Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to Tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works in I heart radio and I love
Speaker 1: all things tech, and today we have a very special
Speaker 1: guest on our show, someone who has worked on really
Speaker 1: interesting problems. Is a rare occasion that I get to
Speaker 1: talk to someone who has experienced in high energy particle physics.
Speaker 1: So I want to introduce to all of you, if
Speaker 1: you haven't listened to his amazing podcast yet, Daniel Whitson.
Speaker 1: Dr Daniel Whitson that Welcome to the show. Hi, thanks
Speaker 1: a lot for having me on. I am so glad
Speaker 1: to have you here now. Daniel, you are one half
Speaker 1: of the podcast team of Daniel and Jorge Explained the Universe,
Speaker 1: and thank you for taking time away from explaining the
Speaker 1: universe to grace my humble show with your presence. I
Speaker 1: greatly appreciate it. Well, thanks a lot for having me on.
Speaker 1: You guys talk about really fascinating stuff, so it's a
Speaker 1: pleasure to be here. It's been a pleasure listening to
Speaker 1: your show. We'll talk a little bit more about that
Speaker 1: towards the end of the episode, but just so that
Speaker 1: my listeners kind of understand where you you're coming from
Speaker 1: before we get into work with the Large Hadron Collider
Speaker 1: and CERN and particle physics. Tell us a bit about yourself,
Speaker 1: all right, Well, I'm devastatingly good looking, which is why
Speaker 1: I have a podcast, and m familiar my my. The
Speaker 1: most important thing to know about me in this context,
Speaker 1: I guess, is that I am a high energy physicist,
Speaker 1: which means that I'm interested in studying the universe at
Speaker 1: the smallest scale, and I do so by smashing stuff
Speaker 1: together at the highest energy. It's like, you know, you
Speaker 1: want to understand how things work, take them apart, and
Speaker 1: that basically what we do is we try to take
Speaker 1: the whole universe apart and understand how it works. So
Speaker 1: I'm a professor at the University of California at Irvine
Speaker 1: that's in Orange County and m I work there, and
Speaker 1: 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 start?
Speaker 1: And how is it going to end? And we basically
Speaker 1: try to tackle those really big sexy questions. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: I love the way you describe that, the idea of
Speaker 1: taking apart the very basic particles that make up stuff
Speaker 1: and and and finding out what makes that work. It's
Speaker 1: very relatable to all the stories of the various innovators
Speaker 1: who got their start taking apart the various pieces of
Speaker 1: technology they have, often to the detriment of their family,
Speaker 1: and then learning how it works and then hopefully being
Speaker 1: able to put it back together again. Except we're looking
Speaker 1: at reality here, how the the very fabric that makes
Speaker 1: up existence works. And uh I also I watched a
Speaker 1: great presentation that you and Jorge gave in which you
Speaker 1: talked about your book and you talked about the gaps
Speaker 1: and scientific knowledge, and that also made me feel like
Speaker 1: I am all a smart person, only because in the
Speaker 1: past I have described our understanding of the universe like
Speaker 1: we're staring through a key hole and we can only
Speaker 1: see a little bit of the illuminated room that's beyond
Speaker 1: the keyhole, and there's stuff and shadows, So there are
Speaker 1: things that we don't really see, and there are elements
Speaker 1: that are out of you and to us. That's that's
Speaker 1: our understanding of the universe. We only see a very
Speaker 1: narrow band of what really exists out there, and our
Speaker 1: goal is to expand that over time. That's right, and
Speaker 1: the most amazing thing in my perspective is that we've
Speaker 1: only recently disc covered 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: it turns 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. I mean that
Speaker 1: maybe some of the most dramatic, most insightful realizations about
Speaker 1: the 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 and 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? Let me 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. But for 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 have a deeper understanding to the point now where
Speaker 1: we even are able to get a grasp on the
Speaker 1: idea that as humans, as as we are the way
Speaker 1: we have evolved, we have limitations in our perception. There
Speaker 1: are things that we are capable of perceiving because we
Speaker 1: have evolved. It is advantageous, it made sense in our environment,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean that's everything there is out there,
Speaker 1: which kind of leads into discussions that I've heard about,
Speaker 1: you know, the various dimensions that we were capable of perceiving.
Speaker 1: Some of those obviously we can we can observe the
Speaker 1: physical dimensions, and then once you start figuring that out,
Speaker 1: you say, well, it may be a leap to you
Speaker 1: to think there are so many more dimensions or potentially
Speaker 1: more dimensions than the ones we can perceive. But we
Speaker 1: also know that we can't see things in the infrared
Speaker 1: or ultra violet UH wave forms. But with technology, we
Speaker 1: can convert that into light that we can see. And
Speaker 1: once you start looking at things like that level where
Speaker 1: you say, oh, yeah, I guess we have developed tools
Speaker 1: that let us go beyond our limitations in our perception,
Speaker 1: then it kind of opens up your mind into the
Speaker 1: idea of now I kind of understand how there can
Speaker 1: be things like dark energy and dark matter that are
Speaker 1: beyond our current capability of detecting it, because it took
Speaker 1: thousands of years for us to get to the point
Speaker 1: where we could, uh could even indirectly observe stuff like
Speaker 1: being for red in the ultraviolet. So that's sort of
Speaker 1: the approach I take with people as well, the idea
Speaker 1: that it feels like you're taking a big leap when
Speaker 1: you start going into things like particle physics, when you
Speaker 1: start talking about quantum quantum effects, because everything seems so strange.
Speaker 1: It doesn't it doesn't work the way the classical physics work,
Speaker 1: and it's it feels like you're asking people to take
Speaker 1: a leap of faith. But once you start to build
Speaker 1: on those blocks, they say, okay, all right, now I'm
Speaker 1: with you. Now I got it. And that kind of
Speaker 1: brings us over to the work that we see over
Speaker 1: at at CERN and the large Hey drunk collider. Now,
Speaker 1: one thing I like to remind people about as well
Speaker 1: before we get there. I thinks he's touched on a
Speaker 1: really interesting topic there. You know, Um, I think people
Speaker 1: have been thinking about mysteries for a long time, right,
Speaker 1: And for a long time, the world was really mysterious.
Speaker 1: It was obvious that there were mysteries. You could just
Speaker 1: go outside and there were things you didn't understand. What
Speaker 1: is lightning? Right? Um? And it's sort of it was
Speaker 1: a common feeling that the world was mysterious, you know,
Speaker 1: like there are more things in the heavens and earth
Speaker 1: than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Right, it's it's
Speaker 1: even in literature. But we've sort of lost that. I
Speaker 1: think a lot of people these days when they walk around,
Speaker 1: they feel like they mostly understand stuff, like, yeah, we
Speaker 1: 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 a 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 matter is 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 feeling that's exactly
Speaker 1: what's going to be needed, because I this is the
Speaker 1: source of stuff I love to talk about, just to
Speaker 1: anyone who will, you know, be patient enough to let
Speaker 1: me chatter at them, let me ask you a question
Speaker 1: that you you mentioned about how we used to explain
Speaker 1: things in terms of gods, and I think that makes
Speaker 1: a lot of sense because humans are good at like
Speaker 1: identifying agency and willfulness in places where there aren't any, Right.
Speaker 1: But there's another element to that, which is the sort
Speaker 1: of the narrative. Right, These gods don't just have personalities
Speaker 1: and wheels that had stories that reasons why they were
Speaker 1: doing what they were doing. And I feel like storytelling
Speaker 1: is a big part of who we are as a species.
Speaker 1: And it's still even though we're not explaining things in
Speaker 1: terms of God's it still drives our science. Like you know,
Speaker 1: if you asked me, um, what would you do if
Speaker 1: you knew the final answer to particle physics, Like if
Speaker 1: you could explain the whole universe in terms of one particle, Um,
Speaker 1: you know that, I would say, then we would want
Speaker 1: to tell a story, right, We want to tell a
Speaker 1: story about what that means about the universe and why
Speaker 1: the universe? Why is the universe this way and not
Speaker 1: the other way? First we have to figure out what
Speaker 1: way is the universe, and then we want to know,
Speaker 1: like why that way. In the end, we're still telling
Speaker 1: stories to ourselves about how the universe came to be
Speaker 1: and what it means and how we should live our lives.
Speaker 1: So it's a very human endeavor. Well, certainly, I mean,
Speaker 1: we we call it matter, and we know about anti matter,
Speaker 1: but we chose the optimist route right when we describe,
Speaker 1: when we describe these things that are antithetical to one another,
Speaker 1: and they they annihilate one another when they come into contact.
Speaker 1: And for some reason that we don't fully understand, we
Speaker 1: had slightly more matter than we had antimatter, and therefore
Speaker 1: we've got stuff. I mean, if we had been pessimists,
Speaker 1: we would call the stuff we have the antimatter, right,
Speaker 1: So clearly there's a narrative issue there. So here, seriously,
Speaker 1: here's the question. Then the question is do you think
Speaker 1: if we met an alien species of physicists, do you
Speaker 1: think they would be asking the same questions or would
Speaker 1: they be satisfied with our answers, or do you think
Speaker 1: the kind of questions we're asking are inherently human in
Speaker 1: some 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, you,
Speaker 1: you mean you're the only intelligent life form, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean of entire I'm talking about entire species. I
Speaker 1: guess I'm not not only. I mean, I could get
Speaker 1: super nihilistic and and and very egotistical and say, well,
Speaker 1: I can only experience my own experience, and therefore I
Speaker 1: know I'm intelligence. But I'm just granting everybody else that consideration. Um,
Speaker 1: that's very this This gets into philosophy and then, which
Speaker 1: I also fascinated by. But I'm a pragmatist, so eventually
Speaker 1: I get very irritated. Um, that's an excellent question, and
Speaker 1: and honestly, the it's one that I haven't given a
Speaker 1: lot of consideration too, largely because I have accepted the fact,
Speaker 1: or at least accepted the notion that any sufficiently intelligent
Speaker 1: species that may exist somewhere else could be so very
Speaker 1: different from what we experience that that the word alien
Speaker 1: only begins to describe how we would uh define such
Speaker 1: a species, And that perhaps their approach to understanding and
Speaker 1: explaining the universe to themselves would be very different. But
Speaker 1: it seems like it would follow a similar pattern but
Speaker 1: I say that only because that's what that's what has
Speaker 1: happened here. I don't have anywhere else to draw any
Speaker 1: conclusions from. So, um, it's so hard to imagine outside
Speaker 1: of your experience, right, It's it's very, very difficult. Yet
Speaker 1: in science, when we discover something new, we're always describing
Speaker 1: it in terms of the things we know. Like we
Speaker 1: want to know what is light? Is it a little particle?
Speaker 1: Is it a little way? Because of the things we know? Right,
Speaker 1: when we find something that's totally new and different, we
Speaker 1: don't even really have the words to describe it. So
Speaker 1: imagining what it's like to be an alien scientist, I
Speaker 1: think it's an impossible question. So yeah, and that's that's
Speaker 1: why I posed it to you. It's why it's why
Speaker 1: I while I find science fiction endlessly entertaining, I love
Speaker 1: science fiction. I also always I roll my eyes a
Speaker 1: little bit when I see the star Trek approach of
Speaker 1: every alien race is a humanoid with slightly different bumps
Speaker 1: on their head, and they speak English the same way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Universal Translator has no problem picking up what their
Speaker 1: speech patterns are. So that like, even when you use
Speaker 1: the Universal translator, uh, the you know, d o Sex
Speaker 1: Macina coming in and saying, oh, yeah, this is going
Speaker 1: to translate everything magically. You think you kind of need
Speaker 1: a sample size, don't you, before you really get a
Speaker 1: grasp on it. But I mean, we have a hard
Speaker 1: enough trouble, hard enough time even on Earth sometimes understanding
Speaker 1: human cultures from around the globe, you know, so understanding
Speaker 1: how to interact with aliens. I think it's gonna be helpless.
Speaker 1: Like if we ever heard a message from aliens, and
Speaker 1: you know, even decoding it would be a huge problem
Speaker 1: if you could even get past that. I have challenges
Speaker 1: understanding some of my relatives, and we all speak the
Speaker 1: same language and arguably come from the same culture. Are
Speaker 1: you sure they all come from Earth? I mean, that
Speaker 1: might be an explanation. I got an uncle that's questionable,
Speaker 1: but pretty much everyone else I got a pretty good
Speaker 1: handle on. This is This is great. This is gonna
Speaker 1: be an eighteen partner. Guys, I'm just gonna sit here
Speaker 1: and and and and monopolized annuals. Time for the rest
Speaker 1: of you. Want to talk about the large Adran Collider
Speaker 1: rather than philosophy of alien civilization, I wouldn't say. Rather,
Speaker 1: I'll just say that my questions were about, well, you know,
Speaker 1: there's one topic which connects them um, which is the
Speaker 1: one way we might discover an alien civilization is by
Speaker 1: first detecting their particle physicists. I have not heard this.
Speaker 1: It might be if somebody's if aliens are building like
Speaker 1: enormous particle colliders like the size of a solar system,
Speaker 1: and we might eventually like sweep through the essentially the
Speaker 1: pollution from that part from that particle accelerator and discover
Speaker 1: them in that way. That would be pretty crazy way
Speaker 1: to find an alien species, But that would be awesome
Speaker 1: because it 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 is
Speaker 1: made out of, and everyone's figuring it out by smashing
Speaker 1: stuff together. So that would be pretty exciting discovery. It
Speaker 1: is interesting I had not heard about that particul are
Speaker 1: a kind of an idea. I've heard of, of course,
Speaker 1: enormous constructs that could especially when you talk about things
Speaker 1: like the Kardashov scale and you're thinking about like the
Speaker 1: dice and sphere and that kind of stuff. These hypothetical
Speaker 1: UM machines that would need to exist in order to
Speaker 1: to take advantage of, say, an entire solar system's energy output,
Speaker 1: which would be necessary to reach those higher levels of
Speaker 1: civilization that we've heard about. But I hadn't heard about.
Speaker 1: I hadn't thought about a particle accelery the size of
Speaker 1: a solar system. To be perfectly honest, the large Hadron
Speaker 1: collider is is a big enough beast for me to
Speaker 1: try and get my mind wrapped around. I mean, they're
Speaker 1: talking about pretty expensive. So yeah, the solar system sized
Speaker 1: collider is going to take another level of civilization before
Speaker 1: we can afford that kind of equipment. Yeah. Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: this is Jonathan from the Future just breaking into Jonathan
Speaker 1: from the past to explain that we're going to take
Speaker 1: a quick break with our conversation with Daniel Whiteson to
Speaker 1: thank our sponsor. So getting to the large Hadron Collider. Uh,
Speaker 1: that would you know? And CERN as well. A lot
Speaker 1: of people think of of CERN is just because the
Speaker 1: Large Hadron Collider got so much press a few years
Speaker 1: ago when it was when they were preparing to bring
Speaker 1: it up online and they were starting to stub up
Speaker 1: the energy levels. I think a lot of people just
Speaker 1: associated those two as being. Uh, the only real like
Speaker 1: they CERN is just that's the agency to oversee the
Speaker 1: Large Hadron Collider. I like to remind people that CERN
Speaker 1: is also the organization where because CERN exists, we have
Speaker 1: a worldwide web. I mean the web started from Tim
Speaker 1: berners Lee, who was working for CERTAIN at the time. So, uh,
Speaker 1: I like to remind people that it's beyond that. But
Speaker 1: let's talk a bit so. So CERN is a European agency.
Speaker 1: That UM is a scientifically oriented agency looking into things
Speaker 1: like these, these high energy reactions. And the large Hadron
Speaker 1: Collider is a particle accelerator. Uh, can I give us
Speaker 1: an overview of what the LHC is for for someone
Speaker 1: who has heard the term but they don't really get
Speaker 1: they don't grock it entirely, alright, Sure, UM, the large
Speaker 1: hay Droun Collider. The basic idea is, let's figure out
Speaker 1: what's inside matter. Let's figure out what's inside matter, and
Speaker 1: let's do that by smashing particles together. So what you
Speaker 1: do with the large Hadron collider the word large it
Speaker 1: obviously just means it's really big. Hadron is a kind
Speaker 1: of particle, and proton is the example of it. So
Speaker 1: you could also call it the Large Proton Collider. UM.
Speaker 1: And we take protons, which are essentially just the nucleus
Speaker 1: of hydrogen. So you start with hydrogen gas which is
Speaker 1: easy to get, heat it up, so the electrons boil off,
Speaker 1: and you left with just the nucleus, which is protons.
Speaker 1: And what we do is we give those protons a kick.
Speaker 1: We use electromagnetic waves to push them, and we push
Speaker 1: them faster and faster and faster and faster until they're
Speaker 1: going about in ninety niono the speed of light. And
Speaker 1: then we smash them into each other. And the idea is,
Speaker 1: see what comes out, See what kind of weird mysterious
Speaker 1: quantum mechanical magic happens to give you new kinds of
Speaker 1: matter and new weird particles. Um. But as you said,
Speaker 1: the Large Hadron Collider is so to the flagship property
Speaker 1: flagship Experimenter, but certain is much broader than that. It's
Speaker 1: a it's a European organization, but it's also international. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've I've been there many summers and you sit at
Speaker 1: a table at the restaurant and there's people speaking all
Speaker 1: sorts of languages. You know, this Italian at this table
Speaker 1: and Russian at that table and tie at the other table,
Speaker 1: and Chinese over here, and you meet people from hundreds
Speaker 1: of countries, well not hundreds, but more than a hundred countries,
Speaker 1: and it's a it's a super international place, which is
Speaker 1: really wonderful, and right now it really is the center
Speaker 1: of the world and the Solar System, and you know,
Speaker 1: maybe the galaxy in terms of particle physics. But we
Speaker 1: do more than just the Large Hadron Collider. We also
Speaker 1: have experiments studying the mysterious particle called the new trino.
Speaker 1: Neutrinos are produced by the Sun and the surface of
Speaker 1: the Earth is just bombarded with neutrinos, but they're mostly
Speaker 1: invisible to us. They don't interact with us, but they
Speaker 1: have a lot of really interesting properties that we don't understand.
Speaker 1: So CERTAIN does a lot of neutrino physics as well.
Speaker 1: Um they do cosmic ray physics, looking at weird particles
Speaker 1: from space. They do a big variety of particle physics.
Speaker 1: And CERTAIN has played a big role in politics as well.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you're aware, but Certain was founded
Speaker 1: after World War Two, the idea being let's get all
Speaker 1: the scientists of Europe to work together on projects rather
Speaker 1: than hiding in their own labs and hating each other
Speaker 1: and sort of like using science as this common human bridge,
Speaker 1: like let's get connected. Let's not have our own like
Speaker 1: individual weapons projects. Let's find something we can all work
Speaker 1: together on in a positive way. And I think it's
Speaker 1: really credited with tying European science together in a way
Speaker 1: that's made it more effective. And you know, building harmonies
Speaker 1: between nations is also good, and I know that personally
Speaker 1: at certain I've eaten a lot of weird food from
Speaker 1: different countries and that's helped me understand, you know, um,
Speaker 1: why the Belgians is like horse meat and why the
Speaker 1: Chinese eat these weird things. And it's a fun cultural
Speaker 1: experience as well as scientific. Well yeah, and and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, getting into some of the fun stuff. Well
Speaker 1: we'll talk about later. But I love reading about, uh,
Speaker 1: things that remind us that scientists are also human. I
Speaker 1: mean it's it's easy to kind of forget from a
Speaker 1: layman perspective. You you hear about science, and you hear
Speaker 1: about scientists, and it tends to almost be another For
Speaker 1: people who are not necessarily involved in science, or are
Speaker 1: not they don't work with scientists, and so they start
Speaker 1: to think of that as their own category of living thing.
Speaker 1: There's a scientist kind of like doctors. There's doctors, they're scientists,
Speaker 1: and uh, it's like that time that you meet your
Speaker 1: middle school science teacher at the grocery store buying cereal
Speaker 1: and you're like, what you know, breakfast, this is not.
Speaker 1: This is not. Scientists have families and ambitions and disappointments
Speaker 1: and and rock rock groups, as it turns out, in
Speaker 1: rock groups, and you know, ankle injuries and all the
Speaker 1: same sort of things that people have. Absolutely, so what
Speaker 1: 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 uh, 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 and the other going the
Speaker 1: other way. And if somebody out there is wondering, well,
Speaker 1: why is it a circle? The reason is the circle
Speaker 1: is that it takes a while to get protons up
Speaker 1: to high enough speed. That's what we want to do,
Speaker 1: is we want to reuse those little boosters. The circle
Speaker 1: is essentially a string of little boosters. Each one gives
Speaker 1: a little kick and gets it going faster and faster.
Speaker 1: And so if you can spin it around multiple times,
Speaker 1: that you can get it going faster and faster. It's
Speaker 1: like when your kids on the merry go round or
Speaker 1: nothing merry around. What is that thing called the at
Speaker 1: the playground that spins around? Yeah, I know what you're
Speaker 1: talking about. I honestly don't know the name of that either.
Speaker 1: The vominator the vominator um uh and and you put
Speaker 1: them on there and you spend it, you keep pushing,
Speaker 1: it goes faster and faster. So that's why it goes
Speaker 1: in a circle. Um. And in order to bend them
Speaker 1: in a circle, we have these really strong magnets. So
Speaker 1: the way the collider works is it's a kick to
Speaker 1: make it faster and then a magnet to bend it
Speaker 1: to go in a circle. And because we want to
Speaker 1: collide the protons, we actually have two of these. We
Speaker 1: have one going one way and other than protons going
Speaker 1: the other way, and so four places around the ring
Speaker 1: we cross those beams, right, we try to collide them.
Speaker 1: And and also it's not individual proton. It's not like
Speaker 1: we put one proton in the in one beam and
Speaker 1: another proton the other beam, and we zoomed around. 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 in tend to some number of
Speaker 1: protons that we passed through another gas of protons hoping
Speaker 1: to get some collisions. And so there's four places around
Speaker 1: the ring that this happens, and each one is surrounded
Speaker 1: by a massive set of detectors um to observe what happens.
Speaker 1: Think of it like a really big digital camera. And
Speaker 1: I work on one of those. And the name of
Speaker 1: the detector is the Atlas detector, which has like which
Speaker 1: sets the record from maybe the worst scientific acronym ever,
Speaker 1: because it has an acronym inside. I think Atlas stands
Speaker 1: for a large toroidal LHC apparatus. It's the most tortured
Speaker 1: acronym ever. Anyway, Atlas surrounds one of the collision points
Speaker 1: and we smash the protons together there and that's where
Speaker 1: the magic happens. And you might be thinking, uh, 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 as what's inside protons um. But we can also
Speaker 1: do something else because of the magic of quantum mechanics.
Speaker 1: What happens when you collide a proton and another proton
Speaker 1: is that the particles inside them interact. So inside a
Speaker 1: proton we have quirks of quirks and down corks, and
Speaker 1: those quirks can interact and they can actually annihilate, which
Speaker 1: means that they convert from mass from little bits of
Speaker 1: stuff flying through the particle collider into energy. Okay, so
Speaker 1: the particles are gone, the stuff that made them up
Speaker 1: is destroyed. It's turned into energy, and then that energy
Speaker 1: gets turned back into mass because a little blob of
Speaker 1: energy is very unstable, doesn't like they hang out very long,
Speaker 1: and so it turns back into mass and it doesn't
Speaker 1: have to turn back into the same kind of stuff
Speaker 1: that it's started from. So you can turn for example,
Speaker 1: two up corks. You can annihilate them together, turn them
Speaker 1: into a ball of energy, and then they can turn
Speaker 1: into muans or electrons or other weird kinds of particles,
Speaker 1: and it's not required that it's made of the same
Speaker 1: stuff because the stuff has disappeared, it's been annihilated. So
Speaker 1: it really is like modern day alchemy. You know, we're
Speaker 1: turning one kind of stuff into another kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: and that's magical because it means we can create any
Speaker 1: kind of stuff that's sort of on the universe's menu.
Speaker 1: We don't have to know it's there in advance. We
Speaker 1: just pour enough energy into the collisions and eventually all
Speaker 1: the kinds of stuff will pop out. So it's it's
Speaker 1: really 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 incredibly cool, like I've never heard it described that way.
Speaker 1: So too, the thought of of smashing these protons together
Speaker 1: at incredibly high energies and then you end up as
Speaker 1: part of that uh at almost like the proto energy
Speaker 1: that can convert into various different types of things based
Speaker 1: on possibly criteria that we don't fully understand, I mean obviously,
Speaker 1: And those are the laws we're trying to figure out,
Speaker 1: you know, we're trying to write down mathematical equations that
Speaker 1: predict how often you'll see this kind of particle, how
Speaker 1: often you see that kind of particle, And the kinds
Speaker 1: of particles that we've studied, you know, electrons and muance whatever.
Speaker 1: We understand how those are made, and we can calculate
Speaker 1: very precisely how often we should see them and uh
Speaker 1: and what energies, and so that's the kind of thing
Speaker 1: we study. We we understand in pretty and pretty good
Speaker 1: detail why some particles are made and when and how often.
Speaker 1: What we're looking for is the weird stuff, the stuff
Speaker 1: we haven't predicted, or the stuff we hadn't anticipated, or
Speaker 1: you know, the things that people have predicted but we
Speaker 1: haven't seen yet. And those things tend to be more rare,
Speaker 1: which is why we smash the particles together so often.
Speaker 1: We do it every twenty five nanoseconds, all day, all
Speaker 1: year long. And the reason is most of the stuff
Speaker 1: that happens is boring. We've seen it before. Occasionally, very rarely,
Speaker 1: something weird will happen and that will give us a
Speaker 1: clue about maybe a new kind of rare particle. So
Speaker 1: I imagine if you're doing this that frequently with that
Speaker 1: many protons, knowing not that all of them are are colliding,
Speaker 1: but still a good amount of them are UM and
Speaker 1: you have these four different points where they're all gathering
Speaker 1: data that you're you're getting getting a few zeros and
Speaker 1: ones out of there. There's a lot I'm guessing a
Speaker 1: lot of information gets generated all the time through these experiments.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a tidal wave of data. Every time
Speaker 1: we have a collision, we read out the whole detector,
Speaker 1: which has a hundred million different detector channels. So it's
Speaker 1: a massive basically digital image of the detector every every
Speaker 1: every twenty five nanoseconds UM and so that's pretty it's
Speaker 1: a pretty large volume of data UM and we it's
Speaker 1: so big that we can't even save it all, right.
Speaker 1: We if we saved it all, it would take huge
Speaker 1: amount of resource, says, and we wouldn't have no time
Speaker 1: to go through it. So what we and most of
Speaker 1: it is not very interesting. Of what happens is just
Speaker 1: like two protons come in, they kind of bounce off
Speaker 1: each other, two protons come out. You know, it's rare
Speaker 1: that you actually have them, like a deep collision that
Speaker 1: interacts with the particles inside that makes something weird. And
Speaker 1: so what we do is we have this system we
Speaker 1: call it the trigger, that makes a keep or kill
Speaker 1: decision on the fly, and it says was it interesting
Speaker 1: enough to save? If so, then shunt it down the
Speaker 1: down the view the wires towards the disk. If no,
Speaker 1: throw it away. And so we have to make these
Speaker 1: keep or kill decisions every twenty five nanoseconds. And when
Speaker 1: it's gone, it's gone. It's not like it's saved to
Speaker 1: back up and you can go through it another time.
Speaker 1: It's just we just toss it out. And so that's
Speaker 1: a really vital system. That's actually the part that my
Speaker 1: group works on. Is this trigger system interesting? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: always thought when I was learning more about this, I
Speaker 1: wrote an article about how the large Hadron collider works
Speaker 1: as part of my work for how stuff works, And
Speaker 1: while I was working on it, it struck me just
Speaker 1: how amazing the actual apparatus is of creating these beams
Speaker 1: and steering them and creating the collision points. And then
Speaker 1: 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. It's it's because these are
Speaker 1: so far outside the normal experience, it's hard to think of, well,
Speaker 1: i'll tell you some details about it. That's actually the
Speaker 1: part of it that I'm most interested in UM. But
Speaker 1: first of 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 everybod gets to do the part they want rather
Speaker 1: than having to do all of it by themselves. UM.
Speaker 1: So I think that's really fun. And the part that
Speaker 1: I'm 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 the 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, as 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 um,
Speaker 1: it 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 steel 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 we're looking at what
Speaker 1: came out of the collision and trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what happened in the middle. And so a lot of
Speaker 1: what we do is is really complicated statistical inference. We say,
Speaker 1: given the data that we saw, which theory of the
Speaker 1: universe is more likely in the theory with the Eggs
Speaker 1: boson or without the Higgs boson. So most of the
Speaker 1: actual work involved is in constructing those two hypotheses and
Speaker 1: comparing them to the data, saying how can we analyze
Speaker 1: the data, how can we um you know, plow through
Speaker 1: the data in a way so that these two hypotheses
Speaker 1: give different predictions. Like in the case of the search
Speaker 1: for the Higgs boson, we were looking for collisions that
Speaker 1: had to photons coming out. So two protons come in,
Speaker 1: two photons come out, right, two little beams of light.
Speaker 1: And that's because the higgs boson um sometimes turns into
Speaker 1: two photons, So we're looking for two photons. The problem
Speaker 1: is there are other things that also turned into two photons,
Speaker 1: lots of ways to make two photons that aren't the
Speaker 1: Higgs boson. But if you did make the Higgs boson
Speaker 1: and it turned into two photons, then it would turn
Speaker 1: into two photons with a certain amount of energy, and
Speaker 1: that amount of energy is connected to how much mass
Speaker 1: is in the higgs boson. So we did is we
Speaker 1: just said, let's look at all the collisions that turned
Speaker 1: into two photons, and let's just compare, and we made
Speaker 1: sort of a plot where we said, on the X
Speaker 1: axis is the amount of energy and the collisions, and
Speaker 1: then why excess is the number. So if you're envisioning this,
Speaker 1: we have one theory that says there should be a
Speaker 1: smooth distribution, and then what the theory with the Higgs
Speaker 1: boson says, well, there should be a smooth distribution, but
Speaker 1: then you should you should get a bump, You should
Speaker 1: get an enhancement around the mass of the Higgs. So
Speaker 1: one theory is there is no Higgs boson, and you
Speaker 1: should get a bunch of just random collisions with two photons,
Speaker 1: no special energy levels. And the other theory is you
Speaker 1: have a Higgs boson, which means you get extra production
Speaker 1: of two photon events and they should cluster and they
Speaker 1: should all have a similar energy. So if you make
Speaker 1: this uh this plot, you should get a bump near
Speaker 1: the mass of the Higgs. And so essentially we have
Speaker 1: two hypotheses. We say no Higgs boson or Higgs boson,
Speaker 1: and then we look at the data. So we've done
Speaker 1: the hard work of constructing two possible ideas and figuring
Speaker 1: out what question to ask the data. That's always the
Speaker 1: crucial thing. It's a question are you asking the data?
Speaker 1: And we've composed the question in a way that we
Speaker 1: hope the data can answer it. And that's how we
Speaker 1: discover the Higgs boson. Is the data followed one curve,
Speaker 1: the curve with a bump in it, and not the
Speaker 1: smooth curve, the curve that had no Higgs boson. So
Speaker 1: a lot of the work we do is involved in
Speaker 1: in analyzing that data, and because it's such a big project,
Speaker 1: we have people specializing in these areas, and this is
Speaker 1: my area specialty is analyzing this data. And one of
Speaker 1: my other interests is in computer science and artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1: And in the last five years we've been borrowing really
Speaker 1: heavily from computer science all these new tools they've developed
Speaker 1: to do really fantastical artificial intelligence to recognize patterns. We
Speaker 1: found ways to take those tools and apply them to
Speaker 1: these questions to say to artificial intelligence tools, can you
Speaker 1: find patterns in this data? Can you learn to find
Speaker 1: Higgs bosons in these ones and zeros um and separate
Speaker 1: them from things that are not higgs bosons but look
Speaker 1: like them. So we've a lot of fun bringing in
Speaker 1: ideas from other fields. We don't invent a lot of
Speaker 1: this stuff by ourselves. We sort of you know, we
Speaker 1: have a nail and we sift around for somebody nearby
Speaker 1: who might have a hammer. M h. Well, that to
Speaker 1: me is always a fascinating thing as well. It's it's
Speaker 1: a different level of innovation where you are thinking rather
Speaker 1: than let's let's invent a brand new tool to do
Speaker 1: this thing. You say, well, do we have any tools
Speaker 1: that perhaps are not currently being used to do this thing,
Speaker 1: but with some some work, we could repurpose them for
Speaker 1: this thing. Um to that, Usually it's a happy discovery. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I remember going over to the computer science department it
Speaker 1: was like two thousand twelve and describing this project and saying, look,
Speaker 1: here's the problem we have. We don't have a tool
Speaker 1: that can solve this problem. What do you have? And
Speaker 1: they said, oh, my gosh, we have the perfect tool.
Speaker 1: Currently we're using it to solve this other problem. And
Speaker 1: I was like, well, what problem are you solving and
Speaker 1: they said, oh, we're trying to figure out how to
Speaker 1: answer the question is there a cat in this Internet video? Right?
Speaker 1: Which is like the perfect example of how of a
Speaker 1: hard but relevant problem. Like it's not easy to say,
Speaker 1: here's a video, can you tell me if there's a cadet?
Speaker 1: It's the kind of thing it's easy for a person,
Speaker 1: but it's really hard for a computer program. Right, how
Speaker 1: do you define a cat? And then it's moving through
Speaker 1: the videos on different colors of cats, cats, of different behaviors.
Speaker 1: It's a difficult problem and it's one where there's a
Speaker 1: lot of data available. So the computer scientists latched onto
Speaker 1: this problem not because it was important or particularly interesting
Speaker 1: or useful, but just because it was hard and they
Speaker 1: had a lot of data. So when I came to
Speaker 1: them with another problem that was hard, where we had
Speaker 1: a lot of data but actually had some like scientific
Speaker 1: value and and sounded cool, they were very excited. So
Speaker 1: they're excited to get to use their tool and something
Speaker 1: that was actually relevant to society into physics and to science.
Speaker 1: And we were excited, of course to use their awesome tool,
Speaker 1: which worked really, really well. So it's usually a sort
Speaker 1: of a peanut butter and chocolate situation when you can
Speaker 1: find this sort of crossovers nice. I like, I like
Speaker 1: the peanut ab her chocolate analogy. And of course, uh,
Speaker 1: the neat thing to me about the machine learning process
Speaker 1: that you were talking about with with identifying cats and
Speaker 1: videos taking an approach like that, where again seemingly if
Speaker 1: you if you explain that to someone, they sound they say, well,
Speaker 1: that sounds like it's trivial. It's I mean, it may
Speaker 1: be a hard computer problem, but what's the purpose. And
Speaker 1: my argument to them has always been, well, a human
Speaker 1: can immediately tell if the computer was right or wrong
Speaker 1: when it or the machine was right or wrong when
Speaker 1: it comes to its conclusion, and therefore go in and
Speaker 1: tweak the waitings of the various decision points. That if
Speaker 1: you're using an our official neural network, you change the
Speaker 1: waitings of the the various values so that it can
Speaker 1: slowly hone in on what is it to be a
Speaker 1: cat and and understand what catness really is, not not
Speaker 1: the character from Hunger Games, but what catness really is.
Speaker 1: And that once you do that, yes, exactly, that's that's
Speaker 1: exactly what you want to do. Right If you're trying
Speaker 1: to create a tool like this, you want to pick
Speaker 1: a goal where a human can say, yes, the the
Speaker 1: computer has managed to hit that goal, or no, the
Speaker 1: computer has not. So that way, once you've perfected the
Speaker 1: approach and you can then start to apply it to
Speaker 1: things where uh, we don't have as full of an understanding.
Speaker 1: You know. It's the difference between supervised learning with machine
Speaker 1: learning and unsupervised learning, and and to me, that's a
Speaker 1: very fascinating area of study. I've talked about that a
Speaker 1: lot on tech stuff as well, and uh, it also
Speaker 1: gets into other issues that I won't. I won't dive
Speaker 1: into here, things like the the need for transparency for
Speaker 1: these kind of systems so that we understand how they
Speaker 1: get to their conclusions and it's not just a black box, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But I digress. How does it know what a cat? Exactly? Exactly? Yeah,
Speaker 1: interpreting these networks is very important. Yeah. If you get
Speaker 1: to 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. 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, just 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 to this happened to seed to the
Speaker 1: computers the job of determining whether is the cat in
Speaker 1: the video? They're better than I am. You say that,
Speaker 1: but I find cat video so cathartic. Um. So this
Speaker 1: one thing I wanted to to touch on just briefly, um,
Speaker 1: And that might be difficult to do. But yeah, we
Speaker 1: mentioned Higgs boson quite a quite a bit. And uh,
Speaker 1: how would you describe what the Higgs boson is to
Speaker 1: someone who's interested in it but doesn't have that background
Speaker 1: in in physics. Yeah, so the Higgs boson is fascinating
Speaker 1: little particle, and it's a sort of part of the
Speaker 1: answer to the question what is stuff? You know, we
Speaker 1: want to understand what are things made out of? But
Speaker 1: part of that is understanding like what am I made
Speaker 1: out of? What is the substance of me? And you
Speaker 1: imagine that if you take yourself apart, you're made out
Speaker 1: of molecules. Those molecules are made out of atoms. Those
Speaker 1: atoms are made out of protons and electrons and neutrons,
Speaker 1: and the protons are made out of quarks. So at
Speaker 1: this point we can describe everything that you're made out
Speaker 1: of in terms of quarks and electrons um. But what
Speaker 1: we still don't know is what are those made out of?
Speaker 1: Like do they get a little scoop of universe stuff?
Speaker 1: You know, there's some sort of basic matter unit, and
Speaker 1: we don't understand like how do they have mass? Where
Speaker 1: does their mass come from? And it's a mystery because
Speaker 1: in our theory, these particles are not little balls. Like
Speaker 1: when I say a particle, you're probably imagining like a
Speaker 1: little spinning beach ball, right, a tiny little dot of
Speaker 1: actual stuff, but something with extent to it, something with size. Well,
Speaker 1: in our current theory, these particles don't have any size.
Speaker 1: Their dots their points in space, which means where is
Speaker 1: the stuff to them? Right? Where is the mass? Where
Speaker 1: does the mass come from? Um, there's no room for
Speaker 1: any mass in a point. Right. If there's mass, there
Speaker 1: have infinite density, which makes no sense at all. You
Speaker 1: have like all these tiny black holes. So the Higgs
Speaker 1: boson is in a way that is a way to
Speaker 1: answer that. What it does is it says that the
Speaker 1: mass the particles have doesn't come from a little scoop
Speaker 1: of universe stuff that they got. Instead, you have to
Speaker 1: think of it's sort of like a charge. Like when
Speaker 1: I tell you an electron has a negative charge, that
Speaker 1: doesn't bother you. But what if I told you electron
Speaker 1: is a point particle there's no room for it. Would
Speaker 1: you ask where does the negative charge go? Or is
Speaker 1: there room for the negative charge? You just think of
Speaker 1: negative charge is sort of like a label, something that
Speaker 1: you can apply to a tiny dot. We should think
Speaker 1: of mass the same way. Mass is not a little
Speaker 1: serving of universe stuff. It's like a charge, and a
Speaker 1: charge of something that tells us how things interact. So
Speaker 1: an electron has a negative charge, which means it, you know,
Speaker 1: um gets repelled from positive stuff, and they can interact
Speaker 1: with photons and things like that. Um particles that have mass.
Speaker 1: Um those particles that have mass us they have mass,
Speaker 1: which is a charge. It tells us how it interacts
Speaker 1: with the higgs boson. So the Higgs boson is the
Speaker 1: thing that gives these that that interacts with these particles
Speaker 1: and makes them move as if they had mass. So
Speaker 1: they have some of 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, who has been around for decades before we
Speaker 1: actually found it. Some theorist was looking at the list
Speaker 1: of particles and the math behind them and saying, this
Speaker 1: doesn't really make sense, like how do these particles? How
Speaker 1: can these particles have mass? There's no way to give
Speaker 1: them mass in our theory. Like, we have a really
Speaker 1: beautiful theory that would work perfectly if all the particles
Speaker 1: in the universe had no mass, But the particles 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 mass 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 move 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. You
Speaker 1: would just click together, would be symmetric, would be beautiful,
Speaker 1: it would mathematically look pretty. And so he said, well,
Speaker 1: maybe 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. Uh it's a story where we take
Speaker 1: a look at uh, 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 trivializing and 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 of not being
Speaker 1: a physicist right where to me, it's it's no, you
Speaker 1: sound like you kind of are an amateur physicist. I
Speaker 1: mean you think about these ways like a physicist. You know,
Speaker 1: it's not all about the mathematical training. It's so sort
Speaker 1: about the front, the way you think, and the way
Speaker 1: you ask questions. So I'm happy to bestow you upon
Speaker 1: you the dubious honor of being a deputized amateur physicist. Excellent.
Speaker 1: I cannot I cannot wait to abuse my authority certificate
Speaker 1: in the mail pretty soon. Yeah, you'll see me walking
Speaker 1: into restaurants saying, give me a good table. I am
Speaker 1: an honorary physicist, and they'll say do you Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: it doesn't work for for podcast celebrity either. I can
Speaker 1: tell you from ten years of experience. Uh. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: the I have the level of fame that is almost
Speaker 1: but 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: honorary physicist. Now you to say we they're excellent. It's
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's so good to join the collective. But
Speaker 1: the there were there were some issues, and it also
Speaker 1: led to a lot of speculation, much of it completely
Speaker 1: baseless from people who had uh, 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 understanding if that were in fact to happen.
Speaker 1: The time frame we're talking about, and the size the
Speaker 1: the UH of it, and and what energy level we'd
Speaker 1: be talking about less than what a mosquito generates when
Speaker 1: it flaps its wings, for example, and at a at
Speaker 1: a at a time that's so small that is impossible
Speaker 1: for us to think of it. We can we could
Speaker 1: look at a measurement. We could look at a number
Speaker 1: 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: a 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 immateurish gift of a picture supposedly from a security
Speaker 1: camera outside the LHC just getting sucked in to to
Speaker 1: a 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 spaghetti location is happening. Now,
Speaker 1: my favorite website is called has the Large Hadron Collider
Speaker 1: destroyed the world yet dot com as we promised 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, yeah, you might wanna, you might want to,
Speaker 1: you know, might make some plans. Um, But yeah, this
Speaker 1: is a this is a common thing that's raised, and
Speaker 1: I think it's reasonable for people to wonder, like our
Speaker 1: physicists going to trigger some sort of universal apocalypse which
Speaker 1: ends 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: Serain has done an excellent job of taking this concern seriously.
Speaker 1: So for those who don't know, there there really is
Speaker 1: a theory that we could be creating miniature black holes
Speaker 1: at the Large Hadron 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, and 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 forever basically, and those particles are traveling
Speaker 1: much faster than the particles at the large age On collider.
Speaker 1: So if collisions of particles were going to cause Earth
Speaker 1: destroying black holes, it would have happened already. And so
Speaker 1: there's a pretty in depth analysis of this um And
Speaker 1: I think one thing that's funny about it is sort
Speaker 1: of the social aspect of it. Like if you ask
Speaker 1: of is this, is it possible for the LHC to
Speaker 1: destroy the universe, to destroy the Earth, The answer is technically, yes,
Speaker 1: it's possible. You don't want to talk about exactly, but
Speaker 1: there's a difference between you know, a scientific answer and
Speaker 1: a sort of a public relations answer where it's possible,
Speaker 1: but not to the level where it's really worth talking about.
Speaker 1: Like it's possible for me to disappear in quantum mechanically
Speaker 1: appear in Paris. Sure it's not impossible, but it's the
Speaker 1: real The odds are so remote nobody should factor that
Speaker 1: into their plans. And that's really what people are asking about, Like,
Speaker 1: is this possible at the level where we need to
Speaker 1: worry about it and make policy changes or you know,
Speaker 1: use it to base decisions on And the answer is no. Um.
Speaker 1: But you know, we as humans are pretty bad about
Speaker 1: thinking about dangers and making decisions based on that. You know,
Speaker 1: I should worry about being struck by lightning or being
Speaker 1: eaten by sharks, but we don't worry too much about
Speaker 1: handgun safety this kind of stuff. So as human as
Speaker 1: we we have our policies upside down. Or even you know,
Speaker 1: the likelihood of getting in even a minor accident in
Speaker 1: a car, I mean, that's incredibly likely compared to these
Speaker 1: other things. But these other things because they I think
Speaker 1: largely because they and they tap into that same part
Speaker 1: of our brains that finds fascination in the unknown. There's
Speaker 1: there's that related element, the fear of the unknown. The
Speaker 1: two are very close, and the less you know about something,
Speaker 1: the 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, being 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 going to find, you know, they
Speaker 1: were part of that. It's a it's a long legacy
Speaker 1: of exploration and to me, that's one of the most
Speaker 1: exciting things we can do as a species. Daniel, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for joining our show. Please can you
Speaker 1: tell us a little bit about your podcast and why
Speaker 1: everyone needs to listen to it? Sure? 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 try 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 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 fasten the 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. Hey, guys, Jonathan from the future again. It's
Speaker 1: pretty awesome. They're flying cars and everything. Anyway, uh, I
Speaker 1: was just here to tell you we're going to take
Speaker 1: another quick break to thank our sponsor. That was a
Speaker 1: phenomenal conversation, or at least I had a ton of fun.
Speaker 1: I hope you guys enjoyed it. Daniel Whiteson is really
Speaker 1: great at communicating science, not just someone who practices it,
Speaker 1: but it's very good at explaining the wonder behind science.
Speaker 1: So definitely check out that podcast. If you guys have
Speaker 1: any suggestions for future topics for tech Stuff, whether it's
Speaker 1: a technology, a company, maybe there's someone else I should
Speaker 1: interview on the show, let me know. Send me an email.
Speaker 1: The addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
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Speaker 1: store that's over at t public dot com slash tech Stuff.
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