What's the fastest event ever measured?

Daniel and Jorge slice time down to its shortest slivers to understand how fast things can happen in the Universe.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It's the
credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily
cash back that can earn four point four zero percent
annual percentage yield. When you open a high Yield savings
account through Apple Card, apply for Applecard in the wallet
app subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple
Card owners subject to eligibility. Apple Card and Savings by

(00:22):
Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC
terms and more at applecard dot Com. When you pop
a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not
thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the
dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day
to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources,
and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is US Dairy

(00:44):
tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digesters to turn
the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns,
and electric cars. Visit us dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability
to learn more.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
Everyone loves getting good at advice and staying in the know.
There's nothing like getting a heads up on something before
you've even had time to think about whether you need
or want it. Well. Thankfully, AT and T provides personalized
recommendations and solutions so you get what's right for you.
Whether right for you means a plan that's better suited
for you and your family, or a product that makes

(01:21):
sense for you and your lifestyle. So relax and let
AT and T provide proactive recommendations to help empower your
best connected life.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
As a United Explorer card member, you can earn fifty
thousand bonus miles plus look forward to extraordinary travel rewards,
including a free checked bag, two times the miles on
United purchases and two times the miles on dining and
at hotels. Become an Explorer and seek out unforgettable places
while enjoying rewards everywhere you travel. Cards issued by JP
Morgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC subject to credit approval Offer,

(01:56):
subject to change Terms apply.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Hey, Orge, do you think our podcast episodes are getting
like a little too long?

Speaker 4 (02:10):
Are they longer than it used to be?

Speaker 1 (02:11):
You know, we used to start out around forty ish
minutes and some of the recent ones been hitting an hour.

Speaker 4 (02:17):
But not the ones with me in it right, I'll
just try to keep it short.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
You ask a lot of questions, and sometimes it takes
an hour to explain them all.

Speaker 4 (02:26):
I guess we are trying to explain the whole universe,
so that's supposed to take a while.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
Yeah, it's actually amazing if you can explain like a
whole year's worth of physics in like sixty minutes.

Speaker 4 (02:37):
Yeah. And the funny thing is that I usually forget
it within sixty seconds.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
That's where you got to listen to it sixty times.

Speaker 4 (02:45):
But then I'll give it when sixty of the attention
it needs to. Hey, we're done after an hour, right.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
I think the math works out.

Speaker 4 (02:53):
Yeah, yeah, I do pay attention to math.

Speaker 5 (03:11):
Hi.

Speaker 4 (03:11):
I am Poor Hee May, cartoonist and the author of
Oliver It's Great, Big Universe.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor
at UC Irvine, and I'm very conscious of our finite
amounts of time.

Speaker 4 (03:22):
You mean, like here on Earth or on the air.

Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah, both, Absolutely, we're spending a non trivial amount of
time on Earth on the air, now that we've done
so many episodes, you know, it's like a non zero
fraction of our lives we spent doing this podcast. Yeah,
I know, but you know, more existentially, my kids are
growing up. I'm gonna leave home soon, and so yeah,

(03:45):
I'm valuing every hour I have with them.

Speaker 4 (03:48):
Yeah, they grow up pretty fast, sometimes too fast.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
Do you believe in parental time dilation? Everybody says, oh,
those years go buy so fast, But you know, when
you have a screaming toddler and it's two in the morning,
it feels like about a million hours before they go
down for their nap.

Speaker 4 (04:04):
Definitely, times needs to go by faster. But I feel
like I've paid attention pretty good. There's definitely a lot
of video records of our children, so we always go
back don memory lean.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 4 (04:19):
But anyways, welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain
the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio in which.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
We try to take an hour to slow down and
really understand something. We think it's worthwhile to update the
mental model in your mind. That's explaining the way the
universe works out there. We wanted to correspond as much
as possible, so the way the universe actually works, the
weird rules that quantum particles follow, the incredible powerful forces

(04:44):
swirling in the hearts of black holes. We want your
brain to be aligned with the universe, even if it
does take a little bit of time.

Speaker 4 (04:52):
Yeah, we do like to take our time to make
the most of your time when it's time to understand the.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
Universe, and the universe operates on so many amazingly different
time scales. We think about our lives and you know,
tens of years, maybe one hundred if we're lucky, but
that's just the blink of an eye in the history
of the universe that is billions of years old. And
then also between every second, there's an incredible number of
quantum operations happening, electrons buzzing and tuing and throwing, and

(05:19):
particles appearing and disappearing. Things happen in the universe from
the tiniest fractions of a second all the way out
to billions and maybe even trillions of years.

Speaker 4 (05:29):
Yeah, there's a lot going on in the universe, and
times seems to be underneath it all, dictating at what
rate things happen and in what order things happen.

Speaker 1 (05:38):
And I wonder sometimes whether the deepest answers to the
nature of the universe are at the shortest time scales,
like what is the real fabric of reality, the smallest
bits in the smallest pieces of time dictating how everything
else works somehow bubbling up to form our universe, or
whether the real story is of the longest time periods.
What's happening to the universe? How does it form or

(06:00):
what is its future? Over billions or maybe trillions of years?
You know, the billions of years that our universe has
existed could just be the first few moments of a
much longer, impossibly to imagine deep time future.

Speaker 4 (06:15):
Do you feel like maybe you have a little bit
of a fear of missing out in the universe, you know,
but maybe things are happening too fast for you to
notice or too long for you to live through.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
Yeah, I have FOMU. I fear of missing the universe
for sure.

Speaker 4 (06:28):
Yeah, physical fear of missing the universe. Fomu.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
Yeah. Some of the most interesting things that happened in
the universe are not the tiniest rules of the little particles,
but how things come together over time. You know, galaxies
took hundreds of millions of years to form. Imagine you
were an intelligent species that existed somehow in the first
one hundred million years in the universe. You would never
even see a galaxy, which to us now is like

(06:54):
the basic building block of what's out there in space.
What if the most basic building block of the few
future hasn't yet formed. An intelligent species that evolve in
a trillion years will wonder about what it was like
to be us, never even seeing the most basic thing
that exists in their universe.

Speaker 4 (07:12):
Or even if the future is set at all.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (07:15):
Right, they're a big question of whether the universe is deterministic,
meaning you can sort of know what's going to happen
in the future or at least in one of the futures,
or whether it's totally random.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
That's right, And we're hoping to push ourselves into a
future where we understand the universe a little bit better,
from the largest time scales to the shortest time scales.

Speaker 4 (07:35):
Yeah, and when it's time to do that, we will
take a little bit of time to explain it to you,
in hopefully more or less an hour, because time seems
to be one of the most fundamental things in the universe,
but sometimes you have to ask questions about time itself.

Speaker 1 (07:48):
And while we can't see the deep future yet, we
can do our best to try to understand the shortest
time scales to zoom in on how fast things are
happening in the universe.

Speaker 4 (07:58):
So today on the podcast, we'll be tagged clang, what's
the fastest event ever measured?

Speaker 1 (08:08):
You know, when people run simulations like the Hearts of
neutron stars or like weather or whatever, they always have
to choose like a minimum time step. Now you have
your universe, and then you evolve it forward in time,
one step in time, and then again and again and again,
and eventually you describe something longer. But there's that minimum
time on the computer, right, Yeah, on the computer when
you run simulations, and so in our real universe. I

(08:31):
think it's fascinating to think about, like, well, what is
the shortest time step? How far have we zoomed in
to see like the fastest thing ever happened?

Speaker 4 (08:39):
Yeah, or possibly we are living in the simulation, right.
Isn't that something that even smart people think about, not
just conspiracy theorists.

Speaker 1 (08:48):
I think it's definitely true that smart people think about it.
I don't know how true it is that smart people
believe in it or think that it's realistic. I know
there's a lot of talk out there about it. It's
a lot of fun to think about. But if you
have to ask people like whether they really believe it,
I mean, I think it's unlikely we're living in a simulation.

Speaker 4 (09:04):
For example, you mean it's fun to simulate in your
head that maybe we're living in a simulation.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
Yeah, it's a really clever sort of meta idea. Like
we think about simulations. As you say, we run simulations
in our head. We use simulations for our science. We
had a whole fun podcast episode about the importance of
doing simulations in science. It's really a whole new branch
of science, sort of different from experimental and theoretical physics.
You know, we describe things like in vivo or in

(09:31):
vitro and now sometimes we call them in silico. But
I don't know that we actually are living in a simulation,
or you know, how we would actually prove that. But
we have a whole episode about that, so folks interested
in that go check out that episode right right.

Speaker 4 (09:44):
But whether it's a simulation or not, there's definitely time
in it. And as you said, when we create little
universes in our computers, you have to pick a timestep
to do your simulation, and so you can kind of
ask the question does that happen in the real universe
as well?

Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah, and when we do it in our simulations, we
pick a timestep short enough that we're not ignoring anything important.
So we try to figure out, like, what is the
shortest time step we're interested in. You know, if you're
simulating like a evolution of a galaxy, nothing really exciting
happens in a year or one hundred years, so you
might take like thousand year time steps. But if you're
simulating like a nuclear explosion underground, you might take timesteps

(10:21):
of like a millionth of a second to make sure
you're capturing all the dynamics.

Speaker 4 (10:25):
Yeah, and as you said, there's lots of things happening
in the universe, and the idea of a timestep is
also important when you try to measure things, right. Yeah, Like,
if you're trying to measure an explosion, you don't want
to sample the explosion every three minutes because it's going
to be gone and over. And when you're sampling, you know,
had the motion of a start, you don't want to
do it every femtosecond because you're going to have too
much data.

Speaker 1 (10:46):
Yeah, exactly, So things happen on different timescales, and the
question is like, what's the fastest thing we've ever measured?
And what's the actual minimum time slice of the universe?

Speaker 4 (10:57):
Two big questions about very small things. Hopefully we can
do it in the short amount of time that we
have well, as usually, we were wondering how many people
out there had thought about the question of what is
the fastest event ever measured? So Daniel went out there
once again to ask people, what do you think is
the most fleeting or fastest physical event ever measured?

Speaker 1 (11:19):
Thanks very much to our listeners who answer these questions
very very quickly. I'm very grateful for your contributions. It
helps me understand what people are thinking about. And I
hope you enjoy hearing your voice on the air. And
if you are out there listening and would like to
hear your voice answering these questions, please don't be shy
write to me to questions at Danielandjorge dot com.

Speaker 4 (11:38):
So think about it for a second. What do you
think is the fastest thing humans have ever detected? Here's
what people had to say.

Speaker 6 (11:46):
I don't know what the smallest time slice ever measured. Here,
I'm going to assume that it's somehow around themto seconds.
I don't know why that number sticks my brain, but
I'm going to say themto seconds.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
The smallest amount of space ever measured, I think is
the plank space.

Speaker 1 (12:05):
Gonna go with plank time.

Speaker 7 (12:08):
That's easy. It's the time between when butter goes from
being soft to being soup. But actually it probably tend
to the negative twenty something, at which point I guess
doesn't even show that time makes any sense anymore.

Speaker 4 (12:23):
All Right, we got some cooking answers here.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
You know, some people listen to our podcast while they're
making dinner, and that might have influenced this answer.

Speaker 4 (12:33):
Well, I'm very interested in this recipe that where you
make soup out of butter.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
You've never had butter soup. Oh man, that.

Speaker 4 (12:43):
Sounds so healthy, so healthy.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah, I'll have butter soup low fat version please. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (12:49):
That will definitely shorten your time on Earth for sure.
I mean expand your space, but short in your time.
I mean that seems like the wrong proportions.

Speaker 1 (12:59):
With well. Buttered chicken is a very popular recipe, so
I'm sure butter soup is a thing people can make.

Speaker 4 (13:04):
Mm, but buttered chicken soup Oh my goodness, what's better
than the physics of that? How does it even work?

Speaker 1 (13:13):
It definitely adds mass.

Speaker 4 (13:15):
But yeah, it's definitely an interesting question, and so let's
jump into it. Daniel. First of all, I guess let's
talk about time in general and the idea that maybe
time is pixelated or there's a minimum amount of time
in the universe. What if physicists think about that.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
Physicists really have no idea how time works.

Speaker 4 (13:34):
All right, we're done.

Speaker 1 (13:35):
Yeah, so it's about time we gave up.

Speaker 6 (13:38):
No.

Speaker 4 (13:38):
Yeah, the shortest episode ever, the shortest podcast about physics
ever recorded, today's episode.

Speaker 1 (13:45):
Yeah, every podcast is just we don't know. Done. No,
It is really an enduring mystery. And it's weird because
time is something we sort of feel like we understand.
It's part of our everyday lives. We talk about all
the time. We all have complicated schedules, we rely on time,
We do time zoneans, we mess them up and miss meetings.
Time is both familiar and also mysterious because we don't

(14:06):
understand like what it is. Special relativity tells us that
it's deeply connected to space, and it makes actually much
more sense to think about time and space together. As
one unit space time. And that makes sense because some
of the things in special relativity show us that space
and time are mixed. That you know, moving quickly through
space can affect your measurement of time. All these sorts

(14:29):
of things sort of the same way that like electricity
and magnetism make more sense when stuck together into one idea.
It doesn't tell you that electricity and magnetism are the
same thing, just that they're connected in the same way
space and time are connected. They're not the same, but
they're related to each other in special relativity.

Speaker 4 (14:46):
Right because I guess we grow up, you know, not
just as kids, but also like sort of through elementary
high school, thinking that space and time are sort of immovable,
right like fixed in the universe. But really then eventually
you learn that space is and time are both and
a squishy, right envirorable. Time can slow down, time can
speed up, space can contract, space can expand they can

(15:07):
both wiggle. But where did this idea that maybe time
is pixelated? Where did it come from or what would
make physicists think that it might be?

Speaker 1 (15:15):
Yeah, it's fascinating. You sort of trace the evolution of
the ideas and we all sort of have that same experience.
Like Newton thought of space and time as absolute and fixed,
as you say, sort of immutable. They're like the backdrop
of the universe. But then Einstein showd us that they're not. Actually,
they're flexible, they're interconnected. But most importantly, Einstein's theory of

(15:37):
general relativity and special relativity still suggests that time is continuous,
it's smooth, it's infinitely divisible, that it's not discrete or pixelated.
It's not like there are steps in time. In Einstein's
theory of the universe. You can take any two moments
and there's always another moment in between. Right, there's no
minimum time step in Einstein's universe, and relativity describes the

(16:01):
universe very very well. It describes the expansion of the
universe and the motion of galaxies and everything we've ever
been able to test about general relativity has always been
bang on, exactly correct, with astonishing accuracy.

Speaker 4 (16:14):
Now, when you say the answing theories suggest that what
does that mean? Does that mean that it only works
with continuous time or that is just always used continuous
time and nobody has thought about applying it to the
pixelated time.

Speaker 1 (16:28):
Yeah, great question. It works assuming that space is continuous.
So you're like, let's start from that assumption and then
build on top of that. And then you could ask, well,
could you have a different theory that didn't make that assumption.
What if you assumed instead that space was pixelated? And
then you run into all sorts of mathematical problems that
nobody has been able to solve before. The motivation for

(16:48):
that comes from quantum mechanics. Like you might ask, well,
why would you wake time pixelated? It feels pretty smooth
to me. I mean, we measure it in seconds, but
we know there's always milliseconds below those and microseconds below those.
Why would you ever imagine there would be pixels? And
that comes from the idea of quantum mechanics, which tells
us that the nature of reality is a sort of discrete.
It's like made out of chunks. It's not smooth, you know,

(17:11):
like when we look at a beam of life from
a flashlight. Einstein's actual discovery from the photoelectric effect tells
us that it's not just like smooth beams of light
that you could like chop up infinitely small, that there's
like a minimum brightness because light comes in packets, these
little things called photons, right, and so quantum mechanics suggests
that even though the universe seems continuous and smooth when

(17:33):
you zoom in, it really is kind of pixelated. It's
just like when you look at your computer screen and
you zoom in, it seems smooth, right, but actually there's
little dots there. There are little basic units.

Speaker 4 (17:44):
So that's the motivation, right, Like even this podcast is pixelated, right,
Like we're recording into a digital device. It's recording it
with a time sample with a minimum time sampling rate,
and then it gets transmitted as bits and then it
plays out there where you're listening to this as those
little bits.

Speaker 1 (18:02):
Yeah, you're exactly right. Digitization is creating some pixelization, right,
You're creating these units, and exactly the sort of way
quantum mechanics works. Fascinatingly though, even analog measurements have a resolution, right,
like a photograph. You think of it as like, oh,
it's photons. It's not like pixels like a digital camera
or a analog recording on like vinyl or on a tape.

(18:26):
It's not using digits. It's analog. It's using some sort
of like magnetic technology to record it, or like physical
bumps on the vinyl. Still that is discrete, right, because
in the end, there's a finite resolution, Like for photographs
there's a resolution of a photon or the molecule of
the chemical atoms that are you know, recording the light,
or on the tape, there's still the resolution of like

(18:47):
the little magnets that are aligned to record your information,
or on the vinyl there's still like the chemistry of
the vinyl itself. So analog is higher resolution, but it's
not infinite resolution, right, And so.

Speaker 4 (18:59):
The idea is that maybe time is also pixelated.

Speaker 1 (19:02):
Yeah, because it's weird to think about time as infinite.
You know, we don't see infinities in reality. Everywhere we
see infinities in our theory, always something acts to prevent
it from happening in reality. And this is what quantum
mechanics tells us, that there are new infinities. You can't
divide things infinitely small, and maybe space itself and time

(19:22):
are pixelated. Maybe there's a minimum unit of space and
a minimum unit of time. This would be very natural
from a quantum mechanical point of view. You asked earlier, like, well,
has anybody tried that? What if you built general relativity
out of discrete units of space and time, you know,
pixelated the universe, and people are trying to do that.
But bringing together the ideas of general relativity and the

(19:43):
ideas of quantum mechanics to make that new concept, like
a theory of gravity and space and time that's built
on discrete units has so far not been successful. People
have been trying for decades. You run into all sorts
of mathematical problems doing so. So we don't have a
theory of general relativity that's built on discrete time. So
we have this theory of general relativity. It tells us
about space and gravity but assumes continuous time. And then

(20:05):
this idea that the universe is quantum mechanical and time
and space are probably discrete. But we can't bring these
two things together.

Speaker 4 (20:12):
Right. But this theory, even though it comes from Einstein,
does have its problems, right, Like it sort of breaks down,
especially when you get down to the smallest levels of
particles in quantum physics.

Speaker 1 (20:23):
Yeah, exactly, general relativity is very, very accurate. But everything
we think in physics has its limitations. Like every theory
you describe is applicable only in certain situations. Situations where
you've derived it, you know, under the assumptions that are valid,
and so, as you mentioned, like general relativity, we think
breaks down in certain situations Like number one, It can't

(20:44):
describe particles, like what is the gravity of a particle?
We don't know because particles have uncertainty. General relativity can
only tell you about how space is bent when you
know where a mass is, Well, what if you don't
know where it is? What if it only has a
probability to be here and a probability to be there,
is space probably bent or space bent on average? We

(21:05):
don't know the answers to these questions, So we don't
know how to do general relativity for quantum particles, and
it makes weird predictions.

Speaker 4 (21:12):
Are we ever going to find out? Like how are
we going to tell if the universe is pixelated in time? Ever?

Speaker 1 (21:19):
Yeah, those are two great questions. Will we ever find
out how general relativity or how space is bent by
quantum particles? There's a bunch of really cool, clever experiments. Well,
one way to do it is to try to come
up with a theory of quantum gravity that mirrors these
things together and tells us sort of like conceptually, how
time might work. Another is to try to like make
approximate calculations and guess even without the theory of quantum gravity.

(21:41):
And you heard one of the listeners talk about the
plank time. And another is to try to make fast
measurements and see, like, can we zoom in on stuff
in the universe and see if we can measure these pixels,
if we can notice some like discrete unit of time
happening in our experiments.

Speaker 4 (21:57):
Like we might measure something in an experiment and actually
see the pixels.

Speaker 1 (22:00):
Of time, Yeah, exactly, the way you can zoom in
on a screen and see the pixels are there, right,
Or you could slow down a movie and notice, oh,
it's not actually a continuous motion, it's just a bunch
of still frames. If you could zoom in on the
physical universe in time, then you might notice those time
pixels if they're there. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (22:20):
Well, I guess the question is how fast are things
in nature? And the second question you can ask is
what's the fastest thing that we can measure or that
we have been able to measure? Yeah, so far, So
let's dig into both of those small questions. I guess
short questions. Probably not, but unfortunately it's time to take
a quick break.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
With big wireless providers, what you see is never what
you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill,
the price you thought you were paying magically skyrockets. With Mintmobile,
You'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When
Mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three
month plan, they really mean it. I've used mint Mobile
and the call quality is always so crisp and so

(23:05):
clear I can recommend it to you, So say bye
bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills
and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with
any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along
with your existing contacts. So dit your overpriced wireless with
mint Mobiles deal and get three months a premium wireless
service for fifteen bucks a month. To get this new
customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan

(23:27):
for just fifteen bucks a month, go to mintmobile dot
com slash universe. That's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Cut
your wireless bill to fifteen bucks a month. At mintmobile
dot com slash universe. Forty five dollars upfront payment required
equivalent to fifteen dollars per month new customers on first
three month plan only speeds slower about forty gigabytes on
unlimited plan. Additional taxi speed and restrictions apply. See mint
Mobile for details.

Speaker 8 (23:47):
AI might be the most important new computer technology ever.
It's storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are
being invested, so buckle up. The problem is that AI
needs a lot of speed and pro assessing power. So
how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control.
It's time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI. OCI is a single platform

(24:12):
for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI
has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds,
offers one consistent price instead of variable regional pricing, and
of course nobody does data better than Oracle. So now
you can train your AI models at twice the speed
and less than half the cost of other clouds. If
you want to do more and spend less, like Uber

(24:34):
eight by eight and Data Bricks Mosaic, take a free
test drive of OCI at Oracle dot com slash strategic.
That's Oracle dot com slash Strategic Oracle dot com Slash Strategic.

Speaker 1 (24:46):
If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It's the
credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily
cash back that can earn four point four zero percent
annual percentage yield. When you open a high yield savings
account through Apple Card, apply for Apple Card in the
wallet app subject to credit approval. Savings is available to
Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Apple Card and Savings

(25:09):
by Goldman, sax Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch Member
FDIC terms and more at applecard dot com. When you
pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy
a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking
about the environmental impact of each and every bite, But
the people in the dairy industry are US. Dairy has
set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas

(25:31):
neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard
every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve
natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water,
for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four
times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes
the barn and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy
tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn

(25:54):
the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns,
and electric cars. So the next time you grab a
slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know
that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using
the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient intents
dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit
us dairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.

Speaker 4 (26:22):
All right, very quickly, Daniel, what are we talking about today?

Speaker 1 (26:25):
We're talking about the fastest things that ever happened.

Speaker 4 (26:29):
Not the fastest podcast episode. I think we're we're already
past that point.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
Maybe somebody out there is playing our podcast at like
ten x so they're understanding the universe is so much
faster than us.

Speaker 4 (26:39):
Well, do we sound like chipmunks now?

Speaker 1 (26:41):
Then to them we should talk really slowly for those people.

Speaker 4 (26:48):
Maybe we shouldn't, like figure out how to encode secret
messages by talking backwards, Like if you play the podcast backwards.

Speaker 1 (26:56):
If you only listen to every twenty fifth word I say.
I've been talking and cet messages the whole time. It's
for the special audience.

Speaker 4 (27:03):
It's like you and Tator Swift hiding secret messages.

Speaker 1 (27:07):
Yeah, it's like those books where if you read only
the words along the left side of the page, it's
a whole second message there.

Speaker 4 (27:12):
All right. If you take every twenty fifth word Daniel
has ever said in all five hundred plus episodes, and
you take every thirteenth word that I ever said in
all five hundred episodes, and you put them in the
right order, you'll get the answer to the origin of
the universe, like.

Speaker 1 (27:27):
The universe and everything. Yeah, that's exactly it is. The
big reveal folk plot twist at the end.

Speaker 4 (27:32):
Today's a day where re announce it.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
Yes, absolutely, But we.

Speaker 4 (27:37):
Are talking about how fast things are in the universe.
And I guess two sort of basic questions. What's the
fastest thing that we know about in the universe and
what's the fastest thing we've ever measured in the universe. Yeah,
so talk to us about how fast things are in
the universe, Like what are the different scales that we
know about.

Speaker 1 (27:54):
Yeah, So, first of all, there's the unit of the second. Right,
the second is like our natural unit of time, but
it's totally arbitrary. We just made it up. It's not
like a physical thing. You know, light travels a certain
distance in a second. There's some caesium atom that oscillates
billions of times in a second. But a second tells
us something about ourselves and our relationship with time, because

(28:14):
it's what we feel like is the minimum unit of
time that sort of makes sense to talk about between people.
It's like the natural rhythm of our thoughts. One second,
is it. I think that's why we pick the second,
you know, because it's reasonable, Like you pick a unit
so that you're usually talking about small numbers. I mean,
we could live our lives with clocks that go down
to the microseconds, but it would be pretty exhausting, you know,

(28:37):
if you had to tell your kid like, okay, you
can watch TV for six billion milliseconds or six billion nanoseconds,
that'd be confusing all the time. So we tend to
pick units so you can say small numbers.

Speaker 4 (28:47):
I think you're talking about like the scale of a second,
not exactly like the second, Like, why is in the
second one point one seconds? Nobody knows, right.

Speaker 1 (28:55):
Yeah, nobody knows. It's totally arbitrary. But why is this
second not like one hundred times longer, one hundred times shorter.
That tells us something about like the scale in which
we live.

Speaker 4 (29:04):
Well, we also talk about like minutes and hours. Those
are really important too, But I think you're saying, like
the second is maybe the minimum amount of time that
sort of our brains can grow or understand or grasp.

Speaker 1 (29:15):
Yeah, exactly, we have no smaller time unit that's not
just like a fraction of a second.

Speaker 4 (29:20):
That makes sense, right, Like nobody worries about things that
happen in the millisecond level on an everyday basis.

Speaker 1 (29:25):
Yeah, exactly. And if you think about the way your
body works, you know, like roughly your heart beats once
a second ish, depending on whether you're an athlete or not.
And your eyes, for example, blink in like a tenth
of a second, and your eyes can only see things
that happen, you know, to like one thirtieth of a second,
which is why you can play a movie with like
thirty frames per second and it looks continuous. Your eye

(29:47):
can't tell the difference between that and actual continuous motion.

Speaker 4 (29:52):
So maybe more it's more like the one tenth of
a second is really kind of the minimum unit that
we were used to thinking about, right, But we are
used to thinking about things that happen in the think
of an eye.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
And I think that's why you choose a unit to
be like a second, and you can think about small
numbers of it, you know, a tenth of a second
or ten seconds. It encapsulates the typical range of human activity.
But of course the physical universe things happen much faster,
you know, like even inside your brain, neurons fire. You know,
we think like about a thousand times a second, so
the processing speed of your brain is like a thousand

(30:22):
times faster than a second. And you know, tiny particles
out there can interact and live for much shorter times,
Like do you create a muon in the upper atmosphere
because a cosmic rays is smashed into a particle, that
muon lives for ten to the minus six seconds a
millionth of a second. Whoa, and you can zoom in
much faster, of course, and think about like what happens

(30:43):
in a billionth of a second. Well, in a billionth
of a second, light travels about a foot.

Speaker 4 (30:48):
Yeah, light is fast.

Speaker 1 (30:50):
Light is pretty fast, but it's amazing to think about,
like slowing time down enough to see light move right,
for light to travel at a small distance. Usually we
think about light as going like around the Earth lots
of times, but in a billionth of a second, it
only goes afoot, which is cool. There are other tiny
particles that live much shorter than the mew on. For example,
if you create a bottom cork, it lives about a

(31:11):
billionth of a second before flying off to something else.
This is a slice of time it's hard to even
really think about, like does that really exist? Is there
like a moment when the bottom cork is like there
and doing its thing before it decays? It feels almost
like zero time already.

Speaker 4 (31:26):
Well, I wonder if it feels like zero time to
us because we're so slow, you know, in our thinking.
But maybe if you have like you know, microscopic creatures
or you know, really tiny beings that probably think a
lot faster, I wonder if that will seem slow to them.

Speaker 1 (31:42):
Yeah, exactly. It's all relative, right, this choice of a second.
It tells us about like how we live our lives.
It's relative to the length of our lives and the
operating of our brain, but it's arbitrary. Time extends on
this enormous spectrum from the many, many, many billions of
years down to the tiniest slice, and we're operating on
a tiny little bit of it, Like the way we
can see a little slice of the visual spectrum, but

(32:04):
there's light with much higher frequencies and lower frequencies in
the universe. Is a wash in that kind of light
that we don't normally see. It's just it's like our
human perspective, but the universe operates on even shorter time scales.
You know, if you go down to like ten to
the minus fifteen seconds, this is now a thempto second.

Speaker 4 (32:20):
I wonder if because we also know time is sort
of relative, right, So I wonder, like, if you create
a bottom cord near a black hole or in a
spacehip going near the speed of light, is that we're
going to seem longer lived to us from our perspective.

Speaker 1 (32:35):
Absolutely, yeah. And like these muons, for example, that we
create in the upper atmosphere, they only live for a
millionth of a second, and so you might wonder, like, well,
would they ever get down to the surface of the Earth,
And the answer is yes, and The only reason they
do make it to the surface is because they're going
very very fast relative to us, so their clocks are
running slow. So even though they live for a millionth

(32:57):
of a second, that's enough time for them to make
get to the surface, because that million of a second
clicks very very slowly. As we're watching them, essentially.

Speaker 4 (33:06):
To them, so are you saying it they live a
million of a second if you're the muon, But to
us they actually live longer.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
To us they live longer. Yet they travel much further
than otherwise because they're going fast, and so their time
ticks slowly. From our point of view. If you had
like a little clock traveling with a muon, you would
see its ticks going very very slowly, and it would
fly very far before a million of a second ticked over,
and then that muon decayed. From its point of view,
it only lives for a million to a second, but

(33:34):
it sees the atmosphere is compressed, because when you're moving
fast relative to something, you see it shortened. So for
the muon's point of view, it sees the atmosphere is compressed.
In short, it can make it to the bottom of
the atmosphere, to the surface in a millionth of a second.
So that's an example of how special relativity is cool
because from one point of view, it's time dilation. From
another point of view, it's length contraction. It's really the

(33:55):
same physics.

Speaker 4 (33:57):
But yeah, time is relative, okay, So what else is
fast in the universe?

Speaker 1 (34:01):
So if you go down to like a femtosecond, how
far can light travel and like ten to the minus
fifteen seconds. Now we're talking about short distances. We're talking
about like less than a micrometer, and you can go
down even further to auto seconds. This is ten to
minus eighteen seconds. This is a hard number to think about.
It's so short that the number of autoseconds in a

(34:22):
single second is the same as the number of seconds
that have elapsed in the whole history of the universe.
Like there's been about ten to the eighteen seconds since
the beginning of the universe, and an auto second is
one in ten to the eighteenth of a second. So
it's really an incredible slice.

Speaker 4 (34:39):
Well, that's like if you take a second and you
split it into a million, and then take each of
those and split it it into a million, and then
take each of those and split it it into a
million timesteps. That's what an attosecond is.

Speaker 1 (34:50):
Yeah, exactly, it's a millionth of a millionth of a million.

Speaker 4 (34:53):
Is there anything that happens at the at a second
level that we know about.

Speaker 1 (34:56):
Absolutely. There are lots of particles that decay in an
auto second. And as we'll talk about in a minute,
we've actually measured things down to the attosecond. It's sort
of incredible. But the universe happens even faster. So we
can think about like a zepto second, which is ten
to the minus twenty one seconds. This is how long
it takes a photon to go from one side of
the hydrogen atom to the other side of the hydrogen atom.

(35:19):
Like super fast photon moving a very short distance, only
takes a zepto second. Pretty zipty, pretty zipty. But you know,
down in the realm of fundamental particles, even a zepto
second can feel like a long time. If we create
a Higgs boson in the Large Hadron collider, for example,
that lasts for a thousands of a zepto second, it's
ten to the minus twenty four seconds.

Speaker 4 (35:41):
Well, meaning like you create a Higgs boson but in
less than one thousands of azepto second it's gone, yeah,
or probably gone.

Speaker 1 (35:49):
It's probably gone. Yeah. Each one has a distribution. They're
pretty tighty. It's sort of like radioactive decay. It's not
an exact measurement, doesn't disappear when its time is up.
There's an average there. But yeah, they live much much
shorter than muons. Muons live forever compared to a higgs boson.
You know, higgs boson can be born and died ten
to eighteen times before a muon decays. Whoa digging down

(36:11):
even deeper. Some of the shortest lived particles we know
about are things like the W boson, the Z boson
on the top quark. These last for like ten to
the minus twenty seven seconds. And that's about as far
as we can go in terms of like theoretical stuff
that we can describe. And this is just probing theoretically,
like what can we describe in our theories of quantum

(36:32):
particles that takes this short amount of time. That's about the.

Speaker 4 (36:35):
Bottom of it, meaning, like, of all the things that
we have names for physically in the universe, that's about
the shortest scale that we be operating.

Speaker 1 (36:44):
Yeah, exactly, And you could postulate something that happens short.
There's no limitation there. Like we think about other particles
that are really really heavy that might decay much much faster.
There's nothing that's stopping you from thinking about that. But
we don't know of any particles in the universe that
operate on a shorter timescale.

Speaker 4 (37:00):
We always talk about how fast things go right, or
light goes right, like like, can't you say, well, light
travels one zipto fento minisecond in less amount of time
than that?

Speaker 1 (37:14):
Yeah, exactly. You can always divide time further according to
general relativity. You can just keep slicing it and you
could measure it the way you describe, like how far
does light go? And if space is continuous and time
is continuous, you could just keep doing that forever. Right,
you go down to ten to the minus a million,
you know, zero point zero with a million zeros and
then a one of seconds and think about how far

(37:36):
light goes there. But at some point you're beyond the
extrapolation the same way that we talked about like general
relativity breaking down. You know, when we go to the
heart of black holes and having infinite density. We're not
really comfortable thinking about things theoretically smaller than a certain
time called the Plank time, which is ten to the
minus forty four seconds. We think that our theory of

(37:58):
quantum particles and quantum field theory and the standard model
works very very well down to about that resolution, and
beyond that we don't trust it.

Speaker 4 (38:06):
I know we had an episode about the plank time,
but it was too much time ago. I don't remember.
So maybe for our listeners, what is the plank time?
But make it quick.

Speaker 1 (38:17):
The plank time is sort of two things. It's on
one hand, just like you put together a bunch of
physical constants of the universe until you get something that
has units of time, and then you ask, okay, what's
the number. So you take like the speed of light
and the gravitational constant and planks constant, and those all
have units on them, you know, energy or meters or
seconds whatever, but you can put them together in a

(38:38):
way that cancels and you get a number, and that
number is ten to the minus forty four seconds, and
then you can ask, well, what does that number mean?
And you know that number doesn't mean anything very precisely.
You hear a lot in popular science that it's like
definitively the minimum resolution of time. It's definitely not that.
It's just like, this is what we can do to
say roughly where things start to be different because at

(38:59):
the plank time or if you rearrange it to the
plank distance, or you rearrange it differently to like the
plank energy, that's where we think our theories break down
where we need to have some contribution from gravity and
some contribution from quant mechanics, and again we don't know
how to put those two things together. So we can
extrapolate our theories up to about the plank energy or
down to the plank time it's equivalent, but beyond that

(39:22):
is basically a question mark. Theoretically, we don't know how
to do calculations that we trust that we can rely
on shorter than the plank time.

Speaker 4 (39:29):
Maybe another way to look at it is that it's
sort of like when the things that we know about
that happen physically in the universe sort of end, right,
Like we don't know of anything that's smaller than the
plank distance, or we don't know of anything that happens
shorter than the plank time scale, and so it's like
unknown territory.

Speaker 1 (39:46):
Yeah, it's unknown territory, and it's unknown territory. We can't
even like really think coherently past it, like we've never
seen anything at ten to the minus forty four seconds.
But we can talk about it, and we can calculate it,
we can imagine it, we can use our theories, but
beyond that, we don't even really know how to think
about it carefully. Like you could think about it not carefully.

(40:06):
You could say, well, I'm just going to use general
relativity and assume it is correct and talk about infinite
slices of time and infinitely short distances light travel. You
could do that, but nobody believes that that describes reality,
the same way nobody believes that there's a singularity the
heart of a black hole. It's a naive extrapolation of
general relativity beyond what we think is reasonable, and so
we can't even really think coherently about it, sort of

(40:29):
the way we can't think coherently about what happened before
the Big Bang because for the same reason our theories
break down there. We need a theory of quantum gravity
to take us further back. So we don't even have
like mental theoretical pictures that we can trust.

Speaker 4 (40:42):
Right, right, all right, Well, that's kind of a picture
of how fast things move in the universe of Daniel.
How fast do kids grow up? Faster than that? Or flower?

Speaker 1 (40:51):
It feels like a million years every hour when you're
in it, and then it feels like a millionth of
a second, and when you're looking back.

Speaker 4 (40:57):
On it as their physical effect. A name for that.
It's called the theory of.

Speaker 1 (41:03):
Relations, theory of relatives.

Speaker 4 (41:05):
Yeah, theory, that's what I I was gonna say, theory
of relatives. Yeah, your relative theory of relatives.

Speaker 1 (41:12):
Parental time dilation in the theory of relatives. But no,
we have been doing our best to try to understand
how fast things actually happen in their universe, not just
think about them theoretically, and lots of really cool, amazing
techniques out there to measure really really short slices of time.

Speaker 4 (41:29):
I guess what we've been talking about are things that
we know happen in super short time scales. But then
there's the other question, the flip side, which is which
of these events can we actually measure and see for
ourselves that they happen at that timescale. Yeah, so let's
get into that technology. But first let's take another quick break.

Speaker 1 (41:52):
When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth
or enjoy a rich spoonful of greeky yogurt, you're probably
not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite,
But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy
has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse
gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working
hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste,

(42:13):
conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water,
for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four
times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes
the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy
tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn
the methane from maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns,

(42:34):
and electric cars. So the next time you grab a
slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know
that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using
the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense
dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit
usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.

Speaker 9 (42:52):
There are children, friends, and families, walking, riding on passing
the roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved
ones who need them to get home safely. Protect cyclists
and pedestrians because they're people too. Go safely California from
the California Office of Traffic Safety and Caltrans Hey, their.

Speaker 10 (43:06):
Fellow globetrotters and destination dreamers. If you're anything like us,
you know that life's too short for boring toasters and towels.
That's why we decided to ditch the traditional wedding registry
and went with honeyfund dot com. And that's your friends
and family chipping in to send you on a dream
you exotic honeymoon, practical check, meaningful, double check. Plus, it's
fee free and so fun for wedding guests to shop.

(43:27):
So why get more stuff when you can have unforgettable experiences.
Join the revolution at honey fund dot com and start
your adventure today.

Speaker 5 (43:36):
Whether you like fresh faced, full glam, or somewhere in between,
you've probably seen Thrive Cosmetics, viral tubing Mescara.

Speaker 4 (43:45):
You know the one in the.

Speaker 5 (43:46):
Turquoise tube all over your socials. It's easy to see
why their best sellers have thousands of five star reviews.
I love their high performance formulas. The Brilliant Eye Brightener
is one of my faves and I I love it
because it's so versatile. You can use it as a
highlighter or an eyeshadow. It's amazing. Refresh your everyday look

(44:07):
with Thrive Cosmetics Beauty that gives back. Right now, you
can get an exclusive twenty percent off your first order
at Thrivecosmetics dot com slash nine oh two one oh.
That's Thrive Cosmetics D A U S E M E
T I C S dot com slash nine oh two
O one oh for twenty percent off your first order.

Speaker 4 (44:39):
All right, we're talking about the fastest things in the universe,
or I guess, the fastest events in the universe, the
things that happened in at the shortest timescales.

Speaker 1 (44:48):
Yeah, exactly, the most fleeting things in the universe. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (44:52):
Yeah, and this podcast is I think at it for
maybe the longest event in the universe. But let's get
to it. We're gonna get a run short of time soon.

Speaker 1 (45:02):
Yeah. So when we try to see things happening in
the universe. We do something pretty basic. We take slow
motion footage. Like if you're taking a movie and you
measure thirty frames per second and then you play them
on the screen at thirty frames per second, then everything
plays like normal. But if instead you take like three
hundred frames per second and you play them on the
screen at thirty frames per second, then time looks slow.

(45:25):
In the movie, everything is slowed down. You can see
Ussain Bolt running at a reasonable rate. You can see
fast things happening more slowly. So that's what we try
to do, is we try to develop cameras that can
basically take pictures or make measurements equivalently much faster than
thirty frames per second, so that we can watch them
slow down and try to understand what happens.

Speaker 4 (45:46):
Right, And it sort of depends on what you're trying
to capture too, Right, Like, the slow motion camera on
your phone can capture you know, your kids running, maybe
somebody jumping into a pool pretty good, But if you're
trying to capture something faster, like a bullet or an explosion,
it's not going to be fast enough exactly.

Speaker 1 (46:03):
And in the old days, people used shutters for this
like you had a camera and you open the shutter
and you let light in. And if you're trying to take,
for example, a picture of a sporting event, where when
things are moving really fast, you had a really fast
shutter setting, right, your shutters open for a tiny fraction
of a second. Whereas if you're taking a picture of
something in the dark, like at night, if a really
long exposure, so gather as much light maybe seconds or

(46:24):
even hours.

Speaker 4 (46:26):
Now, what made you think of a camera? I wonder
if that in the history of humanity, if cameras are
maybe the first time that we've had something like automated
recording instances of data about the world, because before that, I imagine,
you know, it was maybe people writing things down on
a piece of paper.

Speaker 1 (46:44):
I think that before cameras, we probably had recordings of
sound also, right, which you could think about the same way,
you know, probably within decades of each other. I haven't
looked at the details.

Speaker 4 (46:55):
But those were analogue probably right.

Speaker 1 (46:57):
Yeah, those are definitely analog. The first measurements were the analogue.
It's an interesting question, like how far back do we
have like data things where we have recordings that are
not just eyewitness testimony.

Speaker 8 (47:08):
You know.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
I mean Gallet, for example, has his drawings of the
night sky, and in some sense that's still data, right,
it went into his eye and out his arm, so
he's sort of the recording device there.

Speaker 4 (47:18):
Yeah, well that's what I mean. Like I wonder, for
most of the history of science, people were just writing
things down piece of paper. But maybe the cameras, where
you expose a piece of film or played for a
certain amount of time, that's maybe some of the first
times that we had kind of this idea of a
mechanical recording of what's happening in the universe.

Speaker 1 (47:36):
Yeah, very cool question. I'm not sure we'll dig into
the history that. Maybe I'll look into that for an episode.
But these days we use digital cameras, right, and these
digital cameras can be very very fast, and the technology
behind the digital camera actually limits how fast they can go.
The way a digital camera works is that a photon
comes in the lens the same way it does for

(47:57):
a normal camera, but instead of hitting a piece of film,
which has like special chemicals on it that react to
the light, instead you hit a pixel, which is a
piece of silicon, and the photon hits an electron inside
that piece. Of silicon, and then the electron is like free.
It's like bumped out a little hole it was stuck in.
It can move along a little bit and then it
drifts along to the edge of the pixel and it
gets picked up by some electronics and measured. That's how

(48:20):
individual pixel works inside your digital camera. It's this interaction
between the photon the electron. The electron causes a little
bit of current and those can be really fast. Like
you can get CCDs or sea moss devices which are
more modern, which can take pictures down to millions of
frames per second.

Speaker 4 (48:36):
Well, you mean, like the camera in my phone can
do that.

Speaker 1 (48:38):
Not necessarily the camera in your phone, but like very
high tech sea moss and CCD devices can do this.
People who want to take pictures of lightning or like
fuel in a plasma dissolving, or very high speed scientific events,
they have specialized cameras that can get down to millions
of frames per second. In order to be that fast,
you need like very small pixels with very fast electron time.

(49:00):
That's what in the end limits it how long it
takes the electron once it's been freed to like slide
over to the part of the pixel where it gets
read out. If you went really really high speed cameras,
you're going to make some sacrifices in the design to
make it that fast. So then it's not as good
for like taking pictures of your kids, but it's really
good for measuring fast things.

Speaker 4 (49:18):
You might be able to catch the exact point at
which they grew up and record it forever.

Speaker 1 (49:24):
Yeah, exactly when they started rolling their eyes at you
instead of laughing at your jokes.

Speaker 4 (49:28):
Yeah, there you go. That's slow roll their eyes. You
can have it at a million of a second resolution.

Speaker 1 (49:33):
Yeah, and these are cool devices. Actually played with one
for one of my first science projects when I was
a summer student, using it to take pictures of lightning
in the skies in New Mexico at thousands of frames
per second, which is pretty cool. It's amazing to see
the world slow down.

Speaker 4 (49:48):
But I wonder why you bring up cameras. I know
cameras are used in astronomy, right, like those big telescopes
they have basically camera sensors at the end of the telescope.
But how much are cameras used in like physics labs.

Speaker 1 (50:02):
Well, it's a little bit philosophical, you know. You could
think of our particle physics detector as kind of a camera.
You know, it's a bunch of pixels arranged around a
collision point and it takes an image. In some sense,
a camera really is just an array of detectors. You know,
any kind of detector you have, just make an array
of them so you get some sort of like spatial
measurement as well as time. You know, that's really what

(50:22):
a picture is. It's just like a bunch of measurements
all in an array.

Speaker 4 (50:27):
Are you saying that the large Hadron collider the eight
billion dollar machine there, and we could have just used
the cell phone camera.

Speaker 1 (50:35):
Yeah, actually that's what we did. We just bought one
iPhone and it kept the rest of the month for ourselves.

Speaker 4 (50:38):
It's just a whole bunch of iPhones, yes, arranged around.

Speaker 1 (50:42):
Your hard hitting investigative journalism right here has exposed the
scam today.

Speaker 4 (50:46):
Artist, Yes, now, but seriously, like, what's the difference between
the sensors that the large having collider and like my
cell phone camera. Do they work faster or are they
basically the same?

Speaker 1 (50:57):
Or they are basically the same? I mean, actually the
devices near the center of the collision, the fastest, smallest
devices we have are silicon devices, and we borrow the
technology from the semiconductor industry, which use them develop chips
and cameras, so we're basically piggybacking off of that technology.
It's a little bit different because we apply higher voltage

(51:17):
across these pixels to make them read out a little
bit faster, but it's fundamentally the same thing. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (51:22):
Wait, wait, so then when you take a picture of
a Higgs boson, can you put it in portrait mode?
Also you can do the touch up?

Speaker 1 (51:31):
Yeah? Absolutely, I like my Sepia Higgs boson, only timey
Higgs boson, or like.

Speaker 4 (51:36):
The Higgs boson with bunny ears or something.

Speaker 1 (51:40):
All the best scientific papers and bunny ears.

Speaker 4 (51:42):
Absolutely, yes, yeah, I know it'd be very popular in TikTok.

Speaker 1 (51:45):
Yeah, but in the end, this is limited in time.
You know, in the large Hadron collider, we don't need
things much faster than that. We have millions of collisions
per second, and so that the fact that our devices
can read out millions of times per second is fast enough.
We don't need to go faster. But there are people
who aren't interested in things that happen in like a
trillionth of a second instead of a billionth or a
millionth There are special devices, special cameras that can take

(52:07):
footage with trillions of frames per second.

Speaker 3 (52:10):
Wait.

Speaker 4 (52:10):
Wait, so you're saying the large attern collider. You don't
care about things or you can't measure things that happen
faster than a minute of a second.

Speaker 1 (52:18):
We don't care about things that happen faster than that,
and we can't resolve it anyway. It would be much
more expensive to have our devices be able to do that.
But we only have one collision.

Speaker 4 (52:27):
I know you need the latest iPhone.

Speaker 1 (52:28):
Probably we're interested in one collision at a time, right,
So if we only looked at one collision, we wouldn't
need to be very fast. You just have a collision.
It sits in your detector, you read it out. It's
like a single picture. We're not taking movies of these interactions.
We only take one picture basically per interaction.

Speaker 4 (52:48):
Oh I see, but could you would you learn more
if you could take a slow motion movie of like
two protons hitting each other.

Speaker 1 (52:55):
We can't actually instrument the collision itself, only the stuff
that flies out of it, and so in the and
we're just sort of looking at the debris, and sometimes
we are interested in like when bits arise, because it
tells us like how fast they're moving. So we do
have some specialized time of flight detectors people developed to
see like did this photon arrive before that electron in
the same collision or not, So we do sometimes dig

(53:17):
into that a little bit, but mostly we just care
about what flew out. We don't usually care about like
what the order was or the sequence of events doesn't
really tell us that much more, and it's really really
hard to do, especially that fast.

Speaker 4 (53:28):
I'm interesting, but you're saying that there are, as we
talked about before, there are physical events that happened in
a much shorter timescale, and so for that you need
even better cameras.

Speaker 1 (53:37):
Yeah, and these are called streak cameras. The idea of
a CCD or SIEMOS device is a photon releases an electron,
and then you pick up those electrons. But you don't
distinguish between an electron that arrived near the end of
your time cycle and near the beginning of it, and
within a single frame, you count those electrons the same way,
and that loses information if there are things happening faster

(53:57):
than your time cycle than your frame, then you're losing them.
So a streak camera tries to take advantage of that
and applies a time varying electric field. So electrons that
are released at one moment and electrons are released another
moment will end up in different directions. So it sort
of like sweeps a single frame across something in space,

(54:17):
like spreads it out. That's why it's called a streak camera,
like takes these electrons and sprays them across something so
you can tell when they arrived.

Speaker 4 (54:26):
Well wait, wait, so this is like a sensor just
like the camera, or is this a different kind of sensor.

Speaker 1 (54:32):
It's fundamentally like a camera, right. A photon comes in
and releases an electron, but instead of just letting the
electrons drift across your pixel, you know, guiding these electrons
to different places, like on a mini screen, based on
when they arrived.

Speaker 4 (54:46):
So sort of instead of catching the electrons in a bucket,
you sort of sweep the bucket so that you can
tell when the electrons were released, which tells you when
the photons arrived at your sensor exactly.

Speaker 1 (54:58):
Yeah, so where the electron hits tells you when it
was created, which tells you when the photon arrived, so
then you could tell the difference between a photon that
arrived at the beginning or the end of your frame.
And this gets you more more time resolution, yes exactly,
And so street cameras go down to like ten to
the minus fourteen seconds. The fastest that I found was

(55:19):
one that can do seventy trillion frames per second. That's
like a lot of pictures of your kid picking their nose.

Speaker 4 (55:28):
Well, depends how quickly they do it. But what kinds
of things are being measured with this crazy camera? Like
what are they trying to do?

Speaker 1 (55:37):
These things are used to understand like biochemistry and some
kind of interactions you know, like proteins folding or bonds forming,
you know, basically chemicals interacting, this kind of stuff. But
you know, lots of people are just curious and nobody
really knows. It's sort of like uncharted territory. There are
things we think happened in a certain way, and it
might be that if you slow them down, they happen differently.

(55:59):
This weird happening that nobody expected. So it's sort of
like exploring the unknown. So people are using street cameras
to explore all sorts of things hoping to find something new.

Speaker 4 (56:10):
Now, this is if you're trying to capture photons.

Speaker 1 (56:12):
Right, yeah, in order to like take a picture of something.

Speaker 8 (56:15):
Right right, what?

Speaker 4 (56:16):
But you can also just measure things in other ways, right,
like measure the voltage of something, or measure I don't know,
the magnetic field or something. M would those be able
to be measured faster?

Speaker 1 (56:26):
Yeah? Absolutely, there's not a fundamental limitation there.

Speaker 6 (56:29):
You know.

Speaker 1 (56:30):
The question is really like can you capture something which
varies that quickly? Can you isolate it? And in order
to do that, you need to like probe it. You
need to like create something that happens at that fast
time slice so that you can take a picture of it.
You need like something that happens really quickly, and then
something that can respond very quickly, and then something that
can record that. And people are really pushing the forefront

(56:52):
of that technology. This is actually what won the Nobel
Prize in twenty twenty three is making super duper short
laser pulse is down to the atto second, down to
ten to the mine eighteen seconds. And these were super
short laser pulses created by layering longer laser pulses on
top of each other to sort of like interfere with

(57:12):
each other to make a super short pulse. And you
can use this to like probe things that are happening
inside the nucleus or inside an atom. You can give
it a super short kick and see what happens.

Speaker 4 (57:24):
Ye, how does that help you measure of something fast
a short laser pulse.

Speaker 1 (57:28):
The use this technique called pump probe measurements. Basically, you
shoot this laser pulse at the thing you're trying to
look at and you take one measurement of it, so
you have like one measurement of where your electron is
after you zap it with a laser. And what you're
really interested in is like a movie. So you want
to see, like how does the electron jumping from one
energy level to another or from one atom to another.

(57:49):
So you zap it with this laser pulse and you
take one measurement of your electron. That doesn't give you
a whole movie, but you can do it over and
over again. So if you can set up the same
system over and over again and with a laser pulse
at slightly different times along the process and take a
measurement each time, then you can put them together into
a movie. So it's like if you watch your kid

(58:11):
do a long jump and you take a really fast picture,
but only one picture per long jump, and then you
stitch them together into a whole description of the long jump.
Because you're able to take really fast pictures, you have
a now very slow motion movie of the long jump.
It's really a movie of like a thousand long jumps
where you took one picture from each. So it's not
exactly the same thing, but in principle, they are very

(58:32):
fast measurements of this event.

Speaker 4 (58:35):
I think I see what you're saying that this is
like a flash basically, right, Yeah, you're basically creating a
super fast flash which lets you capture what's going on
even if that thing is going super super fast. By
having a really short flash, you can get a picture
of it because otherwise, like even the flash in your
camera takes a while, and so if anything happens faster
than that, it'll just get streaked in your photo.

Speaker 1 (58:57):
Yeah, exactly, Like remember those Strobe foot people developed really
fast flashes and they took pictures like a bullet going
through an apple. You don't need a really fast camera
if you have a really fast flash and everything's dark otherwise,
because then you're only illuminating it during one very brief moment. Now,
imagine you did that same experiment a million times, and
you turn the flash on a slightly different time each time.

(59:18):
You'd have a whole movie, a whole slow motion movie.
It'd be from different bullets hitting different apples, but in
principle you'd put together the dynamics of what's happening.

Speaker 4 (59:27):
All right, So that's a camera then that can take
pictures essentially sort of every at a second.

Speaker 1 (59:34):
Yeah, the limitation so far as forty three auto seconds.
So this is really getting to the edge of what
we can do. But the fastest thing ever measured actually
does get down to the zepdo second. This is a
really cool technique where they shoot a photon and a
molecule that has two electrons. So say, for example, you

(59:55):
have like H two, which is two protons and two
electrons right atoms of hydrogen bonded together. You shoot a
photon at it and it actually interacts with both electrons. Okay,
so this single photon like hits one electron and then
it hits another electrons and those electrons react, right, both
of them generate some signal and those signals interfere, and

(01:00:17):
by looking at the interference between the light generated from
those two electrons, you can see this time difference. So
you can tell that the photon hit one and then
later it hit the other one, and the time difference
between those two things is about two hundred and fifty
zepto seconds.

Speaker 4 (01:00:33):
WHOA, now, what does this help you measure? You use
it to take a photograph of it.

Speaker 1 (01:00:39):
Lets you declare yourself the king of time man. This
is the fastest thing ever measured. So in one sense,
this is just like engineers being awesome and like trying
to make things as fast as possible, just for the
purpose of making things as fast as possible.

Speaker 4 (01:00:52):
Well, first of all, Daniel, engineers are awesome, yes, just
by being engineered ourselves.

Speaker 1 (01:00:56):
Yes, even when they sleep in and sit around in
their pajamas and do little cartoons all day, engineers.

Speaker 4 (01:01:01):
Are exactly I mean, that's even more awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:01:03):
Let's face it, absolutely, that's the pinnacle of awesomeness.

Speaker 4 (01:01:06):
Obviously, right, Like who wouldn't go on that job without doubt?

Speaker 1 (01:01:11):
Without doubt? But you know, if you're interested in how
H two works and how electrons interfere with each other,
you know, and understanding the system and all its full glory.
Usually we think about like an individual electron one at
a time, but really it's a complicated system where the
electrons can interact and affect each other. If you want
to understand the finite gradations of energy levels in H two,

(01:01:32):
then this can help you understand that. By poking one
electron and poking another.

Speaker 4 (01:01:36):
So what is it actually measuring, like the difference in
time between when the electrons came out of the atom,
or just when the photons hit each of the atoms
or what.

Speaker 1 (01:01:46):
Yeah, it's measuring those two electrons. So you're knocking both
electrons out of the atom, and then you're making measurements
of those electrons, and because they're sort of almost on
top of each other, those two electrons can interfere, and
the interference pattern lets you recover the there's a time
difference between the two electrons when they get knocked.

Speaker 4 (01:02:03):
Out and the normal measurement. You think, oh, both electrons
came out at the same time. But yeah, now you're
saying we can actually tell like, oh, this one, the
right one came out first, then the lack.

Speaker 1 (01:02:12):
One exactly, and the difference in time is really minute.
It's two times ten of the negative nineteen seconds, and
that is the fastest thing ever measured.

Speaker 4 (01:02:21):
WHA, that's even faster than the higgs boson.

Speaker 1 (01:02:25):
That's not faster than the higgs boson. But we've never
measured the lifetime of a higgs boson. The higgs boson
lifetime ten of the minus twenty four seconds. That's theoretical, Like,
we don't know how long the higgs boson lasts. We'd
haven't measured it.

Speaker 4 (01:02:38):
Actually, maybe if you install the new iOS on your
large Hydrin collider phones here, yeah, a particle physics portrait mode.
Mm hmm.

Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
There's a way indirectly to understand the lifetime of the
higgs boson because it's connected to its mass and how
different higgs bosons have different masses, And there's a bunch
of theory that lets you say, if you measure the
mass of the higson, you can then extrapolate to know
what its lifetime is. But that's not the same as
actually measuring its lifetime. That theory could be wrong. So
we haven't been able to resolve the lifetime of a

(01:03:09):
higgs boson, like the time between when it's created and
it decays, and even this zepdo second measuring device is
like a factor of ten thousand too slow to observe
a Higgs boson.

Speaker 4 (01:03:22):
Well, I guess maybe what you mean, like, this is
the fastest physical event we've seen. Yeah, with like a
camera basically.

Speaker 1 (01:03:30):
Yeah, with a camera, we're like the definition of a
camera is kind of loose here because we're not like
getting pixels or images here. We're just sort of making
measurements after illuminating it, right, we flash it with an
X ray, maybe take some measurements.

Speaker 4 (01:03:42):
Right, So this is the fastest event that we have
a pick for. So definitely it happened exactly, because otherwise
it didn't happen.

Speaker 1 (01:03:50):
Yeah, Pixar, it didn't happen. And this is the.

Speaker 4 (01:03:52):
Fastest pigs it didn't happen. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:03:54):
And we think probably the universe is operating on a
much shorter timescale we do these calculations. We're pretty confident
in our theory about Higgs bosons and Wz's bosons, where
we think it's happening, but it's not the same as
actually seeing it.

Speaker 4 (01:04:08):
Hmmm, all right, Well, it's kind of this interesting convergence
of technology and theory, right, it's like this is where
rubber meets throat basically, right, Like you have these theories,
but then you need actual measurements to prove that these
things are happening at those time scales. And that's where
the technology is right now, that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:04:26):
And the experimental technology actually taking these pictures is still
like twenty five orders of magnitude away from the theory.
Like the theory will work down to ten of the
minus forty four seconds. We've only measured down to ten
of the minus nineteen seconds. So there's a long way
to go.

Speaker 4 (01:04:41):
Oh so we're halfway there. Sure, Sure, we've done that
in what twenty years?

Speaker 1 (01:04:46):
So yeah, the same way that like getting one thousand
dollars is like halfway to a million dollars, right, it's
just ten to the three insteat.

Speaker 4 (01:04:53):
It if you think logarithmic scale actually or the way
inflation right now.

Speaker 1 (01:05:02):
Much to say, totally fair. Anyway, we're making progress and
we're illuminating the universe. It's smaller and smaller time slices.
Maybe eventually one day we'll see it at its smallest
time slice and discover the granularity of the universe itself.

Speaker 4 (01:05:16):
Yeah, and we can measure the progress of human eyes
to see the fast things in the universe. Daniel, when
should be the next podcast episode where we sample how
fast things can be measured?

Speaker 1 (01:05:28):
You know, things are happening pretty rapidly, so maybe in
the next couple of years so we will break this record.

Speaker 4 (01:05:34):
Which case, we might set a new record for what's
the fastest change in how fast we can measure things
measured by a podcast in portrait mode?

Speaker 1 (01:05:43):
Yeah, and maybe by then we'll be making millions of
dollars instead of thousands.

Speaker 4 (01:05:47):
Yeah, by then we're halfway there. Yeah, hopefully, hopefully, we
can only hope so, and maybe by then I'll actually
remember what we talked about in the episodes.

Speaker 1 (01:05:57):
Sounds like a plan.

Speaker 4 (01:05:58):
All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for
joining us, See you next time.

Speaker 1 (01:06:07):
For more science and curiosity, come find us on social
media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, 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 iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

(01:06:28):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you
pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably
not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in
the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every
day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources,
and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling

(01:06:51):
greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the
methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns,
and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last
Sustainability to learn more.

Speaker 3 (01:07:05):
As a United Explorer Card member, you can earn fifty
thousand bonus miles plus look forward to extraordinary travel rewards,
including a free checked bag, two times the miles on
United purchases and two times the miles on dining and
at hotels. Become an Explorer and seek out unforgettable places
while enjoying rewards everywhere you travel. Cards issued by JP
Morgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC subject to credit approval

(01:07:27):
offer subject to change. Terms apply.

Speaker 5 (01:07:30):
I'm a cleaning lady, a single mom with three kids
and an IQ north of one sixty, so helping the
cops solve a murders, literally the easiest part of my day.

Speaker 11 (01:07:38):
ABC Tuesday the series premiere of falls most anticipated new
drama High Potential. That big brain of hers is going
to help us close out a lot of cases. Haylen
Open is the new base of investigation.

Speaker 1 (01:07:49):
You're a single mom pretend interview, Car, I am not pretending.

Speaker 4 (01:07:52):
I'm just out here super copping.

Speaker 11 (01:07:54):
High Potential series premiere Tuesday, ten ninth Central on ABC
and stream on Hulu