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Speaker 1: Hey, Orge, do you think our podcast episodes are getting
Speaker 1: like a little too long?
Speaker 4: Are they longer than it used to be?
Speaker 1: You know, we used to start out around forty ish
Speaker 1: minutes and some of the recent ones been hitting an hour.
Speaker 4: But not the ones with me in it right, I'll
Speaker 4: just try to keep it short.
Speaker 1: You ask a lot of questions, and sometimes it takes
Speaker 1: an hour to explain them all.
Speaker 4: I guess we are trying to explain the whole universe,
Speaker 4: so that's supposed to take a while.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's actually amazing if you can explain like a
Speaker 1: whole year's worth of physics in like sixty minutes.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And the funny thing is that I usually forget
Speaker 4: it within sixty seconds.
Speaker 1: That's where you got to listen to it sixty times.
Speaker 4: But then I'll give it when sixty of the attention
Speaker 4: it needs to. Hey, we're done after an hour, right.
Speaker 1: I think the math works out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I do pay attention to math.
Speaker 5: Hi.
Speaker 4: I am Poor Hee May, cartoonist and the author of
Speaker 4: Oliver It's Great, Big Universe.
Speaker 1: Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor
Speaker 1: at UC Irvine, and I'm very conscious of our finite
Speaker 1: amounts of time.
Speaker 4: You mean, like here on Earth or on the air.
Speaker 1: Yeah, both, Absolutely, we're spending a non trivial amount of
Speaker 1: time on Earth on the air, now that we've done
Speaker 1: so many episodes, you know, it's like a non zero
Speaker 1: fraction of our lives we spent doing this podcast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, but you know, more existentially, my kids are
Speaker 1: growing up. I'm gonna leave home soon, and so yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm valuing every hour I have with them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they grow up pretty fast, sometimes too fast.
Speaker 1: Do you believe in parental time dilation? Everybody says, oh,
Speaker 1: those years go buy so fast, But you know, when
Speaker 1: you have a screaming toddler and it's two in the morning,
Speaker 1: it feels like about a million hours before they go
Speaker 1: down for their nap.
Speaker 4: Definitely, times needs to go by faster. But I feel
Speaker 4: like I've paid attention pretty good. There's definitely a lot
Speaker 4: of video records of our children, so we always go
Speaker 4: back don memory lean.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 4: But anyways, welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain
Speaker 4: the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio in which.
Speaker 1: We try to take an hour to slow down and
Speaker 1: really understand something. We think it's worthwhile to update the
Speaker 1: mental model in your mind. That's explaining the way the
Speaker 1: universe works out there. We wanted to correspond as much
Speaker 1: as possible, so the way the universe actually works, the
Speaker 1: weird rules that quantum particles follow, the incredible powerful forces
Speaker 1: swirling in the hearts of black holes. We want your
Speaker 1: brain to be aligned with the universe, even if it
Speaker 1: does take a little bit of time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we do like to take our time to make
Speaker 4: the most of your time when it's time to understand the.
Speaker 1: Universe, and the universe operates on so many amazingly different
Speaker 1: time scales. We think about our lives and you know,
Speaker 1: tens of years, maybe one hundred if we're lucky, but
Speaker 1: that's just the blink of an eye in the history
Speaker 1: of the universe that is billions of years old. And
Speaker 1: then also between every second, there's an incredible number of
Speaker 1: quantum operations happening, electrons buzzing and tuing and throwing, and
Speaker 1: particles appearing and disappearing. Things happen in the universe from
Speaker 1: the tiniest fractions of a second all the way out
Speaker 1: to billions and maybe even trillions of years.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a lot going on in the universe, and
Speaker 4: times seems to be underneath it all, dictating at what
Speaker 4: rate things happen and in what order things happen.
Speaker 1: And I wonder sometimes whether the deepest answers to the
Speaker 1: nature of the universe are at the shortest time scales,
Speaker 1: like what is the real fabric of reality, the smallest
Speaker 1: bits in the smallest pieces of time dictating how everything
Speaker 1: else works somehow bubbling up to form our universe, or
Speaker 1: whether the real story is of the longest time periods.
Speaker 1: What's happening to the universe? How does it form or
Speaker 1: what is its future? Over billions or maybe trillions of years?
Speaker 1: You know, the billions of years that our universe has
Speaker 1: existed could just be the first few moments of a
Speaker 1: much longer, impossibly to imagine deep time future.
Speaker 4: Do you feel like maybe you have a little bit
Speaker 4: of a fear of missing out in the universe, you know,
Speaker 4: but maybe things are happening too fast for you to
Speaker 4: notice or too long for you to live through.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have FOMU. I fear of missing the universe
Speaker 1: for sure.
Speaker 4: Yeah, physical fear of missing the universe. Fomu.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Some of the most interesting things that happened in
Speaker 1: the universe are not the tiniest rules of the little particles,
Speaker 1: but how things come together over time. You know, galaxies
Speaker 1: took hundreds of millions of years to form. Imagine you
Speaker 1: were an intelligent species that existed somehow in the first
Speaker 1: one hundred million years in the universe. You would never
Speaker 1: even see a galaxy, which to us now is like
Speaker 1: the basic building block of what's out there in space.
Speaker 1: What if the most basic building block of the few
Speaker 1: future hasn't yet formed. An intelligent species that evolve in
Speaker 1: a trillion years will wonder about what it was like
Speaker 1: to be us, never even seeing the most basic thing
Speaker 1: that exists in their universe.
Speaker 4: Or even if the future is set at all.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Right, they're a big question of whether the universe is deterministic,
Speaker 4: meaning you can sort of know what's going to happen
Speaker 4: in the future or at least in one of the futures,
Speaker 4: or whether it's totally random.
Speaker 1: That's right, And we're hoping to push ourselves into a
Speaker 1: future where we understand the universe a little bit better,
Speaker 1: from the largest time scales to the shortest time scales.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and when it's time to do that, we will
Speaker 4: take a little bit of time to explain it to you,
Speaker 4: in hopefully more or less an hour, because time seems
Speaker 4: to be one of the most fundamental things in the universe,
Speaker 4: but sometimes you have to ask questions about time itself.
Speaker 1: And while we can't see the deep future yet, we
Speaker 1: can do our best to try to understand the shortest
Speaker 1: time scales to zoom in on how fast things are
Speaker 1: happening in the universe.
Speaker 4: So today on the podcast, we'll be tagged clang, what's
Speaker 4: the fastest event ever measured?
Speaker 1: You know, when people run simulations like the Hearts of
Speaker 1: neutron stars or like weather or whatever, they always have
Speaker 1: to choose like a minimum time step. Now you have
Speaker 1: your universe, and then you evolve it forward in time,
Speaker 1: one step in time, and then again and again and again,
Speaker 1: and eventually you describe something longer. But there's that minimum
Speaker 1: time on the computer, right, Yeah, on the computer when
Speaker 1: you run simulations, and so in our real universe. I
Speaker 1: think it's fascinating to think about, like, well, what is
Speaker 1: the shortest time step? How far have we zoomed in
Speaker 1: to see like the fastest thing ever happened?
Speaker 4: Yeah, or possibly we are living in the simulation, right.
Speaker 4: Isn't that something that even smart people think about, not
Speaker 4: just conspiracy theorists.
Speaker 1: I think it's definitely true that smart people think about it.
Speaker 1: I don't know how true it is that smart people
Speaker 1: believe in it or think that it's realistic. I know
Speaker 1: there's a lot of talk out there about it. It's
Speaker 1: a lot of fun to think about. But if you
Speaker 1: have to ask people like whether they really believe it,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's unlikely we're living in a simulation.
Speaker 4: For example, you mean it's fun to simulate in your
Speaker 4: head that maybe we're living in a simulation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a really clever sort of meta idea. Like
Speaker 1: we think about simulations. As you say, we run simulations
Speaker 1: in our head. We use simulations for our science. We
Speaker 1: had a whole fun podcast episode about the importance of
Speaker 1: doing simulations in science. It's really a whole new branch
Speaker 1: of science, sort of different from experimental and theoretical physics.
Speaker 1: You know, we describe things like in vivo or in
Speaker 1: vitro and now sometimes we call them in silico. But
Speaker 1: I don't know that we actually are living in a simulation,
Speaker 1: or you know, how we would actually prove that. But
Speaker 1: we have a whole episode about that, so folks interested
Speaker 1: in that go check out that episode right right.
Speaker 4: But whether it's a simulation or not, there's definitely time
Speaker 4: in it. And as you said, when we create little
Speaker 4: universes in our computers, you have to pick a timestep
Speaker 4: to do your simulation, and so you can kind of
Speaker 4: ask the question does that happen in the real universe
Speaker 4: as well?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and when we do it in our simulations, we
Speaker 1: pick a timestep short enough that we're not ignoring anything important.
Speaker 1: So we try to figure out, like, what is the
Speaker 1: shortest time step we're interested in. You know, if you're
Speaker 1: simulating like a evolution of a galaxy, nothing really exciting
Speaker 1: happens in a year or one hundred years, so you
Speaker 1: might take like thousand year time steps. But if you're
Speaker 1: simulating like a nuclear explosion underground, you might take timesteps
Speaker 1: of like a millionth of a second to make sure
Speaker 1: you're capturing all the dynamics.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and as you said, there's lots of things happening
Speaker 4: in the universe, and the idea of a timestep is
Speaker 4: also important when you try to measure things, right. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 4: if you're trying to measure an explosion, you don't want
Speaker 4: to sample the explosion every three minutes because it's going
Speaker 4: to be gone and over. And when you're sampling, you know,
Speaker 4: had the motion of a start, you don't want to
Speaker 4: do it every femtosecond because you're going to have too
Speaker 4: much data.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, So things happen on different timescales, and the
Speaker 1: question is like, what's the fastest thing we've ever measured?
Speaker 1: And what's the actual minimum time slice of the universe?
Speaker 4: Two big questions about very small things. Hopefully we can
Speaker 4: do it in the short amount of time that we
Speaker 4: have well, as usually, we were wondering how many people
Speaker 4: out there had thought about the question of what is
Speaker 4: the fastest event ever measured? So Daniel went out there
Speaker 4: once again to ask people, what do you think is
Speaker 4: the most fleeting or fastest physical event ever measured?
Speaker 1: Thanks very much to our listeners who answer these questions
Speaker 1: very very quickly. I'm very grateful for your contributions. It
Speaker 1: helps me understand what people are thinking about. And I
Speaker 1: hope you enjoy hearing your voice on the air. And
Speaker 1: if you are out there listening and would like to
Speaker 1: hear your voice answering these questions, please don't be shy
Speaker 1: write to me to questions at Danielandjorge dot com.
Speaker 4: So think about it for a second. What do you
Speaker 4: think is the fastest thing humans have ever detected? Here's
Speaker 4: what people had to say.
Speaker 6: I don't know what the smallest time slice ever measured. Here,
Speaker 6: I'm going to assume that it's somehow around themto seconds.
Speaker 6: I don't know why that number sticks my brain, but
Speaker 6: I'm going to say themto seconds.
Speaker 3: The smallest amount of space ever measured, I think is
Speaker 3: the plank space.
Speaker 1: Gonna go with plank time.
Speaker 7: That's easy. It's the time between when butter goes from
Speaker 7: being soft to being soup. But actually it probably tend
Speaker 7: to the negative twenty something, at which point I guess
Speaker 7: doesn't even show that time makes any sense anymore.
Speaker 4: All Right, we got some cooking answers here.
Speaker 1: You know, some people listen to our podcast while they're
Speaker 1: making dinner, and that might have influenced this answer.
Speaker 4: Well, I'm very interested in this recipe that where you
Speaker 4: make soup out of butter.
Speaker 1: You've never had butter soup. Oh man, that.
Speaker 4: Sounds so healthy, so healthy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll have butter soup low fat version please. Yeah.
Speaker 4: That will definitely shorten your time on Earth for sure.
Speaker 4: I mean expand your space, but short in your time.
Speaker 4: I mean that seems like the wrong proportions.
Speaker 1: With well. Buttered chicken is a very popular recipe, so
Speaker 1: I'm sure butter soup is a thing people can make.
Speaker 4: Mm, but buttered chicken soup Oh my goodness, what's better
Speaker 4: than the physics of that? How does it even work?
Speaker 1: It definitely adds mass.
Speaker 4: But yeah, it's definitely an interesting question, and so let's
Speaker 4: jump into it. Daniel. First of all, I guess let's
Speaker 4: talk about time in general and the idea that maybe
Speaker 4: time is pixelated or there's a minimum amount of time
Speaker 4: in the universe. What if physicists think about that.
Speaker 1: Physicists really have no idea how time works.
Speaker 4: All right, we're done.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's about time we gave up.
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the shortest episode ever, the shortest podcast about physics
Speaker 4: ever recorded, today's episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah, every podcast is just we don't know. Done. No,
Speaker 1: It is really an enduring mystery. And it's weird because
Speaker 1: time is something we sort of feel like we understand.
Speaker 1: It's part of our everyday lives. We talk about all
Speaker 1: the time. We all have complicated schedules, we rely on time,
Speaker 1: We do time zoneans, we mess them up and miss meetings.
Speaker 1: Time is both familiar and also mysterious because we don't
Speaker 1: understand like what it is. Special relativity tells us that
Speaker 1: it's deeply connected to space, and it makes actually much
Speaker 1: more sense to think about time and space together. As
Speaker 1: one unit space time. And that makes sense because some
Speaker 1: of the things in special relativity show us that space
Speaker 1: and time are mixed. That you know, moving quickly through
Speaker 1: space can affect your measurement of time. All these sorts
Speaker 1: of things sort of the same way that like electricity
Speaker 1: and magnetism make more sense when stuck together into one idea.
Speaker 1: It doesn't tell you that electricity and magnetism are the
Speaker 1: same thing, just that they're connected in the same way
Speaker 1: space and time are connected. They're not the same, but
Speaker 1: they're related to each other in special relativity.
Speaker 4: Right because I guess we grow up, you know, not
Speaker 4: just as kids, but also like sort of through elementary
Speaker 4: high school, thinking that space and time are sort of immovable,
Speaker 4: right like fixed in the universe. But really then eventually
Speaker 4: you learn that space is and time are both and
Speaker 4: a squishy, right envirorable. Time can slow down, time can
Speaker 4: speed up, space can contract, space can expand they can
Speaker 4: both wiggle. But where did this idea that maybe time
Speaker 4: is pixelated? Where did it come from or what would
Speaker 4: make physicists think that it might be?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's fascinating. You sort of trace the evolution of
Speaker 1: the ideas and we all sort of have that same experience.
Speaker 1: Like Newton thought of space and time as absolute and fixed,
Speaker 1: as you say, sort of immutable. They're like the backdrop
Speaker 1: of the universe. But then Einstein showd us that they're not. Actually,
Speaker 1: they're flexible, they're interconnected. But most importantly, Einstein's theory of
Speaker 1: general relativity and special relativity still suggests that time is continuous,
Speaker 1: it's smooth, it's infinitely divisible, that it's not discrete or pixelated.
Speaker 1: It's not like there are steps in time. In Einstein's
Speaker 1: theory of the universe. You can take any two moments
Speaker 1: and there's always another moment in between. Right, there's no
Speaker 1: minimum time step in Einstein's universe, and relativity describes the
Speaker 1: universe very very well. It describes the expansion of the
Speaker 1: universe and the motion of galaxies and everything we've ever
Speaker 1: been able to test about general relativity has always been
Speaker 1: bang on, exactly correct, with astonishing accuracy.
Speaker 4: Now, when you say the answing theories suggest that what
Speaker 4: does that mean? Does that mean that it only works
Speaker 4: with continuous time or that is just always used continuous
Speaker 4: time and nobody has thought about applying it to the
Speaker 4: pixelated time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, great question. It works assuming that space is continuous.
Speaker 1: So you're like, let's start from that assumption and then
Speaker 1: build on top of that. And then you could ask, well,
Speaker 1: could you have a different theory that didn't make that assumption.
Speaker 1: What if you assumed instead that space was pixelated? And
Speaker 1: then you run into all sorts of mathematical problems that
Speaker 1: nobody has been able to solve before. The motivation for
Speaker 1: that comes from quantum mechanics. Like you might ask, well,
Speaker 1: why would you wake time pixelated? It feels pretty smooth
Speaker 1: to me. I mean, we measure it in seconds, but
Speaker 1: we know there's always milliseconds below those and microseconds below those.
Speaker 1: Why would you ever imagine there would be pixels? And
Speaker 1: that comes from the idea of quantum mechanics, which tells
Speaker 1: us that the nature of reality is a sort of discrete.
Speaker 1: It's like made out of chunks. It's not smooth, you know,
Speaker 1: like when we look at a beam of life from
Speaker 1: a flashlight. Einstein's actual discovery from the photoelectric effect tells
Speaker 1: us that it's not just like smooth beams of light
Speaker 1: that you could like chop up infinitely small, that there's
Speaker 1: like a minimum brightness because light comes in packets, these
Speaker 1: little things called photons, right, and so quantum mechanics suggests
Speaker 1: that even though the universe seems continuous and smooth when
Speaker 1: you zoom in, it really is kind of pixelated. It's
Speaker 1: just like when you look at your computer screen and
Speaker 1: you zoom in, it seems smooth, right, but actually there's
Speaker 1: little dots there. There are little basic units.
Speaker 4: So that's the motivation, right, Like even this podcast is pixelated, right,
Speaker 4: Like we're recording into a digital device. It's recording it
Speaker 4: with a time sample with a minimum time sampling rate,
Speaker 4: and then it gets transmitted as bits and then it
Speaker 4: plays out there where you're listening to this as those
Speaker 4: little bits.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're exactly right. Digitization is creating some pixelization, right,
Speaker 1: You're creating these units, and exactly the sort of way
Speaker 1: quantum mechanics works. Fascinatingly though, even analog measurements have a resolution, right,
Speaker 1: like a photograph. You think of it as like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's photons. It's not like pixels like a digital camera
Speaker 1: or a analog recording on like vinyl or on a tape.
Speaker 1: It's not using digits. It's analog. It's using some sort
Speaker 1: of like magnetic technology to record it, or like physical
Speaker 1: bumps on the vinyl. Still that is discrete, right, because
Speaker 1: in the end, there's a finite resolution, Like for photographs
Speaker 1: there's a resolution of a photon or the molecule of
Speaker 1: the chemical atoms that are you know, recording the light,
Speaker 1: or on the tape, there's still the resolution of like
Speaker 1: the little magnets that are aligned to record your information,
Speaker 1: or on the vinyl there's still like the chemistry of
Speaker 1: the vinyl itself. So analog is higher resolution, but it's
Speaker 1: not infinite resolution, right, And so.
Speaker 4: The idea is that maybe time is also pixelated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because it's weird to think about time as infinite.
Speaker 1: You know, we don't see infinities in reality. Everywhere we
Speaker 1: see infinities in our theory, always something acts to prevent
Speaker 1: it from happening in reality. And this is what quantum
Speaker 1: mechanics tells us, that there are new infinities. You can't
Speaker 1: divide things infinitely small, and maybe space itself and time
Speaker 1: are pixelated. Maybe there's a minimum unit of space and
Speaker 1: a minimum unit of time. This would be very natural
Speaker 1: from a quantum mechanical point of view. You asked earlier, like, well,
Speaker 1: has anybody tried that? What if you built general relativity
Speaker 1: out of discrete units of space and time, you know,
Speaker 1: pixelated the universe, and people are trying to do that.
Speaker 1: But bringing together the ideas of general relativity and the
Speaker 1: ideas of quantum mechanics to make that new concept, like
Speaker 1: a theory of gravity and space and time that's built
Speaker 1: on discrete units has so far not been successful. People
Speaker 1: have been trying for decades. You run into all sorts
Speaker 1: of mathematical problems doing so. So we don't have a
Speaker 1: theory of general relativity that's built on discrete time. So
Speaker 1: we have this theory of general relativity. It tells us
Speaker 1: about space and gravity but assumes continuous time. And then
Speaker 1: this idea that the universe is quantum mechanical and time
Speaker 1: and space are probably discrete. But we can't bring these
Speaker 1: two things together.
Speaker 4: Right. But this theory, even though it comes from Einstein,
Speaker 4: does have its problems, right, Like it sort of breaks down,
Speaker 4: especially when you get down to the smallest levels of
Speaker 4: particles in quantum physics.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, general relativity is very, very accurate. But everything
Speaker 1: we think in physics has its limitations. Like every theory
Speaker 1: you describe is applicable only in certain situations. Situations where
Speaker 1: you've derived it, you know, under the assumptions that are valid,
Speaker 1: and so, as you mentioned, like general relativity, we think
Speaker 1: breaks down in certain situations Like number one, It can't
Speaker 1: describe particles, like what is the gravity of a particle?
Speaker 1: We don't know because particles have uncertainty. General relativity can
Speaker 1: only tell you about how space is bent when you
Speaker 1: know where a mass is, Well, what if you don't
Speaker 1: know where it is? What if it only has a
Speaker 1: probability to be here and a probability to be there,
Speaker 1: is space probably bent or space bent on average? We
Speaker 1: don't know the answers to these questions, So we don't
Speaker 1: know how to do general relativity for quantum particles, and
Speaker 1: it makes weird predictions.
Speaker 4: Are we ever going to find out? Like how are
Speaker 4: we going to tell if the universe is pixelated in time? Ever?
Speaker 1: Yeah, those are two great questions. Will we ever find
Speaker 1: out how general relativity or how space is bent by
Speaker 1: quantum particles? There's a bunch of really cool, clever experiments. Well,
Speaker 1: one way to do it is to try to come
Speaker 1: up with a theory of quantum gravity that mirrors these
Speaker 1: things together and tells us sort of like conceptually, how
Speaker 1: time might work. Another is to try to like make
Speaker 1: approximate calculations and guess even without the theory of quantum gravity.
Speaker 1: And you heard one of the listeners talk about the
Speaker 1: plank time. And another is to try to make fast
Speaker 1: measurements and see, like, can we zoom in on stuff
Speaker 1: in the universe and see if we can measure these pixels,
Speaker 1: if we can notice some like discrete unit of time
Speaker 1: happening in our experiments.
Speaker 4: Like we might measure something in an experiment and actually
Speaker 4: see the pixels.
Speaker 1: Of time, Yeah, exactly, the way you can zoom in
Speaker 1: on a screen and see the pixels are there, right,
Speaker 1: Or you could slow down a movie and notice, oh,
Speaker 1: it's not actually a continuous motion, it's just a bunch
Speaker 1: of still frames. If you could zoom in on the
Speaker 1: physical universe in time, then you might notice those time
Speaker 1: pixels if they're there. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, I guess the question is how fast are things
Speaker 4: in nature? And the second question you can ask is
Speaker 4: what's the fastest thing that we can measure or that
Speaker 4: we have been able to measure? Yeah, so far, So
Speaker 4: let's dig into both of those small questions. I guess
Speaker 4: short questions. Probably not, but unfortunately it's time to take
Speaker 4: a quick break.
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Speaker 4: All right, very quickly, Daniel, what are we talking about today?
Speaker 1: We're talking about the fastest things that ever happened.
Speaker 4: Not the fastest podcast episode. I think we're we're already
Speaker 4: past that point.
Speaker 1: Maybe somebody out there is playing our podcast at like
Speaker 1: ten x so they're understanding the universe is so much
Speaker 1: faster than us.
Speaker 4: Well, do we sound like chipmunks now?
Speaker 1: Then to them we should talk really slowly for those people.
Speaker 4: Maybe we shouldn't, like figure out how to encode secret
Speaker 4: messages by talking backwards, Like if you play the podcast backwards.
Speaker 1: If you only listen to every twenty fifth word I say.
Speaker 1: I've been talking and cet messages the whole time. It's
Speaker 1: for the special audience.
Speaker 4: It's like you and Tator Swift hiding secret messages.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like those books where if you read only
Speaker 1: the words along the left side of the page, it's
Speaker 1: a whole second message there.
Speaker 4: All right. If you take every twenty fifth word Daniel
Speaker 4: has ever said in all five hundred plus episodes, and
Speaker 4: you take every thirteenth word that I ever said in
Speaker 4: all five hundred episodes, and you put them in the
Speaker 4: right order, you'll get the answer to the origin of
Speaker 4: the universe, like.
Speaker 1: The universe and everything. Yeah, that's exactly it is. The
Speaker 1: big reveal folk plot twist at the end.
Speaker 4: Today's a day where re announce it.
Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely, But we.
Speaker 4: Are talking about how fast things are in the universe.
Speaker 4: And I guess two sort of basic questions. What's the
Speaker 4: fastest thing that we know about in the universe and
Speaker 4: what's the fastest thing we've ever measured in the universe. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so talk to us about how fast things are in
Speaker 4: the universe, Like what are the different scales that we
Speaker 4: know about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So, first of all, there's the unit of the second. Right,
Speaker 1: the second is like our natural unit of time, but
Speaker 1: it's totally arbitrary. We just made it up. It's not
Speaker 1: like a physical thing. You know, light travels a certain
Speaker 1: distance in a second. There's some caesium atom that oscillates
Speaker 1: billions of times in a second. But a second tells
Speaker 1: us something about ourselves and our relationship with time, because
Speaker 1: it's what we feel like is the minimum unit of
Speaker 1: time that sort of makes sense to talk about between people.
Speaker 1: It's like the natural rhythm of our thoughts. One second,
Speaker 1: is it. I think that's why we pick the second,
Speaker 1: you know, because it's reasonable, Like you pick a unit
Speaker 1: so that you're usually talking about small numbers. I mean,
Speaker 1: we could live our lives with clocks that go down
Speaker 1: to the microseconds, but it would be pretty exhausting, you know,
Speaker 1: if you had to tell your kid like, okay, you
Speaker 1: can watch TV for six billion milliseconds or six billion nanoseconds,
Speaker 1: that'd be confusing all the time. So we tend to
Speaker 1: pick units so you can say small numbers.
Speaker 4: I think you're talking about like the scale of a second,
Speaker 4: not exactly like the second, Like, why is in the
Speaker 4: second one point one seconds? Nobody knows, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, nobody knows. It's totally arbitrary. But why is this
Speaker 1: second not like one hundred times longer, one hundred times shorter.
Speaker 1: That tells us something about like the scale in which
Speaker 1: we live.
Speaker 4: Well, we also talk about like minutes and hours. Those
Speaker 4: are really important too, But I think you're saying, like
Speaker 4: the second is maybe the minimum amount of time that
Speaker 4: sort of our brains can grow or understand or grasp.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, we have no smaller time unit that's not
Speaker 1: just like a fraction of a second.
Speaker 4: That makes sense, right, Like nobody worries about things that
Speaker 4: happen in the millisecond level on an everyday basis.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And if you think about the way your
Speaker 1: body works, you know, like roughly your heart beats once
Speaker 1: a second ish, depending on whether you're an athlete or not.
Speaker 1: And your eyes, for example, blink in like a tenth
Speaker 1: of a second, and your eyes can only see things
Speaker 1: that happen, you know, to like one thirtieth of a second,
Speaker 1: which is why you can play a movie with like
Speaker 1: thirty frames per second and it looks continuous. Your eye
Speaker 1: can't tell the difference between that and actual continuous motion.
Speaker 4: So maybe more it's more like the one tenth of
Speaker 4: a second is really kind of the minimum unit that
Speaker 4: we were used to thinking about, right, But we are
Speaker 4: used to thinking about things that happen in the think
Speaker 4: of an eye.
Speaker 1: And I think that's why you choose a unit to
Speaker 1: be like a second, and you can think about small
Speaker 1: numbers of it, you know, a tenth of a second
Speaker 1: or ten seconds. It encapsulates the typical range of human activity.
Speaker 1: But of course the physical universe things happen much faster,
Speaker 1: you know, like even inside your brain, neurons fire. You know,
Speaker 1: we think like about a thousand times a second, so
Speaker 1: the processing speed of your brain is like a thousand
Speaker 1: times faster than a second. And you know, tiny particles
Speaker 1: out there can interact and live for much shorter times,
Speaker 1: Like do you create a muon in the upper atmosphere
Speaker 1: because a cosmic rays is smashed into a particle, that
Speaker 1: muon lives for ten to the minus six seconds a
Speaker 1: millionth of a second. Whoa, and you can zoom in
Speaker 1: much faster, of course, and think about like what happens
Speaker 1: in a billionth of a second. Well, in a billionth
Speaker 1: of a second, light travels about a foot.
Speaker 4: Yeah, light is fast.
Speaker 1: Light is pretty fast, but it's amazing to think about,
Speaker 1: like slowing time down enough to see light move right,
Speaker 1: for light to travel at a small distance. Usually we
Speaker 1: think about light as going like around the Earth lots
Speaker 1: of times, but in a billionth of a second, it
Speaker 1: only goes afoot, which is cool. There are other tiny
Speaker 1: particles that live much shorter than the mew on. For example,
Speaker 1: if you create a bottom cork, it lives about a
Speaker 1: billionth of a second before flying off to something else.
Speaker 1: This is a slice of time it's hard to even
Speaker 1: really think about, like does that really exist? Is there
Speaker 1: like a moment when the bottom cork is like there
Speaker 1: and doing its thing before it decays? It feels almost
Speaker 1: like zero time already.
Speaker 4: Well, I wonder if it feels like zero time to
Speaker 4: us because we're so slow, you know, in our thinking.
Speaker 4: But maybe if you have like you know, microscopic creatures
Speaker 4: or you know, really tiny beings that probably think a
Speaker 4: lot faster, I wonder if that will seem slow to them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. It's all relative, right, this choice of a second.
Speaker 1: It tells us about like how we live our lives.
Speaker 1: It's relative to the length of our lives and the
Speaker 1: operating of our brain, but it's arbitrary. Time extends on
Speaker 1: this enormous spectrum from the many, many, many billions of
Speaker 1: years down to the tiniest slice, and we're operating on
Speaker 1: a tiny little bit of it, Like the way we
Speaker 1: can see a little slice of the visual spectrum, but
Speaker 1: there's light with much higher frequencies and lower frequencies in
Speaker 1: the universe. Is a wash in that kind of light
Speaker 1: that we don't normally see. It's just it's like our
Speaker 1: human perspective, but the universe operates on even shorter time scales.
Speaker 1: You know, if you go down to like ten to
Speaker 1: the minus fifteen seconds, this is now a thempto second.
Speaker 4: I wonder if because we also know time is sort
Speaker 4: of relative, right, So I wonder, like, if you create
Speaker 4: a bottom cord near a black hole or in a
Speaker 4: spacehip going near the speed of light, is that we're
Speaker 4: going to seem longer lived to us from our perspective.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, yeah. And like these muons, for example, that we
Speaker 1: create in the upper atmosphere, they only live for a
Speaker 1: millionth of a second, and so you might wonder, like, well,
Speaker 1: would they ever get down to the surface of the Earth,
Speaker 1: And the answer is yes, and The only reason they
Speaker 1: do make it to the surface is because they're going
Speaker 1: very very fast relative to us, so their clocks are
Speaker 1: running slow. So even though they live for a millionth
Speaker 1: of a second, that's enough time for them to make
Speaker 1: get to the surface, because that million of a second
Speaker 1: clicks very very slowly. As we're watching them, essentially.
Speaker 4: To them, so are you saying it they live a
Speaker 4: million of a second if you're the muon, But to
Speaker 4: us they actually live longer.
Speaker 1: To us they live longer. Yet they travel much further
Speaker 1: than otherwise because they're going fast, and so their time
Speaker 1: ticks slowly. From our point of view. If you had
Speaker 1: like a little clock traveling with a muon, you would
Speaker 1: see its ticks going very very slowly, and it would
Speaker 1: fly very far before a million of a second ticked over,
Speaker 1: and then that muon decayed. From its point of view,
Speaker 1: it only lives for a million to a second, but
Speaker 1: it sees the atmosphere is compressed, because when you're moving
Speaker 1: fast relative to something, you see it shortened. So for
Speaker 1: the muon's point of view, it sees the atmosphere is compressed.
Speaker 1: In short, it can make it to the bottom of
Speaker 1: the atmosphere, to the surface in a millionth of a second.
Speaker 1: So that's an example of how special relativity is cool
Speaker 1: because from one point of view, it's time dilation. From
Speaker 1: another point of view, it's length contraction. It's really the
Speaker 1: same physics.
Speaker 4: But yeah, time is relative, okay, So what else is
Speaker 4: fast in the universe?
Speaker 1: So if you go down to like a femtosecond, how
Speaker 1: far can light travel and like ten to the minus
Speaker 1: fifteen seconds. Now we're talking about short distances. We're talking
Speaker 1: about like less than a micrometer, and you can go
Speaker 1: down even further to auto seconds. This is ten to
Speaker 1: minus eighteen seconds. This is a hard number to think about.
Speaker 1: It's so short that the number of autoseconds in a
Speaker 1: single second is the same as the number of seconds
Speaker 1: that have elapsed in the whole history of the universe.
Speaker 1: Like there's been about ten to the eighteen seconds since
Speaker 1: the beginning of the universe, and an auto second is
Speaker 1: one in ten to the eighteenth of a second. So
Speaker 1: it's really an incredible slice.
Speaker 4: Well, that's like if you take a second and you
Speaker 4: split it into a million, and then take each of
Speaker 4: those and split it it into a million, and then
Speaker 4: take each of those and split it it into a
Speaker 4: million timesteps. That's what an attosecond is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, it's a millionth of a millionth of a million.
Speaker 4: Is there anything that happens at the at a second
Speaker 4: level that we know about.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. There are lots of particles that decay in an
Speaker 1: auto second. And as we'll talk about in a minute,
Speaker 1: we've actually measured things down to the attosecond. It's sort
Speaker 1: of incredible. But the universe happens even faster. So we
Speaker 1: can think about like a zepto second, which is ten
Speaker 1: to the minus twenty one seconds. This is how long
Speaker 1: it takes a photon to go from one side of
Speaker 1: the hydrogen atom to the other side of the hydrogen atom.
Speaker 1: Like super fast photon moving a very short distance, only
Speaker 1: takes a zepto second. Pretty zipty, pretty zipty. But you know,
Speaker 1: down in the realm of fundamental particles, even a zepto
Speaker 1: second can feel like a long time. If we create
Speaker 1: a Higgs boson in the Large Hadron collider, for example,
Speaker 1: that lasts for a thousands of a zepto second, it's
Speaker 1: ten to the minus twenty four seconds.
Speaker 4: Well, meaning like you create a Higgs boson but in
Speaker 4: less than one thousands of azepto second it's gone, yeah,
Speaker 4: or probably gone.
Speaker 1: It's probably gone. Yeah. Each one has a distribution. They're
Speaker 1: pretty tighty. It's sort of like radioactive decay. It's not
Speaker 1: an exact measurement, doesn't disappear when its time is up.
Speaker 1: There's an average there. But yeah, they live much much
Speaker 1: shorter than muons. Muons live forever compared to a higgs boson.
Speaker 1: You know, higgs boson can be born and died ten
Speaker 1: to eighteen times before a muon decays. Whoa digging down
Speaker 1: even deeper. Some of the shortest lived particles we know
Speaker 1: about are things like the W boson, the Z boson
Speaker 1: on the top quark. These last for like ten to
Speaker 1: the minus twenty seven seconds. And that's about as far
Speaker 1: as we can go in terms of like theoretical stuff
Speaker 1: that we can describe. And this is just probing theoretically,
Speaker 1: like what can we describe in our theories of quantum
Speaker 1: particles that takes this short amount of time. That's about the.
Speaker 4: Bottom of it, meaning, like, of all the things that
Speaker 4: we have names for physically in the universe, that's about
Speaker 4: the shortest scale that we be operating.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, And you could postulate something that happens short.
Speaker 1: There's no limitation there. Like we think about other particles
Speaker 1: that are really really heavy that might decay much much faster.
Speaker 1: There's nothing that's stopping you from thinking about that. But
Speaker 1: we don't know of any particles in the universe that
Speaker 1: operate on a shorter timescale.
Speaker 4: We always talk about how fast things go right, or
Speaker 4: light goes right, like like, can't you say, well, light
Speaker 4: travels one zipto fento minisecond in less amount of time
Speaker 4: than that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. You can always divide time further according to
Speaker 1: general relativity. You can just keep slicing it and you
Speaker 1: could measure it the way you describe, like how far
Speaker 1: does light go? And if space is continuous and time
Speaker 1: is continuous, you could just keep doing that forever. Right,
Speaker 1: you go down to ten to the minus a million,
Speaker 1: you know, zero point zero with a million zeros and
Speaker 1: then a one of seconds and think about how far
Speaker 1: light goes there. But at some point you're beyond the
Speaker 1: extrapolation the same way that we talked about like general
Speaker 1: relativity breaking down. You know, when we go to the
Speaker 1: heart of black holes and having infinite density. We're not
Speaker 1: really comfortable thinking about things theoretically smaller than a certain
Speaker 1: time called the Plank time, which is ten to the
Speaker 1: minus forty four seconds. We think that our theory of
Speaker 1: quantum particles and quantum field theory and the standard model
Speaker 1: works very very well down to about that resolution, and
Speaker 1: beyond that we don't trust it.
Speaker 4: I know we had an episode about the plank time,
Speaker 4: but it was too much time ago. I don't remember.
Speaker 4: So maybe for our listeners, what is the plank time?
Speaker 4: But make it quick.
Speaker 1: The plank time is sort of two things. It's on
Speaker 1: one hand, just like you put together a bunch of
Speaker 1: physical constants of the universe until you get something that
Speaker 1: has units of time, and then you ask, okay, what's
Speaker 1: the number. So you take like the speed of light
Speaker 1: and the gravitational constant and planks constant, and those all
Speaker 1: have units on them, you know, energy or meters or
Speaker 1: seconds whatever, but you can put them together in a
Speaker 1: way that cancels and you get a number, and that
Speaker 1: number is ten to the minus forty four seconds, and
Speaker 1: then you can ask, well, what does that number mean?
Speaker 1: And you know that number doesn't mean anything very precisely.
Speaker 1: You hear a lot in popular science that it's like
Speaker 1: definitively the minimum resolution of time. It's definitely not that.
Speaker 1: It's just like, this is what we can do to
Speaker 1: say roughly where things start to be different because at
Speaker 1: the plank time or if you rearrange it to the
Speaker 1: plank distance, or you rearrange it differently to like the
Speaker 1: plank energy, that's where we think our theories break down
Speaker 1: where we need to have some contribution from gravity and
Speaker 1: some contribution from quant mechanics, and again we don't know
Speaker 1: how to put those two things together. So we can
Speaker 1: extrapolate our theories up to about the plank energy or
Speaker 1: down to the plank time it's equivalent, but beyond that
Speaker 1: is basically a question mark. Theoretically, we don't know how
Speaker 1: to do calculations that we trust that we can rely
Speaker 1: on shorter than the plank time.
Speaker 4: Maybe another way to look at it is that it's
Speaker 4: sort of like when the things that we know about
Speaker 4: that happen physically in the universe sort of end, right,
Speaker 4: Like we don't know of anything that's smaller than the
Speaker 4: plank distance, or we don't know of anything that happens
Speaker 4: shorter than the plank time scale, and so it's like
Speaker 4: unknown territory.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's unknown territory, and it's unknown territory. We can't
Speaker 1: even like really think coherently past it, like we've never
Speaker 1: seen anything at ten to the minus forty four seconds.
Speaker 1: But we can talk about it, and we can calculate it,
Speaker 1: we can imagine it, we can use our theories, but
Speaker 1: beyond that, we don't even really know how to think
Speaker 1: about it carefully. Like you could think about it not carefully.
Speaker 1: You could say, well, I'm just going to use general
Speaker 1: relativity and assume it is correct and talk about infinite
Speaker 1: slices of time and infinitely short distances light travel. You
Speaker 1: could do that, but nobody believes that that describes reality,
Speaker 1: the same way nobody believes that there's a singularity the
Speaker 1: heart of a black hole. It's a naive extrapolation of
Speaker 1: general relativity beyond what we think is reasonable, and so
Speaker 1: we can't even really think coherently about it, sort of
Speaker 1: the way we can't think coherently about what happened before
Speaker 1: the Big Bang because for the same reason our theories
Speaker 1: break down there. We need a theory of quantum gravity
Speaker 1: to take us further back. So we don't even have
Speaker 1: like mental theoretical pictures that we can trust.
Speaker 4: Right, right, all right, Well, that's kind of a picture
Speaker 4: of how fast things move in the universe of Daniel.
Speaker 4: How fast do kids grow up? Faster than that? Or flower?
Speaker 1: It feels like a million years every hour when you're
Speaker 1: in it, and then it feels like a millionth of
Speaker 1: a second, and when you're looking back.
Speaker 4: On it as their physical effect. A name for that.
Speaker 4: It's called the theory of.
Speaker 1: Relations, theory of relatives.
Speaker 4: Yeah, theory, that's what I I was gonna say, theory
Speaker 4: of relatives. Yeah, your relative theory of relatives.
Speaker 1: Parental time dilation in the theory of relatives. But no,
Speaker 1: we have been doing our best to try to understand
Speaker 1: how fast things actually happen in their universe, not just
Speaker 1: think about them theoretically, and lots of really cool, amazing
Speaker 1: techniques out there to measure really really short slices of time.
Speaker 4: I guess what we've been talking about are things that
Speaker 4: we know happen in super short time scales. But then
Speaker 4: there's the other question, the flip side, which is which
Speaker 4: of these events can we actually measure and see for
Speaker 4: ourselves that they happen at that timescale. Yeah, so let's
Speaker 4: get into that technology. But first let's take another quick break.
Speaker 1: When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth
Speaker 1: or enjoy a rich spoonful of greeky yogurt, you're probably
Speaker 1: not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite,
Speaker 1: But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy
Speaker 1: has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse
Speaker 1: gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working
Speaker 1: hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste,
Speaker 1: conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water,
Speaker 1: for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four
Speaker 1: times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes
Speaker 1: the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy
Speaker 1: tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn
Speaker 1: the methane from maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns,
Speaker 1: and electric cars. So the next time you grab a
Speaker 1: slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know
Speaker 1: that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using
Speaker 1: the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense
Speaker 1: dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit
Speaker 1: usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
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Speaker 4: All right, we're talking about the fastest things in the universe,
Speaker 4: or I guess, the fastest events in the universe, the
Speaker 4: things that happened in at the shortest timescales.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, the most fleeting things in the universe. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and this podcast is I think at it for
Speaker 4: maybe the longest event in the universe. But let's get
Speaker 4: to it. We're gonna get a run short of time soon.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So when we try to see things happening in
Speaker 1: the universe. We do something pretty basic. We take slow
Speaker 1: motion footage. Like if you're taking a movie and you
Speaker 1: measure thirty frames per second and then you play them
Speaker 1: on the screen at thirty frames per second, then everything
Speaker 1: plays like normal. But if instead you take like three
Speaker 1: hundred frames per second and you play them on the
Speaker 1: screen at thirty frames per second, then time looks slow.
Speaker 1: In the movie, everything is slowed down. You can see
Speaker 1: Ussain Bolt running at a reasonable rate. You can see
Speaker 1: fast things happening more slowly. So that's what we try
Speaker 1: to do, is we try to develop cameras that can
Speaker 1: basically take pictures or make measurements equivalently much faster than
Speaker 1: thirty frames per second, so that we can watch them
Speaker 1: slow down and try to understand what happens.
Speaker 4: Right, And it sort of depends on what you're trying
Speaker 4: to capture too, Right, Like, the slow motion camera on
Speaker 4: your phone can capture you know, your kids running, maybe
Speaker 4: somebody jumping into a pool pretty good, But if you're
Speaker 4: trying to capture something faster, like a bullet or an explosion,
Speaker 4: it's not going to be fast enough exactly.
Speaker 1: And in the old days, people used shutters for this
Speaker 1: like you had a camera and you open the shutter
Speaker 1: and you let light in. And if you're trying to take,
Speaker 1: for example, a picture of a sporting event, where when
Speaker 1: things are moving really fast, you had a really fast
Speaker 1: shutter setting, right, your shutters open for a tiny fraction
Speaker 1: of a second. Whereas if you're taking a picture of
Speaker 1: something in the dark, like at night, if a really
Speaker 1: long exposure, so gather as much light maybe seconds or
Speaker 1: even hours.
Speaker 4: Now, what made you think of a camera? I wonder
Speaker 4: if that in the history of humanity, if cameras are
Speaker 4: maybe the first time that we've had something like automated
Speaker 4: recording instances of data about the world, because before that, I imagine,
Speaker 4: you know, it was maybe people writing things down on
Speaker 4: a piece of paper.
Speaker 1: I think that before cameras, we probably had recordings of
Speaker 1: sound also, right, which you could think about the same way,
Speaker 1: you know, probably within decades of each other. I haven't
Speaker 1: looked at the details.
Speaker 4: But those were analogue probably right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, those are definitely analog. The first measurements were the analogue.
Speaker 1: It's an interesting question, like how far back do we
Speaker 1: have like data things where we have recordings that are
Speaker 1: not just eyewitness testimony.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 1: I mean Gallet, for example, has his drawings of the
Speaker 1: night sky, and in some sense that's still data, right,
Speaker 1: it went into his eye and out his arm, so
Speaker 1: he's sort of the recording device there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well that's what I mean. Like I wonder, for
Speaker 4: most of the history of science, people were just writing
Speaker 4: things down piece of paper. But maybe the cameras, where
Speaker 4: you expose a piece of film or played for a
Speaker 4: certain amount of time, that's maybe some of the first
Speaker 4: times that we had kind of this idea of a
Speaker 4: mechanical recording of what's happening in the universe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, very cool question. I'm not sure we'll dig into
Speaker 1: the history that. Maybe I'll look into that for an episode.
Speaker 1: But these days we use digital cameras, right, and these
Speaker 1: digital cameras can be very very fast, and the technology
Speaker 1: behind the digital camera actually limits how fast they can go.
Speaker 1: The way a digital camera works is that a photon
Speaker 1: comes in the lens the same way it does for
Speaker 1: a normal camera, but instead of hitting a piece of film,
Speaker 1: which has like special chemicals on it that react to
Speaker 1: the light, instead you hit a pixel, which is a
Speaker 1: piece of silicon, and the photon hits an electron inside
Speaker 1: that piece. Of silicon, and then the electron is like free.
Speaker 1: It's like bumped out a little hole it was stuck in.
Speaker 1: It can move along a little bit and then it
Speaker 1: drifts along to the edge of the pixel and it
Speaker 1: gets picked up by some electronics and measured. That's how
Speaker 1: individual pixel works inside your digital camera. It's this interaction
Speaker 1: between the photon the electron. The electron causes a little
Speaker 1: bit of current and those can be really fast. Like
Speaker 1: you can get CCDs or sea moss devices which are
Speaker 1: more modern, which can take pictures down to millions of
Speaker 1: frames per second.
Speaker 4: Well, you mean, like the camera in my phone can
Speaker 4: do that.
Speaker 1: Not necessarily the camera in your phone, but like very
Speaker 1: high tech sea moss and CCD devices can do this.
Speaker 1: People who want to take pictures of lightning or like
Speaker 1: fuel in a plasma dissolving, or very high speed scientific events,
Speaker 1: they have specialized cameras that can get down to millions
Speaker 1: of frames per second. In order to be that fast,
Speaker 1: you need like very small pixels with very fast electron time.
Speaker 1: That's what in the end limits it how long it
Speaker 1: takes the electron once it's been freed to like slide
Speaker 1: over to the part of the pixel where it gets
Speaker 1: read out. If you went really really high speed cameras,
Speaker 1: you're going to make some sacrifices in the design to
Speaker 1: make it that fast. So then it's not as good
Speaker 1: for like taking pictures of your kids, but it's really
Speaker 1: good for measuring fast things.
Speaker 4: You might be able to catch the exact point at
Speaker 4: which they grew up and record it forever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly when they started rolling their eyes at you
Speaker 1: instead of laughing at your jokes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there you go. That's slow roll their eyes. You
Speaker 4: can have it at a million of a second resolution.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and these are cool devices. Actually played with one
Speaker 1: for one of my first science projects when I was
Speaker 1: a summer student, using it to take pictures of lightning
Speaker 1: in the skies in New Mexico at thousands of frames
Speaker 1: per second, which is pretty cool. It's amazing to see
Speaker 1: the world slow down.
Speaker 4: But I wonder why you bring up cameras. I know
Speaker 4: cameras are used in astronomy, right, like those big telescopes
Speaker 4: they have basically camera sensors at the end of the telescope.
Speaker 4: But how much are cameras used in like physics labs.
Speaker 1: Well, it's a little bit philosophical, you know. You could
Speaker 1: think of our particle physics detector as kind of a camera.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a bunch of pixels arranged around a
Speaker 1: collision point and it takes an image. In some sense,
Speaker 1: a camera really is just an array of detectors. You know,
Speaker 1: any kind of detector you have, just make an array
Speaker 1: of them so you get some sort of like spatial
Speaker 1: measurement as well as time. You know, that's really what
Speaker 1: a picture is. It's just like a bunch of measurements
Speaker 1: all in an array.
Speaker 4: Are you saying that the large Hadron collider the eight
Speaker 4: billion dollar machine there, and we could have just used
Speaker 4: the cell phone camera.
Speaker 1: Yeah, actually that's what we did. We just bought one
Speaker 1: iPhone and it kept the rest of the month for ourselves.
Speaker 4: It's just a whole bunch of iPhones, yes, arranged around.
Speaker 1: Your hard hitting investigative journalism right here has exposed the
Speaker 1: scam today.
Speaker 4: Artist, Yes, now, but seriously, like, what's the difference between
Speaker 4: the sensors that the large having collider and like my
Speaker 4: cell phone camera. Do they work faster or are they
Speaker 4: basically the same?
Speaker 1: Or they are basically the same? I mean, actually the
Speaker 1: devices near the center of the collision, the fastest, smallest
Speaker 1: devices we have are silicon devices, and we borrow the
Speaker 1: technology from the semiconductor industry, which use them develop chips
Speaker 1: and cameras, so we're basically piggybacking off of that technology.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit different because we apply higher voltage
Speaker 1: across these pixels to make them read out a little
Speaker 1: bit faster, but it's fundamentally the same thing. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Wait, wait, so then when you take a picture of
Speaker 4: a Higgs boson, can you put it in portrait mode?
Speaker 4: Also you can do the touch up?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Absolutely, I like my Sepia Higgs boson, only timey
Speaker 1: Higgs boson, or like.
Speaker 4: The Higgs boson with bunny ears or something.
Speaker 1: All the best scientific papers and bunny ears.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, yes, yeah, I know it'd be very popular in TikTok.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but in the end, this is limited in time.
Speaker 1: You know, in the large Hadron collider, we don't need
Speaker 1: things much faster than that. We have millions of collisions
Speaker 1: per second, and so that the fact that our devices
Speaker 1: can read out millions of times per second is fast enough.
Speaker 1: We don't need to go faster. But there are people
Speaker 1: who aren't interested in things that happen in like a
Speaker 1: trillionth of a second instead of a billionth or a
Speaker 1: millionth There are special devices, special cameras that can take
Speaker 1: footage with trillions of frames per second.
Speaker 3: Wait.
Speaker 4: Wait, so you're saying the large attern collider. You don't
Speaker 4: care about things or you can't measure things that happen
Speaker 4: faster than a minute of a second.
Speaker 1: We don't care about things that happen faster than that,
Speaker 1: and we can't resolve it anyway. It would be much
Speaker 1: more expensive to have our devices be able to do that.
Speaker 1: But we only have one collision.
Speaker 4: I know you need the latest iPhone.
Speaker 1: Probably we're interested in one collision at a time, right,
Speaker 1: So if we only looked at one collision, we wouldn't
Speaker 1: need to be very fast. You just have a collision.
Speaker 1: It sits in your detector, you read it out. It's
Speaker 1: like a single picture. We're not taking movies of these interactions.
Speaker 1: We only take one picture basically per interaction.
Speaker 4: Oh I see, but could you would you learn more
Speaker 4: if you could take a slow motion movie of like
Speaker 4: two protons hitting each other.
Speaker 1: We can't actually instrument the collision itself, only the stuff
Speaker 1: that flies out of it, and so in the and
Speaker 1: we're just sort of looking at the debris, and sometimes
Speaker 1: we are interested in like when bits arise, because it
Speaker 1: tells us like how fast they're moving. So we do
Speaker 1: have some specialized time of flight detectors people developed to
Speaker 1: see like did this photon arrive before that electron in
Speaker 1: the same collision or not, So we do sometimes dig
Speaker 1: into that a little bit, but mostly we just care
Speaker 1: about what flew out. We don't usually care about like
Speaker 1: what the order was or the sequence of events doesn't
Speaker 1: really tell us that much more, and it's really really
Speaker 1: hard to do, especially that fast.
Speaker 4: I'm interesting, but you're saying that there are, as we
Speaker 4: talked about before, there are physical events that happened in
Speaker 4: a much shorter timescale, and so for that you need
Speaker 4: even better cameras.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and these are called streak cameras. The idea of
Speaker 1: a CCD or SIEMOS device is a photon releases an electron,
Speaker 1: and then you pick up those electrons. But you don't
Speaker 1: distinguish between an electron that arrived near the end of
Speaker 1: your time cycle and near the beginning of it, and
Speaker 1: within a single frame, you count those electrons the same way,
Speaker 1: and that loses information if there are things happening faster
Speaker 1: than your time cycle than your frame, then you're losing them.
Speaker 1: So a streak camera tries to take advantage of that
Speaker 1: and applies a time varying electric field. So electrons that
Speaker 1: are released at one moment and electrons are released another
Speaker 1: moment will end up in different directions. So it sort
Speaker 1: of like sweeps a single frame across something in space,
Speaker 1: like spreads it out. That's why it's called a streak camera,
Speaker 1: like takes these electrons and sprays them across something so
Speaker 1: you can tell when they arrived.
Speaker 4: Well wait, wait, so this is like a sensor just
Speaker 4: like the camera, or is this a different kind of sensor.
Speaker 1: It's fundamentally like a camera, right. A photon comes in
Speaker 1: and releases an electron, but instead of just letting the
Speaker 1: electrons drift across your pixel, you know, guiding these electrons
Speaker 1: to different places, like on a mini screen, based on
Speaker 1: when they arrived.
Speaker 4: So sort of instead of catching the electrons in a bucket,
Speaker 4: you sort of sweep the bucket so that you can
Speaker 4: tell when the electrons were released, which tells you when
Speaker 4: the photons arrived at your sensor exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so where the electron hits tells you when it
Speaker 1: was created, which tells you when the photon arrived, so
Speaker 1: then you could tell the difference between a photon that
Speaker 1: arrived at the beginning or the end of your frame.
Speaker 1: And this gets you more more time resolution, yes exactly,
Speaker 1: And so street cameras go down to like ten to
Speaker 1: the minus fourteen seconds. The fastest that I found was
Speaker 1: one that can do seventy trillion frames per second. That's
Speaker 1: like a lot of pictures of your kid picking their nose.
Speaker 4: Well, depends how quickly they do it. But what kinds
Speaker 4: of things are being measured with this crazy camera? Like
Speaker 4: what are they trying to do?
Speaker 1: These things are used to understand like biochemistry and some
Speaker 1: kind of interactions you know, like proteins folding or bonds forming,
Speaker 1: you know, basically chemicals interacting, this kind of stuff. But
Speaker 1: you know, lots of people are just curious and nobody
Speaker 1: really knows. It's sort of like uncharted territory. There are
Speaker 1: things we think happened in a certain way, and it
Speaker 1: might be that if you slow them down, they happen differently.
Speaker 1: This weird happening that nobody expected. So it's sort of
Speaker 1: like exploring the unknown. So people are using street cameras
Speaker 1: to explore all sorts of things hoping to find something new.
Speaker 4: Now, this is if you're trying to capture photons.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, in order to like take a picture of something.
Speaker 8: Right right, what?
Speaker 4: But you can also just measure things in other ways, right,
Speaker 4: like measure the voltage of something, or measure I don't know,
Speaker 4: the magnetic field or something. M would those be able
Speaker 4: to be measured faster?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Absolutely, there's not a fundamental limitation there.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 1: The question is really like can you capture something which
Speaker 1: varies that quickly? Can you isolate it? And in order
Speaker 1: to do that, you need to like probe it. You
Speaker 1: need to like create something that happens at that fast
Speaker 1: time slice so that you can take a picture of it.
Speaker 1: You need like something that happens really quickly, and then
Speaker 1: something that can respond very quickly, and then something that
Speaker 1: can record that. And people are really pushing the forefront
Speaker 1: of that technology. This is actually what won the Nobel
Speaker 1: Prize in twenty twenty three is making super duper short
Speaker 1: laser pulse is down to the atto second, down to
Speaker 1: ten to the mine eighteen seconds. And these were super
Speaker 1: short laser pulses created by layering longer laser pulses on
Speaker 1: top of each other to sort of like interfere with
Speaker 1: each other to make a super short pulse. And you
Speaker 1: can use this to like probe things that are happening
Speaker 1: inside the nucleus or inside an atom. You can give
Speaker 1: it a super short kick and see what happens.
Speaker 4: Ye, how does that help you measure of something fast
Speaker 4: a short laser pulse.
Speaker 1: The use this technique called pump probe measurements. Basically, you
Speaker 1: shoot this laser pulse at the thing you're trying to
Speaker 1: look at and you take one measurement of it, so
Speaker 1: you have like one measurement of where your electron is
Speaker 1: after you zap it with a laser. And what you're
Speaker 1: really interested in is like a movie. So you want
Speaker 1: to see, like how does the electron jumping from one
Speaker 1: energy level to another or from one atom to another.
Speaker 1: So you zap it with this laser pulse and you
Speaker 1: take one measurement of your electron. That doesn't give you
Speaker 1: a whole movie, but you can do it over and
Speaker 1: over again. So if you can set up the same
Speaker 1: system over and over again and with a laser pulse
Speaker 1: at slightly different times along the process and take a
Speaker 1: measurement each time, then you can put them together into
Speaker 1: a movie. So it's like if you watch your kid
Speaker 1: do a long jump and you take a really fast picture,
Speaker 1: but only one picture per long jump, and then you
Speaker 1: stitch them together into a whole description of the long jump.
Speaker 1: Because you're able to take really fast pictures, you have
Speaker 1: a now very slow motion movie of the long jump.
Speaker 1: It's really a movie of like a thousand long jumps
Speaker 1: where you took one picture from each. So it's not
Speaker 1: exactly the same thing, but in principle, they are very
Speaker 1: fast measurements of this event.
Speaker 4: I think I see what you're saying that this is
Speaker 4: like a flash basically, right, Yeah, you're basically creating a
Speaker 4: super fast flash which lets you capture what's going on
Speaker 4: even if that thing is going super super fast. By
Speaker 4: having a really short flash, you can get a picture
Speaker 4: of it because otherwise, like even the flash in your
Speaker 4: camera takes a while, and so if anything happens faster
Speaker 4: than that, it'll just get streaked in your photo.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, Like remember those Strobe foot people developed really
Speaker 1: fast flashes and they took pictures like a bullet going
Speaker 1: through an apple. You don't need a really fast camera
Speaker 1: if you have a really fast flash and everything's dark otherwise,
Speaker 1: because then you're only illuminating it during one very brief moment. Now,
Speaker 1: imagine you did that same experiment a million times, and
Speaker 1: you turn the flash on a slightly different time each time.
Speaker 1: You'd have a whole movie, a whole slow motion movie.
Speaker 1: It'd be from different bullets hitting different apples, but in
Speaker 1: principle you'd put together the dynamics of what's happening.
Speaker 4: All right, So that's a camera then that can take
Speaker 4: pictures essentially sort of every at a second.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the limitation so far as forty three auto seconds.
Speaker 1: So this is really getting to the edge of what
Speaker 1: we can do. But the fastest thing ever measured actually
Speaker 1: does get down to the zepdo second. This is a
Speaker 1: really cool technique where they shoot a photon and a
Speaker 1: molecule that has two electrons. So say, for example, you
Speaker 1: have like H two, which is two protons and two
Speaker 1: electrons right atoms of hydrogen bonded together. You shoot a
Speaker 1: photon at it and it actually interacts with both electrons. Okay,
Speaker 1: so this single photon like hits one electron and then
Speaker 1: it hits another electrons and those electrons react, right, both
Speaker 1: of them generate some signal and those signals interfere, and
Speaker 1: by looking at the interference between the light generated from
Speaker 1: those two electrons, you can see this time difference. So
Speaker 1: you can tell that the photon hit one and then
Speaker 1: later it hit the other one, and the time difference
Speaker 1: between those two things is about two hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: zepto seconds.
Speaker 4: WHOA, now, what does this help you measure? You use
Speaker 4: it to take a photograph of it.
Speaker 1: Lets you declare yourself the king of time man. This
Speaker 1: is the fastest thing ever measured. So in one sense,
Speaker 1: this is just like engineers being awesome and like trying
Speaker 1: to make things as fast as possible, just for the
Speaker 1: purpose of making things as fast as possible.
Speaker 4: Well, first of all, Daniel, engineers are awesome, yes, just
Speaker 4: by being engineered ourselves.
Speaker 1: Yes, even when they sleep in and sit around in
Speaker 1: their pajamas and do little cartoons all day, engineers.
Speaker 4: Are exactly I mean, that's even more awesome.
Speaker 1: Let's face it, absolutely, that's the pinnacle of awesomeness.
Speaker 4: Obviously, right, Like who wouldn't go on that job without doubt?
Speaker 1: Without doubt? But you know, if you're interested in how
Speaker 1: H two works and how electrons interfere with each other,
Speaker 1: you know, and understanding the system and all its full glory.
Speaker 1: Usually we think about like an individual electron one at
Speaker 1: a time, but really it's a complicated system where the
Speaker 1: electrons can interact and affect each other. If you want
Speaker 1: to understand the finite gradations of energy levels in H two,
Speaker 1: then this can help you understand that. By poking one
Speaker 1: electron and poking another.
Speaker 4: So what is it actually measuring, like the difference in
Speaker 4: time between when the electrons came out of the atom,
Speaker 4: or just when the photons hit each of the atoms
Speaker 4: or what.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's measuring those two electrons. So you're knocking both
Speaker 1: electrons out of the atom, and then you're making measurements
Speaker 1: of those electrons, and because they're sort of almost on
Speaker 1: top of each other, those two electrons can interfere, and
Speaker 1: the interference pattern lets you recover the there's a time
Speaker 1: difference between the two electrons when they get knocked.
Speaker 4: Out and the normal measurement. You think, oh, both electrons
Speaker 4: came out at the same time. But yeah, now you're
Speaker 4: saying we can actually tell like, oh, this one, the
Speaker 4: right one came out first, then the lack.
Speaker 1: One exactly, and the difference in time is really minute.
Speaker 1: It's two times ten of the negative nineteen seconds, and
Speaker 1: that is the fastest thing ever measured.
Speaker 4: WHA, that's even faster than the higgs boson.
Speaker 1: That's not faster than the higgs boson. But we've never
Speaker 1: measured the lifetime of a higgs boson. The higgs boson
Speaker 1: lifetime ten of the minus twenty four seconds. That's theoretical, Like,
Speaker 1: we don't know how long the higgs boson lasts. We'd
Speaker 1: haven't measured it.
Speaker 4: Actually, maybe if you install the new iOS on your
Speaker 4: large Hydrin collider phones here, yeah, a particle physics portrait mode.
Speaker 4: Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: There's a way indirectly to understand the lifetime of the
Speaker 1: higgs boson because it's connected to its mass and how
Speaker 1: different higgs bosons have different masses, And there's a bunch
Speaker 1: of theory that lets you say, if you measure the
Speaker 1: mass of the higson, you can then extrapolate to know
Speaker 1: what its lifetime is. But that's not the same as
Speaker 1: actually measuring its lifetime. That theory could be wrong. So
Speaker 1: we haven't been able to resolve the lifetime of a
Speaker 1: higgs boson, like the time between when it's created and
Speaker 1: it decays, and even this zepdo second measuring device is
Speaker 1: like a factor of ten thousand too slow to observe
Speaker 1: a Higgs boson.
Speaker 4: Well, I guess maybe what you mean, like, this is
Speaker 4: the fastest physical event we've seen. Yeah, with like a
Speaker 4: camera basically.
Speaker 1: Yeah, with a camera, we're like the definition of a
Speaker 1: camera is kind of loose here because we're not like
Speaker 1: getting pixels or images here. We're just sort of making
Speaker 1: measurements after illuminating it, right, we flash it with an
Speaker 1: X ray, maybe take some measurements.
Speaker 4: Right, So this is the fastest event that we have
Speaker 4: a pick for. So definitely it happened exactly, because otherwise
Speaker 4: it didn't happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Pixar, it didn't happen. And this is the.
Speaker 4: Fastest pigs it didn't happen. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And we think probably the universe is operating on a
Speaker 1: much shorter timescale we do these calculations. We're pretty confident
Speaker 1: in our theory about Higgs bosons and Wz's bosons, where
Speaker 1: we think it's happening, but it's not the same as
Speaker 1: actually seeing it.
Speaker 4: Hmmm, all right, Well, it's kind of this interesting convergence
Speaker 4: of technology and theory, right, it's like this is where
Speaker 4: rubber meets throat basically, right, Like you have these theories,
Speaker 4: but then you need actual measurements to prove that these
Speaker 4: things are happening at those time scales. And that's where
Speaker 4: the technology is right now, that's right.
Speaker 1: And the experimental technology actually taking these pictures is still
Speaker 1: like twenty five orders of magnitude away from the theory.
Speaker 1: Like the theory will work down to ten of the
Speaker 1: minus forty four seconds. We've only measured down to ten
Speaker 1: of the minus nineteen seconds. So there's a long way
Speaker 1: to go.
Speaker 4: Oh so we're halfway there. Sure, Sure, we've done that
Speaker 4: in what twenty years?
Speaker 1: So yeah, the same way that like getting one thousand
Speaker 1: dollars is like halfway to a million dollars, right, it's
Speaker 1: just ten to the three insteat.
Speaker 4: It if you think logarithmic scale actually or the way
Speaker 4: inflation right now.
Speaker 1: Much to say, totally fair. Anyway, we're making progress and
Speaker 1: we're illuminating the universe. It's smaller and smaller time slices.
Speaker 1: Maybe eventually one day we'll see it at its smallest
Speaker 1: time slice and discover the granularity of the universe itself.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and we can measure the progress of human eyes
Speaker 4: to see the fast things in the universe. Daniel, when
Speaker 4: should be the next podcast episode where we sample how
Speaker 4: fast things can be measured?
Speaker 1: You know, things are happening pretty rapidly, so maybe in
Speaker 1: the next couple of years so we will break this record.
Speaker 4: Which case, we might set a new record for what's
Speaker 4: the fastest change in how fast we can measure things
Speaker 4: measured by a podcast in portrait mode?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and maybe by then we'll be making millions of
Speaker 1: dollars instead of thousands.
Speaker 4: Yeah, by then we're halfway there. Yeah, hopefully, hopefully, we
Speaker 4: can only hope so, and maybe by then I'll actually
Speaker 4: remember what we talked about in the episodes.
Speaker 1: Sounds like a plan.
Speaker 4: All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for
Speaker 4: joining us, See you next time.
Speaker 1: For more science and curiosity, come find us on social
Speaker 1: media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Instant,
Speaker 1: and now TikTok. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel
Speaker 1: and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio.
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