December 29, 2017 • 42 mins
Will and Mango have so many questions: What is Quantum Teleportation? Are we all swimming in Dark Matter? And why are scientists so obsessed with smashing particles together? Luckily, we've got astrophysicist Daniel Whiteson, co-author of the wonderful new book We Have No Idea, ready to tour us through the universe. Buckle up!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 laden? No? No, I'm just I'm too nervous.
But I will say this. So it seems fair to
say that light speed plays a pretty big role in
(00:21):
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, you know, will anything
ever travel beyond light speed? Well it's a good thing.
(00:44):
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 m he their podcast listeners, Welcome
(01:19):
to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always
I'm joined by my good friend man guest Tic 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
(01:40):
recently been talking about the fact that over the past
few years there have been all these big signs 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 x excitement and confusion surrounding it, and so much more.
(02:03):
It's fun with events like these capture the world's attention.
But but sometimes these events and the science around them
can be very difficult to communicate. 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, and thank you
very much for having me on now. Daniel, this is
a really interesting partnership for this book. You know, you're
(02:26):
a particle physicist that you see Irvine doing a lot
of your research over it 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 on
(02:48):
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, but
(03:09):
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 up by Google when they put
out their latest browser, the Chrome Browser, and Scott McCloud
(03:30):
made a technical comic about the Chrome browser, and like,
if you're not into writing browsers, you might not be
into reading comics about browsers. Because 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
(03:52):
I couldn't draw these cartoons myself. Um, but of course
I was aware of Jorge and his amazing work PhD comics.
You know, he's some think 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
(04:13):
because she said, why don't you email or him and
asked him to do it, And I thought, yeah, right,
that's just like emailing Brad Pitt and asking 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,
(04:35):
but most of it was focused on what we do
know about the universe, all the amazing things that science
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 but very basic
(04:57):
open questions to the universe, really simple stuff that we
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
(05:20):
could discover in the future. And when I was a kid,
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 uh counterintuitive, like the discoveries
of quantum mechanics and relativity. I wanted to give people
(05:40):
the sense that such discoveries discoveries, that that basic scale
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 writing this book. And do 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
(06:03):
protons and speed them up to nearly the speed of light,
and then the particles inside the protons collide and turn
into little 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
(06:24):
there's enough energy budget there. So if you've poured enough
energy 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
(06:45):
made out of How is it work at its smallest levels,
what is the organizational principle for this whole ridiculous, beautiful
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 told disconnected from cosmology,
which looks at like the very big history of the
universe the future of the universe. These days, these two
(07:08):
fields have kind of converged because we're asking a lot
of similar questions. Like one of the big 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
(07:29):
in the laboratory, giving this insight into what's happening at
the very very big scale. I love that there's so
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,
(07:51):
Will general crushing things together is a good way to
start the scientific experiment. Well. Will was asking at the
beginning of the f So it 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?
(08:12):
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 of bringing some real physics into
that situation. Um. 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
(08:35):
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 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
(08:55):
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. 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 physics, because space does really weird things
like thend and expand and ripple. So if your goal
(09:18):
is not necessarily to move faster than light through space,
but just to get somewhere fast, like you want to
go from you know, 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 from the speed of light, you might want to
just compress space itself. Right, so you can bring these
(09:41):
two locations, which ostensibly are very very far apart, if
you can bring them closer 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 faster than the speed of light,
(10:04):
we might actually technically be able to eventually construct warp
drives that can get us to distant places faster than
light traveling through normal space. That's just it's as simple
as that. Really, that's all there is to it. I
assume that we're pretty close to this whole space compression thing,
like with the next five to ten years, we should
(10:25):
be able to do this. Is that right, Daniel? I
would not invest in those companies, but you know there's
a fascinating 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
(10:46):
probably just be an app on your iPhone, right because
now we just handed it from physicists to engineers, and
in current calculations, 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 Jube,
all the massive planet Jupiter. Okay, so vast incredible quantities
(11:08):
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 and 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
(11:30):
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 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
(11:51):
providing plot points and the limitations. Well, I have a
follow up question to that in terms of headlines from
earlier this 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
(12:19):
Part time Genius 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,
(12:43):
So before 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
(13:05):
see if you 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 light.
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,
(13:26):
I read those headlines, and I was pretty excited object
teleported into space. I thought, Wow, we're gonna be beaming
up to space stations in the next few years. Right,
But you're right, the media totally failed to invade that
accurately because no object was teleported into space. Um. Instead,
information was sent into space. And that's much less exciting
(13:48):
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 moving the speed of light. Right. Um,
this was more interesting because it's quantum teleportation. Right. That's
a process by which quantum information like the state of
(14:09):
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 teleportation, right. It's not like your concept where something
(14:29):
disappears and is reappeared somewhere else, resembled 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
speedling for information. Unfortunately it's not. So this headline describes them,
(14:50):
which would have been exciting if it was accurate, but
instead it was 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 limited the universe.
It's still limited to the speed of light, and it
(15:11):
doesn't actually send anything anywhere than information. So it's sort
of deflating, 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 journalists 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
(15:33):
all of its footage from this UFO program, and of
course they saw nothing there to indicate 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,
(15:58):
a summary of human and counters of a third kind,
and it's all totally 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 by touting even modest research
achievements as incredible events in human history. So unfortunately, nothing
(16:19):
was teleported into space. Otherwise I would 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 mountaintop with flags and come talk to us actually
(16:43):
on the quantum teleportation before we move on 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 of out it accurately, of what
this could mean for us. Well, it's an improved way
(17:04):
to send information. So quantum teleportation is just a copying
of quantum information like the 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
(17:28):
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
(17:52):
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 us. Right. Can you talk
a little bit about that. Yeah, this is one of
(18:14):
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 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, the air you're breathing, or the coffee you're sipping,
(18:36):
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
(18:58):
it clusters it a lessons 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
(19:20):
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
(19:40):
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 untouched
What matter sounds right? Unjudgable matter because you pass right
(20:05):
through it, right, You can't feel it and it can't
feel you. So, um, 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 the 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 it's there? Or how did
(20:26):
astro physicists 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, very wrong with our
(20:46):
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. Or you might wonder like, why
are the stars not getting thrown out into intergalactic space?
(21:07):
If you spin a merry go round and you put
ping pong balls on it, those 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 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,
(21:28):
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
(21:50):
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. Of galaxies were spending
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 some invisible sort of
(22:12):
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 they could explain it, because this is
not a small discrepancy. And one of my favorite things
about dark matter is we still know very little about it.
(22:35):
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
us 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 is the theory
of some invisible gravity giving thing, right. It's just like,
(22:58):
take the question what's the new invisible source of gravity
that explains this rotation and answer it with will maybe
some invisible gravity giving thing, right? But instead, in physics
you just tend to give it a fancy name, called
it dark matter, because then it sounds more like an answer.
But the truth is we don't really know very much
about dark matter. We know that it's there, you've seen
(23:19):
it because it causes these galaxies to rota, 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 manner 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 you know,
twenty thirty years ago, we had no idea to even
(23:43):
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 the
way you guys talk about that exactly, And to me,
(24:03):
that's the excitement. You know, is that scientific come up
and 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
everything works this way, right, We say, oh, life on
(24:27):
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
on the scale of astronomical objects. So you know, before
(24:50):
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
point we want to make in this book is that
huge fraction in the universe is not understood, which means
(25:13):
not only that there are questions we've identified that we
mean 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.
People might look back at our understanding of physics and
laugh at us, right, and say, those guys understood nothing.
(25:34):
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
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
(25:56):
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
useful thing when you know, you need philosophy even to
understand why science is important. And um, there's this counterplay
(26:17):
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, 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
(26:39):
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 we cannot see,
which means there's lots of room for people to speculate,
right and speculation wild ideas totally fun um. I think
(27:02):
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 test. So one of my favorite examples is
the multiverse. You hear this idea a lot, maybe our
universe it is part of a set of other universes
which are all weird and different, and that's a fun idea,
(27:24):
But in my view it falls squarely in the philosophy
camp because we can never test it right. These other universes.
By construction, that being another universe means it's the place
we can't interact with. You can't send a probe there
to discover it, you can't see its effects on electrons,
you can't do any sort of experiment to interact with
(27:45):
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 um by theorists
and philosophers, which is wonderful, you know, smoking in appeals
and have a lot of fun. It's important, I think,
(28:07):
to draw that line to say here our ideas we have,
but that's certainly not scientific proven. Yeah, I like some
science communicators sometimes fuzz that line a little bit more
than I'm comfortable with. I like that. We recently did
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
(28:30):
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
before we do that, why don't we take a quick break.
(28:57):
Welcome back to Part time Genius. Now we are talking
to day you Whites and co author of We Have
No 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
(29:19):
until we found it, you know, obviously we couldn't get
too too excited about it. But can you talk a
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
(29:40):
feel like. I think the discovery the Higgs boson is
really an amazing feat in human intellectual history because it
proves the power of maths and patterns. You know, the
origin of it is fifty years ago a bunch of theorists,
including a guy named Higgs. We're looking at what you
knew about particles, and it just couldn't really make sense
(30:02):
of it. You know, the mathematics were just sort of ugly.
They didn't understand how can all these particles fit together?
And what why do some of these particles have mass
and some of these particles don't have mass. It just
didn't really make sense of 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
(30:25):
to it, which is sort of fascinating, and I 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
(30:46):
in the moment, then everything just clicks together and it's
so much simpler and more beautiful. And so maybe this
is the way the universe works. Since is an idea
of something I have 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,
(31:09):
this desire for simplicity, this desire to see the universe
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
(31:31):
and ice cream and hamsters and podcasts and all that
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
(31:52):
smaller scale more simple, or more beautiful or more elegant. Well,
the question they were trying to understand is why are
some particles have this mass 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 or the w boson, these
(32:14):
other particles are very similar to the photon, very similar
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,
(32:36):
little spinning ball of stuff, right. And if you think
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
(32:59):
don't think of up stuff or it's no room in
the 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.
(33:21):
It's just like a label we put on points in space,
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,
(33:41):
other ones don't. And that's the question that we're trying
to answer, and that's where the Higgs does. The Higgs
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 in a electric field or a magnetic field,
(34:01):
but now a new kind of field, a Higgs field.
And this field interacts with particles, and some particles it
makes it harder for them to speed up and slow 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
(34:23):
it has inertia, which is another way of saying it
has mass. So the idea is the mass of these
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
(34:44):
got mass and some particles didn't get mass. And then
the prediction of that field that says, if that field exists,
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 on. So the
Higgs boson and the Higgs field are two different things,
but one sort of proof of the existence of the other.
(35:07):
So that's what we looked for at the Hadron Collider.
We tried to create enough localized energy using our collider
to create a 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 there
was just a huge celebration. Uh, it was sort of
(35:28):
like running a marathon. Honestly, it's such a long process.
We've been looking for the Higgs for decades. When I
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,
(35:48):
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
the hints, little bits of evidence here, a little bit
to Theavean's there, started to build up, slowly, slowly, slowly,
until eventually we crossed the official threshold for having enough
data to convince ourselves and decide say, yes, we can
(36:11):
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 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
(36:31):
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 on the screen and nature tells us
the answer. More of a slow 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,
(36:53):
or maybe ten tho people were involved intimately in this process.
So again, it's not like you're maybe your romantic view
of a physicist 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
(37:15):
exciting idea. It was like meetings and discussions and long
conversations and more meetings and millions of power points slides.
And you know, 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 is like, everybody, get in here.
(37:37):
Jerry saw it. Jerry pushed the big red button boom
who discovered the Higgs boson? You know, the thing is
that the Higgs is pretty rare. 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
(37:59):
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 long game. It's like, you know,
you're putting a puzzle 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
(38:19):
those little edged 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 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
(38:42):
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, 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
(39:02):
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 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
(39:24):
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, tend of tending the thirteen
protons and hope to get 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
(39:47):
accelerator in perfect coincidence. They overlap right at these collision points,
and you get these collisions every twenty five nanoseconds. And
every time there's a collision, we take this massive digital
picture and then we had 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
(40:09):
simplify and reduce it so that we can boil 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 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
(40:30):
about the universe. That's pretty amazing. So so Mega, we've
gotten a chance to talk about traveling at light speed,
quantum teleportation, the Higgs boson. I 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
(40:51):
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 parts.
I'm genius. Thank you very much a lot of fun
guys and I'd love to be back anytime every Thanks
(41:17):
again for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of
how stuff works and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant
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(41:40):
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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 laden? No? No, I'm just I'm too nervous.
But I will say this. So it seems fair to
say that light speed plays a pretty big role in
(00:21):
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, you know, will anything
ever travel beyond light speed? Well it's a good thing.
(00:44):
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 m he their podcast listeners, Welcome
(01:19):
to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always
I'm joined by my good friend man guest Tic 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
(01:40):
recently been talking about the fact that over the past
few years there have been all these big signs 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 x excitement and confusion surrounding it, and so much more.
(02:03):
It's fun with events like these capture the world's attention.
But but sometimes these events and the science around them
can be very difficult to communicate. 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, and thank you
very much for having me on now. Daniel, this is
a really interesting partnership for this book. You know, you're
(02:26):
a particle physicist that you see Irvine doing a lot
of your research over it 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 on
(02:48):
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, but
(03:09):
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 up by Google when they put
out their latest browser, the Chrome Browser, and Scott McCloud
(03:30):
made a technical comic about the Chrome browser, and like,
if you're not into writing browsers, you might not be
into reading comics about browsers. Because 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
(03:52):
I couldn't draw these cartoons myself. Um, but of course
I was aware of Jorge and his amazing work PhD comics.
You know, he's some think 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
(04:13):
because she said, why don't you email or him and
asked him to do it, And I thought, yeah, right,
that's just like emailing Brad Pitt and asking 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,
(04:35):
but most of it was focused on what we do
know about the universe, all the amazing things that science
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 but very basic
(04:57):
open questions to the universe, really simple stuff that we
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
(05:20):
could discover in the future. And when I was a kid,
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 uh counterintuitive, like the discoveries
of quantum mechanics and relativity. I wanted to give people
(05:40):
the sense that such discoveries discoveries, that that basic scale
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 writing this book. And do 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
(06:03):
protons and speed them up to nearly the speed of light,
and then the particles inside the protons collide and turn
into little 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
(06:24):
there's enough energy budget there. So if you've poured enough
energy 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
(06:45):
made out of How is it work at its smallest levels,
what is the organizational principle for this whole ridiculous, beautiful
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 told disconnected from cosmology,
which looks at like the very big history of the
universe the future of the universe. These days, these two
(07:08):
fields have kind of converged because we're asking a lot
of similar questions. Like one of the big 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
(07:29):
in the laboratory, giving this insight into what's happening at
the very very big scale. I love that there's so
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,
(07:51):
Will general crushing things together is a good way to
start the scientific experiment. Well. Will was asking at the
beginning of the f So it 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?
(08:12):
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 of bringing some real physics into
that situation. Um. 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
(08:35):
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 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
(08:55):
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. 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 physics, because space does really weird things
like thend and expand and ripple. So if your goal
(09:18):
is not necessarily to move faster than light through space,
but just to get somewhere fast, like you want to
go from you know, 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 from the speed of light, you might want to
just compress space itself. Right, so you can bring these
(09:41):
two locations, which ostensibly are very very far apart, if
you can bring them closer 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 faster than the speed of light,
(10:04):
we might actually technically be able to eventually construct warp
drives that can get us to distant places faster than
light traveling through normal space. That's just it's as simple
as that. Really, that's all there is to it. I
assume that we're pretty close to this whole space compression thing,
like with the next five to ten years, we should
(10:25):
be able to do this. Is that right, Daniel? I
would not invest in those companies, but you know there's
a fascinating 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
(10:46):
probably just be an app on your iPhone, right because
now we just handed it from physicists to engineers, and
in current calculations, 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 Jube,
all the massive planet Jupiter. Okay, so vast incredible quantities
(11:08):
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 and 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
(11:30):
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 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
(11:51):
providing plot points and the limitations. Well, I have a
follow up question to that in terms of headlines from
earlier this 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
(12:19):
Part time Genius 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,
(12:43):
So before 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
(13:05):
see if you 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 light.
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,
(13:26):
I read those headlines, and I was pretty excited object
teleported into space. I thought, Wow, we're gonna be beaming
up to space stations in the next few years. Right,
But you're right, the media totally failed to invade that
accurately because no object was teleported into space. Um. Instead,
information was sent into space. And that's much less exciting
(13:48):
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 moving the speed of light. Right. Um,
this was more interesting because it's quantum teleportation. Right. That's
a process by which quantum information like the state of
(14:09):
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 teleportation, right. It's not like your concept where something
(14:29):
disappears and is reappeared somewhere else, resembled 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
speedling for information. Unfortunately it's not. So this headline describes them,
(14:50):
which would have been exciting if it was accurate, but
instead it was 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 limited the universe.
It's still limited to the speed of light, and it
(15:11):
doesn't actually send anything anywhere than information. So it's sort
of deflating, 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 journalists 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
(15:33):
all of its footage from this UFO program, and of
course they saw nothing there to indicate 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,
(15:58):
a summary of human and counters of a third kind,
and it's all totally 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 by touting even modest research
achievements as incredible events in human history. So unfortunately, nothing
(16:19):
was teleported into space. Otherwise I would 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 mountaintop with flags and come talk to us actually
(16:43):
on the quantum teleportation before we move on 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 of out it accurately, of what
this could mean for us. Well, it's an improved way
(17:04):
to send information. So quantum teleportation is just a copying
of quantum information like the 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
(17:28):
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
(17:52):
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 us. Right. Can you talk
a little bit about that. Yeah, this is one of
(18:14):
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 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, the air you're breathing, or the coffee you're sipping,
(18:36):
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
(18:58):
it clusters it a lessons 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
(19:20):
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
(19:40):
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 untouched
What matter sounds right? Unjudgable matter because you pass right
(20:05):
through it, right, You can't feel it and it can't
feel you. So, um, 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 the 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 it's there? Or how did
(20:26):
astro physicists 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, very wrong with our
(20:46):
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. Or you might wonder like, why
are the stars not getting thrown out into intergalactic space?
(21:07):
If you spin a merry go round and you put
ping pong balls on it, those 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 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,
(21:28):
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
(21:50):
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. Of galaxies were spending
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 some invisible sort of
(22:12):
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 they could explain it, because this is
not a small discrepancy. And one of my favorite things
about dark matter is we still know very little about it.
(22:35):
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
us 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 is the theory
of some invisible gravity giving thing, right. It's just like,
(22:58):
take the question what's the new invisible source of gravity
that explains this rotation and answer it with will maybe
some invisible gravity giving thing, right? But instead, in physics
you just tend to give it a fancy name, called
it dark matter, because then it sounds more like an answer.
But the truth is we don't really know very much
about dark matter. We know that it's there, you've seen
(23:19):
it because it causes these galaxies to rota, 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 manner 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 you know,
twenty thirty years ago, we had no idea to even
(23:43):
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 the
way you guys talk about that exactly, And to me,
(24:03):
that's the excitement. You know, is that scientific come up
and 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
everything works this way, right, We say, oh, life on
(24:27):
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
on the scale of astronomical objects. So you know, before
(24:50):
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
point we want to make in this book is that
huge fraction in the universe is not understood, which means
(25:13):
not only that there are questions we've identified that we
mean 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.
People might look back at our understanding of physics and
laugh at us, right, and say, those guys understood nothing.
(25:34):
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
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
(25:56):
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
useful thing when you know, you need philosophy even to
understand why science is important. And um, there's this counterplay
(26:17):
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, 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
(26:39):
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 we cannot see,
which means there's lots of room for people to speculate,
right and speculation wild ideas totally fun um. I think
(27:02):
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 test. So one of my favorite examples is
the multiverse. You hear this idea a lot, maybe our
universe it is part of a set of other universes
which are all weird and different, and that's a fun idea,
(27:24):
But in my view it falls squarely in the philosophy
camp because we can never test it right. These other universes.
By construction, that being another universe means it's the place
we can't interact with. You can't send a probe there
to discover it, you can't see its effects on electrons,
you can't do any sort of experiment to interact with
(27:45):
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 um by theorists
and philosophers, which is wonderful, you know, smoking in appeals
and have a lot of fun. It's important, I think,
(28:07):
to draw that line to say here our ideas we have,
but that's certainly not scientific proven. Yeah, I like some
science communicators sometimes fuzz that line a little bit more
than I'm comfortable with. I like that. We recently did
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
(28:30):
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
before we do that, why don't we take a quick break.
(28:57):
Welcome back to Part time Genius. Now we are talking
to day you Whites and co author of We Have
No 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
(29:19):
until we found it, you know, obviously we couldn't get
too too excited about it. But can you talk a
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
(29:40):
feel like. I think the discovery the Higgs boson is
really an amazing feat in human intellectual history because it
proves the power of maths and patterns. You know, the
origin of it is fifty years ago a bunch of theorists,
including a guy named Higgs. We're looking at what you
knew about particles, and it just couldn't really make sense
(30:02):
of it. You know, the mathematics were just sort of ugly.
They didn't understand how can all these particles fit together?
And what why do some of these particles have mass
and some of these particles don't have mass. It just
didn't really make sense of 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
(30:25):
to it, which is sort of fascinating, and I 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
(30:46):
in the moment, then everything just clicks together and it's
so much simpler and more beautiful. And so maybe this
is the way the universe works. Since is an idea
of something I have 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,
(31:09):
this desire for simplicity, this desire to see the universe
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
(31:31):
and ice cream and hamsters and podcasts and all that
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
(31:52):
smaller scale more simple, or more beautiful or more elegant. Well,
the question they were trying to understand is why are
some particles have this mass 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 or the w boson, these
(32:14):
other particles are very similar to the photon, very similar
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,
(32:36):
little spinning ball of stuff, right. And if you think
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
(32:59):
don't think of up stuff or it's no room in
the 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.
(33:21):
It's just like a label we put on points in space,
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,
(33:41):
other ones don't. And that's the question that we're trying
to answer, and that's where the Higgs does. The Higgs
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 in a electric field or a magnetic field,
(34:01):
but now a new kind of field, a Higgs field.
And this field interacts with particles, and some particles it
makes it harder for them to speed up and slow 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
(34:23):
it has inertia, which is another way of saying it
has mass. So the idea is the mass of these
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
(34:44):
got mass and some particles didn't get mass. And then
the prediction of that field that says, if that field exists,
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 on. So the
Higgs boson and the Higgs field are two different things,
but one sort of proof of the existence of the other.
(35:07):
So that's what we looked for at the Hadron Collider.
We tried to create enough localized energy using our collider
to create a 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 there
was just a huge celebration. Uh, it was sort of
(35:28):
like running a marathon. Honestly, it's such a long process.
We've been looking for the Higgs for decades. When I
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,
(35:48):
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
the hints, little bits of evidence here, a little bit
to Theavean's there, started to build up, slowly, slowly, slowly,
until eventually we crossed the official threshold for having enough
data to convince ourselves and decide say, yes, we can
(36:11):
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 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
(36:31):
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 on the screen and nature tells us
the answer. More of a slow 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,
(36:53):
or maybe ten tho people were involved intimately in this process.
So again, it's not like you're maybe your romantic view
of a physicist 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
(37:15):
exciting idea. It was like meetings and discussions and long
conversations and more meetings and millions of power points slides.
And you know, 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 is like, everybody, get in here.
(37:37):
Jerry saw it. Jerry pushed the big red button boom
who discovered the Higgs boson? You know, the thing is
that the Higgs is pretty rare. 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
(37:59):
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 long game. It's like, you know,
you're putting a puzzle 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
(38:19):
those little edged 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 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
(38:42):
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, 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
(39:02):
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 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
(39:24):
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, tend of tending the thirteen
protons and hope to get 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
(39:47):
accelerator in perfect coincidence. They overlap right at these collision points,
and you get these collisions every twenty five nanoseconds. And
every time there's a collision, we take this massive digital
picture and then we had 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
(40:09):
simplify and reduce it so that we can boil 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 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
(40:30):
about the universe. That's pretty amazing. So so Mega, we've
gotten a chance to talk about traveling at light speed,
quantum teleportation, the Higgs boson. I 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
(40:51):
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 parts.
I'm genius. Thank you very much a lot of fun
guys and I'd love to be back anytime every Thanks
(41:17):
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 important things we couldn't even begin
to understand. Tristan McNeil does the editing thing. Noel Brown
made the theme song and does the MIXI mixy sound thing.
Jerry Rowland does the exact producer thing. Gave Louesier is
our lead researcher, with support from the research Army including
Austin Thompson, Nolan Brown and Lucas Adams and Eve. Jeff
(41:40):
Cook gets the show to your ears. Good job, Eves.
If you like what you heard, we hope you'll subscribe,
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