Speaker 1: Hey, they're extraordinaries Kelly here, So I absolutely cannot believe
Speaker 1: this is happening. But my book A City on Mars
Speaker 1: is Barnes and Nobles Nonfiction pick for August. I am
Speaker 1: so excited. So if you swing by your local Barnes
Speaker 1: and Noble, there's likely a display near the front of
Speaker 1: the store with my book, and of course it's on
Speaker 1: Barnes and Nobles's website as well. So to learn about
Speaker 1: where we're likely to settle in space, whether we can
Speaker 1: make babies in space, why astronauts love taco sauce, and
Speaker 1: the legal status of space cannibalism, head over to Barnes
Speaker 1: and Noble and check out A City on Mars? Can
Speaker 1: we settle Space? Should we settle space? And have we
Speaker 1: really thought this through?
Speaker 2: Thanks?
Speaker 3: Everyone.
Speaker 2: We smash particles together at the Large Adron Collider not
Speaker 2: just because it's cool or because we want to know
Speaker 2: what the universe is made out of. It's all those reasons,
Speaker 2: but also we want to understand how those basic bits
Speaker 2: of matter come together to make up our world. Why
Speaker 2: do they interact this way not that way? Can they
Speaker 2: fit together in some new way? We've never seen the
Speaker 2: story of particle physics discoveries is a story of cycles,
Speaker 2: swinging between confusion the many kinds of particles to insight
Speaker 2: about how they come together. Today we'll be tackling a
Speaker 2: topic that has received a lot of attention recently in
Speaker 2: the news. Topponium. What is it and what does it
Speaker 2: tell us about the nature of matter and energy? It
Speaker 2: turns out to be the latest chapter in a rich
Speaker 2: history of discovery, betrayal, and urination. Yes, that's right, I
Speaker 2: said urination. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Speaker 3: Hi. I'm Kelly Waidersmith.
Speaker 1: I study parasites and space, and I do not know
Speaker 1: what toponium is.
Speaker 2: Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I do know
Speaker 2: what toponium is, and I'm also looking forward to declaring
Speaker 2: the discovery of white sonium.
Speaker 3: Oh that would be great, So I await that day.
Speaker 3: I'm sure it will come.
Speaker 1: But my question for you today is what is your
Speaker 1: favorite name for a physics thing? What do you think
Speaker 1: is like the best name physicists have come up with
Speaker 1: for something so far.
Speaker 2: I think one of my favorite names is the rate
Speaker 2: of change of acceleration, which is called jerk which is,
Speaker 2: you know, also a fun word, but it's kind of
Speaker 2: you know, you can jerked around. It kind of makes sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I like that.
Speaker 1: All right, good, good job physicists, you got one.
Speaker 2: But before you applaud us too much for giving jerk
Speaker 2: a cool name.
Speaker 3: I all just named it, didn't.
Speaker 2: They They went a little crazy after jerk and rate
Speaker 2: of change jerk is called snap, and the rate of
Speaker 2: changes snap is called crackle. And the rate of change
Speaker 2: of crackle You want to guess pop?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I bet that was named by children of the eighties,
Speaker 3: isn't that when raised Chrispy's a hit their zenith of popularity.
Speaker 2: That's exactly right. Physicists trying desperately for cultural relevance.
Speaker 3: Sorry guys, but you know, we do our best to
Speaker 3: be relevant because in the NB are trying to understand
Speaker 3: the way the world works, what it's all made out of,
Speaker 3: what you are made out of, what.
Speaker 2: Your breakfast cereal is made out of, and more than
Speaker 2: just what it's made out of, but what it can do,
Speaker 2: because your life isn't dominated by fundamental particles, but by
Speaker 2: those particles put together an interesting, weird, delicious, and hilarious ways.
Speaker 3: Oh I like the delicious ways. I think that's my favorite.
Speaker 1: So you sent me an outline I said, we're talking
Speaker 1: about toponium, and I was like, well, this is yet
Speaker 1: another one of those instances where Kelly gets to learn
Speaker 1: on air and ask stupid questions.
Speaker 3: I have no idea what this is.
Speaker 2: Intelligent questions, intelligent questions. Intelligence, that's what you're here for.
Speaker 3: That's right. I'm continuing to earn my pod in physics.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, yes, we are also offering a POD in physics
Speaker 1: to our listeners, and so let's go ahead and hear
Speaker 1: what they think.
Speaker 3: To Ponium is the particle with the most protons neutrons,
Speaker 3: electrons crammed into it to make it the biggest, biggest
Speaker 3: top of the table.
Speaker 2: Element theoretical matter that has a top quack or something
Speaker 2: like that. Probably some type of metal like strontium.
Speaker 4: That sounds like an element.
Speaker 3: I don't know, but it sounds like a chemical element.
Speaker 3: I'm going to assume that to ponium is related to
Speaker 3: physics and not biology, so there's a good chance that
Speaker 3: it's a mathematical equation. It's the opposite of bottominium.
Speaker 2: Obviously, a mineral developed for the Marvel cinematic universe.
Speaker 3: And then stolen by James Cameron for an upcoming film.
Speaker 2: Matter perhaps purely fear ratical composed of top quarks only
Speaker 2: Toponium is the top quark matter fraction of unobtainium after
Speaker 2: quantum centrifugal separation of unobtainium, or.
Speaker 4: The theoretical element with no protons and no electrons gets
Speaker 4: its own special row at the top of the periodic table.
Speaker 4: Thus topponium, toponium or not toponium, that is the question.
Speaker 2: Rare element, I would say, perhaps a hypothesized element that
Speaker 2: hasn't been discovered yet.
Speaker 5: I've never heard of toponium, but it ends in iem,
Speaker 5: so it makes me think of deuterium or tritium, some
Speaker 5: sort of combination of things. But the only top anel
Speaker 5: is a quark, so it's not some weird combination of
Speaker 5: only top quarks, is it.
Speaker 3: I don't know, But if it doesn't sit on top
Speaker 3: of middleium and botamium, I'm going to be very disappointed.
Speaker 3: These are wonderful answers, I mean, as always, but yeah,
Speaker 3: this one in particular had a lot of funny answers,
Speaker 3: and I'm guess that's because a lot of people are
Speaker 3: in my situation which is to say, no idea, Daniel,
Speaker 3: absolutely no clue.
Speaker 2: And they're trying to reverse engineered from the name, which
Speaker 2: is smart but assumes the physicists give names to things
Speaker 2: in logical ways that can be reverse engineered, which isn't
Speaker 2: always true.
Speaker 3: Big mistake, Big mistake. That's right.
Speaker 1: It's either confusing or wrong or misleading something like that.
Speaker 2: All right, well, let's not keep people in suspense anymore.
Speaker 2: Toponium is a fascinating new thing recently explored by the
Speaker 2: Large Hadron Collider, and it has to do with how
Speaker 2: quarks can come together, which is a whole fascinating area
Speaker 2: of physics that explains how I'm built and you're build
Speaker 2: and how the whole world around us comes together. Plus
Speaker 2: is filled with crazy stories of physicists being outrageous amazing.
Speaker 1: So when you say recently, do you mean like this
Speaker 1: decade or yeah, what do you mean by recently?
Speaker 2: The toponium paper came out last year? Oh wow, Yeah,
Speaker 2: this is a fresh hot off the press, and a
Speaker 2: bunch of people emailed me and said, hey, can when
Speaker 2: you explain this? I don't understand it, because probably the
Speaker 2: paper was too hard to digest, and even the Science
Speaker 2: communication articles about toponym. I felt like they talk about it,
Speaker 2: but they don't really convey the crucial ideas that I
Speaker 2: want people to understand about why this is exciting area
Speaker 2: of research.
Speaker 1: And we are here for the one hour version of
Speaker 1: all of those things. So let's start from the beginning.
Speaker 1: What is a quark? And you gave me the ability
Speaker 1: to explain this to my daughter the other day we
Speaker 1: were talking about quarks, and I felt pretty cool that
Speaker 1: I could go ahead and kind of explain it.
Speaker 3: But let's hear it from you.
Speaker 2: So quarks are something we discovered about fifty years ago.
Speaker 2: They're what make up the protons and the neutrons. So
Speaker 2: you know, you and I are made out of molecules.
Speaker 2: Those molecules are made out of atoms. Every atom has
Speaker 2: a nucleus in it with protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons.
Speaker 2: But those protons and neutrons are not fundamental. They are
Speaker 2: made up of other smaller particles called quarks. And in particular,
Speaker 2: there's two quarks, the upcork and the down cork that
Speaker 2: make up the proton and the neutron. I know this
Speaker 2: for sure until about the late sixties and seventies, and
Speaker 2: how we figured out that protons and neutrons are made
Speaker 2: of quarks. Is a really fun story and a tricky
Speaker 2: one because we can't see quarks by themselves. We have
Speaker 2: to infer their existence. There's a lot of really cool
Speaker 2: and mathematical puzzles that had to be solved to even
Speaker 2: suggest that quarks might be there. So to set the stage,
Speaker 2: we have to go back to like the late nineteen forties.
Speaker 2: What was the state of particle physics in the late
Speaker 2: nineteen forties. Well, we knew about electrons, We knew about
Speaker 2: protons and neutrons. We also knew that there were photons
Speaker 2: out there, right Like, we'd seen photons. Einstein and Planck
Speaker 2: and those guys revolutionized quantum mechanics with a photoelectric effect
Speaker 2: and the idea of photons light as a packet and
Speaker 2: in cosmic rays. We'd seen a few other weird particles
Speaker 2: like muons and pions, but things seemed kind of tidy,
Speaker 2: Like we had a few particles, they all came together
Speaker 2: to mostly explain everything we knew. People felt like, hey,
Speaker 2: we're maybe on the verge of like nailing this, you know,
Speaker 2: narrowing things down. We'd gone from like infinite complexity of
Speaker 2: chemistry down to like a one hundred basic building blocks
Speaker 2: and the periodic table. Now we were down to like
Speaker 2: three objects protons and neutrons and electrons that made everything
Speaker 2: lava and kittens and ice cream and podcasters and everything.
Speaker 2: People felt like, oh yeah, we're on the track. And
Speaker 2: then came the nineteen fifties where everything got weird.
Speaker 3: When you start to feel confident, the universe kicks you
Speaker 3: in the face.
Speaker 2: And this came about because we had a revolution in
Speaker 2: particle physics technologies. Beforehand, we mostly relied on the universe
Speaker 2: to accelerate our particles. So many of the discoveries were
Speaker 2: making of weird particles were cosmic rays, super high energy
Speaker 2: particles that hit the upper atmosphere and then showered. So
Speaker 2: people would like send balloons up into the upper atmosphere
Speaker 2: or leave like big blocks of photographic material on the
Speaker 2: tops of mountains and then slice it super thin and
Speaker 2: expose it.
Speaker 1: Fun fact, the first chicken sandwich to go to space
Speaker 1: was sent up on a balloon by KFC.
Speaker 3: Anyway, move on exactly.
Speaker 2: You can accomplish a lot of things with balloons.
Speaker 4: Yea.
Speaker 2: These balloons are amazing also because they start out like
Speaker 2: pretty big on the ground, and then when they get
Speaker 2: to the upper atmosphere because the pressure is solo, they
Speaker 2: become enormous, like mind boggling, like football stadium size balloons
Speaker 2: when they're in the upper atmosphere. It's incredible. Anyway, we've
Speaker 2: been doing particle physics that way. It's just like, hey,
Speaker 2: let's let the universe accelerate stuff and watch it as
Speaker 2: it smashes into the atmosphere. And that was useful, and
Speaker 2: that's how we saw muons and chaons and other kinds
Speaker 2: of particles. But then folks figure it out better ways
Speaker 2: to accelerate particles here on Earth. So cyclotrons and signotrons,
Speaker 2: all these cool technologies to bend particles and a loop,
Speaker 2: give them a kick and get them going to pretty
Speaker 2: high energies. Let us smash particles together and open up
Speaker 2: a whole golden era of discovery for particle physics.
Speaker 3: And these things are amazing.
Speaker 1: I got to go in the synchrotron facility in the
Speaker 1: UK on Harwell's campus, cool.
Speaker 3: And it was so cool.
Speaker 1: They speed up X rays with magnets and they were
Speaker 1: showing me how all this stuff works, and it was
Speaker 1: I'll never forget it.
Speaker 3: Anyway, cool facilities.
Speaker 2: They can't speed up X rays with magnets. That doesn't
Speaker 2: work because X rays are neutral and so they don't
Speaker 2: feel magnets. But they probably generate X rays from high
Speaker 2: end G particles accelerated and bent by magnets.
Speaker 3: That is right, Thank you. I appreciate the correction.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very cool technology. EO. Lawrence won Nobel Prizes
Speaker 2: for this kind of stuff. It's why we have Lawrence
Speaker 2: National Lab two, Lawrence National Labs. Actually, he's a really
Speaker 2: smart dude. Anyway. By smashing particles into other particles, we
Speaker 2: started discovering a bunch of really strange particles, particles we
Speaker 2: literally called strange, like chaons and other kinds of pions
Speaker 2: and all sorts of stuff. It was like every time
Speaker 2: you turned on the accelerator you discovered a new particle,
Speaker 2: which is crazy. That just doesn't happen these days.
Speaker 3: That is crazy.
Speaker 1: What you said, particles we literally called strange. There is
Speaker 1: a particle called the strange particle.
Speaker 2: There is a particle that called the strange part This
Speaker 2: is a strange quirk. But initially there were particles that
Speaker 2: we classified as strange. We described them as range. These
Speaker 2: are chan particles, and these particles were strange because they
Speaker 2: sort of lasted a long time and then decayed, which
Speaker 2: people hadn't seen before. It turns out that's because they
Speaker 2: were decaying via the weak force, which is pretty weak,
Speaker 2: and so it takes a while for it to work.
Speaker 2: But we didn't understand that at the time. But it
Speaker 2: was an exciting moment because like every time we turned
Speaker 2: on the accelerator, you made a new particle, you could
Speaker 2: name it. It must have been a really fun time
Speaker 2: to be a particle physicist. Yes, and they call this
Speaker 2: time in particle physics the particle zoo.
Speaker 1: I really love zoos, and I feel like I might
Speaker 1: be disappointed if I saw a particle zoo instead of
Speaker 1: a zoo zoo, but.
Speaker 3: It sounds fun.
Speaker 1: I can imagine physicists being like children enjoying the particle zoo.
Speaker 2: I'm glad you take it that way, because I think
Speaker 2: it's actually intended as shade against biology. Yes, because this
Speaker 2: is the era in particle physics where we were seeing
Speaker 2: a bunch of stuff we didn't understand and we were
Speaker 2: just naming it, and so I think they were like,
Speaker 2: we're basically doing botany. You know, we don't understand anything.
Speaker 2: We just give stuff names.
Speaker 3: You guys suck.
Speaker 2: But it's an exciting time to be an experimentalist because
Speaker 2: you're discovering stuff that isn't predicted. It's not like here's
Speaker 2: what the Higgs boson will look like, here's how you
Speaker 2: find it, go do it. Check the box, or here's
Speaker 2: the top quark. It's like, well, we're not understanding anything
Speaker 2: you're doing. Stop discovering new particles, please, because we're confused.
Speaker 2: But you know, for an explorer, that's an exciting time.
Speaker 2: That's like, well we're just you know, collecting new stuff
Speaker 2: and nobody understands. And it was a big puzzle. So
Speaker 2: people have found all these particles and they were wondering
Speaker 2: like are they all fundamental? Are we discovering a bunch
Speaker 2: of new stuff that isn't made out of other stuff?
Speaker 2: Is there a pattern somehow? So it was a big
Speaker 2: theoretical puzzle, like what explains all of these new particles?
Speaker 2: And people started thinking about it and trying to organize
Speaker 2: it and like, hey, are there patterns here? Can we
Speaker 2: look at the masses how many particles are there? And
Speaker 2: a few clever people came up with some ideas to
Speaker 2: explain all of these particles, and it was called the
Speaker 2: eightfold way.
Speaker 1: Oh all right, so I'm just about done stuffing the
Speaker 1: anger that I'm feeling down that earlier comment. But you're
Speaker 1: making me wonder the word particles. Is it part of
Speaker 1: coles because it's part of other things? Was that why
Speaker 1: you guys named it particles?
Speaker 2: Hmmm? That's interesting. The etymology the word particle itself. I
Speaker 2: think it comes from the concept of particle just being
Speaker 2: a tiny bit of stuff, like the smallest particule, you know,
Speaker 2: particularly small stuff.
Speaker 3: Okay, got it, all right, so sorry, Moving on the
Speaker 3: eightfold way.
Speaker 2: The eightfold way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this sounds like something you would learn in a
Speaker 1: martial arts class.
Speaker 3: The eightfold way. So why was it called the eightfold way?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like the Tao of physics or something. Yes,
Speaker 2: because people were looking for patterns, and they were starting
Speaker 2: with the assumption that all these particles might be their
Speaker 2: rearrangement of smaller bits, a smaller number of basic pieces.
Speaker 2: So imagine you have like three different kinds of legos,
Speaker 2: and then you ask like, well, what can I build
Speaker 2: out of these legos? Okay, they click together this way
Speaker 2: or that way or this other way. But if there's
Speaker 2: a small number of them, there's a limited way they
Speaker 2: can come together. And so people imagine, well, what if
Speaker 2: we have like four different kinds of legos, what can
Speaker 2: we explain? And they noticed that if you arrange the
Speaker 2: newly discovered particles in a certain way, that can be
Speaker 2: explained by having four different elementary pieces that all click together.
Speaker 2: For example, these pieces all have different electric charge, and
Speaker 2: so it predicts like a distribution of the electric charges
Speaker 2: of all the particles you can make with these basic pieces.
Speaker 1: And so does that mean they went looking then for
Speaker 1: the four basic parts that would make up the rest
Speaker 1: of the stuff.
Speaker 2: Not initially. First thing they did is they said, well,
Speaker 2: what's missing, Like, are there ways that you can put
Speaker 2: these four basic pieces together to make a particle we
Speaker 2: haven't seen yet? And Gellman famously stood up at a
Speaker 2: conference and said, you know, I predict the existence of
Speaker 2: this new particle. He called it the omega minus, which
Speaker 2: would be a pure combination of the particle we'd later
Speaker 2: call strange quarks, So three strange quarks put together, and
Speaker 2: he even predicted with the mass of it would be.
Speaker 2: And then they went out look for it and they
Speaker 2: found it, and that was very compelling. That's like, okay,
Speaker 2: make a prediction. You know, this isn't just mathematical. But
Speaker 2: at the time, a lot of physicists were like, you know,
Speaker 2: we haven't seen these particles. We're just seeing the combinations
Speaker 2: of them. And while it's compelling to say, look, I
Speaker 2: see their patterns in the particles that are consistent with
Speaker 2: them being made out of a small number of more
Speaker 2: basic elements, we haven't seen them directly, and so people
Speaker 2: just thought of them as like, you know, a mathematical
Speaker 2: calculational tool, the way people are down on string theory
Speaker 2: these days, right, they're like, yeah, well string theory can
Speaker 2: solve quantum gravity, but we never seen a string, so
Speaker 2: how do we really know. It's just mathematics. So people
Speaker 2: sort of dismissed it as like just a mathematical tool.
Speaker 2: They called them partons. They weren't like real particles.
Speaker 1: And in that case, were they called partons because they
Speaker 1: were part of something? Yes, but that's okay, but that's
Speaker 1: not true for particles.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. Partons are like part of something. But
Speaker 2: it's a special word because they're like, it's not real,
Speaker 2: you know, it's just like math. It's not something that
Speaker 2: you could actually see or interact with. It's not necessarily
Speaker 2: part of the physical universe. That's how people felt about
Speaker 2: it in the late nineteen sixties. They were like, this
Speaker 2: is pretty compelling, but we don't know.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: We also had competing names for them. Murray Gelman, who
Speaker 2: won the Nobel Prize for this stuff, called them quarks.
Speaker 2: But there was another guy named Zwig who came up
Speaker 2: with the same idea at about the same time, actually
Speaker 2: a little earlier, but he wasn't as influential, and he
Speaker 2: called them aces.
Speaker 3: Oh which name do I like better?
Speaker 2: I think aces is cool.
Speaker 3: Actually, quarks is fun. Aces is cool.
Speaker 2: Quarks comes from a James Joyce novel. Actually three quarks
Speaker 2: for muster mark is a nonsensical phrase in that novel,
Speaker 2: and that's what inspired Murray Gellman.
Speaker 3: Oh cute, Okay, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Was Gilman generally a very like literate dude or into literature.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was. He was sort of like a renaissance
Speaker 2: man widely read.
Speaker 1: All right, so now we've got quarks instead of aces,
Speaker 1: and so you know, you mentioned string theory and so
Speaker 1: one I remember when we were talking to the string theorists,
Speaker 1: a couple months ago, they were saying that they're not
Speaker 1: sure that we'll ever be.
Speaker 3: Able to test some of these ideas.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but luckily, I believe we eventually got to the
Speaker 1: point where we could test for some of these ideas
Speaker 1: for these particles. So what was the jump that allowed
Speaker 1: us to do that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So so far we've only seen the combinations of
Speaker 2: these still hypothetical quirks macroscopically in our detectors, and so
Speaker 2: in order to probe them, people followed in the footsteps
Speaker 2: of Rutherford. Rutherford around the turn of the century, he
Speaker 2: tried to understand the structure of the atom before we
Speaker 2: knew like, hey, there's a nucleus inside of it. He
Speaker 2: tried to understand, like where is all the stuff in
Speaker 2: the atom? And what he did was he shot stuff
Speaker 2: at it, right, So he shot particles at a gold foil,
Speaker 2: and he saw that sometimes it bounces back and sometimes
Speaker 2: it goes through. And that led him to conclude that
Speaker 2: matter is not evenly distributed in the gold foil. It's
Speaker 2: concentrated in these tiny little spots, these nuclei. Right, So
Speaker 2: we did something similar to understand the structure of the proton, right,
Speaker 2: what's inside the proton.
Speaker 1: And when we get back from the break, we'll find
Speaker 1: out what we did. All right, So we just talked
Speaker 1: about the experiments that Rutherford did to show that atoms
Speaker 1: have of structure, like there's a nucleus. So now let's
Speaker 1: talk about how we figured out the structure of the proton.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. We basically copied Rutherford's strategy, and we've been
Speaker 2: doing that for decades, which is shoot stuff at it
Speaker 2: and see what happens, and by the angles at which
Speaker 2: stuff comes out, you can tell the structure of something.
Speaker 2: So that works for gold. You can shoot particles of
Speaker 2: gold and see the nucleus. How do you probe the proton? Well,
Speaker 2: one thing you can do is smash protons together. That's
Speaker 2: really messy because protons are big bags of goo. So
Speaker 2: to make it a little bit cleaner, what people did
Speaker 2: is they shot electrons at protons. Because electrons don't feel
Speaker 2: the strong nuclear force, they only feel electromagnetism in the
Speaker 2: weak force, and we think they're fundamental so they don't
Speaker 2: break up into other stuff. They're cleaner. So it's really
Speaker 2: like poking your finger out of proton the best way
Speaker 2: that we can. And so these are experiments done at
Speaker 2: Stanford in the late nineteen sixties. They're called deep inelastic
Speaker 2: scattering if you want to learn more about them. Deep
Speaker 2: because they're very high energy and they're probing the structure
Speaker 2: of the proton. Inelastic because what happens is not that
Speaker 2: the electron and the proton bounce off each other, but
Speaker 2: that the electron shatters the proton and interacts with the
Speaker 2: stuff inside of it. And physics we distinguish between elastic
Speaker 2: collisions where things just bounce off, and inelastic where we've
Speaker 2: changed the structure or broken something or things stick together.
Speaker 2: Those are inelastic.
Speaker 3: I feel like it should have been explosive and not explosive, But.
Speaker 2: That's because you're thinking about diarrhea, right, that's a good
Speaker 2: way to categorize diarrhea.
Speaker 1: Not I am a biotics I think we have eight
Speaker 1: different ways of characterizing feces or something like that.
Speaker 2: The Bristol scale. I've read it.
Speaker 3: Yes, Oh yeah, you married a poop person.
Speaker 2: Wow, I'm going to take that in the positive way.
Speaker 2: It was intended.
Speaker 3: Good. I adore Katrina. All right.
Speaker 2: We had a biologist over for dinner the other night,
Speaker 2: and she just moved down here from Stanford and she
Speaker 2: had to bring all of her poop samples, so she
Speaker 2: had to drive them down from Stanford to southern California.
Speaker 2: One hundred and fifty pounds of poop in dry ice.
Speaker 2: That's a lot about it. And I had to keep
Speaker 2: the windows down because the dry ice of sublimates into
Speaker 2: CO two, which will kill you if you keep the
Speaker 2: car closed, into a literally crappy, flaming disaster.
Speaker 1: I once took a box of infected fish brains across
Speaker 1: the Atlantic and had to declare it. And anyway, that
Speaker 1: was an adventure. But I'll just go on so many adventures. Okay,
Speaker 1: so inelastic it breaks it apart.
Speaker 2: And so this is late nineteen sixties, and we probe
Speaker 2: the structure of the proton with electrons, and we saw
Speaker 2: three hard centers the way Rutherford saw like one heart
Speaker 2: center for every item. We saw three heart centers. Like
Speaker 2: we can tell by the angle at which the electron
Speaker 2: comes back out whether it's really bounced off something hard
Speaker 2: or mostly flown through, And we can tell by the
Speaker 2: rate at which that happens that there are three hard centers.
Speaker 2: So google deep and elastic scouting if you want to
Speaker 2: learn more about that. But that was proof to us
Speaker 2: that protons do have structure inside that there really are
Speaker 2: physical things inside the proton. It's not fundamental.
Speaker 1: And at this point where all of the physicists like,
Speaker 1: all right, awesome, I'm totally convinced.
Speaker 2: No, Unfortunately, people were still reluctant. They were like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess so, but like, are they real
Speaker 2: physicists or conservative folks in the sense that they it's
Speaker 2: hard for them to like accept a new idea. You
Speaker 2: need a lot of data. And so at this point
Speaker 2: we actually only had three ideas in mind for quarks,
Speaker 2: the upcork and the down cork that make up the proton,
Speaker 2: and then the strange cork, which make up these new
Speaker 2: weird particles like the omegas and the chaons. So we
Speaker 2: had three particles, and theorists were like, three is weird
Speaker 2: because the upcork and the downcork make a very nice
Speaker 2: pair together. But then having the strange cork by itself,
Speaker 2: that's strange, and it makes all sorts of bizarre calculations
Speaker 2: and the physics doesn't actually work. There's nothing there to
Speaker 2: like balance the strange quirk. You predict all sorts of
Speaker 2: weird behavior. So they said, well, you know, for things
Speaker 2: to make more sense. There should be a fourth one,
Speaker 2: there should be a partner. This is another great example
Speaker 2: of like physicists following their mathematical intuition, They're like, the
Speaker 2: universe should make sense, it should be orderly. This whole
Speaker 2: puzzle would look more sensible, It would make more sense
Speaker 2: to me, sort of mathematically and esthetically if it were complete.
Speaker 2: So physicist said, we think that there's a fourth quark
Speaker 2: out there, and they called it the charm quark. So
Speaker 2: this is a purely theoretical prediction to solve some theoretical problems. Right,
Speaker 2: we have three quarks up down strange, and they predicted
Speaker 2: the existence of this charm quirk just to solve these
Speaker 2: theoretical problems.
Speaker 1: Is there an interesting story behind why they decided to
Speaker 1: name it charm?
Speaker 3: Still upset about that particle zoo thing.
Speaker 2: The reason they named it charm is that they liked
Speaker 2: it and it brought some new symmetry to the subnuclear world.
Speaker 2: You know, there was this imbalance and it sort of
Speaker 2: was there like balance, the strange quirk, and so you know,
Speaker 2: some people call it the charm cork. Some people call
Speaker 2: it the charmed cork. But yeah, sort of like a
Speaker 2: lucky charm to make the universe make sense.
Speaker 3: Like it would be charming. If the universe made sense.
Speaker 2: It would be charming. Wasn't I find the universe pretty charming.
Speaker 2: It's both strange and charming at the same time. All right,
Speaker 2: we agree, So then the races on to look for
Speaker 2: this new particle. Does the charm cork exist? And the
Speaker 2: theorists predicted that if it does exist, you can't see
Speaker 2: it individual, you can never see quirks by themselves, but
Speaker 2: it would click together with itself in this way, so
Speaker 2: that a charm cork and an anti charm cork would
Speaker 2: come together to make a new particle, a particle we
Speaker 2: could call charmonium.
Speaker 1: Oh it sounds like right, charmmander. I feel like now
Speaker 1: we're in the world of Pokemon. But all right, charmonium.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So if you take a quark and you bind
Speaker 2: it with its antiparticle, you call that onium. So charmonium
Speaker 2: would be a charm cork and an anti charm quark.
Speaker 2: And so this is one of the most dramatic and
Speaker 2: colorful stories in the history of particle physics. There were
Speaker 2: folks at MIT trying to discover this thing. At the
Speaker 2: same time. People at Stanford trying to discover this looking
Speaker 2: for charmonium, and they had very very different devices. So
Speaker 2: Bert Richter at Stanford had a whole accelerator and he
Speaker 2: could collide electrons and positrons together. When that happens, it annihilates,
Speaker 2: it can turn into some new particle which can then decay.
Speaker 2: And this is a very effective way to discover new
Speaker 2: particles if you know already how much mass that new
Speaker 2: particle has, because then you can tune your beams, your
Speaker 2: electron and positron beams to have just the right energy.
Speaker 2: So you're making a bunch of these new particles and
Speaker 2: then you can see them decay. So Bert Richter could
Speaker 2: discover this thing in like a day if he knew
Speaker 2: what the mass was. So they scanned the mass from
Speaker 2: low values to high values and they didn't see anything,
Speaker 2: so they were like, hmm, that's weird. At the same time,
Speaker 2: across the country, Sam Ting was doing a very very
Speaker 2: different experiment. He was shooting protons the target hoping that
Speaker 2: charm quarks would come out and would make charmonium and
Speaker 2: then would decay in a way that he could see it.
Speaker 2: It was a much lower rate experiment, but it was
Speaker 2: more broadly sensitive, like he didn't have to know in advance,
Speaker 2: what is the mass of this thing. If it was there,
Speaker 2: it would be made. But the data was sort of
Speaker 2: peter out very gradually, and so he was desperate to
Speaker 2: win this race. He knew he had a very effective technique,
Speaker 2: but it was going to take a long time. And
Speaker 2: while Bert Richter was very fast, but he needed to
Speaker 2: know where to look. And so Sam King really wanted
Speaker 2: to win this race and win the Nobel Prize, so
Speaker 2: he needed as much beam time as possible. And so
Speaker 2: there's a story about how he made sure he got
Speaker 2: enough beam time. And it's not a story that I
Speaker 2: know to be true, but it's a story that exists
Speaker 2: in particle physics popular culture, and I think we should
Speaker 2: find somebody to fact check this. But the version of
Speaker 2: the story I heard from a particle physicist when I
Speaker 2: was an undergrad was that the person Samking was sharing
Speaker 2: beam time with kept having electronics difficulties, Like they would
Speaker 2: come in they were supposed to be have and the
Speaker 2: beam stuff wouldn't work. It's down, Oh Sam, you can
Speaker 2: use the beam. How nice. And apparently they installed the
Speaker 2: video camera and they discovered that someone was urineating on
Speaker 2: the competing experiment at night what so that the electronics
Speaker 2: wouldn't work, And then Ting and his experiment got more time.
Speaker 1: Wait, okay, hold on, all right, so yeah, why why?
Speaker 3: All right, you've explained why this is crazy?
Speaker 2: But okay, so Nobel Prize that's why.
Speaker 1: Okay, right, I guess if you needed any reason, Nobel
Speaker 1: Prize is the reason.
Speaker 3: But like, why pee on it?
Speaker 1: Why not just like pour a little bit of your
Speaker 1: water on it or something like, because p has a smell,
Speaker 1: you're more likely to like get someone to realize something
Speaker 1: wonky's going on, Like why not just pour a little
Speaker 1: of your coffee or your wine on it?
Speaker 3: This is weird.
Speaker 2: It is weird. And that's the detail that makes me
Speaker 2: suspect maybe this is an urban legend, you know, because
Speaker 2: that's the detail that makes the story juicy. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: like a little bit gross and animalistic and whatever. And
Speaker 2: I've spoken to other particle physicists about this, and some
Speaker 2: of them suggest that this story might be made up
Speaker 2: and it might reflect like anti Asian racism in particle physics,
Speaker 2: because you know, particle physics for a long time was
Speaker 2: Western Europeans and Americans and Chinese physicists have contributed great things,
Speaker 2: made a lot of discoveries, but they haven't always been
Speaker 2: as accepted, and so it could be that this is
Speaker 2: just a product of that. And so, you know, I
Speaker 2: tell you this story because it's out there, not because
Speaker 2: I know that it's true. But that's not the end
Speaker 2: of the drama. There's reported bad behavior on both sides
Speaker 2: of the aisle.
Speaker 3: All right, So what did the Richter lab do that
Speaker 3: was poor?
Speaker 2: So sam Ting starts to see evidence of this particle,
Speaker 2: but it's still data is collecting very slowly. You know,
Speaker 2: it's like you're waiting for the water to drain, and
Speaker 2: you're seeing the land features that emerge, and the water's
Speaker 2: just raining very very gradually. And the longer you wait,
Speaker 2: the more precise your results are. But obviously you also
Speaker 2: open the door to your competition. And so sam Ting
Speaker 2: eventually decides, Okay, we have enough data, we're going to publish,
Speaker 2: and he sets a press conference for like, you know,
Speaker 2: a few days later, and then Bert Richter knows somehow
Speaker 2: exactly where to look, tunes his collider to exactly the
Speaker 2: mass of the particle. Sam Ting is about to announce,
Speaker 2: runs data for one day, gets enough data to discover
Speaker 2: this particle, writes the paper the same day, and has
Speaker 2: a dueling press conference the same day as Sam Ting.
Speaker 2: So you have Mit announcing we discovered this new particle.
Speaker 2: We call it the J particle, and Stanford the same
Speaker 2: day discovering the same particle, and they call it the
Speaker 2: PSI particle.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, so many questions.
Speaker 1: Okay, So is the idea here that the Richter lab
Speaker 1: got some like whiff of the data coming out from
Speaker 1: the Ting lab and that's how they figured out the mask.
Speaker 3: How would that data have slipped out? I guess there's
Speaker 3: lots of ways.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a phone call from somebody in the Ting lab,
Speaker 2: you know, somebody disgruntled or like an ex partner of
Speaker 2: somebody in that lab. I don't know, but you.
Speaker 3: Know slips same particleships.
Speaker 2: Share Nobel prizes exactly.
Speaker 3: So that they did get to share the prize? Did
Speaker 3: they both get it?
Speaker 2: They share the prize and the particle shares those two names.
Speaker 2: So even to this day we haven't decided like who
Speaker 2: gets primacy. So we call it the J slash SI particle.
Speaker 1: Oh, it should have been like Rick Ting or Ting
Speaker 1: ser yes, why did Ting name it j and Richter
Speaker 1: name it PSI?
Speaker 2: Because the character in Chinese for Samting's name looks a
Speaker 2: little bit like a j oh cool And if you
Speaker 2: look in the detector when you create one of these
Speaker 2: particles at Stanford, it looks a little bit like the
Speaker 2: Greek letter SI.
Speaker 1: All right, fine, good names descriptive. So that means we
Speaker 1: have created charmonium.
Speaker 2: We have created charmonium exactly. And this we're all announced
Speaker 2: on November eleventh, nineteen seventy four. And this is what
Speaker 2: particle physicists called the November Revolution because at that moment,
Speaker 2: everybody who had any residual doubts about whether quarks are
Speaker 2: real finally gave it up and they're like, Okay, this
Speaker 2: is it. We're in a new era where quarks are real.
Speaker 2: Because we addicted the existence of this quark and what
Speaker 2: it would do, and then people went out and found
Speaker 2: this thing. It was all very very compelling. The quarks
Speaker 2: are real. They are the underlying fabric of all this stuff.
Speaker 2: Because we had predicted and discovered charmonium, a kind of quarkonium.
Speaker 1: Do you all realize you were like fifty to sixty
Speaker 1: years behind the first November Revolution when the Wymar Republic
Speaker 1: came into existence.
Speaker 2: Yes, thank you very much. We have our own parallel stories. Okay,
Speaker 2: all right, all right, not quite as dramatic, But like
Speaker 2: Greg Lansburg, he's a physicist, I know at Brown, his
Speaker 2: father was a particle physicist also, and Greg remembers being
Speaker 2: a kid in the early seventies and his father getting
Speaker 2: a phone call and his mom saying, like it's a
Speaker 2: phone call about something called charmonium, and his father like
Speaker 2: leaves naked and wet out of the shower to go
Speaker 2: get this phone call because like this is a big day,
Speaker 2: and that made an impression on Greg. Actually read this
Speaker 2: story in Greg's thesis in the acknowledgment section, which is
Speaker 2: super fun. I don't know if people realize, but like
Speaker 2: every famous scientist out there wrote a peach and their
Speaker 2: PhD has an acknowledgement section which is very personal and
Speaker 2: written when they were young and like really fun to read.
Speaker 2: So you should like go read like Paul Durak's acknowledgment section.
Speaker 1: You know, it's all out there, and it's always amazing
Speaker 1: to hear that anyone ever reads any theses ever, because
Speaker 1: in our field it's like, oh, yeah, just put it
Speaker 1: in the thesis. It doesn't matter, No one reads those any.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's true. So I tell you this whole story
Speaker 2: to give you a flavor of like how we learned
Speaker 2: what the universe it's made out of. But also in
Speaker 2: the context of toponium, right, this is the beginning of corknia.
Speaker 2: This is like, we can't see quarks directly because they're
Speaker 2: never buy themselves, but we can see what quarks do together.
Speaker 2: And corkonia is when you take a quark and you
Speaker 2: combine it with the anti quark and you make a
Speaker 2: special particle out of that. And so that's Harmonium is
Speaker 2: really the beginning of this Corknia era.
Speaker 1: So does does charmonium evolve into toponium, because I, like,
Speaker 1: I want to lean into this Pokemon saying, is that
Speaker 1: what it evolves into.
Speaker 2: No, No, termonium is very unstable the case very quickly,
Speaker 2: often into like an electron positron pair.
Speaker 3: So it would be a mistake if you were like charmonium,
Speaker 3: I choose you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, okay, exactly, But there are other quarks out there.
Speaker 2: So at this point we have up down charm and
Speaker 2: strange and people are like, oh, that's nice, that's cute.
Speaker 1: I was about to say, oh, you physicists are cute,
Speaker 1: but we just finished a story about you know, possibly
Speaker 1: y'all peing on each other's experiments, so that's less cute.
Speaker 2: But people were wondering, is there another set of these particles? Right?
Speaker 2: Is there an additional pair? Because we had up down
Speaker 2: charm strange and on the lepton side of the world,
Speaker 2: you know, with the electron, we had the muon those
Speaker 2: kinds had a third column, we had the tau particles.
Speaker 2: So people were like, well, if there's three kinds of leptons,
Speaker 2: are there also three kinds of quarks? So they predicted
Speaker 2: the existence of this pair, and one of them was
Speaker 2: called the bottom particle. And so then the hunt was
Speaker 2: on in the seventies for what we call bottomonium. Right,
Speaker 2: a bottom anti bottom pair come together to make a
Speaker 2: particle we now call the upsilon. And so this was
Speaker 2: discovered at Formulab in nineteen seventy seven. And people are like, oh, wow,
Speaker 2: so bottoms are real.
Speaker 3: As a mom, I can tell you I always knew
Speaker 3: bottoms were real. But in the.
Speaker 2: Outline another poop joke. Wow impressed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yep. Yeah, well, I mean that's a Heine joke.
Speaker 1: But anyway, but so the outline says botomium, and you
Speaker 1: said button. You added some uh syllables.
Speaker 3: What is it? Let's how is the longest we could
Speaker 3: make it? Bottomoninium.
Speaker 2: I think it should be bottomonium, right, because the particle
Speaker 2: is a bottom particle. And then you add onium, so.
Speaker 3: Bottomonium, bottomium, bottomium, got it? Bottomonium. That's pretty cute.
Speaker 2: And then there's a whole spectrum of particles that include
Speaker 2: the B quark. They're called B masons where you can
Speaker 2: combine bees with ups, or bees with downs, or bees
Speaker 2: with strange, all sorts of particles you can make if
Speaker 2: you have the B particle. And now we've seen all
Speaker 2: those particles and we study the wazoo out of them.
Speaker 2: It's a whole experiment. It's certain called LHCb, which exists
Speaker 2: just to study the bottom quark and all the weird
Speaker 2: stuff it does with other particles.
Speaker 1: All right, so let's take a break, and when we
Speaker 1: get back, let's focus on top quarks and answer our question.
Speaker 3: What the heck is topponium? All right, we're back, and
Speaker 3: it's the moment you've all been waiting for.
Speaker 1: Daniel is going to lead up to his explanation of
Speaker 1: what is toponium, right.
Speaker 2: And so far we've been sending in the context. Right,
Speaker 2: we've been explaining what quarkonium is, what charmonium was, what
Speaker 2: bottomonium is. So now we can say what toponium would
Speaker 2: be if it exists. Toponium, if it exists, should be
Speaker 2: a bound state of top quarks and anti top quarks.
Speaker 2: Because charm an anti charm makeup particle, bottom and anti
Speaker 2: bottom makeup particle, up an anti up makeup particle. Why
Speaker 2: can't you make a particle with top and anti top
Speaker 2: and that.
Speaker 3: Would be toponium based on the naming scheme, Yeah, that.
Speaker 2: Would be toponium. But the top cork is different from
Speaker 2: all the other particles. It wasn't discovered until in the
Speaker 2: mid nineties ninety five because it's super dup or massive, Like,
Speaker 2: the quarks are all very very light, except for the
Speaker 2: bottom cork, which has five times the mass of the proton,
Speaker 2: which is like, that's very heavy for a cork. But
Speaker 2: the top cork is much more massive than the bottom.
Speaker 2: It has one hundred and seventy five proton masses, so
Speaker 2: like an individual top cork has more mass than like
Speaker 2: the nucleus of a gold atom. And this is why
Speaker 2: it took us twenty years to find the top quark
Speaker 2: after the bottom cork was discovered.
Speaker 3: Wait, if the top quark is so much bigger, why
Speaker 3: was it so hard to find?
Speaker 2: Because it takes much more energy to make it. Like
Speaker 2: the bottom cork, you can make it a pretty low
Speaker 2: energy collider. You only need like protons accelerated a little bit.
Speaker 2: But to make the top quark you got to really
Speaker 2: zoom those protons together to have enough energy to make
Speaker 2: two top quarks, because you can never just make one.
Speaker 2: You got to make a top and an anti top.
Speaker 2: So it's a huge amount of energy. There's a whole
Speaker 2: set of colliders built under the assumption that the top
Speaker 2: quark was going to be like maybe a little heavier
Speaker 2: than the bottom, and then they didn't find anything. So
Speaker 2: it wasn't until the firm lab Tevatron in the late
Speaker 2: nineties that we made top quarks and saw them. And
Speaker 2: that's actually what my PhD thesis was about, seeing the
Speaker 2: top quark and measuring its properties back when we'd only
Speaker 2: ever made a few of them.
Speaker 1: Well, oh wait, were you the first one to describe
Speaker 1: the top quark or like after it was seen.
Speaker 2: I was not the first one. No, but I remember
Speaker 2: the day I was an undergrad when my particle physics
Speaker 2: professor came and said, Hey, today's a big day. We're
Speaker 2: announcing the discovery of the top quark. Because it took
Speaker 2: twenty years to find this thing, it was really exciting
Speaker 2: when people find I mean, we knew it had to
Speaker 2: be there to complete the symmetry, but it took a
Speaker 2: long time, so it was really exciting. But the top
Speaker 2: quarks mass doesn't just mean it takes a lot of
Speaker 2: energy to make, also means that it's really really really unstable.
Speaker 2: Like the top quark decays really really quickly, Like when
Speaker 2: you created it only lasts from like ten to the
Speaker 2: minus twenty three seconds, Like it basically almost instantly decays
Speaker 2: into a bottom cork and a w and other stuff.
Speaker 2: So it only briefly exists.
Speaker 1: That is pretty incredible that something that exists for such
Speaker 1: a short amount of time we're able to measure and
Speaker 1: capture at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so we've never seen a top quirk directly.
Speaker 2: We've only seen what it turns into an indirect evidence
Speaker 2: for its existence. Right, It's like we've seen the hair
Speaker 2: and the footprints of Bigfoot, we never actually captured one
Speaker 2: and like hung out with it.
Speaker 3: Bad example, Daniel, Bigfoot doesn't exist. Do top quarks exist?
Speaker 3: You hope? So?
Speaker 2: Well, we've see in its hair and footprints, so we
Speaker 2: think that it exists. We're pretty confident. And so other
Speaker 2: quarks last much longer, like a bottom cork will last
Speaker 2: much longer, long enough to hang out, find an and
Speaker 2: on a bottom cork and form a new particle bottomonium.
Speaker 2: Top quarks don't do that. Top quarks decay almost instantly,
Speaker 2: so there's really almost no time for it to form toponium. Right,
Speaker 2: Even if you have a top quark and anti top
Speaker 2: quark and they're near each other, it takes time for
Speaker 2: things to like find each other settle down into a
Speaker 2: bound state. It's like if you have a proton and
Speaker 2: an electron there, it takes them a while to figure
Speaker 2: out that they're a match and to settle into hydrogen.
Speaker 2: Like in our universe, it took hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 2: years for things to cool down and settle into neutral hydrogen.
Speaker 2: So for a long time, the lore was toponium is
Speaker 2: impossible because top quarks don't last long enough. They explode
Speaker 2: into other particles before they formed toponium, so we were
Speaker 2: stuck at bottomonium. That was the concept people had until
Speaker 2: about last year.
Speaker 1: WHOA, okay, wait, so you told us that you can't
Speaker 1: see top quarks. Happened too fast, You can't see what
Speaker 1: are they called negative.
Speaker 2: Top quarks, anti top quarks.
Speaker 3: Anti thank you anti top quarks.
Speaker 1: Have we actually seen toponium or is this another hair
Speaker 1: and footprints situation?
Speaker 2: So have we actually seen topony and we've seen a
Speaker 2: sort of maybe version of it. We haven't seen top
Speaker 2: quarks and anti top quarks like settle down into a
Speaker 2: new stable particle that compares to like the jape psi
Speaker 2: or the oopsilon, these other bound states of quarks. But
Speaker 2: people had this idea last year that you know, maybe
Speaker 2: top quarks don't have time to settle into some new state,
Speaker 2: but maybe they can talk to each other. Maybe they
Speaker 2: like exchange some gluons and influence each other. Maybe there's
Speaker 2: some like cross talk between the top and the anti
Speaker 2: top after they're made and before they decay, So maybe
Speaker 2: they don't have time to fully settle into like a
Speaker 2: cozy homie existence together, but they at least, you know,
Speaker 2: exchange a few dms. That was the idea, and so
Speaker 2: we looked for evidence of this at the Large Hadron Collider.
Speaker 2: Where we did is we said, well, what would top
Speaker 2: quarks look like if they didn't exchange any information? And
Speaker 2: then what would they look like if they did exchange
Speaker 2: some information? And it turns out if they talk to
Speaker 2: each other even a little bit, then it makes their
Speaker 2: spins point in different directions. All these particles have fundamental spins,
Speaker 2: and it's not something we understand deeply. It's just like
Speaker 2: an arrow we put on these particles to represent some
Speaker 2: kind of angular momentum they carry. But if they talk
Speaker 2: to each other, then their spins can change a little bit.
Speaker 2: And spin is something we can measure of a top quark.
Speaker 2: We don't see the top directly, but we see what
Speaker 2: it decays into and so from that we can deduce
Speaker 2: what the spin was from, like the angles of the
Speaker 2: stuff that flies out of the top quark. So you
Speaker 2: measure the spin of one top quark and you measure
Speaker 2: the spin of the anti top quark, and then you
Speaker 2: ask are those spins more likely to come from top
Speaker 2: quarks that did talk to each other, or top quarks
Speaker 2: that didn't talk to each other.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna note I didn't like stuff my anger
Speaker 1: down far enough because I'm still keeping track of every
Speaker 1: time you're like, well, we don't really understand what this
Speaker 1: means and we haven't actually seen this other thing, but
Speaker 1: go ahead, keep pooping on biologists. But anyway, I'm glad
Speaker 1: you guys maybe saw this, who knows, but you don't
Speaker 1: understand it.
Speaker 2: So we looked at all the data. We studied a
Speaker 2: huge number of top quarks, and it looks like they
Speaker 2: do talk to each other. There's evidence there that the
Speaker 2: top quarks do interact and it changes the direction of
Speaker 2: their spin as they decay. And so people called this
Speaker 2: toponium and sort of top onium with an asterisk, because
Speaker 2: again it's not like a stable particle in the same
Speaker 2: way that other quark onia are, but it is an interaction.
Speaker 2: And so they gave it a name atas sub t
Speaker 2: like a top quark kind of inspired particle. And it
Speaker 2: made a big splash, and because you know, people were
Speaker 2: excited about the work they did, they fluffed it up
Speaker 2: in the popular literature, and so in a lot of
Speaker 2: popular science articles. You see, it's like as if we
Speaker 2: have discovered this new stable form of matter or this
Speaker 2: new way for top quarks to come together to make
Speaker 2: a particle. That didn't happen. What we did see is
Speaker 2: top quarks for the first time interacting with each other
Speaker 2: before they were decaying, which is still a big deal.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So if I'm trying to put this big deal in context,
Speaker 1: so we have a better understanding of how our universe
Speaker 1: works now. But if we needed such a fancy collider
Speaker 1: to make it happen, how often is this happening. Let's
Speaker 1: first talk about our planet and then maybe like elsewhere
Speaker 1: in the Solar System, where would you expect to see
Speaker 1: it happening?
Speaker 2: Yeah, great question. You know, top quarks are probably created
Speaker 2: naturally all the time in cosmic rays. We talked about
Speaker 2: how we build particle accelerators because we didn't want to
Speaker 2: have to rely on cosmic rays. But it's not because
Speaker 2: cosmic grays don't have enough energy. Cosmic rays are hugely,
Speaker 2: massively energetic. They're much more energetic than our particle colliders.
Speaker 2: They're just harder to control and the really high energy
Speaker 2: particles are rarer, so colliders aren't good at controlled experiments,
Speaker 2: But if you want to go really high energy, cosmic
Speaker 2: rays are the way to go. So all the time,
Speaker 2: top quarks are made in the atmosphere when protons smash
Speaker 2: into other particles, way way way above the clouds. But
Speaker 2: you know they last are ten of them minus twenty
Speaker 2: three seconds, and probably they're creating impairs, and they talk
Speaker 2: to each other a little bit before they decay. Does
Speaker 2: this make any difference in the world If we lived
Speaker 2: in a universe where top quarks didn't talk to each
Speaker 2: other before they decayed, would ice cream taste worse? You know,
Speaker 2: would biologists be less awesome? No, biologists would still be
Speaker 2: awesome and ice cream would still be delicious. I think
Speaker 2: it's a very very subtle effect.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Daniel, I've forgiven you. The anger has gone.
Speaker 2: Away, all right? That was my goal, yes, but you
Speaker 2: know it satisfies our curiosity. We want to understand all
Speaker 2: the details of how these fields come together, how do
Speaker 2: they interact. Are there any surprises because we expected to
Speaker 2: see this, and if we hadn't, we would have been surprised.
Speaker 2: We wouldn't say, Hm, something's going on that we don't
Speaker 2: understand and dug into it more maybe that would have
Speaker 2: been evidence that there's some other field preventing tops from
Speaker 2: talking to each other, or some other particle out there
Speaker 2: that's doing something. Anytime you see something unexpected, it's a
Speaker 2: sign that there's something new to learn about the universe,
Speaker 2: a thread to unravel. So this is just another example
Speaker 2: of scientists like being clever and trying to find ways
Speaker 2: to ask the universe a question. We can't ask directly.
Speaker 2: We can't see quirks directly, so we had to be
Speaker 2: indirect and understand how they click together to make particles.
Speaker 2: We can't see top quarks directly, so we had to
Speaker 2: see how they decay and in fur their existence. And
Speaker 2: so now we're trying to figure out, like how top
Speaker 2: quarks talk to each other by looking at the patterns
Speaker 2: of those decays. It's all very subtle stuff, but to me,
Speaker 2: it's a testament of like the cleverness of experimentalists. You know,
Speaker 2: you have a question, you want an answer to it.
Speaker 2: You got to figure out a way to force the
Speaker 2: universe to share that data with you, and you know
Speaker 2: that's the joy of science. It's like outsmarting the universe,
Speaker 2: forcing it to answer your questions.
Speaker 1: There's such a beauty in cleverly designed experiments and are
Speaker 1: you still working on toponium?
Speaker 2: So I don't personally work on toponium, but there's still
Speaker 2: people definitely studying this and digging deeper into it, and
Speaker 2: so you expect to hear more about it in the
Speaker 2: coming years. But I think I want to underscore the
Speaker 2: point that you just made that there really is beauty
Speaker 2: and creativity in experiments. I think people often feel like
Speaker 2: theoretical physics is where the thinking is and experimental physics
Speaker 2: is like where the engineering is, like yeah, build a thing,
Speaker 2: get it to work. But also the creativity in experimental physics, right,
Speaker 2: you need to be creative figure out like, hey, how
Speaker 2: do we see this thing, how do we force the
Speaker 2: universe to reveal this how do we trick it, how
Speaker 2: we corner it so that we learn the answer to
Speaker 2: our question. A lot of the great discovery and experimental
Speaker 2: science come from somebody being really clever about finding a
Speaker 2: new way to answer a question people have long had.
Speaker 1: I love hearing stories about how science is done and
Speaker 1: the culture of science and seeing how human nature layers
Speaker 1: upon it.
Speaker 3: You know, we.
Speaker 1: Heard a story about one person maybe stealing someone else's
Speaker 1: data or a piece of their data to make their discovery.
Speaker 1: Someone else may be peeing on someone's experiment. And here
Speaker 1: it sounds like there's even within the field of physics,
Speaker 1: a hierarchy for who's the smartest, who's the most clever,
Speaker 1: whose field is doing the best stuff.
Speaker 3: And I think it would be very nice if we
Speaker 3: could remove some of that.
Speaker 1: But in the meantime, it is. It's a human endeavor,
Speaker 1: and we do do beautiful things.
Speaker 2: It is, absolutely yeah. And there's jealousy and this backsebbing,
Speaker 2: and there's people spreading terrible stories about the other folks,
Speaker 2: you know, these anti Stanford stories and anti Mit stories
Speaker 2: and all of that stuff. And you know, you can't
Speaker 2: remove that from science because science is by the people
Speaker 2: of the people. It's for the people, right if we
Speaker 2: made it sterile and it was all done by ais
Speaker 2: a lot less.
Speaker 1: Fun yep, it is a human endeavor with all of
Speaker 1: our foibles sort of layered in.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, thanks for taking this journey with us
Speaker 2: on the human discovery of quarks and the latest research
Speaker 2: on how top quarks talk to each other just before
Speaker 2: they perish. And thanks Kelly for pushing down your anger
Speaker 2: by shade at biologists.
Speaker 1: My anger has left me because you said something nice
Speaker 1: about biologists, and at the end of the day we're
Speaker 1: both friends and it's okay.
Speaker 2: All right. Thanks everybody. This podcast serves to educate, and
Speaker 2: it's a cheap form of.
Speaker 3: Therapy, the cheapest form there is. Thanks everyone.
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