Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseLearn about hexaquarks with Daniel and Jorge
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It's the credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn four point four zero percent annual percentage yield. When you open a high Yield savings account through Apple Card, apply for Applecard in the wallet app subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Apple Card and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC terms and more at applecard dot Com. 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 greenhouse 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 us dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
Hi.
I'm David Ego from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I mean neuroscientists at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship.
Between your brain and your life, because the more we know about what's running under the hood, better we can steer our lives. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, Daniel, do you know what dark matter is made of?
Oh?
Man, I wish I did.
Are you sure it's not something simple like what you like, a bunch of rocks painted black.
Maybe yeah, okay, it's not that.
Or you know, just a huge, ginormous black.
Hole that would be awesome, But it's not that either.
Or maybe it could be a don't go there space banana.
I knew you were gonna go there.
I have to. I mean, how do you know it's not a space banana? Daniel? I am Poor Hamm, a cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I don't believe in space bananas.
What do you mean you don't believe in space banana. You don't believe bananas can be in space, or you don't believe that space can have bananas.
I don't believe that particles randomly bouncing around in space will spontaneously form bananas. That's sort of like the Raleceman bananas hypothesis.
Not even in an infinite universe where anything that's probable happens.
Well, you know, in an infinite universe, there actually must be space banana out there. So and I do think the universe is probably infinite, So you know what, I'm a convert now. I am now a believer in space bani.
List to my cult, and welcome to all of you to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we talk about all the amazing things that are out there and all the amazing things that are in here, and how it all connects and how it all fits together and explain it to you in a way that you can understand and hopefully makes you chuckle.
Yeah. We talk about all of the things that are out there that we know about and all the things out there that we don't know about, and not just space bananas, maybe space bananas made out of dark matter.
That's right, because one of the most exciting things about science is not just getting answers and figuring stuff out, but asking questions. So our goal is to take you to the forefront of those questions, to show you what scientists are thinking about, what are the possibilities for some of the answers to those biggest questions, and explain them to you.
Yeah, because I think for scientists it's not just enough to know that something is out there and to classify it and to kind of catalog it. But yeah, it seems you guys really want to know what things are made of. You know, you want to keep drilling down until you get to what like mathematics.
Well, that's my goal. I mean, I don't want to just know that something is there. I want to know is it made out of the same stuff as you and I are. Can we explain all of the crazy, beautiful, amazing, tasty, weird stuff in the universe in terms of the same basic building blocks or do we need to add another building block? So to me, it's really interesting just to know, like what is it made out of?
Right? Like what would a space banana be made out of? Bananinos? Or bararchs, bananatons.
Whatever they're made out of, you will get to name.
Them, oh good and taste them hopefully.
But the question is if we find space bananas, are they made out of the same particles that normal bananas are made out of? Or they made out of something new and weird different, which might mean that you can't eat them.
Oh, I see, they wouldn't taste the same.
Not if they're made out of some new, weird kind of particle, right exotic space bananas. They might not even be digestible by your system. They might pass right through you. That would be weird.
Oh man. And but then it begs the question are they still bananas?
And then we have to go through the department of banana philosophy to answer that question.
But yeah, we often talk about what things are made of. And one of the biggest questions not just for us and humans, but in all of human history maybe is what is this twenty five seven percent of the universe made out of that scientists have discovered.
That's right. We spend a lot of time understanding the kind of matter that's around us, bananas and people, in toes and ferrets and lava, and discovered that all of it's made out of these tiny little particles quarks and electrons mostly. But then we found that a huge chunk of the universe, twenty five percent of all the energy budget of the universe. Is this other kind of matter, this dark matter? And so of course, as particle physicists, we want to know what is it made out of? Is it made out of particles? If so, is it one particle, is it a familiar particle that we've seen before, or something totally new and weird and different. And I'm used to sort of hyperbolizing this problem as saying, it's not just the biggest question in physics, it's the biggest question in science. But you just went even further. You were like, this is the biggest question in human.
History regarding physics.
I think, woh, oh, you're qualifying it now. All right, it's too late, man, it's too late. We're already.
Number one question, ever, doesn't isn't dark What is dark energy? Bigger?
Okay? Number two question ever is still pretty good?
And so yeah, so it's it's pretty big. I mean, it's twenty five percent of the universe, and like we the regular matter is only five percent, So this is not like a small question. It's it's it's like, what is most of the stuff in the universe made out of?
Yeah, we're kind of the little right. We thought for a long time that we had figured out mostly what matter was made out of, and then we tried to generalize. You said, well, must be that the rest of the universe is also made out of similar kinds of stuff. But if the rest of the universe is more then we're sort of the rest of the universe and that's the normal stuff. And so it's really important that we figure out what that dark matter is made out of. Is it made out of our kind of particles or is it made out of something else?
Yeah, and so we have I think a couple of episodes about dark matter, and maybe if you even go back to some of our first podcast episode episodes, you know, a back when we were younger, before the virus, where we talked about what dark matter is, what scientists think it is, what science is, how scientists know that it's there. And so if you're curious or catching up about what dark matter, please go through our archive and check those episodes out. But the big question about dark matter is what is it made out of? So we it's this weird matter out there in the universe, right Daniel, that is pulling on stars and keeping galaxy together. But nobody knows what it's made out of because it's not made out of stuff that you can see or touch.
Yeah, and for a long time we thought that dark matter couldn't be made out of quarks, that it couldn't be made out of the kinds of stuff that's around us, that it had to be some new, weird, exotic kind of particle. And so we've had lots of ideas for what kind of particle dark matter could be made out of, and maybe you've heard of them. There's the weekly interacting massive particle, the WIMP. Then there's the macho massive astronomical compact halo objects, and then there's other weird stuff like axions. But the sort of the scientific mainstream is to think that dark matter is probably made out of something new and weird, and that's fascinating. That's an amazing opportunity because if you discover this new kind of particle that gives you like a whole new lego block, a whole you know, it opens up this whole new place to play, this new area of physics that we can explore.
Yeah, it's like that time you figure out you can combine Lincoln blogs and legos and it's like, whoa, what can I build now?
Or it turns out most of the world is not built out of Lincoln lawns or legos, Right, and you learned how to use actual concrete to make buildings.
This just took an engineeringly turned you know. But so that was the sort of the thinking about dark matter. But recently in the news, there is a lot of attention being paid to a new paper that just came out that maybe answers this question whether or not dark matter is made out of quarks.
Yeah, it's really sort of a fun question to just ask. Hold on a second, maybe dark matter is actually just made out of something simple, something familiar, in a new arrangement. Maybe it's found a way to hide from us, and so it's worth examining, like why don't we think dark matter is made out of quarks and could those assumptions be wrong?
Okay, so there's a new paper, right you were telling me that has a new idea for how you can maybe use quarks, old regular quarks and use them in a new way to make now, is this a theoretical paper or is this an experimental when they saw something.
Well, the paper is theoretical, but it touches on experimental work. It's from the University of York and it's by a couple of guys who came up with a new way to fit quarks together that could explain dark matter. And so it's a theoretical paper, but it references experimental work, Like it talks about this thing called a hexa quark, which combines six quarks into a weird particle, and they talk about how maybe if you put those quarks together, it could look like dark matter and it could like evade all of the arguments against why quarks can't be dark matter. And so it's sort of like theoretical, like can we make this work? And then they round it up, I think in a cool way by suggesting some ways to check their idea.
Well, interesting, it's a pretty cool idea. And so today on the program, we'll be asking the question could dark matter be made?
Out?
Of course, and several listeners had a question about this paper, so they sent it to us. Jeff Sagar and Jill Turner Bill send us this paper and said, could this be right. Could dark matter just be made out of quarks? So we thought it would be fun to talk about.
I feel like I like how people someplings treat you like the you know how you have a medical doctor relative. Sometimes you're like, I got this itch here in the back of my neck. Can you check it out and tell me if this is something I should be concerned about. I feel like you're sort of like the internet's now physicist uncle.
I'm happy to be your on called physicists because if your dark matter has a rash, then please don't take it to the er. You just need it to rest at home.
That's right. I do not apply dark energy to it or antimatter might be might have a secondary consequences, that's right.
But if you do have a question about something you see online that you think is probably bunked or you don't understand it, send it to us. We'll happy to dive into it, maybe give you a short answer over email, or devote an entire episode to it like this one.
Yeah, and so, as usual, we were curious to see how many people had heard of these hexa quorks and how far has the news about them spread into the public. So, as usual, Daniel went out there and ask people this question, have you heard of hexaquorks? Now, Daniel, because of the situation we're in with the virus coronavirus, how did you approach people this time or did you know? Did you approach it from twenty feet away? How did you record these answers?
I have a massive bubble that has six foot diameter, and I just walk around inside that bubble and people.
You normally have that just to avoid people, but now it comes in handy.
It's usually a natural effect of my odor and my hairstyle.
I see, it's a virtual bubble. I see, we'll just naturally stay away from.
It's an effective bubble.
Now.
These recordings were done last week in advance, and so this was pre pandemic, when people were still walking around in the world and talking to strangers, and I was letting strangers breathe on my phone, which is maybe not a great idea. I have since disinfected it, but in the future we may have to go to internet person on the street questions. So if you're interested in participating in future person on the street interview questions, send me a line and I'll send you our questions.
Because everyone always dreams about being a person on the Internet.
Well, it's sort of inverting it, right. Instead of people on the Internet asking me physics questions, I'm asking random people on the internet physics questions. So it's only.
Fair, I see. So you would ask maybe online, hey have you heard of hexcores and you just get a bunch of recordings and people saying Nope, never heard of it.
We've done this a couple of times though, with remote listeners who wanted to participate, and I would send them the questions in advance and tell them to record their answers with no googling.
All right, well, here's what people have to say, So before you listen to these answers, just think about it. Have you heard of hexachorus or have an inkling as to what they might be? Here's what people had to say, No, or.
Do you guess they might be? You had to guess some kind of starter.
Nope, no, I have.
Not come up, but I don't know anything about it. No, No, all right, not a lot of positive recognition there out there about hexa quarks.
Almost exactly zero.
No.
My favorite answer was hexa what hexa?
What is it like? A witchcraft thing? Like do you hex people.
Well, what do you think? Do you think that's poorly named or you think it just hasn't penetrated the public out there. I mean, if I asked you about hexa quarks, wouldn't you have thought, Oh, it's a particle with six quarks in it. It seems very natural to me.
Well, I guess it depends on what it is, and I currently I don't have a good sense of what it is. But if I had to bet whether physicists name something not in the best way possible, that's where my money would be.
So you're like, hexa quarks, it's probably a new kind of fruit.
Yeah, I think hexa quarks. It's like it sounded like a good idea, but actually it doesn't help you.
All Right, Well, we'll explain what hexa quarks are and how they might possibly but probably not, could explain what dark matter is.
But first, let's take a quick break.
With big wireless providers, what you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill, the price, your thoughts you were paying magically skyrockets. With Mint Mobile, You'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When Mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan. They really mean it. I've used Mint Mobile and the call quality is always so crisp and so clear. I can recommend it to you. So say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts. So dit your overpriced wireless with Mint Mobiles deal and get three months a premium wireless service for fifteen bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month, go to mintmobile dot com slash universe and it's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Cut your wireless build to fifteen bucks a month. At mintmobile dot com slash universe, forty five dollars upfront payment required equivalent to fifteen dollars per month new customers on first three month plan only. Speeds slower about forty gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxi spees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details.
AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry, and literally billions of dollars are being invested, so buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power, So how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control. It's time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI. OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has fourty eight times the bandwidth of other clouds, offers one consistent price instead of variable regional pricing, and of course nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less, like Uber eight by eight and Data Brooks Mosaic. Take a free test drive of OCI at Oracle dot com slash Strategic. That's Oracle dot com slash Strategic Oracle dot com slash Strategic.
If you love iPhone, you'll love Applecard. It's the credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn four point four zero percent annual percentage yield. When you open a high yield savings account through Applecard, apply for Applecard in the Wallet app, subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Applecard owners subject to eligibility. Apple Card and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch Member, FDIC, terms and more at applecard dot com.
All right, Daniel, we're talking about hexaquorgs and it's a new idea that maybe physicists think that it can tell us what dark matter is made out of. So I guess maybe step us through here. First, we know sort of what dark matter is, and the question was before you thought that dark matter couldn't be made out of quarks, So maybe tell us a little bit about why we thought it couldn't be made out of quarks.
Yeah, this is an unusual idea to explain dark matter using quarks, because we thought that we had to rule that out. Most of mainstream science said dark matter has to be some new, weird kind of particle. So if we're going to understand this new idea for how hexa quarks could be dark matter, it's really worth visiting and understanding, like why did we rule out of quarks and how does this new idea maybe sort of evade those arguments? So number one thing is that quarks have electric charge, and quarks interact with light. You know, if you shoot photons it's something made out of quarks, it will react. You know, you shoot light at protons, you shoot light at atoms, it reacts, It shines, it absorbs and emits. All all the stuff out there in the universe does interact with photons.
And so that's why that's kind of why we thought maybe dark matter couldn't be made out of quarks, because regular quarks you can see, but dark matter you can't see.
Yeah, it's dark, right, it doesn't give off light, it doesn't reflect light, it doesn't interact in any way with light.
Right, it's invisible.
It's invisible. Yeah, invisible matter would have been such a better name. Dark matter makes it sound like it's black, right, Yeah, it's not. And you might think, well, there's ways to evade that, you know, what about neutral objects. And it's true that, like you know, photons don't interact with neutral objects. So we thought maybe dark matter is made of neutrinos or something else like that, or maybe neutral atoms.
I guess maybe initially when you guys found dark matter, it's not that you knew it was invisible. You just knew that it didn't emit light and you cann't see it, right, So at that point when you found it and you named it, it could have just been dark or like painted black, right well.
But then it would have obscured, Like if it was just black and absorbed light but didn't admit it, then it would have obscured stuff, like there's so much of it out there. If you could see the dark matter, then the night sky would be a lot darker because we'd be shrouded in it, like our galaxy is in the middle of a huge dark matter halo. If it wasn't invisible, most of the universe would be invisible to us. We would just see darkness in the sky.
Right well, it could be like really small dense pellets of something, right and we wouldn't see it, but it wouldn't be invisible.
But we can see the effects of like gas and dust in the universe, Like most of the stuff in the universe is gas and dust, and we can definitely see that it absorbs light. It blocks our view. The center of the galaxy, for example, is mostly obscured because of all the gas and dust. So even tiny pellets if you got zillions and zillions of them. They obscure your view. It's like a fog.
Okay, So we didn't think it could be quarts because it's dark and it doesn't interact with the light, and we know quarts interact with light, and so is that the main reason we didn't think that dark matter or we don't think dark matter could be made out of quarks?
It's not because it's not that convincing an argument. There are ways to evade, right, There is normal matter that's invisible to photons, like neutrinos and or space bin space bans are invisible to.
Photo space bananas. Yeah, okay, right, as long as we're making up the things.
I feel like I just entered the second level of this cult. Now I've been informed, and you're read into.
The invisible you you made it to stay at a level three, so.
I'm say, and then you know, people wondered like, could you possibly have neutral atoms that don't interact with photons? Et cetera, et cetera. So it turns out we have a much stronger argument for why dark matter can't be made out of quarks, and actually comes from calculations about the Big Bang.
M so we studied the Big Bang and we sort of see the remnants of the debris from the Big Bang, and that actually tells you that dark matter can't be made out of quarks.
Yeah, what it does. That tells you how much stuff in the universe is made out of quarks, because it turns out that the density of quarks in the very early moments of the universe controls how quark matter is formed. Quark matter being like hydrogen and helium and light elements, me and you and all that stuff. The density of the quarks determines how much heavy elements you get. So if you have all huge density of quarks in the early universe, you get more heavy elements like lithium and carbon and oxygen. If you have fewer quarks and the quarks aren't as dense, then they don't combine to form as many heavy elements. And so we measure how much hydrogen is there, how much helium is there, and we can tell from that sort of the density of quarks in the early universe, and that tells us just like how many quarks were there.
And I guess it's not just about quantities, because I mean, you could imagine that maybe there were a ton more cores than we think there were, and some of them just went on to make dark matter instead of hydrogen and helium.
Well that's sort of this idea. That's sort of the idea from this paper.
Yeah, okay, sorry, I should getting credit there and then Nobel price it turns out to be true. Okay, so I see. So before we didn't think that the Big Band made enough quarks to make dark matter because it didn't make sense. But maybe there is a way for this to make sense.
Yeah, And it's sort of an it's a subtle argument. It's a subtraction, right, saying, here's how much matter is out there in the universe, and we know that by looking at how galaxies sowre and you can just see the gravitational effects of it. That's how much dark matter there is. And we know how much quark matter there is based on this Big Bang nucleosynthesis argument, how much helium and lithium was made and so, and they don't add up, so that leaves a gap. So we can't explain all the matter in the universe using quarks. But again, that's assuming that quarks turn into the kind of familiar matter where we're we're familiar with, you know, hydrogen and atoms and protons and.
Neutrons and stuff like like. It couldn't be that it turned into hydrogen helium and then some of that stuff turned into dark matter. That wouldn't That wouldn't work.
No, that doesn't work. But if you could somehow siphon off a bunch of quarks into a new invisible kind of matter that then wouldn't interact with those hydrogen helium and stuff, then maybe that dark matter could be explained by those quarks and not mess up this early universe Big Bang nucleosynthesis stuff. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
H No, I think we're here. I think we're here, right. I mean that's what this idea of a hexa quark is, is that maybe it's something that happened to all those quarks at the Big Bang.
Yeah, And there's a few steps you need there. You need to understand what a hexaquork is. And then the hexa quarks have to sort of siphon themselves off into some state that wouldn't want to interact with the hydrogen and the helium that was happening around then, because remember it was a hot and nasty place the early universe. It's not like you made something and it just got to hang out for fourteen billion years. It was. It was really dense and there were photons everywhere, and so you need to somehow create this stuff and then also protect it from the rest.
Of the universe. I see, take it, like take it out of the craziness. Yeah, so that it can account for dark matter. Now, yeah, well, so step us through. Then what is hexa quork and is it a different kind of quark or is it like a poorly named concept in physics.
I'm feeling a little bit of judgment here, but I'm just going to keep going.
Because now I'm like a cursed quark, you know, like.
I see, Oh, I get it. It's like a like a like a witches quark.
Yeah, yeah, yes, boil.
Boiled, toil in trouble, throw an eye of Newton hexacork. That sounds good. You know, A hexa quork is not a new kind of quark. It's a new combination of existing quarks.
Oh, I see.
And so quarks are very familiar particles. They make up protons and neutrons and other exotic particles, and so there are upquarks and down quarks inside.
Me and you not a exotic particles, right.
They make up non exotic particles, but also you know, weird particles like pions and other kinds of masons they make up. You can rearrange these legos to make all sorts of different kinds of things. We had a whole episode about that how that works. Quarks are amazing little legos.
Right, and usually they're in in pairs or in threes, right.
That's right, And so there are a lot of rules for how you put these legos together. You can't just say I'm going to put these seven quarks together or those nine quarks together, because they feel the strong nuclear force, the most powerful force in the universe, which is very particular about how you put them together. And the strong nuclear force has a different kind of way of arranging itself than any other kind of force. Like electromagnetism has plus and minus. So if you want someone that's neutral, you put a plus and minus together.
Right. That one's simple to think about, because like two pluses can go together because they repel each other, and two negatives can't go together, but a plus and minus they're happy together.
And they form a neutral atom or a neutral system. In the case of the strong nuclear force, though, there are three kinds of charges, and so we can't call them plus and minus because they don't sit nicely along one axis. So we give them the names red, green, and blue, because if you add them all up together, then you get a neutral atom, what we call it colorless atom.
Right, like, if you take a red cork, green cork, and a blue cork, you get sort of like a happy trio.
Yeah, they're a happy trio. So they're balanced out together, and that's sort of similar to electromagnetism. You take one of each of the kinds of charges, a plus and a minus, you add it together, you get neutral. Right In this way, you get one of each of the kinds of colors. You add them together, you get white or colorless. So you can make triplets. You can also make pairs, like you take a red cork and pair it with an anti red cork. That's altiutural.
What color is anti red? Like orange or like a c cyan.
If only I knew a visual artist who was really well.
Versed, well, you're talking to a comics for parties. I only do black and white.
Okay, I'll ask the Sunday cartoonist that question. I don't know what the anti red is, but whatever it is, when you add it to red, you get white.
And so a red and an anti red can sit happily together and be something. Yes, what do you call that? Like a biquark or a two that's called a mason, a mazon, all right, got it?
Yeah, so you so you can start with two quarks a qrk and it's anti color quark. You can do three quarks if you have like RGB, and that's called a baryon. And examples are protons and neutrons, right, very familiar, mm hmm. And then you can get more complicated. And now those are the most common particles in the universe, masons and baryons.
That's what we're made out of, right, We're like our protons and neutrons in your atoms are made out of threesomes of quarks.
That's right, these QRK triplets. And but you can combine them in other ways, like you can take fours. If you have a red and a green and an anti red and an anti green, right, that also is color neutral.
Yeah, because the antis cancel out the red and the green, and then they can all sit happily together.
And can you already guess what that's called? A quater quark, A tetra quark.
A tetra Oh right, yeah, tetra tetras.
That's right. And you can fit them together just like tetras pieces. So that's the four quark version.
And so that's stable because you know, like a color and an anti quark, we're happy by them as a two zone. But you're saying you can get two couples and they're also happy together.
They form a colorless object. And not all of these things are stable, right, Like the proton is stable. The proton will sit around. A proton by itself will sit around for billions of years and do nothing. A neutron is not stable, right, A neutron will turn into a proton and an electron. And similarly, the pairs the masons, they're also not stable. So some of these things are color like, they're neutral, but they're not necessarily.
Stable, all right. But you're saying that they can't fit together, they just won't fit together for very long.
Yeah, And you can keep going, and you can make a combination of five quarks. So here you would need like an R, A B, a G that's color neutral, plus maybe like an R and an anti R, so that gives you an overall particle that's neutral, and that's called a pentaquork, right.
Not a sunk cork.
And then finally we get two hexa quarks.
But wait, tell me about these weird particles with lots of quarks and it like they do they act like regular particles or you know what I mean? Like do they just bounce around with the rest of us here or do they suddenly change or do something different.
They're very short lived. We can make them only in special situations in particle colliders, you smashing of quarks together for a very short amount of time these particles can form, but they last like ten to the minus twenty three seconds and then they fall apart and they turn into lighter, more stable particles I see.
But while they're alive, there are just like regular particles.
They're just like regular particles. But you know that's a whole other question, like, well what is a particle anyway? But they are the bound states, right, They move together, and if you touch them with anything that has less energy than those bonds, then they react all as one and so yeah, they act as a particle, though it's very short lived.
All right. So then and then, but then you can get six quarts together.
You can get six quarks together. And this is just sort of like a die baryon. It's like a red green and blue and then another red green blue, or an anti red and anti green and anti blue.
But isn't that the same as like a quark and an anti like.
A like a proton and an anti proton.
Yeah, like a proton and a neutron.
Yeah, it's similar, but it's you know, they're compressed together. A proton and a neutron has the same quark content as a hexaquork, but it's a different arrangement, you know, the same way that I have the same core content as you, but I'm a different arrangement. It's all about the arrangement. It's all about the bonds and how you fit them together. Like I could make a really ugly thing out of my legos, and you could make something beautiful, and I could say, well, they're made it of the same legos, but that doesn't take away from the beauty of your creation.
Right yeah, yeah, all right, So then so you're saying these are six quarks, not just in like you know, three pairs or two three years. There are actually like six of them, or they're all interacting with each other. They're all sort of connected to each other.
Yeah, and there's one in particular. It's called the d Star and it has a certain mass. It's just under two and a half times the mass of the proton and it was found in twenty eleven and then confirmed in twenty thirteen again in particle collisions, and it lasts for ten to the mine as twenty three seconds. And we think it's made out of three up quarks and three down quarks all put together.
Oh so you found this. This is something that you've seen in the Parkle collider, Like, hey, this came out.
Yeah. So hexa quarks are real, but we don't think they last very long. We think you can make a hexa quork, but then it's gone after ten to the minus twenty three seconds.
Wow, which is like you know, say, any electron years.
But it's much smaller than the amount of time we think dark matter has been around. We think dark matter lasts for billions of years. Right, So for the star hexa quorks to explain dark matter. You have to explain how, for some reason it's lasting for billions of years.
Oh, I see, all right, So this is the candidate for what dark matter might be made out of. It might be made out of these interesting and funny hexa quarks. And so let's get into whether or not that's actually true and what this paper says about dark matter and what it's made out of. But first, let's take a quick break.
When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, or enjoy a rich spoonful of greenogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
We thank you Franklin, as is the doddling dude flying a cut no rain, But those twomens are the most important scientific discoveries of the time.
I'm Evan Ratliffe.
Last season, we tackled the ingenuity of Elon Musk with biographer Walter Isaacson. This time we're diving into the story of Benjamin Franklin, another genius who's desperate to be dusted off from history.
His media empire makes him the most successful self made business person in America.
I mean he was.
Never early to bed, an early to rise type person. He's enormously famous. Women shut wearing their hair and what was called the coiffor a la Franklin.
And who's more relevant now than ever.
The only other person who could have possibly been the first president would have been Benjamin Franklin, but he's too old and once Washington to do it.
Listen to On Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Bosknight and I'm the host of the Taken a Walk podcast Music History on foot ill.
Way, There's three and go, how have your focks Ago?
And all the toll you got the chills?
One a bat Ols or their answer.
The podcast is an audio diary of insightful conversations with musicians and the inside stories behind their music.
Kenny aronofs I'd wake up every morning and I feel grateful, but.
I know it didn't come from luck.
If you get a lucky break, you better be prepared, you better be ready, if you've done your homework, and if continue into your homework, you'll turn that lucky break into something great.
The message of the podcast is simple, honest conversation with musicians about the music they create.
Parnie Wilson, You know I mean Eldon John Pick me up and put me back in my crib when I was a toddler.
It's like, that's the thing that's so cool.
You I've got these stories because of my life.
Listen to the Take in a Walk podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, Daniel, we're talking about the hexa quarks and you're telling me that there are just six quarks held together.
That's it, man, just six quarks held together. Like anybody could have done this at any time.
Uh.
Yeah, you seem kind of underwhelmed a little bit. I mean, you're expecting witches quarks and like spell quarks and magic quarks.
I feel like you're using the word quark for two things. You're using it for the particle that are quarks, the fundamental particles that are quarks, and you're using it also for arrangements of quarts. Do you know what I mean?
Like you see like charmforks, strange quark, hexa quark. That's confusing.
Well, I feel like it's strange quarks. It's like, Okay, that's a different kind of quark, but this is not a different kind of quarks. This is just an arrangement of quarks. It's like saying a bananas, a banana, and a bundle of bananas is a hexa banana.
Actually, that sounds like a great idea to me. What would you like today, sir, I'll have a hexa banana.
But I guess the idea is said. It's a It acts like a particle, just like a like a bunch of bananas. You can throw a bunch of bananas together because they're held together, but they're made out of individual bananas.
Yes, they're made out of individual bananas. And so in this case, we're interested in this D star hexa quark. Not so much because we're interested in like how can you put quarks together at the whole field of quantum chromodynamics that people are interested in, But here we're interested in like maybe could this possibly explain the dark matter?
Mmmm? And so because maybe when you put these six quarks together and they suddenly have special powers.
Yeah. And so to get D star hexa quarks to look like dark matter, you have to do a couple of things. First thing is you have to make it last longer than ten to the minus twenty three seconds, because we think dark matter exists on sort of cosmological time scales that it was created in the early universe, and it's still around. It's not like decaying into normal matter.
It doesn't just evaporate.
It doesn't just evaporate. It sticks round.
Right Otherwise, here it's there.
It's still around. Yeah, it's been here for fourteen billion years. No reason to think it's going to disappear.
Tomorrow, right, So you would have to find a way for these hexachords to be stable to hang around.
Yeah, And the idea is that maybe these d star hexa quorks form some weird state of matter, a Bose Einstein condensate, where they all sort of group together and act like one big mega particle.
Oh man, and let me guess how you call that one a mega quark.
Now, that's the name of a transformer.
I think you're thinking of a megatron.
And Bose Einstein condensate is a weird quantum mechanical state of matter where you get a lot of particles together that are bosons, things like photons or other particles that can sit on top of each other that can be in the same quantum state, where some particles fermions that don't like to be in the same quantum state, like electrons. If you put two electrons around an atom, they don't want to be in the same energy level, but bosons they're happy to sit in the same place. You can have ten million photons all in the same state with the same energy. But if you get enough of these particles, enough of these bosons together, they have like a macroscopic quantity like a droplet. Then it forms a state called a Bose Einstein condensate where it's macroscopically sized, but it behaves like a quantum object.
Like one like they share the quantum uncertainty kind of in a way.
Yeah, it's a quantum wave function with like visible sizes. Usually all the quantum effects are hidden away at the tiny scales where you can't see them, and their average doubt to zero. But here's an object that actually you can see quantum mechanical effects. And we should do a whole podcast episode on Bose Einstein contensates.
All right, So we think that maybe this hexachord lives in a Bose Einstein contentent state, and that's how it becomes dark matter.
Yeah, they did this calculation and they showed that maybe if you could get enough of these together, they could form a Bose Einstein condensate, in which case maybe it would be.
Stable, like if they wouldn't evaporate, they would just they would like being in a Bose Einstein condensate, and then they wouldn't they wouldn't disappear.
And there's you know, a good history here for this kind of idea of saying you have a particle which on itself is unstable, like the neutron, but you put it in a special situation like neutron stars, and it's stable. So like a huge pile of neutrons altogether, they stick around. Neutron stars sticks around. A single neutron will decay pretty quickly into other stuff. So maybe the same thing happens with these d star hexa quorks. And they did some calculations in the paper that showed it it was plausible. It's not just like let's throw this binana against the wall and see if it sticks.
So what do you think is the math? Right? Can you candy things sit in bo Est Einstein condoceant?
Well, it's pretty complicated stuff and it might be right, but you know, I don't see a flaw in it in that part of the calculation. But you know, there are a lot of ideas that could be possible, but that aren't real. You know, you have to not just say this might work. You have to see that it actually does work. Because we're interested in doing in this case is saying like, is it actually the dark matter? Not just could it may be? Maybe be, because they have a long list already of maybees for dark matter.
I see, so it can exist, but there's a question of does it happen in nature? And the second question, which is is it that what dark matter is made out of?
Yeah, and there is one question I have about this paper that makes me very skeptical that these things could be produced and live long enough to become dark matter.
Physics drama.
Physics drama. And that's you remember that in the early universe there was a lot of radiation, Like most of the energy of the early universe were was photons and other things just like energy radiating around. It was a crazy time. A tiny fraction of the energy of the universe was matter back then. And you know, since then things have cooled out a little bit and we have more matter, et cetera. But back then and it was really hard for anything to stay together. You formed an atom five seconds after the universe was born immediately was blasted apart by a photon, and so it's hard to imagine how these d star hexa quarks all survived that crazy photonic time with all this energy bouncing around. And in the paper, I don't see them doing a calculation to show that these things somehow will not interact with photons, because remember they're still made of quarks, right, a photon hits one of these dstar hexl quarks, it should break it up, right.
Well, I guess that brings me to my question, which is why do they think this might be dark matter? Like when you put six quarts together, does it become invisible suddenly and not react to light the way we know dark matter doesn't either.
Well, that's a good question. I mean, these things are electrically neutral, right, and so in that way they could be, but a high enough energy photon will penetrate them. I think the core idea is that maybe this dark matter is made out of these quarks right in this special configuration that allowed them to evade the sort of creation of light matter in the early universe. Remember we talked about how in the early universe most of the quarks got together to make helium and hydrogen and all that kind of stuff, and so we know how many quarks were used to make all that stuff, and it can't explain the dark matter. So this is the way to like siphon off some of those quarks into another kind of matter which could still exist in the universe. And so it's we've always assumed that dark matter couldn't be made of quarks for this reason, and the other arguments against dark matter being quarks are a little looser. They're like, as you're saying, like what happens if you shoot a photon at it? And so if it's possible to have more quarks in the early universe and siphon them off into this special kind of matter, then you know that gives you the license to add more quarks into the universe, which could then explain the dark matter. And it could be that that forms this bosone setin and condensate and then we don't really know, like it might be that that's sensitive to photons, like you smash into it hard enough with the photon it can break it up, but that it's still transparent. So it could be like hanging out there in great ribbons and sheets and fogs made out of quarks but mostly invisible.
I feel like you're sort of a little bit skeptical about this idea because you're saying that in something like that wouldn't survive the craziness of the Big Bang.
Yeah, And they don't explain in the paper how it would survive the very intense photonic atmosphere just after the Big Bang, Like why does this thing last so long? Like they explain how you could make it stable, meaning if you left it by itself, it would last long enough, and if you bombard it with photons, it should break up in there of the universe.
Right, But what if it's invisible to photons, then wouldn't it sort of sit outside of that crazy Big Bang explosion?
But it's not invisible two photons, I mean, most low energy photons would pass through it. But if you bombard it with very high energy photons and there are quarks inside of it, then the bonds between the quarks are no longer relevant. If you shoot a photon as something that's made out of quarks, and the energy the photon is greater than the energy of the bonds between the quarks, then the bond between the quarks don't matter. It doesn't matter anymore whether it's inside a proton or a neutron or some other kind of quark matter.
Bose Einstein quantum wave unity doesn't matter either.
It doesn't matter if you have high enough energy photons. And back in the Big Bang it was crazy high energy photons all the time.
I feel like you're almost saying, like the Big Bang photons would poke a hole in this theory.
They would shine a light on the flaws of this.
Yeah, there you go, all right, well that's but that's pretty interesting. And so this is a paper that and an idea that made a lot of the news because they're like, hey, maybe this is what dark matter is made out of. But you know, it sounds like it's a weight and see kind of thing. Like there's it doesn't answer all the questions. It is something that possibly exists out there, but it's a bit of a stretch.
Yeah, And as usual in science journalism, it was very it was hyped as life, maybe this explains dark matter. It really is just like another idea, And it's great to have a breadth of ideas. We need a lot of ideas because we haven't found dark matter, and we've been looking for a while, and so we got to be creative and think, oh, maybe it's this other thing we forgot, or maybe it could still be this thing we ruled out. That's very healthy, and so it's great that these guys are thinking about these new ideas. But right now it's just sort of like one more thing on the list of what dark matter could be, and it's got some question marks around it.
Do you think it would be better if journalists just ignored science and treated things as if they were more run of the mill.
I think they it would be better if they didn't act like every minor step forward was an incredible discovery that answered a big open question, because then the day we actually do answer those open questions, people will be like, whatever, you found dark matter fifty times in the last ten years, what do I care? You know? So this should have been covered as like physicists have new idea for dark matter, not like dark matter riddle may have been solved.
What have you put in really for real this time? Guys at the end of that news article, we'll save that.
Code for when we actually discover it. But the thing one thing I really like and respect about this paper is that they also came up with a new way to look for this. They're like, Okay, if these things are real, how would we prove it. We can't just have this theoretical idea. They were wondering, like, how would we prove it? And so they thought about, like, if these d star hexaquorks were real, maybe there's some of them here on Earth, and maybe occasionally they sort of collapse and they create these big, crazy showers of cosmic rays, but they look different because they're going sort of up instead of down. Anyway, it's a fascinating idea, and kudos to them for coming up for a new theoretical idea that sort of breaks some of the existing rules and for coming up with an experimental way to look for their idea.
Right, because you're an experimentalist, and so you reacted to that, you're like, hey, I like that part.
Yeah. Well, anytime you have a new theoretical idea, you have to figure out how to test it. You know, ideas are just ideas until they're proven to be reality. That's what experiments are for.
All Right, Well, I guess we'll see they do. You think they'll do these experiments and figure out if it could be dark matter or do you think this will sort of sit in a shell for a while until there's more of a consensus or more of an appealing theoretical argument here.
I think that it will generate some more work in the theoretical community to figure out how to answer some of these other questions and to see, like can it really be dark matter? This is sort of like the first bite of the apple. There's a lot of details still left to figure out that we talked about. But also, it's not that hard to do these experiments. It's just sort of like looking in the data of existing experimental facilities to see if you could see evidence for these things that we just hadn't looked for before. So that's kind of exciting.
You don't have to run any experiment, you could just look at the data from old experiments.
Yes, precisely.
All right, Well, my last question is, Daniel, if you take six space bananas and tie them together, and does that make them a hex of space banana.
And make them a heck of a tasty banana?
Heck wether, I'll give you points for naming that one.
All right, thank you?
All right, Well, I hope that answered the question that a lot of you sent in as to what a hexa quork is and whether or not it can actually explain what dark matter is. I think, as usual with science and physics in the universe, the question is let's wait and see.
Thanks for sending your questions and thanks for tuning in.
See you next time.
If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one Word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel Andhorge dot com. 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 greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors 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.
Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I mean neuroscientists at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. Join me weekly to explore the relation between your brain and your life, because the more we know about what's running under the hood, that or we can steer our lives. Listen to Inner Cosmos with Savid Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Parents looking for a screen free, fun and engaging way to teach your kids the Bible. As a mom, I was looking for the same thing, so I created Kids' Bible Stories podcast.
Thousands of families are raving about it, and kids actually request to listen.
With captivating sound effects, voices, and an apply section at the end to spark meaningful conversations, It's a hit with both kids and parents.
Listen to Kids' Bible Story's podcasts on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
