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