But as far as we know,
electrons are not made out of anything else inside the nucleus. However,
the proton and the neutron, these we already know are
made out of tinier stuff. And so the proton and
the neutron are both made out of corks. And there's
two kinds of corks that you need to make the
proton and the neutron is the up cork and the
(17:41):
down cork. Take two upcorks and down and you get
a proton, or two down corks and up and you
get a neutron. How do we know electrons are not
made out of smaller things maybe like electron quarks or something, Yeah,
little electronitos or something. Well, we don't know. All we
can say is that we've tried to look inside them
and we haven't seen anything yet. I mean, like, how
(18:02):
would you even how would you even look inside of
an electron? The same way we looked inside the atom
and saw that it had a nucleus, right, we saw
that it was made out of smaller pieces. You shoot
particles at it and you try to resolve some structure.
You say, oh, if I shoot at this part of
the electron, it bounces straight back. If I shoot at
this part, it goes right through. And so then you
can tell of the electron has some structure to it. Yeah,
(18:23):
But in order to see that structure, you have to
poke it with a fine enough needle, which means a
high enough energy particle. And so far, so far. Tune
in next week for the final story of the electron. Right, Um,
so far we haven't been able to break the electron
into pieces or to use a needle that's fine enough
to understand that there's more stuff here in the electron
(18:46):
than there. So far we it only looks like a
point to us. You imagine you have you're looking at
the Earth from space right using Google Earth. You know,
can you tell that the town is made out of
tiny houses? Will you keep zooming in and zooming in
and as long as you have more resolution, you can see, oh,
the town is made of houses, and houses made of rooms,
and rooms are made of furniture. But that's only if
you actually have that resolution. So for the electron, we've
(19:08):
zoomed in as far as we can and we can't
see anything smaller. But we haven't zoomed in all the way.
Build bigger colliders and zoom in further and maybe we'll
find something like you zoom in and it still acts
like like just one thing exactly. There's no weirdness about
the way it acts at different scales like there's no
texture there, that's right. There's no texture to the electron
so far, right exactly. But that's that's purely limited by
(19:32):
how powerful our microscopes are, how powerful our particle accelerators are,
which are modern day microscopes. But for the proteon and
the neutron, there is texture there, like there's actually a
little bits inside of it that you can see, yeah, exactly,
and we we can break them up, and we can
interact with those little bits, and we can measure them
and study them. So those are up corks and down corks,
(19:52):
and we know that if you rear, if you arrange
up corks and down corks in one way, you get
a proton. You arrange another way, you get a neutron.
And so that means that everything in the periodic table
can be made out of up corks, down corks, and electrons. Right,
So mixtures of those three things make every atom, which
makes anything that anybody's ever eaten. It's to me, it's
(20:13):
incredible that all this complexity of stuff around us can
be described in just three particles. So what do we
even still talk about protons? I mean, a proton is
just you're saying, it's just the word for arrangement A
of these two quarks and a neutron is just arrangement
number B of the quarks, you know. Yeah, Well, sometimes
arrangements can be interesting. For example, Jorge is a particular
(20:35):
arrangement of protons and neutrons in Pasadena. Right, I think
you'd like to be referred to as Jorge and not
individually talk to your protons, right, yeah, don't talk to
my protons. Talk to me like I'm a person. Eyes
up here, e's up here, Daniel. Um. Yeah, Well, it
turns out that the corks are not just like hanging
out near each other and we call it a proton.
(20:57):
They are tightly bound together. They are held really firm together.
They move like a single thing. Unless you have a
huge amount of energy to look inside, to zoom in
to see that texture, to break it up, you're just
going to see a proton as a proton, even if
it's made out of three corks. It's like three tiny
lego pieces jam together so hard that you need an
expert to pride them apart. Well, this is a perfect
(21:18):
point to take a break. But yeah, that's a really
cool point you're making just just now, which is that
everything that we know about in the universe. It's just
three things arranged in a bazillion different ways. That's all
(21:41):
we are. We're just electrons, up courts and down course. Yeah,
it's all about the arrangements. And you know, there's a
lot of information in the arrangements. You know, if I
rearranged all of your particles into it just a puddle
on the floor, you would not be the same person.
So who you are is your arrangements, you know, it's
not just the elements that make you. You know, I
(22:01):
like to joke with my friends that if you ask
the particle physicists to write a cookbook, it will only
have three ingredients in every single recipe, right up quirks,
down quirks, and electrons, and every recipe would just say mix. No,
that's exactly the point, And all the hard work is
in the arrangements, right Who you are is not just upquorks,
down quirks, and electrons. It's your particular arrangement of those
(22:23):
and assembling those and into the particular thing that makes
you you. Right. And so that's the answer, is that
the things that we see around us in the universe
are not defined by the particles that make them up,
but by the arrangements of those particles. And so if
the whole goal of particle physics or asking this question
is to get some deep inside into the universe, then
that's it. You know, that the universe. Um, that the
(22:45):
complexity in the universe comes from arrangements. That's fascinating to me. Well,
I feel like this point is is kind of maybe
hard to grasp, So I was just thinking that, um,
maybe the way to really grasp it is that imagine
if it wasn't just three particles. Let let's say everything
in the u of Earth was made out of just
one particle, like particle Bob, and everything you me television, Like,
(23:08):
imagine if it was just one particle and everything you
see around you was just different arrangements of Bob, you know.
And that might still be the case. Right, We could
discover that the electron, the upcork, and the downcourt and
all the other particles, which by the way, we haven't
even talked about yet, are made out of one kind
of tiniest little particle. That could be the answer. Yea, yeah,
but it's not that different from three, right, Like three
(23:30):
is still fascinating, Like it's not just Bob. It's like Bob,
Sue and Mary everything. You know, it's just Bos, Sue
and Mary doing different things, and then you get this incredible,
amazing complexity, right. Yeah, And as you say, it could
have been different. It could have been that everything is
made out of its own thing and either that it
was made out of particles or not. You know, you
could have a world where every kind of thing, every
(23:52):
kind of person is made out of a different kind
of particles. You know, you have like three particles and
air particles and cat particles, and that's why cats are
so weird exactly. That's a huge clue about the universe.
You know that the universe at its core is kind
of simple, and to me, that gives me a lot
of motivation. It tells me we can understand it. It
can be boiled down into a simple explanation. It would
(24:15):
be disappointing, if, you know, if you said, oh, I
want to understand the whole universe, and the explanation for
the universe was like a five million page long document.
I had to describe all these complicated things. It's just
Bob su very mix. Yeah, and it's all sort of
emergent phenomena, right, it's the consequences of this small set
of rules. It's like the game Go right. I love
(24:36):
that game because there's a very small number of pieces,
just black and white. It's a very small number of
rules for how you play, but the number of games
you can play is incredible. It's much more complicated than
Chess and UH and all of the gameplay. All the
complexity arises from how you arrange the pieces on the board,
not from having like a million different kinds of pieces
(24:56):
and special rules and cards you can draw. I think
you should talk to all physicists, like the American Physical
Society or the World Physics Congress and just convinced them
to rename the electron the up cork and the down cork, Bob,
Sue and Mary Like. I feel like that would happen
to tremendous impact on like people's understanding. The point you
(25:17):
make is interesting because it seems like it hasn't seeped
into everyday knowledge. Like the people we talked to on
the street, everybody knew about atoms. All know about atoms,
but almost nobody could even name the kind of particles
of his inside the atom, or anything deeper than that.
That's what I'm saying, yes, you're saying it's a marketing failure.
It's a branding problem Bob and Mary, and I bet
in three years you would ask people on the street
(25:39):
what is the universe made off? And people be like, Bob,
su would Mary exactly? And then you would get a
one cent royalty every time that happened. But that's really
your that's your secret plan here. Everything is branding. So
that's where we are as a human species. Right. First
we didn't know what thing for made up. Then we
made up stuff like earth, fire and wind, and then
we figure out Adams electrons, protons, and that's what we're
(25:59):
down to. And you're saying there could be more. We
could still break things down, possibly even further. That's right.
And as far as we know, the up cork, the
down cork, and the electron are not made of anything
smaller as far as we know. But that's only because
we have a limited capacity to look. You know, our
little zoom in knob is maxed out and we haven't
seen anything yet, but we have lots of hints that
(26:22):
they probably they are made out of something smaller. And
those hints are just like the hints we had. We
were looking at the periodic table a hundred years ago,
or when people are just looking at stuff around them
a thousand years ago. Oh, you mean like there's a
pattern between Bob Shu and Mary. You're saying like there's
suspiciously something going on there. Yeah, there's a lot of
unexplained patterns and phenomena that we don't understand. And one
(26:44):
of our greatest strategies for figuring out what's inside up cork,
down cork and electron is expanding the table. Is saying like,
let's make a new periodic table this time of the
fundamental particles, because there are other kinds of particles out there.
It's not just the upcork the down cork in the electron.
When we smash particles together, sometimes we make other kinds
of quarks and other kinds of electrons. You mean, like
(27:06):
sometimes a Peter will pop out or a Fred will
pop out, Yeah, or a fat Albert or something like that, exactly,
because some of these particles are big and heavy. Oh,
I see, But do you only need box when married
to make stuff? But there are other particles out there. Yeah,
So one question is what is the stuff around us
made out of? That's definitely, you know, a corkdown cork electron.
(27:27):
Another question is what kinds of stuff can there be? Right,
because remember we're fourteen billion years into the universe, when
the universe is kind of cold and dispersed and everything
is spread out a lot earlier, you know, when things
were hot and dense, it could have been that other
kinds of stuff was dominant, that there was enough energy
to make heavier particles and they were flying around all
the time. And so we don't just want an answer
(27:50):
for today, you know, we want to answer for a
general answer when it tells us deep things about the
universe itself, not just what is it like now, you
mean back then when things were more hardcore. Exactly what
you're saying is that right now, everything's made out of
Bob should marry. But maybe at some point in the
universe things were made out of other kinds of particles. Yeah,
(28:11):
maybe the particles up corkdown cork and electron and Bob
should mary weren't as common, and more common were other
particles um that we can create now in particle colliders
and study to get a clue to like what the
possibilities are. And so that's the strategies like let's try
to make all the different kind of particles that are possible,
and that gives us a better handle on the patterns.
(28:31):
You know, you can see more of the pattern. You're
like putting together the weave, and you get more and
more stitches and you get an idea for how it's
fitting together, and that gives you more clues to figure
out like what could be underlying all of that, meaning
like maybe we'll find out that Bob, su and Mary
are made out of even small things like Tito ari
and and then yeah, if if you have to ask me,
(28:57):
I'm almost positive these particles know of are made of
smaller ones. That this is not the final answer. That's
your bed, that's your that's what you think absolutely. I mean,
it's just at the limit of current resolution. It's like,
you know J. J. Thompson saying everything is made out
of what I know, everything is made out of the electron.
It's it's ridiculous. It's so much hubris to say we
found the answer and we're probably done. There's so many
(29:18):
unexplained patterns, and you know, we can get into that
in a whole other podcast episode about all these hints
and the new particles that might be out there, but
it just doesn't make sense to me. If this is
the final story, Well, I guess we'll find out what
physicists can do it, you know, if we'll find out
what what kind of stuff they're made out of. Oh, physicists,
we can do it. You're made out of the right stuff,
(29:39):
that's right. Yeah, yeah, And so that's why we're trying
to tear these particles apart to see even deeper. And
you know, what would it mean if the universe is
made out of one kind of thing, Well, that would
tell you something really fundamental, that would say, like, look,
this is the basic element of reality, and everything else
that's around you that's an emergent phenomenon. That's just like
a way they're organized, or a rain stuff. You know,
(30:01):
it's like hurricanes and blenders. They're not basic elements of
the universe. They're just happened to be arrangements of basic elements.
And we want to know what's at the core, you know,
what defines the nature of reality itself. And so that's
the sort of the long term journey we're on, and
you know, we're pretty far along it, but we have
no idea what fraction of the way we have yet
to go. You know, are there five more layers of particles?
(30:23):
Are there a thousand more layers of particles? Is there
just one more layer of particle? We don't know. It
would be amazing to one day look at your neighbor,
you know, or people across the world and just say
to them like, hey, you and I were made of
the same thing. We're made out of this thing. That's right,
all right, Well, thank you very much, guys. I hope
you enjoyed this podcast. Yeah, thanks everyone for listening, and
(30:44):
thanks to all the up corks, down corks and electrons
inside you. And if you're called bobs who are merry,
We're sorry and we don't owe you any money, and
or you're welcome. Do you have a question you wish
(31:05):
we would cover, send it to us. We'd love to
hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge One Word, or email
us to feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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