Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: and usually I love all things tech, but today I'm
Speaker 1: having some issues, been having some technical glitches that I've
Speaker 1: been trying to fix, and unfortunately it means that the
Speaker 1: episode I had planned today, which was a follow up
Speaker 1: an additional space suit episode, is probably gonna have to
Speaker 1: wait till tomorrow. I'm going to My plan is to
Speaker 1: have that one published instead of a tech News episode.
Speaker 1: But I don't want to leave you without an episode
Speaker 1: of the show, so I thought we would play this
Speaker 1: episode that originally published on January seven, two thousand nineteen.
Speaker 1: It's an episode where Daniel Whiteson of Daniel and Jorge
Speaker 1: Explain the Universe, joined the show to talk about his
Speaker 1: work in experimental particle physics and how his work with
Speaker 1: a large Hadron collider what it was like. And you know,
Speaker 1: if we're going to talk about technical glitches, the LHC
Speaker 1: is a good topic because that's an entire, you know,
Speaker 1: particle acceleration facility that had more than its share of
Speaker 1: technical difficulties, including you know, reportedly birds. But I hope
Speaker 1: you enjoy this episode and I'll be back to chat
Speaker 1: with you again towards the end. Today we have a
Speaker 1: very special guest on our show, someone who has worked
Speaker 1: on really interesting problems. Is a rare occasion that I
Speaker 1: get to talk to someone who has experienced in high
Speaker 1: energy particle physics. So I want to introduce to all
Speaker 1: of you, if you haven't listen to his amazing podcast yet,
Speaker 1: Daniel Whitson. Dr Daniel Whitson, Welcome to the show. Hi,
Speaker 1: thanks a lot for having me on. I am so
Speaker 1: glad to have you here now. Daniel. You are one
Speaker 1: half of the podcast team of Daniel and Jorge Explained
Speaker 1: the Universe, and thank you for taking time away from
Speaker 1: explaining the universe to grace my humble show with your presence.
Speaker 1: I greatly appreciate it. Well, thanks a lot for having
Speaker 1: me on. You guys talking about really fascinating stuff. So
Speaker 1: it's a pleasure to be here. It's been a pleasure
Speaker 1: listening to your show. We'll talk a little bit more
Speaker 1: about that towards the end of the episode, but just
Speaker 1: so that my listeners kind of understand where you you're
Speaker 1: coming from before we get into work with the Large
Speaker 1: Hadron Collider and CERN and particle physics. Tell us a
Speaker 1: bit about yourself, all right, Well, I'm devastatingly good looking,
Speaker 1: which is why I have a podcast, and m familiar
Speaker 1: my my. The most important thing to know about me
Speaker 1: in this context, I guess, is that I am a
Speaker 1: high energy physicist, which means that I'm interested in studying
Speaker 1: the universe at the smallest scale, and I do so
Speaker 1: by smashing stuff together at the highest energy. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, you want to understand how things work, take
Speaker 1: them apart, and that's basically what we do, is we
Speaker 1: try to take the whole universe apart and understand how
Speaker 1: it works. So I'm a professor at the University of
Speaker 1: California at Irvine that's in Orange County, and I work there,
Speaker 1: and I work also at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva,
Speaker 1: where the actual collider is, and we have a big
Speaker 1: team of people smashing particles together and trying to figure
Speaker 1: out what is the smallest bit of matter and how
Speaker 1: does it all fit together? And where how did everything
Speaker 1: start and how is it going to end? And we
Speaker 1: basically try to tackle those really big, sexy questions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I I love the way you describe that, the idea
Speaker 1: of taking apart the very basic particles that make up
Speaker 1: stuff and and and finding out what makes at work.
Speaker 1: It's very relatable to all the stories of the various
Speaker 1: innovators who got their start taking apart the various pieces
Speaker 1: of technology they have, often to the the detriment of
Speaker 1: their family, and then learning how it works, and then
Speaker 1: hopefully being able to put it back together again. Except
Speaker 1: we're looking at reality here, how the the very fabric
Speaker 1: that makes up existence works. And uh. I also I
Speaker 1: watched a great presentation that you and Jorge gave in
Speaker 1: which you talked about your book and you talked about
Speaker 1: the gaps and scientific knowledge, and that also made me
Speaker 1: feel like I am all a smart person, only because
Speaker 1: in the past I have described our understanding of the
Speaker 1: universe like we're staring through a key hole and we
Speaker 1: can only see a little bit of the illuminated room
Speaker 1: that's beyond the keyhole, and there's stuff and shadows, So
Speaker 1: there are things that we don't really see, and there
Speaker 1: are elements that are out of you and and to us.
Speaker 1: That's that's our understanding of the universe. We only see
Speaker 1: a very narrow band of what really exists out there,
Speaker 1: and our goal is to expand that over time. That's right,
Speaker 1: and the most amazing thing in my perspective is that
Speaker 1: we've only recently discovered that we are looking through the keyhole.
Speaker 1: I mean, for a long time we thought we were
Speaker 1: saying everything. We thought, well, we've seen the way the
Speaker 1: universe is. Now, we just need to figure out how
Speaker 1: to explain it. We made a lot of progress and
Speaker 1: the last fifty year, in the last twenty or fifty years,
Speaker 1: we've discovered that there's a lot of stuff out there
Speaker 1: that we don't have any understanding of, dark matter, dark energy,
Speaker 1: huge chunks of the universe which completely defy our our explanation.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean it can't be explained. You don't have
Speaker 1: to go to like weird woo woo crystal energy stuff.
Speaker 1: It just means that there's a lot more science left
Speaker 1: to do. And for me, those are wonderful moments in
Speaker 1: the history of science when you you know, you pull
Speaker 1: back a layer of reality and discover, oh my gosh, wow,
Speaker 1: things are totally different from what we expected, or you know,
Speaker 1: turn is out we were only studying the the tail
Speaker 1: of the elephant, and we need to look at the
Speaker 1: rest of it. And and that's exciting, not because the
Speaker 1: science is humbled and realizing that we don't understand everything,
Speaker 1: that's that's a wonderful experience. It's exciting because it means
Speaker 1: there are discoveries left to come, right, means that maybe
Speaker 1: some of the most dramatic, most insightful realizations about the
Speaker 1: nature of the universe might still be ahead of us.
Speaker 1: I like thinking about how in the future and a
Speaker 1: hundred years people might look back with great knowledge of
Speaker 1: how the universe works and wonder what it was like
Speaker 1: to be us when we lived in such ignorance, right
Speaker 1: when we didn't know so many things about so many
Speaker 1: basic things about the universe. Um And what you said
Speaker 1: earlier really resonate with me about trying to figure things
Speaker 1: out by taking them apart. I think that there's an
Speaker 1: innate curiosity in being human. I mean, that's what makes
Speaker 1: being human fun, it makes being being alive worth It
Speaker 1: is that we are driven by this desire to know
Speaker 1: to understand the things around us. So if you're the
Speaker 1: kind of person who's like, how does a blender work?
Speaker 1: Let me take it apart? Or you know how does
Speaker 1: this thing in my car work when we look under
Speaker 1: the hood and poke around, then you're basically a physicist.
Speaker 1: You're the kind of person who wants to understand things
Speaker 1: by taking them apart, by boiling them down to the
Speaker 1: most essential elements, and using that to explain your car,
Speaker 1: and then also your blender and then other things you
Speaker 1: haven't seen before. Right, It's about learning generalizable universal truths. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and I would also argue that the history of
Speaker 1: of humanity has been one in which we have attempted
Speaker 1: to explain the why things are the way they are
Speaker 1: for for all of our history, and the as we
Speaker 1: eliminate gaps piece by piece, and knowing that we still
Speaker 1: have enormous gaps left to fill in, we start to
Speaker 1: really hone in on that over time we're able to
Speaker 1: replace things where we had the explanation of a uh.
Speaker 1: Well though, that that's the gods battling it out in Olympus,
Speaker 1: and that's where the thunder comes from. To know now
Speaker 1: we a deeper understanding to the point now where we
Speaker 1: even are able to get a grasp on the idea
Speaker 1: that as humans, as as we are the way we
Speaker 1: have evolved, we have limitations in our perception. There are
Speaker 1: things that we are capable of perceiving because we have evolved.
Speaker 1: It was advantageous, it made sense in our environment, But
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that's everything there is out there, which
Speaker 1: kind of leads into discussions that I've heard about, you know,
Speaker 1: the various dimensions that we were capable of perceiving. Some
Speaker 1: of those obviously we can. We can observe the physical dimensions,
Speaker 1: and then once you start figuring that out, you say, well,
Speaker 1: it may be a leap to you to think there
Speaker 1: are so many more dimensions or potentially more dimensions than
Speaker 1: the ones we can perceive. But we also know that
Speaker 1: we can't see things in the infrared or ultra violet
Speaker 1: UH wave forms, but with technology, we can convert that
Speaker 1: into light that we can see. And once you start
Speaker 1: looking at things is like that level where you say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess we have developed tools that let us go
Speaker 1: beyond our limitations in our perception. Then it kind of
Speaker 1: opens up your mind into the idea of now I
Speaker 1: kind of understand how there can be things like dark
Speaker 1: energy and dark matter that are beyond our current capability
Speaker 1: of detecting it. Because it took thousands of years for
Speaker 1: us to get to the point where we could, uh
Speaker 1: could even indirectly observe stuff like beingfrared and the ultraviolet.
Speaker 1: So that's sort of the approach I take with people
Speaker 1: as well, the idea that it feels like you're taking
Speaker 1: a big leap when you start going into things like
Speaker 1: particle physics, when you start talking about quantum quantum effects,
Speaker 1: because everything seems so strange. It doesn't it doesn't work
Speaker 1: the way the classical physics work, and it's it feels
Speaker 1: like you're asking people to take a leap of faith.
Speaker 1: But once you start to build on those blocks, they say, okay,
Speaker 1: all right, now I'm with you. Now I got it,
Speaker 1: And that kind of brings us over to the work
Speaker 1: that we see over at at CERN and the large
Speaker 1: hey drunk collider. Now, one thing I like to remind
Speaker 1: people about before before we get there. I think he's
Speaker 1: touched on a really interesting topic there. You know, Um,
Speaker 1: I think people have been thinking about mysteries for a
Speaker 1: long time, right, And for a long time the world
Speaker 1: was really mysterious. It was obvious that there were mysteries
Speaker 1: you could just go outside, and there were things you
Speaker 1: didn't understand. What is lightning? Right, Um, and it's sort
Speaker 1: of it was a common feeling that the world was mysterious,
Speaker 1: you know, like there are more things in the heavens
Speaker 1: and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, right,
Speaker 1: it's even in literature. But we've sort of lost that.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people these days, when they
Speaker 1: walk around, they feel like they mostly understand stuff like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we know how weather works. Maybe we can't predict it exactly,
Speaker 1: but we understand the mechanism of it and gravity we
Speaker 1: have an understanding of that. And the sense of experiencing
Speaker 1: mystery on the daily basis is sort of gone because
Speaker 1: science has made so much progress in explaining the various
Speaker 1: bits around us. And I want to remind people that
Speaker 1: the bigger questions, the larger questions questions we're asking ourselves,
Speaker 1: like why are we here? How should we live? How
Speaker 1: what is the history of everything? Those questions are still
Speaker 1: totally unanswered. And uh, And as you said, I think
Speaker 1: is really insightful about how we don't even know what
Speaker 1: we don't know, because there's a lot of things that
Speaker 1: we've only recently discovered we don't we we didn't understand
Speaker 1: right that there's things happening around us that we're not
Speaker 1: aware of various kinds of particles moving and even different
Speaker 1: kinds of light that's invisible to us, as you said,
Speaker 1: And there's really no limit on how much of that
Speaker 1: there can be, right, I mean, we know certain things,
Speaker 1: we know dark matters invisible. We know neutrinos are invisible.
Speaker 1: There could be other things out there that are also
Speaker 1: invisible that we just haven't even yet discovered that they're
Speaker 1: there through some sort of very slight hints. Right, So
Speaker 1: the amount of discoveries left remaining in the future is enormous,
Speaker 1: which is the kind of thing that gets me all excited. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I I have a feeling, Well, first of all, I
Speaker 1: have a feeling I'm gonna need to fly out to
Speaker 1: California and have have like just maybe a four hour
Speaker 1: long conversation with you, because I haven't feel like that's
Speaker 1: exactly what's going to be needed. But is I This
Speaker 1: is the sort of stuff I love to talk about
Speaker 1: just to anyone who will, you know, be patient enough
Speaker 1: to let me chatter at them. Let let me ask
Speaker 1: you a question that you you mentioned about how we
Speaker 1: used to explain things in terms of gods, and I
Speaker 1: think that makes a lot of sense because humans are
Speaker 1: good at like identifying agency and willfulness in places where
Speaker 1: there aren't any. Right. But there's another element to that,
Speaker 1: which is the sort of the narrative. Right, These gods
Speaker 1: don't just have personalities and wheels that had stories the
Speaker 1: reasons why they were doing what they were doing. And
Speaker 1: I feel like storytelling is a big part of who
Speaker 1: we are as a species, and it's still even though
Speaker 1: we're not explaining things in terms of gods, it still
Speaker 1: drives our science. Like you know, if you asked me, um,
Speaker 1: what would you do if you knew the final answer
Speaker 1: to particle physics? Like if you could explain the whole
Speaker 1: universe in terms of one particle? Um, you know that,
Speaker 1: I would say, then we would want to tell a story, right,
Speaker 1: We want to tell a story about what that means
Speaker 1: about the universe and why the universe? Why is the
Speaker 1: universe this way and not the other way? First we
Speaker 1: have to figure out what way is the universe, and
Speaker 1: then we want to know, like why that way. In
Speaker 1: the end, we're still telling stories to ourselves about how
Speaker 1: the universe came to be and what it means and
Speaker 1: how we should live our lives. So it's a very
Speaker 1: human endeavor. Well, certainly, I mean, we we call it matter,
Speaker 1: and we know about antimatter, but we chose the optimist
Speaker 1: route right when we describe, when we describe these things
Speaker 1: that are antithetical to one another, and they they annihilate
Speaker 1: one another when they come into contact. And for some
Speaker 1: reason that we don't fully understand, we had slightly more
Speaker 1: matter than we had antimatter, and therefore we've got stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean, if we had been pessimists, we would call
Speaker 1: the stuff we have the antimatter. Right, So clearly there's
Speaker 1: a narrative issue there that's right. So here, seriously, here's
Speaker 1: the question. Then the question is do you think if
Speaker 1: we met an alien species of physicists, do you think
Speaker 1: they would be asking the same questions or would they
Speaker 1: be satisfied with our answers? Or do you think the
Speaker 1: kind of questions we're asking are inherently human in some
Speaker 1: way that we don't even understand? What an excellent question. Now, obviously,
Speaker 1: from the scientific perspective, I have to tell you that
Speaker 1: I have a very small sample size of intelligent life
Speaker 1: forms that I can work from. I only have the one. Really,
Speaker 1: you you mean, you're the only intelligent life form you're
Speaker 1: I don't know, I mean of entire I'm talking about
Speaker 1: entire species. I guess I'm not not only I mean,
Speaker 1: I could get super nihilistic and and and very egotistical
Speaker 1: and say, well, I can only experience my own experience,
Speaker 1: and therefore I know I'm intelligence. But I'm just granting
Speaker 1: everybody else that consideration. Um, that's this. This gets into
Speaker 1: philosophy and then, which I also fascinated by. But I'm
Speaker 1: a pregnantist, so eventually I get very irritated. Um, that's
Speaker 1: an excellent question, and and honestly, the it's one that
Speaker 1: I haven't given a lot of consideration too, largely because
Speaker 1: I have accepted the fact, or at least accepted the
Speaker 1: notion that any sufficiently intelligent species that may exist somewhere
Speaker 1: else would be so very different from what we experience
Speaker 1: that that the word alien only begins to describe how
Speaker 1: we would uh define such a species, and that perhaps
Speaker 1: their approach to understanding and explaining the universe to themselves
Speaker 1: would be very different. But it seems like it would
Speaker 1: follow a similar pattern. But I say that only because
Speaker 1: that's what that's what has happened here. I don't have
Speaker 1: anywhere else to draw any conclusions from. So, um, it's
Speaker 1: so hard to imagine outside of your experience, right, It's
Speaker 1: it's very, very difficult. Even in science, when we discover
Speaker 1: something new, we're always describing it in terms of the
Speaker 1: things we know. Like we want to know what is light?
Speaker 1: Is it a little particle? Is it a little way?
Speaker 1: Because of the things we know, Right, when we find
Speaker 1: something that's totally new and different, we don't even really
Speaker 1: have the words to describe it. So imagining what it's
Speaker 1: like to be an alien scientist is I think it's
Speaker 1: an impossible question. So yeah, and that's that's why I
Speaker 1: posed it to you. It's why it's I I while
Speaker 1: I find science fiction endlessly entertaining, I love science fiction.
Speaker 1: I also always I roll my eyes a little bit
Speaker 1: when I see the Star Trek approach of every alien
Speaker 1: race is a humanoid with slightly different bumps on their head,
Speaker 1: and they speak the English the same way. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: Universal Translator has no problem picking up what their speech
Speaker 1: patterns are. So that like, even when you use the
Speaker 1: Universal translator, uh the you know, d O sex Macina
Speaker 1: coming in and saying, oh, yeah, this is going to
Speaker 1: translate everything magically. You think you kind of thing a
Speaker 1: sample size, don't you before you really get a grasp
Speaker 1: on it. But I mean, we have a hard enough trouble,
Speaker 1: hard enough time even on Earth sometimes understanding human cultures
Speaker 1: from around the globe, you know, understanding how to interact
Speaker 1: with aliens. I think it's going to be hopeless. Like
Speaker 1: if we ever heard a message from aliens, and you know,
Speaker 1: even decoding it would be a huge problem if you
Speaker 1: could even get past that. I have challenges understanding some
Speaker 1: of my relatives, and we all speak the same language
Speaker 1: and arguably come from the same Sure are you sure
Speaker 1: they all come from Earth? I mean that might be
Speaker 1: an explanation. I got an uncle that's questionable, but pretty
Speaker 1: much everyone else I got a pretty good handle on. Alright,
Speaker 1: this is this is great. This is gonna be an
Speaker 1: eighteen partner. Guys. I'm just gonna sit here and and
Speaker 1: and and monopolize Daniel's time for you want to you
Speaker 1: want to talk about the large Dan Collider rather than
Speaker 1: philosophy of alien civilization. I wouldn't say rather, I'll just
Speaker 1: say that those were what my questions were about. Well,
Speaker 1: you know there's one topic which connects them, um, which
Speaker 1: is the one way we might discover an alien civilization
Speaker 1: is by first detecting their particle physicists. I have not
Speaker 1: heard this. It might be if somebody's if aliens are
Speaker 1: building like enormous particle colliders like the size of a
Speaker 1: solar system, and we might eventually like sweep through the
Speaker 1: essentially the pollution from that part from that particle accelerator
Speaker 1: and discover them in that way. That would be pretty
Speaker 1: crazy way defined an alien species, but that would be
Speaker 1: awesome because they would It would tell us that, hey, look,
Speaker 1: particle physics is not just a human thing, it's a
Speaker 1: universal thing. Everyone wants to know what the universe has
Speaker 1: made out of, and everyone's figuring it out by smashing
Speaker 1: step together. So that would be pretty exciting discovery. It
Speaker 1: is interesting I had not heard about that particular kind
Speaker 1: of an idea. I've heard of, of course, enormous constructs
Speaker 1: that could especially when you talk about things like the
Speaker 1: Kardashov scale and you're thinking about like the dice and
Speaker 1: sphere and that kind of stuff. These hypothetical um machines
Speaker 1: that would need to exist in order to to take
Speaker 1: advantage of, say an entire solar system's energy output, which
Speaker 1: would be necessary to reach those higher levels of civilization
Speaker 1: that we've heard about, but I hadn't heard about. I
Speaker 1: hadn't thought about a particle accelery the size of a
Speaker 1: solar system. To be perfectly honest, the Large Hadron Collator
Speaker 1: is is a big enough beast for me to try
Speaker 1: and get my mind wrapped around. I mean they're a
Speaker 1: pretty big and pretty expensive. So yeah, the solar system
Speaker 1: sizelder is going to take another level of civilization before
Speaker 1: we can afford that kind of equipment. Yeah, Daniel and
Speaker 1: I will be back with more about the LHC and
Speaker 1: just a moment, but first let's take a quick break.
Speaker 1: So getting to the Large Hadron Collider, Uh, that would
Speaker 1: you know? And CERN as well. A lot of people
Speaker 1: think of of CERN is just because the Large Hadron
Speaker 1: Collider got so much press a few years ago when
Speaker 1: it was when they were preparing to bring it up
Speaker 1: online and they were starting to stub up the energy levels.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people just associated those two
Speaker 1: as being uh the only real like the CERN is
Speaker 1: just that's the agency to oversee the Large Hadron Collider.
Speaker 1: I like to remind people that CERN is also the
Speaker 1: organization where because CERN exists. We have a worldwide web.
Speaker 1: I mean the web started from Tim berners Lee, who
Speaker 1: was working for CERTAIN at the time. So, uh, I
Speaker 1: like to remind people that it's beyond that. But let's
Speaker 1: talk a bit so. So CERTAIN is a European agency
Speaker 1: that is a scientifically oriented agency looking into things like these,
Speaker 1: these high energy reactions. And the large Hadron Collider is
Speaker 1: a particle accelerator. Uh, kind of give us an overview
Speaker 1: of what the LHC is for for someone who has
Speaker 1: heard the term but they don't really get they don't
Speaker 1: grock it entirely, alright, sure, Um, the large hadron collider.
Speaker 1: The basic idea is, let's figure out what's inside matter.
Speaker 1: Let's figure out what's inside matter, and let's do that
Speaker 1: by smashing particles together. So what you do with the
Speaker 1: large hadron collider the word large it obviously just means
Speaker 1: it's really big. Hadron is a kind of particle, and
Speaker 1: proton is the example of it, so you could also
Speaker 1: call it the large proton collider. Um, And we take protons,
Speaker 1: which are essentially just the nucleus of hydrogen. So you
Speaker 1: start with hydrogen gas, which is easy to get. Heat
Speaker 1: it up. So the electrons boil off, and you're left
Speaker 1: with just the nucleus, which is protons. And what we
Speaker 1: do is we give those protons a kick. We use
Speaker 1: electromagnetic waves to push them, and we push them faster
Speaker 1: and faster and faster and faster until they're going about
Speaker 1: the speed of light. And then we smash them into
Speaker 1: each other. And the idea is, see what comes out.
Speaker 1: See what kind of weird mysterious quantum mechanical magic happens
Speaker 1: to give you new kinds of matter and new weird
Speaker 1: particles um. But as you said, the Large Hadron Collider
Speaker 1: is sort of a flagship property, flagship experiment, but certain
Speaker 1: is much broader than that. It's a it's a European organization,
Speaker 1: but it's also international. I mean, I've I've been there
Speaker 1: many summers, and you sit at a table at the
Speaker 1: restaurant and there's people speaking all sorts of languages. You know,
Speaker 1: this Italian at this table, and Russian at that table,
Speaker 1: and Tie at the other table, and Chinese over here,
Speaker 1: and you meet people from hundreds of countries, well not hundreds,
Speaker 1: but more than a hundred countries. And it's a it's
Speaker 1: a super international place, which is really wonderful and right
Speaker 1: now it really is the center of the world, world
Speaker 1: and the Solar System, and you know, maybe the galaxy
Speaker 1: in terms of particle physics. But we do more than
Speaker 1: just the Large Hadron Collider. We also have experiments studying
Speaker 1: the mysterious particle called the neutrino. Neutrinos are produced by
Speaker 1: the Sun and the surface of the Earth is just
Speaker 1: bombarded with neutrinos, but they're mostly invisible to us. They
Speaker 1: don't interact with us, but they have a lot of
Speaker 1: really interesting properties that we don't understand. So CERTAIN does
Speaker 1: a lot of neutrino physics as well. Um they do
Speaker 1: cosmic ray physics, looking at weird particles from space. They
Speaker 1: do a big variety of particle physics. And CERTAIN has
Speaker 1: played a big role in politics as well. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you're aware, but CERTAIN was founded after World
Speaker 1: War Two, the idea being let's get all the scientists
Speaker 1: of Europe to work together on projects rather than hiding
Speaker 1: in their own labs and hating each other, and sort
Speaker 1: of like using science as this common human bridge, like
Speaker 1: let's get connected. Let's not have our own like individual
Speaker 1: weapons projects. Let's find something we can all work together
Speaker 1: on in a positive way. And I think it's really
Speaker 1: credited with tying European science together in a way that's
Speaker 1: made it more effective. And you know, building harmonies between
Speaker 1: nations is also good, and I know that personally at
Speaker 1: certain I've eaten a lot of weird food from different
Speaker 1: countries and that's helped me understand, you know, um, how
Speaker 1: why the Belgians like horse meat and why the Chinese
Speaker 1: eat these weird things. And it's a fun cultural experience
Speaker 1: as well as scientific. Well yeah, and and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: getting into some of the fun stuff. Well, we'll talk
Speaker 1: about it later. But I love reading about, uh things
Speaker 1: that remind us that scientists are also human. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's easy to kind of forget from a layman perspective.
Speaker 1: You you hear about science, and you hear about scientists,
Speaker 1: and it tends to almost be another for people who
Speaker 1: are not necessarily involved in science, or are not they
Speaker 1: don't work with scientists, and so they start to think
Speaker 1: of that as their own category of living thing. There's
Speaker 1: a scientist kind of like doctors. There's doctors, they're scientists,
Speaker 1: and uh, well it's like that time that you meet
Speaker 1: your middle school science teacher at the grocery store, like
Speaker 1: buying cereal and you're like, what breakfast? This is not
Speaker 1: stro strain does not. Scientists have families and ambitions and
Speaker 1: disappointments and uh and rock rock groups, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: in rock groups and you know, ankle injuries and all
Speaker 1: the same sort of things that people have. Absolutely, so
Speaker 1: what experiment at the LHC did you are you working with? Specifically,
Speaker 1: they're different because they're different ones that are associated with
Speaker 1: different points along the LHC. As I understand it, where
Speaker 1: it's different essentially collision points that are looking at very
Speaker 1: specific of the byproducts of these high energy collisions. That's right.
Speaker 1: So we have two beams of protons um, one going
Speaker 1: one way around the circle, the other going the other way.
Speaker 1: And if somebody out there is wondering, well, why is
Speaker 1: it a circle, the reason is the circle is that
Speaker 1: it takes a while to get protons up to high
Speaker 1: enough speed. That's what we want to do, is we
Speaker 1: want to reuse those little boosters. The circle is essentially
Speaker 1: a string of little boosters. Each one gives a little
Speaker 1: kick and gets it going faster and faster, and so
Speaker 1: if you can spin it around multiple times that you
Speaker 1: can get it going faster and faster. It's like when
Speaker 1: your kids on the Merry go round or nothing merry
Speaker 1: go around. What is that thing called the at the
Speaker 1: playground that spins around? Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: I honestly don't know the name of that either. The
Speaker 1: vominator the vominator um uh. And and you put them
Speaker 1: on there and you spin it, you keep pushing. It
Speaker 1: goes faster and faster. So that's why it goes in
Speaker 1: a circle. Um. And in order to bend them in
Speaker 1: a circle, we have these really strong magnets. So the
Speaker 1: way the collider works is it's a kick to make
Speaker 1: it faster and then a magnet to bend it to
Speaker 1: go in a circle. And because we want to collide
Speaker 1: the protons, we actually have two of these. We have
Speaker 1: one going one way and other than protons going the
Speaker 1: other way, and so four places around the ring we
Speaker 1: cross those beams, right, we try to collide them. And
Speaker 1: and also it's not individual proton. It's not like we
Speaker 1: put one proton in the in one beam and another
Speaker 1: proton the other beam and we zoomed around and we
Speaker 1: smashed one proton. It's really hard to get protons to
Speaker 1: hit each other because they're so small um, and so
Speaker 1: we actually have like a little gas of protons. It's
Speaker 1: a we call it a technical term is a bunch
Speaker 1: of protons, and it's you know, tend to some number
Speaker 1: of protons that we passed through another gas of protons
Speaker 1: hoping to get some collisions. And so there's four places
Speaker 1: around the ring that this happens, and each one is
Speaker 1: surrounded by a massive set of detectors um to observe
Speaker 1: what happens. Think of it like a really big digital camera.
Speaker 1: And I work on one of those. And the name
Speaker 1: of the detector is the Atlas detector, which has like
Speaker 1: which sets the record from maybe the worst scientific acronym
Speaker 1: ever because it has an acronym inside. I think ATLAS
Speaker 1: stands for a large toroidal LHC apparatus. It's the most
Speaker 1: tortured acronym ever. Anyway, Atlas surrounds one of the collision
Speaker 1: points and we smash the protons together there and that's
Speaker 1: where the magic happens. And you might be thinking, you know,
Speaker 1: if you smash protons together, all you can learn about
Speaker 1: is what's inside protons. Right the way, if you take
Speaker 1: your blender apart. You can learn about what's inside blenders.
Speaker 1: That's true, and we can learn about what's inside blenders,
Speaker 1: but what's inside protons um. But we can also do
Speaker 1: something else because of the magic of quantum mechanics. What
Speaker 1: happens when you collide a proton and another proton is
Speaker 1: that the particles inside them interact. So inside a proton
Speaker 1: we have quarks, up quarks and down corks, and those
Speaker 1: quirks can interact and they can actually annihilate, which means
Speaker 1: that they convert from mass from little bits of stuff
Speaker 1: flying through the particle collider into energy. Okay, so the
Speaker 1: particles are gone, the stuff that made them up is
Speaker 1: destroyeds turned into energy, and then that energy gets turned
Speaker 1: back into mass because a little blob of energy is
Speaker 1: very unstable, doesn't like they hang out very long, and
Speaker 1: so it turns back into mass, and it doesn't have
Speaker 1: to turn back into the same kind of stuff that
Speaker 1: it's started from. So you can turn for example, two
Speaker 1: up corks, you can annihilate them together, turn them into
Speaker 1: a ball of energy, and then they can turn into
Speaker 1: muans or electrons or other weird kinds of particles. And
Speaker 1: it's not required that it's made of the same stuff
Speaker 1: because the stuff has disappeared, it's been annihilated. So it
Speaker 1: really is like modern day alchemy. You know, we're turning
Speaker 1: one kind of stuff into another kind of stuff, and
Speaker 1: that's magical because it means we can create any kind
Speaker 1: of stuff that's sort of on the universe's menu. We
Speaker 1: don't have to know it's there in advance. We just
Speaker 1: pour enough energy into the collisions and eventually all the
Speaker 1: kinds of stuff will pop out. So it's it's really
Speaker 1: like an exploration machine. It's like saying, what's out there,
Speaker 1: what's on Nature's list of particles? What can we make
Speaker 1: if we put enough energy into the collider. And so
Speaker 1: that's how we smash protons together to try to figure
Speaker 1: out what is the list of particles that the universe
Speaker 1: has on the list of sort of allowed states. And
Speaker 1: that's that's what we're doing to try to get inside
Speaker 1: into this question of what is the universe made out of.
Speaker 1: That's InCred credibly cool, like I've never heard it described
Speaker 1: that way. So too, the thought of of smashing these
Speaker 1: protons together at incredibly high energies and then you end
Speaker 1: up as part of that essentially almost like the proto
Speaker 1: energy that can convert into various different types of things
Speaker 1: based on possibly criteria that we don't fully understand. I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously you go. And those are the laws we're trying
Speaker 1: to figure out, you know. We're trying to write down
Speaker 1: mathematical equations that predict how often you'll see this kind
Speaker 1: of particle, how often you see that kind of particle,
Speaker 1: And the kinds of particles that we've studied, you know,
Speaker 1: electrons and mues whatever. We understand how those are made,
Speaker 1: and we can calculate very precisely how often we should
Speaker 1: see them and uh, and what energies and so that's
Speaker 1: the kind of thing we study. We we understand in
Speaker 1: pretty and pretty good detail why some particles are made
Speaker 1: and when and how often. What we're looking for is
Speaker 1: the weird stuff, the stuff we haven't predicted, or the
Speaker 1: stuff we hadn't anticipated, or you know, the things that
Speaker 1: people have predicted but we haven't seen yet. And those
Speaker 1: things tend to be more rare, which is why we
Speaker 1: smash the particles together so often. We do it every
Speaker 1: twenty five nanoseconds, all day, all year long. And the
Speaker 1: reason is most of the stuff that happens is boring.
Speaker 1: We've seen it before. Occasionally, very rarely, something weird will
Speaker 1: happen and that'll give us a clue about maybe a
Speaker 1: new kind of rare particle. So I imagine if you're
Speaker 1: doing this that frequently with that many protons, knowing not
Speaker 1: that all of them are are colliding, but still a
Speaker 1: good amount of them are UM and you have these
Speaker 1: four different points where they're all gathering data that you're
Speaker 1: you're getting getting a few zeros and ones out of there.
Speaker 1: There's a lot I'm guessing a lot of information gets
Speaker 1: generated all the time through these experience. It's a it's
Speaker 1: a tidal wave of data. Every time we have a collision,
Speaker 1: we read out the whole detector, which has a hundred
Speaker 1: million different detector channels. So it's a massive basically digital
Speaker 1: image of the detector every every every twenty five nanoseconds
Speaker 1: UM and so that's pretty that's a pretty large volume
Speaker 1: of data UM and we it's so big that we
Speaker 1: can't even save it all, right, we if we saved
Speaker 1: it all, it would take a huge amount of resources
Speaker 1: and we wouldn't have no time to go through it.
Speaker 1: So what we do, and most of it is not
Speaker 1: very interesting of what happens is just like two protons
Speaker 1: come in, they kind of bounce off each other, two
Speaker 1: protons come out. You know, it's rare that you actually
Speaker 1: have them, like a deep collision that interacts with the
Speaker 1: particles inside that makes something weird. And so what we
Speaker 1: do is we have this system we call it the trigger,
Speaker 1: that makes a keep or kill decision on the fly,
Speaker 1: and it says was it interesting enough to save? If so,
Speaker 1: then shunt it down the down the view the wires
Speaker 1: towards the disk. If no, throw it away. And so
Speaker 1: we have to make these keep or kill decisions every
Speaker 1: twenty five nanoseconds. And when it's gone, it's gone. It's
Speaker 1: not like it's saved to back up and you can
Speaker 1: go through it another time. It's just we just toss
Speaker 1: it out. And so that's a really vital system that's actual.
Speaker 1: The part that my group works on is this trigger system? Interesting? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I always thought when I was learning more about this,
Speaker 1: I wrote an article about how the large hadron collider
Speaker 1: works as part of my work for How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: And while I was working on it, it struck me
Speaker 1: just how amazing the actual apparatus is of creating these
Speaker 1: beams and steering them and creating the collision points. And
Speaker 1: then it occurred to me that as challenging as it is,
Speaker 1: you know, as much learning and engineering and all the
Speaker 1: expertise that would be required to make such a thing happen.
Speaker 1: As impressive as that is, it's it's also incredibly impressive
Speaker 1: to think about how do you deal with the information
Speaker 1: that you generate from such a thing. It's so large,
Speaker 1: and the ability to differentiate between what is interesting versus
Speaker 1: what has already been known and therefore like this is
Speaker 1: something that we don't necessarily need to consider because it's
Speaker 1: this is this is like we might as well have
Speaker 1: this etched on the side of a mountain already. We're good,
Speaker 1: let's just concentrate this other stuff. Um. And as you
Speaker 1: start to look at the challenges that people have with
Speaker 1: big data in general, which is orders of magnitude smaller
Speaker 1: than one is being generated at the LHC. But you
Speaker 1: look at those challenges just like businesses who are saying like,
Speaker 1: we don't even know what what data we have at
Speaker 1: this point, and you think, well, that's troubling. Then you realize, well,
Speaker 1: if we're having trouble with that, imagine the challenge of
Speaker 1: sifting through all that information to find these gems, these
Speaker 1: these indications of something unknown or not fully understood, and
Speaker 1: it boggled my mind. So to me, that is one
Speaker 1: of the the huge achievements was not just the incredible
Speaker 1: technological triumph of building a particle accelerator as large and
Speaker 1: as powerful as the LHC, but then creating the way
Speaker 1: to deal with the information that's generated as a result.
Speaker 1: And I think a lot of people don't necessarily appreciate
Speaker 1: that or understand that, because they're just thinking of, uh,
Speaker 1: there's probably conceptualizing. You know, these these particles hitting each
Speaker 1: other really at high speed, and then there's maybe a
Speaker 1: flash of light or something, and then there's a little
Speaker 1: squiggly line that goes off into the distance and you think, oh,
Speaker 1: that was a cork right now. It's it's because these
Speaker 1: are so far outside the normal experience, it's hard to
Speaker 1: think of. Well, I'll tell you some details about it.
Speaker 1: That's actually the part of it that I'm most interested in. Um.
Speaker 1: But first, the human side of it is that this
Speaker 1: apparatus is so complex that everybody who participates and it's
Speaker 1: you know, tens of thousands of scientists all working together.
Speaker 1: Certainly not my project by myself. Everybody who participates only
Speaker 1: does a little bit. You know, the people who specialize
Speaker 1: in getting the beams to go really high speed, and
Speaker 1: people who specialize in focusing the beams, and people who
Speaker 1: specialize in building the detectors that surround the beam, and
Speaker 1: people who specialize in um in the trigger, and people
Speaker 1: who specialize in analyzing the data. And one of the
Speaker 1: cool things is that you can specialize. You can say
Speaker 1: I really like climbing around the detector with a wrench
Speaker 1: and I want to spend my days doing that, or
Speaker 1: you can say, oh, I'm really interested in the data
Speaker 1: reduction problem, and so we sort of get to attract
Speaker 1: all types and people who are good at different things,
Speaker 1: and everybody gets to do the part they want rather
Speaker 1: than having to do all of it by themselves. Um So,
Speaker 1: I think that's really fun. And the part that I'm
Speaker 1: most interested in is exactly what you were just mentioning,
Speaker 1: is how do you go from this huge pile of
Speaker 1: data to saying things about the universe right to say
Speaker 1: I've got all these zeros and ones. How do I
Speaker 1: then say, oh, look we have a Higgs boson. We
Speaker 1: know it exists or we found dark matter or something
Speaker 1: like that. And and one of the problems is that
Speaker 1: we don't create these particles and then like have them
Speaker 1: in a jar. It's not like we're producing a pile
Speaker 1: of higgs bosons and we can point them to them
Speaker 1: and say, look, these are higgs bosons. You can tell
Speaker 1: you can touch them, or they have some weird property
Speaker 1: or something right the way, like in condensed matter, they
Speaker 1: can make new kinds of goo and then they can
Speaker 1: show it to you and then has with strange effects
Speaker 1: or something. The higgs bosons that we produce only last
Speaker 1: for like ten to the minus twenty something seconds. So
Speaker 1: this this picture I told you where the corks collide,
Speaker 1: they turned into something um some energy. Then they turned
Speaker 1: into a new particle. That's true, but that new particle
Speaker 1: might only last for a really really short amount of
Speaker 1: time because a lot of these particles are very heavy
Speaker 1: and unstable, and they don't like to live very long.
Speaker 1: Unlike you know, electrons or protons, which can last for
Speaker 1: billions or trillions of years, we don't even know. Some
Speaker 1: of these particles are inherently unstable and they turn into
Speaker 1: other particles. And so what we see in our detector
Speaker 1: is never direct proof of that new particle. Instead, it's
Speaker 1: always indirect evidence. It's like, um, you came to a
Speaker 1: UM came to an intersection, and you see, you know,
Speaker 1: shards in the ground. You see glass over here, and
Speaker 1: you see steal over there, and there's a dead body
Speaker 1: over here, and you have to figure out what happened.
Speaker 1: It's always like that that we're looking at what out
Speaker 1: of the collision and trying to figure out what happened
Speaker 1: in the middle. And so a lot of what we
Speaker 1: do is is really complicated statistical inference. We say, given
Speaker 1: the data that we saw, which theory of the universe
Speaker 1: is more likely in the theory with the Higgs boson
Speaker 1: or without the Higgs boson. So most of the actual
Speaker 1: work involved is in constructing those two hypotheses and comparing
Speaker 1: them to the data, saying, how can we analyze the data,
Speaker 1: how can we um you know, plow through the data
Speaker 1: in a way so that these two hypotheses give different predictions.
Speaker 1: Like in the case of the search for the Higgs boson,
Speaker 1: we were looking for collisions that had to photons coming out.
Speaker 1: So two protons come in, two photons come out, right,
Speaker 1: two little beams of light. And that's because the higgs
Speaker 1: boson um sometimes turns into two photons, so we're looking
Speaker 1: for two photons. Problem is, there are other things that
Speaker 1: also turned into two photons, lots of ways to make
Speaker 1: two photons that aren't the Higgs boson. But if you
Speaker 1: did make the Higgs boson and it turned into two photons,
Speaker 1: then it would turn into two photons with a certain
Speaker 1: amount of energy. That amount of energy is connected to
Speaker 1: how much mass is in the Higgs boson. So we
Speaker 1: did is we just said, let's look at all the
Speaker 1: collisions that turned into two photons, and let's just compare,
Speaker 1: and we made sort of a plot where we said,
Speaker 1: on the x axis is the amount of energy and
Speaker 1: the collisions and then why access is the number. So
Speaker 1: if you're envisioning this, we have one theory that says
Speaker 1: there should be a smooth distribution, and then what the
Speaker 1: theory with the Higgs boson says, well, there should be
Speaker 1: a smooth distribution, but then you should you should get
Speaker 1: a bump, you should get an enhancement around the mass
Speaker 1: of the higgs. So one theory is there is no
Speaker 1: Higgs boson and you should get a bunch of just
Speaker 1: random collisions with two photons no special energy levels. And
Speaker 1: the other theory is you have a Higgs boson, which
Speaker 1: means you get extra production of two photon events and
Speaker 1: they should cluster and they should all have a similar energy.
Speaker 1: So if you make this uh this plot, you should
Speaker 1: get a bump near the mass of the Higgs. And
Speaker 1: so essentially we have two hypotheses. We say no Higgs
Speaker 1: boson or Higgs boson, and then we look at the data.
Speaker 1: So we've done the hard work of constructing two possible
Speaker 1: ideas and figuring out what question to ask the data.
Speaker 1: That's always the crucial things. What question are you asking
Speaker 1: the data? And we've composed the question in a way
Speaker 1: that we hope the data can answer it. And that's
Speaker 1: how we discover the Higgs boson is the data followed
Speaker 1: one curve, the curve with a bump in it, and
Speaker 1: not the smooth curve, the curve that had no Higgs boson.
Speaker 1: So a lot of the work we do is involved
Speaker 1: in in analyzing that data, and because it's such a
Speaker 1: big project, we have people specializing in these areas, and
Speaker 1: this is my area specialty is analyzing this data and
Speaker 1: one of my other interests is in computer science and
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence, And in the last five years we've been
Speaker 1: borrowing really heavily from computer science all these new tools
Speaker 1: they've developed to do really fantastical artificial intelligence to recognize patterns.
Speaker 1: We found ways to take those tools and apply them
Speaker 1: to these quests to say, to artificial intelligence tools, can
Speaker 1: you find patterns in this data? Can you learn to
Speaker 1: find Higgs bosons in these ones and zeros um and
Speaker 1: separate them from things that are not Higgs bosons but
Speaker 1: look like them. So we've had a lot of fun
Speaker 1: bringing in ideas from other fields. We don't invent a
Speaker 1: lot of this stuff by ourselves. We sort of you know,
Speaker 1: we have a nail and we sift around for somebody
Speaker 1: nearby who might have a hammer. Mm hmm. Well, that
Speaker 1: to me is always a fascinating thing as well. It's
Speaker 1: it's a different level of innovation where you are thinking,
Speaker 1: rather than let's let's invent a brand new tool to
Speaker 1: do this thing, you say, well, do we have any
Speaker 1: tools that perhaps are not currently being used to do
Speaker 1: this thing, but with some some work, we could repurpose
Speaker 1: them for this thing. Um exactly. It's usually it's a
Speaker 1: happy discovery. Yeah. I remember going over to the computer
Speaker 1: science department it was like two thousand twelve and describing
Speaker 1: this project and saying, look, here's the problem we have.
Speaker 1: We don't have a tool that can solve this problem.
Speaker 1: What do you have? And they said, oh, my gosh,
Speaker 1: we have the perfect tool. Currently we're using it to
Speaker 1: solve this other problem. And I was like, well, what
Speaker 1: problem are you solving and they said, oh, we're trying
Speaker 1: to figure out how to answer the question is there
Speaker 1: a cat in this Internet video? Right? Which is like
Speaker 1: the perfect example of how of a hard but relevant problem,
Speaker 1: Like it's not easy to say, here's a video, can
Speaker 1: you tell me if there's a cadet? It's the kind
Speaker 1: of thing it's easy for a person, but it's really
Speaker 1: hard for a computer program. Right, how do you define
Speaker 1: a cat? And then it's moving through the videos like
Speaker 1: different colors of cats, cats, of different behaviors. It's a
Speaker 1: difficult problem and it's one where there's a lot of
Speaker 1: data available. So the computer scientists latched onto this problem
Speaker 1: not because it was important or particularly interesting or useful,
Speaker 1: but just because it was hard and they had a
Speaker 1: lot of data. So when I came to them, with
Speaker 1: another problem that was hard where we had a lot
Speaker 1: of data but actually had some like scientific value and
Speaker 1: it sounded cool. They were very excited, So they're excited
Speaker 1: to get to use their tool and something that was
Speaker 1: actually real event into society, into physics and to science.
Speaker 1: And we were excited, of course to use their awesome
Speaker 1: tool which worked really, really well. So it's usually a
Speaker 1: sort of a peanut butter and chocolate situation when you
Speaker 1: can find this sort of crossovers nice. I like. I
Speaker 1: like the peanut butter chocolate analogy. Daniel and I have
Speaker 1: more to say about the LHC, but before we get
Speaker 1: to that, we're going to take another quick break. The
Speaker 1: neat thing up to me about the machine learning process
Speaker 1: that you were talking about with with identifying cats and videos.
Speaker 1: Taking an approach like that where again seemingly if you
Speaker 1: if you explain that to someone, they sound they say, well,
Speaker 1: that sounds like it's trivia hill. It's I mean, it
Speaker 1: may be a hard computer problem, but what's the purpose.
Speaker 1: And my argument to them has always been, well, a
Speaker 1: human can immediately tell if the computer was right or
Speaker 1: wrong when it or the machine was right or wrong
Speaker 1: when it comes to its conclusion and therefore go in
Speaker 1: and tweak the waitings of the various decisions points that
Speaker 1: if you're using an our official neural network, you change
Speaker 1: the waitings of the the various values so that it
Speaker 1: can slowly hone in on what is it to be
Speaker 1: a cat and and understand what catness really is, not
Speaker 1: not the character from Hunger Games, but what catness really is.
Speaker 1: And that one, yes, exactly, that's that's exactly what you
Speaker 1: want to do, right If you're trying to create a
Speaker 1: tool like this, you want to pick a goal where
Speaker 1: a human can say, yes, the the computer has managed
Speaker 1: to hit that goal, or no, the computer has not.
Speaker 1: So that way, once you've perfected the approach and you
Speaker 1: can then start to apply it to things where uh,
Speaker 1: we don't have as full of an understanding. It's the
Speaker 1: difference between supervised learning with machine learning and unsupervised learning.
Speaker 1: And and to me, that's a very fascinating area of study.
Speaker 1: I've talked about that a lot on tech stuff as well,
Speaker 1: and uh, it also gets into other issues that I
Speaker 1: won't I won't dive into here, things like the the
Speaker 1: need for transparency for these kind of systems so that
Speaker 1: we understand how they get to their conclusions and it's
Speaker 1: not just a black box, etcetera, etcetera. But I digress.
Speaker 1: How does it know what's a cat? Exactly? Exactly? Interpreting
Speaker 1: these networks is very important. Yeah, if you get to
Speaker 1: a point where you watch a video and you say, oh,
Speaker 1: I didn't see a cat in there, but the computer
Speaker 1: says there's a cat in there, And the computer says, no,
Speaker 1: there absolutely as a cat in there. Just because you
Speaker 1: didn't see it doesn't mean it's not there. And then
Speaker 1: you start to get a little worried. You're thinking, are
Speaker 1: we are we heading toward how territory here? Let's uh,
Speaker 1: let's pump the brakes a little bit and find out
Speaker 1: how you got them happy to see to the computers
Speaker 1: the job of determining whether is a cat in the video?
Speaker 1: They're better than I am. You say that, but I
Speaker 1: find cat video so cathartic. Um. So this one thing
Speaker 1: I wanted to touch on just briefly, um, and that
Speaker 1: might be difficult to do. But yeah, we mentioned Higgs
Speaker 1: boson quite a quite a bit. And how would you
Speaker 1: describe what the eggs boson is to someone who's interested
Speaker 1: in it but doesn't have that background in in physics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the Higgs boson is fascinating a particle, and it's
Speaker 1: a sort of part of the answer to the question
Speaker 1: what is stuff? You know, we want to understand what
Speaker 1: are things made out of? A part of that is
Speaker 1: understanding like what am I made out of? What is
Speaker 1: the substance of me? And you imagine that if you
Speaker 1: take yourself apart, you're made out of molecules. Those molecules
Speaker 1: made out of atoms. Those atoms are made out of
Speaker 1: protons and electrons and neutrons, and the protons are made
Speaker 1: out of quarks. So at this point we can describe
Speaker 1: everything that you're made out of in terms of quarks
Speaker 1: and electrons um. But what we still don't know is
Speaker 1: what are those made out of? Like do they get
Speaker 1: a little scoop of universe stuff? You know, there's some
Speaker 1: sort of basic matter unit, and we don't understand like
Speaker 1: how do they have mass? Where does their mass come from?
Speaker 1: And it's a mystery because in our theory, these particles
Speaker 1: are not little balls. Like when I say a particle,
Speaker 1: you're probably imagining like a little spinning beach ball, right,
Speaker 1: a tiny little dot of actual stuff, but something with
Speaker 1: extent to its mo with size. Well, in our current theory,
Speaker 1: these particles don't have any size. Their dots there points
Speaker 1: in space, which means where is the stuff to them? Right?
Speaker 1: Where is the mass? Where does the mass come from? Um,
Speaker 1: there's no room for any mass in a point. Right.
Speaker 1: If there's mass, there have infinite density, which makes no
Speaker 1: sense at all. You have like all these tiny black holes.
Speaker 1: So the Higgs boson is in a way is a
Speaker 1: way to answer that. What it does is it says
Speaker 1: that the mass the particles have doesn't come from a
Speaker 1: little scoop of universe stuff that they got. Instead, you
Speaker 1: have to think of it's sort of like a charge.
Speaker 1: Like when I tell you an electron has a negative charge.
Speaker 1: That doesn't bother you. But what if I told you
Speaker 1: electron is a point particle there's no room for it.
Speaker 1: Would you ask where does the negative charge go? Or
Speaker 1: is there room for the negative charge? You just think
Speaker 1: of negative charge is sort of like a lay bowl,
Speaker 1: something that you can apply to a tiny dot. We
Speaker 1: should think of mass the same way. Mass is not
Speaker 1: a little serving of universe stuff. It's like a charge,
Speaker 1: and a charge is something that tells us how things interact.
Speaker 1: So an electron has a negative charge, which means it
Speaker 1: you know, um gets repelled from positive stuff, and they
Speaker 1: can interact with photons and things like that. Um particles
Speaker 1: that have mass. Um those particles that have mass, they
Speaker 1: have mass, which is a charge. It tells us how
Speaker 1: it interacts with the Higgs boson. So the Higgs boson
Speaker 1: is the thing that gives these that that interacts with
Speaker 1: these particles and makes them move as if they had mass,
Speaker 1: So they have something the label on them, and the
Speaker 1: higgs boson interacts with them if you have if you
Speaker 1: have a lot of mass, higgs boson interacts with them
Speaker 1: a lot, and that's what gives them inertia. It makes
Speaker 1: makes it hard for them to speed up or hard
Speaker 1: for them to slow down. Right, And so that's what
Speaker 1: the higgs boson does, is it gives mass to these
Speaker 1: particles or explains how a tiny little particle can have
Speaker 1: any mass at all. And the fascinating thing is that
Speaker 1: the idea has been around for decades before we actually
Speaker 1: found it. Some theorist was looking at the list of
Speaker 1: particles and the math behind them and saying this doesn't
Speaker 1: really make sense, like how do these particles, how can
Speaker 1: these particles have mass. There's no way to give them
Speaker 1: mass in our theory. Like, we have a really beautiful
Speaker 1: theory that would work perfectly if all the particles in
Speaker 1: the universe had no mass, But the particles do have mass,
Speaker 1: and when you try to add mass in various ways,
Speaker 1: it just doesn't work mathematically. It breaks all sorts of
Speaker 1: other rules. So he came up with a way to
Speaker 1: give math to these particles by having them interact with
Speaker 1: this other new particle we've never seen before. And the
Speaker 1: thing I love about that is that it's it's purely aesthetic.
Speaker 1: It's like philosophical. It's like saying, I'm looking at all
Speaker 1: these puzzle pieces and it seems to be one missing.
Speaker 1: This whole story, right, This more back to the idea
Speaker 1: of a story. This whole story would make much more
Speaker 1: sense if there was one more character in it. It
Speaker 1: would just click together, would be symmetric, it would be beautiful,
Speaker 1: it would mathematically look pretty. And so he said, well, abe,
Speaker 1: there is one, right, so let's go look for it.
Speaker 1: And it was so compelling an idea that we spent
Speaker 1: decades and billions of dollars looking for it and then
Speaker 1: actually found it. Right, what a triumph for theoretical physics.
Speaker 1: To say, just in my mind, I can think about
Speaker 1: the patterns of the universe and predict what else is
Speaker 1: out there that we've never seen. To me, that's incredible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love that. It's a story where we take a
Speaker 1: look at at an idea that's that's largely fleshed out,
Speaker 1: and then we think, there's this would work so great
Speaker 1: if only there was this thing. You know what, I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna I'm going to create the mathematics here. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna figure out mathematically how this thing could
Speaker 1: exist if everything else we've assumed is more or less right,
Speaker 1: And then wow, that looks really nice. Boy, it would
Speaker 1: be great if that thing exists. We should find out
Speaker 1: if that thing exists, and then and then a lot
Speaker 1: of time and thought is put to it. Not obviously
Speaker 1: I'm trivial I saying, I'm very much generalizing. But to me,
Speaker 1: it's just it is beautiful, but it's also there's like
Speaker 1: a level there's a level of beautiful absurdity to it
Speaker 1: that I find interesting from my perspective, not being a
Speaker 1: physicist right where to me, it's it's I don't know,
Speaker 1: you sound like you kind of are an amateur physicist.
Speaker 1: I mean, you think about these ways like a physicist.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not all about the mathematical training. It's
Speaker 1: that's what about the front, the way you think, and
Speaker 1: the way you ask questions. So I'm happy to bestow
Speaker 1: you upon you the dubious honor being a deputized amateur physicist. Excellent.
Speaker 1: I cannot I cannot wait to abuse my authority alcoholic
Speaker 1: looking certificate in the mail pretty soon. Yeah, you'll see
Speaker 1: me walking into restaurants saying, give me a good table.
Speaker 1: I am an honorary physicist, and they'll say, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it doesn't work for for podcast celebrity either. I can
Speaker 1: tell you from ten years of experience. Yeah, it's the
Speaker 1: I have the level of fame that is almost but
Speaker 1: not quite completely useless, And honestly I'm okay with that.
Speaker 1: Um well, let me let me shift this a little bit.
Speaker 1: We'll kind of uh get toward the end of our
Speaker 1: conversation here to talk about some more silly fun stuff.
Speaker 1: One of the things I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: heard about when the LHC was, you know, still powering up.
Speaker 1: It was a very long process. In fact, it was
Speaker 1: longer than we had anticipated because there were some problems
Speaker 1: that we encountered along the way. I say we as
Speaker 1: if I had anything to do with it. You're an
Speaker 1: honor Earth physics. Now you can say we they're excellent,
Speaker 1: and it's it's uh, it's so good to join the collective.
Speaker 1: But the there were there were some issues, and it
Speaker 1: also led to a lot of speculation, much of it
Speaker 1: completely baseless from people who had little to no understanding
Speaker 1: of what was happening, but apparently access to wonderful platforms
Speaker 1: from which they could espouse these these baseless claims. But
Speaker 1: we had everything from people saying this is going to
Speaker 1: create black holes without really one understanding what a black
Speaker 1: hole is to understand inning if that were in fact
Speaker 1: to happen. The time frame we're talking about, and the size,
Speaker 1: the the uh of it, and and what energy level
Speaker 1: we'd be talking about less than what a mosquito generates
Speaker 1: when it flaps its wings, for example, and at a
Speaker 1: at a at a time that's so small that is
Speaker 1: impossible for us to think of it. We can we
Speaker 1: could look at a measurement, We could look at a
Speaker 1: number with a whole bunch of zeros, you know, a dot,
Speaker 1: a bunch of zeros and then a one after it,
Speaker 1: and think, oh, that's how long it is based on
Speaker 1: you know, point zero zero zero, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, one seconds.
Speaker 1: But you can't by the time you think that, so
Speaker 1: countless number of those have passed. And so to me,
Speaker 1: that was one of those things that I found funny
Speaker 1: and infuriating at the same time, this sort of misconception about, oh,
Speaker 1: the LHC is a doomsday device that is going to
Speaker 1: end all life because we're going to create a black
Speaker 1: hole that will suck up the entire universe. There's even,
Speaker 1: as I recall, there's a website that had a very funny,
Speaker 1: very amateurish gift of a picture supposedly from a security
Speaker 1: camera outside the LHC just getting sucked in to a
Speaker 1: single point as if a black hole had been created,
Speaker 1: and I thought, wow, that's amazing. That's amazing connection to
Speaker 1: be able to continue to broadcast while spaghettification is happening.
Speaker 1: My favorite website is called has the Large hage On
Speaker 1: Collider destroyed the world yet? Dot com? We promise as
Speaker 1: physicist to always keep up to date, right, so if
Speaker 1: you go to that website and it says yes, then
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, you might wanna, you might want to,
Speaker 1: you know, might make some plans, But yeah, this is
Speaker 1: a this is a common thing that's raised, and I
Speaker 1: think it's reasonable for people to wonder, like our physicists
Speaker 1: going to trigger some sort of universal apocalypse which ends
Speaker 1: society as we know it. It's a fair question, um,
Speaker 1: But it's also reasonable for us to lean on physicists
Speaker 1: expertise and answering the question. In this case, I think
Speaker 1: Cerain has done an excellent job of taking this concern seriously.
Speaker 1: So for those who don't know, there really is a
Speaker 1: theory that we could be creating miniature black holes at
Speaker 1: the large A Run collider. The idea is that gravity
Speaker 1: might be very very power. Gravity, which is the weakest force,
Speaker 1: might actually be very very powerful if you bring things
Speaker 1: really close together, like the close the size you know,
Speaker 1: the width of a proton is sort of close together.
Speaker 1: So if you smash these protons together really high energy,
Speaker 1: they might get close enough where the gravity gets really
Speaker 1: really strong. I meaning you could create black holes, because
Speaker 1: black holes are essentially displaces where gravity gets really strong.
Speaker 1: And if that's the case, those black holes, if they
Speaker 1: last long enough could sit there and sort of swallow matter.
Speaker 1: But you know, there's lots of reasons not to be
Speaker 1: worried about that. First of all, we think if these
Speaker 1: black holes are created, they wouldn't last very long. They
Speaker 1: would radiate into nothing using Hawking radiation. And if they
Speaker 1: and and we believe that collisions have been happening for
Speaker 1: a long long time, like we've been being hit by
Speaker 1: particles from space for ever basically, and those particles are
Speaker 1: traveling much faster than the particles of the large change
Speaker 1: on colider. So if collisions of particles we're going to
Speaker 1: cause Earth destroying black holes, it would have happened already.
Speaker 1: And so there's a pretty in depth analysis of this
Speaker 1: um And I think one thing that's funny about is
Speaker 1: sort of the social aspect of it. Like if you
Speaker 1: ask a physicist, is it possible for the l AC
Speaker 1: to destroy the universe, to destroy the Earth. The answer
Speaker 1: is technically, yes, it's possible. You don't want to talk
Speaker 1: about exactly, But there's a difference between, you know, a
Speaker 1: scientific answer and a sort of a public relations answer
Speaker 1: where it's possible but not to the level where it's
Speaker 1: really worth talking about. Like it's possible for me to
Speaker 1: disappear in quantum mechanically appear in Paris. Sure it's not impossible,
Speaker 1: but it's the real The odds are so remote, and
Speaker 1: nobody should factor that into their plans. And that's really
Speaker 1: what people are asking about, Like, is this possible at
Speaker 1: the level where we need to worry about it and
Speaker 1: make policy changes or you know, use it to base
Speaker 1: decisions on And the answer is no. Um. But you know,
Speaker 1: we as humans are pretty bad about thinking about dangers
Speaker 1: and making decisions based on that. You know, you'll worry
Speaker 1: about being struck by lightning or being eaten by sharks,
Speaker 1: but we don't worry too much about handgun safety this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. So as you on, as we we
Speaker 1: have our policies upside down, or even you know, the
Speaker 1: likelihood of getting in even a minor accident in a car,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's incredibly likely compared to these other things.
Speaker 1: But these other things because they I think largely because
Speaker 1: they and they tap into that same part of our
Speaker 1: brains that finds fascination in the unknown. There's there's that
Speaker 1: related element, the fear of the unknown. The two are
Speaker 1: very close. And the less you know about something the
Speaker 1: more likely you are to fear it um. And paradoxically,
Speaker 1: also the more you know about something, depending on what
Speaker 1: it is, the more you might start to fear it. Um.
Speaker 1: So it's it's a really interesting Oh boy, be human.
Speaker 1: Sure is great, um. But in the end, it's all about,
Speaker 1: you know, trying to answer these questions and exploring the unknown,
Speaker 1: and to me, that's always worth it. The guys who
Speaker 1: jumped in a ship and sailed into the ocean not
Speaker 1: knowing what they were gonna find, you know, they were
Speaker 1: part of that. It's a it's a long legacy of
Speaker 1: exploration and to me that's one of the most exciting
Speaker 1: things we can do as a species. Daniel, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for joining our show. Please can you tell
Speaker 1: us a little bit about your podcast and why everyone
Speaker 1: needs to listen to it? Sure? Um. Our podcast is
Speaker 1: called Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. I'm one half
Speaker 1: of it. The other half is Jorge Chom, the Internet
Speaker 1: famous cartoons behind PhD Comics, and we do a fun
Speaker 1: chat about philosophy and science and trying to explain things
Speaker 1: about the universe and the idea there is to take
Speaker 1: big topics and break them up into pieces that are
Speaker 1: actually understandable, not just so you hear a lot of
Speaker 1: fancy words and you don't really understand, but so that
Speaker 1: you've come away with a pretty good grasp of what
Speaker 1: these topics are. And we cover things like the Big
Speaker 1: Bang and teleportation and fast and light travel and history
Speaker 1: of the universe and the future of the universe. And
Speaker 1: so check it out. It's a lot of fun. It's
Speaker 1: called Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. Yeah, it's fantastic, guys.
Speaker 1: If you have not listened, you need to check it out.
Speaker 1: I very much enjoyed it's I consider it sort of
Speaker 1: a spiritual cousin to text stuff and and and it
Speaker 1: makes me. It makes me long for the day when
Speaker 1: I can I can get a co host who I
Speaker 1: can bounce stuff off of and they can bounce stuff
Speaker 1: off of me. Right now, I'm playing tennis with myself,
Speaker 1: so that is always a challenge. Daniel, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for joining the show. We greatly appreciate it. Thanks
Speaker 1: very much for having me on. And hello to all
Speaker 1: your listeners. We'll be back with a little bit more
Speaker 1: about the LHC after these messages. I hope you enjoyed
Speaker 1: that episode. From two thousand nineteen and again tomorrow we
Speaker 1: should have the second part the space Suit episode. I
Speaker 1: apologize again, I'm so glad we did not call this
Speaker 1: show How Tech Works, because, based on my experience of
Speaker 1: trying to troubleshoot for the last several hours, I clearly
Speaker 1: don't know as much as I thought I did. To
Speaker 1: be fair, there's some pretty extraordinary circumstances that are interfering,
Speaker 1: but all excuses aside. We will have the part two
Speaker 1: of the space Suits episode tomorrow. I hope you are
Speaker 1: doing well, and if you have suggestions for topics I
Speaker 1: should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out.
Speaker 1: The best way to do that is on Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle for the show is text stuff H s W
Speaker 1: and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
Speaker 1: is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
Speaker 1: my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Three