Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge talk about whether the cozy story of the proton might need to be updated to describe all of its true charm.
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Hey or hey, if we found a new quark. What would you call.
It pedro or vin? Well? What are the current ones called?
Well, there's up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom.
Oh man, I feel like you can only go up from there.
You're pretty down on these names.
I mean they're pretty strange.
I personally find them kind of charming.
I guess you do like things that are off color.
You might think this whole scheme needs a rewrite from the top.
All right, Well, dive in, Buttom's up. Hi. I'm Horae maker Donas and the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at U c Irvine, and I hope to one day be involved in a big argument about how to name a new particle.
Oh, you're not involved yet. I mean, don't you guys name things before you discover them.
Yeah, that's true. We do name hypothetical particles that might not even be part of the universe.
Can I lay a stake to that? Like, Hey, if anyone ever discovers a quirk in the future, I'm naming it there.
I think you can call it whatever you like. Yeah, whether it catches on is another question.
No, But I said it first. Doesn't that count? Do you have dibbs in physics?
There is no dip and physics we even have disagreements about what a name things which go on for decades.
What if I name the the DIBs? It DIBs both on? But anyways, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
Where we want to be the first to explain everything about the universe to you, from how all the tiny little particles work, from their interactions to their little bits of matter, to their quantum fields and the way they work together to make everything that's glorious and delicious and badly named in the universe.
That's right, because it is a strange and charming universe out there, full of mysteries that we are still discovering. New discoveries are still being made even today about how the universe works and what are all the things in it.
One way to answer the question how does the universe work is to figure out what its tiniest bits are and what rules they follow. In some sense, that would be an explanation because it's sort of the most fundamental description. In another sense, it's sort of lacking a lot of connection to reality. Even if you understand the tiny little bits, you don't necessarily understand why BlackBerry ice cream is so delicious.
Yeah, and it's pretty amazing that we've discovered so much about what matter is made out of. Given that we have these kind of soft, squishy eyeballs, it really don't work all that well. All the time, we have augmented our bear senses with all sorts of amazing technological eyeballs, things that can gather ancient photons while orbiting the Earth, and devices that poke and probe little bits of matter to reveal their structure, or even as simple as reading glasses, which I forgot today to bring. So that's why I'm only about eighty percent sure of what we're talking about today.
Is that up from usual seventy five percent or down?
I guess, I mean eighty percent sure what's on this page in front of me?
I see? Well, you know, I think we've been working together for more than a decade before I even learned that you wore glasses.
Oh well, I only just started wearing reading glasses maybe a year or two a two. It came pretty fast.
I see. So you're saying, after ten years of working with Daniel, you're incurring actual physical damage. That's right.
I al was talking about tiny microscopic particles. I mean that would ruin anyone's eyesight.
All right, there you have it, folks, a health warning for this podcast. We're five years in, which means you're all five years away from ruining your eyesight.
M Well, I did worse glasses for a long time. Then I got laser surgery, which is amazing. But now I'm getting older any reading glasses, which totally stinks. You haven't hit that wall yet.
I've been wearing glasses since I was a teenager, and I'm definitely not getting my eyeballs lasered. Oh no, but.
Aren't you physicists? Don't you trust the lasers.
I'm a physicist, so I definitely don't trust the lasers.
What have they made a lazing operation that? Did you see subpotomic particles?
Oh boy? Yeah? Well, I would definitely volunteer other people for it, ask them all sorts of questions about it.
Really, you don't want to see particles with your naked eye.
No, I prefer augmented technological eyeballs. And to keep my eyeballs.
Unaltered, I see you're like, take a picture.
Exactly, build me device, put the picture on a screen. I'm happy with that.
But anyways, it would be amazing to see at that microscopic level because we would discover maybe what matter is actually made out of.
And we have made a lot of progress over the years and figuring out what the tiny little bits are that click together to explain our world and what the tiny bits inside those bits are and how they work together. But there are still lots and lots of questions, not just questions about the crazy weird particles we may or may not discover a colliders, but questions about what you and I are actually made out of.
That's right, It's been a long road to discover the building blocks of stuff around us. We started with tiny hypothetical particles made out of earth, wind and fire, right, That's how the Greek started, and then we moved on to atoms.
I don't know if the Greeks thought about like wind particles and fire particles. They had lots of different crazy ideas about how the universe works. But yeah, you can dot dot dot from there to.
Quiet field there. Yeah, I didn't know what zoos is. Isn't zoos basically like a particles, a lightning particle.
The Zeus particle. And I don't think i've ever heard that phrase before. That sounds like a really awesome young adult thriller.
That sounds like, well, we should name the next next particle I discover, or that I propose we discovered.
Well, some people do call the Higgs boson the god particles, so maybe we should just broaden that, you know, we should have the Jehovah particle.
And that's right, be more inclusive about all religions.
Really, yeah, exactly.
But it has been a pretty amazing road to discover what things are made of. And at some point, I guess people discovered that we're made out of atoms.
Right, Yeah, that's right. That's the first step, and it's in some ways the most amazing, the most incredible, the biggest sort of intellectual leap to say that all the craziness in the universe, the almost infinite variety of stuff out there, can be explained with a small set of basic building blocks, the atoms. About one hundred elements of the periodic table can be put together in all sorts of ways to explain everything that we've ever seen, like philosophically, it's not obvious that we would have to live in a universe that works that way, where the arrangements of the smallest bits explain the complexity that we experience.
Yeah, I mean, it could have been that we lived in a universe where everything was made out of earth, wind and fire, right, Yeah.
Or everything could have been made out of its own different kind of stuff. Everything out there in the universe could have had its own elemental particle that explains it. But instead, it seems like as you dig deeper and deeper into the firmament of the universe, things weirdly get simpler.
And so we cracked open matter to discoverage made out of atoms, and then at some point we cracked open the atom to find out that it's made out of smaller particles.
Yeah, the nucleus has protons and neutrons, and and surrounding those are electrons. And those protons and neutrons themselves, we discovered are also not fundamental bits of the universe. They are made of even smaller particles bound together with an incredibly powerful force.
Yeah, and so we have a name for those particles. They're called quarks. And we think we know maybe what all the quarks are.
We think we know. Maybe that's definitely a good summary of the physics of basically anything.
We think we know that maybe basic size, isn't it? Or really that's just human reality and anything that's out there. We just think we know it's there.
Yeah, and at a comma, maybe at the end and you're golden or.
Or a question mark.
But the story isn't over.
Maybe, And so.
You've probably been told a familiar story about how the proton is made out of two different quarks, the upquark and the down but that's not the end of the story, Comma.
Maybe it never is. Yeah, there might be only two kinds of quarks inside of the proton, but is that really the case? And so today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question are there charm quarks inside the proton? Are we basically asking if the proton is charming?
We're asking about it's chat Yeah, is it good at having conversations or is it kind of dull? Does it have riz? Is a proton?
Rizzy?
Should you take a proton out with you on Friday night to be your wingman or wing woman?
That's right? Or would it be too charming. You don't want you don't want that? Yeah, as your wingman or wing particle.
We are in our desperate efforts to be relevant to modern culture here.
Yeah, or to pretend we're young and still go out on Friday nights. I mean, come on, let's face it, my Friday nights are and do not involve putting on anything besides pajama.
Let me just squint through my reading glasses to read the latest slaying the youth for saying that word.
Riz like charisma.
Oh is that what riz is short for?
I was wondering, Oh, man, you're even worse than me. I guess you are older than me.
Am. I I'm rounding up to fifty for sure.
So well, I guess it's it's charmed, the same as charisma sort of.
How would you shorten charm harm arm arm?
Obviously? I think we all associate cham with charm.
And when I heard that word before, chams about what is that? Can't place it?
Yeah?
Yeah?
Pretty soon all the kids well say like, oh man, that that kid really has cham.
Yeah he's so chamming. He's a champion. Yes, with a cham pion. There you go. You are a particle a man.
Yeah, gosh, you brought it back around to particle physics. Yes, the Champion, Yeah.
Exactly, it's already a particle name after you, and.
I hear it's the best one. It's like it beat out all the other particles. All right, well, this is an interesting question. Are there charm quarks inside the proton? Well, first of all, I feel like maybe not a lot of people know the conventional wisdom, which is that there are only two of the other kinds of quarks in the proton.
Yeah. The story you're usually told is that the proton is made of just two kinds of quarks, the upquark and the down quark. These are the lightest quarks that exist out there, the ones that are stable and usually seen as the basic building blocks of matter.
Yeah, and so the question is is there a third kind of quark inside the proton? And is it charming or is it kind of an annoying quark?
Is the whole thing kind of strange?
All right? Well, as usually, we were wondering how many people out there had thought about this question or wondered what exactly is inside the proton.
Thanks very much to everybody who participates in this segment. We'd love to hear your voice on the podcast, So please write to me. Get over that barrier that's been preventing you from participating, and send me an email to questions at Danielanjorge dot com.
So think about it for a second. Do you think the proton is charming? Here's what people had to say. A proton is positively charged.
I think some charming. It's positive. Yes.
I believe that a proton is made up of up quarks and down quarks. So I'm going to say no to the charm quark.
I like the sound of charm quarks. I'm picturing that character from Star Trek now as he's trying to do a deal. That's a charm quark. I'm not sure what a charm quark is, but if there were quarks, there are up quarks and down quarks inside the proton, right, So I would say that if there are quarks, they're inside a proton. So, yes, there are charm quarks inside the proton, and I look forward to learning exactly what a charm quark is.
All right, some interesting ideas here, little Star Trek reference here, that was a Star Trek TG reference.
Right, Yeah, I'm pretty sure quark only appears in the next generation, and he is kind of charming.
Hmmm.
All right, well, most people seem positive that the proton is charming, although there was one person who said.
No, Yeah, some people have heard the story that protons are just made of up quarks and down quarks.
All right, well, let's dig into it, Daniel, Maybe start with the basics. What is a quark and what is a charming one, and what is it not charming quark?
So, quarks are the particles that we see inside the proton and inside the neutron, and also inside a bunch of other particles that we've seen in collisions and in cosmic rays, like chaons and pions and other particles that are not stable. But when you smash these particles together, you discover that there really are smaller bits inside of them, and those are the particles we call quarks.
How are quark's name, by the way.
How are the individual quarks name? Or how is the word quark invented?
Yeah? Like, how did they come up with the word quark? Like it sounds kind of quirky? Was that a real word before that they discovered the particle? Or did they invent any word?
Yeah? So, it's a really interesting story. Quork actually is a thing out there in the world. It's like a yogurty thing that is eaten in Germany and other parts of Europe. But in English, quarks were named by Murray Gellman, and he actually took the word from a James Joyce poem, Finnigan's Wake, where it says three quarks from Master Mark.
What did James Joyce mean by it?
Well, there's some debate, of course, because James Joyce is a poet, and so they never like use words in the ways that people expect.
Meaning. It was a typo, maybe.
A genius typo, who knows. But the word quark here is like a variation of the word croak, and so the line in the poem is about like cheering the king. Three quarks from mister Mark is like three croaks or three cheers.
And so the person who discovered these particles picked that because he thought there were three particles, or why did they pick that word out of that poem.
He's got a long story for why he picked this, but essentially it comes down to the fact that there were three of them at the time, at the time that he was coming up with a name for it. We thought that there were three different kinds of quarks, the up, the down, and the strange, and so he was looking for something connected to three.
And by three, you mean like, you know, the more you do these collisions and you explore what matter is made out of, you find three different flavors of these particles.
Right, Yeah, there's three different kinds of these particles that were initially identified. And it comes out of this era in particle physics called the particle Zoo, when we turned on colliders, smashed protons into stuff and saw all sorts of weird particles come out. When we saw pions, we saw chaons, we saw mega particles, we saw row particles. Basically, every time you turned on the collider and added a bit more energy, you saw new stuff come out. And so it was a very confusing time in particle physics, like what are all these particles? Are they all made from the same thing? Are they all their own different kind of thing? And quarks? Was an effort to unify that, to explain it. Murray Gelmon and other folks realized that with just three basic particles, the upcork, the down cork, and the strange quirk, you could explain all the particles zoo is just being different combinations of these three basic building blocks. The same way you can explain like everything we experience in terms of one hundred elements. They were able to explain all of the elements of the particle Zoo in terms of these just three basic building blocks.
M Like, maybe you could say, like iron is not like a totally different particle than oxygen or carbon. It's just like they're just made of different arrangements of the same particles.
Yeah, exactly. You can make any element with a certain number of protons and neutrons and electrons. Right, there's really only three building blocks there that explain all of that complexity. In the same way you can make pions out of an upcork and an antiquark, you could make chaons if you mix in some strange quarks. You can make protons out of three quarks. You can make neutrons out of three quarks. And so they were able to explain all of this complexity using three basic building blocks, and they were even able to predict the existence of particles we hadn't seen yet. They said, if you mix all these particles together, there's one way to mix them that nobody's seen yet, and they predicted that that particle existed, and then they saw it, and so that's what really convinced everybody that it was real.
What was it called?
So it was the omega minus particle, which was made out of three strange quarks, and it was actually Gelman predicted it. He stood up at a conference and made this prediction, which is sort of ballsy, and then it was observed and people believed that they were real.
Now the quarks were hypothetical or do we eventually see them individually like at a collider?
Yeah, great question. For a long time, people believe the math of these quarks and they said, all right, well the math works, but they're kind of hypothetical. But then there was sort of a philosophical debate about whether they're real or hypothetical because you can't to actually see them by themselves. You cannot you cannot ever see a quark by itself. Yeah. The quarks feel this strong force, which is much stronger than electromagnetism, for example, and they're so tightly bound together. There's so much energy in their interaction that if you pull them apart, that energy creates more quarks basically to shield it. It's such a powerful force that it always neutralizes itself the same way like lightning is neutralizing any charge difference between the ground and clouds. Because electromagntism is so powerful, the strong force does that as well, very very rapidly. So quarks can never be seen on their own. You can only ever see them put together in these various combinations.
WHOA, So, then what makes you think that's an individual particle? Like if you never see some it alone, how do you know it's like a thing?
Yeah, that's a great philosophical question, and you can actually ask the same question of basically anything. You could even ask that question of the electron, Like we never see the electron by itself. An electron is actually surrounded by a cloud of virtual particles, including lots of photons. You never actually probe the pure individual electron. So everything is just sort of like part of the fabric of reality. It's a bit of a philosophical question when you declare that it's real. We have these models, we do these calculations, they're accurate, they predict the results of experiments, and so we think that probably they're real, But you know, we could be totally wrong. The whole story we're telling about the nature of the universe and how particles work could also just be totally wrong. The whole thing could just be an elaborate mathematical tool that mostly works. So it's actually a pretty subtle philosophical question what's real out there and what's just sort of part of the story we're telling.
Well, you mean we only actually think the quirk exists. Dot maybe, yeah, dot dot maybe.
But there are some very powerful arguments that at least it's the right way to think about the universe. Whether it's like philosophically true and out there is sort of another question I see.
It could be maybe like a non particle or some sort of weird thing that we can grasp our heads around.
It could be that there's another way to think of what's inside these particles that works better. Because one problem we have is that the strong force is so powerful it's very difficult to make calculations with, Like, you get things a little bit wrong, and the power of the force makes things very very wrong, So it's very difficult to make predictions with unlike electromagnetism, where we can make very very precise predictions about exactly what happens when two electrons bounce off each other, when two quarks collide. It's a huge mess, and we don't know how to do those calculations very well. So that might be a sign that we have it like the wrong idea. Maybe when aliens come, they'll have a better theory for what's going on inside all these particles, and it's just much simpler and crisper, and the mathematics of it makes sense.
M all right, Well, let's get into which quarks, if they do exist, are in the proton and why we think the protum may or may not be charming. So let's dig into that. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about whether there are charm quarks inside the proton. That's the I guess the question on everyone's minds these days.
You know, you joke, but it's actually a hot topic that's been debated in particle physics for it literally decades, whether the proton has charm in it or whether it's just made of ups and downs.
That's what I mean. It's like it's on everyone's mind, right, and.
It's been a question basically since the charm cork was discovered. I mean, you ask about, like, why do we think that quarks are real? I think the moment that the whole community went from these are cute, but we don't know to yeah, these are real. Was this day in November in nineteen seventy four, when the charm cork was discovered.
What happened.
It's called the November Revolution because it's so dramatic, and this is the moment when the charm cork was shown to be real. Experiments declared the discovery of the charm cork because the picture of having only three quarks, the up, the down, and the strange was a little weird, like the up and the down are sort of paired together. The strange cork is a lot like the down cork. It has the same electric charge or whatever, sort of like a cousin of the down cork. And people were wondering, like, is there a cousin of the up cork? Shouldn't the upcork also have a cousin? Shouldn't there be like patterns and symmetries and balance on all that stuff. So people predicted, Okay, this cork should exist out there. If these are real, there should be another one. And so people were looking for this cork and they were actually two competing groups, one at MIT led by Sam King and another one at Stanford led by Burt Richter. Both looking for the charm cork, and they declared discovery of the charm cork on the same day in dueling press conferences across the country from each other, and they gave the particle. The charm cork makes different names.
What what did they name them?
So the charm cork combines with an anti charm cork to make this particle. Sam Ting called it the j particle, apparently j sort of to the character for his name in Chinese. Bert Richter called it the Si particle because he liked Greek names for particles. And so the same day we had a new particle given two different names that Jay and the psi.
M like at the exact same minute, don't they doesn't count like which minute you make the announcement.
In the Internet era, it does kind of matter. People like time their papers to try to get them on the archive at the top of the list on the first day or whatever to avoid being scooped. But I think back then the resolution of this stuff was more like dependent on like sending letters and mail. So if you made your announcements on the same day, counts as two independent discoveries that are basically simultaneous. But there is a lot of drama about how they happened to make these discoveries on the same day. Because Sam King's experiment was very slow. He was going to take like a year to figure this stuff out. But he didn't have to know where to look. It was like a very general kind of experiment. Bert Richter could discover this thing in like a few hours if somebody told him exactly where to look. And Richter did an initial skin and didn't see it, he sort of like accidentally skipped over it. And the story is like maybe somebody on Sam King's team tipped off Bert Richter and told him exactly where to look so that he could do the experiment and coming with a discovery at exactly the same moment as the MIT team. Nobody knows for sure.
What happened, like I kind of make espionage.
Yeah or something. There's a lot of crazy stories, some of which are not safe for podcasting, which you can google and hear about, but to this day we have not.
Settled this not safe for podcasting. How delicious is this story?
There are stories about scatological sabotage of various experiments.
What you mean involving bodily fluids? Yes, exactly, I think that's safe for podcasting, but maybe not desirable talk about in a podcast.
It just seems to show you that there's sort of high drama, and you know, Nobel prizes were on the line. In the end, both the these guys won the Nobel Prize. They shared it for the discovery of this particle two charm quarks bound together. And we still call the particle j SI. We give it both names because we couldn't figure out how to settle this dispute.
And so this is the moment you're saying that the charm cork was discovered. Because this particle is made out of two charm corks. What made them think it was made out of two charm quarks?
It has all the properties that they predicted if the charm cork exists, they predicted that it would form this particle, which has about twice the mass of an individual charm cork, and it would decay in certain ways and the angles of those decays. So it basically looked exactly like what they expected. And there's no other way to explain this particle. And they can't explain this particle with just upquarks, down quarks and strange quarks. So that told them, ah, there must be this new quark out there, and that made people feel like, okay, quarks are real because we've predicted a quark and then seen it. It's not just descriptive. It's not like we're just using it to tell a story about what we've already seen. It's helping us understand future experiments, all right.
So that's how we discovered the charm cork. No, I guess the question is is there one inside the proton?
So the simple story is no. I mean, this initial description of quarks as the building blocks of all these weird particles tell us that the proton is made of two upquarks and one down cork. And that works because the math is really weird for these particles. Like an upcork has charged two thirds, like an electron is charged minus one. An upqork has charged two thirds, it's like fractionally charged, and the down cork has charged minus one third. So you add up two upquarks, you get four thirds of a charge. You add a down cork and it brings it back down to plus one. So the proton is explained in terms of two upquarks and a down cork and that's a nice simple story, but like everything else in physics, there's always more to it.
Now is that the only difference between an upcork and a down cork is there electrical charge.
There are also difference in mass. The upcork is lower mass than the down cork, and they have differences in their other charges. Remember, the electrical charge is how we talk about the electromagnetic interaction. Things that have electrical charge interact electromagnetically. Things that don't don't interact electromagnetically, like a neutrino no electric charge. No electromagnetic interaction ignores electric fields. But particles have other kinds of charges, Like if you feel the weak force, you have weak charges, and the weak force is very complicated, it has two different kinds of charge. So the upcork and the down cork are different also in their weak charges how they interact with the weak field.
And so then the charm cork is just like an upcore, just heavier or why do you call it a cousin of the upcork?
Yeah, because it has all the same charges as the upcork. It's charged two thirds electromagnetically. It has the same spin as the upcork. It has the same weak charges as the upquork. So if you make like a periodic table of the fundamental particles, it just makes sense to put the charm there next to the upcork. The way the strange is next to the down. Is the down and the strange they have all the same electrical charges and the weak charges, and so these particles are very similar to each other except their difference.
In mass, meaning that it just has more mass. It's like an upcork, but just heavier.
Yeah, it's an upcork, but just heavier. And that's explained of course, because of its interactions with the Higgs boson. The charm interacts more with the Higgs field, and so it has more mass than the upcork, and not by a little bit. It has like six hundred times the mass of the upcork. It's actually more massive than the proton.
Okay, so then you're saying that the question of whether there are charm quarks inside the proton, the answer is no, maybe question mark, So why the no?
So the simplest story is just like you've got three quarks, You're done, But think about how those quarks are actually stuck together, How do quarks come together to make a proton. They don't like physically click together like pieces of a puzzle. They're bound together. There's a force that holds them together the same way they like a proton and an electric together make a hydrogen atom. Because of the electromagnetic force. The quarks are bound together with the strong force, which means that there's a bunch of gluons there also inside the proton. So the proton is like two up quarks and a down cork and a zillion gluons in between them. So already we know there's a little bit more to the proton than just the quarks.
M I guess maybe I'm getting a little confused because a proton, you said, is two up quarks and a down corek, and a neutron, for example, is two down quarks and one upquark. Yes, so it's sort of like the same, but you just switch one of the quarks exactly.
And that's why beta de cave requires just switching one down or up or back and forth.
M Okay, So now we're asking if the proton has a different kind of quark in it, But if we change the quarks in a proton, it wouldn't be a proton anymore, would it.
A proton is a proton is a proton. That's just the thing we find in nature. The question is what's in it. It might be that the protons inerbs are different and from what we've been describing for a while, our story might have been a little bit wrong. So if there are charmquarks also inside a proton, then that's what a proton is. We're not talking about replacing one of the upwork with a charm cork. We're asking if there are more quarks in there, if it's not just up, up and down, if there's extra other little bits in there.
Oh, I see, Like a proton is still proton with two up quarks and a down quark, But like, maybe is there a charm cork jammed in there somehow? Yeah, we haven't seen before.
Mm hmmm, exactly are there like little bits quantum mechanically of charm cork hanging out in there?
Okay, And this is the burning question in particle physics. Now, why do you even have this question? Why? Why do you think there might be charm quarks inside the proton?
Well, we're always just curious, like what is stuff made out of. We want to know definitively, like what is a proton? Because the proton's the basic building block of everything out there in the universe. When the universe cooled and stuff slowed down, this is what it decided to make, mostly protons. So, like you want to know the answer to the question how does our universe work? What's it made out of? You gotta understand the proton. And so we're always happy with the first answer, but then we want to dig deeper and say, is that the total stories they're more going on to the proton, And then there are hints, there are hints that maybe there is something else. And one of the hints is that we know that the glue between those particles has the capacity to make more quarks. Like those gluons we talked about that stick the upquarks and the down corks together. They don't just hang out and stay gluons. Sometimes they turn it to quarks and then back. So you can have a gluon in the proton that's flying around all of a sudden it turns into a bottom cork and an anti bottom cork, and then back into a gluon. So if you shoot a probe at a proton. Sometimes you hit the main quarks, the upcorks and the down corks. Sometimes you hit a gluon. Sometimes you hit a bottom cork. Sometimes you hit a charm cork. Sometimes you hit a top cork. It's a big frothing mess.
It sounds like it did sort of like quantum mechanical magic, where there is like an infinite number of particles popping into existence probabilistically. But we still say that the proton is made out of three quarks, right, and those are more real than the other imaginary quarks.
Yeah, those are the intrinsic quarks. We say that two upquarks and the down cork are like the building block of the proton because they're there all the time, right, They're just always part of the proton. They sort of define what the proton is. And we know that the gluons that they're slashing around and that, as you say, quantum mechanically, sometimes if you poke into them, they can be turning into something else and you caught them in the act and maybe you can interact with that particle. But we think about those as like extrinsic particles. We don't think of those as necessarily part of the proton itself, because the energy to create those and to make that interaction happen comes from the collision, Like you want to smash two protons together to see what's inside and to interact with those gluons. Then the energy to make like the bottom cork or whatever else other weird quarks you're talking about, comes from the energy you've put in. And so we're interested in more deeply the question like what's the proton itself made out of? And so this is the question people have been asking, like, when a proton is just sitting there by itself, does it also still have some charm cork in it?
So?
Wait, are you asking whether the proton has in addition to the up, up and down as intrinsic quarks, does it also have an intrinsic charm corek to it?
Yes?
Are you asking whether it has a lot of extrinsic charm forks in it?
We already know it has a lot of extrinsic charm corks, like it has extrinsic everything, because the gluons have so much energy and if you interact with them, they can basically make anything. We're asking whether it has intrinsic charm cork, Like when a proton is just sitting there, does it also actually have some charm cork in it? And that's conception a little hard to get your mind around, because like, what does that mean. We're talking about these three particles make up the quark, right, Remember that everything we're talking about is quantum mechanical, and so really we're talking about making the picture of the proton a little bit more complicated, not just like there are three parts, but like there are more options here. Sometimes it has two upquarks in a down. Sometimes one of those is a charm quark. Sometimes one of those is an upcork. Sometimes one of those is a downquark. It's a little bit more of a complicated mixture of these particles. If there is intrinsic charm in the proton.
Mmm, okay, So you're sort of saying, like, if we have the picture that it's made out of two upquarks and when downcork, but maybe the picture is more like it's changing all the time, Like maybe the proton is transforming inside of itself into different combinations of quarks.
Yes, exactly, And so people have been trying to answer this question for a long time. They've been doing it the only way that we know how, which is to try to break open the proton, throw other protons at it, or throw electrons at it, smash something into it. It's tricky though, because you want to distinguish between the scenario where like the proton has intrinsic charm quarks in it, you know, like the internals of it is like changing back and forth from upquorks to charm quarks, or you're creating charm corks when you collide. You're manufacturing these extrinsic charm corks in the process of probing it. It's been a very difficult set of experiments to do to distinguish between the charm corks we see in the protoun are the intrinsic or are the extrinsic. It's not an easy experiment.
Mmmm.
All right, Well, let's dig into the details of this experiment and what it tells us about what's really inside of proton or what a prodoun really is actually made out. So let's begin to that. But first let's take another quick break.
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All right, we're asking what's really inside the proton? Is it just two upquarks and a downquark as we've been told, or as you and I have been telling people for years now. Daniel, I feel like maybe you're now calling his liars because it turns out that maybe the question of whether there's more to the proton than just these quarks, like maybe it's insides are changing all the time, from two upquarks and downcork to something else which involves another kind of quark, the charm pork.
I think everything we've been telling people for years has an implicit comma maybe dot dot dot at the end of it.
I feel like, if you wanted to make that explicit, maybe we should make it more explicit, Daniel, we ali should renamed the podcast Danie and Jore explained the Universe.
Maybe you know, it's just part of our scientific storytelling or always trying to come up with a way to describe the universe and then figuring out, oh, that doesn't actually capture all the details. Let's add some bells and whistles, or let's simplify it. Oh, let's throw the whole thing out and explain it in another way, it's just part of the journey.
I mean, I feel like maybe all this time you could have just added like we think that this is what it's made out of, not like I feel like for years we've been saying, oh, yes, the proton is made out of two upcourse into that court like that's a fact, but it's not.
Well, you know, when you're introducing people to really weird complex topics, you have to do it bit by bid. And if you start with all the qualifiers, all the reasons why we don't understand it, they're never going to get to the things we think we may do understand.
I think people can handle scientists think or we think it's made out of this.
I guess I feel like that's implied with everything that comes out of my mouth. Anyway, Now on listeners, insert a scientist think in front of everything. You hear me say, that's right.
Maybe we should have like one of those quick read disclaimers at the end of each episode, like Daniel Horry explained, the universe has not been verified by the FDA or a valid international physics organization.
Even valid international physics organizations, they just think stuff. Man, they can be wrong.
Well, some things are more verified by experiments than others.
Right, yes, yes, that's true, and that's what we're trying to capture here on the podcast, the current mainstream thinking for how the universe works.
All right, well, I guess we'll tell Corey, our engineer, to just add that disclaimer at the end of every episode from now and retroactively. Maybe also, can you do that? I feel like, you know, maybe we've been deceiving people for five years.
Daniel, Well, you know, they got to stick around for the twist.
The twists where we revealed that we like, these.
Are approximations, they're not lying.
I see the betrayal.
Oh good faith explanations.
All right, So the idea is that the proton is mostly mind to upquarks in a down cork, but maybe you think there's a possibility that that changes sometimes. Yeah, And so you're saying, first you said, the simple answer is that no, there's no charm cork in the proton. Why was that No?
Again, that's just the sort of simplest answer, and it's also short of common sense. The charm cork has more mass than the proton, so it's sort of like saying that the proton is less than the some of its parts if it has like a little bit of charm cork in.
It, meaning like it's mostly two ups and quarks in that down cork. Right. Yeah, that's why the basic answer is no. But then you're saying, maybe there's more going on. Maybe it does change into some charminess sometimes. Is that what's going on?
Yeah, exactly, because in quantum mechanics, anything that can happen will happen, and we don't see a reason why you can't sometimes have charm quarks hanging out inside the proton. But these calculations are really hard to do. You know, Chromodynamics, the theory that explains how the strong interactions work and how quirks come together to make particles, is a bear to work with. We can't even do things like calculate from first principles what the mass of the proton should be or the mass of these other particles. It's like very, very difficult to do anything with. So it's dominated by experiments. We have to go out and actually measure this stuff and see what's in the universe and then try to figure out how to explain it with our calculations. Because we're really limited in the calculations we can do here. And so people have been doing experiments to see like what's inside the proton for a few decades now, and there were some hints, Oh, look, this experiment says there actually is some charm inside the proton, some intrinsic charm, not charm that's created when we collide stuff together out of that energy, but charm that was already there. And then another experiment that came along said Nope, we don't see any charm. And these things were limited because we didn't have enough data, we didn't have enough energy, we didn't have enough power. But recently, because the large Hadron collider, we have more data, we have more energy, we can get more definitive measurements for what's inside the proton.
Hmmm, I feel like you're talking about charm like it's a property, like riz, you know, or like actual charm. Is it like a property? I thought we were talking about the charm quark.
Saying whether it has charm. It's just shorthand for saying whether there's a probability to find charm quarks in the proton. But we are changing a little bit what we mean by it's made out of right. We think of the atom is made out of protons, neutrons, and electrons, Like you have those things as ingredients, you put them together, and now you call it an atom. Here is a little bit different. It's a little fuzzyer. It's a little bit more quantum mechanical. We're saying, like, the wave function of the proton has components of the upcork and the down cork, and maybe there's a component there for the charm cork. Not like the charm cork is always there, but there's always a probability for it. So it changes a little bit what we mean by like, this proton is made of something.
But I guess then you get into a question of like where do you draw the line quantum mechanically, it is technically possible for my body to suddenly turn into the body of Brad Pitt, right, Like that's a quantum mechanical probability. It's very small, but it is technically a possibility right in this universe.
Yeah, I mean, I think you're both equally chamming, so you're already there.
Yeah, Brad Pitt is very chamming. But just because I can turn into Brad Pitt at any moment doesn't mean that I am Brad Pitt. Mm hm.
But you can ask the question if I call Jorge a thousand times, what fraction the time does Brad answer?
Right? And well, even if it's like one in a trillion, at what point what number of phone calls should I change my name to Brad Pitt?
Yeah? Well, if you've always called Jorge and Brad has never answered, then you can't say that there's a Brad contribution to Jorge. But as soon as that happens, then boom, you've measured the Brad fraction Ofjorge cham.
And then at what point do you say that I am made out of Brad Pitt.
When you can measure some Brady the time the Brad answers, that's what we'll declare you are partially Brad Pit.
Like, is there a percentage that you would do that? Just like in the proton, is there a percentage of charm corkins that you would then say, yes, the proton does have a charm cork in it, because technically it does right now, right, there's a very small probability, as you said, that things in it can turn into a charm poard.
I don't think there's any minimum quantities. As long as you can measure it, as long as it's large enough for us to detect it, then we'll say we found charm in the proton and we know that it's there. Otherwise it's just sort of theoretical. It's like saying, you know, is there a teapot a zillion light years away? I mean, maybe there is, but we'll never detect it, so it's just theoretical. But as long as we measure some charm cork in the proton, then we can say it's there. Otherwise it's just like a possibility. And again we can't really even do the calculations or we can predict theoretically and to say how much charm there should be in the proton, So it really has to be led by measurements.
Hmmm.
But I guess maybe the question is like, are you saying that it's possible that the proton has a charm work in it, or is there maybe something the theory that says it's impossible, or is that what you're trying to get at, Like we need to prove it to make sure that it is possible.
Yeah, the theory says that it's possible, but the theory is very fuzzy and very hard to work with. So the best thing to do is to go out there and measure the charm fraction of the proton, and that might help us come back and improve our theories and get a better grip on what we think is going on.
I see, so you think that maybe it is possible for the insights of a proton to turn into a charm cork, but you're not sure yet because you haven't seen it or confirmed it exactly in experiments. Some people have, some people haven't.
And that was the scenario until a couple of years ago, and then using data at the Large Hadron Collider, we were able to confirm that there really is charm cork inside the proton. So this is a paper that came out in twenty twenty two that had very powerful statistical evidence for charm quark's inside protons, which means we're pretty sure we can say the proton is charming. But you know, dot dot maybe question mark.
Well, I feel like the language you're using is maybe confusing, Like you're not saying it has charm inside of it, You're saying it sometimes turns into a charm cork. What's inside of the proton.
I think the most precise way to say it is that the wave function for the proton has probabilities for upquarks, down quarks, and charm quarks. Sometimes when you look inside the proton you will find a charm core.
Mmm. Oh all right, So then it has been experimentally verified.
You think maybe the latest evidence from about a year ago is pretty persuasive. It's more than three statistical sigmas of significance.
Now, what's the difference there, Like, what's the thing that makes you more sure rather than not that it's not like coming from the energy when you collide these particles, for example, that it's actually there if you don't look at it.
It comes from the patterns of how the particles emerge from the collisions. Like if it's coming from actually inside the proton, then you'll see these particles come out in the path that the protons were taking, and the charm quirks are moving with the protons as they come into the collision. If the charm cork wasn't there the whole time, it's just made during the collision, you tend to see these charm corks fly out more like at the center or just where the collision happens, So there's some subtle patterns there that people have been looking for, but the spray of particles. You get a different prediction if the charm cork was there all the time than if the charm cork is only created in the moments of the collision. But it's a subtle effect, which is why this experiment was very difficult to do and needed a lot of data and was only wrapped up a couple of years ago.
M okay, So now does that mean that the international physics community has issued a giant apology for all those textbooks and posters that say that the proton is made out of two up quarks in the down cork because all this time you've been wrong.
Well, I think we're working on stickers on our web store that say dot dot dot maybe to be added to every textbook ever.
Well no, but I mean it like, you know, you walk down the physics department, you see a poster with the fundamental theory of particle physics, and it's as that a proton is made out of to upcorks in downcork. But now you have to change the story.
It sounds like, yeah, it's an update to the story. It's part of science evolving and becoming more charming as we learn more about how the universe works.
So are you going to change those posters? Do you think that? Or maybe the question is do you think those posters need to be updated?
Yeah, it's a tough question of sort of pedagogy, like how do you teach this stuff? You know, the story is mostly the same, but there are nuances, and so it might be worth introducing those at the very start, or it might be worth explaining those as you dig deeper into the story.
I understand what you mean because I do a lot of science communication, but there is sort of a fine line between not saying something that's not true yeah, and saying something that's more complicated.
Yeah. No, it's a difficult line or walk I agree?
So which one do you think it is? Do you think it needs to be updated at some point? If I say right now that the proton is made out of to upcords and down quarks, you technically would have to say that's not true, or we think that's not true. So if I see it on a poster, does that need to be corrected?
I think that basically everything we say in quantum mechanics and in particle physics is an approximation. So from that perspective, like nothing is exactly true, there's always qualifications.
Where're going to take down the posters exactly, I don't say anything.
At all, but it's still worth saying. It's still worth introducing people to these ideas, even if the story we tell at first is only approximately true, and the end all of our understanding is probably only approximately true.
Well, I mean, I feel like some things are stronger than others. Like you can say an atom is made out of protons and electrons. There's no cavea to that, is there?
Well, there's other stuff in there, right, The photons can turn into other particles, and so when you interact with an atom sometimes you find W bosons and Z bosons.
Inside there, in addition to the electrons and protons. But the electrons and protons are still there.
No electrons and protons are still there, all.
Right, Well, another interesting insight into how we're still faring things out. The universe is vast and and our current theories may change tomorrow or today, or maybe they should have changed a while ago.
We're here trying to explain our constantly evolving understanding to you.
All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.
For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Instant, and now TikTok. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down green house gas emissions. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digesters to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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Hey everyone, Jake's Story. Elli here from John Boy Media. I want to tell you about my podcast, Waken Jake. I've been a sports nut my whole life, and there's nothing I love more than talking about it. If you're a sports fan, Waken Jake is the place for you, covering all the hot topics from the sports world. A lot of baseball, a lot of postseason coverage, mock drafts, awards, guest interviews, all of it. New episodes every Monday and Wednesday. Come watch along on the waken Jake YouTube channel or listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
