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Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, I was wondering how heavy are the fundamental particles? Oh, man,

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Speaker 1: is a really big range from very light to pretty massive?

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Speaker 1: But like how heavy and how massive? Like? How can

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Speaker 1: I get a handle on on these numbers? Well, one

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Speaker 1: way to do it is to think about electrons like cats,

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Speaker 1: I mean like electric cats. No, no, no, think about

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Speaker 1: it in relative terms. If an electron was like the

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Speaker 1: mass of a cat instead of its super tiny mass,

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Speaker 1: then how heavy would a mu want be? While mu

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Speaker 1: want is two hundred times heavier? Though, mue would be

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Speaker 1: like a walrus? All right, Yeah, that's pretty heavy stuff.

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Speaker 1: And your lightest quarks, the ones that make up the

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Speaker 1: protons and neutrons inside your body, up and down corks,

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Speaker 1: If the electron has the mass of a cat, and

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Speaker 1: then the quarks would be about as heavy as a

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Speaker 1: typical dog. I see, And does the light corks also

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Speaker 1: chase the electron? They do, actually, but it's this pretty

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Speaker 1: stable circle and they've been running in circles for billions

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Speaker 1: of you, like a Tom and Jerry cartoon. But what

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Speaker 1: about the top cork? I hear that one's pretty heavy? Yeah,

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Speaker 1: So if the electron is a cat, then the top

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Speaker 1: cork would be six blue whales. Yeah, that is bigger

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Speaker 1: than a cat. It's three hundred and fifty thousand cats.

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Speaker 1: Are the whales electric too, They're more positive? Hi am

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Speaker 1: or handmate cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics. I'm Daniel.

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Speaker 1: I'm a particle physicist, and I weighed the top cork

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Speaker 1: for my PhD thesis. Oh did you really that was

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Speaker 1: your Like the title of your thesis, I weigh one

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Speaker 1: of the fundamental particles and this is what I found.

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Speaker 1: Click to find out more. Yeah, so what if we

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Speaker 1: are very curious about exactly how much mass each of

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Speaker 1: these particles has? And back when I was a PhD student,

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Speaker 1: the newly discovered particle was the top cork, and it

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Speaker 1: was crazy heavy and everybody wants to know exactly how

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Speaker 1: heavy was it. So my thesis and post stock work

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Speaker 1: were like fancy statistical techniques to extract as much information

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Speaker 1: as possible to get the mass of the top cork. Wow,

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Speaker 1: it was a heavy burden. Did your thesis also weigh

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Speaker 1: a lot? Like? Was it a thousand pages? It was

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Speaker 1: a pretty massive topic. Yeah, was it printed in the

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Speaker 1: size of a top cork? I thought at some point

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Speaker 1: that I was going to collapse into a black hole

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Speaker 1: during the writing of this thesis from all the snacks

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Speaker 1: you were eating while you were writing it. As my

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Speaker 1: thesis got longer and longer, I thought, what is the

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Speaker 1: short style radius of a PhD thesis? Anyway? But anyways,

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Speaker 1: welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explained the Universe,

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Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio in which we put

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Speaker 1: the whole universe on a scale to understand exactly what

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Speaker 1: it's made of and how it's little bits work. Examine

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Speaker 1: all the tiny, little moving parts to understand how they work,

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Speaker 1: how much stuff they have, how they interact with each other,

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Speaker 1: and how that all comes together an incredible chaotic dance

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Speaker 1: to make the world that we know. Yeah, because it

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Speaker 1: is a pretty massively cool universe full of giant, incredible

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Speaker 1: things that defy our brains in terms of their size

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Speaker 1: and scale, and also the tiniest, smallest things that you

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Speaker 1: can even imagine. Some of these things are tinier than tiny,

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Speaker 1: that's right, And that feeling you get when you look

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Speaker 1: out into the universe that there are these really different

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Speaker 1: scales that like, you are so much smaller than the Earth,

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Speaker 1: and the Earth is so much smaller than the Sun,

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Speaker 1: which is tiny compared to the galaxy. That same kind

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Speaker 1: of thing happens also for particle physics. There are particles

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Speaker 1: that are a million times heavier than other particles, and

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Speaker 1: so we have this broad spectrum of masses. One of

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Speaker 1: the great mysteries of particle physics is understanding exactly why

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Speaker 1: that is. Yeah, the smallest of scales in our universe.

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Speaker 1: There's a whole zoo of particles that not only exists,

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Speaker 1: but that can exist and do exist sometimes in the universe,

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Speaker 1: and they all weigh a different amount. And particle physicists

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Speaker 1: really care about exactly how much they weigh because sometimes

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Speaker 1: our theories predict how much they should weigh, and so

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Speaker 1: if they don't weigh exactly the amount we expect, then

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Speaker 1: we know something is wrong, something is new in the

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Speaker 1: universe that we didn't understand, and sometimes that's a clue

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Speaker 1: that reveals a whole new chain of discoveries. M isn't

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Speaker 1: that a little awkward, though, Daniel, Like, what would you

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Speaker 1: do if there were a whole bunch of physicists really

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Speaker 1: interested in how much you wait or how massive you are?

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Speaker 1: I would be flattered. I'm like, Wow, I'm so important

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Speaker 1: to the universe. There are grants being written about me,

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Speaker 1: Particle accelerators being devised just to accelerate Daniel and anti

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Speaker 1: Daniel together. Physics paparazzi outside your house all the time,

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Speaker 1: trying to shoot particles at you. Wouldn't that be kind

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Speaker 1: of annoying? At some point over here, Daniel, over here,

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Speaker 1: pep pep pew, they'd be like, don't have any more chocolate.

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Speaker 1: We just spent ten billion dollars measuring how heavy you are.

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Speaker 1: You just gonna change the answer. You can't just do that.

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Speaker 1: Oh man, you have don't go on a diet for

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Speaker 1: a lot, all of that literature, you know. The truth

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Speaker 1: is I would hate to be the subject of so

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Speaker 1: much scrutiny. I'm such an introvert. That would be a nightmare.

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Speaker 1: But maybe you're making the point that we don't ask

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Speaker 1: these particles if they want to be studied, right, Nobody

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Speaker 1: got their consent to be part of our experiments. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: what if they want to keep their mass private? Well?

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Speaker 1: The interesting thing about particles is that they don't have

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Speaker 1: mass as an individual property, Like I weigh a different

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Speaker 1: amount than you do, and then every other person out

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Speaker 1: there does. But particles all basically have the same mass

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Speaker 1: if they're the same type. In fact, it's sort of

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Speaker 1: the way we categorize particles, Like the difference between an

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Speaker 1: electron and a muan is a muan is a heavier

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Speaker 1: version of the electron. But all the muans out there

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Speaker 1: have exactly the same mass because they're all part of

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Speaker 1: the same quantum field. They're all just ripples in the

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Speaker 1: same field. Yeah. Well, even taking a step back, it's

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Speaker 1: sort of amazing that you can break down everything in

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Speaker 1: the universe into like a short list of little, tiny particles,

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Speaker 1: you know, sort of like the universe is made out

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Speaker 1: of only five or six or nine lego pieces, and

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Speaker 1: it's interesting that all these lego pieces are just a

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Speaker 1: little bit different from each other. They not only have

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Speaker 1: different like charges and quantum numbers, but they weigh differently. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and particle physics is all about finding those patterns, saying

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Speaker 1: what are these particles have in common and what's different

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Speaker 1: about these particles? And the reason we do that is

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Speaker 1: that we're hoping to reveal some deeper layer of reality.

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Speaker 1: We think that probably these five or six or twelve

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Speaker 1: lego pieces aren't the fundamental nature of reality. They aren't

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Speaker 1: the most basic parts of our existence, that they're more

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Speaker 1: like the atoms we see that are made of smaller pieces,

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Speaker 1: and that by arranging the fundamental particles and studying the patterns,

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Speaker 1: we can get some clues as to what might be

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Speaker 1: going on underneath. Yeah, and as you said, physics are

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Speaker 1: really interested in knowing what the exact masses of these

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Speaker 1: particles are because I guess you want to get the

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Speaker 1: model right, right, Like if the model is off by

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Speaker 1: even a little bit, you're wrong about the universe. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: And because the masses tell us a lot about how

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Speaker 1: these particles are connected to each other. Remember that when

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Speaker 1: particles fly through the universe, they're new were just a

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Speaker 1: tiny dot flying through empty space. They're flying through lots

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Speaker 1: of quantum fields and interacting with those fields, and how

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Speaker 1: they interact with those fields changes how they move, and

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Speaker 1: that's part of how they get their mass. So by

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Speaker 1: measuring the mass of these particles we can tell something

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Speaker 1: about how they're touching all these other fields. So it's

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Speaker 1: a very very sensitive probe of the particles and how

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Speaker 1: they talk to the other particles. Yeah. And so if

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Speaker 1: we've known about these particles for a bit of a

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Speaker 1: long time now, and we've measured through mass. I mean,

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Speaker 1: if you did it for your thesis, that must have

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Speaker 1: been what like a hundred years ago, two hundred don't

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Speaker 1: try to flatter me. Last year maybe, But they've been

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Speaker 1: measured before, right, Like, that's one of the first things

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Speaker 1: you did when you discovered these particles, when physicists discovered them,

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Speaker 1: it was measure how much they wait, that's right, but

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Speaker 1: it's a long project. First you discover the particle, you

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Speaker 1: just know that it exists. Then you start to study

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Speaker 1: its properties. One of the first things you do, is

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Speaker 1: you said, is to measure its mass. The first measurements

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Speaker 1: are usually very imprecise because you only have a handful

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Speaker 1: of examples. You just discover this thing, is barely enough

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Speaker 1: data to show that it exists. But as you accumulate

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Speaker 1: more data and your techniques get fancy and fancier, then

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Speaker 1: your measurements get more and more precise, and then you

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Speaker 1: can start asking really interesting questions about like is the

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Speaker 1: mask what we expected it to be? Doesn't make sense

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Speaker 1: to us, Yeah, it doesn't make sense in terms of

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Speaker 1: the theory that you have and firm the math right,

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Speaker 1: and does it all hang together? Like there needs to

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Speaker 1: be some self consistency right, right, And it seems like

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Speaker 1: every time you do an experiment, you're refining that measurement,

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Speaker 1: like you're adding more than the numbers down the decimal

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Speaker 1: places of how much you how well you know this

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Speaker 1: the mass of them? Yeah, And there's really two different

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Speaker 1: ways that you can do that. One is just do

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Speaker 1: more experiments. You get more data, and that can reduce

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Speaker 1: what we call these statistical uncertainty, like the chance that

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Speaker 1: you accidentally measure the wrong number due to a quantum fluctuation.

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Speaker 1: But then later, once you have enough data, the real

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Speaker 1: work is in understanding the data that you have to

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Speaker 1: remove sources of bias because that becomes the dominant source

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Speaker 1: of the uncertainty. So it can take years or even

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Speaker 1: in decades before the final answer has come out about

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Speaker 1: these measurements. Most precise results are sometimes arrived at ten

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Speaker 1: years after the last bit of data was taken. Well,

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Speaker 1: we've been doing this for a while, weighing the particles,

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Speaker 1: and I think as in general, we've sort of feel

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Speaker 1: that we or if we felt that we had a

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Speaker 1: pretty good handle on what these particles weighed. But recently

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Speaker 1: there's been some big news about or maybe big error

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Speaker 1: about them that's right. Last week we released a paper

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Speaker 1: to the world about a new measurement of the mass

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Speaker 1: of one of the heaviest particles, a w boson. This

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Speaker 1: is the particle that communicates the weak force and the

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Speaker 1: CDF collaboration and group working at Fermilab where actually I

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Speaker 1: was a post doc, so I did my research on

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Speaker 1: that experiment, released a paper measuring the mass of this

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Speaker 1: thing with unprecedented precision. Like the uncertainty they claim on

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Speaker 1: their measurement is much smaller than anybody has ever achieved,

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Speaker 1: so it should be a very very precise measurement of

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Speaker 1: the mass. But the answer they got, the measurement they

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Speaker 1: made of the mass, that number was a big surprise

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Speaker 1: to everybody, and it made a big news. You were

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Speaker 1: telling me that it was all over the science pages

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Speaker 1: of all the major newspapers. That's right. It actually was

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Speaker 1: the cover of Science, which is basically the biggest journal,

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Speaker 1: and it was all over the news on. A bunch

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Speaker 1: of listeners wrote in and said, hey, what's going on

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Speaker 1: with this measurement? And also, hey, Daniel, I saw your

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Speaker 1: name on this paper. What's up? What what's up? Indeed,

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Speaker 1: so you're you're one of the authors of this paper.

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Speaker 1: I am, in fact, one of the authors of this

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Speaker 1: paper out of how many three hundred and eighty nine,

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Speaker 1: three hundred and eighty nine authors? Was your position in

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Speaker 1: there where you near the top or the bottom or

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Speaker 1: is it alphabetic? It's alphabetical, so I'm always near the

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Speaker 1: end of the list. Who goes after you? Mr uh xylophone.

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Speaker 1: We have collabrators from all over the world, so we

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Speaker 1: have every letter from the Hungarians whose names start with

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Speaker 1: two a's to Chinese collaborators whose name starts with z

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Speaker 1: h zough. I am not close to the end of

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Speaker 1: the list, m Well. I In my field, at least

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Speaker 1: when I was working on research, being near the end

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Speaker 1: means you were more senior. So that's a good thing, right,

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Speaker 1: It can be a good thing in our field, though

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Speaker 1: we have this sort of ridiculous policy or anybody who

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Speaker 1: has contributed in any way to building the detector or

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Speaker 1: running the experiment is an author on every paper that

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Speaker 1: uses that data, even if it comes out years later.

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Speaker 1: I've worked on this experiment in almost ten years, but

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Speaker 1: they still put my name on every paper, which is

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Speaker 1: kind of ridiculous. Wow, So did you get to like

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Speaker 1: type one word out of the whole paper or something.

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Speaker 1: It's kind of embarrassing. But I didn't know about this

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Speaker 1: paper until just a few days before the news broke. Really,

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Speaker 1: it's like, hey, we're including you in this paper. You

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Speaker 1: might win a no More prize. UM good life, f

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Speaker 1: y I. It's sort of silly, and it just speaks

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Speaker 1: to how like modern science is done in these really

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Speaker 1: big collaborations and the publishing system hasn't really caught up

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Speaker 1: to that. You know, authors sounds like a lot. But

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Speaker 1: in my current collaboration on a list at the Large

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Speaker 1: Hadron Collider, we have five thousand authors on every paper,

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Speaker 1: and we publish more than a hundred and twenty papers

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Speaker 1: every year. That means twice a week there's a paper

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Speaker 1: going out with my name on it. I don't even

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Speaker 1: know the titles of most of the papers that my

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Speaker 1: name is on, and some of them I couldn't even

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Speaker 1: explain the title to you. So being an author on

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Speaker 1: these papers doesn't really mean that much. Then, how do

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Speaker 1: you know it's good science? Like? What if they discover

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Speaker 1: one of them, UM was not correct? Wouldn't that look

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Speaker 1: bad on you? I think that's an excellent question, and

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Speaker 1: I think in a perfect world, everybody who's an author

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Speaker 1: in every paper should be responsible for the scientific content

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Speaker 1: of that paper. I think that we know that that's

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Speaker 1: not how things are working right now, and we need

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Speaker 1: to revise somehow the way these authorship policies work. And

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Speaker 1: I've actually proposed inside my collaboration that we do change that,

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Speaker 1: that we don't have everybody being author on every paper.

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Speaker 1: But there's a lot of resistance to that proposal. I

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Speaker 1: guess there's some politics. But on the plus side, you

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Speaker 1: probably get residuals and royalties right from these papers. You

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Speaker 1: know that in science you pay to publish, right, You

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Speaker 1: don't get paid to push. You get negative royalties exactly, Nobody.

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Speaker 1: If you go google my name, I have something like

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Speaker 1: more than a thousand papers with my name on it.

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Speaker 1: Only a hundred of those are like my actual scientific output.

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Speaker 1: Most of them are work done by my colleagues, and

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Speaker 1: I'm sure it's all excellent. Well, yeah, that's pretty cool.

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Speaker 1: And so this paper that your name is on was

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Speaker 1: big news, and in fact it was massive news. And

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Speaker 1: so today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question,

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Speaker 1: is the w boson two massive? It feels like a

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Speaker 1: very judgmental title here Daniel like, how can something how

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Speaker 1: can something be too massive? Well, it has a higher

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Speaker 1: mass then is predicted by the theory, and higher mass

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Speaker 1: than other measurements. So their new result that came out

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Speaker 1: is bigger than the previous measurements. It means if they're right,

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Speaker 1: then the w boson isn't fat more massive than we

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Speaker 1: thought it was and more massive than our current theory

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Speaker 1: can explain. Well, I'm curious to see what happened. Did

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Speaker 1: the w boson gain weight or with somebody leaning on

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Speaker 1: the scale or something, But it's a very small difference,

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Speaker 1: kind of right, like what was the old measurement and

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Speaker 1: what was what's the new measurement? So the old measurement

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Speaker 1: is quoted in weird units, which is why in the

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Speaker 1: intro we talked about cats. But the units are mega

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Speaker 1: electron volts, so that's millions of electron volts, and for calibration,

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Speaker 1: about a thousand of these m evs are about what

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Speaker 1: a proton ways. So the previous measurement of a w

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Speaker 1: boson was about eighty thousand, three hundred and seventy mtvs,

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Speaker 1: so like eighty point four almost protons. And now what

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Speaker 1: did they measure it to be? The new one they

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Speaker 1: measured to be eighty thousand, four hundred and thirty four,

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Speaker 1: So it's an increase of about sixty four of these mtvs.

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Speaker 1: I didn't quite spot the difference between the two numbers,

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Speaker 1: about I'm sure to have phisic. It's a huge difference.

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Speaker 1: It's a very small difference. You're right, you know, it's

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Speaker 1: a difference of sixty four MTV out of eighty thousand.

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Speaker 1: So it's very very precise. Issue is that the theory

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Speaker 1: predicts it to be eighty thousand, three hundred and fifty

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Speaker 1: seven with a very small uncertainty of about six. So

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Speaker 1: the old measurement was eight three hundred and seventy and

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Speaker 1: the new measurement is eighty thousand, four hundred and thirty four. Again,

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Speaker 1: I'm catching the difference. I feel like it's maybe like

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Speaker 1: maybe we can put it in terms of percentage. It's

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Speaker 1: like point one percent different, maybe less. Yes, So the

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Speaker 1: difference between the old measurement and the new measurement is

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Speaker 1: less than point one percent relative to the ws mass

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Speaker 1: M And I guess that sounds like a little but

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Speaker 1: to a physicist that's um massive. Shall we say it's huge? Right,

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Speaker 1: because if it doesn't match the theory, then there's either

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Speaker 1: something wrong with the experiment or something wrong with the theory. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: The key thing is not how big is this difference

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Speaker 1: of sixty four mtvs relative to the WS mass. That's tiny.

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Speaker 1: The key is to compare the difference to how well

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Speaker 1: we know these numbers. The difference is sixty four mtvs

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Speaker 1: in the measurement, the uncertainty is ten mtvs. So like

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Speaker 1: they are very certain in this new measurement relative to

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Speaker 1: the other measurement. So like the uncertainty is one sixth

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Speaker 1: of this difference. All right, well, um, it's a big

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Speaker 1: result and made all the news and and a lot

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Speaker 1: of people ask you to come on the podcast and

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Speaker 1: explain it, right, that's right. Folks were wondering what this

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Speaker 1: meant for physics. Did it really break science like all

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Speaker 1: those psyclon journalism headlines said, And so they wanted us

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Speaker 1: to talk about it. Oh, man, I hope it didn't

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Speaker 1: break science, because then we have to return it is science,

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Speaker 1: have a warranty on it, or wait, we can return

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Speaker 1: it was usually we were wondering how many people out

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Speaker 1: there had heard of this headline and knew what it meant,

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Speaker 1: what the difference between the W bosons mass could mean.

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Speaker 1: And so, since this was a late breaking news event,

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Speaker 1: instead of asking our cadre of Internet volunteers, I just

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Speaker 1: walked around campus here at you see Irvine to see

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Speaker 1: had undergrads heard the big news about the w boson? Yeah?

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Speaker 1: And so you went out there into the campus and

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Speaker 1: you ask people if they had heard of this interesting

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Speaker 1: measurement and does it worry them? Here's what people had

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Speaker 1: to say. Have you heard of the w boson? Only

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Speaker 1: heard boson but not w um? What do you think

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Speaker 1: it means if scientists discover that the w boson is

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Speaker 1: a little heavier than it's supposed to be? I don't care.

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Speaker 1: Have you heard of the w boson? What do you

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Speaker 1: think it might be? Probably a policy in place for

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Speaker 1: like an environmental aspects. And what do you think it

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Speaker 1: would mean if scientists discover that some particle is heavier

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Speaker 1: than it's supposed to be. Not so good? That's um

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Speaker 1: not so good to be honest. And I've heard of

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Speaker 1: the boson, not the w boson. Whatever. What do you

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Speaker 1: think it means if scientists discover that the w boson

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Speaker 1: is a little heavier than it's supposed to be. I'm

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Speaker 1: not sure. Does it make you worried? Yes? Have you

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Speaker 1: heard of the W boson? What do you think it is?

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Speaker 1: Boson and shape? Look at you? And what do you

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Speaker 1: think it means if scientists discover that it's heavier than

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Speaker 1: it's supposed to be? Have you heard of the W boson? No?

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Speaker 1: If you have any guess what it might be? Now

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Speaker 1: my first year? No? Um, what do you think it

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Speaker 1: means if scientists discover that some particle is heavier than

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Speaker 1: it's supposed to be, it's more like charged. I don't know.

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Speaker 1: Do you know what the w boson is? Have you

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Speaker 1: heard of it? What do you think it might mean?

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Speaker 1: If scientists discover that it's a little bit heavier than

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Speaker 1: it's supposed to be, maybe it might be a bad thing.

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Speaker 1: Does it make you worried? Kind of? But not really

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Speaker 1: since I don't really know what it is? Thank you.

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Speaker 1: What do you think it means if the W boson

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Speaker 1: is a little heavier than it's supposed to be, the

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Speaker 1: interaction length is a little shorter, Does it make you worried?

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Speaker 1: M hm no, it makes me excited, all right. The

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Speaker 1: question is do you know what the W boson is? No?

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Speaker 1: I do not you have to guess what you think

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Speaker 1: maybe a science law. I don't know. And what do

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Speaker 1: you think it means? If scientists discover that a particle

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Speaker 1: is heavier than it's supposed to be, it just didn't

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Speaker 1: find it correctly last time? No, I don't you have

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Speaker 1: to guess? What do you think it might be? Something

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Speaker 1: with either physics or chemistry? Okay? And if scientists measure

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Speaker 1: a particle and discover that it's more massive than it's

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Speaker 1: supposed to be, what do you think that means? Maybe

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Speaker 1: there's something else smaller than that particle. That's possible if

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Speaker 1: it's bigger than we think it is. Okay, the w boson,

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Speaker 1: I'm not familiar. If you have a guess a particle particle? Cool?

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Speaker 1: And if scientists measure a particle and discover that it's

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Speaker 1: heavier than it's supposed to be, what do you think

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Speaker 1: that might mean? It's something unstable or that it's not

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Speaker 1: functional in a normal manner? All right, Not a lot

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Speaker 1: of people have maybe heard of this. Nobody had any

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Speaker 1: idea of what I was talking about. Um, some people

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Speaker 1: thought it was some sort of policy or some particles

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Speaker 1: shaped like a W. I was kind of surprised. I

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Speaker 1: thought the w boson was a little better known than that.

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Speaker 1: It's only famous in certain circles a certain scales, like

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Speaker 1: if you're really small, the w boson is big. Yeah. Well,

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Speaker 1: I thought the w boson is going to get a W,

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Speaker 1: but it looks like I got an L instead. Well.

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Speaker 1: It's interesting because this time you went out into the campus,

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Speaker 1: which is more of a maybe general audience than the

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Speaker 1: one that you find online, because online you sort of

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Speaker 1: get a lot of listeners of this podcast. Yeah, and

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Speaker 1: I think that listeners the podcast probably have an idea

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Speaker 1: of what the w boson is, but maybe don't necessarily

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Speaker 1: understand why it's important to measure its mass and what

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Speaker 1: this new measurement means and if we can believe it. Well,

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Speaker 1: I guess to start with for those of us who

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Speaker 1: don't know what a w bozon is, Daniel, can you

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Speaker 1: explain it to us? Yeah, as you described earlier, we

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Speaker 1: know that the world around us is made of tiny

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Speaker 1: little particles and stuff that makes up you and me

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Speaker 1: and the table in front of us. It's not smooth

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Speaker 1: and continue us like it seems. It's more like a

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Speaker 1: mesh with these little points of matter connected by forces,

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Speaker 1: and so we've discovered but the little points of matter

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Speaker 1: are made out of time, the little bits of stuff,

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Speaker 1: and we call those matter particles fermions, like quarks and electrons.

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Speaker 1: But there are also the forces that tie those things together.

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Speaker 1: And those forces you can think about as communicated via field,

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Speaker 1: like an electric field from an electron. You can also

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Speaker 1: think about them as communicated via particles. So we call

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Speaker 1: these force particles like ripples in those fields. And so

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Speaker 1: for example, when an electron pushes against another electron, you

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Speaker 1: can think about that is like ripples in their electromagnetic fields,

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Speaker 1: or exchanging virtual particles. In this case it would be

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Speaker 1: a photon. So every force that you know about has

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Speaker 1: a particle associated with it, Like the magnetic field has

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Speaker 1: the photon, the strong force has the gluon. The weak

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Speaker 1: nuclear force, the weakest of all the forces we know,

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Speaker 1: actually has three of these particles, the W plus, the

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Speaker 1: W minus, and the Z. So there's sort of like

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Speaker 1: heavier versions of the photon for the electroweak force, right,

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Speaker 1: And I think this is something that maybe confuses a

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Speaker 1: lot of people, or at least it confuses me. You know,

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Speaker 1: this idea that you know when you take high school physics,

430
00:22:10,960 --> 00:22:12,760
Speaker 1: or you know, even college physics. Do you sort of

431
00:22:12,760 --> 00:22:15,640
Speaker 1: think of forces as just the some invisible things, like

432
00:22:15,920 --> 00:22:18,119
Speaker 1: you know, the Earth is pushing me down through some

433
00:22:18,200 --> 00:22:22,640
Speaker 1: invisible force, or you know, a magnet repels another magnet

434
00:22:22,720 --> 00:22:25,200
Speaker 1: through some invisible force. But you're saying that, actually, what's

435
00:22:25,240 --> 00:22:29,240
Speaker 1: going on. It's like they're exchanging sort of invisible particles

436
00:22:29,440 --> 00:22:32,040
Speaker 1: when something is pushing against something else. It's a bit

437
00:22:32,080 --> 00:22:34,560
Speaker 1: of a subtle question. We did a podcast recently about

438
00:22:34,600 --> 00:22:37,000
Speaker 1: what is a particle? And one way to think about

439
00:22:37,000 --> 00:22:39,600
Speaker 1: how particles push against each other is that each particle

440
00:22:39,720 --> 00:22:43,200
Speaker 1: creates a field, and that field pushes on other particles.

441
00:22:43,240 --> 00:22:45,600
Speaker 1: So when two electrons come near each other, each one

442
00:22:45,720 --> 00:22:48,040
Speaker 1: has an electric field that pushes on the other particle.

443
00:22:48,280 --> 00:22:52,240
Speaker 1: Totally equivalent, mathematically and philosophically. Acceptable way to think about

444
00:22:52,240 --> 00:22:55,640
Speaker 1: it is, instead of feels, to think about particles being exchanged.

445
00:22:55,680 --> 00:22:58,200
Speaker 1: An electron comes by another one and it shoots a

446
00:22:58,280 --> 00:23:01,719
Speaker 1: photons at the other electron. On I think like photons,

447
00:23:01,880 --> 00:23:03,720
Speaker 1: I mean I don't see light. I don't see like

448
00:23:03,800 --> 00:23:06,720
Speaker 1: bright flashes of light between electrons. Well, these aren't things

449
00:23:06,760 --> 00:23:08,919
Speaker 1: that you see, right. You can't see a photon unless

450
00:23:08,960 --> 00:23:11,440
Speaker 1: it hits your eye. These are photons that are shot

451
00:23:11,440 --> 00:23:14,399
Speaker 1: back and forth between the electrons, and sometimes there are

452
00:23:14,400 --> 00:23:18,200
Speaker 1: a special category of particles we call virtual particles that

453
00:23:18,320 --> 00:23:21,879
Speaker 1: don't follow all the same rules that normal real particles

454
00:23:21,880 --> 00:23:24,280
Speaker 1: that you observe do. If you're interested in the subtleties there,

455
00:23:24,359 --> 00:23:28,080
Speaker 1: we have a whole podcast episode about what are virtual particles? Right,

456
00:23:28,119 --> 00:23:30,800
Speaker 1: It's interesting that, like you know, the force that one

457
00:23:30,840 --> 00:23:34,520
Speaker 1: magnet pushes on another magnet is basically the same thing

458
00:23:34,680 --> 00:23:37,120
Speaker 1: as the light that hits your eyeball from the sun. Right.

459
00:23:37,359 --> 00:23:38,960
Speaker 1: It's it's sort of hard to square the two, but

460
00:23:39,000 --> 00:23:41,480
Speaker 1: they're the same thing because one feels tactile and the

461
00:23:41,480 --> 00:23:43,840
Speaker 1: other one feels visual. But they're the same thing. They

462
00:23:43,840 --> 00:23:46,880
Speaker 1: are the same thing depending on your definition of same thing.

463
00:23:47,080 --> 00:23:50,640
Speaker 1: They're all part of a larger phenomenon, which is electromagnetism.

464
00:23:51,160 --> 00:23:53,160
Speaker 1: There can be different aspects of it. It's like saying

465
00:23:53,320 --> 00:23:56,840
Speaker 1: our electric fields the same as magnetic fields. Well not exactly,

466
00:23:56,880 --> 00:23:59,280
Speaker 1: but there are two sides of the same coin, and

467
00:23:59,320 --> 00:24:01,760
Speaker 1: so in that sent they are the same. Every force

468
00:24:01,800 --> 00:24:07,199
Speaker 1: that's applied via electromagnetism is communicated via electromagnetic fields, and

469
00:24:07,320 --> 00:24:11,080
Speaker 1: all information that moves through electromagnetic fields you can think

470
00:24:11,080 --> 00:24:14,359
Speaker 1: of as photons, like every ripple in those fields, every

471
00:24:14,400 --> 00:24:16,720
Speaker 1: piece of information with the field, was one way and

472
00:24:16,760 --> 00:24:19,080
Speaker 1: now it's another way that you can think of as

473
00:24:19,160 --> 00:24:22,480
Speaker 1: a photon M. And so the photon is basically the

474
00:24:22,520 --> 00:24:25,760
Speaker 1: thing that carries force, or the electromagnetic force, and so

475
00:24:25,800 --> 00:24:29,240
Speaker 1: the W boson is one of the things that carries

476
00:24:29,280 --> 00:24:31,439
Speaker 1: the force for the weak force, which is one of

477
00:24:31,440 --> 00:24:33,879
Speaker 1: the fundamental forces. Exactly, the weak force is one of

478
00:24:33,920 --> 00:24:36,960
Speaker 1: the fundamental forces. And it actually has three of these

479
00:24:36,960 --> 00:24:40,160
Speaker 1: particles that carry its forces, which seems weird, like why

480
00:24:40,200 --> 00:24:42,560
Speaker 1: does it need three? It's busier, you know, it needs

481
00:24:42,560 --> 00:24:45,919
Speaker 1: more staff, it needs three sort of because we've already

482
00:24:45,920 --> 00:24:48,879
Speaker 1: done some unification, like we found the W plus, we

483
00:24:48,920 --> 00:24:51,200
Speaker 1: found the W minus, we found the Z, and we realized, oh,

484
00:24:51,240 --> 00:24:54,480
Speaker 1: these are actually all part of the same thing. Originally,

485
00:24:54,480 --> 00:24:56,960
Speaker 1: people found the Z and the W separately and they're like, oh,

486
00:24:57,000 --> 00:25:00,200
Speaker 1: these are different phenomena until scientists put them together into

487
00:25:00,320 --> 00:25:03,120
Speaker 1: one idea called the weak force. And so those sort

488
00:25:03,119 --> 00:25:06,159
Speaker 1: of fit together very nice as part of the same force.

489
00:25:06,480 --> 00:25:08,520
Speaker 1: So we have those three particles, the W plus, the

490
00:25:08,680 --> 00:25:11,320
Speaker 1: W minus, and the Z that we now call carriers

491
00:25:11,400 --> 00:25:15,399
Speaker 1: of the weak force, the force particles for the weak force. Okay,

492
00:25:15,440 --> 00:25:17,480
Speaker 1: so this one is a force particle. Does that mean

493
00:25:17,480 --> 00:25:20,560
Speaker 1: that we're not actually made out of W bosons or

494
00:25:21,240 --> 00:25:24,080
Speaker 1: is it somehow sort of these things trapped inside of me.

495
00:25:24,240 --> 00:25:27,639
Speaker 1: It's another great philosophical question, right there are w bosons

496
00:25:27,760 --> 00:25:30,960
Speaker 1: inside you right now, because there are particles that are

497
00:25:30,960 --> 00:25:33,800
Speaker 1: feeling the weak force. Right some particle potassium, for examples,

498
00:25:33,840 --> 00:25:36,600
Speaker 1: decaying radioactively right now from the banana that you just ate,

499
00:25:36,840 --> 00:25:38,919
Speaker 1: and that's happening via the weak force. So there's a

500
00:25:39,040 --> 00:25:41,840
Speaker 1: W inside you right now. Are you made up of

501
00:25:42,119 --> 00:25:44,760
Speaker 1: w's is a little bit harder to say, Like, you're

502
00:25:44,800 --> 00:25:47,399
Speaker 1: made up of the matter that's inside you, but a

503
00:25:47,440 --> 00:25:50,399
Speaker 1: lot of your mass actually comes from the energy and

504
00:25:50,480 --> 00:25:53,840
Speaker 1: the bonds inside that matter, Like your matter comes from

505
00:25:53,840 --> 00:25:56,560
Speaker 1: your protons, but the mass of the protons mostly comes

506
00:25:56,600 --> 00:25:59,399
Speaker 1: from gluons inside you. So I would say that you

507
00:25:59,440 --> 00:26:02,399
Speaker 1: are made up of those matter particles, and also the

508
00:26:02,440 --> 00:26:06,960
Speaker 1: force particles definitely need them to make up Jorge M. Yes,

509
00:26:07,000 --> 00:26:11,280
Speaker 1: and that's important for sure, especially um bananas. So then

510
00:26:11,960 --> 00:26:15,000
Speaker 1: is the W boson helping keep me together? Is this

511
00:26:15,119 --> 00:26:17,480
Speaker 1: something that sort of helps things you know, stay as

512
00:26:17,560 --> 00:26:20,159
Speaker 1: one piece or does it only happen when things decay

513
00:26:20,240 --> 00:26:22,760
Speaker 1: or things break down. The W boson is part of

514
00:26:22,760 --> 00:26:25,080
Speaker 1: the weak force, and it's really really weak, and so

515
00:26:25,119 --> 00:26:28,080
Speaker 1: it doesn't play a role in holding together quarks into

516
00:26:28,119 --> 00:26:30,359
Speaker 1: protons and neutrons, and it doesn't play a role in

517
00:26:30,440 --> 00:26:34,680
Speaker 1: terms of holding the atom together like electrons surrounding the nucleus,

518
00:26:34,720 --> 00:26:36,600
Speaker 1: and so it doesn't really play a role in holding

519
00:26:36,600 --> 00:26:39,720
Speaker 1: things together. It mostly plays a role when things break down,

520
00:26:40,119 --> 00:26:43,119
Speaker 1: When a neutron decays into a proton, for example, that

521
00:26:43,160 --> 00:26:46,280
Speaker 1: happens via the weak force. M I see, all right, well,

522
00:26:46,320 --> 00:26:48,760
Speaker 1: but it's still important because, you know, it tells us

523
00:26:48,760 --> 00:26:50,639
Speaker 1: a lot about how things breakdown, which is kind of

524
00:26:50,680 --> 00:26:53,879
Speaker 1: an important process in the way the universe works. And

525
00:26:53,880 --> 00:26:57,000
Speaker 1: it's also important because it's a cousin of the photon.

526
00:26:57,680 --> 00:27:01,000
Speaker 1: The WS and the Z are actually very closely related

527
00:27:01,200 --> 00:27:03,520
Speaker 1: to the photon. They're just sort of like heavy versions

528
00:27:03,560 --> 00:27:06,240
Speaker 1: of the photon. And the way that we group those

529
00:27:06,280 --> 00:27:08,760
Speaker 1: three particles together, the W plus W minus and the

530
00:27:08,880 --> 00:27:11,000
Speaker 1: Z into the weak force, we can actually include the

531
00:27:11,000 --> 00:27:14,199
Speaker 1: photon into that, making a quartet of force particles that

532
00:27:14,240 --> 00:27:17,320
Speaker 1: all fit together really beautifully, and we call that unified

533
00:27:17,359 --> 00:27:21,480
Speaker 1: force the electro weak force, where we combine electromagnetism and

534
00:27:21,560 --> 00:27:24,520
Speaker 1: the weak force into one idea. I see. So it's

535
00:27:24,520 --> 00:27:26,960
Speaker 1: only famous because of its cousin. That feels a little

536
00:27:27,320 --> 00:27:32,240
Speaker 1: nepotistic there. It's part of the entourage of famous. It's

537
00:27:32,280 --> 00:27:36,080
Speaker 1: the guy who gets the water whenever the the photon

538
00:27:36,160 --> 00:27:39,639
Speaker 1: doesn't roll without the woveson. Alright, Well, it's one of

539
00:27:39,640 --> 00:27:43,400
Speaker 1: the fundamental particles, and it's important because it's in particle interactions,

540
00:27:43,480 --> 00:27:46,600
Speaker 1: and it helps define our theory of the universe. And

541
00:27:46,640 --> 00:27:49,320
Speaker 1: so recently scientists measured it to be different than we

542
00:27:49,400 --> 00:27:52,120
Speaker 1: thought it was. And so let's get into that measurement

543
00:27:52,160 --> 00:27:54,399
Speaker 1: and what it could mean. But first, let's take a

544
00:27:54,480 --> 00:28:09,719
Speaker 1: quick break. All Right, we're talking and discreetly about the

545
00:28:09,880 --> 00:28:12,399
Speaker 1: w bosons mass Daniel. I guess there's a lot of

546
00:28:12,400 --> 00:28:14,119
Speaker 1: interest in knowing how much this thing weighs. Do you

547
00:28:14,119 --> 00:28:16,919
Speaker 1: think the ws out there are blushing? Can? Can't? Do

548
00:28:16,920 --> 00:28:20,520
Speaker 1: they have color? Do they have color charge for them

549
00:28:20,560 --> 00:28:23,520
Speaker 1: to turn red? No, you're right, they are colorless. They

550
00:28:23,560 --> 00:28:27,600
Speaker 1: are colorless. They're they're colorless. Maybe they don't care. All right,

551
00:28:27,640 --> 00:28:30,040
Speaker 1: So there was a big headline recently that the mass

552
00:28:30,040 --> 00:28:33,600
Speaker 1: of the Dewey boson is heavier, is more than what

553
00:28:33,640 --> 00:28:37,480
Speaker 1: we thought or what the theory predicts. And so Daniel,

554
00:28:37,680 --> 00:28:39,640
Speaker 1: I guess maybe a more basic question is why does

555
00:28:39,640 --> 00:28:42,560
Speaker 1: the force particle need mass? War isn't it just transmitting forces?

556
00:28:42,680 --> 00:28:44,560
Speaker 1: It doesn't need mass, And a lot of the force

557
00:28:44,640 --> 00:28:48,080
Speaker 1: particles don't have mass, right, the photon doesn't eight gluons

558
00:28:48,120 --> 00:28:50,720
Speaker 1: and none of them have mass. But this particle has mass.

559
00:28:50,800 --> 00:28:53,160
Speaker 1: It doesn't need mass, and we think back in the

560
00:28:53,320 --> 00:28:56,520
Speaker 1: very early universe it didn't have mass, but then it

561
00:28:56,720 --> 00:29:00,560
Speaker 1: got massive because of the Higgs boson. Interesting, so it

562
00:29:00,600 --> 00:29:03,760
Speaker 1: doesn't neat mass, but it somehow has mass, and it's

563
00:29:03,760 --> 00:29:05,880
Speaker 1: all because of the Higgs boson. It's all because of

564
00:29:05,880 --> 00:29:09,360
Speaker 1: the Higgs boson. Exactly. Remember how the photon and these

565
00:29:09,360 --> 00:29:12,600
Speaker 1: particles fit together beautifully into this nice quartet, and they'd

566
00:29:12,640 --> 00:29:14,920
Speaker 1: be this very nice symmetry. For those of you interested

567
00:29:14,920 --> 00:29:17,480
Speaker 1: in the mathematical details, it's a gauge symmetry where you

568
00:29:17,520 --> 00:29:20,600
Speaker 1: can like rotate these particles into each other and it

569
00:29:20,640 --> 00:29:23,360
Speaker 1: preserves all sorts of interesting properties. That only works if

570
00:29:23,400 --> 00:29:25,480
Speaker 1: these particles are all massless, if none of them have

571
00:29:25,560 --> 00:29:28,240
Speaker 1: any mass, And we think in the very early universe

572
00:29:28,280 --> 00:29:30,440
Speaker 1: that was true, and the W and the Z had

573
00:29:30,440 --> 00:29:32,360
Speaker 1: no mass, and they flew around the universe just the

574
00:29:32,360 --> 00:29:34,520
Speaker 1: way the photon does. And in fact, we think the

575
00:29:34,520 --> 00:29:38,440
Speaker 1: weak force was much stronger because it's particles weren't so massive,

576
00:29:38,520 --> 00:29:41,080
Speaker 1: so they could fly further and interact more. But then

577
00:29:41,080 --> 00:29:44,080
Speaker 1: the Higgs boson came along and it broke that symmetry.

578
00:29:44,520 --> 00:29:47,960
Speaker 1: May have heard the phrase electro weak symmetry breaking, that's

579
00:29:47,960 --> 00:29:50,280
Speaker 1: what this refers to. It made the ws and the

580
00:29:50,360 --> 00:29:53,120
Speaker 1: z s very heavy, and it left the photon massless.

581
00:29:53,960 --> 00:29:55,440
Speaker 1: M Yeah, I guess it's kind of weird to think

582
00:29:55,480 --> 00:29:58,200
Speaker 1: of a force particle as having mass because first of all,

583
00:29:58,680 --> 00:30:01,200
Speaker 1: um that means it's it's slower, right, like it can't

584
00:30:01,240 --> 00:30:03,440
Speaker 1: go at the speed of light. And two does that

585
00:30:03,480 --> 00:30:06,080
Speaker 1: mean that it's like costs you to exert a force,

586
00:30:06,160 --> 00:30:07,760
Speaker 1: you know, if you have to use mass or where

587
00:30:07,760 --> 00:30:10,080
Speaker 1: does that mass come from? If you are pushing one

588
00:30:10,120 --> 00:30:13,320
Speaker 1: thing from another with the weak force, it definitely costs you.

589
00:30:13,400 --> 00:30:16,120
Speaker 1: To create ws and zs is harder than it is

590
00:30:16,160 --> 00:30:18,400
Speaker 1: to create photons. That's why it took us longer to

591
00:30:18,520 --> 00:30:21,280
Speaker 1: discover them. At colliders. The WS and disease were only

592
00:30:21,280 --> 00:30:24,520
Speaker 1: discovered in the eighties at certain we had enough energy

593
00:30:24,520 --> 00:30:27,200
Speaker 1: and colliders to make them. And then if you don't

594
00:30:27,200 --> 00:30:28,959
Speaker 1: have enough energy to make them, you can make them

595
00:30:28,960 --> 00:30:32,840
Speaker 1: as virtual versions where you like borrow the energy temporarily

596
00:30:32,960 --> 00:30:35,520
Speaker 1: from the universe to make this heavy particle. But the

597
00:30:35,560 --> 00:30:38,560
Speaker 1: heavier the particle is, the less likely you are to

598
00:30:38,600 --> 00:30:41,440
Speaker 1: be able to borrow that energy. So to like borrow

599
00:30:41,560 --> 00:30:44,440
Speaker 1: enough energy to quantum fluctuate a w out of the

600
00:30:44,520 --> 00:30:47,440
Speaker 1: vacuum is much less likely than it is for lower

601
00:30:47,440 --> 00:30:50,920
Speaker 1: mass particles. Is that where the name weak force comes from,

602
00:30:51,000 --> 00:30:53,120
Speaker 1: because it's sort of like it's really hard to do,

603
00:30:53,160 --> 00:30:57,360
Speaker 1: so nobody ever uses it. Kind of that is why

604
00:30:57,400 --> 00:31:00,600
Speaker 1: the weak force is weak, because it's particles are massive exactly,

605
00:31:01,160 --> 00:31:02,600
Speaker 1: and it also means that it doesn't have a lot

606
00:31:02,600 --> 00:31:06,360
Speaker 1: of range, right, Like if something has mass, it eventually decays,

607
00:31:06,520 --> 00:31:09,320
Speaker 1: and so like you can't shoot a boson from here

608
00:31:09,320 --> 00:31:12,080
Speaker 1: to the Mars because it's not going to get there. Yeah,

609
00:31:12,080 --> 00:31:14,360
Speaker 1: the universe likes to spread out its energy. It doesn't

610
00:31:14,360 --> 00:31:17,000
Speaker 1: like to have a lot of energy density in one particle,

611
00:31:17,080 --> 00:31:20,280
Speaker 1: and so if a particle can decay to less mass particles,

612
00:31:20,320 --> 00:31:22,960
Speaker 1: it will so The reason your electrons are stable is

613
00:31:23,000 --> 00:31:25,479
Speaker 1: because there's nothing lighter than an electron that they can

614
00:31:25,520 --> 00:31:28,720
Speaker 1: decay into. But a W can decay into things, and

615
00:31:28,760 --> 00:31:32,080
Speaker 1: so it will very quickly. Like a W naturally lives

616
00:31:32,080 --> 00:31:35,479
Speaker 1: for ten to the nineties twenty five seconds. What so

617
00:31:35,520 --> 00:31:37,440
Speaker 1: you have ten to the minus twenty five seconds to

618
00:31:37,520 --> 00:31:41,160
Speaker 1: measure its weight. We'll get into the details. But you

619
00:31:41,200 --> 00:31:44,920
Speaker 1: can't actually weigh w's directly, and you can't see them directly. Well,

620
00:31:45,120 --> 00:31:47,480
Speaker 1: all right, well that sounds like a perfect transition here

621
00:31:47,520 --> 00:31:49,640
Speaker 1: to talk about how you do measure the mass of

622
00:31:49,880 --> 00:31:52,320
Speaker 1: a force particle if it's so hard. Well, the first

623
00:31:52,320 --> 00:31:54,600
Speaker 1: thing to understand is that you don't measure its weight, right,

624
00:31:54,640 --> 00:31:56,960
Speaker 1: you measure its mass. The difference there is that weight

625
00:31:57,080 --> 00:31:59,960
Speaker 1: is the force of gravity on an object, or mass

626
00:32:00,080 --> 00:32:02,479
Speaker 1: we think of as an inherent quantity. Although you can

627
00:32:02,480 --> 00:32:05,080
Speaker 1: get into whole philosophical questions about what is mass and

628
00:32:05,080 --> 00:32:07,000
Speaker 1: where does it come from? The mass is something that

629
00:32:07,040 --> 00:32:09,680
Speaker 1: you have even if you're not in a gravitational field. Right,

630
00:32:09,720 --> 00:32:12,520
Speaker 1: So you would weigh different on Saturn than you do

631
00:32:12,560 --> 00:32:14,920
Speaker 1: on Jupiter than you do on Earth, but your mass

632
00:32:15,080 --> 00:32:17,360
Speaker 1: is the same. So that's the quantity we're interested in

633
00:32:17,600 --> 00:32:21,000
Speaker 1: your trying to measure not how much it weighs on Earth,

634
00:32:21,040 --> 00:32:23,240
Speaker 1: but like how hard it is to get it accelerated,

635
00:32:23,360 --> 00:32:26,120
Speaker 1: or how much energy it costs to make this mass? Right, yeah,

636
00:32:26,160 --> 00:32:28,520
Speaker 1: how much inertia it has? How much it been space.

637
00:32:28,720 --> 00:32:30,840
Speaker 1: The other problem is that you can't really use gravity

638
00:32:30,960 --> 00:32:33,440
Speaker 1: to measure these things. Like if I asked you how

639
00:32:33,480 --> 00:32:35,880
Speaker 1: massive is that bag of onions, you would put it

640
00:32:35,920 --> 00:32:37,880
Speaker 1: on a scale you would use gravity. You would say,

641
00:32:37,920 --> 00:32:39,640
Speaker 1: I know how much gravitational force there is on it,

642
00:32:39,680 --> 00:32:41,560
Speaker 1: so I can deduce what it's massive. Now I would

643
00:32:41,560 --> 00:32:46,200
Speaker 1: just mash it against another bag of onions. Physicist, you're

644
00:32:46,240 --> 00:32:51,400
Speaker 1: a natural physicist, now exactly, make some freakasy or something exactly.

645
00:32:51,920 --> 00:32:54,520
Speaker 1: And so the reason we can't do that with particles

646
00:32:54,640 --> 00:32:56,600
Speaker 1: is that they don't weigh very much. You know, these

647
00:32:56,600 --> 00:32:59,560
Speaker 1: amounts we talked about earlier are tiny, and so the

648
00:32:59,600 --> 00:33:02,880
Speaker 1: gravity pactional force on the w bson it exists, but

649
00:33:02,960 --> 00:33:05,720
Speaker 1: it's basically impossible to measure even though the w is

650
00:33:05,760 --> 00:33:09,280
Speaker 1: one of the most massive particles, And so instead we

651
00:33:09,280 --> 00:33:12,719
Speaker 1: don't measure its weight, we measure its mass. All right, Well,

652
00:33:12,760 --> 00:33:14,840
Speaker 1: then how do you measure its mass? Well, we would

653
00:33:14,880 --> 00:33:17,320
Speaker 1: love to measure its mass by seeing like how it moves,

654
00:33:17,320 --> 00:33:19,800
Speaker 1: so we can measure it's inertia, right, But we can't

655
00:33:19,800 --> 00:33:22,040
Speaker 1: do that either, because, as we said before, the W

656
00:33:22,200 --> 00:33:24,400
Speaker 1: doesn't last for very long. When we make it in

657
00:33:24,400 --> 00:33:26,960
Speaker 1: our colliders, it lasts for ten to the minus twenty

658
00:33:27,000 --> 00:33:30,080
Speaker 1: five seconds before it decays into other stuff. And so

659
00:33:30,280 --> 00:33:33,280
Speaker 1: because we can't ever see the W directly, all we

660
00:33:33,320 --> 00:33:35,360
Speaker 1: can do is look at that other stuff the W

661
00:33:35,560 --> 00:33:39,680
Speaker 1: turned into and try to reconstruct what its mass was, right,

662
00:33:39,680 --> 00:33:41,600
Speaker 1: because I think the other particles that do fly for

663
00:33:41,600 --> 00:33:43,400
Speaker 1: a while, you can see like how much they bend

664
00:33:43,440 --> 00:33:45,320
Speaker 1: in a magnetic field and things like that, and that

665
00:33:45,400 --> 00:33:48,000
Speaker 1: kind of tells you it's momentum, which tells you it's mass,

666
00:33:48,080 --> 00:33:51,520
Speaker 1: right exactly. So you use equals mc squared and you say, well,

667
00:33:51,560 --> 00:33:54,480
Speaker 1: the mass of the W boson is getting converted into

668
00:33:54,520 --> 00:33:57,120
Speaker 1: the energy of these other particles it turns into. If

669
00:33:57,120 --> 00:33:59,240
Speaker 1: you have some particle that's really heavy but you can't

670
00:33:59,280 --> 00:34:01,480
Speaker 1: see it directly, it doesn't last very long. It turns

671
00:34:01,480 --> 00:34:04,200
Speaker 1: into other particles that you can see. Then you can

672
00:34:04,280 --> 00:34:07,600
Speaker 1: measure the energy or the momentum of those particles, and

673
00:34:07,640 --> 00:34:10,040
Speaker 1: from that energy you can reconstruct how much mass the

674
00:34:10,080 --> 00:34:13,439
Speaker 1: original heavy particle had because its mass is getting turned

675
00:34:13,440 --> 00:34:16,320
Speaker 1: into the energy of those particles. Be like trying to

676
00:34:16,320 --> 00:34:19,680
Speaker 1: see how much Daniel whites and ways by weighing your kids.

677
00:34:20,960 --> 00:34:23,759
Speaker 1: Sort of, It's more like measuring the brightness of a

678
00:34:23,840 --> 00:34:25,920
Speaker 1: nuclear bomb and using that to figure out how much

679
00:34:25,920 --> 00:34:30,800
Speaker 1: fuel there was, Like what was there before things broke apart? Exactly?

680
00:34:30,800 --> 00:34:33,120
Speaker 1: If I took all this energy that was released and

681
00:34:33,160 --> 00:34:35,640
Speaker 1: asked how much mass is that equivalent to, then you're

682
00:34:35,680 --> 00:34:38,759
Speaker 1: weighing the mass that was converted into energy. So that's

683
00:34:38,800 --> 00:34:40,600
Speaker 1: what we're doing with the W. We're seeing the parts

684
00:34:40,600 --> 00:34:43,560
Speaker 1: that fly out the decay products of the W. We're

685
00:34:43,600 --> 00:34:47,080
Speaker 1: measuring their energy or their momentum, depending on the particle,

686
00:34:47,400 --> 00:34:49,320
Speaker 1: and we're using that to figure out how massive the

687
00:34:49,480 --> 00:34:53,200
Speaker 1: W must have been. Well, that sounds straightforward, but there

688
00:34:53,239 --> 00:34:56,080
Speaker 1: are difficulties, right, It's tricky. It is tricky, and one

689
00:34:56,120 --> 00:34:59,360
Speaker 1: reason is that the W doesn't always decay to visible particles.

690
00:35:00,080 --> 00:35:02,279
Speaker 1: The way they measure its mass is when the w

691
00:35:02,400 --> 00:35:05,880
Speaker 1: DK is to a muon and a neutrino, and the

692
00:35:05,960 --> 00:35:08,000
Speaker 1: MU one you can see it flies to a detector.

693
00:35:08,000 --> 00:35:10,560
Speaker 1: It bends in a magnetic field. You can measure that

694
00:35:10,719 --> 00:35:12,799
Speaker 1: bending so you can deduce the momentum of the muan.

695
00:35:13,080 --> 00:35:15,759
Speaker 1: The neutrino, however, flies right through your detector and you

696
00:35:15,800 --> 00:35:18,560
Speaker 1: can't see it. It's invisible, So that makes the problem

697
00:35:18,600 --> 00:35:20,560
Speaker 1: a little harder. Yeah, I guess you need all the

698
00:35:20,600 --> 00:35:23,719
Speaker 1: pieces to get a good rectorate measurement of what the

699
00:35:23,760 --> 00:35:25,759
Speaker 1: thing looked like when was put together. Right, if you're

700
00:35:25,760 --> 00:35:27,440
Speaker 1: missing a piece, then you're not gonna be able to

701
00:35:27,480 --> 00:35:30,160
Speaker 1: tell how much the thing. Wait, originally it makes it harder.

702
00:35:30,280 --> 00:35:32,040
Speaker 1: You can do a better measurement if you have all

703
00:35:32,080 --> 00:35:34,040
Speaker 1: the pieces, but even if you have half the pieces,

704
00:35:34,120 --> 00:35:36,439
Speaker 1: you can still make a measurement. Like imagine you could

705
00:35:36,440 --> 00:35:39,359
Speaker 1: only see half of a nuclear bombs explosion. The fact

706
00:35:39,360 --> 00:35:41,239
Speaker 1: that you know you're seeing half of it means you

707
00:35:41,280 --> 00:35:44,120
Speaker 1: can extrapolate to the other half. Right, as long as

708
00:35:44,120 --> 00:35:46,600
Speaker 1: you know what you're missing, you can guess what might

709
00:35:46,640 --> 00:35:49,040
Speaker 1: have been there. So they measure the mass the w

710
00:35:49,280 --> 00:35:51,719
Speaker 1: just by seeing one of these particles that flies out.

711
00:35:52,520 --> 00:35:54,440
Speaker 1: But then do you sort of need to know what

712
00:35:55,120 --> 00:35:58,080
Speaker 1: the missing particles parts are, right, And that's where your

713
00:35:58,120 --> 00:35:59,840
Speaker 1: models come in. That's where a lot of our models

714
00:35:59,880 --> 00:36:02,280
Speaker 1: come in. And that's where a lot of the really

715
00:36:02,520 --> 00:36:05,719
Speaker 1: careful experimental work comes into figuring out how to do

716
00:36:05,760 --> 00:36:08,400
Speaker 1: this very very precisely. Yeah, because there's a lot of

717
00:36:08,440 --> 00:36:10,920
Speaker 1: like uncertainty, right, and so you need a lot of

718
00:36:11,000 --> 00:36:14,200
Speaker 1: data to make sure that what you're measuring is correct, right. Yeah.

719
00:36:14,239 --> 00:36:16,200
Speaker 1: You want to see a lot of examples to make

720
00:36:16,239 --> 00:36:19,759
Speaker 1: sure you're not seeing anything weird, any random fluctuations. And

721
00:36:19,760 --> 00:36:22,960
Speaker 1: in the latest measurement they had four million examples of

722
00:36:23,160 --> 00:36:26,080
Speaker 1: w boson is decaying either to an electron or into

723
00:36:26,080 --> 00:36:29,120
Speaker 1: a muant. But that's not really the problem. That challenge

724
00:36:29,160 --> 00:36:31,880
Speaker 1: these days is not getting enough examples of ws. They

725
00:36:31,880 --> 00:36:34,640
Speaker 1: think they have enough. The challenge is making sure there

726
00:36:34,680 --> 00:36:38,400
Speaker 1: aren't biases. Like when your muan flies through its magnetic

727
00:36:38,440 --> 00:36:41,520
Speaker 1: field and you're using its curvature in that field to

728
00:36:41,600 --> 00:36:44,839
Speaker 1: measure its momentum, are you sure you know exactly how

729
00:36:44,880 --> 00:36:48,160
Speaker 1: strong your magnetic field is, as one of your magnets

730
00:36:48,200 --> 00:36:51,480
Speaker 1: that makes that magnetic field slipped by one millimeter in

731
00:36:51,520 --> 00:36:54,640
Speaker 1: the thirty years since some grad student installed it, how

732
00:36:54,680 --> 00:36:57,560
Speaker 1: would you know? And so it's that level of scrutiny,

733
00:36:57,560 --> 00:37:01,520
Speaker 1: that level of detailed understanding required to a precise measurement

734
00:37:01,719 --> 00:37:03,640
Speaker 1: of the mass of the W right because I guess

735
00:37:03,680 --> 00:37:06,880
Speaker 1: if your instrument is off, all of your results are

736
00:37:06,880 --> 00:37:08,600
Speaker 1: going to be off, right, Like if there's a blur

737
00:37:08,680 --> 00:37:11,120
Speaker 1: in your microscope, you're going to think that, you know,

738
00:37:11,160 --> 00:37:13,719
Speaker 1: what you're measuring has a blur in it, exactly. And

739
00:37:13,719 --> 00:37:15,960
Speaker 1: that's why this measurement has taken so long. You know,

740
00:37:16,000 --> 00:37:19,120
Speaker 1: they stopped collecting data in two thousand and twelve and

741
00:37:19,160 --> 00:37:21,720
Speaker 1: this measurement came out. Now, it took them ten years

742
00:37:22,120 --> 00:37:25,880
Speaker 1: to understanding gory detail exactly what does that magnetic field

743
00:37:25,880 --> 00:37:28,319
Speaker 1: look like? How does the detector respond? They did things

744
00:37:28,360 --> 00:37:31,319
Speaker 1: like looking at cosmic rays muans from space to see

745
00:37:31,440 --> 00:37:34,840
Speaker 1: how they fly through the detector to understand exactly where

746
00:37:34,880 --> 00:37:37,759
Speaker 1: every piece of it is down to the micron. Wow,

747
00:37:37,800 --> 00:37:39,440
Speaker 1: that would sort of drive me crazy, right if you

748
00:37:39,440 --> 00:37:42,439
Speaker 1: have to worry about, you know, your experiment, which is huge,

749
00:37:42,480 --> 00:37:44,040
Speaker 1: but you have to worry about it down to like

750
00:37:44,080 --> 00:37:46,279
Speaker 1: the particle level, Like are all the particles in my

751
00:37:46,320 --> 00:37:50,480
Speaker 1: instrument okay? Or are they somehow being you know, shaped

752
00:37:50,680 --> 00:37:53,440
Speaker 1: or moved by some cosmic fourth. Yeah. And it reveals

753
00:37:53,480 --> 00:37:55,640
Speaker 1: something cool about these experiments, which is that there are

754
00:37:55,719 --> 00:37:58,160
Speaker 1: very different kinds of physics you can do. There's the

755
00:37:58,200 --> 00:38:01,080
Speaker 1: folks who are like, let's look for an exciting signature

756
00:38:01,200 --> 00:38:03,239
Speaker 1: or something new that if we see it, we know

757
00:38:03,360 --> 00:38:05,279
Speaker 1: it's there, and it's like a big press release. And

758
00:38:05,280 --> 00:38:06,960
Speaker 1: there are other folks are like, I want to very

759
00:38:07,000 --> 00:38:11,000
Speaker 1: carefully understand this one particle to gory detail. Even if

760
00:38:11,040 --> 00:38:14,480
Speaker 1: it cars ten years of super fine understanding of how

761
00:38:14,480 --> 00:38:16,560
Speaker 1: the detector works, it's just sort of like a different

762
00:38:16,560 --> 00:38:19,520
Speaker 1: way to do science. And so I imagine that people

763
00:38:19,560 --> 00:38:22,279
Speaker 1: have been working on this for you know, decades, and

764
00:38:22,320 --> 00:38:25,359
Speaker 1: they've been refining this measurement of this one particle, and

765
00:38:25,480 --> 00:38:28,080
Speaker 1: they've got some new results out a few days ago.

766
00:38:28,239 --> 00:38:30,680
Speaker 1: That's right, they did, and their answer shocked the world.

767
00:38:31,040 --> 00:38:34,520
Speaker 1: All well, let's get into this massive shock, this massive

768
00:38:34,560 --> 00:38:37,520
Speaker 1: discovery about the w boson and what it could mean.

769
00:38:37,880 --> 00:38:52,920
Speaker 1: But first let's take another quick break. All right, I know,

770
00:38:53,040 --> 00:38:54,960
Speaker 1: so who got to tell the w boson that it

771
00:38:55,000 --> 00:38:57,480
Speaker 1: weighs more than it should? Well, maybe the w boson

772
00:38:57,560 --> 00:38:59,840
Speaker 1: is like you. It doesn't read science, so it doesn't

773
00:39:00,200 --> 00:39:03,319
Speaker 1: know you're gonna say. It's like me, who doesn't care

774
00:39:03,320 --> 00:39:06,200
Speaker 1: how much their way. Hope you could all be so lucky.

775
00:39:06,440 --> 00:39:08,680
Speaker 1: Maybe the w is listening to this podcast, and this

776
00:39:08,719 --> 00:39:11,800
Speaker 1: is how it's finding out. Oh no, that would be awkward. Sorry,

777
00:39:12,560 --> 00:39:16,280
Speaker 1: you look great, boon. So they did the big measurement.

778
00:39:16,400 --> 00:39:18,200
Speaker 1: It's sort of it's a new measurement, right, or it's

779
00:39:18,239 --> 00:39:20,479
Speaker 1: something they've been measuring for a long time and only

780
00:39:20,520 --> 00:39:22,840
Speaker 1: just now they published the results. Yeah, and if you

781
00:39:22,920 --> 00:39:25,120
Speaker 1: might be surprised to hear that this is not a

782
00:39:25,120 --> 00:39:27,959
Speaker 1: measurement that's coming from CERN, it's not from our new

783
00:39:28,080 --> 00:39:31,680
Speaker 1: fancy collider, the Large Hadron collider that discovered the Higgs boson.

784
00:39:32,160 --> 00:39:35,719
Speaker 1: This is from the previous generation. The last champion, the

785
00:39:35,800 --> 00:39:39,000
Speaker 1: Tevatron just outside Chicago, which has the energy of about

786
00:39:39,040 --> 00:39:42,120
Speaker 1: one seventh the Large Hadron Collider and turned off in

787
00:39:42,239 --> 00:39:45,400
Speaker 1: two thousand and twelve. But they've been biding their time

788
00:39:45,440 --> 00:39:49,080
Speaker 1: and working carefully on this measurement for ten years, having

789
00:39:49,200 --> 00:39:52,759
Speaker 1: just released it. Wait what they did their measurement back

790
00:39:52,760 --> 00:39:56,040
Speaker 1: in twelve, and they've been just processing the data for

791
00:39:56,160 --> 00:39:59,480
Speaker 1: ten years. The last collisions were in two thousand and twelve.

792
00:39:59,520 --> 00:40:02,040
Speaker 1: And yes, they have been processing the data and analyzing

793
00:40:02,080 --> 00:40:04,880
Speaker 1: it and thinking about how to bring down these uncertainties

794
00:40:04,920 --> 00:40:08,160
Speaker 1: and measuring the location of the detector and calibrating it

795
00:40:08,200 --> 00:40:10,920
Speaker 1: and double checking it and double checking those double checkings

796
00:40:11,080 --> 00:40:14,000
Speaker 1: and then hiring somebody else to independently cross calibrate those

797
00:40:14,000 --> 00:40:16,440
Speaker 1: double checkings. Oh, I see, Like, if you find that

798
00:40:16,480 --> 00:40:19,360
Speaker 1: there's a bias in your instrument, you don't fix the instrument,

799
00:40:19,480 --> 00:40:21,520
Speaker 1: You just fix the data to account for it. Well,

800
00:40:21,560 --> 00:40:23,960
Speaker 1: they spent the last ten years developing these tools to

801
00:40:24,000 --> 00:40:26,200
Speaker 1: measure the w boson and to get the answer. They

802
00:40:26,200 --> 00:40:28,880
Speaker 1: didn't know what the answer was until very recently. We

803
00:40:28,920 --> 00:40:31,839
Speaker 1: do this thing in particle physics where we blind ourselves

804
00:40:31,880 --> 00:40:34,640
Speaker 1: from the answer to avoid biasing ourselves. We don't want

805
00:40:34,640 --> 00:40:37,080
Speaker 1: to change the way we're analyzing the data to get

806
00:40:37,080 --> 00:40:39,360
Speaker 1: the answer that we want or the answer we expect.

807
00:40:39,440 --> 00:40:42,120
Speaker 1: So they actually added a random number to all of

808
00:40:42,160 --> 00:40:44,440
Speaker 1: their data so that nobody who was working on the

809
00:40:44,440 --> 00:40:48,120
Speaker 1: analysis would know what answer to expect. And they only

810
00:40:48,280 --> 00:40:51,880
Speaker 1: unblinded it. They only removed that random number in just

811
00:40:51,920 --> 00:40:54,120
Speaker 1: about a year and a half ago. Wow, that's wild.

812
00:40:54,120 --> 00:40:57,040
Speaker 1: So they like corrupt the data so a little bit right,

813
00:40:57,120 --> 00:41:00,080
Speaker 1: so that you don't like look for the like, you

814
00:41:00,120 --> 00:41:03,880
Speaker 1: don't manipulate your analysis to get the answer. You're like,

815
00:41:04,120 --> 00:41:06,319
Speaker 1: you're supposed to work in your analysis independent of what

816
00:41:06,360 --> 00:41:08,640
Speaker 1: the data says. And we're not worried about like explicit

817
00:41:08,680 --> 00:41:11,560
Speaker 1: manipulation where people are like fudging the results. We're worried

818
00:41:11,560 --> 00:41:14,520
Speaker 1: about like subtle biases. For example, if you get the

819
00:41:14,560 --> 00:41:17,520
Speaker 1: answer you expect, you stop looking for mistakes, whereas if

820
00:41:17,520 --> 00:41:19,800
Speaker 1: you get the answer you don't expect, you keep looking

821
00:41:19,800 --> 00:41:21,919
Speaker 1: for bugs. And so what happens is people just leave

822
00:41:22,000 --> 00:41:24,400
Speaker 1: bugs in if they cancel each other out, or they

823
00:41:24,480 --> 00:41:27,000
Speaker 1: leave bugs in if they've given the answer they expect,

824
00:41:27,040 --> 00:41:29,640
Speaker 1: which might not be the right answer. With his history

825
00:41:29,640 --> 00:41:33,719
Speaker 1: and particle physics of experiments confirming previous experiments, and then

826
00:41:33,760 --> 00:41:36,920
Speaker 1: we discover later, oh, all those experiments were actually off

827
00:41:37,040 --> 00:41:39,960
Speaker 1: by a big factor, and then the result jumps. So

828
00:41:40,000 --> 00:41:41,840
Speaker 1: we have to be very careful because we only have

829
00:41:41,920 --> 00:41:43,920
Speaker 1: one shot at this right. You can't run the collider

830
00:41:43,960 --> 00:41:46,960
Speaker 1: for ten years again with one data set. You have

831
00:41:47,000 --> 00:41:49,360
Speaker 1: to do it right in an unbiased way. So we

832
00:41:49,520 --> 00:41:52,759
Speaker 1: hide the answer from ourselves to avoid being biased by

833
00:41:52,800 --> 00:41:55,920
Speaker 1: what we expect to see. M M. That's wild. It's

834
00:41:55,920 --> 00:41:58,040
Speaker 1: will that you would do the experiment and then just

835
00:41:58,120 --> 00:42:01,000
Speaker 1: kind of sit on the data or working for ten years.

836
00:42:01,440 --> 00:42:03,000
Speaker 1: You know. I think as part of the public, you're

837
00:42:03,040 --> 00:42:05,400
Speaker 1: sort of used to this idea of like scientists in

838
00:42:05,400 --> 00:42:07,800
Speaker 1: a lab and she's measuring something and she goes, yourek,

839
00:42:08,080 --> 00:42:10,279
Speaker 1: the results are there, but here it's like they do

840
00:42:10,320 --> 00:42:12,759
Speaker 1: the measurement and then ten years later it's like, oh,

841
00:42:12,800 --> 00:42:14,919
Speaker 1: hey we found something. Yeah, well, most of the people

842
00:42:15,000 --> 00:42:17,120
Speaker 1: left this experiment. This experiment used to have like five

843
00:42:17,520 --> 00:42:19,960
Speaker 1: scientists on it in it's heyday, and then the large

844
00:42:20,000 --> 00:42:22,880
Speaker 1: hage On collider turned on and almost everybody moved over

845
00:42:23,040 --> 00:42:25,640
Speaker 1: to the LHC to work at CERN. But a few

846
00:42:25,640 --> 00:42:28,279
Speaker 1: folks stayed behind because this measurement would take a long

847
00:42:28,400 --> 00:42:31,239
Speaker 1: time and a lot of really careful work, and they

848
00:42:31,239 --> 00:42:33,279
Speaker 1: thought it was worth it. So there's just like a

849
00:42:33,320 --> 00:42:35,200
Speaker 1: few folks left and most of the lights are off,

850
00:42:35,239 --> 00:42:37,400
Speaker 1: and they're like wrapping up the last little bits of

851
00:42:37,440 --> 00:42:39,640
Speaker 1: science you can do with this data, right right, And

852
00:42:39,680 --> 00:42:41,200
Speaker 1: I guess it's tough because it's not like you can

853
00:42:41,200 --> 00:42:43,680
Speaker 1: ask them to do it again, right, not like, oh,

854
00:42:43,800 --> 00:42:45,520
Speaker 1: you found this that's interesting. Can you run it for

855
00:42:45,600 --> 00:42:48,120
Speaker 1: me again and see if we find it again? You

856
00:42:48,160 --> 00:42:50,400
Speaker 1: can't because the thing is like ten years old. It's

857
00:42:50,440 --> 00:42:53,480
Speaker 1: been decommissioned for ten years. M it's in pieces, literally,

858
00:42:53,520 --> 00:42:56,160
Speaker 1: like it doesn't exist anymore. They've built a museum where

859
00:42:56,160 --> 00:42:58,600
Speaker 1: it used to be. Wow, all right, well what did

860
00:42:58,640 --> 00:43:00,640
Speaker 1: they find? What was this exp remant that they did?

861
00:43:00,800 --> 00:43:04,760
Speaker 1: So the experiment is the collision of protons and anti protons.

862
00:43:04,800 --> 00:43:08,320
Speaker 1: So the experiment uses the Tevatron collider, which smashes protons

863
00:43:08,360 --> 00:43:12,759
Speaker 1: and anti protons together at two trillion electron bolts and

864
00:43:13,000 --> 00:43:15,920
Speaker 1: that's one seventh the energy of the large Antron collider,

865
00:43:15,960 --> 00:43:18,360
Speaker 1: and it's different from the LHC. And then it's protons

866
00:43:18,400 --> 00:43:21,640
Speaker 1: and anti protons instead of protons and protons, which is

867
00:43:21,680 --> 00:43:26,640
Speaker 1: what the LHC collides. Really you can make anti protons, yeah,

868
00:43:26,680 --> 00:43:28,560
Speaker 1: and it's hard, which is why they didn't do it

869
00:43:28,600 --> 00:43:31,640
Speaker 1: for the late C. But at the Tevatron we fabricated

870
00:43:31,680 --> 00:43:35,640
Speaker 1: anti protons by smashing particles and basically a big blob

871
00:43:35,680 --> 00:43:38,440
Speaker 1: of rock and filtering out the anti protons that come

872
00:43:38,440 --> 00:43:40,919
Speaker 1: out the other side. Not very easy to make them,

873
00:43:41,000 --> 00:43:43,600
Speaker 1: or to store them, or to insert them and accelerate them.

874
00:43:43,719 --> 00:43:45,640
Speaker 1: It was a huge piece of work, and kudo to

875
00:43:45,640 --> 00:43:48,399
Speaker 1: the accelerator engineers at Fermula who made that work. Yeah,

876
00:43:48,480 --> 00:43:50,600
Speaker 1: it's pretty cool. I guess they're very ordinary, right, because

877
00:43:50,600 --> 00:43:59,440
Speaker 1: they're very anti everything. They're not protons exactly. There antons antons. Well,

878
00:43:59,480 --> 00:44:01,760
Speaker 1: I guess what I mean? Is is this an experiment

879
00:44:01,760 --> 00:44:04,280
Speaker 1: similar to the large hadron collector? Like, is is it about,

880
00:44:04,520 --> 00:44:06,799
Speaker 1: you know, spinning protons around in a ring and then

881
00:44:06,840 --> 00:44:09,279
Speaker 1: you spin anti protons I guess the other way in

882
00:44:09,320 --> 00:44:11,560
Speaker 1: the same ring, and then you bring them together. It's

883
00:44:11,560 --> 00:44:13,560
Speaker 1: similar in idea to the l e C. You have

884
00:44:13,600 --> 00:44:16,640
Speaker 1: a ring, you're accelerating particles around it. A few points

885
00:44:16,680 --> 00:44:20,240
Speaker 1: around the ring, you smash those particles together to create collisions.

886
00:44:20,280 --> 00:44:22,600
Speaker 1: So here you have protons going one way and anti

887
00:44:22,640 --> 00:44:25,400
Speaker 1: protons going the other way. And so you need two

888
00:44:25,440 --> 00:44:28,359
Speaker 1: different rings because you don't want the protons and antiprotons

889
00:44:28,440 --> 00:44:30,560
Speaker 1: just smash together except at the heart of your detector.

890
00:44:30,640 --> 00:44:33,560
Speaker 1: But you can't actually use the same magnets because protons

891
00:44:33,600 --> 00:44:36,200
Speaker 1: going one way it bent the same as anti protons

892
00:44:36,200 --> 00:44:38,239
Speaker 1: going the other way. So that was a clever trick.

893
00:44:38,360 --> 00:44:40,319
Speaker 1: And so you smash a bunch of these a lot,

894
00:44:40,600 --> 00:44:42,080
Speaker 1: and then you look at kind of what comes out

895
00:44:42,080 --> 00:44:44,560
Speaker 1: of it, right, and mostly what happens when you smash

896
00:44:44,600 --> 00:44:47,120
Speaker 1: protons and antiprotons is a big flash and a lot

897
00:44:47,160 --> 00:44:49,320
Speaker 1: of quarks flying out. Because quarks are created by the

898
00:44:49,360 --> 00:44:51,759
Speaker 1: strong force which is the most powerful force, and so

899
00:44:51,800 --> 00:44:54,080
Speaker 1: it's the most likely thing to happen. The weak force

900
00:44:54,200 --> 00:44:57,000
Speaker 1: is very weak, and so it's interactions are much rarer.

901
00:44:57,440 --> 00:45:00,640
Speaker 1: But sometimes what happens is you get a down cork

902
00:45:00,760 --> 00:45:03,799
Speaker 1: from one particle and anti up cork from the other,

903
00:45:04,080 --> 00:45:06,919
Speaker 1: and they come together to make a W minus. Where

904
00:45:06,960 --> 00:45:08,880
Speaker 1: you might get an up cork from one side and

905
00:45:09,080 --> 00:45:11,839
Speaker 1: anti down cork from the other come together to make

906
00:45:11,840 --> 00:45:15,360
Speaker 1: a W plus. That happens very rarely in billions of collisions,

907
00:45:15,719 --> 00:45:17,439
Speaker 1: and you filter those out and you get a few

908
00:45:17,480 --> 00:45:22,400
Speaker 1: million examples after running from like ten years. Wow, and

909
00:45:22,440 --> 00:45:24,759
Speaker 1: so how long did they run this experiment? This data

910
00:45:24,800 --> 00:45:27,279
Speaker 1: set is about ten years of running that ended in

911
00:45:27,320 --> 00:45:30,040
Speaker 1: two thousand and twelve. Wow, wait they ran it for

912
00:45:30,080 --> 00:45:32,239
Speaker 1: ten years and then it I guess that makes sense

913
00:45:32,239 --> 00:45:34,000
Speaker 1: now it took him ten years just to go through

914
00:45:34,000 --> 00:45:35,960
Speaker 1: all that data. Well, it takes ten years just to

915
00:45:36,080 --> 00:45:39,000
Speaker 1: get the data, just like do the collisions and find

916
00:45:39,040 --> 00:45:42,200
Speaker 1: those ws, and then another ten years to analyze it,

917
00:45:42,280 --> 00:45:44,279
Speaker 1: to go through it and to get the answer. So

918
00:45:44,360 --> 00:45:46,560
Speaker 1: from start to finish, it's twenty years. It's ten years

919
00:45:46,600 --> 00:45:49,200
Speaker 1: of data taking and ten years of data analysis and

920
00:45:49,200 --> 00:45:51,239
Speaker 1: how long to build the thing that wasn't mean also

921
00:45:51,320 --> 00:45:53,040
Speaker 1: like ten years, right, Oh yeah, that was ten or

922
00:45:53,040 --> 00:45:55,640
Speaker 1: fifteen years. They started that even earlier. That's back when

923
00:45:55,640 --> 00:45:58,279
Speaker 1: I was a baby. So this whole projects like as

924
00:45:58,320 --> 00:46:03,000
Speaker 1: long as my lifetime. That's wild, Okay. So then you

925
00:46:03,200 --> 00:46:06,120
Speaker 1: look at the brief from this these collisions and somebody

926
00:46:06,120 --> 00:46:09,720
Speaker 1: you pieced together the measurement of the w Boson mass,

927
00:46:09,760 --> 00:46:11,759
Speaker 1: and I guess what did they find? So what they

928
00:46:11,800 --> 00:46:14,680
Speaker 1: found was not what they expected. All the other experiments

929
00:46:14,719 --> 00:46:16,960
Speaker 1: in the world has measured this, The LHC has measured it,

930
00:46:17,160 --> 00:46:20,200
Speaker 1: Other experiments that Tetron have measured it, experiments from other

931
00:46:20,239 --> 00:46:22,600
Speaker 1: colliders have measured it, and they all came up with

932
00:46:22,640 --> 00:46:25,800
Speaker 1: an answer of eighty thousand, three hundred and seventy. That

933
00:46:25,880 --> 00:46:29,200
Speaker 1: was the previous best measurement of the w boson mass okay,

934
00:46:29,280 --> 00:46:32,680
Speaker 1: eight three seventy, eight three seventy. And people were pretty

935
00:46:32,680 --> 00:46:35,239
Speaker 1: happy with that number because it agreed with what the

936
00:46:35,239 --> 00:46:38,040
Speaker 1: theorists predicted. The theorists go into their offices and to

937
00:46:38,080 --> 00:46:40,720
Speaker 1: sit down with calculations, and they say, the W boson

938
00:46:40,880 --> 00:46:43,239
Speaker 1: sometimes interacts with the Higgs and with the top and

939
00:46:43,280 --> 00:46:45,720
Speaker 1: we know the mass of those particles, how heavy should

940
00:46:45,760 --> 00:46:47,840
Speaker 1: the w B, and they do all their calculations and

941
00:46:47,880 --> 00:46:50,319
Speaker 1: they come up with a number, and their number was

942
00:46:50,440 --> 00:46:53,160
Speaker 1: eighty three fifty seven. So the old measurement was eight

943
00:46:53,280 --> 00:46:56,160
Speaker 1: three seventy and the expectation from the theorists was eight

944
00:46:56,400 --> 00:47:00,399
Speaker 1: three fifty seven. Those are pretty close. People were pretty happy. Yeah,

945
00:47:00,440 --> 00:47:03,359
Speaker 1: and like you said, it came that three seventy came

946
00:47:03,440 --> 00:47:06,520
Speaker 1: from multiple colliders, right, Like you know, they measured it

947
00:47:06,560 --> 00:47:09,839
Speaker 1: in Geneva, they measured it in Japan. And now this

948
00:47:09,880 --> 00:47:13,840
Speaker 1: new measurement was four thirty four with an uncertainty of

949
00:47:13,920 --> 00:47:16,680
Speaker 1: just ten. So not only is it like sixty mtb

950
00:47:16,840 --> 00:47:20,160
Speaker 1: above the theory, it's like above the other measurements with

951
00:47:20,200 --> 00:47:23,640
Speaker 1: an uncertainty of just ten. So the result is shocking,

952
00:47:24,000 --> 00:47:27,080
Speaker 1: not just because it's so much heavier than the previous measurements,

953
00:47:27,239 --> 00:47:29,839
Speaker 1: but because it seems so confident. They're like, oh, yeah,

954
00:47:29,880 --> 00:47:32,680
Speaker 1: it's heavier, and we're very sure it's heavier. Well, as

955
00:47:32,719 --> 00:47:35,640
Speaker 1: we've learned from us politics, being confident doesn't mean that

956
00:47:35,680 --> 00:47:39,960
Speaker 1: you're right, though, doesn't it. Yeah, Well, there's a difference

957
00:47:40,000 --> 00:47:42,920
Speaker 1: between physics and politics, and this is one of them.

958
00:47:42,960 --> 00:47:44,879
Speaker 1: It's kind of an interesting scenario. So you're saying that,

959
00:47:44,920 --> 00:47:48,120
Speaker 1: like the theory predicts through fifty seven, most of the

960
00:47:48,120 --> 00:47:50,160
Speaker 1: people who have measured this measured this to be three

961
00:47:50,200 --> 00:47:53,560
Speaker 1: seventy and they were all independent, right, with different colliders.

962
00:47:53,640 --> 00:47:57,880
Speaker 1: But now this new measurement is way higher. Wouldn't you

963
00:47:57,880 --> 00:48:00,279
Speaker 1: just say, like, there's something wrong here? You it? But

964
00:48:00,320 --> 00:48:03,680
Speaker 1: this measurement is also the most precise of all the

965
00:48:03,719 --> 00:48:06,920
Speaker 1: measurements we've made. This one claims to have the best

966
00:48:07,040 --> 00:48:10,120
Speaker 1: handle on all of these details that affect the mass

967
00:48:10,160 --> 00:48:11,920
Speaker 1: of the w. So on one side of the room

968
00:48:11,920 --> 00:48:14,480
Speaker 1: you have a bunch of imprecise measurements saying one value.

969
00:48:14,680 --> 00:48:16,200
Speaker 1: On the other side of the room you have one

970
00:48:16,600 --> 00:48:20,839
Speaker 1: very precise measurement claiming something else. And so it's a puzzle. Yeah,

971
00:48:20,840 --> 00:48:24,120
Speaker 1: I mean some someone must be wrong kind of a right.

972
00:48:24,680 --> 00:48:26,600
Speaker 1: And it feels like this one's out there in the

973
00:48:26,680 --> 00:48:28,840
Speaker 1: corner of the room by itself, whereas everybody else is

974
00:48:28,840 --> 00:48:31,120
Speaker 1: on the other side. If somebody could be wrong, or

975
00:48:31,120 --> 00:48:33,080
Speaker 1: it could be random chance, and you can ask the

976
00:48:33,160 --> 00:48:35,960
Speaker 1: question like, well, what's the odds of a random fluctuation?

977
00:48:36,000 --> 00:48:38,320
Speaker 1: You know, these are quantum particles we're talking about. Sometimes

978
00:48:38,320 --> 00:48:39,960
Speaker 1: as new ones end up a little faster in the

979
00:48:40,040 --> 00:48:42,560
Speaker 1: w looks a little heavier. That can happen. There's always

980
00:48:42,560 --> 00:48:44,960
Speaker 1: statistic but they calculated what are the odds of the

981
00:48:45,080 --> 00:48:47,879
Speaker 1: w boson having the mass the theory expects, and then

982
00:48:47,880 --> 00:48:50,719
Speaker 1: see DF measuring this, and those odds are one in

983
00:48:50,920 --> 00:48:54,520
Speaker 1: ten to the twelve. So it's very unlikely to be

984
00:48:54,520 --> 00:48:58,120
Speaker 1: like a random fluctuation, right, Yeah, I mean, I'm sure

985
00:48:58,200 --> 00:48:59,920
Speaker 1: that's what they got, But I guess there's a skeptical

986
00:49:00,360 --> 00:49:02,879
Speaker 1: you know, engineer, you could you know, if you're out

987
00:49:02,880 --> 00:49:04,600
Speaker 1: there in the middle, in a corner of the room

988
00:49:04,600 --> 00:49:06,719
Speaker 1: by yourself, maybe late there was something wrong with the

989
00:49:06,719 --> 00:49:09,680
Speaker 1: equipment or something. What's the certainty that they didn't make

990
00:49:09,719 --> 00:49:11,640
Speaker 1: a mistake. It's a bit hard to pull apart. Like,

991
00:49:11,719 --> 00:49:14,200
Speaker 1: on one hand, I know these folks. They are the

992
00:49:14,200 --> 00:49:17,080
Speaker 1: most careful scientists I've ever met, the kind of people

993
00:49:17,080 --> 00:49:19,399
Speaker 1: where if you show them a result and there's one

994
00:49:19,480 --> 00:49:21,879
Speaker 1: tiny little part of it that doesn't make perfect sense,

995
00:49:21,920 --> 00:49:24,279
Speaker 1: like what's this wiggle over here, they will not let

996
00:49:24,280 --> 00:49:26,279
Speaker 1: it go, and they will go down a rabbit hole

997
00:49:26,360 --> 00:49:28,880
Speaker 1: for months to understand it. It It can be very frustrating

998
00:49:28,920 --> 00:49:31,760
Speaker 1: to work with these people because they are so detail oriented,

999
00:49:31,960 --> 00:49:33,759
Speaker 1: and that's why it took them ten years because they

1000
00:49:33,800 --> 00:49:36,960
Speaker 1: did so many insane cross checks just to make sure

1001
00:49:37,160 --> 00:49:38,840
Speaker 1: they didn't mess at all up. So they have a

1002
00:49:38,920 --> 00:49:42,120
Speaker 1: lot of credibility. On the other hand, their result disagrees

1003
00:49:42,200 --> 00:49:44,960
Speaker 1: with everybody else, and so you've got to wonder if

1004
00:49:44,960 --> 00:49:47,520
Speaker 1: there's something that they haven't understood. And one area to

1005
00:49:47,560 --> 00:49:50,279
Speaker 1: look at is like this claim of their precision. They're

1006
00:49:50,280 --> 00:49:53,000
Speaker 1: claiming this measurement of four thirty four with an uncertainty

1007
00:49:53,000 --> 00:49:55,480
Speaker 1: of about ten. Some people have wondered whether that estimate

1008
00:49:55,520 --> 00:49:58,359
Speaker 1: is accurate, if in fact, they really understand those uncertainties

1009
00:49:58,400 --> 00:50:00,560
Speaker 1: as well as they think they do. And it's not

1010
00:50:00,640 --> 00:50:03,919
Speaker 1: about them making a mistake in any one cross check.

1011
00:50:04,280 --> 00:50:06,960
Speaker 1: It's about how to arrive at this small uncertainty and

1012
00:50:07,000 --> 00:50:10,600
Speaker 1: then what that means. For example, they had many sources

1013
00:50:10,640 --> 00:50:13,280
Speaker 1: of uncertainty, how do they combine all of those two?

1014
00:50:13,560 --> 00:50:16,560
Speaker 1: I mean, if you have two uncertainties of five MTV,

1015
00:50:17,000 --> 00:50:20,440
Speaker 1: what's the chances of getting a ten MTV fluctuation? The

1016
00:50:20,480 --> 00:50:23,600
Speaker 1: answer depends a lot on whether those two sources tend

1017
00:50:23,600 --> 00:50:26,640
Speaker 1: to fluctuate together or tend to cancel each other out.

1018
00:50:26,840 --> 00:50:29,920
Speaker 1: And now we're talking about understanding how likely a sixty

1019
00:50:30,120 --> 00:50:33,680
Speaker 1: MTV fluctuation is with lots of sources of uncertainty that

1020
00:50:33,719 --> 00:50:36,680
Speaker 1: are all around five MTV. To say that you know

1021
00:50:36,760 --> 00:50:39,920
Speaker 1: how likely that is means you think you understand the

1022
00:50:40,080 --> 00:50:44,560
Speaker 1: rare events really well and whether they fluctuate together or

1023
00:50:44,680 --> 00:50:48,080
Speaker 1: cancel out. So I think the result is probably right,

1024
00:50:48,440 --> 00:50:53,160
Speaker 1: but the uncertainty might be underestimated, or the calculation of

1025
00:50:53,280 --> 00:50:56,600
Speaker 1: how unlikely we are to get this big a deviation

1026
00:50:57,040 --> 00:51:00,120
Speaker 1: might be a bit overstated. So in that case, the

1027
00:51:00,160 --> 00:51:03,120
Speaker 1: result might not really be in that much tension with

1028
00:51:03,200 --> 00:51:06,600
Speaker 1: the other results or with the theory results. Right. Well,

1029
00:51:06,640 --> 00:51:08,480
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not trying to, you know, throw down

1030
00:51:08,560 --> 00:51:11,800
Speaker 1: under work. I'm sure they're top notch and they're amazing scientists.

1031
00:51:11,840 --> 00:51:14,719
Speaker 1: I guess maybe the maybe the question that is on

1032
00:51:14,760 --> 00:51:16,680
Speaker 1: my mind is like, well, what could have been wrong

1033
00:51:16,719 --> 00:51:19,080
Speaker 1: with the other measurements? That would you know, what could

1034
00:51:19,120 --> 00:51:21,200
Speaker 1: be the reason this one is so different? What could

1035
00:51:21,200 --> 00:51:22,520
Speaker 1: have been wrong with the other measurements? You want to

1036
00:51:22,560 --> 00:51:26,720
Speaker 1: cast out on their qualities as a scientistic what I'm saying,

1037
00:51:27,000 --> 00:51:30,880
Speaker 1: I'm saying is this new measurement is doing that, and

1038
00:51:30,920 --> 00:51:32,600
Speaker 1: what are they saying could have been wrong with the

1039
00:51:32,600 --> 00:51:34,799
Speaker 1: other ones? Well, so they're not analyzing the other ones

1040
00:51:34,840 --> 00:51:36,920
Speaker 1: and criticizing them. They're just coming up with their measurements

1041
00:51:36,920 --> 00:51:39,200
Speaker 1: saying here's what we got. And they did a lot

1042
00:51:39,200 --> 00:51:42,120
Speaker 1: of really important and impressive cross checks, like they used

1043
00:51:42,120 --> 00:51:44,040
Speaker 1: the same method to measure the mass of the z

1044
00:51:44,160 --> 00:51:48,200
Speaker 1: bos on those z ways about these mtvs, and just

1045
00:51:48,239 --> 00:51:49,960
Speaker 1: as a cross check, they're like, let's measure the mass

1046
00:51:50,000 --> 00:51:52,080
Speaker 1: the z and they got its spot on, agreeing with

1047
00:51:52,120 --> 00:51:55,040
Speaker 1: everybody else. So there's a lot of reasons to believe this,

1048
00:51:55,160 --> 00:51:57,320
Speaker 1: but as you say, it disagrees with the other measurements,

1049
00:51:57,360 --> 00:51:59,520
Speaker 1: and we don't understand that. The truth is, we don't

1050
00:51:59,560 --> 00:52:03,040
Speaker 1: understand and the discrepancy between these experiments, there's two different

1051
00:52:03,040 --> 00:52:06,680
Speaker 1: important discrepancies. There's this new CDF result is different from

1052
00:52:06,680 --> 00:52:10,719
Speaker 1: what the theory expects. It's also different from the other measurements,

1053
00:52:11,120 --> 00:52:13,400
Speaker 1: and those are two things that we don't understand. I

1054
00:52:13,440 --> 00:52:16,960
Speaker 1: see nobody's saying nobody's wrong, anybody's wrong. They're just saying like, hey,

1055
00:52:17,000 --> 00:52:18,839
Speaker 1: I know you guys did this, but this is we

1056
00:52:18,880 --> 00:52:20,400
Speaker 1: did this, and we worked hard, and this is what

1057
00:52:20,480 --> 00:52:22,920
Speaker 1: we found. Let's let's all sit together and figure it out.

1058
00:52:23,040 --> 00:52:24,440
Speaker 1: So now we sit through it and try to think

1059
00:52:24,440 --> 00:52:26,360
Speaker 1: about it and try to understand where things could have

1060
00:52:26,440 --> 00:52:29,160
Speaker 1: gone wrong, or if this one's right, what it means

1061
00:52:29,400 --> 00:52:31,640
Speaker 1: about particle physm Right. Yeah, I was gonna say. The

1062
00:52:31,680 --> 00:52:35,320
Speaker 1: science headlines were not so measured. They're like, oh my gosh,

1063
00:52:35,360 --> 00:52:37,960
Speaker 1: did we break science as everything we thought was right

1064
00:52:38,360 --> 00:52:40,879
Speaker 1: as it turned out to be wrong? Right, It's that's

1065
00:52:40,880 --> 00:52:43,360
Speaker 1: sort of how this has been kind of portrayed in

1066
00:52:43,360 --> 00:52:45,719
Speaker 1: the media, right, like maybe we've been wrong all this time. Yeah,

1067
00:52:45,760 --> 00:52:48,239
Speaker 1: the most exciting way to read this is, Wow, this

1068
00:52:48,280 --> 00:52:51,040
Speaker 1: new measurement is right, and it means that the theory

1069
00:52:51,239 --> 00:52:53,400
Speaker 1: is wrong. That means that the prediction of the w

1070
00:52:53,520 --> 00:52:56,520
Speaker 1: mass to be lower than what CDF just measured means

1071
00:52:56,520 --> 00:52:58,960
Speaker 1: that those predictions are wrong, which means that all those

1072
00:52:59,000 --> 00:53:02,440
Speaker 1: fancy calculation is about how w bosons and mid virtual

1073
00:53:02,480 --> 00:53:05,560
Speaker 1: top corks and Higgs bosons those must be wrong, which

1074
00:53:05,600 --> 00:53:08,360
Speaker 1: means there's something wrong in our theory of particle physics.

1075
00:53:08,680 --> 00:53:12,920
Speaker 1: If this new measurement is correct, I see, and so

1076
00:53:12,960 --> 00:53:15,359
Speaker 1: I guess what specifically could have been wrong with our

1077
00:53:16,000 --> 00:53:19,440
Speaker 1: clearly wrongular theory about the universe that this measurement exposes.

1078
00:53:19,719 --> 00:53:21,600
Speaker 1: The great thing about these kind of measurements is that

1079
00:53:21,640 --> 00:53:25,400
Speaker 1: they're very general probe like, these masses are sensitive to

1080
00:53:25,440 --> 00:53:28,239
Speaker 1: the existence of basically every particle out there. Remember the

1081
00:53:28,320 --> 00:53:30,960
Speaker 1: muan gm is to measurement we talked about recently. You

1082
00:53:31,040 --> 00:53:33,120
Speaker 1: did that really cool cartoon about the reason that's so

1083
00:53:33,160 --> 00:53:35,920
Speaker 1: powerful is because it's sensitive to the existence of all

1084
00:53:35,920 --> 00:53:38,359
Speaker 1: these other fields out there that it can interact with.

1085
00:53:38,480 --> 00:53:40,520
Speaker 1: And the W mass is the same way. When it's

1086
00:53:40,560 --> 00:53:43,560
Speaker 1: flying through space, it's sensitive to the existence of new

1087
00:53:43,600 --> 00:53:46,400
Speaker 1: particles we don't know about that might change its mass.

1088
00:53:46,800 --> 00:53:49,279
Speaker 1: So what this means is there might be other particles

1089
00:53:49,280 --> 00:53:52,160
Speaker 1: out there that make the W mass different from what

1090
00:53:52,239 --> 00:53:55,719
Speaker 1: our calculations assume. Our calculations use the existence of all

1091
00:53:55,719 --> 00:53:57,600
Speaker 1: the particles we know about, but if there are more

1092
00:53:57,600 --> 00:54:01,440
Speaker 1: particles out there, you would get a different W I see. Yeah,

1093
00:54:01,480 --> 00:54:03,640
Speaker 1: it's sort of like the zoo analogy, right, Like, you know,

1094
00:54:03,719 --> 00:54:06,759
Speaker 1: we have this Zoo diagram of all the particles, but

1095
00:54:06,800 --> 00:54:09,400
Speaker 1: if something's off, maybe it means that, you know, the

1096
00:54:09,440 --> 00:54:13,239
Speaker 1: panda is sprouting off a little rabbit on the sign

1097
00:54:13,239 --> 00:54:15,120
Speaker 1: and the nobody had noticed before. Yeah, Or if you're

1098
00:54:15,160 --> 00:54:17,040
Speaker 1: feeding the panda three square meals a day and it's

1099
00:54:17,040 --> 00:54:20,200
Speaker 1: still gaining weight, maybe somebody sneaking at some snacks and

1100
00:54:20,200 --> 00:54:25,440
Speaker 1: you weren't. Whatever, maybe some some physicists who are overly

1101
00:54:25,480 --> 00:54:29,360
Speaker 1: interested in its weight I've been snagging or helping it out, yeah, exactly.

1102
00:54:29,480 --> 00:54:31,359
Speaker 1: Or maybe the clever pand is sneaking out of its

1103
00:54:31,400 --> 00:54:33,840
Speaker 1: cage at night and helping itself to the vending machine.

1104
00:54:33,960 --> 00:54:37,160
Speaker 1: There you go, mystery solve. But I guess it's sort

1105
00:54:37,160 --> 00:54:39,560
Speaker 1: of points to this idea, and I think probably the

1106
00:54:39,600 --> 00:54:41,520
Speaker 1: reason that it got so many headlines is that, you know,

1107
00:54:41,600 --> 00:54:44,080
Speaker 1: everyone is interested in this idea of like, you know,

1108
00:54:44,160 --> 00:54:46,359
Speaker 1: we have this model of the universe. Maybe we've been

1109
00:54:46,400 --> 00:54:49,360
Speaker 1: wrong all along and it's a little solahous, but it

1110
00:54:49,440 --> 00:54:52,240
Speaker 1: has happened in the past, right, It definitely has happened

1111
00:54:52,239 --> 00:54:54,600
Speaker 1: in the past. And you know, there are two different

1112
00:54:54,600 --> 00:54:57,480
Speaker 1: ways to discover something new about particles in the universe.

1113
00:54:57,520 --> 00:55:00,200
Speaker 1: One is like actually see some new particle like the

1114
00:55:00,239 --> 00:55:02,120
Speaker 1: Higgs boson, and be like, look, here's something new. We

1115
00:55:02,160 --> 00:55:04,399
Speaker 1: found it. Another way is to just do a bunch

1116
00:55:04,440 --> 00:55:07,360
Speaker 1: of consistency checks between the particles we do know and

1117
00:55:07,360 --> 00:55:09,600
Speaker 1: see if they all add up, because if they don't,

1118
00:55:09,640 --> 00:55:11,879
Speaker 1: it means that there must be some particle out there

1119
00:55:11,920 --> 00:55:14,160
Speaker 1: playing on the field. That you're not aware of. So

1120
00:55:14,239 --> 00:55:16,200
Speaker 1: it's a little bit more indirect, but it's also a

1121
00:55:16,239 --> 00:55:18,480
Speaker 1: little bit more general, So it's a nice way to

1122
00:55:18,840 --> 00:55:21,600
Speaker 1: cast a wide netancy. Is there something new out there?

1123
00:55:21,760 --> 00:55:24,080
Speaker 1: And we would love to discover something new because it

1124
00:55:24,120 --> 00:55:28,160
Speaker 1: would help us understand all the open mysteries of particle physics. Yeah,

1125
00:55:28,239 --> 00:55:29,920
Speaker 1: and I guess it sort of takes a little bit

1126
00:55:29,960 --> 00:55:32,080
Speaker 1: of courage to do that, right, Like if you know

1127
00:55:32,120 --> 00:55:34,640
Speaker 1: that everyone is saying one thing, right, they have this

1128
00:55:34,719 --> 00:55:38,120
Speaker 1: measurement of the w boson it's matches the theory. You know,

1129
00:55:38,120 --> 00:55:39,920
Speaker 1: it takes a lot for sciences to go like, hey,

1130
00:55:40,080 --> 00:55:42,040
Speaker 1: I'm measuring it to be different, to just sort of

1131
00:55:42,040 --> 00:55:44,759
Speaker 1: stick your head out there and say, hey, maybe it's

1132
00:55:44,800 --> 00:55:46,719
Speaker 1: different than what everyone thought it was. And you know,

1133
00:55:46,800 --> 00:55:50,440
Speaker 1: they've known about this result since November twenty twenty. That's

1134
00:55:50,440 --> 00:55:52,920
Speaker 1: when they remove that random number and actually saw the

1135
00:55:52,920 --> 00:55:55,200
Speaker 1: answer for the first time. And they kept it to

1136
00:55:55,239 --> 00:55:58,279
Speaker 1: themselves in a very small circle of folks while they

1137
00:55:58,280 --> 00:56:00,840
Speaker 1: worked for a year and a half and just double

1138
00:56:00,880 --> 00:56:03,560
Speaker 1: triple check all of their double checks before they went

1139
00:56:03,600 --> 00:56:05,840
Speaker 1: out there in public with it. And I'm sure as you,

1140
00:56:05,920 --> 00:56:08,480
Speaker 1: as one of the authors, got to double check it right. No,

1141
00:56:08,640 --> 00:56:10,600
Speaker 1: I wasn't even aware about this until two weeks ago,

1142
00:56:10,880 --> 00:56:13,480
Speaker 1: so they kept us to a very small circle. Otherwise,

1143
00:56:13,480 --> 00:56:14,840
Speaker 1: you know, it would have been on the podcast a

1144
00:56:14,880 --> 00:56:20,000
Speaker 1: year ago. Folks would have been the first to hear, right, right, Yeah, Daniel,

1145
00:56:20,040 --> 00:56:22,200
Speaker 1: what's what's going on there? You though you have connections?

1146
00:56:22,760 --> 00:56:24,360
Speaker 1: We should have been ahead of this story. No, I

1147
00:56:24,440 --> 00:56:26,840
Speaker 1: got the paper a few days before it was released,

1148
00:56:26,840 --> 00:56:30,120
Speaker 1: everybody else under embargo. Yeah, and I guess you also

1149
00:56:30,160 --> 00:56:32,960
Speaker 1: never know what's going to capture the imagination of the public,

1150
00:56:33,040 --> 00:56:36,000
Speaker 1: right and the newspapers. Right. Sometimes I feel like, you know,

1151
00:56:36,200 --> 00:56:39,919
Speaker 1: some these discoveries are seemed like they're the amazing and revolutionary,

1152
00:56:39,960 --> 00:56:42,680
Speaker 1: but hardly anyone notices. Yeah, you can never tell what

1153
00:56:42,719 --> 00:56:45,840
Speaker 1: people are excited about. But particle physicists at least are excited.

1154
00:56:45,920 --> 00:56:48,160
Speaker 1: You know. The day after this was announced, there was

1155
00:56:48,200 --> 00:56:51,560
Speaker 1: a flood of new papers put out by theorists explaining

1156
00:56:51,600 --> 00:56:53,640
Speaker 1: this new result. They have some model where the Higgs

1157
00:56:53,719 --> 00:56:56,560
Speaker 1: boson is made of other smaller particles it's not fundamental

1158
00:56:56,680 --> 00:56:59,080
Speaker 1: and that explains the w boson. Or they have a

1159
00:56:59,120 --> 00:57:02,080
Speaker 1: model with some new crazy particle they call a sweet

1160
00:57:02,160 --> 00:57:05,759
Speaker 1: no particle like a weird supersymmetric version of the w

1161
00:57:05,960 --> 00:57:08,719
Speaker 1: boson and now it explains this. So now that we

1162
00:57:08,800 --> 00:57:11,160
Speaker 1: have this new result, the theory community is going wild

1163
00:57:11,239 --> 00:57:13,399
Speaker 1: coming up with ways to explain it. Well, I guess

1164
00:57:13,440 --> 00:57:15,799
Speaker 1: that's sort of how signs works. You know, it's in

1165
00:57:15,840 --> 00:57:19,080
Speaker 1: a continual process where people are coming up with new ideas,

1166
00:57:19,160 --> 00:57:23,120
Speaker 1: new measurements, and you gotta, you know, don't take the

1167
00:57:23,200 --> 00:57:27,000
Speaker 1: established facts as established sometimes exactly. And if you trust

1168
00:57:27,080 --> 00:57:29,760
Speaker 1: what you've done and you double checked everything, and you've

1169
00:57:29,760 --> 00:57:31,640
Speaker 1: got to come out there with your answer even if

1170
00:57:31,680 --> 00:57:34,040
Speaker 1: it flies in the face of other measurements, because hey,

1171
00:57:34,120 --> 00:57:36,959
Speaker 1: maybe you're wrong or maybe they're wrong. History will sort

1172
00:57:36,960 --> 00:57:38,960
Speaker 1: it out, all right. Well, best of luck to the

1173
00:57:39,000 --> 00:57:41,920
Speaker 1: scientists working on this, and then I guess stay tuned

1174
00:57:41,960 --> 00:57:44,520
Speaker 1: to see who is not right. But you know who

1175
00:57:44,560 --> 00:57:48,440
Speaker 1: has the most to say about what's the mass of

1176
00:57:48,480 --> 00:57:50,800
Speaker 1: the w boson? That's right. We'll keep working on it,

1177
00:57:50,840 --> 00:57:53,080
Speaker 1: will make measurements of it at the Large Hadron Collider

1178
00:57:53,160 --> 00:57:55,920
Speaker 1: and and at future colliders, and eventually we will know

1179
00:57:56,080 --> 00:57:58,400
Speaker 1: the truth. Yeah, we will know if Daniel was actually

1180
00:57:58,400 --> 00:58:02,640
Speaker 1: working on this or not. To be surprised even to himself. Well,

1181
00:58:02,680 --> 00:58:05,320
Speaker 1: we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, see

1182
00:58:05,320 --> 00:58:15,480
Speaker 1: you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel

1183
00:58:15,520 --> 00:58:18,040
Speaker 1: and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I

1184
00:58:18,280 --> 00:58:21,640
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Or more podcast from my heart Radio, visit

1185
00:58:21,720 --> 00:58:25,240
Speaker 1: the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

1186
00:58:25,320 --> 00:58:26,840
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows.