August 5, 2025 • 48 mins
Daniel and Kelly explain how top quarks talk to each other and potentially form new states of matter.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, they're extraordinaries Kelly here, So I absolutely cannot believe
this is happening. But my book A City on Mars
is Barnes and Nobles Nonfiction pick for August. I am
so excited. So if you swing by your local Barnes
and Noble, there's likely a display near the front of
the store with my book, and of course it's on
Barnes and Nobles's website as well. So to learn about
(00:22):
where we're likely to settle in space, whether we can
make babies in space, why astronauts love taco sauce, and
the legal status of space cannibalism, head over to Barnes
and Noble and check out A City on Mars? Can
we settle Space? Should we settle space? And have we
really thought this through?
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Thanks?
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Everyone.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
We smash particles together at the Large Adron Collider not
just because it's cool or because we want to know
what the universe is made out of. It's all those reasons,
but also we want to understand how those basic bits
of matter come together to make up our world. Why
do they interact this way not that way? Can they
fit together in some new way? We've never seen the
(01:13):
story of particle physics discoveries is a story of cycles,
swinging between confusion the many kinds of particles to insight
about how they come together. Today we'll be tackling a
topic that has received a lot of attention recently in
the news. Topponium. What is it and what does it
tell us about the nature of matter and energy? It
(01:33):
turns out to be the latest chapter in a rich
history of discovery, betrayal, and urination. Yes, that's right, I
said urination. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Hi. I'm Kelly Waidersmith.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
I study parasites and space, and I do not know
what toponium is.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I do know
what toponium is, and I'm also looking forward to declaring
the discovery of white sonium.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Oh that would be great, So I await that day.
I'm sure it will come.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
But my question for you today is what is your
favorite name for a physics thing? What do you think
is like the best name physicists have come up with
for something so far.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
I think one of my favorite names is the rate
of change of acceleration, which is called jerk which is,
you know, also a fun word, but it's kind of
you know, you can jerked around. It kind of makes sense.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Yeah, yeah, I like that.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
All right, good, good job physicists, you got one.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
But before you applaud us too much for giving jerk
a cool name.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
I all just named it, didn't.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
They They went a little crazy after jerk and rate
of change jerk is called snap, and the rate of
changes snap is called crackle. And the rate of change
of crackle You want to guess pop?
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yeah, I bet that was named by children of the eighties,
isn't that when raised Chrispy's a hit their zenith of popularity.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
That's exactly right. Physicists trying desperately for cultural relevance.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Sorry guys, but you know, we do our best to
be relevant because in the NB are trying to understand
the way the world works, what it's all made out of,
what you are made out of, what.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Your breakfast cereal is made out of, and more than
just what it's made out of, but what it can do,
because your life isn't dominated by fundamental particles, but by
those particles put together an interesting, weird, delicious, and hilarious ways.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Oh I like the delicious ways. I think that's my favorite.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
So you sent me an outline I said, we're talking
about toponium, and I was like, well, this is yet
another one of those instances where Kelly gets to learn
on air and ask stupid questions.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
I have no idea what this is.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Intelligent questions, intelligent questions. Intelligence, that's what you're here for.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
That's right. I'm continuing to earn my pod in physics.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Absolutely, yes, we are also offering a POD in physics
to our listeners, and so let's go ahead and hear
what they think.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
To Ponium is the particle with the most protons neutrons,
electrons crammed into it to make it the biggest, biggest
top of the table.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Element theoretical matter that has a top quack or something
like that. Probably some type of metal like strontium.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
That sounds like an element.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
I don't know, but it sounds like a chemical element.
I'm going to assume that to ponium is related to
physics and not biology, so there's a good chance that
it's a mathematical equation. It's the opposite of bottominium.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Obviously, a mineral developed for the Marvel cinematic universe.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
And then stolen by James Cameron for an upcoming film.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Matter perhaps purely fear ratical composed of top quarks only
Toponium is the top quark matter fraction of unobtainium after
quantum centrifugal separation of unobtainium, or.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
The theoretical element with no protons and no electrons gets
its own special row at the top of the periodic table.
Thus topponium, toponium or not toponium, that is the question.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Rare element, I would say, perhaps a hypothesized element that
hasn't been discovered yet.
Speaker 5 (05:29):
I've never heard of toponium, but it ends in iem,
so it makes me think of deuterium or tritium, some
sort of combination of things. But the only top anel
is a quark, so it's not some weird combination of
only top quarks, is it.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
I don't know, But if it doesn't sit on top
of middleium and botamium, I'm going to be very disappointed.
These are wonderful answers, I mean, as always, but yeah,
this one in particular had a lot of funny answers,
and I'm guess that's because a lot of people are
in my situation which is to say, no idea, Daniel,
absolutely no clue.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
And they're trying to reverse engineered from the name, which
is smart but assumes the physicists give names to things
in logical ways that can be reverse engineered, which isn't
always true.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
Big mistake, Big mistake. That's right.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
It's either confusing or wrong or misleading something like that.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
All right, well, let's not keep people in suspense anymore.
Toponium is a fascinating new thing recently explored by the
Large Hadron Collider, and it has to do with how
quarks can come together, which is a whole fascinating area
of physics that explains how I'm built and you're build
and how the whole world around us comes together. Plus
is filled with crazy stories of physicists being outrageous amazing.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
So when you say recently, do you mean like this
decade or yeah, what do you mean by recently?
Speaker 2 (06:53):
The toponium paper came out last year? Oh wow, Yeah,
this is a fresh hot off the press, and a
bunch of people emailed me and said, hey, can when
you explain this? I don't understand it, because probably the
paper was too hard to digest, and even the Science
communication articles about toponym. I felt like they talk about it,
but they don't really convey the crucial ideas that I
want people to understand about why this is exciting area
(07:15):
of research.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
And we are here for the one hour version of
all of those things. So let's start from the beginning.
What is a quark? And you gave me the ability
to explain this to my daughter the other day we
were talking about quarks, and I felt pretty cool that
I could go ahead and kind of explain it.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
But let's hear it from you.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
So quarks are something we discovered about fifty years ago.
They're what make up the protons and the neutrons. So
you know, you and I are made out of molecules.
Those molecules are made out of atoms. Every atom has
a nucleus in it with protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons.
But those protons and neutrons are not fundamental. They are
made up of other smaller particles called quarks. And in particular,
(07:54):
there's two quarks, the upcork and the down cork that
make up the proton and the neutron. I know this
for sure until about the late sixties and seventies, and
how we figured out that protons and neutrons are made
of quarks. Is a really fun story and a tricky
one because we can't see quarks by themselves. We have
to infer their existence. There's a lot of really cool
and mathematical puzzles that had to be solved to even
(08:16):
suggest that quarks might be there. So to set the stage,
we have to go back to like the late nineteen forties.
What was the state of particle physics in the late
nineteen forties. Well, we knew about electrons, We knew about
protons and neutrons. We also knew that there were photons
out there, right Like, we'd seen photons. Einstein and Planck
and those guys revolutionized quantum mechanics with a photoelectric effect
(08:38):
and the idea of photons light as a packet and
in cosmic rays. We'd seen a few other weird particles
like muons and pions, but things seemed kind of tidy,
Like we had a few particles, they all came together
to mostly explain everything we knew. People felt like, hey,
we're maybe on the verge of like nailing this, you know,
narrowing things down. We'd gone from like infinite complexity of
(09:00):
chemistry down to like a one hundred basic building blocks
and the periodic table. Now we were down to like
three objects protons and neutrons and electrons that made everything
lava and kittens and ice cream and podcasters and everything.
People felt like, oh yeah, we're on the track. And
then came the nineteen fifties where everything got weird.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
When you start to feel confident, the universe kicks you
in the face.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
And this came about because we had a revolution in
particle physics technologies. Beforehand, we mostly relied on the universe
to accelerate our particles. So many of the discoveries were
making of weird particles were cosmic rays, super high energy
particles that hit the upper atmosphere and then showered. So
people would like send balloons up into the upper atmosphere
or leave like big blocks of photographic material on the
(09:47):
tops of mountains and then slice it super thin and
expose it.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Fun fact, the first chicken sandwich to go to space
was sent up on a balloon by KFC.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Anyway, move on exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
You can accomplish a lot of things with balloons.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
Yea.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
These balloons are amazing also because they start out like
pretty big on the ground, and then when they get
to the upper atmosphere because the pressure is solo, they
become enormous, like mind boggling, like football stadium size balloons
when they're in the upper atmosphere. It's incredible. Anyway, we've
been doing particle physics that way. It's just like, hey,
let's let the universe accelerate stuff and watch it as
(10:23):
it smashes into the atmosphere. And that was useful, and
that's how we saw muons and chaons and other kinds
of particles. But then folks figure it out better ways
to accelerate particles here on Earth. So cyclotrons and signotrons,
all these cool technologies to bend particles and a loop,
give them a kick and get them going to pretty
high energies. Let us smash particles together and open up
(10:44):
a whole golden era of discovery for particle physics.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
And these things are amazing.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
I got to go in the synchrotron facility in the
UK on Harwell's campus, cool.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
And it was so cool.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
They speed up X rays with magnets and they were
showing me how all this stuff works, and it was
I'll never forget it.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
Anyway, cool facilities.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
They can't speed up X rays with magnets. That doesn't
work because X rays are neutral and so they don't
feel magnets. But they probably generate X rays from high
end G particles accelerated and bent by magnets.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
That is right, Thank you. I appreciate the correction.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yeah, it's very cool technology. EO. Lawrence won Nobel Prizes
for this kind of stuff. It's why we have Lawrence
National Lab two, Lawrence National Labs. Actually, he's a really
smart dude. Anyway. By smashing particles into other particles, we
started discovering a bunch of really strange particles, particles we
literally called strange, like chaons and other kinds of pions
(11:39):
and all sorts of stuff. It was like every time
you turned on the accelerator you discovered a new particle,
which is crazy. That just doesn't happen these days.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
That is crazy.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
What you said, particles we literally called strange. There is
a particle called the strange particle.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
There is a particle that called the strange part This
is a strange quirk. But initially there were particles that
we classified as strange. We described them as range. These
are chan particles, and these particles were strange because they
sort of lasted a long time and then decayed, which
people hadn't seen before. It turns out that's because they
were decaying via the weak force, which is pretty weak,
and so it takes a while for it to work.
(12:13):
But we didn't understand that at the time. But it
was an exciting moment because like every time we turned
on the accelerator, you made a new particle, you could
name it. It must have been a really fun time
to be a particle physicist. Yes, and they call this
time in particle physics the particle zoo.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
I really love zoos, and I feel like I might
be disappointed if I saw a particle zoo instead of
a zoo zoo, but.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
It sounds fun.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
I can imagine physicists being like children enjoying the particle zoo.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
I'm glad you take it that way, because I think
it's actually intended as shade against biology. Yes, because this
is the era in particle physics where we were seeing
a bunch of stuff we didn't understand and we were
just naming it, and so I think they were like,
we're basically doing botany. You know, we don't understand anything.
We just give stuff names.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
You guys suck.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
But it's an exciting time to be an experimentalist because
you're discovering stuff that isn't predicted. It's not like here's
what the Higgs boson will look like, here's how you
find it, go do it. Check the box, or here's
the top quark. It's like, well, we're not understanding anything
you're doing. Stop discovering new particles, please, because we're confused.
But you know, for an explorer, that's an exciting time.
That's like, well we're just you know, collecting new stuff
(13:23):
and nobody understands. And it was a big puzzle. So
people have found all these particles and they were wondering
like are they all fundamental? Are we discovering a bunch
of new stuff that isn't made out of other stuff?
Is there a pattern somehow? So it was a big
theoretical puzzle, like what explains all of these new particles?
And people started thinking about it and trying to organize
it and like, hey, are there patterns here? Can we
(13:44):
look at the masses how many particles are there? And
a few clever people came up with some ideas to
explain all of these particles, and it was called the
eightfold way.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Oh all right, so I'm just about done stuffing the
anger that I'm feeling down that earlier comment. But you're
making me wonder the word particles. Is it part of
coles because it's part of other things? Was that why
you guys named it particles?
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Hmmm? That's interesting. The etymology the word particle itself. I
think it comes from the concept of particle just being
a tiny bit of stuff, like the smallest particule, you know,
particularly small stuff.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Okay, got it, all right, so sorry, Moving on the
eightfold way.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
The eightfold way.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Yeah, this sounds like something you would learn in a
martial arts class.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
The eightfold way. So why was it called the eightfold way?
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Yeah, it's like the Tao of physics or something. Yes,
because people were looking for patterns, and they were starting
with the assumption that all these particles might be their
rearrangement of smaller bits, a smaller number of basic pieces.
So imagine you have like three different kinds of legos,
and then you ask like, well, what can I build
out of these legos? Okay, they click together this way
(14:57):
or that way or this other way. But if there's
a small number of them, there's a limited way they
can come together. And so people imagine, well, what if
we have like four different kinds of legos, what can
we explain? And they noticed that if you arrange the
newly discovered particles in a certain way, that can be
explained by having four different elementary pieces that all click together.
(15:17):
For example, these pieces all have different electric charge, and
so it predicts like a distribution of the electric charges
of all the particles you can make with these basic pieces.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
And so does that mean they went looking then for
the four basic parts that would make up the rest
of the stuff.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Not initially. First thing they did is they said, well,
what's missing, Like, are there ways that you can put
these four basic pieces together to make a particle we
haven't seen yet? And Gellman famously stood up at a
conference and said, you know, I predict the existence of
this new particle. He called it the omega minus, which
would be a pure combination of the particle we'd later
(15:54):
call strange quarks, So three strange quarks put together, and
he even predicted with the mass of it would be.
And then they went out look for it and they
found it, and that was very compelling. That's like, okay,
make a prediction. You know, this isn't just mathematical. But
at the time, a lot of physicists were like, you know,
we haven't seen these particles. We're just seeing the combinations
of them. And while it's compelling to say, look, I
(16:14):
see their patterns in the particles that are consistent with
them being made out of a small number of more
basic elements, we haven't seen them directly, and so people
just thought of them as like, you know, a mathematical
calculational tool, the way people are down on string theory
these days, right, they're like, yeah, well string theory can
solve quantum gravity, but we never seen a string, so
how do we really know. It's just mathematics. So people
(16:36):
sort of dismissed it as like just a mathematical tool.
They called them partons. They weren't like real particles.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
And in that case, were they called partons because they
were part of something? Yes, but that's okay, but that's
not true for particles.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Yeah, that's right. Partons are like part of something. But
it's a special word because they're like, it's not real,
you know, it's just like math. It's not something that
you could actually see or interact with. It's not necessarily
part of the physical universe. That's how people felt about
it in the late nineteen sixties. They were like, this
is pretty compelling, but we don't know.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
We also had competing names for them. Murray Gelman, who
won the Nobel Prize for this stuff, called them quarks.
But there was another guy named Zwig who came up
with the same idea at about the same time, actually
a little earlier, but he wasn't as influential, and he
called them aces.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Oh which name do I like better?
Speaker 2 (17:24):
I think aces is cool.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Actually, quarks is fun. Aces is cool.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Quarks comes from a James Joyce novel. Actually three quarks
for muster mark is a nonsensical phrase in that novel,
and that's what inspired Murray Gellman.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Oh cute, Okay, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Was Gilman generally a very like literate dude or into literature.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Yeah, he was. He was sort of like a renaissance
man widely read.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
All right, so now we've got quarks instead of aces,
and so you know, you mentioned string theory and so
one I remember when we were talking to the string theorists,
a couple months ago, they were saying that they're not
sure that we'll ever be.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
Able to test some of these ideas.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Yeah, but luckily, I believe we eventually got to the
point where we could test for some of these ideas
for these particles. So what was the jump that allowed
us to do that?
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Yeah, So so far we've only seen the combinations of
these still hypothetical quirks macroscopically in our detectors, and so
in order to probe them, people followed in the footsteps
of Rutherford. Rutherford around the turn of the century, he
tried to understand the structure of the atom before we
knew like, hey, there's a nucleus inside of it. He
tried to understand, like where is all the stuff in
(18:35):
the atom? And what he did was he shot stuff
at it, right, So he shot particles at a gold foil,
and he saw that sometimes it bounces back and sometimes
it goes through. And that led him to conclude that
matter is not evenly distributed in the gold foil. It's
concentrated in these tiny little spots, these nuclei. Right, So
we did something similar to understand the structure of the proton, right,
(18:56):
what's inside the proton.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
And when we get back from the break, we'll find
out what we did. All right, So we just talked
(19:22):
about the experiments that Rutherford did to show that atoms
have of structure, like there's a nucleus. So now let's
talk about how we figured out the structure of the proton.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Yeah, exactly. We basically copied Rutherford's strategy, and we've been
doing that for decades, which is shoot stuff at it
and see what happens, and by the angles at which
stuff comes out, you can tell the structure of something.
So that works for gold. You can shoot particles of
gold and see the nucleus. How do you probe the proton? Well,
one thing you can do is smash protons together. That's
(19:52):
really messy because protons are big bags of goo. So
to make it a little bit cleaner, what people did
is they shot electrons at protons. Because electrons don't feel
the strong nuclear force, they only feel electromagnetism in the
weak force, and we think they're fundamental so they don't
break up into other stuff. They're cleaner. So it's really
like poking your finger out of proton the best way
(20:12):
that we can. And so these are experiments done at
Stanford in the late nineteen sixties. They're called deep inelastic
scattering if you want to learn more about them. Deep
because they're very high energy and they're probing the structure
of the proton. Inelastic because what happens is not that
the electron and the proton bounce off each other, but
that the electron shatters the proton and interacts with the
(20:33):
stuff inside of it. And physics we distinguish between elastic
collisions where things just bounce off, and inelastic where we've
changed the structure or broken something or things stick together.
Those are inelastic.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
I feel like it should have been explosive and not explosive, But.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
That's because you're thinking about diarrhea, right, that's a good
way to categorize diarrhea.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Not I am a biotics I think we have eight
different ways of characterizing feces or something like that.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
The Bristol scale. I've read it.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
Yes, Oh yeah, you married a poop person.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Wow, I'm going to take that in the positive way.
It was intended.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
Good. I adore Katrina. All right.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
We had a biologist over for dinner the other night,
and she just moved down here from Stanford and she
had to bring all of her poop samples, so she
had to drive them down from Stanford to southern California.
One hundred and fifty pounds of poop in dry ice.
That's a lot about it. And I had to keep
the windows down because the dry ice of sublimates into
CO two, which will kill you if you keep the
car closed, into a literally crappy, flaming disaster.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
I once took a box of infected fish brains across
the Atlantic and had to declare it. And anyway, that
was an adventure. But I'll just go on so many adventures. Okay,
so inelastic it breaks it apart.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
And so this is late nineteen sixties, and we probe
the structure of the proton with electrons, and we saw
three hard centers the way Rutherford saw like one heart
center for every item. We saw three heart centers. Like
we can tell by the angle at which the electron
comes back out whether it's really bounced off something hard
or mostly flown through, And we can tell by the
rate at which that happens that there are three hard centers.
(22:12):
So google deep and elastic scouting if you want to
learn more about that. But that was proof to us
that protons do have structure inside that there really are
physical things inside the proton. It's not fundamental.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
And at this point where all of the physicists like,
all right, awesome, I'm totally convinced.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
No, Unfortunately, people were still reluctant. They were like, yeah,
I mean, I guess so, but like, are they real
physicists or conservative folks in the sense that they it's
hard for them to like accept a new idea. You
need a lot of data. And so at this point
we actually only had three ideas in mind for quarks,
the upcork and the down cork that make up the proton,
and then the strange cork, which make up these new
weird particles like the omegas and the chaons. So we
(22:50):
had three particles, and theorists were like, three is weird
because the upcork and the downcork make a very nice
pair together. But then having the strange cork by itself,
that's strange, and it makes all sorts of bizarre calculations
and the physics doesn't actually work. There's nothing there to
like balance the strange quirk. You predict all sorts of
weird behavior. So they said, well, you know, for things
(23:11):
to make more sense. There should be a fourth one,
there should be a partner. This is another great example
of like physicists following their mathematical intuition, They're like, the
universe should make sense, it should be orderly. This whole
puzzle would look more sensible, It would make more sense
to me, sort of mathematically and esthetically if it were complete.
So physicist said, we think that there's a fourth quark
(23:33):
out there, and they called it the charm quark. So
this is a purely theoretical prediction to solve some theoretical problems. Right,
we have three quarks up down strange, and they predicted
the existence of this charm quirk just to solve these
theoretical problems.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Is there an interesting story behind why they decided to
name it charm?
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Still upset about that particle zoo thing.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
The reason they named it charm is that they liked
it and it brought some new symmetry to the subnuclear world.
You know, there was this imbalance and it sort of
was there like balance, the strange quirk, and so you know,
some people call it the charm cork. Some people call
it the charmed cork. But yeah, sort of like a
lucky charm to make the universe make sense.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Like it would be charming. If the universe made sense.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
It would be charming. Wasn't I find the universe pretty charming.
It's both strange and charming at the same time. All right,
we agree, So then the races on to look for
this new particle. Does the charm cork exist? And the
theorists predicted that if it does exist, you can't see
it individual, you can never see quirks by themselves, but
it would click together with itself in this way, so
(24:37):
that a charm cork and an anti charm cork would
come together to make a new particle, a particle we
could call charmonium.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Oh it sounds like right, charmmander. I feel like now
we're in the world of Pokemon. But all right, charmonium.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Yeah. So if you take a quark and you bind
it with its antiparticle, you call that onium. So charmonium
would be a charm cork and an anti charm quark.
And so this is one of the most dramatic and
colorful stories in the history of particle physics. There were
folks at MIT trying to discover this thing. At the
same time. People at Stanford trying to discover this looking
(25:12):
for charmonium, and they had very very different devices. So
Bert Richter at Stanford had a whole accelerator and he
could collide electrons and positrons together. When that happens, it annihilates,
it can turn into some new particle which can then decay.
And this is a very effective way to discover new
particles if you know already how much mass that new
(25:32):
particle has, because then you can tune your beams, your
electron and positron beams to have just the right energy.
So you're making a bunch of these new particles and
then you can see them decay. So Bert Richter could
discover this thing in like a day if he knew
what the mass was. So they scanned the mass from
low values to high values and they didn't see anything,
so they were like, hmm, that's weird. At the same time,
(25:54):
across the country, Sam Ting was doing a very very
different experiment. He was shooting protons the target hoping that
charm quarks would come out and would make charmonium and
then would decay in a way that he could see it.
It was a much lower rate experiment, but it was
more broadly sensitive, like he didn't have to know in advance,
what is the mass of this thing. If it was there,
it would be made. But the data was sort of
(26:16):
peter out very gradually, and so he was desperate to
win this race. He knew he had a very effective technique,
but it was going to take a long time. And
while Bert Richter was very fast, but he needed to
know where to look. And so Sam King really wanted
to win this race and win the Nobel Prize, so
he needed as much beam time as possible. And so
there's a story about how he made sure he got
(26:39):
enough beam time. And it's not a story that I
know to be true, but it's a story that exists
in particle physics popular culture, and I think we should
find somebody to fact check this. But the version of
the story I heard from a particle physicist when I
was an undergrad was that the person Samking was sharing
beam time with kept having electronics difficulties, Like they would
come in they were supposed to be have and the
(27:00):
beam stuff wouldn't work. It's down, Oh Sam, you can
use the beam. How nice. And apparently they installed the
video camera and they discovered that someone was urineating on
the competing experiment at night what so that the electronics
wouldn't work, And then Ting and his experiment got more time.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Wait, okay, hold on, all right, so yeah, why why?
Speaker 3 (27:23):
All right, you've explained why this is crazy?
Speaker 2 (27:25):
But okay, so Nobel Prize that's why.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Okay, right, I guess if you needed any reason, Nobel
Prize is the reason.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
But like, why pee on it?
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Why not just like pour a little bit of your
water on it or something like, because p has a smell,
you're more likely to like get someone to realize something
wonky's going on, Like why not just pour a little
of your coffee or your wine on it?
Speaker 3 (27:45):
This is weird.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
It is weird. And that's the detail that makes me
suspect maybe this is an urban legend, you know, because
that's the detail that makes the story juicy. Yeah, it's
like a little bit gross and animalistic and whatever. And
I've spoken to other particle physicists about this, and some
of them suggest that this story might be made up
and it might reflect like anti Asian racism in particle physics,
(28:07):
because you know, particle physics for a long time was
Western Europeans and Americans and Chinese physicists have contributed great things,
made a lot of discoveries, but they haven't always been
as accepted, and so it could be that this is
just a product of that. And so, you know, I
tell you this story because it's out there, not because
I know that it's true. But that's not the end
of the drama. There's reported bad behavior on both sides
(28:30):
of the aisle.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
All right, So what did the Richter lab do that
was poor?
Speaker 2 (28:36):
So sam Ting starts to see evidence of this particle,
but it's still data is collecting very slowly. You know,
it's like you're waiting for the water to drain, and
you're seeing the land features that emerge, and the water's
just raining very very gradually. And the longer you wait,
the more precise your results are. But obviously you also
open the door to your competition. And so sam Ting
(28:57):
eventually decides, Okay, we have enough data, we're going to publish,
and he sets a press conference for like, you know,
a few days later, and then Bert Richter knows somehow
exactly where to look, tunes his collider to exactly the
mass of the particle. Sam Ting is about to announce,
runs data for one day, gets enough data to discover
(29:18):
this particle, writes the paper the same day, and has
a dueling press conference the same day as Sam Ting.
So you have Mit announcing we discovered this new particle.
We call it the J particle, and Stanford the same
day discovering the same particle, and they call it the
PSI particle.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
Oh my gosh, so many questions.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Okay, So is the idea here that the Richter lab
got some like whiff of the data coming out from
the Ting lab and that's how they figured out the mask.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
How would that data have slipped out? I guess there's
lots of ways.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Yeah, a phone call from somebody in the Ting lab,
you know, somebody disgruntled or like an ex partner of
somebody in that lab. I don't know, but you.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
Know slips same particleships.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Share Nobel prizes exactly.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
So that they did get to share the prize? Did
they both get it?
Speaker 2 (30:04):
They share the prize and the particle shares those two names.
So even to this day we haven't decided like who
gets primacy. So we call it the J slash SI particle.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Oh, it should have been like Rick Ting or Ting
ser yes, why did Ting name it j and Richter
name it PSI?
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Because the character in Chinese for Samting's name looks a
little bit like a j oh cool And if you
look in the detector when you create one of these
particles at Stanford, it looks a little bit like the
Greek letter SI.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
All right, fine, good names descriptive. So that means we
have created charmonium.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
We have created charmonium exactly. And this we're all announced
on November eleventh, nineteen seventy four. And this is what
particle physicists called the November Revolution because at that moment,
everybody who had any residual doubts about whether quarks are
real finally gave it up and they're like, Okay, this
is it. We're in a new era where quarks are real.
(30:59):
Because we addicted the existence of this quark and what
it would do, and then people went out and found
this thing. It was all very very compelling. The quarks
are real. They are the underlying fabric of all this stuff.
Because we had predicted and discovered charmonium, a kind of quarkonium.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Do you all realize you were like fifty to sixty
years behind the first November Revolution when the Wymar Republic
came into existence.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Yes, thank you very much. We have our own parallel stories. Okay,
all right, all right, not quite as dramatic, But like
Greg Lansburg, he's a physicist, I know at Brown, his
father was a particle physicist also, and Greg remembers being
a kid in the early seventies and his father getting
a phone call and his mom saying, like it's a
phone call about something called charmonium, and his father like
(31:44):
leaves naked and wet out of the shower to go
get this phone call because like this is a big day,
and that made an impression on Greg. Actually read this
story in Greg's thesis in the acknowledgment section, which is
super fun. I don't know if people realize, but like
every famous scientist out there wrote a peach and their
PhD has an acknowledgement section which is very personal and
(32:05):
written when they were young and like really fun to read.
So you should like go read like Paul Durak's acknowledgment section.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
You know, it's all out there, and it's always amazing
to hear that anyone ever reads any theses ever, because
in our field it's like, oh, yeah, just put it
in the thesis. It doesn't matter, No one reads those any.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah, that's true. So I tell you this whole story
to give you a flavor of like how we learned
what the universe it's made out of. But also in
the context of toponium, right, this is the beginning of corknia.
This is like, we can't see quarks directly because they're
never buy themselves, but we can see what quarks do together.
And corkonia is when you take a quark and you
combine it with the anti quark and you make a
(32:43):
special particle out of that. And so that's Harmonium is
really the beginning of this Corknia era.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
So does does charmonium evolve into toponium, because I, like,
I want to lean into this Pokemon saying, is that
what it evolves into.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
No, No, termonium is very unstable the case very quickly,
often into like an electron positron pair.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
So it would be a mistake if you were like charmonium,
I choose you.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Yeah, exactly, okay, exactly, But there are other quarks out there.
So at this point we have up down charm and
strange and people are like, oh, that's nice, that's cute.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
I was about to say, oh, you physicists are cute,
but we just finished a story about you know, possibly
y'all peing on each other's experiments, so that's less cute.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
But people were wondering, is there another set of these particles? Right?
Is there an additional pair? Because we had up down
charm strange and on the lepton side of the world,
you know, with the electron, we had the muon those
kinds had a third column, we had the tau particles.
So people were like, well, if there's three kinds of leptons,
are there also three kinds of quarks? So they predicted
(33:48):
the existence of this pair, and one of them was
called the bottom particle. And so then the hunt was
on in the seventies for what we call bottomonium. Right,
a bottom anti bottom pair come together to make a
particle we now call the upsilon. And so this was
discovered at Formulab in nineteen seventy seven. And people are like, oh, wow,
(34:09):
so bottoms are real.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
As a mom, I can tell you I always knew
bottoms were real. But in the.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Outline another poop joke. Wow impressed.
Speaker 3 (34:17):
Yeah, yep. Yeah, well, I mean that's a Heine joke.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
But anyway, but so the outline says botomium, and you
said button. You added some uh syllables.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
What is it? Let's how is the longest we could
make it? Bottomoninium.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
I think it should be bottomonium, right, because the particle
is a bottom particle. And then you add onium, so.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
Bottomonium, bottomium, bottomium, got it? Bottomonium. That's pretty cute.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
And then there's a whole spectrum of particles that include
the B quark. They're called B masons where you can
combine bees with ups, or bees with downs, or bees
with strange, all sorts of particles you can make if
you have the B particle. And now we've seen all
those particles and we study the wazoo out of them.
It's a whole experiment. It's certain called LHCb, which exists
just to study the bottom quark and all the weird
(35:09):
stuff it does with other particles.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
All right, so let's take a break, and when we
get back, let's focus on top quarks and answer our question.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
What the heck is topponium? All right, we're back, and
(35:40):
it's the moment you've all been waiting for.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Daniel is going to lead up to his explanation of
what is toponium, right.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
And so far we've been sending in the context. Right,
we've been explaining what quarkonium is, what charmonium was, what
bottomonium is. So now we can say what toponium would
be if it exists. Toponium, if it exists, should be
a bound state of top quarks and anti top quarks.
Because charm an anti charm makeup particle, bottom and anti
bottom makeup particle, up an anti up makeup particle. Why
(36:09):
can't you make a particle with top and anti top
and that.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
Would be toponium based on the naming scheme, Yeah, that.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Would be toponium. But the top cork is different from
all the other particles. It wasn't discovered until in the
mid nineties ninety five because it's super dup or massive, Like,
the quarks are all very very light, except for the
bottom cork, which has five times the mass of the proton,
which is like, that's very heavy for a cork. But
the top cork is much more massive than the bottom.
(36:37):
It has one hundred and seventy five proton masses, so
like an individual top cork has more mass than like
the nucleus of a gold atom. And this is why
it took us twenty years to find the top quark
after the bottom cork was discovered.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
Wait, if the top quark is so much bigger, why
was it so hard to find?
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Because it takes much more energy to make it. Like
the bottom cork, you can make it a pretty low
energy collider. You only need like protons accelerated a little bit.
But to make the top quark you got to really
zoom those protons together to have enough energy to make
two top quarks, because you can never just make one.
You got to make a top and an anti top.
So it's a huge amount of energy. There's a whole
(37:14):
set of colliders built under the assumption that the top
quark was going to be like maybe a little heavier
than the bottom, and then they didn't find anything. So
it wasn't until the firm lab Tevatron in the late
nineties that we made top quarks and saw them. And
that's actually what my PhD thesis was about, seeing the
top quark and measuring its properties back when we'd only
ever made a few of them.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Well, oh wait, were you the first one to describe
the top quark or like after it was seen.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
I was not the first one. No, but I remember
the day I was an undergrad when my particle physics
professor came and said, Hey, today's a big day. We're
announcing the discovery of the top quark. Because it took
twenty years to find this thing, it was really exciting
when people find I mean, we knew it had to
be there to complete the symmetry, but it took a
long time, so it was really exciting. But the top
quarks mass doesn't just mean it takes a lot of
(37:59):
energy to make, also means that it's really really really unstable.
Like the top quark decays really really quickly, Like when
you created it only lasts from like ten to the
minus twenty three seconds, Like it basically almost instantly decays
into a bottom cork and a w and other stuff.
So it only briefly exists.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
That is pretty incredible that something that exists for such
a short amount of time we're able to measure and
capture at all.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Yeah, and so we've never seen a top quirk directly.
We've only seen what it turns into an indirect evidence
for its existence. Right, It's like we've seen the hair
and the footprints of Bigfoot, we never actually captured one
and like hung out with it.
Speaker 3 (38:37):
Bad example, Daniel, Bigfoot doesn't exist. Do top quarks exist?
You hope? So?
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Well, we've see in its hair and footprints, so we
think that it exists. We're pretty confident. And so other
quarks last much longer, like a bottom cork will last
much longer, long enough to hang out, find an and
on a bottom cork and form a new particle bottomonium.
Top quarks don't do that. Top quarks decay almost instantly,
so there's really almost no time for it to form toponium. Right,
(39:05):
Even if you have a top quark and anti top
quark and they're near each other, it takes time for
things to like find each other settle down into a
bound state. It's like if you have a proton and
an electron there, it takes them a while to figure
out that they're a match and to settle into hydrogen.
Like in our universe, it took hundreds of thousands of
years for things to cool down and settle into neutral hydrogen.
(39:26):
So for a long time, the lore was toponium is
impossible because top quarks don't last long enough. They explode
into other particles before they formed toponium, so we were
stuck at bottomonium. That was the concept people had until
about last year.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
WHOA, okay, wait, so you told us that you can't
see top quarks. Happened too fast, You can't see what
are they called negative.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
Top quarks, anti top quarks.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
Anti thank you anti top quarks.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
Have we actually seen toponium or is this another hair
and footprints situation?
Speaker 2 (40:01):
So have we actually seen topony and we've seen a
sort of maybe version of it. We haven't seen top
quarks and anti top quarks like settle down into a
new stable particle that compares to like the jape psi
or the oopsilon, these other bound states of quarks. But
people had this idea last year that you know, maybe
top quarks don't have time to settle into some new state,
(40:21):
but maybe they can talk to each other. Maybe they
like exchange some gluons and influence each other. Maybe there's
some like cross talk between the top and the anti
top after they're made and before they decay, So maybe
they don't have time to fully settle into like a
cozy homie existence together, but they at least, you know,
exchange a few dms. That was the idea, and so
we looked for evidence of this at the Large Hadron Collider.
(40:44):
Where we did is we said, well, what would top
quarks look like if they didn't exchange any information? And
then what would they look like if they did exchange
some information? And it turns out if they talk to
each other even a little bit, then it makes their
spins point in different directions. All these particles have fundamental spins,
and it's not something we understand deeply. It's just like
an arrow we put on these particles to represent some
(41:05):
kind of angular momentum they carry. But if they talk
to each other, then their spins can change a little bit.
And spin is something we can measure of a top quark.
We don't see the top directly, but we see what
it decays into and so from that we can deduce
what the spin was from, like the angles of the
stuff that flies out of the top quark. So you
measure the spin of one top quark and you measure
the spin of the anti top quark, and then you
(41:27):
ask are those spins more likely to come from top
quarks that did talk to each other, or top quarks
that didn't talk to each other.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
I'm just gonna note I didn't like stuff my anger
down far enough because I'm still keeping track of every
time you're like, well, we don't really understand what this
means and we haven't actually seen this other thing, but
go ahead, keep pooping on biologists. But anyway, I'm glad
you guys maybe saw this, who knows, but you don't
understand it.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
So we looked at all the data. We studied a
huge number of top quarks, and it looks like they
do talk to each other. There's evidence there that the
top quarks do interact and it changes the direction of
their spin as they decay. And so people called this
toponium and sort of top onium with an asterisk, because
again it's not like a stable particle in the same
(42:11):
way that other quark onia are, but it is an interaction.
And so they gave it a name atas sub t
like a top quark kind of inspired particle. And it
made a big splash, and because you know, people were
excited about the work they did, they fluffed it up
in the popular literature, and so in a lot of
popular science articles. You see, it's like as if we
have discovered this new stable form of matter or this
(42:32):
new way for top quarks to come together to make
a particle. That didn't happen. What we did see is
top quarks for the first time interacting with each other
before they were decaying, which is still a big deal.
Speaker 5 (42:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
So if I'm trying to put this big deal in context,
so we have a better understanding of how our universe
works now. But if we needed such a fancy collider
to make it happen, how often is this happening. Let's
first talk about our planet and then maybe like elsewhere
in the Solar System, where would you expect to see
it happening?
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Yeah, great question. You know, top quarks are probably created
naturally all the time in cosmic rays. We talked about
how we build particle accelerators because we didn't want to
have to rely on cosmic rays. But it's not because
cosmic grays don't have enough energy. Cosmic rays are hugely,
massively energetic. They're much more energetic than our particle colliders.
They're just harder to control and the really high energy
(43:21):
particles are rarer, so colliders aren't good at controlled experiments,
But if you want to go really high energy, cosmic
rays are the way to go. So all the time,
top quarks are made in the atmosphere when protons smash
into other particles, way way way above the clouds. But
you know they last are ten of them minus twenty
three seconds, and probably they're creating impairs, and they talk
to each other a little bit before they decay. Does
(43:43):
this make any difference in the world If we lived
in a universe where top quarks didn't talk to each
other before they decayed, would ice cream taste worse? You know,
would biologists be less awesome? No, biologists would still be
awesome and ice cream would still be delicious. I think
it's a very very subtle effect.
Speaker 3 (43:59):
Thank you, Daniel, I've forgiven you. The anger has gone.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Away, all right? That was my goal, yes, but you
know it satisfies our curiosity. We want to understand all
the details of how these fields come together, how do
they interact. Are there any surprises because we expected to
see this, and if we hadn't, we would have been surprised.
We wouldn't say, Hm, something's going on that we don't
understand and dug into it more maybe that would have
been evidence that there's some other field preventing tops from
(44:24):
talking to each other, or some other particle out there
that's doing something. Anytime you see something unexpected, it's a
sign that there's something new to learn about the universe,
a thread to unravel. So this is just another example
of scientists like being clever and trying to find ways
to ask the universe a question. We can't ask directly.
We can't see quirks directly, so we had to be
(44:45):
indirect and understand how they click together to make particles.
We can't see top quarks directly, so we had to
see how they decay and in fur their existence. And
so now we're trying to figure out, like how top
quarks talk to each other by looking at the patterns
of those decays. It's all very subtle stuff, but to me,
it's a testament of like the cleverness of experimentalists. You know,
(45:05):
you have a question, you want an answer to it.
You got to figure out a way to force the
universe to share that data with you, and you know
that's the joy of science. It's like outsmarting the universe,
forcing it to answer your questions.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
There's such a beauty in cleverly designed experiments and are
you still working on toponium?
Speaker 2 (45:22):
So I don't personally work on toponium, but there's still
people definitely studying this and digging deeper into it, and
so you expect to hear more about it in the
coming years. But I think I want to underscore the
point that you just made that there really is beauty
and creativity in experiments. I think people often feel like
theoretical physics is where the thinking is and experimental physics
is like where the engineering is, like yeah, build a thing,
(45:44):
get it to work. But also the creativity in experimental physics, right,
you need to be creative figure out like, hey, how
do we see this thing, how do we force the
universe to reveal this how do we trick it, how
we corner it so that we learn the answer to
our question. A lot of the great discovery and experimental
science come from somebody being really clever about finding a
(46:04):
new way to answer a question people have long had.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
I love hearing stories about how science is done and
the culture of science and seeing how human nature layers
upon it.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
You know, we.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Heard a story about one person maybe stealing someone else's
data or a piece of their data to make their discovery.
Someone else may be peeing on someone's experiment. And here
it sounds like there's even within the field of physics,
a hierarchy for who's the smartest, who's the most clever,
whose field is doing the best stuff.
Speaker 3 (46:31):
And I think it would be very nice if we
could remove some of that.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
But in the meantime, it is. It's a human endeavor,
and we do do beautiful things.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
It is, absolutely yeah. And there's jealousy and this backsebbing,
and there's people spreading terrible stories about the other folks,
you know, these anti Stanford stories and anti Mit stories
and all of that stuff. And you know, you can't
remove that from science because science is by the people
of the people. It's for the people, right if we
made it sterile and it was all done by ais
a lot less.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Fun yep, it is a human endeavor with all of
our foibles sort of layered in.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
All right, Well, thanks for taking this journey with us
on the human discovery of quarks and the latest research
on how top quarks talk to each other just before
they perish. And thanks Kelly for pushing down your anger
by shade at biologists.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
My anger has left me because you said something nice
about biologists, and at the end of the day we're
both friends and it's okay.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
All right. Thanks everybody. This podcast serves to educate, and
it's a cheap form of.
Speaker 3 (47:32):
Therapy, the cheapest form there is. Thanks everyone.
Speaker 1 (47:45):
Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (47:49):
We would love to hear from you, We really would.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
We want to know what questions you have about this
Extraordinary Universe.
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Speaker 3 (48:16):
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Speaker 2 (48:19):
Don't be shy, write to us.
Hey, they're extraordinaries Kelly here, So I absolutely cannot believe
this is happening. But my book A City on Mars
is Barnes and Nobles Nonfiction pick for August. I am
so excited. So if you swing by your local Barnes
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the store with my book, and of course it's on
Barnes and Nobles's website as well. So to learn about
(00:22):
where we're likely to settle in space, whether we can
make babies in space, why astronauts love taco sauce, and
the legal status of space cannibalism, head over to Barnes
and Noble and check out A City on Mars? Can
we settle Space? Should we settle space? And have we
really thought this through?
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Thanks?
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Everyone.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
We smash particles together at the Large Adron Collider not
just because it's cool or because we want to know
what the universe is made out of. It's all those reasons,
but also we want to understand how those basic bits
of matter come together to make up our world. Why
do they interact this way not that way? Can they
fit together in some new way? We've never seen the
(01:13):
story of particle physics discoveries is a story of cycles,
swinging between confusion the many kinds of particles to insight
about how they come together. Today we'll be tackling a
topic that has received a lot of attention recently in
the news. Topponium. What is it and what does it
tell us about the nature of matter and energy? It
(01:33):
turns out to be the latest chapter in a rich
history of discovery, betrayal, and urination. Yes, that's right, I
said urination. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Hi. I'm Kelly Waidersmith.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
I study parasites and space, and I do not know
what toponium is.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I do know
what toponium is, and I'm also looking forward to declaring
the discovery of white sonium.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Oh that would be great, So I await that day.
I'm sure it will come.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
But my question for you today is what is your
favorite name for a physics thing? What do you think
is like the best name physicists have come up with
for something so far.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
I think one of my favorite names is the rate
of change of acceleration, which is called jerk which is,
you know, also a fun word, but it's kind of
you know, you can jerked around. It kind of makes sense.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Yeah, yeah, I like that.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
All right, good, good job physicists, you got one.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
But before you applaud us too much for giving jerk
a cool name.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
I all just named it, didn't.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
They They went a little crazy after jerk and rate
of change jerk is called snap, and the rate of
changes snap is called crackle. And the rate of change
of crackle You want to guess pop?
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yeah, I bet that was named by children of the eighties,
isn't that when raised Chrispy's a hit their zenith of popularity.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
That's exactly right. Physicists trying desperately for cultural relevance.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Sorry guys, but you know, we do our best to
be relevant because in the NB are trying to understand
the way the world works, what it's all made out of,
what you are made out of, what.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Your breakfast cereal is made out of, and more than
just what it's made out of, but what it can do,
because your life isn't dominated by fundamental particles, but by
those particles put together an interesting, weird, delicious, and hilarious ways.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Oh I like the delicious ways. I think that's my favorite.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
So you sent me an outline I said, we're talking
about toponium, and I was like, well, this is yet
another one of those instances where Kelly gets to learn
on air and ask stupid questions.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
I have no idea what this is.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Intelligent questions, intelligent questions. Intelligence, that's what you're here for.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
That's right. I'm continuing to earn my pod in physics.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Absolutely, yes, we are also offering a POD in physics
to our listeners, and so let's go ahead and hear
what they think.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
To Ponium is the particle with the most protons neutrons,
electrons crammed into it to make it the biggest, biggest
top of the table.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Element theoretical matter that has a top quack or something
like that. Probably some type of metal like strontium.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
That sounds like an element.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
I don't know, but it sounds like a chemical element.
I'm going to assume that to ponium is related to
physics and not biology, so there's a good chance that
it's a mathematical equation. It's the opposite of bottominium.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Obviously, a mineral developed for the Marvel cinematic universe.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
And then stolen by James Cameron for an upcoming film.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Matter perhaps purely fear ratical composed of top quarks only
Toponium is the top quark matter fraction of unobtainium after
quantum centrifugal separation of unobtainium, or.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
The theoretical element with no protons and no electrons gets
its own special row at the top of the periodic table.
Thus topponium, toponium or not toponium, that is the question.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Rare element, I would say, perhaps a hypothesized element that
hasn't been discovered yet.
Speaker 5 (05:29):
I've never heard of toponium, but it ends in iem,
so it makes me think of deuterium or tritium, some
sort of combination of things. But the only top anel
is a quark, so it's not some weird combination of
only top quarks, is it.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
I don't know, But if it doesn't sit on top
of middleium and botamium, I'm going to be very disappointed.
These are wonderful answers, I mean, as always, but yeah,
this one in particular had a lot of funny answers,
and I'm guess that's because a lot of people are
in my situation which is to say, no idea, Daniel,
absolutely no clue.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
And they're trying to reverse engineered from the name, which
is smart but assumes the physicists give names to things
in logical ways that can be reverse engineered, which isn't
always true.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
Big mistake, Big mistake. That's right.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
It's either confusing or wrong or misleading something like that.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
All right, well, let's not keep people in suspense anymore.
Toponium is a fascinating new thing recently explored by the
Large Hadron Collider, and it has to do with how
quarks can come together, which is a whole fascinating area
of physics that explains how I'm built and you're build
and how the whole world around us comes together. Plus
is filled with crazy stories of physicists being outrageous amazing.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
So when you say recently, do you mean like this
decade or yeah, what do you mean by recently?
Speaker 2 (06:53):
The toponium paper came out last year? Oh wow, Yeah,
this is a fresh hot off the press, and a
bunch of people emailed me and said, hey, can when
you explain this? I don't understand it, because probably the
paper was too hard to digest, and even the Science
communication articles about toponym. I felt like they talk about it,
but they don't really convey the crucial ideas that I
want people to understand about why this is exciting area
(07:15):
of research.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
And we are here for the one hour version of
all of those things. So let's start from the beginning.
What is a quark? And you gave me the ability
to explain this to my daughter the other day we
were talking about quarks, and I felt pretty cool that
I could go ahead and kind of explain it.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
But let's hear it from you.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
So quarks are something we discovered about fifty years ago.
They're what make up the protons and the neutrons. So
you know, you and I are made out of molecules.
Those molecules are made out of atoms. Every atom has
a nucleus in it with protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons.
But those protons and neutrons are not fundamental. They are
made up of other smaller particles called quarks. And in particular,
(07:54):
there's two quarks, the upcork and the down cork that
make up the proton and the neutron. I know this
for sure until about the late sixties and seventies, and
how we figured out that protons and neutrons are made
of quarks. Is a really fun story and a tricky
one because we can't see quarks by themselves. We have
to infer their existence. There's a lot of really cool
and mathematical puzzles that had to be solved to even
(08:16):
suggest that quarks might be there. So to set the stage,
we have to go back to like the late nineteen forties.
What was the state of particle physics in the late
nineteen forties. Well, we knew about electrons, We knew about
protons and neutrons. We also knew that there were photons
out there, right Like, we'd seen photons. Einstein and Planck
and those guys revolutionized quantum mechanics with a photoelectric effect
(08:38):
and the idea of photons light as a packet and
in cosmic rays. We'd seen a few other weird particles
like muons and pions, but things seemed kind of tidy,
Like we had a few particles, they all came together
to mostly explain everything we knew. People felt like, hey,
we're maybe on the verge of like nailing this, you know,
narrowing things down. We'd gone from like infinite complexity of
(09:00):
chemistry down to like a one hundred basic building blocks
and the periodic table. Now we were down to like
three objects protons and neutrons and electrons that made everything
lava and kittens and ice cream and podcasters and everything.
People felt like, oh yeah, we're on the track. And
then came the nineteen fifties where everything got weird.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
When you start to feel confident, the universe kicks you
in the face.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
And this came about because we had a revolution in
particle physics technologies. Beforehand, we mostly relied on the universe
to accelerate our particles. So many of the discoveries were
making of weird particles were cosmic rays, super high energy
particles that hit the upper atmosphere and then showered. So
people would like send balloons up into the upper atmosphere
or leave like big blocks of photographic material on the
(09:47):
tops of mountains and then slice it super thin and
expose it.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Fun fact, the first chicken sandwich to go to space
was sent up on a balloon by KFC.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Anyway, move on exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
You can accomplish a lot of things with balloons.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
Yea.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
These balloons are amazing also because they start out like
pretty big on the ground, and then when they get
to the upper atmosphere because the pressure is solo, they
become enormous, like mind boggling, like football stadium size balloons
when they're in the upper atmosphere. It's incredible. Anyway, we've
been doing particle physics that way. It's just like, hey,
let's let the universe accelerate stuff and watch it as
(10:23):
it smashes into the atmosphere. And that was useful, and
that's how we saw muons and chaons and other kinds
of particles. But then folks figure it out better ways
to accelerate particles here on Earth. So cyclotrons and signotrons,
all these cool technologies to bend particles and a loop,
give them a kick and get them going to pretty
high energies. Let us smash particles together and open up
(10:44):
a whole golden era of discovery for particle physics.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
And these things are amazing.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
I got to go in the synchrotron facility in the
UK on Harwell's campus, cool.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
And it was so cool.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
They speed up X rays with magnets and they were
showing me how all this stuff works, and it was
I'll never forget it.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
Anyway, cool facilities.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
They can't speed up X rays with magnets. That doesn't
work because X rays are neutral and so they don't
feel magnets. But they probably generate X rays from high
end G particles accelerated and bent by magnets.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
That is right, Thank you. I appreciate the correction.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yeah, it's very cool technology. EO. Lawrence won Nobel Prizes
for this kind of stuff. It's why we have Lawrence
National Lab two, Lawrence National Labs. Actually, he's a really
smart dude. Anyway. By smashing particles into other particles, we
started discovering a bunch of really strange particles, particles we
literally called strange, like chaons and other kinds of pions
(11:39):
and all sorts of stuff. It was like every time
you turned on the accelerator you discovered a new particle,
which is crazy. That just doesn't happen these days.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
That is crazy.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
What you said, particles we literally called strange. There is
a particle called the strange particle.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
There is a particle that called the strange part This
is a strange quirk. But initially there were particles that
we classified as strange. We described them as range. These
are chan particles, and these particles were strange because they
sort of lasted a long time and then decayed, which
people hadn't seen before. It turns out that's because they
were decaying via the weak force, which is pretty weak,
and so it takes a while for it to work.
(12:13):
But we didn't understand that at the time. But it
was an exciting moment because like every time we turned
on the accelerator, you made a new particle, you could
name it. It must have been a really fun time
to be a particle physicist. Yes, and they call this
time in particle physics the particle zoo.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
I really love zoos, and I feel like I might
be disappointed if I saw a particle zoo instead of
a zoo zoo, but.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
It sounds fun.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
I can imagine physicists being like children enjoying the particle zoo.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
I'm glad you take it that way, because I think
it's actually intended as shade against biology. Yes, because this
is the era in particle physics where we were seeing
a bunch of stuff we didn't understand and we were
just naming it, and so I think they were like,
we're basically doing botany. You know, we don't understand anything.
We just give stuff names.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
You guys suck.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
But it's an exciting time to be an experimentalist because
you're discovering stuff that isn't predicted. It's not like here's
what the Higgs boson will look like, here's how you
find it, go do it. Check the box, or here's
the top quark. It's like, well, we're not understanding anything
you're doing. Stop discovering new particles, please, because we're confused.
But you know, for an explorer, that's an exciting time.
That's like, well we're just you know, collecting new stuff
(13:23):
and nobody understands. And it was a big puzzle. So
people have found all these particles and they were wondering
like are they all fundamental? Are we discovering a bunch
of new stuff that isn't made out of other stuff?
Is there a pattern somehow? So it was a big
theoretical puzzle, like what explains all of these new particles?
And people started thinking about it and trying to organize
it and like, hey, are there patterns here? Can we
(13:44):
look at the masses how many particles are there? And
a few clever people came up with some ideas to
explain all of these particles, and it was called the
eightfold way.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Oh all right, so I'm just about done stuffing the
anger that I'm feeling down that earlier comment. But you're
making me wonder the word particles. Is it part of
coles because it's part of other things? Was that why
you guys named it particles?
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Hmmm? That's interesting. The etymology the word particle itself. I
think it comes from the concept of particle just being
a tiny bit of stuff, like the smallest particule, you know,
particularly small stuff.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Okay, got it, all right, so sorry, Moving on the
eightfold way.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
The eightfold way.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Yeah, this sounds like something you would learn in a
martial arts class.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
The eightfold way. So why was it called the eightfold way?
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Yeah, it's like the Tao of physics or something. Yes,
because people were looking for patterns, and they were starting
with the assumption that all these particles might be their
rearrangement of smaller bits, a smaller number of basic pieces.
So imagine you have like three different kinds of legos,
and then you ask like, well, what can I build
out of these legos? Okay, they click together this way
(14:57):
or that way or this other way. But if there's
a small number of them, there's a limited way they
can come together. And so people imagine, well, what if
we have like four different kinds of legos, what can
we explain? And they noticed that if you arrange the
newly discovered particles in a certain way, that can be
explained by having four different elementary pieces that all click together.
(15:17):
For example, these pieces all have different electric charge, and
so it predicts like a distribution of the electric charges
of all the particles you can make with these basic pieces.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
And so does that mean they went looking then for
the four basic parts that would make up the rest
of the stuff.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Not initially. First thing they did is they said, well,
what's missing, Like, are there ways that you can put
these four basic pieces together to make a particle we
haven't seen yet? And Gellman famously stood up at a
conference and said, you know, I predict the existence of
this new particle. He called it the omega minus, which
would be a pure combination of the particle we'd later
(15:54):
call strange quarks, So three strange quarks put together, and
he even predicted with the mass of it would be.
And then they went out look for it and they
found it, and that was very compelling. That's like, okay,
make a prediction. You know, this isn't just mathematical. But
at the time, a lot of physicists were like, you know,
we haven't seen these particles. We're just seeing the combinations
of them. And while it's compelling to say, look, I
(16:14):
see their patterns in the particles that are consistent with
them being made out of a small number of more
basic elements, we haven't seen them directly, and so people
just thought of them as like, you know, a mathematical
calculational tool, the way people are down on string theory
these days, right, they're like, yeah, well string theory can
solve quantum gravity, but we never seen a string, so
how do we really know. It's just mathematics. So people
(16:36):
sort of dismissed it as like just a mathematical tool.
They called them partons. They weren't like real particles.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
And in that case, were they called partons because they
were part of something? Yes, but that's okay, but that's
not true for particles.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Yeah, that's right. Partons are like part of something. But
it's a special word because they're like, it's not real,
you know, it's just like math. It's not something that
you could actually see or interact with. It's not necessarily
part of the physical universe. That's how people felt about
it in the late nineteen sixties. They were like, this
is pretty compelling, but we don't know.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
We also had competing names for them. Murray Gelman, who
won the Nobel Prize for this stuff, called them quarks.
But there was another guy named Zwig who came up
with the same idea at about the same time, actually
a little earlier, but he wasn't as influential, and he
called them aces.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Oh which name do I like better?
Speaker 2 (17:24):
I think aces is cool.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Actually, quarks is fun. Aces is cool.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Quarks comes from a James Joyce novel. Actually three quarks
for muster mark is a nonsensical phrase in that novel,
and that's what inspired Murray Gellman.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Oh cute, Okay, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Was Gilman generally a very like literate dude or into literature.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Yeah, he was. He was sort of like a renaissance
man widely read.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
All right, so now we've got quarks instead of aces,
and so you know, you mentioned string theory and so
one I remember when we were talking to the string theorists,
a couple months ago, they were saying that they're not
sure that we'll ever be.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
Able to test some of these ideas.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Yeah, but luckily, I believe we eventually got to the
point where we could test for some of these ideas
for these particles. So what was the jump that allowed
us to do that?
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Yeah, So so far we've only seen the combinations of
these still hypothetical quirks macroscopically in our detectors, and so
in order to probe them, people followed in the footsteps
of Rutherford. Rutherford around the turn of the century, he
tried to understand the structure of the atom before we
knew like, hey, there's a nucleus inside of it. He
tried to understand, like where is all the stuff in
(18:35):
the atom? And what he did was he shot stuff
at it, right, So he shot particles at a gold foil,
and he saw that sometimes it bounces back and sometimes
it goes through. And that led him to conclude that
matter is not evenly distributed in the gold foil. It's
concentrated in these tiny little spots, these nuclei. Right, So
we did something similar to understand the structure of the proton, right,
(18:56):
what's inside the proton.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
And when we get back from the break, we'll find
out what we did. All right, So we just talked
(19:22):
about the experiments that Rutherford did to show that atoms
have of structure, like there's a nucleus. So now let's
talk about how we figured out the structure of the proton.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Yeah, exactly. We basically copied Rutherford's strategy, and we've been
doing that for decades, which is shoot stuff at it
and see what happens, and by the angles at which
stuff comes out, you can tell the structure of something.
So that works for gold. You can shoot particles of
gold and see the nucleus. How do you probe the proton? Well,
one thing you can do is smash protons together. That's
(19:52):
really messy because protons are big bags of goo. So
to make it a little bit cleaner, what people did
is they shot electrons at protons. Because electrons don't feel
the strong nuclear force, they only feel electromagnetism in the
weak force, and we think they're fundamental so they don't
break up into other stuff. They're cleaner. So it's really
like poking your finger out of proton the best way
(20:12):
that we can. And so these are experiments done at
Stanford in the late nineteen sixties. They're called deep inelastic
scattering if you want to learn more about them. Deep
because they're very high energy and they're probing the structure
of the proton. Inelastic because what happens is not that
the electron and the proton bounce off each other, but
that the electron shatters the proton and interacts with the
(20:33):
stuff inside of it. And physics we distinguish between elastic
collisions where things just bounce off, and inelastic where we've
changed the structure or broken something or things stick together.
Those are inelastic.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
I feel like it should have been explosive and not explosive, But.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
That's because you're thinking about diarrhea, right, that's a good
way to categorize diarrhea.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Not I am a biotics I think we have eight
different ways of characterizing feces or something like that.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
The Bristol scale. I've read it.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
Yes, Oh yeah, you married a poop person.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Wow, I'm going to take that in the positive way.
It was intended.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
Good. I adore Katrina. All right.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
We had a biologist over for dinner the other night,
and she just moved down here from Stanford and she
had to bring all of her poop samples, so she
had to drive them down from Stanford to southern California.
One hundred and fifty pounds of poop in dry ice.
That's a lot about it. And I had to keep
the windows down because the dry ice of sublimates into
CO two, which will kill you if you keep the
car closed, into a literally crappy, flaming disaster.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
I once took a box of infected fish brains across
the Atlantic and had to declare it. And anyway, that
was an adventure. But I'll just go on so many adventures. Okay,
so inelastic it breaks it apart.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
And so this is late nineteen sixties, and we probe
the structure of the proton with electrons, and we saw
three hard centers the way Rutherford saw like one heart
center for every item. We saw three heart centers. Like
we can tell by the angle at which the electron
comes back out whether it's really bounced off something hard
or mostly flown through, And we can tell by the
rate at which that happens that there are three hard centers.
(22:12):
So google deep and elastic scouting if you want to
learn more about that. But that was proof to us
that protons do have structure inside that there really are
physical things inside the proton. It's not fundamental.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
And at this point where all of the physicists like,
all right, awesome, I'm totally convinced.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
No, Unfortunately, people were still reluctant. They were like, yeah,
I mean, I guess so, but like, are they real
physicists or conservative folks in the sense that they it's
hard for them to like accept a new idea. You
need a lot of data. And so at this point
we actually only had three ideas in mind for quarks,
the upcork and the down cork that make up the proton,
and then the strange cork, which make up these new
weird particles like the omegas and the chaons. So we
(22:50):
had three particles, and theorists were like, three is weird
because the upcork and the downcork make a very nice
pair together. But then having the strange cork by itself,
that's strange, and it makes all sorts of bizarre calculations
and the physics doesn't actually work. There's nothing there to
like balance the strange quirk. You predict all sorts of
weird behavior. So they said, well, you know, for things
(23:11):
to make more sense. There should be a fourth one,
there should be a partner. This is another great example
of like physicists following their mathematical intuition, They're like, the
universe should make sense, it should be orderly. This whole
puzzle would look more sensible, It would make more sense
to me, sort of mathematically and esthetically if it were complete.
So physicist said, we think that there's a fourth quark
(23:33):
out there, and they called it the charm quark. So
this is a purely theoretical prediction to solve some theoretical problems. Right,
we have three quarks up down strange, and they predicted
the existence of this charm quirk just to solve these
theoretical problems.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Is there an interesting story behind why they decided to
name it charm?
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Still upset about that particle zoo thing.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
The reason they named it charm is that they liked
it and it brought some new symmetry to the subnuclear world.
You know, there was this imbalance and it sort of
was there like balance, the strange quirk, and so you know,
some people call it the charm cork. Some people call
it the charmed cork. But yeah, sort of like a
lucky charm to make the universe make sense.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Like it would be charming. If the universe made sense.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
It would be charming. Wasn't I find the universe pretty charming.
It's both strange and charming at the same time. All right,
we agree, So then the races on to look for
this new particle. Does the charm cork exist? And the
theorists predicted that if it does exist, you can't see
it individual, you can never see quirks by themselves, but
it would click together with itself in this way, so
(24:37):
that a charm cork and an anti charm cork would
come together to make a new particle, a particle we
could call charmonium.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Oh it sounds like right, charmmander. I feel like now
we're in the world of Pokemon. But all right, charmonium.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Yeah. So if you take a quark and you bind
it with its antiparticle, you call that onium. So charmonium
would be a charm cork and an anti charm quark.
And so this is one of the most dramatic and
colorful stories in the history of particle physics. There were
folks at MIT trying to discover this thing. At the
same time. People at Stanford trying to discover this looking
(25:12):
for charmonium, and they had very very different devices. So
Bert Richter at Stanford had a whole accelerator and he
could collide electrons and positrons together. When that happens, it annihilates,
it can turn into some new particle which can then decay.
And this is a very effective way to discover new
particles if you know already how much mass that new
(25:32):
particle has, because then you can tune your beams, your
electron and positron beams to have just the right energy.
So you're making a bunch of these new particles and
then you can see them decay. So Bert Richter could
discover this thing in like a day if he knew
what the mass was. So they scanned the mass from
low values to high values and they didn't see anything,
so they were like, hmm, that's weird. At the same time,
(25:54):
across the country, Sam Ting was doing a very very
different experiment. He was shooting protons the target hoping that
charm quarks would come out and would make charmonium and
then would decay in a way that he could see it.
It was a much lower rate experiment, but it was
more broadly sensitive, like he didn't have to know in advance,
what is the mass of this thing. If it was there,
it would be made. But the data was sort of
(26:16):
peter out very gradually, and so he was desperate to
win this race. He knew he had a very effective technique,
but it was going to take a long time. And
while Bert Richter was very fast, but he needed to
know where to look. And so Sam King really wanted
to win this race and win the Nobel Prize, so
he needed as much beam time as possible. And so
there's a story about how he made sure he got
(26:39):
enough beam time. And it's not a story that I
know to be true, but it's a story that exists
in particle physics popular culture, and I think we should
find somebody to fact check this. But the version of
the story I heard from a particle physicist when I
was an undergrad was that the person Samking was sharing
beam time with kept having electronics difficulties, Like they would
come in they were supposed to be have and the
(27:00):
beam stuff wouldn't work. It's down, Oh Sam, you can
use the beam. How nice. And apparently they installed the
video camera and they discovered that someone was urineating on
the competing experiment at night what so that the electronics
wouldn't work, And then Ting and his experiment got more time.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Wait, okay, hold on, all right, so yeah, why why?
Speaker 3 (27:23):
All right, you've explained why this is crazy?
Speaker 2 (27:25):
But okay, so Nobel Prize that's why.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Okay, right, I guess if you needed any reason, Nobel
Prize is the reason.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
But like, why pee on it?
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Why not just like pour a little bit of your
water on it or something like, because p has a smell,
you're more likely to like get someone to realize something
wonky's going on, Like why not just pour a little
of your coffee or your wine on it?
Speaker 3 (27:45):
This is weird.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
It is weird. And that's the detail that makes me
suspect maybe this is an urban legend, you know, because
that's the detail that makes the story juicy. Yeah, it's
like a little bit gross and animalistic and whatever. And
I've spoken to other particle physicists about this, and some
of them suggest that this story might be made up
and it might reflect like anti Asian racism in particle physics,
(28:07):
because you know, particle physics for a long time was
Western Europeans and Americans and Chinese physicists have contributed great things,
made a lot of discoveries, but they haven't always been
as accepted, and so it could be that this is
just a product of that. And so, you know, I
tell you this story because it's out there, not because
I know that it's true. But that's not the end
of the drama. There's reported bad behavior on both sides
(28:30):
of the aisle.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
All right, So what did the Richter lab do that
was poor?
Speaker 2 (28:36):
So sam Ting starts to see evidence of this particle,
but it's still data is collecting very slowly. You know,
it's like you're waiting for the water to drain, and
you're seeing the land features that emerge, and the water's
just raining very very gradually. And the longer you wait,
the more precise your results are. But obviously you also
open the door to your competition. And so sam Ting
(28:57):
eventually decides, Okay, we have enough data, we're going to publish,
and he sets a press conference for like, you know,
a few days later, and then Bert Richter knows somehow
exactly where to look, tunes his collider to exactly the
mass of the particle. Sam Ting is about to announce,
runs data for one day, gets enough data to discover
(29:18):
this particle, writes the paper the same day, and has
a dueling press conference the same day as Sam Ting.
So you have Mit announcing we discovered this new particle.
We call it the J particle, and Stanford the same
day discovering the same particle, and they call it the
PSI particle.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
Oh my gosh, so many questions.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Okay, So is the idea here that the Richter lab
got some like whiff of the data coming out from
the Ting lab and that's how they figured out the mask.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
How would that data have slipped out? I guess there's
lots of ways.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Yeah, a phone call from somebody in the Ting lab,
you know, somebody disgruntled or like an ex partner of
somebody in that lab. I don't know, but you.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
Know slips same particleships.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Share Nobel prizes exactly.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
So that they did get to share the prize? Did
they both get it?
Speaker 2 (30:04):
They share the prize and the particle shares those two names.
So even to this day we haven't decided like who
gets primacy. So we call it the J slash SI particle.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Oh, it should have been like Rick Ting or Ting
ser yes, why did Ting name it j and Richter
name it PSI?
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Because the character in Chinese for Samting's name looks a
little bit like a j oh cool And if you
look in the detector when you create one of these
particles at Stanford, it looks a little bit like the
Greek letter SI.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
All right, fine, good names descriptive. So that means we
have created charmonium.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
We have created charmonium exactly. And this we're all announced
on November eleventh, nineteen seventy four. And this is what
particle physicists called the November Revolution because at that moment,
everybody who had any residual doubts about whether quarks are
real finally gave it up and they're like, Okay, this
is it. We're in a new era where quarks are real.
(30:59):
Because we addicted the existence of this quark and what
it would do, and then people went out and found
this thing. It was all very very compelling. The quarks
are real. They are the underlying fabric of all this stuff.
Because we had predicted and discovered charmonium, a kind of quarkonium.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Do you all realize you were like fifty to sixty
years behind the first November Revolution when the Wymar Republic
came into existence.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Yes, thank you very much. We have our own parallel stories. Okay,
all right, all right, not quite as dramatic, But like
Greg Lansburg, he's a physicist, I know at Brown, his
father was a particle physicist also, and Greg remembers being
a kid in the early seventies and his father getting
a phone call and his mom saying, like it's a
phone call about something called charmonium, and his father like
(31:44):
leaves naked and wet out of the shower to go
get this phone call because like this is a big day,
and that made an impression on Greg. Actually read this
story in Greg's thesis in the acknowledgment section, which is
super fun. I don't know if people realize, but like
every famous scientist out there wrote a peach and their
PhD has an acknowledgement section which is very personal and
(32:05):
written when they were young and like really fun to read.
So you should like go read like Paul Durak's acknowledgment section.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
You know, it's all out there, and it's always amazing
to hear that anyone ever reads any theses ever, because
in our field it's like, oh, yeah, just put it
in the thesis. It doesn't matter, No one reads those any.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah, that's true. So I tell you this whole story
to give you a flavor of like how we learned
what the universe it's made out of. But also in
the context of toponium, right, this is the beginning of corknia.
This is like, we can't see quarks directly because they're
never buy themselves, but we can see what quarks do together.
And corkonia is when you take a quark and you
combine it with the anti quark and you make a
(32:43):
special particle out of that. And so that's Harmonium is
really the beginning of this Corknia era.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
So does does charmonium evolve into toponium, because I, like,
I want to lean into this Pokemon saying, is that
what it evolves into.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
No, No, termonium is very unstable the case very quickly,
often into like an electron positron pair.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
So it would be a mistake if you were like charmonium,
I choose you.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Yeah, exactly, okay, exactly, But there are other quarks out there.
So at this point we have up down charm and
strange and people are like, oh, that's nice, that's cute.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
I was about to say, oh, you physicists are cute,
but we just finished a story about you know, possibly
y'all peing on each other's experiments, so that's less cute.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
But people were wondering, is there another set of these particles? Right?
Is there an additional pair? Because we had up down
charm strange and on the lepton side of the world,
you know, with the electron, we had the muon those
kinds had a third column, we had the tau particles.
So people were like, well, if there's three kinds of leptons,
are there also three kinds of quarks? So they predicted
(33:48):
the existence of this pair, and one of them was
called the bottom particle. And so then the hunt was
on in the seventies for what we call bottomonium. Right,
a bottom anti bottom pair come together to make a
particle we now call the upsilon. And so this was
discovered at Formulab in nineteen seventy seven. And people are like, oh, wow,
(34:09):
so bottoms are real.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
As a mom, I can tell you I always knew
bottoms were real. But in the.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Outline another poop joke. Wow impressed.
Speaker 3 (34:17):
Yeah, yep. Yeah, well, I mean that's a Heine joke.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
But anyway, but so the outline says botomium, and you
said button. You added some uh syllables.
Speaker 3 (34:30):
What is it? Let's how is the longest we could
make it? Bottomoninium.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
I think it should be bottomonium, right, because the particle
is a bottom particle. And then you add onium, so.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
Bottomonium, bottomium, bottomium, got it? Bottomonium. That's pretty cute.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
And then there's a whole spectrum of particles that include
the B quark. They're called B masons where you can
combine bees with ups, or bees with downs, or bees
with strange, all sorts of particles you can make if
you have the B particle. And now we've seen all
those particles and we study the wazoo out of them.
It's a whole experiment. It's certain called LHCb, which exists
just to study the bottom quark and all the weird
(35:09):
stuff it does with other particles.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
All right, so let's take a break, and when we
get back, let's focus on top quarks and answer our question.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
What the heck is topponium? All right, we're back, and
(35:40):
it's the moment you've all been waiting for.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Daniel is going to lead up to his explanation of
what is toponium, right.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
And so far we've been sending in the context. Right,
we've been explaining what quarkonium is, what charmonium was, what
bottomonium is. So now we can say what toponium would
be if it exists. Toponium, if it exists, should be
a bound state of top quarks and anti top quarks.
Because charm an anti charm makeup particle, bottom and anti
bottom makeup particle, up an anti up makeup particle. Why
(36:09):
can't you make a particle with top and anti top
and that.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
Would be toponium based on the naming scheme, Yeah, that.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Would be toponium. But the top cork is different from
all the other particles. It wasn't discovered until in the
mid nineties ninety five because it's super dup or massive, Like,
the quarks are all very very light, except for the
bottom cork, which has five times the mass of the proton,
which is like, that's very heavy for a cork. But
the top cork is much more massive than the bottom.
(36:37):
It has one hundred and seventy five proton masses, so
like an individual top cork has more mass than like
the nucleus of a gold atom. And this is why
it took us twenty years to find the top quark
after the bottom cork was discovered.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
Wait, if the top quark is so much bigger, why
was it so hard to find?
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Because it takes much more energy to make it. Like
the bottom cork, you can make it a pretty low
energy collider. You only need like protons accelerated a little bit.
But to make the top quark you got to really
zoom those protons together to have enough energy to make
two top quarks, because you can never just make one.
You got to make a top and an anti top.
So it's a huge amount of energy. There's a whole
(37:14):
set of colliders built under the assumption that the top
quark was going to be like maybe a little heavier
than the bottom, and then they didn't find anything. So
it wasn't until the firm lab Tevatron in the late
nineties that we made top quarks and saw them. And
that's actually what my PhD thesis was about, seeing the
top quark and measuring its properties back when we'd only
ever made a few of them.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Well, oh wait, were you the first one to describe
the top quark or like after it was seen.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
I was not the first one. No, but I remember
the day I was an undergrad when my particle physics
professor came and said, Hey, today's a big day. We're
announcing the discovery of the top quark. Because it took
twenty years to find this thing, it was really exciting
when people find I mean, we knew it had to
be there to complete the symmetry, but it took a
long time, so it was really exciting. But the top
quarks mass doesn't just mean it takes a lot of
(37:59):
energy to make, also means that it's really really really unstable.
Like the top quark decays really really quickly, Like when
you created it only lasts from like ten to the
minus twenty three seconds, Like it basically almost instantly decays
into a bottom cork and a w and other stuff.
So it only briefly exists.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
That is pretty incredible that something that exists for such
a short amount of time we're able to measure and
capture at all.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Yeah, and so we've never seen a top quirk directly.
We've only seen what it turns into an indirect evidence
for its existence. Right, It's like we've seen the hair
and the footprints of Bigfoot, we never actually captured one
and like hung out with it.
Speaker 3 (38:37):
Bad example, Daniel, Bigfoot doesn't exist. Do top quarks exist?
You hope? So?
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Well, we've see in its hair and footprints, so we
think that it exists. We're pretty confident. And so other
quarks last much longer, like a bottom cork will last
much longer, long enough to hang out, find an and
on a bottom cork and form a new particle bottomonium.
Top quarks don't do that. Top quarks decay almost instantly,
so there's really almost no time for it to form toponium. Right,
(39:05):
Even if you have a top quark and anti top
quark and they're near each other, it takes time for
things to like find each other settle down into a
bound state. It's like if you have a proton and
an electron there, it takes them a while to figure
out that they're a match and to settle into hydrogen.
Like in our universe, it took hundreds of thousands of
years for things to cool down and settle into neutral hydrogen.
(39:26):
So for a long time, the lore was toponium is
impossible because top quarks don't last long enough. They explode
into other particles before they formed toponium, so we were
stuck at bottomonium. That was the concept people had until
about last year.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
WHOA, okay, wait, so you told us that you can't
see top quarks. Happened too fast, You can't see what
are they called negative.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
Top quarks, anti top quarks.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
Anti thank you anti top quarks.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
Have we actually seen toponium or is this another hair
and footprints situation?
Speaker 2 (40:01):
So have we actually seen topony and we've seen a
sort of maybe version of it. We haven't seen top
quarks and anti top quarks like settle down into a
new stable particle that compares to like the jape psi
or the oopsilon, these other bound states of quarks. But
people had this idea last year that you know, maybe
top quarks don't have time to settle into some new state,
(40:21):
but maybe they can talk to each other. Maybe they
like exchange some gluons and influence each other. Maybe there's
some like cross talk between the top and the anti
top after they're made and before they decay, So maybe
they don't have time to fully settle into like a
cozy homie existence together, but they at least, you know,
exchange a few dms. That was the idea, and so
we looked for evidence of this at the Large Hadron Collider.
(40:44):
Where we did is we said, well, what would top
quarks look like if they didn't exchange any information? And
then what would they look like if they did exchange
some information? And it turns out if they talk to
each other even a little bit, then it makes their
spins point in different directions. All these particles have fundamental spins,
and it's not something we understand deeply. It's just like
an arrow we put on these particles to represent some
(41:05):
kind of angular momentum they carry. But if they talk
to each other, then their spins can change a little bit.
And spin is something we can measure of a top quark.
We don't see the top directly, but we see what
it decays into and so from that we can deduce
what the spin was from, like the angles of the
stuff that flies out of the top quark. So you
measure the spin of one top quark and you measure
the spin of the anti top quark, and then you
(41:27):
ask are those spins more likely to come from top
quarks that did talk to each other, or top quarks
that didn't talk to each other.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
I'm just gonna note I didn't like stuff my anger
down far enough because I'm still keeping track of every
time you're like, well, we don't really understand what this
means and we haven't actually seen this other thing, but
go ahead, keep pooping on biologists. But anyway, I'm glad
you guys maybe saw this, who knows, but you don't
understand it.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
So we looked at all the data. We studied a
huge number of top quarks, and it looks like they
do talk to each other. There's evidence there that the
top quarks do interact and it changes the direction of
their spin as they decay. And so people called this
toponium and sort of top onium with an asterisk, because
again it's not like a stable particle in the same
(42:11):
way that other quark onia are, but it is an interaction.
And so they gave it a name atas sub t
like a top quark kind of inspired particle. And it
made a big splash, and because you know, people were
excited about the work they did, they fluffed it up
in the popular literature, and so in a lot of
popular science articles. You see, it's like as if we
have discovered this new stable form of matter or this
(42:32):
new way for top quarks to come together to make
a particle. That didn't happen. What we did see is
top quarks for the first time interacting with each other
before they were decaying, which is still a big deal.
Speaker 5 (42:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
So if I'm trying to put this big deal in context,
so we have a better understanding of how our universe
works now. But if we needed such a fancy collider
to make it happen, how often is this happening. Let's
first talk about our planet and then maybe like elsewhere
in the Solar System, where would you expect to see
it happening?
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Yeah, great question. You know, top quarks are probably created
naturally all the time in cosmic rays. We talked about
how we build particle accelerators because we didn't want to
have to rely on cosmic rays. But it's not because
cosmic grays don't have enough energy. Cosmic rays are hugely,
massively energetic. They're much more energetic than our particle colliders.
They're just harder to control and the really high energy
(43:21):
particles are rarer, so colliders aren't good at controlled experiments,
But if you want to go really high energy, cosmic
rays are the way to go. So all the time,
top quarks are made in the atmosphere when protons smash
into other particles, way way way above the clouds. But
you know they last are ten of them minus twenty
three seconds, and probably they're creating impairs, and they talk
to each other a little bit before they decay. Does
(43:43):
this make any difference in the world If we lived
in a universe where top quarks didn't talk to each
other before they decayed, would ice cream taste worse? You know,
would biologists be less awesome? No, biologists would still be
awesome and ice cream would still be delicious. I think
it's a very very subtle effect.
Speaker 3 (43:59):
Thank you, Daniel, I've forgiven you. The anger has gone.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Away, all right? That was my goal, yes, but you
know it satisfies our curiosity. We want to understand all
the details of how these fields come together, how do
they interact. Are there any surprises because we expected to
see this, and if we hadn't, we would have been surprised.
We wouldn't say, Hm, something's going on that we don't
understand and dug into it more maybe that would have
been evidence that there's some other field preventing tops from
(44:24):
talking to each other, or some other particle out there
that's doing something. Anytime you see something unexpected, it's a
sign that there's something new to learn about the universe,
a thread to unravel. So this is just another example
of scientists like being clever and trying to find ways
to ask the universe a question. We can't ask directly.
We can't see quirks directly, so we had to be
(44:45):
indirect and understand how they click together to make particles.
We can't see top quarks directly, so we had to
see how they decay and in fur their existence. And
so now we're trying to figure out, like how top
quarks talk to each other by looking at the patterns
of those decays. It's all very subtle stuff, but to me,
it's a testament of like the cleverness of experimentalists. You know,
(45:05):
you have a question, you want an answer to it.
You got to figure out a way to force the
universe to share that data with you, and you know
that's the joy of science. It's like outsmarting the universe,
forcing it to answer your questions.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
There's such a beauty in cleverly designed experiments and are
you still working on toponium?
Speaker 2 (45:22):
So I don't personally work on toponium, but there's still
people definitely studying this and digging deeper into it, and
so you expect to hear more about it in the
coming years. But I think I want to underscore the
point that you just made that there really is beauty
and creativity in experiments. I think people often feel like
theoretical physics is where the thinking is and experimental physics
is like where the engineering is, like yeah, build a thing,
(45:44):
get it to work. But also the creativity in experimental physics, right,
you need to be creative figure out like, hey, how
do we see this thing, how do we force the
universe to reveal this how do we trick it, how
we corner it so that we learn the answer to
our question. A lot of the great discovery and experimental
science come from somebody being really clever about finding a
(46:04):
new way to answer a question people have long had.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
I love hearing stories about how science is done and
the culture of science and seeing how human nature layers
upon it.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
You know, we.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
Heard a story about one person maybe stealing someone else's
data or a piece of their data to make their discovery.
Someone else may be peeing on someone's experiment. And here
it sounds like there's even within the field of physics,
a hierarchy for who's the smartest, who's the most clever,
whose field is doing the best stuff.
Speaker 3 (46:31):
And I think it would be very nice if we
could remove some of that.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
But in the meantime, it is. It's a human endeavor,
and we do do beautiful things.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
It is, absolutely yeah. And there's jealousy and this backsebbing,
and there's people spreading terrible stories about the other folks,
you know, these anti Stanford stories and anti Mit stories
and all of that stuff. And you know, you can't
remove that from science because science is by the people
of the people. It's for the people, right if we
made it sterile and it was all done by ais
a lot less.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Fun yep, it is a human endeavor with all of
our foibles sort of layered in.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
All right, Well, thanks for taking this journey with us
on the human discovery of quarks and the latest research
on how top quarks talk to each other just before
they perish. And thanks Kelly for pushing down your anger
by shade at biologists.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
My anger has left me because you said something nice
about biologists, and at the end of the day we're
both friends and it's okay.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
All right. Thanks everybody. This podcast serves to educate, and
it's a cheap form of.
Speaker 3 (47:32):
Therapy, the cheapest form there is. Thanks everyone.
Speaker 1 (47:45):
Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (47:49):
We would love to hear from you, We really would.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
We want to know what questions you have about this
Extraordinary Universe.
Speaker 1 (47:56):
We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions
for future shows.
Speaker 3 (48:00):
If you contact us, we will get back to you.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us
at Questions at Danielandkelly.
Speaker 1 (48:09):
Dot org, or you can find us on social media.
We have accounts on x, Instagram, Blue Sky and on
all of those platforms.
Speaker 3 (48:16):
You can find us at d and K Universe.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
Don't be shy, write to us.
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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