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