Rerun: Working with the Large Hadron Collider

Jonathan is joined by Daniel Whiteson of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. Daniel works in the field of experimental particle physics and conducts research using the LHC. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio,
and usually I love all things tech, but today I'm
having some issues, been having some technical glitches that I've

(00:26):
been trying to fix, and unfortunately it means that the
episode I had planned today, which was a follow up
an additional space suit episode, is probably gonna have to
wait till tomorrow. I'm going to My plan is to
have that one published instead of a tech News episode.
But I don't want to leave you without an episode

(00:48):
of the show, so I thought we would play this
episode that originally published on January seven, two thousand nineteen.
It's an episode where Daniel Whiteson of Daniel and Jorge
Explain the Universe, joined the show to talk about his
work in experimental particle physics and how his work with

(01:09):
a large Hadron collider what it was like. And you know,
if we're going to talk about technical glitches, the LHC
is a good topic because that's an entire, you know,
particle acceleration facility that had more than its share of
technical difficulties, including you know, reportedly birds. But I hope

(01:32):
you enjoy this episode and I'll be back to chat
with you again towards the end. Today we have a
very special guest on our show, someone who has worked
on really interesting problems. Is a rare occasion that I
get to talk to someone who has experienced in high

(01:54):
energy particle physics. So I want to introduce to all
of you, if you haven't listen to his amazing podcast yet,
Daniel Whitson. Dr Daniel Whitson, Welcome to the show. Hi,
thanks a lot for having me on. I am so
glad to have you here now. Daniel. You are one
half of the podcast team of Daniel and Jorge Explained

(02:16):
the Universe, and thank you for taking time away from
explaining the universe to grace my humble show with your presence.
I greatly appreciate it. Well, thanks a lot for having
me on. You guys talking about really fascinating stuff. So
it's a pleasure to be here. It's been a pleasure
listening to your show. We'll talk a little bit more
about that towards the end of the episode, but just

(02:38):
so that my listeners kind of understand where you you're
coming from before we get into work with the Large
Hadron Collider and CERN and particle physics. Tell us a
bit about yourself, all right, Well, I'm devastatingly good looking,
which is why I have a podcast, and m familiar
my my. The most important thing to know about me

(03:01):
in this context, I guess, is that I am a
high energy physicist, which means that I'm interested in studying
the universe at the smallest scale, and I do so
by smashing stuff together at the highest energy. It's like,
you know, you want to understand how things work, take
them apart, and that's basically what we do, is we
try to take the whole universe apart and understand how

(03:21):
it works. So I'm a professor at the University of
California at Irvine that's in Orange County, and I work there,
and I work also at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva,
where the actual collider is, and we have a big
team of people smashing particles together and trying to figure
out what is the smallest bit of matter and how
does it all fit together? And where how did everything

(03:42):
start and how is it going to end? And we
basically try to tackle those really big, sexy questions. Yeah,
I I love the way you describe that, the idea
of taking apart the very basic particles that make up
stuff and and and finding out what makes at work.
It's very relatable to all the stories of the various

(04:04):
innovators who got their start taking apart the various pieces
of technology they have, often to the the detriment of
their family, and then learning how it works, and then
hopefully being able to put it back together again. Except
we're looking at reality here, how the the very fabric
that makes up existence works. And uh. I also I

(04:26):
watched a great presentation that you and Jorge gave in
which you talked about your book and you talked about
the gaps and scientific knowledge, and that also made me
feel like I am all a smart person, only because
in the past I have described our understanding of the

(04:46):
universe like we're staring through a key hole and we
can only see a little bit of the illuminated room
that's beyond the keyhole, and there's stuff and shadows, So
there are things that we don't really see, and there
are elements that are out of you and and to us.
That's that's our understanding of the universe. We only see
a very narrow band of what really exists out there,

(05:07):
and our goal is to expand that over time. That's right,
and the most amazing thing in my perspective is that
we've only recently discovered that we are looking through the keyhole.
I mean, for a long time we thought we were
saying everything. We thought, well, we've seen the way the
universe is. Now, we just need to figure out how
to explain it. We made a lot of progress and
the last fifty year, in the last twenty or fifty years,

(05:31):
we've discovered that there's a lot of stuff out there
that we don't have any understanding of, dark matter, dark energy,
huge chunks of the universe which completely defy our our explanation.
That doesn't mean it can't be explained. You don't have
to go to like weird woo woo crystal energy stuff.
It just means that there's a lot more science left
to do. And for me, those are wonderful moments in

(05:51):
the history of science when you you know, you pull
back a layer of reality and discover, oh my gosh, wow,
things are totally different from what we expected, or you know,
turn is out we were only studying the the tail
of the elephant, and we need to look at the
rest of it. And and that's exciting, not because the
science is humbled and realizing that we don't understand everything,
that's that's a wonderful experience. It's exciting because it means

(06:12):
there are discoveries left to come, right, means that maybe
some of the most dramatic, most insightful realizations about the
nature of the universe might still be ahead of us.
I like thinking about how in the future and a
hundred years people might look back with great knowledge of
how the universe works and wonder what it was like
to be us when we lived in such ignorance, right

(06:34):
when we didn't know so many things about so many
basic things about the universe. Um And what you said
earlier really resonate with me about trying to figure things
out by taking them apart. I think that there's an
innate curiosity in being human. I mean, that's what makes
being human fun, it makes being being alive worth It
is that we are driven by this desire to know

(06:55):
to understand the things around us. So if you're the
kind of person who's like, how does a blender work?
Let me take it apart? Or you know how does
this thing in my car work when we look under
the hood and poke around, then you're basically a physicist.
You're the kind of person who wants to understand things
by taking them apart, by boiling them down to the
most essential elements, and using that to explain your car,
and then also your blender and then other things you

(07:16):
haven't seen before. Right, It's about learning generalizable universal truths. Yeah,
and and I would also argue that the history of
of humanity has been one in which we have attempted
to explain the why things are the way they are
for for all of our history, and the as we

(07:36):
eliminate gaps piece by piece, and knowing that we still
have enormous gaps left to fill in, we start to
really hone in on that over time we're able to
replace things where we had the explanation of a uh.
Well though, that that's the gods battling it out in Olympus,
and that's where the thunder comes from. To know now

(07:59):
we a deeper understanding to the point now where we
even are able to get a grasp on the idea
that as humans, as as we are the way we
have evolved, we have limitations in our perception. There are
things that we are capable of perceiving because we have evolved.
It was advantageous, it made sense in our environment, But

(08:20):
that doesn't mean that's everything there is out there, which
kind of leads into discussions that I've heard about, you know,
the various dimensions that we were capable of perceiving. Some
of those obviously we can. We can observe the physical dimensions,
and then once you start figuring that out, you say, well,
it may be a leap to you to think there

(08:42):
are so many more dimensions or potentially more dimensions than
the ones we can perceive. But we also know that
we can't see things in the infrared or ultra violet
UH wave forms, but with technology, we can convert that
into light that we can see. And once you start
looking at things is like that level where you say, oh, yeah,
I guess we have developed tools that let us go

(09:04):
beyond our limitations in our perception. Then it kind of
opens up your mind into the idea of now I
kind of understand how there can be things like dark
energy and dark matter that are beyond our current capability
of detecting it. Because it took thousands of years for
us to get to the point where we could, uh

(09:26):
could even indirectly observe stuff like beingfrared and the ultraviolet.
So that's sort of the approach I take with people
as well, the idea that it feels like you're taking
a big leap when you start going into things like
particle physics, when you start talking about quantum quantum effects,
because everything seems so strange. It doesn't it doesn't work
the way the classical physics work, and it's it feels

(09:49):
like you're asking people to take a leap of faith.
But once you start to build on those blocks, they say, okay,
all right, now I'm with you. Now I got it,
And that kind of brings us over to the work
that we see over at at CERN and the large
hey drunk collider. Now, one thing I like to remind
people about before before we get there. I think he's
touched on a really interesting topic there. You know, Um,

(10:10):
I think people have been thinking about mysteries for a
long time, right, And for a long time the world
was really mysterious. It was obvious that there were mysteries
you could just go outside, and there were things you
didn't understand. What is lightning? Right, Um, and it's sort
of it was a common feeling that the world was mysterious,
you know, like there are more things in the heavens
and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, right,

(10:31):
it's even in literature. But we've sort of lost that.
I think a lot of people these days, when they
walk around, they feel like they mostly understand stuff like, yeah,
we know how weather works. Maybe we can't predict it exactly,
but we understand the mechanism of it and gravity we
have an understanding of that. And the sense of experiencing
mystery on the daily basis is sort of gone because
science has made so much progress in explaining the various

(10:53):
bits around us. And I want to remind people that
the bigger questions, the larger questions questions we're asking ourselves,
like why are we here? How should we live? How
what is the history of everything? Those questions are still
totally unanswered. And uh, And as you said, I think
is really insightful about how we don't even know what
we don't know, because there's a lot of things that

(11:14):
we've only recently discovered we don't we we didn't understand
right that there's things happening around us that we're not
aware of various kinds of particles moving and even different
kinds of light that's invisible to us, as you said,
And there's really no limit on how much of that
there can be, right, I mean, we know certain things,
we know dark matters invisible. We know neutrinos are invisible.
There could be other things out there that are also

(11:35):
invisible that we just haven't even yet discovered that they're
there through some sort of very slight hints. Right, So
the amount of discoveries left remaining in the future is enormous,
which is the kind of thing that gets me all excited. Yeah,
I I have a feeling, Well, first of all, I
have a feeling I'm gonna need to fly out to
California and have have like just maybe a four hour
long conversation with you, because I haven't feel like that's

(11:57):
exactly what's going to be needed. But is I This
is the sort of stuff I love to talk about
just to anyone who will, you know, be patient enough
to let me chatter at them. Let let me ask
you a question that you you mentioned about how we
used to explain things in terms of gods, and I
think that makes a lot of sense because humans are
good at like identifying agency and willfulness in places where

(12:20):
there aren't any. Right. But there's another element to that,
which is the sort of the narrative. Right, These gods
don't just have personalities and wheels that had stories the
reasons why they were doing what they were doing. And
I feel like storytelling is a big part of who
we are as a species, and it's still even though
we're not explaining things in terms of gods, it still
drives our science. Like you know, if you asked me, um,

(12:41):
what would you do if you knew the final answer
to particle physics? Like if you could explain the whole
universe in terms of one particle? Um, you know that,
I would say, then we would want to tell a story, right,
We want to tell a story about what that means
about the universe and why the universe? Why is the
universe this way and not the other way? First we
have to figure out what way is the universe, and
then we want to know, like why that way. In

(13:02):
the end, we're still telling stories to ourselves about how
the universe came to be and what it means and
how we should live our lives. So it's a very
human endeavor. Well, certainly, I mean, we we call it matter,
and we know about antimatter, but we chose the optimist
route right when we describe, when we describe these things
that are antithetical to one another, and they they annihilate

(13:24):
one another when they come into contact. And for some
reason that we don't fully understand, we had slightly more
matter than we had antimatter, and therefore we've got stuff.
I mean, if we had been pessimists, we would call
the stuff we have the antimatter. Right, So clearly there's
a narrative issue there that's right. So here, seriously, here's
the question. Then the question is do you think if

(13:45):
we met an alien species of physicists, do you think
they would be asking the same questions or would they
be satisfied with our answers? Or do you think the
kind of questions we're asking are inherently human in some
way that we don't even understand? What an excellent question. Now, obviously,
from the scientific perspective, I have to tell you that
I have a very small sample size of intelligent life
forms that I can work from. I only have the one. Really,

(14:09):
you you mean, you're the only intelligent life form you're
I don't know, I mean of entire I'm talking about
entire species. I guess I'm not not only I mean,
I could get super nihilistic and and and very egotistical
and say, well, I can only experience my own experience,
and therefore I know I'm intelligence. But I'm just granting
everybody else that consideration. Um, that's this. This gets into

(14:34):
philosophy and then, which I also fascinated by. But I'm
a pregnantist, so eventually I get very irritated. Um, that's
an excellent question, and and honestly, the it's one that
I haven't given a lot of consideration too, largely because
I have accepted the fact, or at least accepted the
notion that any sufficiently intelligent species that may exist somewhere

(14:58):
else would be so very different from what we experience
that that the word alien only begins to describe how
we would uh define such a species, and that perhaps
their approach to understanding and explaining the universe to themselves
would be very different. But it seems like it would

(15:21):
follow a similar pattern. But I say that only because
that's what that's what has happened here. I don't have
anywhere else to draw any conclusions from. So, um, it's
so hard to imagine outside of your experience, right, It's
it's very, very difficult. Even in science, when we discover
something new, we're always describing it in terms of the
things we know. Like we want to know what is light?

(15:43):
Is it a little particle? Is it a little way?
Because of the things we know, Right, when we find
something that's totally new and different, we don't even really
have the words to describe it. So imagining what it's
like to be an alien scientist is I think it's
an impossible question. So yeah, and that's that's why I
posed it to you. It's why it's I I while
I find science fiction endlessly entertaining, I love science fiction.

(16:06):
I also always I roll my eyes a little bit
when I see the Star Trek approach of every alien
race is a humanoid with slightly different bumps on their head,
and they speak the English the same way. Yeah, the
Universal Translator has no problem picking up what their speech
patterns are. So that like, even when you use the
Universal translator, uh the you know, d O sex Macina

(16:30):
coming in and saying, oh, yeah, this is going to
translate everything magically. You think you kind of thing a
sample size, don't you before you really get a grasp
on it. But I mean, we have a hard enough trouble,
hard enough time even on Earth sometimes understanding human cultures
from around the globe, you know, understanding how to interact
with aliens. I think it's going to be hopeless. Like

(16:50):
if we ever heard a message from aliens, and you know,
even decoding it would be a huge problem if you
could even get past that. I have challenges understanding some
of my relatives, and we all speak the same language
and arguably come from the same Sure are you sure
they all come from Earth? I mean that might be
an explanation. I got an uncle that's questionable, but pretty
much everyone else I got a pretty good handle on. Alright,

(17:11):
this is this is great. This is gonna be an
eighteen partner. Guys. I'm just gonna sit here and and
and and monopolize Daniel's time for you want to you
want to talk about the large Dan Collider rather than
philosophy of alien civilization. I wouldn't say rather, I'll just
say that those were what my questions were about. Well,
you know there's one topic which connects them, um, which

(17:33):
is the one way we might discover an alien civilization
is by first detecting their particle physicists. I have not
heard this. It might be if somebody's if aliens are
building like enormous particle colliders like the size of a
solar system, and we might eventually like sweep through the
essentially the pollution from that part from that particle accelerator

(17:57):
and discover them in that way. That would be pretty
crazy way defined an alien species, but that would be
awesome because they would It would tell us that, hey, look,
particle physics is not just a human thing, it's a
universal thing. Everyone wants to know what the universe has
made out of, and everyone's figuring it out by smashing
step together. So that would be pretty exciting discovery. It
is interesting I had not heard about that particular kind

(18:18):
of an idea. I've heard of, of course, enormous constructs
that could especially when you talk about things like the
Kardashov scale and you're thinking about like the dice and
sphere and that kind of stuff. These hypothetical um machines
that would need to exist in order to to take
advantage of, say an entire solar system's energy output, which

(18:39):
would be necessary to reach those higher levels of civilization
that we've heard about, but I hadn't heard about. I
hadn't thought about a particle accelery the size of a
solar system. To be perfectly honest, the Large Hadron Collator
is is a big enough beast for me to try
and get my mind wrapped around. I mean they're a
pretty big and pretty expensive. So yeah, the solar system

(18:59):
sizelder is going to take another level of civilization before
we can afford that kind of equipment. Yeah, Daniel and
I will be back with more about the LHC and
just a moment, but first let's take a quick break.
So getting to the Large Hadron Collider, Uh, that would

(19:22):
you know? And CERN as well. A lot of people
think of of CERN is just because the Large Hadron
Collider got so much press a few years ago when
it was when they were preparing to bring it up
online and they were starting to stub up the energy levels.
I think a lot of people just associated those two
as being uh the only real like the CERN is
just that's the agency to oversee the Large Hadron Collider.

(19:43):
I like to remind people that CERN is also the
organization where because CERN exists. We have a worldwide web.
I mean the web started from Tim berners Lee, who
was working for CERTAIN at the time. So, uh, I
like to remind people that it's beyond that. But let's
talk a bit so. So CERTAIN is a European agency

(20:04):
that is a scientifically oriented agency looking into things like these,
these high energy reactions. And the large Hadron Collider is
a particle accelerator. Uh, kind of give us an overview
of what the LHC is for for someone who has
heard the term but they don't really get they don't

(20:24):
grock it entirely, alright, sure, Um, the large hadron collider.
The basic idea is, let's figure out what's inside matter.
Let's figure out what's inside matter, and let's do that
by smashing particles together. So what you do with the
large hadron collider the word large it obviously just means
it's really big. Hadron is a kind of particle, and

(20:47):
proton is the example of it, so you could also
call it the large proton collider. Um, And we take protons,
which are essentially just the nucleus of hydrogen. So you
start with hydrogen gas, which is easy to get. Heat
it up. So the electrons boil off, and you're left
with just the nucleus, which is protons. And what we
do is we give those protons a kick. We use
electromagnetic waves to push them, and we push them faster

(21:09):
and faster and faster and faster until they're going about
the speed of light. And then we smash them into
each other. And the idea is, see what comes out.
See what kind of weird mysterious quantum mechanical magic happens
to give you new kinds of matter and new weird
particles um. But as you said, the Large Hadron Collider
is sort of a flagship property, flagship experiment, but certain

(21:33):
is much broader than that. It's a it's a European organization,
but it's also international. I mean, I've I've been there
many summers, and you sit at a table at the
restaurant and there's people speaking all sorts of languages. You know,
this Italian at this table, and Russian at that table,
and Tie at the other table, and Chinese over here,
and you meet people from hundreds of countries, well not hundreds,
but more than a hundred countries. And it's a it's

(21:55):
a super international place, which is really wonderful and right
now it really is the center of the world, world
and the Solar System, and you know, maybe the galaxy
in terms of particle physics. But we do more than
just the Large Hadron Collider. We also have experiments studying
the mysterious particle called the neutrino. Neutrinos are produced by
the Sun and the surface of the Earth is just

(22:15):
bombarded with neutrinos, but they're mostly invisible to us. They
don't interact with us, but they have a lot of
really interesting properties that we don't understand. So CERTAIN does
a lot of neutrino physics as well. Um they do
cosmic ray physics, looking at weird particles from space. They
do a big variety of particle physics. And CERTAIN has
played a big role in politics as well. I don't
know if you're aware, but CERTAIN was founded after World

(22:37):
War Two, the idea being let's get all the scientists
of Europe to work together on projects rather than hiding
in their own labs and hating each other, and sort
of like using science as this common human bridge, like
let's get connected. Let's not have our own like individual
weapons projects. Let's find something we can all work together
on in a positive way. And I think it's really

(22:57):
credited with tying European science together in a way that's
made it more effective. And you know, building harmonies between
nations is also good, and I know that personally at
certain I've eaten a lot of weird food from different
countries and that's helped me understand, you know, um, how
why the Belgians like horse meat and why the Chinese
eat these weird things. And it's a fun cultural experience

(23:17):
as well as scientific. Well yeah, and and uh, you know,
getting into some of the fun stuff. Well, we'll talk
about it later. But I love reading about, uh things
that remind us that scientists are also human. I mean,
it's it's easy to kind of forget from a layman perspective.
You you hear about science, and you hear about scientists,
and it tends to almost be another for people who

(23:43):
are not necessarily involved in science, or are not they
don't work with scientists, and so they start to think
of that as their own category of living thing. There's
a scientist kind of like doctors. There's doctors, they're scientists,
and uh, well it's like that time that you meet
your middle school science teacher at the grocery store, like

(24:03):
buying cereal and you're like, what breakfast? This is not
stro strain does not. Scientists have families and ambitions and
disappointments and uh and rock rock groups, as it turns out,
in rock groups and you know, ankle injuries and all
the same sort of things that people have. Absolutely, so
what experiment at the LHC did you are you working with? Specifically,

(24:27):
they're different because they're different ones that are associated with
different points along the LHC. As I understand it, where
it's different essentially collision points that are looking at very
specific of the byproducts of these high energy collisions. That's right.
So we have two beams of protons um, one going
one way around the circle, the other going the other way.

(24:49):
And if somebody out there is wondering, well, why is
it a circle, the reason is the circle is that
it takes a while to get protons up to high
enough speed. That's what we want to do, is we
want to reuse those little boosters. The circle is essentially
a string of little boosters. Each one gives a little
kick and gets it going faster and faster, and so
if you can spin it around multiple times that you
can get it going faster and faster. It's like when

(25:11):
your kids on the Merry go round or nothing merry
go around. What is that thing called the at the
playground that spins around? Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
I honestly don't know the name of that either. The
vominator the vominator um uh. And and you put them
on there and you spin it, you keep pushing. It
goes faster and faster. So that's why it goes in
a circle. Um. And in order to bend them in
a circle, we have these really strong magnets. So the

(25:33):
way the collider works is it's a kick to make
it faster and then a magnet to bend it to
go in a circle. And because we want to collide
the protons, we actually have two of these. We have
one going one way and other than protons going the
other way, and so four places around the ring we
cross those beams, right, we try to collide them. And
and also it's not individual proton. It's not like we

(25:55):
put one proton in the in one beam and another
proton the other beam and we zoomed around and we
smashed one proton. It's really hard to get protons to
hit each other because they're so small um, and so
we actually have like a little gas of protons. It's
a we call it a technical term is a bunch
of protons, and it's you know, tend to some number
of protons that we passed through another gas of protons

(26:17):
hoping to get some collisions. And so there's four places
around the ring that this happens, and each one is
surrounded by a massive set of detectors um to observe
what happens. Think of it like a really big digital camera.
And I work on one of those. And the name
of the detector is the Atlas detector, which has like
which sets the record from maybe the worst scientific acronym

(26:39):
ever because it has an acronym inside. I think ATLAS
stands for a large toroidal LHC apparatus. It's the most
tortured acronym ever. Anyway, Atlas surrounds one of the collision
points and we smash the protons together there and that's
where the magic happens. And you might be thinking, you know,

(27:00):
if you smash protons together, all you can learn about
is what's inside protons. Right the way, if you take
your blender apart. You can learn about what's inside blenders.
That's true, and we can learn about what's inside blenders,
but what's inside protons um. But we can also do
something else because of the magic of quantum mechanics. What
happens when you collide a proton and another proton is

(27:20):
that the particles inside them interact. So inside a proton
we have quarks, up quarks and down corks, and those
quirks can interact and they can actually annihilate, which means
that they convert from mass from little bits of stuff
flying through the particle collider into energy. Okay, so the
particles are gone, the stuff that made them up is
destroyeds turned into energy, and then that energy gets turned

(27:44):
back into mass because a little blob of energy is
very unstable, doesn't like they hang out very long, and
so it turns back into mass, and it doesn't have
to turn back into the same kind of stuff that
it's started from. So you can turn for example, two
up corks, you can annihilate them together, turn them into
a ball of energy, and then they can turn into
muans or electrons or other weird kinds of particles. And

(28:07):
it's not required that it's made of the same stuff
because the stuff has disappeared, it's been annihilated. So it
really is like modern day alchemy. You know, we're turning
one kind of stuff into another kind of stuff, and
that's magical because it means we can create any kind
of stuff that's sort of on the universe's menu. We
don't have to know it's there in advance. We just

(28:29):
pour enough energy into the collisions and eventually all the
kinds of stuff will pop out. So it's it's really
like an exploration machine. It's like saying, what's out there,
what's on Nature's list of particles? What can we make
if we put enough energy into the collider. And so
that's how we smash protons together to try to figure
out what is the list of particles that the universe

(28:51):
has on the list of sort of allowed states. And
that's that's what we're doing to try to get inside
into this question of what is the universe made out of.
That's InCred credibly cool, like I've never heard it described
that way. So too, the thought of of smashing these
protons together at incredibly high energies and then you end
up as part of that essentially almost like the proto

(29:14):
energy that can convert into various different types of things
based on possibly criteria that we don't fully understand. I mean,
obviously you go. And those are the laws we're trying
to figure out, you know. We're trying to write down
mathematical equations that predict how often you'll see this kind
of particle, how often you see that kind of particle,
And the kinds of particles that we've studied, you know,

(29:35):
electrons and mues whatever. We understand how those are made,
and we can calculate very precisely how often we should
see them and uh, and what energies and so that's
the kind of thing we study. We we understand in
pretty and pretty good detail why some particles are made
and when and how often. What we're looking for is
the weird stuff, the stuff we haven't predicted, or the
stuff we hadn't anticipated, or you know, the things that

(29:57):
people have predicted but we haven't seen yet. And those
things tend to be more rare, which is why we
smash the particles together so often. We do it every
twenty five nanoseconds, all day, all year long. And the
reason is most of the stuff that happens is boring.
We've seen it before. Occasionally, very rarely, something weird will
happen and that'll give us a clue about maybe a

(30:18):
new kind of rare particle. So I imagine if you're
doing this that frequently with that many protons, knowing not
that all of them are are colliding, but still a
good amount of them are UM and you have these
four different points where they're all gathering data that you're
you're getting getting a few zeros and ones out of there.

(30:40):
There's a lot I'm guessing a lot of information gets
generated all the time through these experience. It's a it's
a tidal wave of data. Every time we have a collision,
we read out the whole detector, which has a hundred
million different detector channels. So it's a massive basically digital
image of the detector every every every twenty five nanoseconds

(31:02):
UM and so that's pretty that's a pretty large volume
of data UM and we it's so big that we
can't even save it all, right, we if we saved
it all, it would take a huge amount of resources
and we wouldn't have no time to go through it.
So what we do, and most of it is not
very interesting of what happens is just like two protons
come in, they kind of bounce off each other, two

(31:23):
protons come out. You know, it's rare that you actually
have them, like a deep collision that interacts with the
particles inside that makes something weird. And so what we
do is we have this system we call it the trigger,
that makes a keep or kill decision on the fly,
and it says was it interesting enough to save? If so,
then shunt it down the down the view the wires

(31:43):
towards the disk. If no, throw it away. And so
we have to make these keep or kill decisions every
twenty five nanoseconds. And when it's gone, it's gone. It's
not like it's saved to back up and you can
go through it another time. It's just we just toss
it out. And so that's a really vital system that's actual.
The part that my group works on is this trigger system? Interesting? Yeah,

(32:04):
I always thought when I was learning more about this,
I wrote an article about how the large hadron collider
works as part of my work for How Stuff Works.
And while I was working on it, it struck me
just how amazing the actual apparatus is of creating these
beams and steering them and creating the collision points. And

(32:28):
then it occurred to me that as challenging as it is,
you know, as much learning and engineering and all the
expertise that would be required to make such a thing happen.
As impressive as that is, it's it's also incredibly impressive
to think about how do you deal with the information

(32:49):
that you generate from such a thing. It's so large,
and the ability to differentiate between what is interesting versus
what has already been known and therefore like this is
something that we don't necessarily need to consider because it's
this is this is like we might as well have
this etched on the side of a mountain already. We're good,

(33:09):
let's just concentrate this other stuff. Um. And as you
start to look at the challenges that people have with
big data in general, which is orders of magnitude smaller
than one is being generated at the LHC. But you
look at those challenges just like businesses who are saying like,
we don't even know what what data we have at

(33:30):
this point, and you think, well, that's troubling. Then you realize, well,
if we're having trouble with that, imagine the challenge of
sifting through all that information to find these gems, these
these indications of something unknown or not fully understood, and
it boggled my mind. So to me, that is one

(33:50):
of the the huge achievements was not just the incredible
technological triumph of building a particle accelerator as large and
as powerful as the LHC, but then creating the way
to deal with the information that's generated as a result.
And I think a lot of people don't necessarily appreciate
that or understand that, because they're just thinking of, uh,

(34:14):
there's probably conceptualizing. You know, these these particles hitting each
other really at high speed, and then there's maybe a
flash of light or something, and then there's a little
squiggly line that goes off into the distance and you think, oh,
that was a cork right now. It's it's because these
are so far outside the normal experience, it's hard to
think of. Well, I'll tell you some details about it.

(34:35):
That's actually the part of it that I'm most interested in. Um.
But first, the human side of it is that this
apparatus is so complex that everybody who participates and it's
you know, tens of thousands of scientists all working together.
Certainly not my project by myself. Everybody who participates only
does a little bit. You know, the people who specialize
in getting the beams to go really high speed, and

(34:56):
people who specialize in focusing the beams, and people who
specialize in building the detectors that surround the beam, and
people who specialize in um in the trigger, and people
who specialize in analyzing the data. And one of the
cool things is that you can specialize. You can say
I really like climbing around the detector with a wrench
and I want to spend my days doing that, or
you can say, oh, I'm really interested in the data

(35:16):
reduction problem, and so we sort of get to attract
all types and people who are good at different things,
and everybody gets to do the part they want rather
than having to do all of it by themselves. Um So,
I think that's really fun. And the part that I'm
most interested in is exactly what you were just mentioning,
is how do you go from this huge pile of
data to saying things about the universe right to say

(35:37):
I've got all these zeros and ones. How do I
then say, oh, look we have a Higgs boson. We
know it exists or we found dark matter or something
like that. And and one of the problems is that
we don't create these particles and then like have them
in a jar. It's not like we're producing a pile
of higgs bosons and we can point them to them
and say, look, these are higgs bosons. You can tell
you can touch them, or they have some weird property

(35:58):
or something right the way, like in condensed matter, they
can make new kinds of goo and then they can
show it to you and then has with strange effects
or something. The higgs bosons that we produce only last
for like ten to the minus twenty something seconds. So
this this picture I told you where the corks collide,
they turned into something um some energy. Then they turned
into a new particle. That's true, but that new particle

(36:20):
might only last for a really really short amount of
time because a lot of these particles are very heavy
and unstable, and they don't like to live very long.
Unlike you know, electrons or protons, which can last for
billions or trillions of years, we don't even know. Some
of these particles are inherently unstable and they turn into
other particles. And so what we see in our detector
is never direct proof of that new particle. Instead, it's

(36:43):
always indirect evidence. It's like, um, you came to a
UM came to an intersection, and you see, you know,
shards in the ground. You see glass over here, and
you see steal over there, and there's a dead body
over here, and you have to figure out what happened.
It's always like that that we're looking at what out
of the collision and trying to figure out what happened
in the middle. And so a lot of what we

(37:04):
do is is really complicated statistical inference. We say, given
the data that we saw, which theory of the universe
is more likely in the theory with the Higgs boson
or without the Higgs boson. So most of the actual
work involved is in constructing those two hypotheses and comparing
them to the data, saying, how can we analyze the data,
how can we um you know, plow through the data

(37:26):
in a way so that these two hypotheses give different predictions.
Like in the case of the search for the Higgs boson,
we were looking for collisions that had to photons coming out.
So two protons come in, two photons come out, right,
two little beams of light. And that's because the higgs
boson um sometimes turns into two photons, so we're looking

(37:47):
for two photons. Problem is, there are other things that
also turned into two photons, lots of ways to make
two photons that aren't the Higgs boson. But if you
did make the Higgs boson and it turned into two photons,
then it would turn into two photons with a certain
amount of energy. That amount of energy is connected to
how much mass is in the Higgs boson. So we

(38:08):
did is we just said, let's look at all the
collisions that turned into two photons, and let's just compare,
and we made sort of a plot where we said,
on the x axis is the amount of energy and
the collisions and then why access is the number. So
if you're envisioning this, we have one theory that says
there should be a smooth distribution, and then what the
theory with the Higgs boson says, well, there should be

(38:29):
a smooth distribution, but then you should you should get
a bump, you should get an enhancement around the mass
of the higgs. So one theory is there is no
Higgs boson and you should get a bunch of just
random collisions with two photons no special energy levels. And
the other theory is you have a Higgs boson, which
means you get extra production of two photon events and

(38:49):
they should cluster and they should all have a similar energy.
So if you make this uh this plot, you should
get a bump near the mass of the Higgs. And
so essentially we have two hypotheses. We say no Higgs
boson or Higgs boson, and then we look at the data.
So we've done the hard work of constructing two possible
ideas and figuring out what question to ask the data.

(39:11):
That's always the crucial things. What question are you asking
the data? And we've composed the question in a way
that we hope the data can answer it. And that's
how we discover the Higgs boson is the data followed
one curve, the curve with a bump in it, and
not the smooth curve, the curve that had no Higgs boson.
So a lot of the work we do is involved
in in analyzing that data, and because it's such a

(39:34):
big project, we have people specializing in these areas, and
this is my area specialty is analyzing this data and
one of my other interests is in computer science and
artificial intelligence, And in the last five years we've been
borrowing really heavily from computer science all these new tools
they've developed to do really fantastical artificial intelligence to recognize patterns.

(39:56):
We found ways to take those tools and apply them
to these quests to say, to artificial intelligence tools, can
you find patterns in this data? Can you learn to
find Higgs bosons in these ones and zeros um and
separate them from things that are not Higgs bosons but
look like them. So we've had a lot of fun
bringing in ideas from other fields. We don't invent a
lot of this stuff by ourselves. We sort of you know,

(40:18):
we have a nail and we sift around for somebody
nearby who might have a hammer. Mm hmm. Well, that
to me is always a fascinating thing as well. It's
it's a different level of innovation where you are thinking,
rather than let's let's invent a brand new tool to
do this thing, you say, well, do we have any
tools that perhaps are not currently being used to do

(40:40):
this thing, but with some some work, we could repurpose
them for this thing. Um exactly. It's usually it's a
happy discovery. Yeah. I remember going over to the computer
science department it was like two thousand twelve and describing
this project and saying, look, here's the problem we have.
We don't have a tool that can solve this problem.
What do you have? And they said, oh, my gosh,

(41:01):
we have the perfect tool. Currently we're using it to
solve this other problem. And I was like, well, what
problem are you solving and they said, oh, we're trying
to figure out how to answer the question is there
a cat in this Internet video? Right? Which is like
the perfect example of how of a hard but relevant problem,
Like it's not easy to say, here's a video, can
you tell me if there's a cadet? It's the kind

(41:22):
of thing it's easy for a person, but it's really
hard for a computer program. Right, how do you define
a cat? And then it's moving through the videos like
different colors of cats, cats, of different behaviors. It's a
difficult problem and it's one where there's a lot of
data available. So the computer scientists latched onto this problem
not because it was important or particularly interesting or useful,

(41:42):
but just because it was hard and they had a
lot of data. So when I came to them, with
another problem that was hard where we had a lot
of data but actually had some like scientific value and
it sounded cool. They were very excited, So they're excited
to get to use their tool and something that was
actually real event into society, into physics and to science.
And we were excited, of course to use their awesome

(42:04):
tool which worked really, really well. So it's usually a
sort of a peanut butter and chocolate situation when you
can find this sort of crossovers nice. I like. I
like the peanut butter chocolate analogy. Daniel and I have
more to say about the LHC, but before we get
to that, we're going to take another quick break. The

(42:27):
neat thing up to me about the machine learning process
that you were talking about with with identifying cats and videos.
Taking an approach like that where again seemingly if you
if you explain that to someone, they sound they say, well,
that sounds like it's trivia hill. It's I mean, it
may be a hard computer problem, but what's the purpose.
And my argument to them has always been, well, a

(42:49):
human can immediately tell if the computer was right or
wrong when it or the machine was right or wrong
when it comes to its conclusion and therefore go in
and tweak the waitings of the various decisions points that
if you're using an our official neural network, you change
the waitings of the the various values so that it
can slowly hone in on what is it to be

(43:10):
a cat and and understand what catness really is, not
not the character from Hunger Games, but what catness really is.
And that one, yes, exactly, that's that's exactly what you
want to do, right If you're trying to create a
tool like this, you want to pick a goal where
a human can say, yes, the the computer has managed

(43:33):
to hit that goal, or no, the computer has not.
So that way, once you've perfected the approach and you
can then start to apply it to things where uh,
we don't have as full of an understanding. It's the
difference between supervised learning with machine learning and unsupervised learning.
And and to me, that's a very fascinating area of study.

(43:54):
I've talked about that a lot on tech stuff as well,
and uh, it also gets into other issues that I
won't I won't dive into here, things like the the
need for transparency for these kind of systems so that
we understand how they get to their conclusions and it's
not just a black box, etcetera, etcetera. But I digress.
How does it know what's a cat? Exactly? Exactly? Interpreting

(44:15):
these networks is very important. Yeah, if you get to
a point where you watch a video and you say, oh,
I didn't see a cat in there, but the computer
says there's a cat in there, And the computer says, no,
there absolutely as a cat in there. Just because you
didn't see it doesn't mean it's not there. And then
you start to get a little worried. You're thinking, are
we are we heading toward how territory here? Let's uh,
let's pump the brakes a little bit and find out
how you got them happy to see to the computers

(44:37):
the job of determining whether is a cat in the video?
They're better than I am. You say that, but I
find cat video so cathartic. Um. So this one thing
I wanted to touch on just briefly, um, and that
might be difficult to do. But yeah, we mentioned Higgs
boson quite a quite a bit. And how would you

(44:59):
describe what the eggs boson is to someone who's interested
in it but doesn't have that background in in physics. Yeah,
so the Higgs boson is fascinating a particle, and it's
a sort of part of the answer to the question
what is stuff? You know, we want to understand what
are things made out of? A part of that is

(45:20):
understanding like what am I made out of? What is
the substance of me? And you imagine that if you
take yourself apart, you're made out of molecules. Those molecules
made out of atoms. Those atoms are made out of
protons and electrons and neutrons, and the protons are made
out of quarks. So at this point we can describe
everything that you're made out of in terms of quarks

(45:40):
and electrons um. But what we still don't know is
what are those made out of? Like do they get
a little scoop of universe stuff? You know, there's some
sort of basic matter unit, and we don't understand like
how do they have mass? Where does their mass come from?
And it's a mystery because in our theory, these particles

(46:01):
are not little balls. Like when I say a particle,
you're probably imagining like a little spinning beach ball, right,
a tiny little dot of actual stuff, but something with
extent to its mo with size. Well, in our current theory,
these particles don't have any size. Their dots there points
in space, which means where is the stuff to them? Right?
Where is the mass? Where does the mass come from? Um,

(46:23):
there's no room for any mass in a point. Right.
If there's mass, there have infinite density, which makes no
sense at all. You have like all these tiny black holes.
So the Higgs boson is in a way is a
way to answer that. What it does is it says
that the mass the particles have doesn't come from a
little scoop of universe stuff that they got. Instead, you
have to think of it's sort of like a charge.

(46:45):
Like when I tell you an electron has a negative charge.
That doesn't bother you. But what if I told you
electron is a point particle there's no room for it.
Would you ask where does the negative charge go? Or
is there room for the negative charge? You just think
of negative charge is sort of like a lay bowl,
something that you can apply to a tiny dot. We
should think of mass the same way. Mass is not

(47:06):
a little serving of universe stuff. It's like a charge,
and a charge is something that tells us how things interact.
So an electron has a negative charge, which means it
you know, um gets repelled from positive stuff, and they
can interact with photons and things like that. Um particles
that have mass. Um those particles that have mass, they
have mass, which is a charge. It tells us how

(47:27):
it interacts with the Higgs boson. So the Higgs boson
is the thing that gives these that that interacts with
these particles and makes them move as if they had mass,
So they have something the label on them, and the
higgs boson interacts with them if you have if you
have a lot of mass, higgs boson interacts with them
a lot, and that's what gives them inertia. It makes
makes it hard for them to speed up or hard

(47:49):
for them to slow down. Right, And so that's what
the higgs boson does, is it gives mass to these
particles or explains how a tiny little particle can have
any mass at all. And the fascinating thing is that
the idea has been around for decades before we actually
found it. Some theorist was looking at the list of
particles and the math behind them and saying this doesn't

(48:11):
really make sense, like how do these particles, how can
these particles have mass. There's no way to give them
mass in our theory. Like, we have a really beautiful
theory that would work perfectly if all the particles in
the universe had no mass, But the particles do have mass,
and when you try to add mass in various ways,
it just doesn't work mathematically. It breaks all sorts of
other rules. So he came up with a way to

(48:33):
give math to these particles by having them interact with
this other new particle we've never seen before. And the
thing I love about that is that it's it's purely aesthetic.
It's like philosophical. It's like saying, I'm looking at all
these puzzle pieces and it seems to be one missing.
This whole story, right, This more back to the idea
of a story. This whole story would make much more
sense if there was one more character in it. It

(48:53):
would just click together, would be symmetric, it would be beautiful,
it would mathematically look pretty. And so he said, well, abe,
there is one, right, so let's go look for it.
And it was so compelling an idea that we spent
decades and billions of dollars looking for it and then
actually found it. Right, what a triumph for theoretical physics.
To say, just in my mind, I can think about
the patterns of the universe and predict what else is

(49:15):
out there that we've never seen. To me, that's incredible. Yeah,
I love that. It's a story where we take a
look at at an idea that's that's largely fleshed out,
and then we think, there's this would work so great
if only there was this thing. You know what, I'm
just gonna I'm going to create the mathematics here. I'm

(49:38):
gonna I'm gonna figure out mathematically how this thing could
exist if everything else we've assumed is more or less right,
And then wow, that looks really nice. Boy, it would
be great if that thing exists. We should find out
if that thing exists, and then and then a lot
of time and thought is put to it. Not obviously

(49:59):
I'm trivial I saying, I'm very much generalizing. But to me,
it's just it is beautiful, but it's also there's like
a level there's a level of beautiful absurdity to it
that I find interesting from my perspective, not being a
physicist right where to me, it's it's I don't know,
you sound like you kind of are an amateur physicist.
I mean, you think about these ways like a physicist.

(50:19):
You know, it's not all about the mathematical training. It's
that's what about the front, the way you think, and
the way you ask questions. So I'm happy to bestow
you upon you the dubious honor being a deputized amateur physicist. Excellent.
I cannot I cannot wait to abuse my authority alcoholic
looking certificate in the mail pretty soon. Yeah, you'll see
me walking into restaurants saying, give me a good table.

(50:42):
I am an honorary physicist, and they'll say, yeah, no,
it doesn't work for for podcast celebrity either. I can
tell you from ten years of experience. Yeah, it's the
I have the level of fame that is almost but
not quite completely useless, And honestly I'm okay with that.
Um well, let me let me shift this a little bit.
We'll kind of uh get toward the end of our

(51:04):
conversation here to talk about some more silly fun stuff.
One of the things I think a lot of people
heard about when the LHC was, you know, still powering up.
It was a very long process. In fact, it was
longer than we had anticipated because there were some problems
that we encountered along the way. I say we as
if I had anything to do with it. You're an
honor Earth physics. Now you can say we they're excellent,

(51:26):
and it's it's uh, it's so good to join the collective.
But the there were there were some issues, and it
also led to a lot of speculation, much of it
completely baseless from people who had little to no understanding
of what was happening, but apparently access to wonderful platforms

(51:46):
from which they could espouse these these baseless claims. But
we had everything from people saying this is going to
create black holes without really one understanding what a black
hole is to understand inning if that were in fact
to happen. The time frame we're talking about, and the size,
the the uh of it, and and what energy level

(52:09):
we'd be talking about less than what a mosquito generates
when it flaps its wings, for example, and at a
at a at a time that's so small that is
impossible for us to think of it. We can we
could look at a measurement, We could look at a
number with a whole bunch of zeros, you know, a dot,
a bunch of zeros and then a one after it,

(52:30):
and think, oh, that's how long it is based on
you know, point zero zero zero, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, one seconds.
But you can't by the time you think that, so
countless number of those have passed. And so to me,
that was one of those things that I found funny
and infuriating at the same time, this sort of misconception about, oh,

(52:51):
the LHC is a doomsday device that is going to
end all life because we're going to create a black
hole that will suck up the entire universe. There's even,
as I recall, there's a website that had a very funny,
very amateurish gift of a picture supposedly from a security
camera outside the LHC just getting sucked in to a

(53:15):
single point as if a black hole had been created,
and I thought, wow, that's amazing. That's amazing connection to
be able to continue to broadcast while spaghettification is happening.
My favorite website is called has the Large hage On
Collider destroyed the world yet? Dot com? We promise as
physicist to always keep up to date, right, so if

(53:37):
you go to that website and it says yes, then
you know, yeah, you might wanna, you might want to,
you know, might make some plans, But yeah, this is
a this is a common thing that's raised, and I
think it's reasonable for people to wonder, like our physicists
going to trigger some sort of universal apocalypse which ends
society as we know it. It's a fair question, um,

(53:57):
But it's also reasonable for us to lean on physicists
expertise and answering the question. In this case, I think
Cerain has done an excellent job of taking this concern seriously.
So for those who don't know, there really is a
theory that we could be creating miniature black holes at
the large A Run collider. The idea is that gravity
might be very very power. Gravity, which is the weakest force,

(54:19):
might actually be very very powerful if you bring things
really close together, like the close the size you know,
the width of a proton is sort of close together.
So if you smash these protons together really high energy,
they might get close enough where the gravity gets really
really strong. I meaning you could create black holes, because
black holes are essentially displaces where gravity gets really strong.

(54:40):
And if that's the case, those black holes, if they
last long enough could sit there and sort of swallow matter.
But you know, there's lots of reasons not to be
worried about that. First of all, we think if these
black holes are created, they wouldn't last very long. They
would radiate into nothing using Hawking radiation. And if they
and and we believe that collisions have been happening for

(55:00):
a long long time, like we've been being hit by
particles from space for ever basically, and those particles are
traveling much faster than the particles of the large change
on colider. So if collisions of particles we're going to
cause Earth destroying black holes, it would have happened already.
And so there's a pretty in depth analysis of this
um And I think one thing that's funny about is

(55:22):
sort of the social aspect of it. Like if you
ask a physicist, is it possible for the l AC
to destroy the universe, to destroy the Earth. The answer
is technically, yes, it's possible. You don't want to talk
about exactly, But there's a difference between, you know, a
scientific answer and a sort of a public relations answer
where it's possible but not to the level where it's

(55:44):
really worth talking about. Like it's possible for me to
disappear in quantum mechanically appear in Paris. Sure it's not impossible,
but it's the real The odds are so remote, and
nobody should factor that into their plans. And that's really
what people are asking about, Like, is this possible at
the level where we need to worry about it and
make policy changes or you know, use it to base
decisions on And the answer is no. Um. But you know,

(56:06):
we as humans are pretty bad about thinking about dangers
and making decisions based on that. You know, you'll worry
about being struck by lightning or being eaten by sharks,
but we don't worry too much about handgun safety this
kind of stuff. So as you on, as we we
have our policies upside down, or even you know, the
likelihood of getting in even a minor accident in a car,
I mean, that's incredibly likely compared to these other things.

(56:30):
But these other things because they I think largely because
they and they tap into that same part of our
brains that finds fascination in the unknown. There's there's that
related element, the fear of the unknown. The two are
very close. And the less you know about something the
more likely you are to fear it um. And paradoxically,

(56:52):
also the more you know about something, depending on what
it is, the more you might start to fear it. Um.
So it's it's a really interesting Oh boy, be human.
Sure is great, um. But in the end, it's all about,
you know, trying to answer these questions and exploring the unknown,
and to me, that's always worth it. The guys who
jumped in a ship and sailed into the ocean not
knowing what they were gonna find, you know, they were

(57:13):
part of that. It's a it's a long legacy of
exploration and to me that's one of the most exciting
things we can do as a species. Daniel, thank you
so much for joining our show. Please can you tell
us a little bit about your podcast and why everyone
needs to listen to it? Sure? Um. Our podcast is
called Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. I'm one half
of it. The other half is Jorge Chom, the Internet

(57:35):
famous cartoons behind PhD Comics, and we do a fun
chat about philosophy and science and trying to explain things
about the universe and the idea there is to take
big topics and break them up into pieces that are
actually understandable, not just so you hear a lot of
fancy words and you don't really understand, but so that
you've come away with a pretty good grasp of what
these topics are. And we cover things like the Big

(57:57):
Bang and teleportation and fast and light travel and history
of the universe and the future of the universe. And
so check it out. It's a lot of fun. It's
called Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. Yeah, it's fantastic, guys.
If you have not listened, you need to check it out.
I very much enjoyed it's I consider it sort of
a spiritual cousin to text stuff and and and it

(58:20):
makes me. It makes me long for the day when
I can I can get a co host who I
can bounce stuff off of and they can bounce stuff
off of me. Right now, I'm playing tennis with myself,
so that is always a challenge. Daniel, thank you so
much for joining the show. We greatly appreciate it. Thanks
very much for having me on. And hello to all
your listeners. We'll be back with a little bit more

(58:43):
about the LHC after these messages. I hope you enjoyed
that episode. From two thousand nineteen and again tomorrow we
should have the second part the space Suit episode. I
apologize again, I'm so glad we did not call this

(59:05):
show How Tech Works, because, based on my experience of
trying to troubleshoot for the last several hours, I clearly
don't know as much as I thought I did. To
be fair, there's some pretty extraordinary circumstances that are interfering,
but all excuses aside. We will have the part two

(59:26):
of the space Suits episode tomorrow. I hope you are
doing well, and if you have suggestions for topics I
should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out.
The best way to do that is on Twitter. The
handle for the show is text stuff H s W
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff

(59:50):
is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Three