Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, what exactly is your job title these days? Well?
Speaker 1: I call myself a particle physicist, all right, so then
Speaker 1: this question should be pretty easy for you. Can you
Speaker 1: tell me what exactly a particle is? Oh? Boy, I
Speaker 1: wish I could. What I mean you wish? Aren't you
Speaker 1: a particle physicist? How can you not know what it is? Well?
Speaker 1: I guess it's kind of just a made up job title,
Speaker 1: I suppose. I mean, you must be smashing something there
Speaker 1: in your large accelerator. Yeah, maybe that's what we should
Speaker 1: have called it, the large something collider, the large something
Speaker 1: something collider. I mean, I voted for something collider face,
Speaker 1: but nobody else wanted that. It's not too late. I
Speaker 1: am more handmade cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Speaker 1: I'm Daniel. I'm a professor of physics at you see ermine,
Speaker 1: and I'm also a particle physicist whatever that means. Maybe
Speaker 1: that should be the title should be whatever physicist technically
Speaker 1: that encompasses the whole universe. Or I could just be
Speaker 1: a professor of whatever. What are you teaching this year? Whatever?
Speaker 1: In your house, you're probably a professor of that. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you hear from your kids a lot whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I do have two teenagers, so I do get that
Speaker 1: a lot. You get a lot of something at home.
Speaker 1: Not a whole lot of interests in physics, but a
Speaker 1: whole lot interest in whatever, dad, or a lot of
Speaker 1: non interests. I guess in whatever. Sometimes I can trick
Speaker 1: them into being interested in physics. Oh yeah, how does
Speaker 1: that work? You pay them now? They asked me a
Speaker 1: question about something else they're honestly curious about, and then
Speaker 1: I turned it into a question about physics. I guess
Speaker 1: everything at the end is physics sort of, and so
Speaker 1: basically anything that anything they ask you as a physics question.
Speaker 1: When can I go to sleep? Well, it depends on
Speaker 1: the physics of the chemistry and your brain. Let's explore that.
Speaker 1: Sit down, I'll give you a lecture, and that's a
Speaker 1: good way to put them to sleep. It all works out.
Speaker 1: But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain
Speaker 1: the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio in which
Speaker 1: we turn the whole universe into a physics question and
Speaker 1: ask what is it, how does it work? And can
Speaker 1: we figure it out without putting you to sleep. We
Speaker 1: take your mind on a journey into the craziest things
Speaker 1: that the universe contains, the craziest things that the universe does,
Speaker 1: and the craziest, strangest things that the universe might also
Speaker 1: be made out of. That's right. We take you in
Speaker 1: a journey to the big whatever because the universe is
Speaker 1: full of what you know, it's full of stuff, and
Speaker 1: there's also an ever there because the universe is several
Speaker 1: billion years old and maybe around for trillions of more years.
Speaker 1: That's right. There's not many things that we can say
Speaker 1: with certainty in physics and philosophy, but we can say
Speaker 1: that there is something out there and we're something, right, also,
Speaker 1: are don't we something? I'm something? You're something. The listener
Speaker 1: is something and you're definitely listening to something right now. Well,
Speaker 1: you're more, you're more of a something else, Dan. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna take that in the entirely positive way that it
Speaker 1: was meant. Definitely not nothing. Something. It stands out you mean,
Speaker 1: like a ZiT sort of rises above the skin. That's
Speaker 1: that's something else, Daniel. But I'm happy to be the
Speaker 1: black head in this universe. But it is a pretty
Speaker 1: wonderful universal of amazing things to discover, and every day
Speaker 1: we're learning more and more about it. We're looking out
Speaker 1: there into the stars and looking with our microscopes at
Speaker 1: the smallest things in existence, and we're giving names. We're
Speaker 1: not just taking names, we're giving out names to these things.
Speaker 1: And we're doing more than just trying to see what's
Speaker 1: out there in the universe. We're trying to make sense
Speaker 1: of it. We're trying to describe the crazy bonkers universe
Speaker 1: that we see out there in terms of ideas that
Speaker 1: makes sense in our It's we have a small mental
Speaker 1: toolbox of concepts that we are familiar with, and we
Speaker 1: need to describe the whole crazy universe out there in
Speaker 1: terms of these simple ideas. Yeah, does that mean we
Speaker 1: have like little tiny hammers inside of our brains and
Speaker 1: little tiny screwdrivers sort of? I think that as kids
Speaker 1: grow up, they experienced the universe and they encounter new
Speaker 1: ideas and they sort of become familiar with them, and
Speaker 1: then that things in your brain is like the set
Speaker 1: of ideas that you are comfortable with. You know, a thing,
Speaker 1: what can the thing do, what can the thing be?
Speaker 1: What are the rules of a thing? And then lady,
Speaker 1: you try to describe other stuff in terms of that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. Yeah, it's almost like we sort of
Speaker 1: experienced two different universes in a way, right, Like, as
Speaker 1: you grow up, the universe seems to be one way.
Speaker 1: It seems to follow sort of like Newtonian physics. Things
Speaker 1: bouncing around, things are hard, things are soft, things fly
Speaker 1: through the air. But then as you learn more and
Speaker 1: more about the universe, as humanity has learned more and
Speaker 1: more about the universe, things got more complex. They certainly did.
Speaker 1: There are so many things out there in the universe
Speaker 1: that we do not experience in childhood that we do
Speaker 1: not have intuitive concepts for, because they're not the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that our brains involved to understand, and not
Speaker 1: the kind of things that we learned to deal with
Speaker 1: when we were children. And yet they are out there
Speaker 1: and they are part of the real world, and so
Speaker 1: we need to somehow extrapolate from the kinds of concepts
Speaker 1: that we do understand out there into the fuzzy weirdness
Speaker 1: that the universe is. And it makes me wonder how
Speaker 1: other intelligent species think about the universe, if they have
Speaker 1: different ways of interacting with the universe, or if they're
Speaker 1: very very small or very very large or very very fast,
Speaker 1: would they think that our understanding of the universe is
Speaker 1: strange and alien. The way we might think there's is whoa.
Speaker 1: You just kind of blew my mind there, right, Like
Speaker 1: we usually assume aliens are the same size and the
Speaker 1: same shape as we are. But maybe aliens are you know,
Speaker 1: a tiny microscopic of almost quantum size and beings. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or maybe aliens can like taste photons and smell electrons
Speaker 1: and have weird quantum interactions, and for them, quantum mechanics
Speaker 1: is totally intuitive and they would find you know, classical
Speaker 1: mechanics is like, wow, that's fantastic and beautiful. What an
Speaker 1: interesting simplification of big quantum mechanics. It's really fun. And
Speaker 1: of course you know, I can turn any question into
Speaker 1: one about aliens, yes, or maybe the aliens are just
Speaker 1: going like whatever, that's actually what my kids complain about
Speaker 1: their Like, dad stopped turning this into something about aliens.
Speaker 1: I didn't ask about aliens. Well, all teenagers act like
Speaker 1: aliens sometimes, or at least they feel alienated or they
Speaker 1: wonder if their parents are aliens. You just need a
Speaker 1: cone head, I guess. But it does seem like we're
Speaker 1: sort of maybe stuck it away in our childhood view
Speaker 1: of the universe sometimes or at least it's hard to
Speaker 1: you know, kind of think about the real universe because
Speaker 1: it is sort of complex and not intuitive from a
Speaker 1: child's perspective. But then our language and our way of
Speaker 1: thinking is sort of stuck because that's how we grew up.
Speaker 1: And it's a real question whether or not we can
Speaker 1: comprehend a true, chaotic, buzzing reality that's out there in
Speaker 1: terms of the kinds of ideas that we have, or
Speaker 1: do we need to somehow invent or discover a completely
Speaker 1: new kind of concept which previously was alien two our thinking,
Speaker 1: you know, just following the mathematics and then developing inventing
Speaker 1: some new kind of intuition sort of as an adult
Speaker 1: intellectual species that we need to grapple with the craziness
Speaker 1: of reality. I wonder if even our brains are capable,
Speaker 1: right or equipped or designed to maybe grasp the true
Speaker 1: nature of the universe. You know, it could be that,
Speaker 1: you know, like sort of like dogs can't do calculus,
Speaker 1: maybe we really understand the define mathematics at the core
Speaker 1: of reality. And I don't like the way you're talking
Speaker 1: about my dog there, man, I mean, don't put limits
Speaker 1: on my dog's village. Dog can do calculus or at
Speaker 1: least algebra. Come on, you can count treats. I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1: There you go. I'm sure he can calculate the radio
Speaker 1: treats too, So that's sort of like calculus. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: you're right, we don't know if the human brain is
Speaker 1: capable of grasping the true nature of reality. Certainly dogs
Speaker 1: are not, as much as we love them, and so
Speaker 1: then there's no guarantee that we are infinitely intelligent and
Speaker 1: capable of understanding. If super intelligent aliens come to Earth
Speaker 1: and want to explain physics to us, could we even
Speaker 1: understand it? Could we grocket even if they knew how
Speaker 1: to speak our language and our mathematics and our physics.
Speaker 1: Would we fail that class? Yeah? Or maybe they would
Speaker 1: have to like trick us into understanding or liking or
Speaker 1: asking the right questions about physics. You know, you think
Speaker 1: we'd just be like whatever, aliens, we don't want to
Speaker 1: hear it. Just give me a headache, man, I would
Speaker 1: sign up for that headache. I would go to that class.
Speaker 1: What if it was a constant headache, like seven headache? Man?
Speaker 1: Have you tried quantum mechanics? That's basically seven headache. I
Speaker 1: feel like that's humanity trying to absorb something which is
Speaker 1: truly alien, which is far from our experience, something we
Speaker 1: have never experienced on the early Savannahs. I mean, we
Speaker 1: didn't need to know to be able to hunt mammoth,
Speaker 1: and yet we are somehow beginning to grapple with it.
Speaker 1: We are getting a sort of mathematical fluency with a
Speaker 1: truly alien concept. We'll just need to require the aliens
Speaker 1: to bring espirin at least give us a hand. But
Speaker 1: it is interesting to try to, you know, understand these
Speaker 1: fundamental concepts about the universe. And there is one concept
Speaker 1: out there that may seem pretty easy to understand, but
Speaker 1: actually there is a lot of uncertainty about it. Something
Speaker 1: very basic about the universe, that's right, And if you
Speaker 1: ask people whose job it is to understand this stuff,
Speaker 1: you get lots of very different answers, to my surprise.
Speaker 1: So to be on the podcast, we will be tackling
Speaker 1: the question what is a particle? And just to be clear,
Speaker 1: then in your official title is particle physicists. So you know,
Speaker 1: first of all, it's shocking that you don't know. And
Speaker 1: second of all, if we were going to ask somebody
Speaker 1: we should ask you. You know we have one of
Speaker 1: the leading experts in the field here. Yeah. Well, I
Speaker 1: suppose you could say that a particle physicist is someone
Speaker 1: who tries to understand what particles are, not somebody who
Speaker 1: already knows the answers, right, because member science is a journey.
Speaker 1: You ask somebody who's an expert in dinosaurs, they don't
Speaker 1: know everything about dinosaurs. Maybe they know everything that humans
Speaker 1: know about dinosaurs, but they don't already have all the
Speaker 1: answers right. Right. When I hire a plumber, I don't
Speaker 1: really want someone who knows plumbing. I just want someone
Speaker 1: who comes in to learn about plumbing. Well, that's why
Speaker 1: you don't hire a physicist to do your plumbing, because
Speaker 1: they'll be like, Oh, I have this great R and
Speaker 1: D project. I'm curious this new theoretical idea for plumbing
Speaker 1: will work in your toilet. That's right. I wanna build
Speaker 1: a water collider inside your walls and we'll see what happens. No,
Speaker 1: I'm just putting a small black hole under your toilet
Speaker 1: and it's just gonna suck everything away. That would be
Speaker 1: a pretty green solution. It would conserve water for sure.
Speaker 1: Whether dark matter can go into a black hole. Oh man,
Speaker 1: that's next level physics, spread there, or lower level physics.
Speaker 1: But you know, particle physicists are people who are curious
Speaker 1: about these questions. What is the universe is made out
Speaker 1: of at its most fundamental level, And it's something we've
Speaker 1: made a lot of progress thinking about in the last
Speaker 1: hundred years or so. But there's a shocking diversity of answers,
Speaker 1: even among particles physicists. Yeah, something as simple of award
Speaker 1: as a particle can have many different meanings, and in
Speaker 1: physics it can mean very different things. So it's usually
Speaker 1: we were wondering how many people out there have thought
Speaker 1: about this very basic question what is a particle, and
Speaker 1: whether or not they have a true answer to it.
Speaker 1: So thank you very much for everybody who is willing
Speaker 1: to answer random questions for the podcast. It's some great
Speaker 1: help to us and we love hearing your voice and
Speaker 1: having you all out there participated makes us feel a
Speaker 1: little bit like this is a conversation, So please, if
Speaker 1: you'd like to participate, don't be shy right to us.
Speaker 1: Two questions at Daniel I and Jorge dot com. So
Speaker 1: think about it for a second, what do you think
Speaker 1: is a particle. Here's what people have to say, Well,
Speaker 1: Daniel and Jrrey, I think I learned this one from you.
Speaker 1: At a particle is a certain excitation of a certain field.
Speaker 1: I'll leave it at that. To me, a particle is
Speaker 1: the smallest, this great thing that you can poke where
Speaker 1: we don't yet know how to smash it into smaller bits.
Speaker 1: My understanding is that a particle is just an excitation
Speaker 1: in a quantum field, and when it reaches a certain
Speaker 1: energy level um our many electron golds in that field.
Speaker 1: That causes a particle to just appear as a consequence
Speaker 1: of the energy in the field. It's just the basic
Speaker 1: unit for that has of matter and um and energy.
Speaker 1: We have different definitions based on how we're talking about
Speaker 1: what a particle is. Maybe talking about a particle from
Speaker 1: the perspective of an engineer building a particle collider, you
Speaker 1: might have a certain definition. If you're talking about it
Speaker 1: in a theoretical physics sort of minded way, you might
Speaker 1: have a slightly different definition. I think it's something that
Speaker 1: we're still grappling with because it's not something that we
Speaker 1: have an intuitive understanding of. So I think there's a
Speaker 1: lot of different ideas and a lot of different ways
Speaker 1: to try and make analogies that we can understand to
Speaker 1: sort of encompass this concept of particle. A particle is
Speaker 1: that portion of the standard model divided into quantized pieces
Speaker 1: which may or may not be fundamental. They may be
Speaker 1: thought of as the building blocks of the universe, and
Speaker 1: they may be also thought of as perturbations, wiggles, or
Speaker 1: vibrations of their concommittant field. I generally use the word
Speaker 1: particle to describe small bits of stuff, and it doesn't
Speaker 1: just mean atom. You can even say, like a cork
Speaker 1: is a particle, and of course are made up of
Speaker 1: other things. Those two are particles. So I guess the
Speaker 1: word particle just means a bit of something, the smallest
Speaker 1: bit of something you could possibly have. All Right, I
Speaker 1: got a little existential there and a little basic. Some
Speaker 1: people were, like, a particle, it's just a particle, right,
Speaker 1: It's like the basically unit of stuff. Yeah, it is
Speaker 1: a really fascinating question, and you hear in these answers
Speaker 1: a lot of different ideas. Yeah. Yeah, some people say
Speaker 1: it's like an excitation in a quantum field, and some
Speaker 1: people say it's just like the smallest thing you can
Speaker 1: poke at Nobody said it was Daniel job. Nobody said
Speaker 1: why are you asking me? If you're asking me, we're
Speaker 1: in trouble. It's like if your dentist asks you what
Speaker 1: am I supposed to do next? At least nobody said
Speaker 1: something or whatever. It's not nothing. Oh, there you go.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's not nothing. Is that one of the leading theories.
Speaker 1: That's not an explanation though, that's just like ruling out
Speaker 1: other explanations. Maybe that is the answer, Daniel. That's like
Speaker 1: when you ask your teenager who didnt to the car
Speaker 1: and they say, I don't know, but it wasn't me.
Speaker 1: That's not an answer. Yeah, so let's dig into this.
Speaker 1: It's it's almost almost like a philosophical question, right Daniel,
Speaker 1: like what is a particle? Or maybe more like a
Speaker 1: semantic question, you know, about the meaning of the word
Speaker 1: or is this actual? Like physics questions like we don't
Speaker 1: even have math for it. I think it's all of
Speaker 1: the above. It's definitely an interesting lesson in history how
Speaker 1: we came up with this concept of a particle, what
Speaker 1: it meant to people through time. There's also a philosophical question,
Speaker 1: you know, if you could describe the universe in terms
Speaker 1: of particles versus fields, versus something else, which is the
Speaker 1: true stuff of the universe. But it's also really a
Speaker 1: physics question. You know, we are trying to understand the universe,
Speaker 1: and it's most basic level, what is the fundamental element
Speaker 1: of the universe. Some things are fundamental, they're inherent properties
Speaker 1: of the universe, and other things like ice cream cones,
Speaker 1: are emergent. They arise out of the complex interactions of
Speaker 1: other stuff. So it's really sort of the heart of
Speaker 1: particle physics is understanding the very nature of the universe.
Speaker 1: So I think it really is a physical question as well.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a party, It's right there in the
Speaker 1: name particle. Well I never made that connection. My whole
Speaker 1: job is just a party. You're a party animal, professional
Speaker 1: party animal, professional party. Yeah, and if you have had
Speaker 1: a bunch of particle physicists at your party, you know
Speaker 1: that's true. Yeah, you know it's not really a party.
Speaker 1: But anyways, let's dig into this kind of deep question, Daniel,
Speaker 1: I guess how would you even start to tackle this question.
Speaker 1: I think a good way to begin is to recognize
Speaker 1: that particles are really at the heart of what we
Speaker 1: mean by the stuff around us. It's a huge inside
Speaker 1: already to say that the things that are around us,
Speaker 1: the ice cream cone, the lava, the kittens, whatever you
Speaker 1: ate for lunch, all of this stuff is made out
Speaker 1: of smaller pieces. Right, So the fact that you had
Speaker 1: a cheese sandwich for lunch is not because that cheese
Speaker 1: sandwich is made out of like cheese bits and sandwich bits.
Speaker 1: It's all made out of the same stuff, right. There's
Speaker 1: no cheese sandwichiness to the universe. There's no lava eatness
Speaker 1: to the universe. That's all made out of the same
Speaker 1: fundamental pieces. And so when you take the universe apart,
Speaker 1: you discover this really deep and fascinating fact that most
Speaker 1: of the qualities of the things around you are determined
Speaker 1: by the smaller bits they're made out of. And not
Speaker 1: like the identity of those bits, but how those bits
Speaker 1: are arranged. Right. But that that's sort of a modern
Speaker 1: view of the universe, right, I mean, when we started
Speaker 1: back in ancient times, you know, we noticed, I think
Speaker 1: we noticed that we can you can break stuff apart,
Speaker 1: right like you can break a person apart. You can
Speaker 1: take a rock and smash it into smaller and smaller
Speaker 1: bits but it probably our limitation was that if you
Speaker 1: break a rock into smaller bits, eventually just get tiny
Speaker 1: little rocks or kind of little pieces of people. But
Speaker 1: there's sort of no way for us to know, like, oh,
Speaker 1: this rock stuff is different than this plant stuff. Right,
Speaker 1: Certainly in ancient times, but there was this concept that
Speaker 1: maybe there are a few basic elements. You know, they
Speaker 1: thought it was air, wind, fire, and water initially, but
Speaker 1: this idea that maybe everything around us was made of
Speaker 1: basic ingredients mixed together in different ways. That is an
Speaker 1: ancient idea. Although you know, every time you're giving credit
Speaker 1: to the Greeks for some ancient idea that sounds very
Speaker 1: modern and insightful, you gotta remember they had lots of
Speaker 1: other crazy ancient ideas that we never forget because they're
Speaker 1: so far off that we ignore them. Right right, I'm
Speaker 1: well aware of your anti Grecian is m. You're kind
Speaker 1: of down on the Greeks. Do you think they were
Speaker 1: just like shooting ideas everywhere and some of them stuck
Speaker 1: on the wall. I mean, have you read Greek philosophy,
Speaker 1: And basically that's exactly what they did. They sent around
Speaker 1: in robes, eating olives and throwing ideas against the wall.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a great way to do things. It
Speaker 1: is a great way to do things, and it's wonderful
Speaker 1: that people were thinking so deeply a long time ago.
Speaker 1: The problem is they didn't really have ways to test
Speaker 1: these ideas until very very recently. So for a long
Speaker 1: time the idea has just sort of floated out there
Speaker 1: in idea space. But more recently we have actually gained
Speaker 1: insights about the universe by doing experiments. And it was
Speaker 1: something like a hundred and fifty years ago that the
Speaker 1: concept of a particle really came together and it emerged
Speaker 1: out of experiments that people were doing. Interesting, So was
Speaker 1: this before or after the idea of the atom, Like,
Speaker 1: do we have an idea of what an atom was,
Speaker 1: is the smallest thing you can kind of break stuff
Speaker 1: apart into, before the idea of a particle? Or did
Speaker 1: we think about particles before atoms? We thought about atoms first.
Speaker 1: I mean atoms also come from the Greeks, right, Democratus
Speaker 1: had the idea of atoms, and then later on in
Speaker 1: chemistry we noticed that there were these integer quantities in
Speaker 1: chemical equations. So people had this concept that maybe things
Speaker 1: were made out of atoms. But we didn't really know
Speaker 1: how those atoms worked, you know, what was inside the atom,
Speaker 1: what was the structure of the atom itself, what made
Speaker 1: this element different from that element, And that didn't come
Speaker 1: about until the discovery of the electron in the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds. This is J. J. Thompson who was playing
Speaker 1: around with cathode rays, these strange glowing rays in these
Speaker 1: tubes where they had pumped out most of the gas. Mmm. Interesting,
Speaker 1: So you're saying that, I guess we tried bringing down
Speaker 1: rocks as small as we could and at some point,
Speaker 1: which chemistry, you get to the idea of like maybe
Speaker 1: there's the smallest possible bit of stuff. And so we
Speaker 1: knew about atoms, but maybe we thought that, you know,
Speaker 1: there was a carbon atom and that was different than
Speaker 1: a hydrogen atom, and that was different than an oxygen atom, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's kind of where we were before we thought
Speaker 1: about things smaller than an atom exactly. And there's a
Speaker 1: reductive approach, and so we wonder, like, well, what makes
Speaker 1: a carbon atom different from an oxygen atom? Is that
Speaker 1: just it is that like the fundamental element of the universe.
Speaker 1: It's like the carbon genus and the oxygen genus or
Speaker 1: is there some quality to carbon that makes it carbon
Speaker 1: ey and a different quality that makes it oxygen e? Right,
Speaker 1: And so we wonder like, is that come out of
Speaker 1: the internal structure? Are there the same bits inside are
Speaker 1: arranged in different ways? Can we explain them in terms
Speaker 1: of another deeper layer of reality? And so that's of
Speaker 1: course the goal of particle physics to keep tearing things
Speaker 1: apart and understand in the relationship between these things and
Speaker 1: what explains their nature what makes carbon carbony and what
Speaker 1: makes oxygen oxygen e? Right? Right? Because I guess it
Speaker 1: could have been that could have been the answer, right,
Speaker 1: Like we could have lived in the universe where carbon
Speaker 1: was one of the fundamental particles and oxygen was one
Speaker 1: of the fundamental you know, units of the universe, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it could have been that. But you're saying that once
Speaker 1: we discovered the electron, then we started to take apart
Speaker 1: the atoms in theory, Yes, and it could even have
Speaker 1: been possible at a higher level, you know, you're talking
Speaker 1: about elements, but it could have been that. You know,
Speaker 1: cheese for example, it was made out of some fundamental
Speaker 1: cheese object and couldn't be divided into smaller things cheese
Speaker 1: is pretty fundamental, at least to my diet. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it could have been that carbon was just one thing
Speaker 1: in the universe and oxygen was another thing. But if
Speaker 1: that were true, some physicists would wonder, like, what's the
Speaker 1: relationship between carbon and oxygen? Why are there two things?
Speaker 1: Why can't I express them in terms of just one
Speaker 1: fundamental thing? So there will always be people pushing at
Speaker 1: that boundary and wondering if there's a deeper explanation. But
Speaker 1: you're right, we don't know. And that's sort of where
Speaker 1: we are today in particle physics. With a few objects
Speaker 1: we think maybe our fundamental and we wonder about their
Speaker 1: relationships and if there is a deeper explanation. Right, Because
Speaker 1: we eventually broke apart the item, we discovered the electrons
Speaker 1: and the protons, and then the protons can be broken
Speaker 1: into courts, and the courts can be can be broken
Speaker 1: into cheese. Right, I hope that we discover some new
Speaker 1: quantum property and we call it cheese. We've called them
Speaker 1: flavor and color, right, it would be just as inappropriate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I was just kidding, But really we were down
Speaker 1: to like the court level. Right, as far as we know,
Speaker 1: when you try to break stuff down to its smallest level,
Speaker 1: we're down to corks and electrons and like their cousins
Speaker 1: in the periodic table of the standard model. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: all of this is just like a hierarchy of our understanding.
Speaker 1: It doesn't really define what we're talking about. Like we're
Speaker 1: talking about an electron, we're talking about quirks we haven't
Speaker 1: really specified, like what is that thing? You know, it's
Speaker 1: a word, we're saying, it's part of the and but
Speaker 1: what do we mean is going on inside the atom?
Speaker 1: What is the nature of these things? Right? I mean,
Speaker 1: that's basically the question we're asking today is what is
Speaker 1: exactly an electron and what exactly is a court? Because
Speaker 1: we as far as we know, you can't break those
Speaker 1: down into smaller little bits, right. And the cool thing
Speaker 1: is that you can make a lot of progress doing
Speaker 1: particle physics without knowing the answer to that question. You
Speaker 1: can talk about the relationships between these things. You can
Speaker 1: build one thing out of other things without even really
Speaker 1: understanding what it is you're talking about. And that's sort
Speaker 1: of my job is to try to make progress even
Speaker 1: though we don't understand like the core fundamentals, the true
Speaker 1: foundation of the nature of reality right, right, because we've
Speaker 1: talked about this in the podcast before. How there's this
Speaker 1: kind of progression, right, like to do engineering at least,
Speaker 1: like to build a building, you don't really need to
Speaker 1: know chemistry, and to do chemistry, you don't really need
Speaker 1: to know understand quantum particles, and to and to put
Speaker 1: together an atom, you don't really sort of need to
Speaker 1: know what is exactly a particle in a mathematical sense.
Speaker 1: But your job is to like go as deep as
Speaker 1: you can and break that down until like nobody can
Speaker 1: ever break it down anymore. Yeah, And that's true that
Speaker 1: you don't need, for example, to understand quantum gravity to
Speaker 1: predict the path of hurricanes. And I'm grateful that the
Speaker 1: world works this way and sort of layers of emergent theories,
Speaker 1: so you don't need to know how the universe begin
Speaker 1: order to make chicken soup, for example. But we're sort
Speaker 1: of clueless at another level more than just like the
Speaker 1: engineers not understanding how the corks work. We're dealing with
Speaker 1: corks and we still don't really know what they are,
Speaker 1: and we have these mathematical tools that we can use
Speaker 1: to predict what they're going to do, but they are
Speaker 1: so strange and so counter to our intuition that we
Speaker 1: can't really answer the question, like, what is this thing
Speaker 1: we're talking about? We have the math that describes it,
Speaker 1: but we don't have like an intuitive grasp of it.
Speaker 1: So then that's what you mean by particle. When we're
Speaker 1: asking what is a particle, we're really asking what is
Speaker 1: a cork? And what is an electro? Exactly? What is
Speaker 1: this thing we're talking about? What does it mean? What
Speaker 1: is its fundamental nature? And more than that, like what
Speaker 1: makes a cork different from an electron? The way you
Speaker 1: were talking about, like maybe carbon could just be different
Speaker 1: from oxygen. It could just be two fundamental elements of
Speaker 1: the universe. Why is a cork different from an electron?
Speaker 1: Like what makes them different? One of them has more
Speaker 1: cheese obviously. All right, let's get into possible ideas for
Speaker 1: what a particle could be, and as always, we'll talk
Speaker 1: about what does it all mean? Man, So let's get
Speaker 1: into that, but first let's take a quick break. All right,
Speaker 1: we are asking fundamental questions here on the podcast today, Daniel,
Speaker 1: we're asking what exactly is a particle? I mean, we
Speaker 1: know that matter can be broken down into atoms, and
Speaker 1: adams can be broken down into electrons and corks. But
Speaker 1: what exactly is an electron or a cork. That's a
Speaker 1: difficult question to answer. It is, and when you'd say particle,
Speaker 1: most people probably imagine like a tiny little dot of matter,
Speaker 1: like the smallest bit of stuff. And you heard some
Speaker 1: of the listeners answering in that way, and that's very convenient,
Speaker 1: but it's sort of an extrapolation of an intuitive idea
Speaker 1: you had that like, rocks are made out of small rocks,
Speaker 1: and those rocks are mad out of even smaller rocks,
Speaker 1: and when you get down to it, the universe is
Speaker 1: basically a bunch of super tiny little rocks. It does
Speaker 1: rock the universe the little cheesy sometimes, but it kind
Speaker 1: of rocks. It rocks my world for sure. But we
Speaker 1: know that that's not a completely accurate picture because when
Speaker 1: you get down to the quantum level, the rules do change.
Speaker 1: The rules for rocks are the classical rules. You know,
Speaker 1: the things move through the universe smoothly and continuously, that
Speaker 1: they follow rules of where you used to If something
Speaker 1: is here and then later it's there, it went from
Speaker 1: here to there. We also know that the quantum particles.
Speaker 1: The super tiniest little rocks in the universe don't follow
Speaker 1: those rules, so we need like a new concept for
Speaker 1: what's going on down there. At the very smallest level,
Speaker 1: we just say they're little, tiny rocks, right, because like
Speaker 1: one kind of physics is good for keeping track of rocks,
Speaker 1: that's Newtonian physics. But at the smallest level and things
Speaker 1: get quantum, things get kind of fuzzy, and then it's
Speaker 1: they're more accurately represented by waves, right, Yeah, And we
Speaker 1: have these equations, these wave equations, which seem to control
Speaker 1: what happened to these little objects, these little particles, and
Speaker 1: we can solve those wave equations, and they predict with
Speaker 1: a probability where these particles are likely to go. But
Speaker 1: already we're presented with a confusion, like, well, are we
Speaker 1: talking about these things as a wave as a particle? Do?
Speaker 1: I sometimes talk about them as a particle, sometimes talk
Speaker 1: about them as a wave. And hear lots of people
Speaker 1: saying that these objects are waves most of the time,
Speaker 1: but then when you look at them, they become particles. Right,
Speaker 1: that's a common picture. But I think that that's not
Speaker 1: really an accurate way to think about it. I think
Speaker 1: more accurate is to think that these objects are something
Speaker 1: new and different. There neither particles nor waves, though they
Speaker 1: can sometimes be described in analogy by either of those pictures.
Speaker 1: Interesting because I always thought about it them as you know,
Speaker 1: they're waves that sort of looked like particles from Afar.
Speaker 1: If you get down to the smallest level, they look
Speaker 1: like a wave, but if you used to just kind
Speaker 1: of pull back, they look more like a little bit
Speaker 1: of stuff moving around, except that sometimes they look like waves.
Speaker 1: Even from Afar. You know, you can see interference effects,
Speaker 1: which are macroscopic effects. A double slit experiment shows you
Speaker 1: that particles passing through those slits interfere with themselves and
Speaker 1: create these like macroscopic effects. This interference patterns on the screen.
Speaker 1: So these wave like effects can also influence you know,
Speaker 1: real visible stuff. Okay, so then that's one definition of
Speaker 1: a particle is that it's a collapse wave or like
Speaker 1: a wave that when you that that when you look
Speaker 1: at it becomes a particle kind of. There is a
Speaker 1: common attempt to sort of weave together this idea that
Speaker 1: maybe a particle is a wave and sometimes it acts
Speaker 1: like a particle when you look at it. Right. The
Speaker 1: problem of course, is that we don't really know what
Speaker 1: it means to say you look at it. We've had
Speaker 1: a few podcasts on this topic of the quantum mechanics
Speaker 1: measurement problem, like what does it mean to look at
Speaker 1: something and collapse its wave function? Why when an electron
Speaker 1: is flying along through the universe does the universe suddenly decide, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're going to take on particle like little mini rock
Speaker 1: like properties and decide now where the electron actually is.
Speaker 1: Whereas a minute ago we were happy having it being
Speaker 1: a quantum wave and having uncertainty to it. What makes
Speaker 1: the universe decide to draw from this random probability distribution
Speaker 1: and decide where the electron is so that you can
Speaker 1: look at it with your experiments. It sounds to me
Speaker 1: kind of like what's in your head is that you're
Speaker 1: thinking that a particle is something that has like a
Speaker 1: definite location and boundary and velocity and like you know
Speaker 1: where it is. It's like a little rock that's just
Speaker 1: sitting on your desk. But a quantum wave is different
Speaker 1: than that. Like, a quantum wave is not like a
Speaker 1: little rock, right, Like it's it's that boundary between uncertainty
Speaker 1: and certainty that maybe you think the definition of a
Speaker 1: particle is that's a the way to put it, and
Speaker 1: the reason is that we can't see uncertainty in that way.
Speaker 1: We can't measure the quantum wave function directly. We can't
Speaker 1: see a photon as in two states at the same time.
Speaker 1: We don't observe that. Ever, our experiments, they count particles.
Speaker 1: That's why particles are such a compelling concept. It's because
Speaker 1: it's what we see in our experiments. We can do
Speaker 1: single photon experiments when we see a one photon fly
Speaker 1: across the room and hit a screen. We never see
Speaker 1: a photon like in two possible states at once. That's
Speaker 1: only like what the universe does when it's calculating what
Speaker 1: might happen in your experiment. It's nothing we actually observe.
Speaker 1: That's why we use the word particle when we talk
Speaker 1: about things we actually observe, because that's all we can observe.
Speaker 1: We can't see those waves directly. Oh, I see what
Speaker 1: you're saying. You're saying that maybe one possible definition of
Speaker 1: the word particle is it's what happens when you sample
Speaker 1: a quantum wavefunction, right, it starts after the particle is
Speaker 1: seen or interact with something else before that it's not
Speaker 1: a particle. That's a common idea and it's compelling, but
Speaker 1: it's deeply, deeply flawed, right, because you don't have a
Speaker 1: clear definition for what it means to look at it
Speaker 1: or to sample it. You know, like we talked about before,
Speaker 1: if you're gonna poke this electron with your finger, then
Speaker 1: you know it has a wave function. Maybe it's here
Speaker 1: and gets poked by your finger, or maybe it's over
Speaker 1: there and it doesn't get poked. But when you touch
Speaker 1: it with your finger, the universe has to decide. But
Speaker 1: how does that happen? Because in the end, your finger
Speaker 1: is also made out of quantum particles, right, It's just
Speaker 1: made out of other electrons and quirks. So why can't
Speaker 1: it just interact in an uncertain way with that electron
Speaker 1: and leave things uncertain? At what point does your finger
Speaker 1: become a classical object that forces the universe to collapse
Speaker 1: the wave function? And what point can it stay uncollapsed?
Speaker 1: That's not defined, it's not specified, and that's what makes
Speaker 1: that picture totally unsatisfactory. And it also kind of leads
Speaker 1: you to the problem of like, what is it before
Speaker 1: before it collapsed or what is it before you measured it? Right,
Speaker 1: it's like a pre particle almost, which that doesn't help you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what is that thing that's going through the universe? Like?
Speaker 1: Is the wave functioning a real physical thing? Is it
Speaker 1: just a calculation that's in our minds that we used
Speaker 1: to predict these things? Is the universe doing that calculation
Speaker 1: somewhere in its internal computer? Like? What's going on? What's
Speaker 1: going on? Man? All right? So that's kind of one idea.
Speaker 1: What you're saying. It's kind of flawed because they kind
Speaker 1: of doesn't help you. But then maybe what if I
Speaker 1: just think of a particle as that wave? Right? Like,
Speaker 1: what if I think of the particle as just an
Speaker 1: excitation of a quantum field. So the way the history
Speaker 1: went was that Schereninger develops his wave equation as a
Speaker 1: way to describe what's going on with these particles, and
Speaker 1: it worked amazingly. I loved you know, he just wrote
Speaker 1: this thing down and he had no real justification for it,
Speaker 1: you know, like it might have worked, and then it
Speaker 1: just kind of did, like wow, and predicted experiments. That's cool,
Speaker 1: But it turned out to be very hard to use
Speaker 1: because it really just describes one particle flying through the universe,
Speaker 1: and you know, the universe is filled with particles, and
Speaker 1: so as soon as you have like multiple particles, three
Speaker 1: or four, ten seven particles, it's basically hopeless. You know,
Speaker 1: you can't use the short in your equation to solve
Speaker 1: any realistic problem. So then the mathematical and physical geniuses
Speaker 1: in the first part of the last century developed this
Speaker 1: new idea of a field. Right, they have this idea
Speaker 1: of a field from classical physics. You know, electromagnetic field
Speaker 1: already existed, and they say, well, what if there are
Speaker 1: these quantum fields, and instead of describing one electron over
Speaker 1: here is one short in or wave, and that electron
Speaker 1: over there is another shorting of wave, we unify it
Speaker 1: into a big picture of an electron field, and both
Speaker 1: electrons are just wiggles in that field. And then we
Speaker 1: could just like you know, think about the motion of
Speaker 1: that field rather than the motion of individual electrons. I see,
Speaker 1: like before we thought of maybe electrons as like separate magnets,
Speaker 1: like there's one magnet over here, there's another magnet over there.
Speaker 1: But another way to think about them together, it's like
Speaker 1: they're all part of the same magnet, right, or they're
Speaker 1: all part of the same magnetic field of the universe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's a really powerful idea, not just because it's helpful,
Speaker 1: like it lets you do calculations you otherwise couldn't do.
Speaker 1: The Shorting equation, for example, describes how a particle moves
Speaker 1: to the universe. It's very difficult to describe the creation
Speaker 1: or the annihilation of particles, but we know that happens
Speaker 1: all the time when you use fields. However, it's no
Speaker 1: big deal, Like you can create a particle, just excite
Speaker 1: the field another step. It's just like take the string
Speaker 1: and strum it harder. Or you can describe the destruction
Speaker 1: of particles when the field relaxes and releases that energy
Speaker 1: into like another field. So things that were hard now
Speaker 1: become natural. Right, And so in this view, the universe
Speaker 1: is filled with a field, and a particle is really
Speaker 1: just like a little like excitation in that field, like
Speaker 1: a little like a blip in it almost, And so
Speaker 1: we're all just made out of blips. Yeah, and don't
Speaker 1: underestimate the physical implications of that. It means that particles
Speaker 1: are not the fundamental element of the universe we're talking
Speaker 1: before about like fundamental versus emergent. Right, like ice cream
Speaker 1: cones are not fundamental property of the universe. You could
Speaker 1: expect there to be a universe where there are no
Speaker 1: ice cream cones, and maybe there won't be in the future,
Speaker 1: sorry to say. In that same sense, this means that
Speaker 1: particle holes in this view are not fundamental to the universe.
Speaker 1: They just like sort of are a description of how
Speaker 1: fields wiggle. The fields are the real fundamental building blocks
Speaker 1: of the universe. That what the universe is is space
Speaker 1: filled with quantum fields, and those fields wiggle in certain
Speaker 1: ways that we call particles. Yeah, like you, it's almost
Speaker 1: like we were looking at the tale of an elephant
Speaker 1: and we didn't know that. Really what's important is that
Speaker 1: there's a whole elephant and from us. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: really beautiful. As you get into the mathematics of quantum fields,
Speaker 1: you see so many symmetries and patterns emerge that just
Speaker 1: strike you as like, wow, I'm reading the truth about
Speaker 1: the universe. We talked in a recent podcast episode about
Speaker 1: a really subtle concept, gauge symmetry, which talks about like
Speaker 1: how these fields are related to each other. You can
Speaker 1: like rotate these fields so that one turns into another one,
Speaker 1: and you see these symmetries exist in our universe, and
Speaker 1: there are the reasons for things like why is electric
Speaker 1: charge conserved because there's a symmetry in the photons field
Speaker 1: it were wires photons to exist and acquires electromagnetism. So
Speaker 1: it really like feels like you're reading the deep truth
Speaker 1: of the universe when you get immersed in quantum field theory.
Speaker 1: But I guess the basic idea is to define a
Speaker 1: particle is just a little blip in the field, right,
Speaker 1: and it's really the field that kind of puts together
Speaker 1: the things in the universe. Yeah, you can have fields
Speaker 1: that exist without having any particles in them. And then
Speaker 1: a particle, as you say, is like you start with
Speaker 1: a vacuum and you put energy into it and it excites,
Speaker 1: And that's what a particle is. And it's not just
Speaker 1: that it's much more mathematically handy to do these calculation
Speaker 1: it also sort of solves a really deep problem which
Speaker 1: you alluded to earlier. Somebody asked Freemandeyson, the famous physicist,
Speaker 1: once what he thought was the greatest accomplishment in physics
Speaker 1: and the last fifty years, and he said that it
Speaker 1: was quantum field theory being able to explain why all
Speaker 1: electrons are the same. And you were saying earlier, like
Speaker 1: you can think of electrons is like just different magnets.
Speaker 1: But if you think about that, why I are all
Speaker 1: electrons the same? If electrons are just different particles, why
Speaker 1: do they all have the same mass? And quantum field
Speaker 1: theory it answers that because it says, well, there aren't
Speaker 1: a bunch of different electrons. There's just really one electron.
Speaker 1: It's just all the same excitation in the same field.
Speaker 1: There's only just one electron field in the universe. But
Speaker 1: how does that ans really question? Like why is this
Speaker 1: blip in this field the same as the blip in
Speaker 1: the field over there? Because the field only knows how
Speaker 1: to blip in a certain way. It's a quantum field, right,
Speaker 1: it can blip once or twice or three times. It
Speaker 1: can't blimp like one point to five times, right, that's
Speaker 1: just what the field knows how to do. The field
Speaker 1: itself has a mass. It gets that mass from the
Speaker 1: Higgs boson, and it gets the same mass over here
Speaker 1: as it gets over there, and it gets an alpha centauri.
Speaker 1: And so the single field that fills the universe, that
Speaker 1: controls all of the electrons. So then I guess what's
Speaker 1: wrong with this picture of a particle? Is there anything
Speaker 1: wrong with this of looking at particles? It's just excitations
Speaker 1: in the field. So if you ask particle physicists what's
Speaker 1: more fundamental a field or a particle, A lot of
Speaker 1: them say the fields are that this is sort of
Speaker 1: prevailing view. But there's sort of a stubborn minority that
Speaker 1: say no, no no, no, no. Fields are just the thing
Speaker 1: we used to calculate. Mima or Kannie Hahmed, who is
Speaker 1: a famous physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Speaker 1: Princeton and widely considered like one of the smartest dues around,
Speaker 1: he said, the fields are just a convenient fiction. And
Speaker 1: the thing is that we don't see fields directly. Right.
Speaker 1: Particles are the things that we see. They are the
Speaker 1: things that we observe in our experiments and the things
Speaker 1: we smashed together in our colliders. Fields are what we
Speaker 1: used to do calculations. But like, are they real? The
Speaker 1: particles themselves are the things that we see that we
Speaker 1: can count, that we can interact with, right, Like, like,
Speaker 1: is it a thing or is it? Just? Like? I
Speaker 1: guess the consequence of how the universe works, like the
Speaker 1: math of the universe. Just because we have a mathematical
Speaker 1: description of how things work doesn't mean that it's real, right,
Speaker 1: what's real is what we see in our experiments, and
Speaker 1: those are particles, and we see how particles bounce off
Speaker 1: each other, and we see how particles interact with each other.
Speaker 1: And you can view the whole system of the universe
Speaker 1: mathematically without using fields, like you can say there are
Speaker 1: no fields, There are just particles and particles when they
Speaker 1: interact with each other, they don't use fields. They use
Speaker 1: virtual particles. So like when electrons push against each other,
Speaker 1: what's happening is they're exchanging photons. So you can replace fields,
Speaker 1: which just like sums over infinite virtual particles, and it's
Speaker 1: mathematically totally equivalent. You can do like all the same
Speaker 1: calculations using virtual particles. So like our fields just a
Speaker 1: way to express zillions of virtual particles all flying around
Speaker 1: or are particles just like vibrations in these fields. They're
Speaker 1: fundamentally mathematically equivalent. And it's a bit of a philosophical question,
Speaker 1: which is the right picture of the universe. I see
Speaker 1: you're saying, like maybe thinking of a particle or defining
Speaker 1: a particles and excitation in the field may not be
Speaker 1: accurate because maybe fields don't exist. So and so maybe
Speaker 1: it doesn't make sense for something to be of an
Speaker 1: expectation of something that doesn't exist, and that maybe particles
Speaker 1: are just their own thing and fields are just like
Speaker 1: this mathematical convenience that ties all the particles together. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we have this expectation that if we come up with
Speaker 1: a mathematical description of the universe that works, it must
Speaker 1: somehow be true. But it's not necessarily the case, and
Speaker 1: it's possible potentially to have multiple distinct mathematical descriptions of
Speaker 1: the universe that all work. And so you can't claim that, oh, like,
Speaker 1: I need fields to do my calculations, so therefore field
Speaker 1: must be out there and reel in the universe. They
Speaker 1: could just be a way that we do the calculations,
Speaker 1: all right. So you're saying kind of maybe um math
Speaker 1: is wrong or the math doesn't exist. We're saying maybe
Speaker 1: fields don't exist. Right. Math definitely exists, but we don't
Speaker 1: know necessarily if it's fundamental to the universe or just
Speaker 1: part of the way that we think. All right, So
Speaker 1: then that's another view of what a particle is. What's
Speaker 1: another way we can look at particles. Another way we
Speaker 1: can look at particles is maybe they are not fundamental.
Speaker 1: Maybe they're just like zoomed out, wiggling other things. You know,
Speaker 1: take like the field perspective to the extreme and say, like, well,
Speaker 1: what makes an electron different from a cork If you
Speaker 1: say that the electron is a vibration the electron field,
Speaker 1: and the cork is a vibration the cork field, why
Speaker 1: do we have these two fields, the cork field and
Speaker 1: the electron field. Are they somehow related? Is there a
Speaker 1: deeper relationship? And so string theory, for example, is a
Speaker 1: view that those two different fields, the electron field in
Speaker 1: the cork field are actually just one. Is some deeper
Speaker 1: field that like can vibrate in these other dimensions, and
Speaker 1: it looks like an electron field if it's vibrating one way,
Speaker 1: and it looks like a cork field if it's vibrating
Speaker 1: in another way. And so this of course is string theory,
Speaker 1: the idea that the whole universe is built on these
Speaker 1: super tiny vibrating strings. Interesting, like, there's only one field
Speaker 1: in the universe and it can vibrate in different ways. Yeah,
Speaker 1: one basic universe stuff, And that would be really satisfying
Speaker 1: because it would be a very simple answer, like what's
Speaker 1: fundamental universe? While you got this one thing and you
Speaker 1: can vibrate this way and it looks like a cork field,
Speaker 1: and to con vibrate the other way and it looks
Speaker 1: like an electron field. Like you were saying earlier, when
Speaker 1: you zoom out, they look different. When you zoom in,
Speaker 1: you can tell, Oh, it's the same old thing, just
Speaker 1: acting differently. All right, let's get into this with a
Speaker 1: little bit more detail, and let's drink people along on
Speaker 1: what strength theory is. And let's take another quick break.
Speaker 1: All right, we're talking about deep questions today. We are
Speaker 1: questioning what does it mean to be a particle? What
Speaker 1: is the definition of that, and what does it mean
Speaker 1: in terms of how it matches up with reality and
Speaker 1: how things really are. And so we talked about different
Speaker 1: ideas for what a particle could be, and the late
Speaker 1: one we talked about was about string theory, like maybe
Speaker 1: particles are just little vibrations in some kind of universal
Speaker 1: field that's just out there in the universe. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you can take this as like an extrapolation of our
Speaker 1: current ideas of particles as excitations in a bunch of
Speaker 1: different quantum fields. Maybe we can unify all those fields
Speaker 1: together into the one universe field, and then electrons are
Speaker 1: a different kind of wiggle than quirks, and different kind
Speaker 1: of wiggle than neutrinos, And that would answer a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of really fascinating questions. You know, why are electrons
Speaker 1: different from neutrinos. It turns out it's just because they're
Speaker 1: wiggling and these other dimensions differently than neutrinos are. It
Speaker 1: would be super cool. So in strength theory, that that
Speaker 1: is what's kind of being assumed that is happening is
Speaker 1: that there's one field, you know, and is there a
Speaker 1: name for this field? The field? Not really, I guess
Speaker 1: if there's just one field, you don't have to give
Speaker 1: it names, right, the answer to distinguish things, it's the
Speaker 1: capital F field. Yeah. But you have string that are
Speaker 1: like one dimensional vibrations. You have brains which are like
Speaker 1: two dimensional surfaces brains B R, A, n E as
Speaker 1: in membrane, not as in brains like the thing in
Speaker 1: inside your skull. Right, But these are just that's like
Speaker 1: a mathematical concept. It's not really something that vibrates. It's
Speaker 1: just kind of like the dimensions of it, right, or
Speaker 1: the space of it. Well, you can have one dimensional objects,
Speaker 1: which are the strings, and you can also have two
Speaker 1: dimensional objects, which would be the brains, and these strings
Speaker 1: can sometimes vibrate between the brains. You can have all
Speaker 1: sorts of complicated things, but the fundamental elements of the universe,
Speaker 1: the particles that we're familiar with, would be made out
Speaker 1: of these one dimensional vibrating strings that vibrate differently. And again,
Speaker 1: you know, this is all speculative. We have no evidence
Speaker 1: for string theory. We don't even know if string theory
Speaker 1: is the right theory to do this. But as an
Speaker 1: example of how you could go deeper and you could
Speaker 1: get at some of these really interesting questions about like,
Speaker 1: you know, what makes quarks and electrons different the same
Speaker 1: we we were wondering, like what makes carbon different from oxygen? Right?
Speaker 1: It is that made be Electrons and corks are not
Speaker 1: actually particles, They're just like things put together from a
Speaker 1: smaller particle, right Yeah, Or maybe they are fields that
Speaker 1: vibrate in different ways and that's why they look different.
Speaker 1: So instead of thinking about the electron is made up
Speaker 1: of smaller things. Think of it like as a version
Speaker 1: of one larger thing, like the way we think about
Speaker 1: like the electron and the positron has two sides of
Speaker 1: the same coin, rather than two separate particles. We can
Speaker 1: think about the electron and the corks and the neutrinos
Speaker 1: and all these different particles as different kinds of wiggles
Speaker 1: that this one field can do. And so the electron
Speaker 1: field wouldn't exist really, even though we currently have a
Speaker 1: mathematical description for it. It would actually just be like
Speaker 1: a sub field of the the field. In the same
Speaker 1: way that like, does ice cream really exist? It's useful
Speaker 1: to talk about ice cream when you're doing physics at
Speaker 1: one level, it's not really useful to talk about like
Speaker 1: the fields it's made out of. Ice cream does exist,
Speaker 1: even if it's actually just a bunch of vibrating fields.
Speaker 1: So in that same sense, like, yes, the electron feel
Speaker 1: is a useful thing to talk about if you're like
Speaker 1: doing experiments with electrons, even if deep down it's just
Speaker 1: like a particular flavor of this universal string field. Well,
Speaker 1: I think the ice cream is definitely real. In my waistline.
Speaker 1: It tastes really good, that's right. Yeah, as real flavor.
Speaker 1: But that's kind of one idea for a particle. But
Speaker 1: then you don't you run into the same problem you
Speaker 1: did before, which is like, is a particle of vibration
Speaker 1: and excitation of this field or is the field itself?
Speaker 1: The field really the fundamental thing about the universe? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't answer that philosophical questions, just sort of like
Speaker 1: goes deeper down. The fields are fundamental route to try
Speaker 1: to unify all the fields into one field. It doesn't
Speaker 1: answer the fundamental question of our the fields actually real
Speaker 1: or is this just a mathematical picture? And that's something
Speaker 1: we might not ever be able to probe because in
Speaker 1: the end of fields are not something we see in
Speaker 1: the same way that early on in quantum mechanics, we
Speaker 1: had this idea of a wave function. But you can't
Speaker 1: see the wave function directly. You just see the particles
Speaker 1: and you do calculations about how the wave function influences
Speaker 1: the particles, but you never see the wave function. You
Speaker 1: can't see things in a quantum superposition, for example, And
Speaker 1: so it doesn't answer that philosophical question. All right, So
Speaker 1: another alternative, but maybe not a great definition of a particle.
Speaker 1: What is maybe another definition of a particle. Well, there
Speaker 1: are some folks that take a completely different view and
Speaker 1: trying to build a completely different idea for what a
Speaker 1: particle is. And I love these kinds of approaches because
Speaker 1: they like overthrow everything we've been working on for our
Speaker 1: hundred years and start from scratch. These are the folks
Speaker 1: that look at the universe as built out of little
Speaker 1: bits of space, you know, instead of looking at spaces
Speaker 1: like smooth and continuous. They say, well, what if space
Speaker 1: is made out of pixels and all those pixels are
Speaker 1: woven together using quantum entanglement. So you have this new
Speaker 1: view of the universe as like a bunch of little
Speaker 1: quantum pixels that are woven together into a fabric that
Speaker 1: we call space. Right there is the thedea of like
Speaker 1: we space is kind of like a foam almost right,
Speaker 1: Like it's not a thing, and it's not like a
Speaker 1: big emptyiness. It's actually like basically like a giant um,
Speaker 1: like a giant massive of bubbles right sort of adjacent
Speaker 1: to each other. So you start with that idea, and
Speaker 1: then you take it one step further and you make
Speaker 1: analogies to ideas we've discovered in quantum computers. Quantum computers
Speaker 1: are this different way to do calculations. By using quantum
Speaker 1: mechanical objects instead of classical objects like transistors or switches,
Speaker 1: you can do all sorts of weird different calculations. And
Speaker 1: if you aren't familiar with quantum computers, with the whole
Speaker 1: podcast episode on what that is. But some of the
Speaker 1: ideas from quantum computers people think might be applicable to
Speaker 1: this sort of like quantum space time. And so you
Speaker 1: can think of sort of like this quantum spacetime, this
Speaker 1: quantum foam. It's sort of like a huge array of cubits,
Speaker 1: these like fundamental elements of a quantum computer. You're started
Speaker 1: talking about maybe like reducing the physical universe down to
Speaker 1: just like information ation, Right, that's kind of one view
Speaker 1: of the universe is that it's not like real, it's
Speaker 1: not something tangible or spacious. It's actually just all kind
Speaker 1: of information ones and zeros. Yes, it's all about information,
Speaker 1: and quantum computing is about how you manipulate information. In fact,
Speaker 1: all computing is about manipulating information to try to get
Speaker 1: the answer to a question that you have, and quantum
Speaker 1: computers manipulate information in a different way than classical computers,
Speaker 1: and one of the issues they have when they're dealing
Speaker 1: with information and quantum computers is how to do things
Speaker 1: like error correction because quantum computers are a bit fuzzy,
Speaker 1: are a bit messy, and so they're trying to recover
Speaker 1: information sometimes when it's been fuzzed up and lost from
Speaker 1: quantum computers. And people have found that this actually is
Speaker 1: very similar to questions of like trying to get information
Speaker 1: out of a black hole. Another topic we've talked about
Speaker 1: in the podcast a lot is like what happens to
Speaker 1: information when it goes into a black hole? Particles fall
Speaker 1: into black hole, they contain information. If that black hole
Speaker 1: eventually evaporates due to Hawking creation, where is that information gone?
Speaker 1: And is this potential solution to this quantum information black
Speaker 1: hole problem that says maybe there's like quantum entanglements between
Speaker 1: the inside and the outside of the black hole. And
Speaker 1: people have restruction this now in terms of quantum computing
Speaker 1: and seeing connections between solutions to quantum computing error correction
Speaker 1: problems and black hole information problems and all that just
Speaker 1: to say like maybe it makes sense to look at
Speaker 1: the whole universe is like one massive quantum computer whoa.
Speaker 1: I mean, like maybe it makes sense, like you found
Speaker 1: connections between the physical world and this information world, and
Speaker 1: so maybe the whole universe is just information. Maybe the
Speaker 1: whole universe is just information. And then the connection back
Speaker 1: to the question of the episode what is a particle?
Speaker 1: Is that in some of these space times that arise
Speaker 1: from looking at the whole universe as a bunch of
Speaker 1: quantum bits that are all entangled, there are these entanglement
Speaker 1: patterns that sort of emerge, and they correspond to like
Speaker 1: localized bits of energy floating in our three D world.
Speaker 1: And so what you see in these quantum computers are
Speaker 1: like these packets of information that like to stick together
Speaker 1: and float through that quantum world. And is this what
Speaker 1: a particle is? You know? Do we have particles in
Speaker 1: our actual universe? Because underneath we have this quantum phone
Speaker 1: that likes to entangle in certain ways, so that information
Speaker 1: propagates and these like discrete blobs through the spacetime. It's
Speaker 1: very tentative and it's very speculative, but it's a fun,
Speaker 1: sort of brand new idea for what like a particle
Speaker 1: might be. Well, yeah, I think I need to smoke
Speaker 1: some more bid and wrap my head around this, But
Speaker 1: it sounds like you're saying like maybe the nature of
Speaker 1: the universe isn't the way we experience it. It's maybe
Speaker 1: just all abstract information, like you know, my the fact
Speaker 1: that I'm here. I'm not really here next to you
Speaker 1: or next to this my desk. I'm really just like
Speaker 1: one quantum bit clump of information in a represent in
Speaker 1: some universal computer. And this desk is also a clump
Speaker 1: of information. And some of we're all sort of related
Speaker 1: by quantum entanglement, and that we interpret that entanglement as
Speaker 1: like me being next to it. Yeah, and there are
Speaker 1: these rules these quantum bits like to follow, and that
Speaker 1: these behaviors that emerge from the way they interact, and
Speaker 1: some of those behaviors are what we would describe as particles.
Speaker 1: And so we're part of this system and we look around,
Speaker 1: we observe it, we describe these things. Doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: what we see is fundamental. What we see is emergent.
Speaker 1: It's more like ice creams and hurricanes than the actual
Speaker 1: units of the universe. And you can refashion these particles
Speaker 1: in terms of you know, some sort of like weird
Speaker 1: quantum bits as part of the universal computer. You know, again,
Speaker 1: this is like a speculative idea that is like ten
Speaker 1: years from being even a tentative idea, but it's already
Speaker 1: got a cool name. They call it it from cubit
Speaker 1: meaning like the whole universe comes from quantum computers. WHOA, Like,
Speaker 1: it's like something in the universe Earth is actually just
Speaker 1: a bit of information kind of right, yeah, like for
Speaker 1: something to be defined as something, it's all just information. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The deeper idea is, if you assemble information in this
Speaker 1: sort of self organizing way, self perpetuating way, does that
Speaker 1: create a reality? Can reality just be like a projection
Speaker 1: of this informational arrangement? And so like you need several
Speaker 1: more layers of an appeals to really understand the meaning
Speaker 1: of that. But it's kind of like how you know
Speaker 1: if I play a video game on my PlayStation that
Speaker 1: there's this whole world, but it's really just writing on
Speaker 1: top of a bunch of you know, transistors, and it's
Speaker 1: all writing and as information as ones and zeros zipping about.
Speaker 1: You're saying like maybe an electron is not really a thing.
Speaker 1: It's just like a bit of information sort of writing
Speaker 1: on top of this quantum foam computer that is actually
Speaker 1: the universe. Yeah, or maybe that's what a thing is.
Speaker 1: That's what it means to be a thing is to
Speaker 1: be part of this quantum information in the universe computer
Speaker 1: those all the things we've her experience are just that,
Speaker 1: and that's what a thing is. And so it's a
Speaker 1: super fun idea because it gives you this like glimpse
Speaker 1: into an alternative view of the workings of the universe
Speaker 1: at like the deepest level. But you know, it could
Speaker 1: also just be bunk or clue, or it could all
Speaker 1: just be in an aliens PlayStation quantum PlayStation PlayStation qute.
Speaker 1: Why don't they just press the cheek codes already so
Speaker 1: I can get to the next level? Yeah, when am
Speaker 1: I going to upgrade? That's what I'm waiting for. But
Speaker 1: I guess, you know, maybe I wonder if it could
Speaker 1: be all all be Like all of these ideas about particles,
Speaker 1: I wonder if they could all be true. You know,
Speaker 1: like maybe an electron is a bit of information on
Speaker 1: a quantum computer, and it's also a vibration in a
Speaker 1: one unifying field, and it's also collapse wavefunction, you know,
Speaker 1: do you know what I mean? Like, maybe these all
Speaker 1: these ideas are just different ways of looking at what's
Speaker 1: actually true, just like sort of Raschumn style, we might
Speaker 1: all have different stories to describe the same series of events.
Speaker 1: There might be multiple ways to describe reality that are
Speaker 1: self consistent and predict experiments and yet fundamentally at their hearts,
Speaker 1: like conceptionally very different. And that's a little scary because
Speaker 1: it means that maybe there isn't a single truth about
Speaker 1: the universe. Maybe there are multiple truths, or maybe there
Speaker 1: is no truth. There are just those stories, those mathematical
Speaker 1: stories we tell ourselves about the way the universe out
Speaker 1: there works. And so to you know, bring it back
Speaker 1: to aliens again. I think it would be really exciting
Speaker 1: to talk to alien physicists and discover, like, do they
Speaker 1: have a completely different way of thinking about the universe?
Speaker 1: Is a particle even a concept for them? Or have
Speaker 1: they discovered the same structures as we have and what
Speaker 1: does that mean about their universality? Right? Or like we
Speaker 1: talked about earlier, maybe there is a truth like there
Speaker 1: is such a thing as a particle, but our brains
Speaker 1: and our way of doing or you know, limitations and
Speaker 1: math and thinking only allow us to look at it
Speaker 1: in these different ways. But really, there is a truth
Speaker 1: that which but we just don't get it or can't
Speaker 1: get it, or we get it as much as our
Speaker 1: dogs understand hurricanes or maybe your dogs of view of
Speaker 1: the universe is the correct one, right, May we're just
Speaker 1: overthinking things, Daniel's what I'm saying. Maybe the universe is
Speaker 1: really just all about treats and not treats. Yeah, and naps.
Speaker 1: Really that's the fundamental element of the universe, the knaps. Certainly,
Speaker 1: your dog seems happier than most particle physicists. True, I
Speaker 1: think my dog is having a better life than I am.
Speaker 1: That we should all be dogs. We should. I'll be
Speaker 1: my dog. But I guess again, just another interesting, you know,
Speaker 1: exploration into what it means for things to be real
Speaker 1: in this universe and what's at the heart of reality.
Speaker 1: You know, it seems like we we still don't know
Speaker 1: and may never know. We still don't know, and we
Speaker 1: may never know. But we're gonna have fun along the
Speaker 1: way and make a lot of friends. And you know,
Speaker 1: even if you answer this question, you know, what is
Speaker 1: a particle? And you decided when you did some experiment
Speaker 1: or some philosophical argument to persuade yourself that fields where
Speaker 1: the fundamental element of the universe. You could still ask,
Speaker 1: all right, but why why does space have fields in it?
Speaker 1: Where these deals come from? Right? Do you have to
Speaker 1: have fields? Could you have space without fields? So even
Speaker 1: if you answered all these questions, you would still have
Speaker 1: plenty of stuff to dig into. Or you can say
Speaker 1: the alternative, which is um, whatever, time to take a nap. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd like to eat a treat, take a nap. That
Speaker 1: is something actually that professors and dogs have in common,
Speaker 1: is taking afternoon naps. You're a little rougher. Well, my
Speaker 1: bark's not as bad as my bite. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: we hope you enjoyed that trip into asking questions about
Speaker 1: reality and what does it all mean to be something
Speaker 1: in the universe? And this is a question for me
Speaker 1: of particular interest. We'd like to send you off today
Speaker 1: with a song sent in by a listener, Ben Kelly.
Speaker 1: This song captures the spirit of wonder we feel when
Speaker 1: we think about the amazing strangeness of reality. So this
Speaker 1: is Ben Kelly and his band The Amber Bugs. We
Speaker 1: took a used at nature and saw there's nothing No
Speaker 1: bad rocks build from a floor on the feet that
Speaker 1: pture of the house I'm plants around the sun that
Speaker 1: ain't put it of th stuff juice way. Everything is
Speaker 1: made up like this, Everything is just made up. Everything
Speaker 1: is made up. You're gonna have to base office. It's
Speaker 1: not just made up. Thanks for joining us, See you
Speaker 1: next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that. Daniel and
Speaker 1: Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: For more podcast from My Heart Radio, visit the I
Speaker 1: Aren't Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.