September 14, 2018 • 42 mins
In honor of the new show, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, Will and Mango revisit some of their favorite questions: What is Quantum Teleportation? Are we all swimming in Dark Matter? And why are scientists so obsessed with smashing particles together? And we've got astrophysicist Daniel Whiteson, co-author of the wonderful new book We Have No Idea, ready to answer them all. Buckle up!
Daniel & Jorge Explain the Universe starts September 25th.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, their podcast listeners. So we are re airing an
episode today, but it's for a great reason, I promise
you know. Will and I are working on this brand
new podcast that debuts next week. It's called Daniel and
Jorge Explained the Universe. It is super fun, and we
commissioned it with the hopes that not only would get
people excited about space and all these big questions out there,
but also for all the budding scientists and and the
(00:24):
kids who listen with their parents, because you know, we
wanted to feed all those hungry minds. Anyway, Daniel and
Jorge is a twice weekly chat show between a particle
physicist and a super smart cartoonist, and we hope you'll
tune in. But since that show isn't launching for another week,
we thought you might want to hear our conversation with
the Daniel of Daniel and Jorge Daniel Whites and I
(00:45):
hope you dig it. Guess what Mango? What's that? Will? So,
have you seen the last Jedi yet? I have. I
was going to ask you a question about it, but
we have to keep this spoiler free here, so I'm
honestly kind of scared to say anything. Uh, do you
want to say it in pick ladin? No, No, I'm
just I'm too nervous. But I will say this, so
(01:06):
it seems fair to say that light speed plays a
pretty big role in the Star Wars films. That's what
you wanted to say. I mean, it's true. But well,
you know, as I sat there in the theater, my
mind started wandering again. You know, not because it isn't
a great movie. I really liked it, but I started
thinking again about the idea of traveling at or beyond
light speed. And it's one of the age old questions,
(01:28):
you know, will anything ever travel beyond light speed? Well
it's a good thing. We have a brilliant author here
today is to answer some of the biggest questions about
the universe, and only one of them is about Star Wars. Yeah,
but the book that he's written is called We Have
No Idea. But you're right, we should give him a
shot anyway, So let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listeners,
(02:07):
welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and as
always I'm joined by my good friend Man gues Ticketer
and the man on the other side of the soundproof glass.
Sporting an impressive coral saken hair part. That's our friend
and producer Tristan McNeil, who knew his hair could even
part like that. So that's not what we're here to
talk about, or is it maybe another episode? I don't
think it's anyway. So I know you and I have
(02:29):
recently been talking about the fact that over the past
few years there have been all these big science events
that have just gotten so much attention and people have
gotten really excited about. We had the discovery of the
Higgs boson a few years ago. We had that big
eclipse that you and I and our families all traveled
out to see. There was um quantum teleportation and all
this excitement and confusion surrounding it, and so much more.
(02:52):
It's fun when events like these capture the world's attention.
But but sometimes these events and the science around them
can be very difficult to commune. Okay, but today we've
got to truly give the communicator and one of the
co authors of a book called We Have No Idea,
Daniel Whites, and welcome to Part Time Genius. Hello, thank
you very much for having me on now. Daniel, this
is a really interesting partnership for this book. You know,
(03:14):
you're a particle physicist that you see Irvine doing a
lot of your research over at CERN and and you've
partnered with a terrific cartoonist and Jorge cham And It's
been a lot of fun getting to know you guys
over the past couple of months now. Jorge also has
a PhD and robotics. So I have to ask, how
did you guys meet and then decide to take on
a project like we have no idea? Well, we met
(03:37):
on Tinder first. Oh good, it's a great way to
get going, you know, like most modern couples that we
did meet on the internet. It was maybe ten years
ago now, and I was thinking about other ways we
could communicate physics to the general public because I felt
like there's a lot of exciting questions we're asking with physics,
(03:58):
but we're not always doing a great job of expressing
that excitement and the basic ideas to the general public.
And I thought there was an opening there to communicate
some of the stuff using cartoons. Actually, I saw a
really awesome technical comic put out by Google when they
put out their latest browser, the Chrome browser, and Scott
McCloud made a technical comic about the Chrome browser, and like,
(04:22):
if you're not into writing browsers, you might not be
into reading comics about browsers. But they had a great
job of making this seem interesting, and I thought, wow,
if they can make browser development sound fun, and maybe
cartoons are a good way to show other things like physics.
But I don't have any artistic skills myself, and so
I couldn't draw these cartoons myself. Um, but of course
(04:44):
I was aware of Jorge and his amazing work PhD comics.
You know, he's something of an internet celebrity in academia.
Everybody knows him, and his comics are really captured the
restoration of research and academic life. Anyway, my wife suggested
she's also an academic and she's a big fan of his.
She said, why don't you email or him and asked
him to do it. And I thought, yeah, right, that's
(05:07):
just like emailing Brad Pitt and ask him about the movie.
That's that's pretty awesome. And the project that resulted from
that a few years later, obviously is is we have
no idea, so can you tell us a little bit
about the the idea behind this book? Yeah, I thought
that there's a lot of great science communication that's happening,
but most of it was focused on what we do
know about the universe, all the amazing things that science
(05:29):
has learned, and it's important to show people what we
figured out. But I thought something was missing that. I
felt like people had a misunderstanding of how much we
knew about the universe. So we thought, let's instead write
a book showing people all the huge, the very basic
open questions of the universe, really simple stuff that we
(05:50):
haven't yet figured out, stuff like how big is the universe?
And how did it start? And how will it end.
I thought there must be an appetite for people who
are really interested in this basic stuff and excited to
learn that we haven't yet figured it out. Because to me,
ignorance is an opportunity. It's a possibility of things you
could discover in the future. And when I was a kid,
(06:11):
I was always excited about that possibility of exploring the
unknown and figuring out something new, discovering that the world
was different from the way we thought it might be
and turned out to be completely counterintuitive, like the discoveries
of quantum mechanics and relativity. I wanted to give people
the sense that such discoveries, discoveries that that basic scale
(06:33):
might still be ahead of us, that there are still
really big basic questions that we haven't answered. So that
was the idea behind running this book. And can you
tell us just a little bit about you know, I
know you're a particle physicist, that's certain, but what does
that mean exactly and what are you doing in the lab?
So it's certain we collide protons together. We take the
protons and speed them up to nearly the speed of light,
(06:55):
and then the particles inside the protons collide and turn
into balls of energy. Temporarily, they lose their form of
matter and turn into pure energy. And then that energy
has this amazing feature which it can turn into any
kind of particle in the universe as long as there's
enough energy budget there. So if you've poured enough energy
(07:16):
into your collisions, you can make any kind of particle
there is, which means you can discover new kinds of
matter even if you didn't know it existed. So that's
sort of awesome. It's a it's a way to explore
the universe. And that's the thing that got me excited
about particle physics is exploring what the universe has made
out of how is it work at its smallest levels?
What is the organizational principle for this whole ridiculous, beautiful
(07:40):
universe we find ourselves in. And the fascinating thing about
that is that it used to be the particle physics,
which looks at the very very small it's totally disconnected
from cosmology, which looks at like the very big history
of the universe the future of the universe. These days,
these two fields have kind of converged because we're asking
a lot of similar questions, Like one of the big
(08:02):
questions and cosmology is what is all the dark matter? Right?
Where is all this missing invisible matter in the universe. Well,
it's certain what we're trying to do is make dark matter.
We're trying to collide those particles together to make a
new kind of matter, and we might produce dark matter
in the laboratory, giving this insight into what's happening at
the very very big scale. I love that there's so
(08:23):
many fascinating things in that statement, and also so many
questions I have coming out of it. And I also
just love that like it starts with such a simple idea,
like the joy of crashing things together. And creating all
these new things that it's stunning. But um, I know general,
crushing things together is a good way to start the
scientific experiment. Well Will was asking at the beginning of
(08:48):
the episode about the Last Jedi. You don't want to
have said anyone with spoilers, but he talked about how
the speed of light does come up in it, and
is it possible or will it be possible for anything
to travel faster than light speed? So I just saw
that movie and I was thinking about the same stuff
when I was watching it. I thought they did it
without spoilers. I thought they did a pretty good job
(09:09):
of bringing some real physics into that situation. But your
question was will we ever travel faster than the speed
of light? Um? Of all the things we don't know
about the universe, this is one we're pretty sure. We
know that nothing can move through space faster than the
speed of light. Now I didn't answer your question directly.
I changed it a little bit so I could be
(09:30):
more more definitive. That is, nothing can move through space
faster than the speed of light, So an object flying
through space can't ever go faster than lighthood. However, that's
a really important copy moving through space because recently we
discovered in the last few decades that space is a
weird thing. Space can do things that we didn't understand.
(09:52):
If you think space is just like the emptiness in
the universe, the backdrop on which everything happens, and then
you need to get caught up with some modern of
physics because space does really weird things like bend and
expand and ripple. So if your goal is not necessarily
to move faster than light through space, but just to
get somewhere fast, like you want to go from you know,
(10:15):
your rebel base to wherever you need to go, and
you want to not spend a million years getting there,
then instead of moving through space fast in the speed
of light, you might want to just compress space itself. Right,
so you can bring these two locations, which ostensibly are
very very far apart, if you can bring them closer
(10:35):
together by by shrinking space, by compressing space, then you
can get there rapidly without going faster than the speed
of light. And that's the actual idea behind developing actual
work drives. So while you can't move through space fast
than the speed of light, we might actually technically be
able to eventually construct work drives that can get us
(10:57):
to distant places faster than traveling through normal space. It's
just it's as simple as that manger. It really, that's
all there is to it. So I assume that we're
pretty close to this whole space compression thing, like with
the next five to ten years, we should be able
to do this. Is that right, Daniel? I would not
invest in those companies, but you know there's a fascinating
(11:20):
transition there, right. Anytime, if something is just totally impossible,
it's totally impossible. But now we've moved warp drives from
totally impossible to completely impractical and very very very difficult,
which means, yeah, in ten years it will probably just
be an half on your iPhone, right because now we
just handed it from physicists to engineers, and in current calculations,
(11:43):
you know, the energy to run a warp drive, even
go to like Alpha Centauri would require more energy than
is contained in like the planet jup, all the massive
planet Jupiter. Okay, so fast, incredible quantities of energy we
can't even imagine. However, you know, it's it's it's just
become an efficiency problem. Now somebody can build a better one,
(12:05):
and you can build a more effective one, right, And
of course, for your listeners, nobody's actually constructed any sort
of functioning warp drive. But theoretically it's not impossible to
compress space to travel places faster than light could. Um.
And that's what I liked about in that movie. You know,
they don't just go places instantly in the last They
(12:25):
don't just disappear from one place and appear somewhere else.
They have to get there. And even though they're moving
through hyperspace, right, there's still a speed they're moving through
hyperspace and a maximum this limitation there. And so that's
where the physics comes in, right, is in providing plot
points and the limitations. Well, I have a follow up
question to that in terms of headlines from earlier this
(12:48):
year that dealt with traveling through space, and I want
to ask you about that. But before we do that,
let's take a quick break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius.
(13:09):
We're talking to Daniel Whites and one of the co
authors of We Have No Idea, this awesome book that
talks about all of the things in the universe, not
necessarily that we do know, but the many big questions
that we don't know. And we're putting Daniel on the
spot today and asking him to answer every single big
question about the universe that seems reasonable to me. Think,
So what do you think? So? Yeah, so, so before
(13:32):
the break, I mentioned that I had another question that
related to headlines that we saw everywhere earlier this year.
There was a headline that said, first object teleported from Earth,
and I have to be honest, Daniel, I struggled with
the way the media was covering this event that happened,
this quantum teleportation, and I wanted to see if you
(13:54):
could talk to us a little bit about that and
does it relate to what we were talking about earlier,
this idea of you know, being able to travel through
space at faster than the speed of Like, can you
just talk to us a little bit about this event
and and how the media may have struggled a little
bit to communicate what actually happened in that experiment. Yeah.
(14:15):
I read those headlines that I was pretty excited object
teleported into space. I thought, Wow, we're going to be
beaming up to space stations in the next few years, right,
But you're right, the media totally failed to convaye that
accurately because no object was teleported into space. Um. Instead,
information was sent into space, and that's much less exciting
(14:37):
because it's essentially just beaming a message. Right. So you can,
we know already how to send information from one place
to another. We have lots of techniques for that. Radio
laser or some of these things move at the speed
of light. Right. Um. This was more interesting because it's
quantum teleportation. Right. It's a process by which quantum information,
(14:57):
like the state of an atom or a photon, can
be transmitted exactly from one location to another. Right. And
it involves like entangling particles and using their quantum relationships
to send that information. So it's a new way to
send information. But it's not telebrotation, right. It's not like
your concept where something disappears and it's reappeared somewhere else,
(15:21):
reassembled there. Um. And it's also does not move faster
than the speed of light. A lot of people think
quantum entanglement is a way around uh sending information is
a way around the maximum speed limit for information. Unfortunately
it's not. So this headline describes them, which would have
been exciting if it was accurate, but instead it was
(15:43):
a cool technical achievement. They had transmitted information using this
new quantum technique further than anybody ever had, and they
sent it out into space, which nobody had done before.
But it doesn't break the speed limit of the universe.
It's still limited to the speed of light and doesn't
actually send anything anywhere than information. So it's sort of deflating,
(16:05):
and I think it gets to a larger point of
how this stuff happens, Like how do you do an
interesting experiment and then some journalist writes it up as
if it's something different, as if it's something much more dramatic.
You know. There's another example of that just a couple
of days ago, when the Pentagon released all of its
footage from this UFO program, and of course they saw
(16:28):
nothing there to indicates the presence of aliens on Earth.
But I've been watching the news and it's been everywhere.
All this stuff has been covered as if we're now
just discovered that the that the Pentagon has been talking
to aliens, and the headlines headlines or things like summary
of human encounters with um, you know, summary of human
(16:48):
encounters of the third kind, and it's all total misleading
click base. But I think that's one of the problems
with science journalism these days is that in the crowded
media community to have to sort of scream for attention, uh,
touting even modest research achievements as incredible events in human history.
So unfortunately nothing was teleported into space. Otherwise I would
(17:10):
be in line because I'd like to get up there.
I do wish we had talked to you about the
whole alien thing, because we're we're actually recording this from
a bunker right now, so it would have been useful information. Yeah, yeah,
I wish you had quantum teleported that information to us
before a bunker. I would expect you guys to be
on a mountain top with flags and come talk to
us actually on the quantum teleportation before we move on
(17:34):
to another topic. I mean, it is one of those things,
like you said, should have been a celebrated achievement because
it is something that had been done in a way
that had never been done before and at that distance.
Can you talk to us a little bit about what
the implications are if we are speaking about it accurately,
of what this could mean for us. Well, it's an
improved way to send information. So quantum teleportation is just
(17:56):
a copying of quantum information. Like electron spin or photon
state um that can be transmitted in principle exactly from
one location to another. And the cool thing about that
is just sending information without noise over that information loss, right,
And of course in a an actual practically built system,
(18:17):
there is always information loss because you can't isolate these
particles from their environment. But the hope is if we
perfect this kind of technology, you could send information with
less noise, with less information loss over longer distances. So
it's always good to have several technologies being developed in
order to send information. So this is another one that
could could in principle in the future give us information
(18:41):
transmission with less power and less less noise and less
data loss. So, Daniel, I know we've chat a little
bit about dark matter in the in the past, and
I just thought that conversation was so fascinating. But I
want you to share some of that with our listeners.
And it's not just something that's out there, but it's
actually something that's all around, is right. Can you talk
a little bit about that. Yeah, this is one of
(19:03):
my favorite things about physics is when it reveals to
us that the world we thought we lived in is
actually totally different if you look at it using a
new tool or a new perspective. And that's what we've
discovered with dark matter. We've discovered that most of the
universe is not the kind of matter that you're familiar
with the kind of matter that makes up the chair
you're sitting on, or either air you're breathing, or the
(19:24):
coffee you're sipping, or stars or gases or planets or dust.
That most of the universe, the matter in the universe
is something else, something invisible, this thing called dark matter.
And most people, if they hear about dark matter, they think, oh,
maybe that's some weird kind of matter out there in space.
But the thing about dark matter is that it's it
has gravity, It attracts everything with mass to it, and
(19:47):
it clusters a coalescence together indeed, into these big blobs.
And those big blobs line up perfectly with where normal
matter is, like galaxies and stars and gas and dust.
Most of the dark matter and universe is distributed where
the normal matter is because they attract each other gravitationally.
And so what that means is that very likely we
(20:08):
are sitting in a soup of dark matter. Like can
you imagine all the air in the room around you. Right,
that's the matter that we understand, but it's invisible, and
you're cool with being surrounded by invisible matter most of
the time. But you didn't realize is that there's also
five times as much matter in the form of dark
matter that you weren't even aware of, and it's here
(20:29):
with us. You hold out your hands and you close
them together. You're enclosing some dark matter. You're holding dark
matter in your hands. Now, you can't interact with dark
matter and call it dark, but really it should be
called invisible or in transible, intransible what's the word for
something you can't touch. It should be called an untouchable matter, right,
(20:52):
untouchable matter because you pass right through it. Right, you
can't feel it and it can't feel you. So it's
everywhere all around us, and I think most people don't
realize that. Every day when they go to school or
go to work, or get in their car, whatever, they're
moving through this invisible ocean of dark matter. Yeah, that's
unbelievable to think about. So how do we know that
(21:12):
it's there? Or how did astrophysicists figure out that dark
matter was was out there? It's a great story how
dark matter was discovered. It's sort of a classic science
story where somebody was just dotting the eyes and crossing
the teas and saying, well, I think we understand how
this works. Let's just make sure and do some double checks.
And then those double checks revealed that something was very,
(21:34):
very wrong with our understanding of the universe. So the
double check was looking at how galaxies rotate. Um. You know,
galaxies are these big swarms of stars, and galaxies are spinning. Now,
if you imagine the galaxy spinning, you think of it
like a merry go round, Right, you might wonder, like,
why are the stars not getting thrown out into intergalactic space?
(21:56):
If you spin a merry go round and you put
ping pong balls on it, these ping pong balls will
fly out into space. So why are the stars not
flying out into space? The answer is is gravity in
the galaxy that's holding those stars, that's keeping them from
getting thrown out into the universe. So then you can
do something cool, which is cross check your numbers. You
can say, if I know how fast the galaxy is spinning,
(22:17):
then I can calculate how much gravity I need to
hold the stars in place. But then I can add
up all the stars and ask is there enough gravity
to hold those stars in place? So you add up
all the mass of the galaxy you can see, calculate
the gravity from that, compare it to how fast things
are spinning. So they went they sent some grad student
to double check these numbers and said, we think we
(22:39):
understand this, just go double check and the grad students
when made this measurements decades ago, and it turns out
it didn't work like at all. I mean, the galaxies
were spinning way way too fast. There wasn't nearly enough
gravity in these galaxies to hold the stars in So
we didn't understand was there some gravity coming from an
(23:00):
invisible sort of stuff that we couldn't see. Why weren't
the stars getting thrown out into space? Was there some
other force to gravity work differently than we imagined. So
there's something basically didn't understand, and people had to think
big about the kind of ideas that could explain it.
Because this is not a small discrepancy. And one of
my favorite things about dark matter is we still know
(23:22):
very little about it. And the name of the theory
itself is sort of a description of the question, right like,
we don't know why galaxies are spinning. We don't know
what's what's giving this extra gravity, so we just come
up with a theory dark meaning we can't see it,
matter meaning it gives gravity. So it's like dark matter
(23:42):
is the theory of some invisible gravity giving thing, right.
It's just like, take the question what's the new invisible
source of gravity that explains this rotation and answer it with, well,
maybe some invisible gravity giving thing, right, But instead, in
physics you just tend to give it a fancy name,
call it dark matter, because then it sounds more like
an answer. But the truth is, we don't really know
(24:05):
very much about dark matter. We know that it's there.
You seen it because it constans these galaxies to verta
But we don't know what it is made out of. Particles,
Is it made out of something else? What kind of
particles is it made out of? But we know very
little about dark runner, And I love hearing the way
you guys talk about these sorts of discoveries or at
least an understanding that this must be in existence, that
(24:27):
you know, twenty thirty years ago, we had no idea
to even question this kind of thing or even think
about this kind of thing. We thought we had a
general understanding of how the universe was structured in some way,
and then as we learn more and more, the main
thing that we're doing is exposing all of the many
things that we have no idea about. And I love
(24:50):
the way you guys talk about that exactly, And to me,
that's the excitement. You know, is that scientific come up?
It's right, the universe says you thought you understood something.
You guys are such idiots like and you know, we're
doing the best we can. But we continue as humans
to make this mistake of over generalizing. We have a
bunch of examples from our experience and we say, maybe
(25:12):
everything works this way, right, we say, oh, life on
Earth works this way. Maybe everything in the universe operates
under the same rules. But we continue to discover that
our experience is parochial, that it's just one slice of
the kind of physics you could have. You know, the
life that we leave is sort of large on the
scale of like tiny particles, and it's sort of slow
(25:35):
on the scale of astronomical objects. So you know, before
Newton and before Einstein, you might have thought, oh, we
have most of physics figured out, but then quantum mechanics
and relativity show us that actually we didn't understand anything
about the way the universe works at its lowest level.
And this is a continuous process, right, And so another
(25:55):
point we want to make in this book is a
huge fraction in the universe is not understood, which means
not only that there are questions we've identified that we
need the answers to, like how did the universe begin?
And what is the universe made out of? But there
might be basic things that we think we understand that
will be revealed to be wrong in two hundred years.
(26:16):
People might look back at our understanding of physics and
laugh at us, right and say, those guys understood nothing.
That's the case. I mean that means that that you know,
crazy revelations and new ways of looking at the universe
are ahead of us, and I hope they happen in
my lifetime. Well, I I think one of the things
that was also encouraging to me to hear was how
(26:36):
you said there's so much room for philosophy in this
not understanding the world, right, like that there's there's stuff
you know, and then space to speculate and think and
think big I found that really poetic. Yeah. Well, one
of the fun things about science is that it's so
philosophically important, right Um. I love when people talk about,
you know, is philosophy important? There is science the only
(26:58):
useful thing when you know, you need philosophy even to
understand why science is important. And there's this counterplay between
science and philosophy. There are things that you can test, right,
experiments we can do to measure things and understand things,
and there are things we can't yet test. You know,
we can't understand what's beyond the edge of our observable universe,
(27:20):
right Um, there's the universe is a certain age, it's
almost fourteen billion years old, and we can't see anything
that's beyond a certain horizon because life just hasn't had
time to get to us yet. So what's beyond their
purely the realm of philosophy, because no science experiment can
tell you. It's just an invisible, impierceable veil beyond which
(27:42):
we cannot see, which means there's lots of room for
people to speculate, right, and speculation and wild ideas totally fun. Um.
I think there's a lot of room for that. But
I also think it's important to draw a bright line
between the science and the philosophy because there are some
things that we can hand test. So one of my
favorite examples is the multiverse. You hear this idea a lot,
(28:06):
maybe our universe, it's part of a set of other
universes which are all weird and different, and that's a
fun idea, But in my view it falls squarely in
the philosophy camp because we can never test it right.
These other universes by construction, being another universe means it's
the place we can't interact with. You can't send a
(28:26):
probe there to discover it, you can't see its effects
on electrons, you can't do any sort of experiment to
interact with that universe, which means you could never prove
those other universes exist, which means it will forever be philosophy.
I don't say that in any sort of negative sense. Right,
forever being philosophy means forever the speculation by theorists and philosophers,
(28:50):
which is wonderful, you know, smoke banan appeals and have
a lot of fun. But it's important, I think, to
draw that line. Say, here are ideas we have, but
that certainly not scientific proven. Yeah, I like some science
communicators sometimes fuzz that line a little bit more than
I'm comfortable with. M I like that. We recently did
(29:10):
an episode on trash talking, and you just describe philosophers
as smoking banana peals and having a lot of fun.
I kind of like that. Maybe maybe we'll have them
on to be like, hey, so what do you think
about particle physicists? Now, I'm just kidding that that's terrific. Well,
I have a couple of other big questions for you
that you must answer before we let you go. But
(29:30):
before we do that, why don't we take a quick break.
Welcome back to Part Time Genius. Now we are talking
to Daniel Whites and co author of We Have No
(29:50):
Idea This terrific, terrific book, and we have a couple
of other big questions before we let him go. So, Daniel,
I did want to talk a little bit more about
some of your work at CERN, and specifically about the
big discovery a few years ago of the Higgs boson,
something that we all knew we were looking for, and
until we found it, you know, obviously we couldn't get
too too excited about it. But can you talk a
(30:12):
little bit about that process, one helping us understand the
significance of the Higgs boson, but two also just what
it's like to be somewhere, you know, like where you're working,
and when a discovery that you know you've been looking
for for so long is finally there. What that must
feel like. I think the discovery the Higgs boson is
(30:32):
really an amazing feat in human intellectual history because it
proves the power of math and patterns. You know. The
origin of it is the fifty years ago a bunch
of theorists, including a guy named Higgs. We're looking at
what we knew about particles, and it just couldn't really
make sense of it. You know, the mathematics were just
(30:53):
sort of ugly. They didn't understand how can all these
particles fit together? And what why do some of these
particles have ass and some of these particles don't have mass.
It just didn't really make sense to them. It wasn't beautiful.
And there's this interesting push in theoretical physics to say
that the universe should be simple and our theory of
it should be beautiful. There should be some elegance, some
symmetry to it, which is sort of fascinating, and I
(31:15):
think a whole other topics we could explore. But this
desire for simplicity and elegance and beauty pushed them to think,
is there another way we could look at these particles?
And so this guy, Peter Higgs and several other people
came up with this theory. They said, you know what,
if you add one more particle to this mix, and
that particle has this special property I'll tell you about
in the moment, then everything just clicks together and it's
(31:38):
so much simpler and more beautiful. And so maybe this
is the way the universe works. So this is an
idea of something I had fifty years ago. And the
incredible thing is that he was right. You know, this
particle does exist, and it does do the things that
he suspected that it did. And it suggests that, you know,
this desire for simplicity, this desire to see the universe
(32:01):
and in an aesthetically simple and beautiful and elegant way,
might be a good way to look at things. Right
that we the universe at its core is not a
messy jumble of rules, but a simple set of lessons
out of which emerge complex, fascinating phenomenon, right, like particles
and ice cream and hamsters and podcasts and all that
(32:22):
sort of stuff. You know, the idea that the universe
can be explained from a few small set of rules
is very to me attractive philosophically, right, and the game
we're back into philosophy. And so the question is why
did this particle make things simpler? What about this particle
made our understanding of how the universe worked at its
smaller scale more simple, or more beautiful or more elegant. Well,
(32:45):
the question they were trying to understand is why are
some particles have this pass and other particles don't. For example,
the photon photon flies through space that has no mass,
it's just energy moving at the speed of light. Other
particles like the z boson with the w boson, these
other particles are very similar to the photon, very similar
(33:06):
properties and play similar rules, but they're really heavy. They
have a lot of mass. So people who aren't trying
to understand why is that um what controls what has
mass and what doesn't have mass? And before we answer that,
you have to think about what is mass. If you
think about a particle, you're probably thinking about a tiny,
little spinning ball of stuff. Right. And if we think
(33:28):
about a particle that has mass, probably envisioning it has
like a little serving of some stuff to it and
that's what gives it mass, right, But in our theory
that's not the case. In our theory, these particles are
all point particles. They're all tiny dots in space with
zero volume. So when we think about mass, actually we
don't think about stuff or it's no room in the
(33:51):
particle for any stuff. It's not like something that has
mass has a bigger serving of universe stuff or or
more of its squeezed into a little space. They all
have the zero volume. So instead of thinking about mass
as an amount of stuff, you need to think of
It's sort of the way you think about electric charge.
It's just like a label we put on points in space,
(34:13):
all right. You don't think about when you think about
the electron. You don't think where is the negative charge
of the electron? Is there room for the negative charge?
Does it fit in there? Right? You just think, oh,
electron has the negative charge. So you should think about
particles the same way. Some of them have this mass property,
other ones don't. And that's the question that we're trying
to answer, and that's where the Higgs does. The Higgs
(34:36):
is this crazy idea. It says that maybe there's this
field that fills the entire universe, literally, the whole universe
filled with this new kind of field called the Higgs field,
a field like an electric field or a magnetic field,
but now a new kind of field, a Higgs field.
And this field interacts with particles. In some particles it
(34:58):
makes it harder for them to speed up and slowed down,
and other particles it ignores. So if the Higgs field
interacts with your particle like the W the z boson
that it makes it hard for that particle to speed
up and hard for it to slow down. That means
it has inertia, which is another way of saying it
has mass. So the idea is the mass of these
(35:19):
particles comes from the way they interact with this new
crazy field. And photons just don't interact with that field.
They fly right through without even noticing. That was the idea.
And if this field existed, it explained why some particles
got mass and some particles didn't get mass. And then
the prediction of that field, it says, if that field exists,
(35:40):
then sometimes it would get excited, and in certain spots
it would get excited enough to create out of the
vacuum this particle called the Higgs boson. So the Higgs
boson and the Higgs field are two different things, but
one sort of proof of the existence of the other.
So that's what we looked for at the Hadron collider.
We try to create enough localized energy using our collider
(36:02):
to create Higgs boson so we could spot it, which
would be proof of the existence of the Higgs field,
which would explain why particles have mass. So what was
that experience like as it was discovered. I'm sure that
was just a huge celebration, huh. It was sort of
like running a marathon. Honestly, it's such a long process.
We've been looking for the Higgs for decades. When I
(36:25):
started in particle physics in about it was the top
priority for particle physics, and then we discovered it, you know,
in two thousand and twelve. And along the way there
were times we thought we might have hints of it,
and times we thought we'll never see it, or you know,
will we even have the power to discover it um
But it sort of happened gradually. We started to see
(36:46):
the hints, little bits of evidence here, a little bits
of evidence there, started build up slowly, slowly, slowly, until
eventually we crossed the official threshold for having enough data
to convince ourselves and decide say, yes, we say that
we've discovered it. But it's sort of like when you
get to mile twenty two of your marathon. At that
point you're pretty sure you're gonna finish, you just sort
(37:08):
of got to stumble across the finish line. There's no
like real moment there where we said, okay, we've discovered it.
I mean, there was a public announcement, but by that
point everybody inside the community had already been convinced that
it was real. It was there, so it wasn't really
like a It's not like some late night moment where
the experiment concluded and we saw the results pop up
(37:30):
on the screen and nature tells us the answer. More
of a low accumulation of results. And the other thing
I think a lot of people don't recognize is this
was done by massive teams of people, or maybe ten
people were involved intimately in this process. So again, it's
not like you're maybe your romantic view of a physicist
(37:53):
or you know, grad student late at night alone in
the lab seeing the answer for the first time and
having that experience of knowing something about the universe that
nobody else knows. Right, That's that's an exciting idea. It
was like meetings and discussions and long conversations and more
meetings and millions of power points slides and you know,
(38:14):
I don't mean to undermine the glamorous nature or particle
physics or anything, but you asked what was it like?
And you know it was a long slog. Yeah, it is.
It is funny because I think we do all imagine
It's like, everybody, get in here. Jerry saw it. Jerry
pushed the big red button. Who discovered the Higgs boson? Yeah,
you know, the thing is that the Higgs is pretty rare.
(38:35):
Even if you focus your particle beams and give them
a lot of energy, you're producing one every few seconds,
whereas you have you know, billions of collisions and seconds.
So you have to sift through a lot of collisions,
and then you have to do it for a long
time to accumulate enough examples that you statistically can say
we're pretty sure it exists. So it's uh, it's a
(38:57):
long game. It's like, you know, you're putting a puzz
of pieces together, and before you get the last piece in,
you're pretty sure you knew what the puzzle looks like,
but you know you still have to go through the
work of putting all the finding those little ledge pieces
and filling in the sky and all those pieces. You know,
I've heard you talk about those numbers of collisions and
numbers of experiments that you have to do. When you
(39:18):
say a lot, it's actually it's pretty mind blowing. Can
you talk about what that is when you're doing these
experiments to find something that you know is pretty rare.
What frequency of experiments are you doing? And then and
and then how many of them? Right? So we're looking
for rare stuff. Most of the time when you collide
to protons together, not much happens to protons come out. Occasionally,
(39:43):
you know, one in a million or one in a
billion times something different will happen. So if you want
to see a lot of examples of the rare stuff,
you've got to sift through a huge number of examples
of the boring stuff. So that's why we do as
many collisions as we can. So we do it every
twenty five nanoseconds. So we have these huge detectors at
certain which are focused around this collision points, and then
(40:05):
the accelerator runs through the heart of the detector and
it delivers two beams which cross right at that collision point.
And the beams are not like let's shoot one particle
at one other particle. You shoot like a bunch of
particles like ten to the thirteen protons at another bunch
tended of tending the thirteen protons and hope to get
(40:25):
some collisions. And then you have these bunches staggered through
your accelerator. Accelerators a big circle, so you imagine all
these little bunches zooming through the accelerator in perfect coincidence.
They overlap right at these collision points, and you get
these collisions every five nanoseconds, and every time there's a collision,
(40:47):
we take this massive digital picture, and then we have
this enormous fire hose the data that pours out of
the detector, and we have to somehow try to capture
that and analyze it and simplify and reduce it so
that we can oil it all down to answer an
actual physics question, like does this particle exist. To me,
that's one of the fun parts. I'm sort of a
(41:07):
statistics and data processing, machine learning kind of guy, data science,
and so for me, it's a really fun puzzles how
to drink from this massive fire hose of information and
answer very high level questions about the universe. It's pretty amazing.
So so Mega, we've gotten a chance to talk about
traveling at light speed, quantum teleportation, the Higgs boson. I
(41:29):
don't know if achieve it. I still have a thousand
more questions I could ask. Yeah, I'm pretty sure we're
gonna have to have you back on Daniel sometime, but
I do hope that all of our listeners will check
out your awesome book that you and Jorge have worked
on together. We have no idea, but Daniel, thanks so
much for joining us on Part Time Genius. Thank you
(41:50):
very much. A lot of fun guys, and I'd love
to be back anytime. Remember thanks again for listening. Part
Time Genius is a production of how stuff works and
wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the
(42:12):
important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Tristan McNeil
does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song
and does the mixy mixy sound thing. Jerry Roland does
the exact producer thing. Gave. Loesier is our lead researcher,
with support from the Research Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan
Brown and Lucas Adams and Eve. Jeff Cook gets the
show to your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like
what you heard, we hope you'll subscribe, and if you
(42:33):
really really like what you've heard, maybe you could leave
a good review for us. Did you forget James Jason
who
Hey, their podcast listeners. So we are re airing an
episode today, but it's for a great reason, I promise
you know. Will and I are working on this brand
new podcast that debuts next week. It's called Daniel and
Jorge Explained the Universe. It is super fun, and we
commissioned it with the hopes that not only would get
people excited about space and all these big questions out there,
but also for all the budding scientists and and the
(00:24):
kids who listen with their parents, because you know, we
wanted to feed all those hungry minds. Anyway, Daniel and
Jorge is a twice weekly chat show between a particle
physicist and a super smart cartoonist, and we hope you'll
tune in. But since that show isn't launching for another week,
we thought you might want to hear our conversation with
the Daniel of Daniel and Jorge Daniel Whites and I
(00:45):
hope you dig it. Guess what Mango? What's that? Will? So,
have you seen the last Jedi yet? I have. I
was going to ask you a question about it, but
we have to keep this spoiler free here, so I'm
honestly kind of scared to say anything. Uh, do you
want to say it in pick ladin? No, No, I'm
just I'm too nervous. But I will say this, so
(01:06):
it seems fair to say that light speed plays a
pretty big role in the Star Wars films. That's what
you wanted to say. I mean, it's true. But well,
you know, as I sat there in the theater, my
mind started wandering again. You know, not because it isn't
a great movie. I really liked it, but I started
thinking again about the idea of traveling at or beyond
light speed. And it's one of the age old questions,
(01:28):
you know, will anything ever travel beyond light speed? Well
it's a good thing. We have a brilliant author here
today is to answer some of the biggest questions about
the universe, and only one of them is about Star Wars. Yeah,
but the book that he's written is called We Have
No Idea. But you're right, we should give him a
shot anyway, So let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listeners,
(02:07):
welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and as
always I'm joined by my good friend Man gues Ticketer
and the man on the other side of the soundproof glass.
Sporting an impressive coral saken hair part. That's our friend
and producer Tristan McNeil, who knew his hair could even
part like that. So that's not what we're here to
talk about, or is it maybe another episode? I don't
think it's anyway. So I know you and I have
(02:29):
recently been talking about the fact that over the past
few years there have been all these big science events
that have just gotten so much attention and people have
gotten really excited about. We had the discovery of the
Higgs boson a few years ago. We had that big
eclipse that you and I and our families all traveled
out to see. There was um quantum teleportation and all
this excitement and confusion surrounding it, and so much more.
(02:52):
It's fun when events like these capture the world's attention.
But but sometimes these events and the science around them
can be very difficult to commune. Okay, but today we've
got to truly give the communicator and one of the
co authors of a book called We Have No Idea,
Daniel Whites, and welcome to Part Time Genius. Hello, thank
you very much for having me on now. Daniel, this
is a really interesting partnership for this book. You know,
(03:14):
you're a particle physicist that you see Irvine doing a
lot of your research over at CERN and and you've
partnered with a terrific cartoonist and Jorge cham And It's
been a lot of fun getting to know you guys
over the past couple of months now. Jorge also has
a PhD and robotics. So I have to ask, how
did you guys meet and then decide to take on
a project like we have no idea? Well, we met
(03:37):
on Tinder first. Oh good, it's a great way to
get going, you know, like most modern couples that we
did meet on the internet. It was maybe ten years
ago now, and I was thinking about other ways we
could communicate physics to the general public because I felt
like there's a lot of exciting questions we're asking with physics,
(03:58):
but we're not always doing a great job of expressing
that excitement and the basic ideas to the general public.
And I thought there was an opening there to communicate
some of the stuff using cartoons. Actually, I saw a
really awesome technical comic put out by Google when they
put out their latest browser, the Chrome browser, and Scott
McCloud made a technical comic about the Chrome browser, and like,
(04:22):
if you're not into writing browsers, you might not be
into reading comics about browsers. But they had a great
job of making this seem interesting, and I thought, wow,
if they can make browser development sound fun, and maybe
cartoons are a good way to show other things like physics.
But I don't have any artistic skills myself, and so
I couldn't draw these cartoons myself. Um, but of course
(04:44):
I was aware of Jorge and his amazing work PhD comics.
You know, he's something of an internet celebrity in academia.
Everybody knows him, and his comics are really captured the
restoration of research and academic life. Anyway, my wife suggested
she's also an academic and she's a big fan of his.
She said, why don't you email or him and asked
him to do it. And I thought, yeah, right, that's
(05:07):
just like emailing Brad Pitt and ask him about the movie.
That's that's pretty awesome. And the project that resulted from
that a few years later, obviously is is we have
no idea, so can you tell us a little bit
about the the idea behind this book? Yeah, I thought
that there's a lot of great science communication that's happening,
but most of it was focused on what we do
know about the universe, all the amazing things that science
(05:29):
has learned, and it's important to show people what we
figured out. But I thought something was missing that. I
felt like people had a misunderstanding of how much we
knew about the universe. So we thought, let's instead write
a book showing people all the huge, the very basic
open questions of the universe, really simple stuff that we
(05:50):
haven't yet figured out, stuff like how big is the universe?
And how did it start? And how will it end.
I thought there must be an appetite for people who
are really interested in this basic stuff and excited to
learn that we haven't yet figured it out. Because to me,
ignorance is an opportunity. It's a possibility of things you
could discover in the future. And when I was a kid,
(06:11):
I was always excited about that possibility of exploring the
unknown and figuring out something new, discovering that the world
was different from the way we thought it might be
and turned out to be completely counterintuitive, like the discoveries
of quantum mechanics and relativity. I wanted to give people
the sense that such discoveries, discoveries that that basic scale
(06:33):
might still be ahead of us, that there are still
really big basic questions that we haven't answered. So that
was the idea behind running this book. And can you
tell us just a little bit about you know, I
know you're a particle physicist, that's certain, but what does
that mean exactly and what are you doing in the lab?
So it's certain we collide protons together. We take the
protons and speed them up to nearly the speed of light,
(06:55):
and then the particles inside the protons collide and turn
into balls of energy. Temporarily, they lose their form of
matter and turn into pure energy. And then that energy
has this amazing feature which it can turn into any
kind of particle in the universe as long as there's
enough energy budget there. So if you've poured enough energy
(07:16):
into your collisions, you can make any kind of particle
there is, which means you can discover new kinds of
matter even if you didn't know it existed. So that's
sort of awesome. It's a it's a way to explore
the universe. And that's the thing that got me excited
about particle physics is exploring what the universe has made
out of how is it work at its smallest levels?
What is the organizational principle for this whole ridiculous, beautiful
(07:40):
universe we find ourselves in. And the fascinating thing about
that is that it used to be the particle physics,
which looks at the very very small it's totally disconnected
from cosmology, which looks at like the very big history
of the universe the future of the universe. These days,
these two fields have kind of converged because we're asking
a lot of similar questions, Like one of the big
(08:02):
questions and cosmology is what is all the dark matter? Right?
Where is all this missing invisible matter in the universe. Well,
it's certain what we're trying to do is make dark matter.
We're trying to collide those particles together to make a
new kind of matter, and we might produce dark matter
in the laboratory, giving this insight into what's happening at
the very very big scale. I love that there's so
(08:23):
many fascinating things in that statement, and also so many
questions I have coming out of it. And I also
just love that like it starts with such a simple idea,
like the joy of crashing things together. And creating all
these new things that it's stunning. But um, I know general,
crushing things together is a good way to start the
scientific experiment. Well Will was asking at the beginning of
(08:48):
the episode about the Last Jedi. You don't want to
have said anyone with spoilers, but he talked about how
the speed of light does come up in it, and
is it possible or will it be possible for anything
to travel faster than light speed? So I just saw
that movie and I was thinking about the same stuff
when I was watching it. I thought they did it
without spoilers. I thought they did a pretty good job
(09:09):
of bringing some real physics into that situation. But your
question was will we ever travel faster than the speed
of light? Um? Of all the things we don't know
about the universe, this is one we're pretty sure. We
know that nothing can move through space faster than the
speed of light. Now I didn't answer your question directly.
I changed it a little bit so I could be
(09:30):
more more definitive. That is, nothing can move through space
faster than the speed of light, So an object flying
through space can't ever go faster than lighthood. However, that's
a really important copy moving through space because recently we
discovered in the last few decades that space is a
weird thing. Space can do things that we didn't understand.
(09:52):
If you think space is just like the emptiness in
the universe, the backdrop on which everything happens, and then
you need to get caught up with some modern of
physics because space does really weird things like bend and
expand and ripple. So if your goal is not necessarily
to move faster than light through space, but just to
get somewhere fast, like you want to go from you know,
(10:15):
your rebel base to wherever you need to go, and
you want to not spend a million years getting there,
then instead of moving through space fast in the speed
of light, you might want to just compress space itself. Right,
so you can bring these two locations, which ostensibly are
very very far apart, if you can bring them closer
(10:35):
together by by shrinking space, by compressing space, then you
can get there rapidly without going faster than the speed
of light. And that's the actual idea behind developing actual
work drives. So while you can't move through space fast
than the speed of light, we might actually technically be
able to eventually construct work drives that can get us
(10:57):
to distant places faster than traveling through normal space. It's
just it's as simple as that manger. It really, that's
all there is to it. So I assume that we're
pretty close to this whole space compression thing, like with
the next five to ten years, we should be able
to do this. Is that right, Daniel? I would not
invest in those companies, but you know there's a fascinating
(11:20):
transition there, right. Anytime, if something is just totally impossible,
it's totally impossible. But now we've moved warp drives from
totally impossible to completely impractical and very very very difficult,
which means, yeah, in ten years it will probably just
be an half on your iPhone, right because now we
just handed it from physicists to engineers, and in current calculations,
(11:43):
you know, the energy to run a warp drive, even
go to like Alpha Centauri would require more energy than
is contained in like the planet jup, all the massive
planet Jupiter. Okay, so fast, incredible quantities of energy we
can't even imagine. However, you know, it's it's it's just
become an efficiency problem. Now somebody can build a better one,
(12:05):
and you can build a more effective one, right, And
of course, for your listeners, nobody's actually constructed any sort
of functioning warp drive. But theoretically it's not impossible to
compress space to travel places faster than light could. Um.
And that's what I liked about in that movie. You know,
they don't just go places instantly in the last They
(12:25):
don't just disappear from one place and appear somewhere else.
They have to get there. And even though they're moving
through hyperspace, right, there's still a speed they're moving through
hyperspace and a maximum this limitation there. And so that's
where the physics comes in, right, is in providing plot
points and the limitations. Well, I have a follow up
question to that in terms of headlines from earlier this
(12:48):
year that dealt with traveling through space, and I want
to ask you about that. But before we do that,
let's take a quick break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius.
(13:09):
We're talking to Daniel Whites and one of the co
authors of We Have No Idea, this awesome book that
talks about all of the things in the universe, not
necessarily that we do know, but the many big questions
that we don't know. And we're putting Daniel on the
spot today and asking him to answer every single big
question about the universe that seems reasonable to me. Think,
So what do you think? So? Yeah, so, so before
(13:32):
the break, I mentioned that I had another question that
related to headlines that we saw everywhere earlier this year.
There was a headline that said, first object teleported from Earth,
and I have to be honest, Daniel, I struggled with
the way the media was covering this event that happened,
this quantum teleportation, and I wanted to see if you
(13:54):
could talk to us a little bit about that and
does it relate to what we were talking about earlier,
this idea of you know, being able to travel through
space at faster than the speed of Like, can you
just talk to us a little bit about this event
and and how the media may have struggled a little
bit to communicate what actually happened in that experiment. Yeah.
(14:15):
I read those headlines that I was pretty excited object
teleported into space. I thought, Wow, we're going to be
beaming up to space stations in the next few years, right,
But you're right, the media totally failed to convaye that
accurately because no object was teleported into space. Um. Instead,
information was sent into space, and that's much less exciting
(14:37):
because it's essentially just beaming a message. Right. So you can,
we know already how to send information from one place
to another. We have lots of techniques for that. Radio
laser or some of these things move at the speed
of light. Right. Um. This was more interesting because it's
quantum teleportation. Right. It's a process by which quantum information,
(14:57):
like the state of an atom or a photon, can
be transmitted exactly from one location to another. Right. And
it involves like entangling particles and using their quantum relationships
to send that information. So it's a new way to
send information. But it's not telebrotation, right. It's not like
your concept where something disappears and it's reappeared somewhere else,
(15:21):
reassembled there. Um. And it's also does not move faster
than the speed of light. A lot of people think
quantum entanglement is a way around uh sending information is
a way around the maximum speed limit for information. Unfortunately
it's not. So this headline describes them, which would have
been exciting if it was accurate, but instead it was
(15:43):
a cool technical achievement. They had transmitted information using this
new quantum technique further than anybody ever had, and they
sent it out into space, which nobody had done before.
But it doesn't break the speed limit of the universe.
It's still limited to the speed of light and doesn't
actually send anything anywhere than information. So it's sort of deflating,
(16:05):
and I think it gets to a larger point of
how this stuff happens, Like how do you do an
interesting experiment and then some journalist writes it up as
if it's something different, as if it's something much more dramatic.
You know. There's another example of that just a couple
of days ago, when the Pentagon released all of its
footage from this UFO program, and of course they saw
(16:28):
nothing there to indicates the presence of aliens on Earth.
But I've been watching the news and it's been everywhere.
All this stuff has been covered as if we're now
just discovered that the that the Pentagon has been talking
to aliens, and the headlines headlines or things like summary
of human encounters with um, you know, summary of human
(16:48):
encounters of the third kind, and it's all total misleading
click base. But I think that's one of the problems
with science journalism these days is that in the crowded
media community to have to sort of scream for attention, uh,
touting even modest research achievements as incredible events in human history.
So unfortunately nothing was teleported into space. Otherwise I would
(17:10):
be in line because I'd like to get up there.
I do wish we had talked to you about the
whole alien thing, because we're we're actually recording this from
a bunker right now, so it would have been useful information. Yeah, yeah,
I wish you had quantum teleported that information to us
before a bunker. I would expect you guys to be
on a mountain top with flags and come talk to
us actually on the quantum teleportation before we move on
(17:34):
to another topic. I mean, it is one of those things,
like you said, should have been a celebrated achievement because
it is something that had been done in a way
that had never been done before and at that distance.
Can you talk to us a little bit about what
the implications are if we are speaking about it accurately,
of what this could mean for us. Well, it's an
improved way to send information. So quantum teleportation is just
(17:56):
a copying of quantum information. Like electron spin or photon
state um that can be transmitted in principle exactly from
one location to another. And the cool thing about that
is just sending information without noise over that information loss, right,
And of course in a an actual practically built system,
(18:17):
there is always information loss because you can't isolate these
particles from their environment. But the hope is if we
perfect this kind of technology, you could send information with
less noise, with less information loss over longer distances. So
it's always good to have several technologies being developed in
order to send information. So this is another one that
could could in principle in the future give us information
(18:41):
transmission with less power and less less noise and less
data loss. So, Daniel, I know we've chat a little
bit about dark matter in the in the past, and
I just thought that conversation was so fascinating. But I
want you to share some of that with our listeners.
And it's not just something that's out there, but it's
actually something that's all around, is right. Can you talk
a little bit about that. Yeah, this is one of
(19:03):
my favorite things about physics is when it reveals to
us that the world we thought we lived in is
actually totally different if you look at it using a
new tool or a new perspective. And that's what we've
discovered with dark matter. We've discovered that most of the
universe is not the kind of matter that you're familiar
with the kind of matter that makes up the chair
you're sitting on, or either air you're breathing, or the
(19:24):
coffee you're sipping, or stars or gases or planets or dust.
That most of the universe, the matter in the universe
is something else, something invisible, this thing called dark matter.
And most people, if they hear about dark matter, they think, oh,
maybe that's some weird kind of matter out there in space.
But the thing about dark matter is that it's it
has gravity, It attracts everything with mass to it, and
(19:47):
it clusters a coalescence together indeed, into these big blobs.
And those big blobs line up perfectly with where normal
matter is, like galaxies and stars and gas and dust.
Most of the dark matter and universe is distributed where
the normal matter is because they attract each other gravitationally.
And so what that means is that very likely we
(20:08):
are sitting in a soup of dark matter. Like can
you imagine all the air in the room around you. Right,
that's the matter that we understand, but it's invisible, and
you're cool with being surrounded by invisible matter most of
the time. But you didn't realize is that there's also
five times as much matter in the form of dark
matter that you weren't even aware of, and it's here
(20:29):
with us. You hold out your hands and you close
them together. You're enclosing some dark matter. You're holding dark
matter in your hands. Now, you can't interact with dark
matter and call it dark, but really it should be
called invisible or in transible, intransible what's the word for
something you can't touch. It should be called an untouchable matter, right,
(20:52):
untouchable matter because you pass right through it. Right, you
can't feel it and it can't feel you. So it's
everywhere all around us, and I think most people don't
realize that. Every day when they go to school or
go to work, or get in their car, whatever, they're
moving through this invisible ocean of dark matter. Yeah, that's
unbelievable to think about. So how do we know that
(21:12):
it's there? Or how did astrophysicists figure out that dark
matter was was out there? It's a great story how
dark matter was discovered. It's sort of a classic science
story where somebody was just dotting the eyes and crossing
the teas and saying, well, I think we understand how
this works. Let's just make sure and do some double checks.
And then those double checks revealed that something was very,
(21:34):
very wrong with our understanding of the universe. So the
double check was looking at how galaxies rotate. Um. You know,
galaxies are these big swarms of stars, and galaxies are spinning. Now,
if you imagine the galaxy spinning, you think of it
like a merry go round, Right, you might wonder, like,
why are the stars not getting thrown out into intergalactic space?
(21:56):
If you spin a merry go round and you put
ping pong balls on it, these ping pong balls will
fly out into space. So why are the stars not
flying out into space? The answer is is gravity in
the galaxy that's holding those stars, that's keeping them from
getting thrown out into the universe. So then you can
do something cool, which is cross check your numbers. You
can say, if I know how fast the galaxy is spinning,
(22:17):
then I can calculate how much gravity I need to
hold the stars in place. But then I can add
up all the stars and ask is there enough gravity
to hold those stars in place? So you add up
all the mass of the galaxy you can see, calculate
the gravity from that, compare it to how fast things
are spinning. So they went they sent some grad student
to double check these numbers and said, we think we
(22:39):
understand this, just go double check and the grad students
when made this measurements decades ago, and it turns out
it didn't work like at all. I mean, the galaxies
were spinning way way too fast. There wasn't nearly enough
gravity in these galaxies to hold the stars in So
we didn't understand was there some gravity coming from an
(23:00):
invisible sort of stuff that we couldn't see. Why weren't
the stars getting thrown out into space? Was there some
other force to gravity work differently than we imagined. So
there's something basically didn't understand, and people had to think
big about the kind of ideas that could explain it.
Because this is not a small discrepancy. And one of
my favorite things about dark matter is we still know
(23:22):
very little about it. And the name of the theory
itself is sort of a description of the question, right like,
we don't know why galaxies are spinning. We don't know
what's what's giving this extra gravity, so we just come
up with a theory dark meaning we can't see it,
matter meaning it gives gravity. So it's like dark matter
(23:42):
is the theory of some invisible gravity giving thing, right.
It's just like, take the question what's the new invisible
source of gravity that explains this rotation and answer it with, well,
maybe some invisible gravity giving thing, right, But instead, in
physics you just tend to give it a fancy name,
call it dark matter, because then it sounds more like
an answer. But the truth is, we don't really know
(24:05):
very much about dark matter. We know that it's there.
You seen it because it constans these galaxies to verta
But we don't know what it is made out of. Particles,
Is it made out of something else? What kind of
particles is it made out of? But we know very
little about dark runner, And I love hearing the way
you guys talk about these sorts of discoveries or at
least an understanding that this must be in existence, that
(24:27):
you know, twenty thirty years ago, we had no idea
to even question this kind of thing or even think
about this kind of thing. We thought we had a
general understanding of how the universe was structured in some way,
and then as we learn more and more, the main
thing that we're doing is exposing all of the many
things that we have no idea about. And I love
(24:50):
the way you guys talk about that exactly, And to me,
that's the excitement. You know, is that scientific come up?
It's right, the universe says you thought you understood something.
You guys are such idiots like and you know, we're
doing the best we can. But we continue as humans
to make this mistake of over generalizing. We have a
bunch of examples from our experience and we say, maybe
(25:12):
everything works this way, right, we say, oh, life on
Earth works this way. Maybe everything in the universe operates
under the same rules. But we continue to discover that
our experience is parochial, that it's just one slice of
the kind of physics you could have. You know, the
life that we leave is sort of large on the
scale of like tiny particles, and it's sort of slow
(25:35):
on the scale of astronomical objects. So you know, before
Newton and before Einstein, you might have thought, oh, we
have most of physics figured out, but then quantum mechanics
and relativity show us that actually we didn't understand anything
about the way the universe works at its lowest level.
And this is a continuous process, right, And so another
(25:55):
point we want to make in this book is a
huge fraction in the universe is not understood, which means
not only that there are questions we've identified that we
need the answers to, like how did the universe begin?
And what is the universe made out of? But there
might be basic things that we think we understand that
will be revealed to be wrong in two hundred years.
(26:16):
People might look back at our understanding of physics and
laugh at us, right and say, those guys understood nothing.
That's the case. I mean that means that that you know,
crazy revelations and new ways of looking at the universe
are ahead of us, and I hope they happen in
my lifetime. Well, I I think one of the things
that was also encouraging to me to hear was how
(26:36):
you said there's so much room for philosophy in this
not understanding the world, right, like that there's there's stuff
you know, and then space to speculate and think and
think big I found that really poetic. Yeah. Well, one
of the fun things about science is that it's so
philosophically important, right Um. I love when people talk about,
you know, is philosophy important? There is science the only
(26:58):
useful thing when you know, you need philosophy even to
understand why science is important. And there's this counterplay between
science and philosophy. There are things that you can test, right,
experiments we can do to measure things and understand things,
and there are things we can't yet test. You know,
we can't understand what's beyond the edge of our observable universe,
(27:20):
right Um, there's the universe is a certain age, it's
almost fourteen billion years old, and we can't see anything
that's beyond a certain horizon because life just hasn't had
time to get to us yet. So what's beyond their
purely the realm of philosophy, because no science experiment can
tell you. It's just an invisible, impierceable veil beyond which
(27:42):
we cannot see, which means there's lots of room for
people to speculate, right, and speculation and wild ideas totally fun. Um.
I think there's a lot of room for that. But
I also think it's important to draw a bright line
between the science and the philosophy because there are some
things that we can hand test. So one of my
favorite examples is the multiverse. You hear this idea a lot,
(28:06):
maybe our universe, it's part of a set of other
universes which are all weird and different, and that's a
fun idea, But in my view it falls squarely in
the philosophy camp because we can never test it right.
These other universes by construction, being another universe means it's
the place we can't interact with. You can't send a
(28:26):
probe there to discover it, you can't see its effects
on electrons, you can't do any sort of experiment to
interact with that universe, which means you could never prove
those other universes exist, which means it will forever be philosophy.
I don't say that in any sort of negative sense. Right,
forever being philosophy means forever the speculation by theorists and philosophers,
(28:50):
which is wonderful, you know, smoke banan appeals and have
a lot of fun. But it's important, I think, to
draw that line. Say, here are ideas we have, but
that certainly not scientific proven. Yeah, I like some science
communicators sometimes fuzz that line a little bit more than
I'm comfortable with. M I like that. We recently did
(29:10):
an episode on trash talking, and you just describe philosophers
as smoking banana peals and having a lot of fun.
I kind of like that. Maybe maybe we'll have them
on to be like, hey, so what do you think
about particle physicists? Now, I'm just kidding that that's terrific. Well,
I have a couple of other big questions for you
that you must answer before we let you go. But
(29:30):
before we do that, why don't we take a quick break.
Welcome back to Part Time Genius. Now we are talking
to Daniel Whites and co author of We Have No
(29:50):
Idea This terrific, terrific book, and we have a couple
of other big questions before we let him go. So, Daniel,
I did want to talk a little bit more about
some of your work at CERN, and specifically about the
big discovery a few years ago of the Higgs boson,
something that we all knew we were looking for, and
until we found it, you know, obviously we couldn't get
too too excited about it. But can you talk a
(30:12):
little bit about that process, one helping us understand the
significance of the Higgs boson, but two also just what
it's like to be somewhere, you know, like where you're working,
and when a discovery that you know you've been looking
for for so long is finally there. What that must
feel like. I think the discovery the Higgs boson is
(30:32):
really an amazing feat in human intellectual history because it
proves the power of math and patterns. You know. The
origin of it is the fifty years ago a bunch
of theorists, including a guy named Higgs. We're looking at
what we knew about particles, and it just couldn't really
make sense of it. You know, the mathematics were just
(30:53):
sort of ugly. They didn't understand how can all these
particles fit together? And what why do some of these
particles have ass and some of these particles don't have mass.
It just didn't really make sense to them. It wasn't beautiful.
And there's this interesting push in theoretical physics to say
that the universe should be simple and our theory of
it should be beautiful. There should be some elegance, some
symmetry to it, which is sort of fascinating, and I
(31:15):
think a whole other topics we could explore. But this
desire for simplicity and elegance and beauty pushed them to think,
is there another way we could look at these particles?
And so this guy, Peter Higgs and several other people
came up with this theory. They said, you know what,
if you add one more particle to this mix, and
that particle has this special property I'll tell you about
in the moment, then everything just clicks together and it's
(31:38):
so much simpler and more beautiful. And so maybe this
is the way the universe works. So this is an
idea of something I had fifty years ago. And the
incredible thing is that he was right. You know, this
particle does exist, and it does do the things that
he suspected that it did. And it suggests that, you know,
this desire for simplicity, this desire to see the universe
(32:01):
and in an aesthetically simple and beautiful and elegant way,
might be a good way to look at things. Right
that we the universe at its core is not a
messy jumble of rules, but a simple set of lessons
out of which emerge complex, fascinating phenomenon, right, like particles
and ice cream and hamsters and podcasts and all that
(32:22):
sort of stuff. You know, the idea that the universe
can be explained from a few small set of rules
is very to me attractive philosophically, right, and the game
we're back into philosophy. And so the question is why
did this particle make things simpler? What about this particle
made our understanding of how the universe worked at its
smaller scale more simple, or more beautiful or more elegant. Well,
(32:45):
the question they were trying to understand is why are
some particles have this pass and other particles don't. For example,
the photon photon flies through space that has no mass,
it's just energy moving at the speed of light. Other
particles like the z boson with the w boson, these
other particles are very similar to the photon, very similar
(33:06):
properties and play similar rules, but they're really heavy. They
have a lot of mass. So people who aren't trying
to understand why is that um what controls what has
mass and what doesn't have mass? And before we answer that,
you have to think about what is mass. If you
think about a particle, you're probably thinking about a tiny,
little spinning ball of stuff. Right. And if we think
(33:28):
about a particle that has mass, probably envisioning it has
like a little serving of some stuff to it and
that's what gives it mass, right, But in our theory
that's not the case. In our theory, these particles are
all point particles. They're all tiny dots in space with
zero volume. So when we think about mass, actually we
don't think about stuff or it's no room in the
(33:51):
particle for any stuff. It's not like something that has
mass has a bigger serving of universe stuff or or
more of its squeezed into a little space. They all
have the zero volume. So instead of thinking about mass
as an amount of stuff, you need to think of
It's sort of the way you think about electric charge.
It's just like a label we put on points in space,
(34:13):
all right. You don't think about when you think about
the electron. You don't think where is the negative charge
of the electron? Is there room for the negative charge?
Does it fit in there? Right? You just think, oh,
electron has the negative charge. So you should think about
particles the same way. Some of them have this mass property,
other ones don't. And that's the question that we're trying
to answer, and that's where the Higgs does. The Higgs
(34:36):
is this crazy idea. It says that maybe there's this
field that fills the entire universe, literally, the whole universe
filled with this new kind of field called the Higgs field,
a field like an electric field or a magnetic field,
but now a new kind of field, a Higgs field.
And this field interacts with particles. In some particles it
(34:58):
makes it harder for them to speed up and slowed down,
and other particles it ignores. So if the Higgs field
interacts with your particle like the W the z boson
that it makes it hard for that particle to speed
up and hard for it to slow down. That means
it has inertia, which is another way of saying it
has mass. So the idea is the mass of these
(35:19):
particles comes from the way they interact with this new
crazy field. And photons just don't interact with that field.
They fly right through without even noticing. That was the idea.
And if this field existed, it explained why some particles
got mass and some particles didn't get mass. And then
the prediction of that field, it says, if that field exists,
(35:40):
then sometimes it would get excited, and in certain spots
it would get excited enough to create out of the
vacuum this particle called the Higgs boson. So the Higgs
boson and the Higgs field are two different things, but
one sort of proof of the existence of the other.
So that's what we looked for at the Hadron collider.
We try to create enough localized energy using our collider
(36:02):
to create Higgs boson so we could spot it, which
would be proof of the existence of the Higgs field,
which would explain why particles have mass. So what was
that experience like as it was discovered. I'm sure that
was just a huge celebration, huh. It was sort of
like running a marathon. Honestly, it's such a long process.
We've been looking for the Higgs for decades. When I
(36:25):
started in particle physics in about it was the top
priority for particle physics, and then we discovered it, you know,
in two thousand and twelve. And along the way there
were times we thought we might have hints of it,
and times we thought we'll never see it, or you know,
will we even have the power to discover it um
But it sort of happened gradually. We started to see
(36:46):
the hints, little bits of evidence here, a little bits
of evidence there, started build up slowly, slowly, slowly, until
eventually we crossed the official threshold for having enough data
to convince ourselves and decide say, yes, we say that
we've discovered it. But it's sort of like when you
get to mile twenty two of your marathon. At that
point you're pretty sure you're gonna finish, you just sort
(37:08):
of got to stumble across the finish line. There's no
like real moment there where we said, okay, we've discovered it.
I mean, there was a public announcement, but by that
point everybody inside the community had already been convinced that
it was real. It was there, so it wasn't really
like a It's not like some late night moment where
the experiment concluded and we saw the results pop up
(37:30):
on the screen and nature tells us the answer. More
of a low accumulation of results. And the other thing
I think a lot of people don't recognize is this
was done by massive teams of people, or maybe ten
people were involved intimately in this process. So again, it's
not like you're maybe your romantic view of a physicist
(37:53):
or you know, grad student late at night alone in
the lab seeing the answer for the first time and
having that experience of knowing something about the universe that
nobody else knows. Right, That's that's an exciting idea. It
was like meetings and discussions and long conversations and more
meetings and millions of power points slides and you know,
(38:14):
I don't mean to undermine the glamorous nature or particle
physics or anything, but you asked what was it like?
And you know it was a long slog. Yeah, it is.
It is funny because I think we do all imagine
It's like, everybody, get in here. Jerry saw it. Jerry
pushed the big red button. Who discovered the Higgs boson? Yeah,
you know, the thing is that the Higgs is pretty rare.
(38:35):
Even if you focus your particle beams and give them
a lot of energy, you're producing one every few seconds,
whereas you have you know, billions of collisions and seconds.
So you have to sift through a lot of collisions,
and then you have to do it for a long
time to accumulate enough examples that you statistically can say
we're pretty sure it exists. So it's uh, it's a
(38:57):
long game. It's like, you know, you're putting a puzz
of pieces together, and before you get the last piece in,
you're pretty sure you knew what the puzzle looks like,
but you know you still have to go through the
work of putting all the finding those little ledge pieces
and filling in the sky and all those pieces. You know,
I've heard you talk about those numbers of collisions and
numbers of experiments that you have to do. When you
(39:18):
say a lot, it's actually it's pretty mind blowing. Can
you talk about what that is when you're doing these
experiments to find something that you know is pretty rare.
What frequency of experiments are you doing? And then and
and then how many of them? Right? So we're looking
for rare stuff. Most of the time when you collide
to protons together, not much happens to protons come out. Occasionally,
(39:43):
you know, one in a million or one in a
billion times something different will happen. So if you want
to see a lot of examples of the rare stuff,
you've got to sift through a huge number of examples
of the boring stuff. So that's why we do as
many collisions as we can. So we do it every
twenty five nanoseconds. So we have these huge detectors at
certain which are focused around this collision points, and then
(40:05):
the accelerator runs through the heart of the detector and
it delivers two beams which cross right at that collision point.
And the beams are not like let's shoot one particle
at one other particle. You shoot like a bunch of
particles like ten to the thirteen protons at another bunch
tended of tending the thirteen protons and hope to get
(40:25):
some collisions. And then you have these bunches staggered through
your accelerator. Accelerators a big circle, so you imagine all
these little bunches zooming through the accelerator in perfect coincidence.
They overlap right at these collision points, and you get
these collisions every five nanoseconds, and every time there's a collision,
(40:47):
we take this massive digital picture, and then we have
this enormous fire hose the data that pours out of
the detector, and we have to somehow try to capture
that and analyze it and simplify and reduce it so
that we can oil it all down to answer an
actual physics question, like does this particle exist. To me,
that's one of the fun parts. I'm sort of a
(41:07):
statistics and data processing, machine learning kind of guy, data science,
and so for me, it's a really fun puzzles how
to drink from this massive fire hose of information and
answer very high level questions about the universe. It's pretty amazing.
So so Mega, we've gotten a chance to talk about
traveling at light speed, quantum teleportation, the Higgs boson. I
(41:29):
don't know if achieve it. I still have a thousand
more questions I could ask. Yeah, I'm pretty sure we're
gonna have to have you back on Daniel sometime, but
I do hope that all of our listeners will check
out your awesome book that you and Jorge have worked
on together. We have no idea, but Daniel, thanks so
much for joining us on Part Time Genius. Thank you
(41:50):
very much. A lot of fun guys, and I'd love
to be back anytime. Remember thanks again for listening. Part
Time Genius is a production of how stuff works and
wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the
(42:12):
important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Tristan McNeil
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(42:33):
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