Listener Questions 67

Daniel and Jorge answer questions about moving planets, the Higgs field, and the future of particle physics.

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (02:39):
Hey or Hey, when was the last time your family moved?

Speaker 9 (02:42):
We moved to our house maybe eleven years ago.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
Wow, that's been a while. You know. The longer you
live somewhere, the harder it is to move.

Speaker 9 (02:50):
What do you think that is? Lake indersia or potential energy?
Are we trapped in a potential energy?

Speaker 1 (02:56):
Well sort of. I think you're trapped by your You
gradually accumulate stuff in every corner, makes it impossible to ever.

Speaker 9 (03:04):
Leave because of the gravity or the nostalgia.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
The overwhelming task of packing it all up into boxes.

Speaker 9 (03:12):
Sounds like you need Marie Coonda to do some consulting
for you.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
It's all right. I try to leave the house as
little as possible.

Speaker 10 (03:17):
Anyway.

Speaker 9 (03:33):
Hi, I'm Jorge Amy, cartoonists and the author of Oliver's
Great big universe.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor
at UC Irvine, and I've moved a lot of times
in my life and never was it fun.

Speaker 9 (03:45):
Well, there's a certain aspect of getting rid of your
old stuff that's kind of cathartic. Don't you feel lighter
after you move? Or did you just bring everything with you?

Speaker 11 (03:55):
No?

Speaker 1 (03:55):
I always start out so optimistic and thinking, Oh, this
time it's going to be great, and then about halfway
through I realized I'm only five percent of the way through.
And then at the end of just throwing random stuff away.

Speaker 9 (04:07):
Of throwing out your stuff, of packing. Oh, but you know,
you can hire people to do that, right, or ask
your friends and buy them a peer.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
I usually use moving as an opportunity to cleanse myself
of all the stuff I should have thrown away earlier.

Speaker 9 (04:22):
When was the last time you moved?

Speaker 1 (04:23):
Between two thousand and seven and twenty twelve, the family
moved across the Atlantic, I think eleven times.

Speaker 9 (04:31):
I think that's just called going on vacation, isn't.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
It now when you're living there for nine months and
setting up schools and bank accounts.

Speaker 9 (04:39):
Soul man, But you've been in the same place now
for twelve years.

Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah, since the kids got older, we've stayed in California
and haven't moved back to the Collider as often.

Speaker 9 (04:48):
Wow, so it's your house now, just the giant pile
of stuff.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
I can't even close the door, it's so jammed full
of crap.

Speaker 9 (04:56):
Well, fortunately it makes for a good soundproofing, I guess
for podcast recording.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
That's why I've been doing it.

Speaker 9 (05:03):
Yes, one positive thing. But anyways, welcome to our podcast
Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
In which we help you soar through the ever increasing
piles of knowledge that humanity has accumulated along the way.
We learned this, we learned that, we learned the other thing,
and our goal is to organize it to marry condo
your mind and make it crisp and clean and understandable.
Because we think, we hope, we assume the universe is understandable,
that we can make sense of it with our little minds,

(05:31):
and that we can explain all of it to you.

Speaker 9 (05:34):
That's right. We try to relocate your brain out there
to the giant, vast cosmos that exists out there for
us to try to understand, and we try to move
you with the amazing things that scientists have discovered about
why we're here and how things work.

Speaker 1 (05:48):
And one thing we'd love our listeners to do is
to participate in this goal directly by asking their own
questions about the universe. Don't just sit back and let
the answers from scientists rain down upon your brain. Go
out there and ask your own questions about the universe.
What doesn't make sense to you, how do you think
it works, Why isn't your idea the right one about

(06:09):
the universe? And so On this podcast we talk to
you about the universe, but we also want to hear
from you. Send us your questions to questions at Danielandjorge
dot com.

Speaker 9 (06:19):
That's right, because it's not just scientists that have questions,
it's everybody. We all look at the night sky, the
day sky, all of the guys, and we wonder about
what's out there and how to make sense of it all.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
It's a part of being human trying to make sense
of the universe, wanting to understand it, and it's something
that everybody can do. You don't have to be a
professional scientist to look up at the night sky, and
wonder what it all means. Or if you've been listening
to the podcast and there's some ideas that don't quite
fit into your mind together, they don't click the way
that you want them to, then write to me questions

(06:52):
at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Everybody gets an answer,
and sometimes I got a question that we answer right
here on the podcast.

Speaker 9 (06:59):
Yeah, and sometimes we'd like to answer your questions. And
so today on the program, we'll be tackling listener questions
number sixty seven over five dozen.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
These are questions for listeners that tickled me, or I
thought we would have fun talking about, or I needed
a little extra time to do some research before answering.

Speaker 9 (07:24):
So we have three awesome questions here today. They are
about habitable moons, about the Higgs field, and about Daniel's
favorite subject, particle colliders and moving it. Right, are we
going to move the particle collider?

Speaker 1 (07:38):
We're not going to move the particle collider, but we
might spend tens of billions of dollars on a new one.

Speaker 9 (07:44):
Oh boy, isn't it easier just to move it?

Speaker 1 (07:48):
You don't gain anything from moving it. You need a bigger,
fancier one or a different flavor of one and those
are expensive.

Speaker 9 (07:56):
Oh boy, Well we'll dig into that, but first we'll
tackle a question from Lydia, who is eleven years old.

Speaker 12 (08:03):
Hi, Daniel Jorge. My name is Lydia and I'm eleven
years old. I have a question for you. Do you
think it will ever be possible to move planets or
moons into more habitable zones? And if you could, which
planet or moon in our Solar System.

Speaker 7 (08:17):
Would you move?

Speaker 9 (08:18):
All right, pretty interesting question about lots of things here,
about habitable zones and solar systems and about I guess
planet orbits. That's a lot going on in the mind
of an eleven year old.

Speaker 1 (08:32):
I love that Lydia is thinking about the future. She's
trying to make the Solar System a better place for humanity,
and she's wondering about all the details of it. So
good job, Lydia. Thanks for your forward thinking.

Speaker 9 (08:44):
Yeah, future president, hopefully seems like we could use some
some forward thinking in our leadership. But the question is interesting.
It sounds like she's asking whether there are planets out
there that we can't live in or move us, whether
we can somehow not terraform it or change it, but

(09:04):
actually just move it. To a cozier spot.

Speaker 1 (09:07):
Yeah. For example, some of the planets that are closer
to the Sun than Earth, Venus and Mercury, are very
very hot, and planets that are further from Earth, like Mars,
are very very cold. Neither of those seem very cozy
to live on. And so I think Lydia's ideas like
could we bring Mars closer? Could we push Venus further out?
Or I love that she even mentions moons. You know,

(09:28):
Jupiter and Saturn have some huge moons. Could we snag
one of those and bring them closer and make it
a place that humanity could survive.

Speaker 9 (09:38):
You need a lot of friends and a lot of
beer to get your friends to move a whole moon.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
Depends how much stuff it's accumulated in the years. Right,
If you've been keeping it clean and crisp, maybe it's
a little easier to pack everything up.

Speaker 9 (09:53):
I think it just depends on how many friends you have.

Speaker 1 (09:56):
Can you call a moving company and be like, hey,
do you have a box big enough to fit like Europa?

Speaker 9 (10:02):
I'm sure U haul has something for that. You haul
the moon, you haul a planet. I mean, they just
rent you the vehicle of stuff. Then you have to
do it.

Speaker 1 (10:15):
Hey, if they have a device capable of moving a moon,
I'll drive it. That sounds like fun. I compare aalletl
park that thing.

Speaker 9 (10:21):
Don't you need a special license?

Speaker 1 (10:23):
Though only if you get pulled over.

Speaker 9 (10:25):
By the Solar syst the police. But anyways, it's a
pretty interesting question, and so let's dig into it, Daniel,
Is it possible to move a planet to a different orbit?

Speaker 1 (10:35):
So it definitely is possible, like the physics doesn't say no,
But in the case of some planets or moons, it's
not necessarily a good idea, Like, even if you could
do it, it wouldn't really give you a place humans
could live. And in other cases, like Mars, it's possible
and it might solve some of the problems, but it
would cost an enormous amount of energy.

Speaker 9 (10:57):
Hmm, Well, you mentioned Mars, so maybe let's start but
that what's wrong with Mars now, isn't it sort of
already in the habitable zone?

Speaker 1 (11:05):
So Mars is a lot smaller than Earth and a
little further out, so it gets a lot less sun
than Earth does, which makes it very very cold. It
also has a very dilute atmosphere, so it has trouble
hanging on to any of the heat that it does
get from the Sun. So bringing Mars closer Earth would
definitely help that. You also need to increase the atmosphere,
so you couldn't totally avoid doing terraforming. You need to

(11:27):
make an oxygen rich atmosphere unless you want to live
in bubbles your whole life. But bringing it closer to
Earth would be handy. It would also make it easier
to colonize Mars, like the round trip time would be shorter,
connections between the two civilizations could be crisper, So there'd
be a lot of advantages to having Mars closer in.

Speaker 9 (11:46):
Oh, I see, it's sort of like that saying, right,
like if Muhammad can't go to the mountain, then you
bring the mountain to you.

Speaker 1 (11:53):
Yeah, exactly. It's sort of like where you're going to
buy your vacation house. Is it just going to be
half an hour away or is it a nine our
plane flight. It's a lot easier if it's just the
short drive.

Speaker 9 (12:04):
But is he the biggest problem for Mars? It's I
know it's cold, but it's not like crazy cold.

Speaker 1 (12:11):
I mean, Mars is definitely like less comfortable than Antarctica,
so it's not cold the way like the surface of
Pluto is, but it's definitely very cold, too cold for humans.
But that's all connected to the atmosphere, right. It has
a very dilute atmosphere, so it doesn't hold in that temperature.
That thin atmosphere also means that it doesn't protect you
from cosmic rays the way the Earth's atmosphere does. It

(12:33):
also doesn't have a magnetic field to do a lot
of shielding. So yeah, there's big problems with Mars that
you couldn't solve even by moving it.

Speaker 9 (12:40):
So then would it even help to move it, Like
if it got warmer, would it maybe just blow off
all the atmosphere or is this an actual working proposal.

Speaker 1 (12:49):
No, that's definitely an issue. Now you bring it warmer,
you're going to melt some of the frozen CO two
for example that's at the poles, and that's going to
increase the atmosphere, but you might also blow it off. Right,
as you say, is increasing radiation because Mars is smaller,
so it doesn't have the same gravity as Earth, so
it's harder for it to hang onto its atmosphere. That's
a bigger issue for the moons for example, like Europa,

(13:10):
or Enceladus or Io. All these big moons of the
gas giants. A lot of them have frozen surfaces, and
some of them even have like liquid oceans underneath them.
But if you brought them into the habitable zone, you
would melt those surfaces and boil off those oceans and
leave yourself with just a rocky core. So moving these
things to the habitable zone wouldn't necessarily work.

Speaker 9 (13:32):
Well, let's say that we try with Mars and we
wanted to make it as warm as Earth. How much
would you.

Speaker 1 (13:38):
Have to move it in Well, given the current atmosphere,
you'd have to have Mars be closer to the Sun
than Earth, because Mars can't hang on to the heat.
But if you just wanted to move Mars like near
the Earth's orbit so that it was in the same
zone it was easier to go back and forth, which
might make terraforming and building an atmosphere easier as well.
Then you'd need to do what's called a a Homan transfer,

(14:01):
which is a way to like change orbits. This is
what spaceships do. For example, if they're orbiting high and
they want to go low, or they're orbiting low and
they want to go high. It's a classic way to
change your orbit by firing your rocket thrusters.

Speaker 9 (14:14):
How does it work? Do you have to like accelerate
or just move away from the sun or towards the Sun?
How does that work?

Speaker 1 (14:21):
So there's a zillion different ways you could do it,
but the Homan transfer is the one that requires the
least energy, and it definitely requires some force, some acceleration.
Imagine you're in a circular orbits you have a particular
velocity and a particular radius, and that's all aligned and nice,
and now you want to be in a different circular orbit,
maybe larger, maybe smaller. What you need to do is
change to an elliptical orbit. So you fire your thrusters,

(14:44):
so you move out of your circular orbit into an
elliptical orbit. Elliptical orbit, because an ellipse doesn't have a
fixed radius, right, a circle is a fixed radius. You're
always the same distance from the Sun or whatever. An
ellipse you get closer sometimes and further other times. You
go on this elliptical orbit temporarily, and then when you
get to the radius you want, you fire your rockets

(15:04):
again to put yourself back into a circular orbit at
that new radius. So it's two firings of your rocket,
two accelerations, two delta vs as they call them in
the space business.

Speaker 9 (15:15):
Oh, I see. So you wouldn't have to fire your
rockets or push the planet the w hallway. You just
give it like a one initial push, and then later,
when you're further where you want to be, you give
it another push.

Speaker 1 (15:27):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 9 (15:28):
And in the case where you want to get closer
to the Sun, you're talking about slowing down the planet, right, you.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
Want to slow it down, you also have to change
its direction, right, because in an elliptical orbit operates differently
from a circular orbit, So you want to change your
whole vector, not just the magnitude.

Speaker 9 (15:44):
But yeah, okay, so we have to slow down Mars.
And then once it gets closer to Earth, or maybe
even beyond Earth or its orbit, then you want to
slow it down some more.

Speaker 1 (15:55):
Well, things in the inner Solar System orbit at a
higher velocity than things in the outer Solar System, and
that's just basic circular motion. So for example, Earth is
moving at thirty kilometers per second relative to the Sun
and Mars is moving at twenty four kilometers per second.
Relative to the Sun, and that doesn't depend on mass,
It just depends on radius. At every radius is a

(16:17):
certain velocity you need in order to move in a
circular orbit. In the end, you'd have to speed Mars
up in order to get it to move at the
Earth's orbit.

Speaker 9 (16:26):
All right, So then once you're in this closer orbit
to the Sun, then you'll eat in a stable orbit.

Speaker 1 (16:31):
Yeah, exactly, And so it did the calculation for like
how much of a kick would you need to give
Mars in order to accomplish this, And so initially, to
move Mars into an elliptical orbit, you have to change
its velocity by like two and a half kilometers per second,
which is not a small amount. I mean Mars is

(16:51):
currently going like twenty four kilometers per second, so it's
like more than ten percent of the speed of Mars.
And then you're in the elyptical orbit. And then to
kick it back into a circular orbit, you have to
give it a delta v of almost three kilometers per second.
And so those are the two kicks that you have
to give Mars in order to change its orbit to

(17:12):
have the same radius as the Earth's orbit.

Speaker 9 (17:14):
Oh interesting, And so it sort of sounds like it's
going to be hard, right, because you have to sloid
down by ten percent of a whole giant planet.

Speaker 1 (17:21):
Yeah, exactly. And it's fascinating because these numbers don't depend
on mass, Like it's the same for a proton as
it is for a planet when you're talking in terms
of delta V. But then when you think about it
in terms of energy, right, the energy is like one
half mv squared, Then the mass really does affect it.
It takes a lot more energy to change the orbit
of a planet relative to a proton. And these planets

(17:44):
just have so much mass. Even Mars, which is kind
of small, has like an unfathomable amount of stuff, and
so to move Mars from one orbit to the other
would take like ten to the thirty one jewels.

Speaker 9 (17:58):
Well, that's a lot of jewels. What would that mean? Like,
could you use rockets to you know, slow yourself down?
How would you even slow down a planet?

Speaker 1 (18:05):
This is a huge amount of energy, like orders of magnitude,
much more than humanity produces and uses every year, So
you'd need something crazy. You basically have to build like
a rocket and attach it to the planet and drive
the planet like a spaceship. So the simplest way to
do this is to like dig stuff out of the
planet and launch it into space. If you could pick

(18:27):
up a rock and throw it into space so it
doesn't like come back to the planet it reaches escape velocity,
then effectively that's giving the whole planet a little push, right,
because by conservation momentum, the rock goes one way, the
planet goes the other way. Now, that's a really tiny
little push because it's just a little rock. But if
you keep doing it, and you do a lot of it,
and you push those rocks really really fast, then effectively

(18:50):
you are pushing the planet. So if you build something
which like dig stuff out of Mars and throws it
into space, that's essentially a rocket attached to Mars. And
that's how you could do it.

Speaker 9 (19:01):
Couldn't you just use rockets.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
Like build rockets and just point them at the ground.

Speaker 9 (19:05):
Yeah, basically build them upside down.

Speaker 1 (19:07):
Yeah, absolutely, you can do that. But then where you're
gonna get all the fuel? Right? The thing is you
need an enormous amount of energy, and so you might
as well take the propulsion from the planet itself. This
an incredible amount, like in order to do this on
Mars and achieve this kind of transfer. You just dig
out a trillion kilograms of material and eject it into

(19:28):
space at ninety nine percent of the speed of light
every single day for almost five thousand years.

Speaker 9 (19:36):
WHOA, that sounds crazy. So this is using your like
scooping up dirt and throw it in into space scheme.

Speaker 1 (19:42):
Yeah, and we haven't even talked about, like how do
you accomplish getting dirt to ninety nine percent the speed
of light?

Speaker 2 (19:48):
Well?

Speaker 9 (19:48):
Could you you just use like atomic bombs or something
you know, I'm thinking of like a rocket that uses
nuclear fission.

Speaker 1 (19:55):
Maybe you might want to use fission or fusion as
a way to accelerate this stuff. But you can need
some propellant, right, you need to change the momentum of
the planet, which means you need to eject something from it.
The other thing you could do is like solar power, right,
try to use that somehow. But either way, it's just
an overwhelming amount of energy, something that humanity you can't

(20:15):
even conceive of producing. Not to mention like wrestling into
this crazy scheme.

Speaker 9 (20:21):
Because you need ten to the thirty one jewels, but like,
how much is this then an atomic bomb? Give off.
I'm just trying to get a sense of like, is
it thirty thousand nuclear bombs or thirty basillion.

Speaker 1 (20:31):
Yeah, atomic bombs are pretty impressive, but they give off
order of magnitude like ten to the twelve, ten to
the thirteen jewels, and we need ten to the thirty one.
So we're talking like, you know, ten to the nineteen
nuclear bombs.

Speaker 9 (20:44):
Whoa, so that's one followed by nineteen zero number of
nuclear bombs.

Speaker 1 (20:49):
Yeah, exactly, So pretty impractical. Another way to do this,
maybe is to try to take advantage of other things
in the Solar System that have energy in them, you know,
things like asteroids and comets. These things have a vast
amount of gravitational energy as it come towards the inner
Solar System. They're moving with very high velocity, and we

(21:11):
often are using the gravity of other things in the
Solar System to navigate, like when we send spacecraft out
there where you slingshot them around Jupiter or this kind
of stuff. So if you could somehow direct comets from
the Ord Cloud or the Kuiper Belt to rain down
and pass near Mars, each one of them would give
Mars a little bit of a tug. If you did
a gravitational slingshot using comets, it would change the trajectory

(21:35):
of the comet and the planet. So if you did
that enough times, you could change the trajectory of the
planet enough to accomplish this same maneuver. But it would
still take a lot of comets.

Speaker 9 (21:46):
Well, yeah, it sounds like you were just making it
more complicated because you still have to spend all that
energy to move the comets to get out there to
the comets and then move them.

Speaker 1 (21:54):
Well, I don't think it would take that much energy
to move the comets because you're using the energy of
the Sun. You just take the comment, give it a
little nudge so it falls out of orbit. You know,
they're moving pretty slow that far out, and so it
doesn't take a big nudge to get them to fall
towards the Inner Solar System. And then they gather a
lot of energy as they're coming in, and you take
advantage of it when they're zipping by. But you know

(22:16):
that's dangerous for other reasons, like you make a miscalculation
and boom, comet hits the Earth and it's all over.

Speaker 9 (22:25):
Yeah, then we'll really need to move to another planet exactly.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
So Lydia a great question. I don't think it's really
practical anytime in the near future, but I hope somebody
figures it out.

Speaker 9 (22:36):
It sounds like maybe it's easier just to terror for Mars,
so that becomes warmer.

Speaker 1 (22:42):
Yeah, we have a whole episode about how you might
do that. It's very challenging and quite impractical. Maybe less
impractical than moving the planet. It's still very, very difficult.
I see.

Speaker 9 (22:54):
All right, Well, maybe the solution is just to hire
Marie Konda to come clean up our planet and then
nobody will want to move.

Speaker 1 (23:03):
That's right, Lydia, and I hope you clean up your room.

Speaker 9 (23:05):
Hey, yeah, and Lydia's parents, you're welcome. All right, Well,
thank you Lydia for that awesome question. Now let's get
to our other questions of the day. We have a
question about the Higgs field and about particle colliders, so
let's get to those. But first let's take a quick break.

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Speaker 1 (24:46):
Behind their music.

Speaker 15 (24:47):
Russ Kunkle, the basic connection that I had with someone
that was great coming out of the whiskey was David Crosby.

Speaker 1 (24:53):
David.

Speaker 15 (24:53):
I met David and Steven and Graham kind of around
the same time, basically through my wife Leah, who is
Cass Elliott's sister.

Speaker 13 (25:03):
The message of the podcast is simple, honest conversation with
musicians about the music they create. Mike Campbell of The Heartbreakers.

Speaker 1 (25:11):
It is correct.

Speaker 6 (25:12):
I rarely worked things out. I like to go off
the cup and try to grab things out of the
air while you're playing the song and try to catch
a little magic.

Speaker 13 (25:19):
Listen to the Take in a Walk podcast on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 (25:27):
Hey, I'm Jackie Thomas, the host of a brand new
Black Effect original series, black Lit, the podcast for diving
deep into the rich world of black literature. I'm Jackie Thomas,
and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant
community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories.

(25:47):
Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who
listen to audio books while commuting or running errands. For
those who find themselves seeking solad, wisdom, and refuge between
the chapters, from thought provoking novels to powerful poetry. We'll
explore the stories that shape our culture. Together. We'll dissect
classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the

(26:11):
brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify
the voices of black writers and to bring their words
to life. Listen to black Lit on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 (26:27):
I'm doctor Laurie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast.
As the US elections approach, it can feel like we're
angrier and more divided than ever. But in a new
copule season of my podcast, I'll share with the science
really shows that we're surprisingly more united than most people think.

Speaker 7 (26:46):
We all know something is wrong in our culture and
our politics, and that we need to do better, and
that we can do better with.

Speaker 3 (26:53):
The help of Stanford psychologist Jamiale Zaki.

Speaker 11 (26:56):
It's really tragic.

Speaker 5 (26:56):
If cynicism were appeal, it'd be a poison.

Speaker 3 (27:00):
We'll see that our fellow humans, even those we disagree with,
are more generous than we assume.

Speaker 16 (27:05):
My assumption, my feeling, my hunch is that a lot
of us are actually looking for a way to disagree
and still be in relationships with each other.

Speaker 3 (27:14):
All that on the Happiness Lap. Listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 8 (27:28):
In nineteen eighty two, Atari players had one thing on
their minds sword Quest. This wasn't just a new game.
Atari promised one hundred and fifty grand in prizes to
four finalists, but the prizes disappeared, and what started as
a video game promotion became one of the most controversial
moments in eighties pop culture.

Speaker 1 (27:50):
I just don't believe they exist. If my reactions shock
at awe.

Speaker 9 (27:54):
That sword was amazing, It was so beautiful.

Speaker 8 (27:57):
I'm Jamie Loftus. Join me this for the Legend of
sword Quest, a podcast about the fall of Atari and
the disappearing sword Quest prizes. We'll follow the quest for
lost treasure across four decades.

Speaker 9 (28:10):
It's almost like a metaphor for the industry and Atari
itself in a way.

Speaker 8 (28:15):
Listen to the Legend of sword Quest on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 9 (28:31):
All right, we're answering listener questions here today, and our
next question comes from Mark, who has a question about
the Higgs Field.

Speaker 17 (28:39):
Hey, daniel Le Jorge I'm back with a serious question,
just as I sort of feel confident that I'm building
a mental map, at least at the most primitive.

Speaker 1 (28:50):
Level, of how this quantum stuff works.

Speaker 17 (28:52):
This Higgs Boston is I don't understand how does a
field lend mass to other fields?

Speaker 1 (29:00):
What does it?

Speaker 8 (29:01):
In part?

Speaker 17 (29:01):
If mass is like what potential energy you're gathered?

Speaker 7 (29:07):
What?

Speaker 17 (29:08):
Yeah, that's the question. Where is the mass coming from?
Then it just seems like we're at another level of
incomprehensibility here. How is it transferring mass?

Speaker 9 (29:20):
All right? A pretty massive question here about basically how
does the Higgs field work? How does it give mass
other particles?

Speaker 1 (29:29):
Yeah, a really good question, a really deep question. And
when that we've been sort of probing in several different
episodes on the podcast, trying to give people an intuition
for how this works.

Speaker 9 (29:39):
Well, I guess maybe let's go get back to basics.
So the Higgs field is something that was proven to
exist about ten years ago, and in the media you
always hear that it's the field and the particle that
gives other particles their mass.

Speaker 1 (29:55):
Yeah, exactly, And maybe we should start with the concept
of a field because this is a little bit mysterious
for people. I mean, particles are something we can sort
of imagine. We think of them as tiny specks of
stuff explaining the microscopic world. You see. They're traces in
cloud chambers or particle detectors. But fields are a little
bit more in direct We don't ever see fields directly,

(30:17):
and we say that particles move through fields, and particles
are excitations of fields. And a field is just like
a number that you put everywhere in space, like the
Higgs field, for example. It's just a number. It has
a value here, it has a value there, it has
a value somewhere else. But those values aren't just random
and arbitrary. There's mathematics that describe how those values relate

(30:38):
to each other and how those values change in time.
The same way. It's like if you have a sheet,
one that you might put on your bed and you
wave it in the air, right, waves move through that sheet,
and the same way waves can move through the Higgs
field or any other kind of field.

Speaker 18 (30:53):
Right.

Speaker 9 (30:54):
Right, But I guess maybe a question is like our
fields physical things or just sort of like mathematical conveniences
that physicists use in their equations, Meaning like if you
have a field, but no particles in it? Is that
field there?

Speaker 1 (31:10):
Nobody knows the answer to that question, man. I mean,
I think the mainstream view is that fields are the
fundamental building blocks of the universe as we know so far.
We don't know what they're made out of, and we
think of particles as emerging from fields. There're these special
ripples in the fields. They move in a special way.
There's something that comes out of the fields. But nobody

(31:31):
really knows that the fields are there, or if they's
just something we think about. To answer your second question,
in our current conception, if you believe fields are there,
then they're still there with no particles in them. Right.
They exist everywhere in space and they can never go
down all the way to zero because they're quantum, so
they're always fuzzing and frothing a tiny little bit. But
whether fields are really there, like when we're not looking

(31:53):
at them, is not a science question. It's a philosophy question.
It's one you can't test. It requires answering the question
what happens when you don't look, And to do science
you have to look.

Speaker 9 (32:02):
M But I guess you know we talked about and
I know you said that fields have like an energy
to them. So if they have an energy to them,
doesn't that mean that they sort of exist when you're
not looking, well, we.

Speaker 1 (32:16):
Describe them as existing and having energy, that doesn't mean
that they are there, that they are real. You know,
there's no way to interact with a field directly to
like measure it. You know, you can see this effect
on other stuff, but you can't actually measure them directly,
even if you do ascribe energy to it. But the
energy in the field is a crucial concept for getting

(32:37):
an intuition for like how this all works, because what's
happening in the field when it's oscillating is sometimes it's
oscillating in a way that moves like way you wiggle
your sheet and a ripple moves through it. But sometimes
you can also oscillate in place, and what's happening there
is that the field is wiggling sort of the same
way that like a ball trapped in a well if

(32:58):
there isn't any friction, can go up and down for ever.
It's switching between like kinetic energy it's moving fast at
the bottom of the well, and potential energy. It's not moving,
but it still has energy of location. When it's at
the top of the well. Put a ball in a
little well. It can oscillate around that forever. Fields can
do that too. They can sort of oscillate in place,
like a little standing wave, and that's where their mass

(33:19):
comes from.

Speaker 9 (33:20):
Like the whole field, or just like in a little spot.

Speaker 1 (33:23):
At any point. These fields can do that. So, for example,
the electron field can be mostly empty and then in
one spot they can be doing this special oscillation. And
that's what an electron is. It's this special oscillation of
the electron field. It's got some energy and it's oscillating
in this stable way. And some fields can do this,
like the electron field can do this. They can just

(33:44):
oscillate in place, and that's what we call an electron
and that's an electron at rest. And fields that can
do this are fields that have mass. Like the photon field,
it can only oscillate in the way the ripples move.
It can never oscillate in place. Right. The electromagnet field
can't make you a photon that's just sitting there because
photons don't have mass, and so in order to do

(34:06):
this thing, to oscillate in place, they have to have mass.

Speaker 9 (34:09):
Oh, well, that's sort of another philosophical question, right, like
can an electron stay still? Like, isn't it a quantum particle?

Speaker 1 (34:16):
Yeah, that's a good point. An electron can never be
located to exactly one location, which you have is like
a little packet. And we talked about like how long
is a particle, how wide is a particle on a
recent podcast. It depends on how much uncertainty there is,
And so you always have like a little neighborhood of
the field that's sort of oscillating coherently, and that depends
on the uncertainty in those measurements. So it's never like

(34:38):
a dot, it's none. Think of it like a single
point in the field as doing the oscillation. Think of
it like a little localized packet. And the important thing
to understand is that none of these fields operate independently. Right.
You have a field that has some energy, it's oscillating,
but there are also other fields, and the fields can
transfer energy back and forth. That's how, for example, the
photon field and the electron field, energy can slide between

(34:59):
Themhotons can turn into electrons and positrons or photons can
push on electrons, for example, in the same way the
Higgs field interacts with all of these fields and changes
how they wiggle, and then changing how they wiggle it
gives them mass. It gives some of these fields the
capacity to do this wiggle in place thing, which is
what gives those particles mass.

Speaker 9 (35:21):
I think you're getting to Mark's question now, which is
that like, how exactly does that happen? And it seems
like you sort of said it this both ways, like
you need mass for it to stay in place, or
it can only stay in place if you give it mass.

Speaker 1 (35:36):
Yeah, exactly, So go back to the thinking about the
ball in the well. The ball in the well moves
in a certain way because it has mass. Right now,
if the ball didn't have mass, it would operate very differently,
like it wouldn't feel the same gravitational potential energy, it
wouldn't oscillate in the well that way. So imagine you
took a ball without mass and you added some special
magic forces that changed the way the ball moved. So

(35:58):
now it moves exactly the same way it would if
it did have mass. Okay, so every time the ball
is moving, you give it a little special push to
change its direction so that it moves exactly the same
way it did as if it had mass. That's what
the Higgs field is doing. It's taking particles that naturally
don't have mass. The electron wouldn't have any mass without
Higgs field and changing the way it moves in exactly

(36:22):
the same way that you would expect if the electron
field had its own mass by itself. That's why we
say it gives the electron mass because it changes the
way the electron field wiggles and precisely the way it
would if the electron had its own mass. So the
mass comes from the Higgs field and the interaction between
the Higgs field and the electron field. It's not inherent

(36:43):
in the electron field itself.

Speaker 9 (36:45):
Meaning I guess I got a little confused with your
ball analogy because now I'm thinking, like, the ball has
mass or what. But it seemed interesting to think about that.
An electron is just a standing wiggle in the electron field,
And you're saying that because of the way that the
electron field and the Higgs field interact, then that wiggle

(37:07):
can stay in place. Is that kind of what you're saying?

Speaker 1 (37:09):
Yeah, exactly, So for the electron field to wiggle in place,
it needs to be able to trade kinetic energy for
potential energy and back to kinetic energy and then back
to back to potential energy. That's what the wiggle is, right,
And in order to do that, it needs to be
able to have potential energy, and that's what the Higgs
field gives it. Interactions between the electron field and the

(37:30):
Higgs field create a potential well for the electron which
lets it oscillate in.

Speaker 9 (37:35):
Place, like it gives it a place for the energy
to go to.

Speaker 1 (37:39):
Yeah, exactly, it can go from kinetic to potential and
then back, whereas a photon field is like just kinetic energy.
It's always flying through space that doesn't slosh back into
potential energy and then kinetic energy and potential energy and
kinetic energy.

Speaker 9 (37:51):
Well, let me recap. Maybe what you're saying is that
in order for the electron field to wiggle in place
and therefore have an electron instead of need something to
suck some energy out of it kind of in place.
Otherwise it we'll just go somewhere, we'll take off.

Speaker 1 (38:06):
You could still have an electron, it would be massless, right,
in order to have an electron at rest, it has
to have mass, and so you need something to change
how the electron is oscillating. It's not exactly taking the
energy out of the electron field. It's just creating potential
energy for the electron You know, imagine, for example, a
kid on a swing. Right. In order for the kid
to swing back and forth, that has to be the

(38:28):
swing there pushing them back as they move. Without the swing,
the kid just flies off. So the Higgs field is
sort of like the swing that keeps the kid oscillating
back and forth rather than just flying off.

Speaker 9 (38:40):
It pushes the electron wiggle to stay in place.

Speaker 1 (38:43):
Yeah, exactly. And in another universe where you didn't have
a Higgs field and you had an electron field that
actually had mass on its own, it would wiggle in
exactly the same way.

Speaker 9 (38:52):
Are there things that have mass on their own?

Speaker 1 (38:55):
There are none in our universe. We don't think particles
like that can exist because it would break some of
the other laws of particle physics, some of the symmetries
that we think are held. That's why you need something
like the Higgs field to give these particles mass.

Speaker 9 (39:08):
Ah interesting, And I guess, just to be clear, you
need the Higgs field to give things resting mass, right.

Speaker 1 (39:14):
Yeah, resting mass is the only kind of mass we
think about. There's this concept called relativistic mass, which is
really just a confusing way to think about energy. You
shouldn't think about things gaining mass as they go faster.
We define mass to be an invarying quantity, the same
as you would measure at rest.

Speaker 9 (39:32):
But I guess this idea that you know a lot
of our mass that we have in our bodies comes
from the energy doesn't necessarily come from particles. It comes
from the trapped energy between the particles. That's a different
kind of mass, right, Or does that mass also comes
from the Higgs field?

Speaker 1 (39:46):
Oh? No, great point. You're right, This is not the
only way to get mass, right, Mass in general comes
from internal stored energy. What we've been describing is like
how the electron gets internal stored energy, is that oscillates
in place that comes from the Higgs field. Quarks do
the same thing. Quarks get energy from the Higgs field.
But you put three quarks together into a proton that

(40:06):
has much more mass than the mass of the individual quarks.
And that's because those quarks now have a little bounce state.
The proton is like a little box keeping them oscillating
in place, and that energy comes from the strong force
creating that box, not from the Higgs field, and that
most of the mass of the proton comes from the
energy of the bonds between the quarks, this little bull

(40:27):
that the quarks live in that we call the proton.
So most of the mass in your bodies comes actually
from these bounds created by the strong force that give
the proton internal stored energy. And that's really where mass
comes from, any kind of internal stored energy, not energy
of motion, energy at rest, internal stored energy.

Speaker 9 (40:46):
So then the Higgs field is responsible for some of
our mass, but not all of it.

Speaker 1 (40:52):
Yeah, really a tiny, tiny fraction, because quarks have almost
no mass. Almost all of your mass comes from the
mass of protons and neutrons, which is overwhelmingly from the
strong force.

Speaker 9 (41:03):
So when they say, like the Higgs field and the
Higgs boson gives particles their mass, it's maybe not as
grand deal as of a statement as it may sound
to a lot of people.

Speaker 1 (41:13):
Yeah, exactly. I mean, without the Higgs field, all the
fundamental particles would have no mass, and then nothing would
be possible, like electrons would fly out of orbits at
the speed of light, all this kind of stuff. But
you're right, most of the mass in the universe doesn't
come directly from the Higgs field.

Speaker 9 (41:27):
Where does it come from, Daniel?

Speaker 1 (41:30):
Most of the mass in protons comes from the strong force, right.
It gives internalstored energy to the proton, and that's what
gives us mass. A deeper question is like, well, all right,
you're talking about mass, but why is inertial mass a thing? Anyway?
Why is internal stored energy change how much force it
takes to get some acceleration? And that's a really deep.

Speaker 9 (41:50):
Question, That's what I mean. Yeah, that's still a big
UNNOI right.

Speaker 1 (41:53):
Still a big unknown. You know, why do we even
have a inertiut man?

Speaker 9 (41:57):
Yeah? Like why are heavier? Or at the same time,
why are more energetic things harder to move? Like we
don't know that, right, nobody knows that.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
Yeah, we describe that using general relativity, but we don't
have an answer for like why in the same way
that like general relativity describes that space does get curved
in the presence of mass, but doesn't really tell us
like why does that happen? What is the mechanism for
underlying it? To understand that, we'd need to have some
deeper level theory that explains like what space is, but

(42:27):
we have no idea yet.

Speaker 9 (42:29):
Right, right, Or maybe we could just move to a
universe in which people have figured it out.

Speaker 19 (42:34):
Let's just take a big rocket, put it, we get
a U haul, we'll put pack all the physicists into it,
and then and then just ship into a more knowledgeable universe.

Speaker 1 (42:46):
Yeah, or just more knowledgeable solar system even you know,
to go to another universe. Let's just go visit the
aliens and go to their physics school and learn how
this all works.

Speaker 9 (42:55):
Unless they're also on the move, in which case you
might get there and then nobody's there. We missed the party, man, Yeah,
you missed the main course, which might have might be
you if there are aliens involved. All right, Well, I
think that answers a question for Mark, which is just
sort of like, how does the Higgs field work? And

(43:16):
it sounds like it's mainly about the interaction between the
Higgs field and the electron field allowing it to wiggle
in place, which is what looks like mass.

Speaker 1 (43:26):
That's right, And if you want a deeper intuition into
what fields are and how this all.

Speaker 9 (43:31):
Works, then it's not possible.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
So then I really recommend Matt Stressler's book Waves In
an Impossible See, which starts from almost nothing, uses almost
no math, and gives you a really deep intuition for Fields.

Speaker 9 (43:44):
All right, well, thank you Mark for that question. Now
let's get to our last question of the day, and
it's about Daniel's future career. It seems about the particle
collider at CERN, so let's dig into that. But first
let's take another quick break.

Speaker 13 (44:03):
I'm buzs Knight and I'm the host of the Taking
a Walk podcast music History on Foot.

Speaker 14 (44:07):
John Oates Great songs endured, and I'm very proud and
happy to know that I was part of something that
will endure.

Speaker 13 (44:15):
The podcast is an audio diary of insightful conversations with
musicians and the inside stories.

Speaker 1 (44:22):
Behind their music.

Speaker 15 (44:23):
Russ Kunkle, The basic connection that I had with someone
that was great coming out of.

Speaker 1 (44:27):
The Whiskey was David Crosby.

Speaker 15 (44:29):
David I met David and Steven and Graham kind of
around the same time, basically through my wife Leah, who
is Cass Elliott's sister.

Speaker 13 (44:38):
The message of the podcast is simple, honest conversation with
musicians about the music they create. Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers.

Speaker 6 (44:47):
It is correct. I rarely worked things out. I like
to go off the cup and try to grab things
out of the air while you're playing the song and
try to catch a little magic.

Speaker 13 (44:55):
Listen to the Taking a Walk podcast on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 (45:03):
Hey, I'm Jackie Thomas, the host of a brand new
Black Effect original series, black Lit, the podcast for diving
deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jackie Thomas,
and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant
community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories.

(45:23):
Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who
listen to audio books while commuting or running errands. For
those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge Between
the chapters, from thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, We'll
explore the stories that shape our culture. Together. We'll dissect
classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the

(45:47):
brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify
the voices of Black writers and to bring their words
to life. Listen to black Lit on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 3 (46:03):
I'm doctor Laurie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast.
Is the US elections approach. It can feel like we're
angrier and more divided than ever, But in a new
hopeful season of my podcast, I'll share with the science
it really shows that we're surprisingly more united than most
people think.

Speaker 7 (46:22):
We all know something is wrong in our culture, in
our politics, and that we need to do better, and
that we can do better.

Speaker 3 (46:29):
With the help of Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki.

Speaker 1 (46:31):
It's really tragic.

Speaker 20 (46:32):
If cynicism were appeal, it'd be a poison.

Speaker 3 (46:36):
We'll see that our fellow humans, even those we disagree with,
are more generous than we assume.

Speaker 16 (46:41):
My assumption, my feeling, my hunch is that a lot
of us are actually looking for a way to disagree
and still be in relationships with each other.

Speaker 3 (46:50):
All that on the Happiness Lab listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 18 (47:04):
I'm Carrie Champion, and this is season four of Naked Sports,
where we live at the intersection of sports and culture.
Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry Caitlin
Clark versus Angel Reese.

Speaker 20 (47:16):
I know I'll go down in history.

Speaker 16 (47:17):
People an't talking about women's basketballs just because of one
single game.

Speaker 9 (47:21):
Every great player needs a foil.

Speaker 7 (47:23):
And hear them wise.

Speaker 6 (47:24):
I just come here to play.

Speaker 7 (47:24):
Ask Paul Ray Kendled, and that's what I focused on.

Speaker 18 (47:26):
From college to the pros, Clark and Reeves have changed
the way we consume women's sports.

Speaker 1 (47:32):
Angel Reese is a joy to watch.

Speaker 8 (47:35):
She is unapologetically black.

Speaker 9 (47:37):
I love her.

Speaker 18 (47:38):
What exactly ignited this fire? Why has it been so
good for the game? And can the fanfare surrounding these
two supernovas be sustained? This game is only going to
get better because the talent is getting better. This new
season will cover all things sports and culture. Listen to
Naked Sports on the Black Effect Podcast Network. iHeartRadio, app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 4 (48:00):
The Black Effect Podcast Network is sponsored by diet Coke.

Speaker 21 (48:06):
We think of Franklin as the doddling dude flying a
kite in the rain, but those experiments are the most
important scientific discoveries of the time.

Speaker 1 (48:15):
I'm Evan Ratliffe.

Speaker 20 (48:16):
Last season we tackled the ingenuity of Elon Musk with
biographer Walter Isaacson. This time we're diving into the story
of Benjamin Franklin, another genius who's desperate to be dusted
off from history.

Speaker 21 (48:27):
His media empire makes him the most successful self made
business person in America. I mean, he was never early
to bed, an early to rise type person. He's enormously famous.
Women start wearing their hair and what was called the
coiffor a la Franklin.

Speaker 20 (48:44):
And who's more relevant now than ever.

Speaker 21 (48:47):
The only other person who could have possibly been the
first president would have been Benjamin Franklin, but he's too
old and wants Washington to do it.

Speaker 20 (48:56):
Listen to On Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 9 (49:12):
Where we're talking about listener questions here today on our
last question comes from Bill comes from Union City, California.

Speaker 22 (49:22):
Hi, Daniel and Jorge. This is Bill Quirk, a retired
astrophysicist living in Union City, California. I'm curious what's going
to happen now at CERN and the other large particle
colliders now that you haven't found the supersymmetric particles. What
are people going to be looking at what possible discoveries

(49:46):
can this lead to. Daniel, I don't understand how you
can understand so many different things. You'll explain them so well.
Thanks for everything, enjoy the show very much.

Speaker 1 (49:59):
Bye.

Speaker 9 (50:00):
All right, great question from Bill. So, cern is the
big facility outside of Geneva where the large Hadron collider is,
and I think Bill is asking what's going to happen
to it? You know, there was a lot of fanfare
about ten fifteen years ago about the Higgs boson, but
not a lot of news since then. What are the
plans for it?

Speaker 1 (50:20):
Yeah, the plans are to keep running it because though
we haven't found anything after the Higgs boson, there are
still lots of possibilities for discoveries. Bill mentions super symmetric particles.
These are particles that a lot of physicists hoped to
discover shortly after finding the Higgs, but we haven't seen
any of them, which has been a bit of a disappointment.

Speaker 9 (50:42):
Like have you ruled them out totally, like you've given
up or is there still a possibility or do most
physicists think they don't exist?

Speaker 1 (50:48):
Yeah, a little bit of all of that sort of
We can't ever rule out something exists because it could
exist but just be really really rare, like if it
only happens once every twenty years than our collider and
we only run the collider for one year, we can't
rule it out. It could also be really really heavy,
like maybe our collider doesn't have enough energy to make it.

(51:10):
So all we can do is we can rule out
low mass stuff that we could make that isn't rare,
And so it's sort of a statistical statement. The longer
that we run the collider, the more we can rule
out rare stuff, and the higher the energy the collider,
the more we can rule out heavy stuff. So we're
always just ruling out like a fraction of that space.
So that said, a lot of physicists claimed that nature

(51:32):
really wanted very common, very low mass supersymmetric particles, and
those people were wrong. A lot of the field has
moved on from supersymmetry. They've sort of given up on it,
But there's also a lot of diehards that really believe
in it.

Speaker 9 (51:45):
And they believe that maybe they're there, but they're just
heavier or rarer than we thought before.

Speaker 1 (51:51):
Yeah, and maybe we're just looking for them wrong. And
so they don't appear the way that we expected, and
we need to look for them in new interesting ways.
Maybe they're hidden in certain ways and we can reveal
them if we're clever enough. So there's definitely a lot
of people looking for supersymmetry. And realize also that, like
the LEDC has been running for fifteen years or so,
it's going to run for another fifteen but the rate

(52:13):
at which the collisions happens increases very quickly. But most
of the collisions we're ever going to see are in
the future. That's because we get better and better at
operating the machine, so we can have more collisions per
second as time goes on. So we've seen like one
percent of the data we're ever going to see from
the machine. Most of the data is still in the future,
and so it could be that that future data reveals

(52:35):
something like supersymmetry or something else interesting.

Speaker 9 (52:38):
So to answer Bill's question, that's sort of part of
the plan. The plan is for the Large Hydron Collider
to just keep smashing particles for another fifteen years.

Speaker 1 (52:48):
Yeah, exactly, for about another fifteen years. And we're not
just looking for supersymmetry. We're also looking for all sorts
of other stuff. We're looking for things we didn't necessarily anticipate,
because you know, you land on Mars, so you don't
just look for cats and dogs and people. You look
for any kind of life. So we're trying to broadly imagine,
like what new particles might be out there that we
didn't imagine or that are really weird and crazy. And

(53:11):
one of my favorite example is actually Bill's last name.
There's a theory of a particle called a quirk, not
a quirk, but a quirk with an eye just like Bill. WHOA.

Speaker 9 (53:21):
That's an interesting coincidence.

Speaker 1 (53:23):
It is really a fun coincidence.

Speaker 9 (53:25):
I mean it sounds like if you just want to
find a quirk, just good call Bill exactly.

Speaker 1 (53:29):
It's a really quirky theory, and it predicts particles that
look very different from anything we've ever seen before. They
were sort of move in a really weird way in
our detector, and so far the way we've analyzed the data,
we wouldn't be able to see these quirks. And so
my group and a bunch of other people are starting
to go back and analyze data to see if we
can find evidence for these quirks. So that's just one example,

(53:50):
But there could be stuff in the data we've taken
already that we haven't found yet because we haven't figured
out how to look for it yet. Some of the
stuff is trickier to look for than your standard electrons,
muons and this kind of stuff. So as we develop
new techniques, we might be able to discover things in
existing data, not just wait for more data.

Speaker 9 (54:08):
I see. Well, since you mentioned that, maybe give people
a quick three minute explanation of what is a quirk
because I don't think we've talked about it before.

Speaker 1 (54:16):
Have we? No, we have not. Yeah, a quirk is
like a quark, but it has a different kind of force.
It's like a new version of the strong force. And
quirks are much heavier than quarks, and so when you
produce two quarks at the particle collider, what happens is
that the strong force doesn't like them being far apart,
so it creates a bunch of new quarks out of

(54:37):
that energy. For quirks, that's not possible because quirks are
too massive, So the universe can't turn that energy into
new quirks because there isn't enough energy to make quirks
because their mass is higher, And so what that means
is that you have these two particles that now fly
apart from each other, and they still have that great
energy between them, which means they wiggle in really weird ways.

(54:58):
Rather than just flying through a magnetic field like a
charge particle, they oscillate inside the detector, which is really
a challenge for our current data analysis pipeline to discover.

Speaker 9 (55:08):
So then that's sort of the answer for bills that
you're a large hundred collatter is going to keep running
and you're looking for I guess rarer or harder to
find particles.

Speaker 1 (55:16):
Yeah, and people are also developing techniques to look for
things that are completely unexpected, like running machine learning based
anomaly detection algorithms to see if there's anything just like
really weird in the data. So we're going to keep
minding this data hoping to make discoveries.

Speaker 9 (55:31):
And you're also trying to make antimatter, right and stuff
like that.

Speaker 1 (55:35):
Well, in a particle collider, you can make basically anything
that the universe is capable of. You smash those protons
together and eventually you make everything on nature's menu. And
we often make antimatter. We're hoping we might even make
like dark matter and be able to detect it in
our collider, all sorts of stuff. There are other experiments
that's earned not the collider that do things like make

(55:55):
anti hydrogen and study its behavior.

Speaker 9 (55:57):
Oh, I see, now, are there plans to make more colliders,
bigger colliders, or to expand the current collider?

Speaker 1 (56:04):
Yes, all of those. We just finished put it together
like a ten year plan for particle physics, and there's
some interesting proposals. Some people think that when the large
Hadron collider is done running, we should build a bigger
circular collider, and so this would involve like a larger
tunnel under Geneva, and because it's bigger, you could have
more energy in it. You're limited by like the strength

(56:25):
of the magnets that you need to curve the particles
around in that circle. If you can't make your magnets stronger,
you can just make the circle bigger, and then you
can get your particles moving faster with the same magnets.
So that's one possibility.

Speaker 9 (56:38):
So you can make particles go at point nine nine
nine nine nine nine nine nine with the speed of
light instead of point nine nine nine nine nine nine.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
Yeah. Well, currently the collider explores up to about thirteen
and a half terra electron volts trillion electron volts, and
this new one would go up to fifty or one
hundred terra electron volts. And that doesn't sound like that
big a jump, but that's like multiplying by four or
eight the sort of entire energy range we've ever explored.
You know, it's like landing on eight new Earth like

(57:07):
planets simultaneously. It's an enormous range that we could use
to discover something.

Speaker 9 (57:11):
So how many dines does that give us in terms
of how fast we can explain particles at a percentage
at the speed of light.

Speaker 1 (57:18):
Oh, I don't even know.

Speaker 9 (57:19):
A lot of nines, half a nine, three nines.

Speaker 1 (57:23):
We don't even think about it in terms of velocity
because it's a crazy asymptopic quantity. We just think in
terms of energy. That's right.

Speaker 9 (57:29):
You don't want to think that each nine cause about
ten billion bills.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
I don't like to think about that now. But these
colliders would be very expensive because you've got to drill
the tunnel, you've got to build the magnets. The whole
thing is expensive. It's tens of billions and a competitor
on the international scene is China is proposing to maybe
build one of these colliders over there. They think they
have the money, and they are ramping up very quickly
in terms of particle physics in their universities, and I

(57:54):
think they would like to be the leader in particle
physics in the world. So there's two big competing proposals
there from CERN, one from China, and then there's a
dark Horse, which is saying, hey, maybe we shouldn't be
colliding protons or electrons, let's try colliding something else.

Speaker 9 (58:08):
What what else can you collide?

Speaker 1 (58:11):
Well, there's a really fun proposal for a muon collider.
Muons are just like heavy versions of electrons. They're not hadrons,
they're not hadrons. No, they're fundamental particles, and they're really
hard to use because they don't last very long. Like
electrons are stable, they last forever, but muons last a
few microseconds, and so it's hard to get them in
a collider and keep them going and all this kind

(58:31):
of stuff. You might wonder like, well, why bother, Well,
the answer is they have more mass than electrons do,
and so colliding muons gives you more Higgs bosons than
colliding electrons, because higgs boson interacts with particles that have mass, right,
and interacts more with particles that have more mass. So
when you smash two muons together, you have a much
higher chance of making a Higgs boson than when you

(58:53):
smash two electrons together. So the muon collider is what
they call a Higgs factory. It would produce oodles and
noodles of Higgs bosons and allow us to study it
in great detail.

Speaker 9 (59:04):
To answer I guess what question?

Speaker 1 (59:05):
Oh yeah, well, good point. I mean, the Higgs boson
was discovered and it acts the way we expect, but
it might be that it's not quite the Higgs boson
we expected. It could have some weird new properties. And
one way to make discoveries is to like measure all
the properties of the higgs boson, its mass, it's spin,
it's precise interactions with all the other particles, really really accurately,
and see if it lines up with our predictions. And

(59:27):
if it doesn't, that's a hint that there's something new
going on, some new particles or feels out there that
are messing up our calculations.

Speaker 9 (59:34):
All right, now, Daniel, since technically you are employed by CERN.
Do we need to give a sponsored content warning here?

Speaker 1 (59:43):
I am actually not technically employed by CERN. I'm employed
with the University of California, though I do my research
at CERN, and I'm certainly very heavily biased here that
I think this stuff is a lot of fun. It's
tens of billions of dollars, so whether or not governments
want to spend that money is a very political question. Personally,
I think we should spend lots more money on science,

(01:00:03):
not just particle physics, but astrophysics and condensed matter physics
and maybe even chemistry. So I'm all in favor.

Speaker 9 (01:00:09):
Of it, right right, but not philosophy.

Speaker 1 (01:00:13):
Definitely more money for philosophy. I don't know if you
call that science or not. That's a philosophy question.

Speaker 9 (01:00:17):
All right, Well, great questions here today. Thanks for our
question askers for standing in their questions.

Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
Thanks to everybody who thinks about the universe, wonders about it,
and tunes into the podcast hoping to gain some understanding.
We really love hearing your thoughts and answering your questions.

Speaker 9 (01:00:33):
We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See
you next time.

Speaker 1 (01:00:42):
For more science and curiosity. Come find us on social
media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, This, Org,
Instant and now TikTok. Thanks for listening and remember that.
Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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