Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseHow many particles has the Large Hadron Collider discovered?
Daniel and Jorge reveal that the Large Hadron Collider has found much more than just the Higgs boson!
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 Applecard, 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.
Have you boosted your business with Lenovo Pro yet? Become a Lenovo Pro member for free today and unlock access to Lenovo's exclusive business store for technology expert advisors and essential products and services designed just for you. Visit Lenovo dot com slash Lenovo Pro to sign up for free. That's Lenovo dot Com slash Lenovo Pro Lenovo unlock new AI experiences with Lenovo's think Pad x one carbon powered by Intel Core ultraprocessors.
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 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. Most deals are barely worth mentioning.
But then there's AT and t's best deal on the new Samsung Galaxy Z flip six featuring flexcamp with Galaxy AI. You can get it on them when you trade in your eligible smartphone, any year, any condition.
It's a deal so good you'll.
Be shouting from the rooftops.
So grab a latter and learn how to get that new phone on AT and T. AT and T connecting changes everything requires trade in a Galaxy s noteworzzerou smartphone limited time off for two hundred fifty six gigbyes for zero dollars addtional beest.
Terms and restrictions apply.
Ceett dot com Slash Samsung is an eighteen ighty store for details.
Hey Daniel, how much does it cost to discover a new particle?
Well I'm sorry to say that, like everything else, the prices seem to be going up and up.
Oh, you mean, like with inflation.
I think there's more than that going on. I mean, the electron was really cheap to discover in the eighteen hundreds, but then the top quark probably cost a billion dollars or.
So a billion dollars to discover one particle.
A billion dollars is cheap. These days, the Higgs boson probably costs more than ten billion dollars and billion.
That's like super fantasy caviar.
Probably tastes just as bad, Daniel.
Caviar isn't about the flavor, it's about the glamor.
Well, that's also true about particle physics. I mean it's all ball gowns and tuxedos in the control room at CERN.
Oh.
I see, that's why it cost ten billion dollars. It's the dress code that's killing you. At least you have a dress code. I thought physicist war you know boxer shorts and T shirts.
It's a T shirt with a tuxedo printed on it.
Hi am Hooorhan made cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who's never discovered a new particle.
Oh yet, Well, technically, Dana, don't you discover new particles all the time? Like you know, this oxygen molecular breathing right now is technically new to me.
That's true. Each individual particle has its own wonderful spirit and personality. But we're more interested in new types of particles, new things that nobody in the world has ever seen before, things that can blow our minds and teach us something new about the universe.
Well, welcome to this new type of podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we soared through all amazing and crazy stuff in this universe. The stuff made of oxygen, the stuff made of carbon, the stuff made of nitrogen, and the stuff made of things we don't even yet understand. The rest of the universe, whatever it's made out of, We tackle it. We ask the big questions, and we try to explain all of it to you.
Because there is a lot of stuff in the universe, actually, maybe an infinite amount of stuff.
Right There might be an infinite number of particles, and there might even be an infinite number of kinds of particles, so we have no idea. We're looking at an ice cube and we don't know if it's the whole cube or just the tip of the iceberg.
That's right, everything is made out of stuff, and we are made out of stuff, and we are also constantly trying to discover what this stuff is made out of and how it works and how it's put together, and what are the rules that tell the stuff what it can and cannot do.
Yeah, it feels like if we could pull apart everything in the universe into its tiniest little bits and understand those rules, we will have revealed something true, something fundamental, something deep in the source code of the universe. And like looking at those rules and understanding that basic set of particles would finally tell us how the universe is really put together.
I guess it's pretty amazing that, you know, there's all this stuff in the universe and us little humans on this little rock floating in space so sort of figured out that this stuff has kind of rules and types of stuff to it, right, Like, it's not just random, and there's only a certain number of kinds of stuff out there, and that kind of stuff has certain rules about how it can put together and how it interacts with itself.
Yeah, And the incredible thing is that there's a pretty small number of particles, Like the particles that make up me and you. There's just really three of them, is the upcork, the down cork, and the electron. But you can put those particles together in so many different ways to get an incredible variety of things. So as you look at into the universe and you see all these weird things, you know, from bananas to comets to planets to neutron stars, you know that all those things are made of the same basic particles, just put together in different ways. And it's sort of incredible, like philosophically, that the universe even works that way, that you could take all this ritable complexity and boil it down to relative simplicity at the lowest level.
Even caviar at Daniels caviar made out of regular particles or really expensive particles.
It tastes like it's made out of some other weird, kind of gross particles.
I take it you're not a fan of the caviar.
Not a fan of tiny little salty fish eggs exploding in my mouth. You don't even really understand how. That's the thing.
Maybe you haven't bought the expensive kind, maybe you've only had the cheap kind. If you only had the electrons of cada.
I should just keep spending more money on caviar until I like it. Yeah, that's a good idea.
It's all about the cracker. Like, if you have the right cracker, you.
Could put anything on it, caviar, higgs bosons. It doesn't matter if you have the right cracker, it's all good.
Higgs boson exploded in your mouth. That would be kind of troublesome, wouldn't it.
I don't know. It might be salty, might be delicious.
It would sortadly cost a lot of money, probably.
That's right, at ten billion dollars per particle. I don't think I could even taste it.
But yeah, we are all made out of stuff, and that stuff in one sense, it feels like it's made out of a small number of kinds of stuff, you know, like you said, quarks and electrons. But at the same time, it seems like the universe is full of all kinds of particles and possibly, as you said, maybe an infinite number of different kinds of particles.
Yeah, we sort of took a left turn there at some point in history, Like for a long time, we were taking this stuff around us, and we were figuring out that it was made of a simpler set of stuff, you know, like all the crazy stuff in the universe is made out of elements, and then oh, it turns out those elements are just made out of protons and neutrons and electrons, and oh wow, look the protons and neutrons are made out of quarks. We were getting simpler and simpler and simpler. But then at some point we discovered a bunch of other weird stuff, other weird particles that you don't need to make up ordinary matter, things we've talked about in the podcast, like muons and tows and other kinds of quarks. And it's sort of puzzling, like why those particles exist. You don't need them to make bananas, so why do they exist in the universe. But if we systematically discover all of them, we might get some sort of like glimpse at the larger pattern and figure out what is really going on in the universe.
Yeah, it's kind of humbling, I guess, to think that, you know, we are basic the masters of our We think we're masters of our universe, but really we're just made out of like a small corner of the particle, you know, table, and even matter and even stuff is just a small part of the whole universe, right, Most of the universe is energy.
Yeah, that's true. A huge fraction of the universe is just energy, and we are made out of sort of the lightest stuff. Like all these other heavy particles, they don't last for very long, and they fall apart really quickly, and they decay into lighter and lighter particles. So the reason the electron lives forever while the muon doesn't is that the electron is the lightest thing. It can't turn into anything lighter, whereas the muon can decay into the electron. So everything is made out of these lightest particles. It's sort of like if everything was just made out of hydrogen or hydrogen and helium. Instead, we're made out of a much more complex set of stuff. And so in the same way for particles, we want to understand, like what are those other heavier particles and what can they do?
It would be cool if we were made out of helium and we all float around, right technically, or I guess if everything else was made out of hydrogen, we'd just fall to the bottom.
I'm actually on all helium diet right now. I'm trying to lose weight. You're it works. Actually, I just keep inflating this balloon and I keep losing weight. It's amazing.
You're in the helio diet exactly.
If I get a big enough balloon, I'll be literally weightless.
But your voice will be really high pitched, and this podcast would be a totally different experience, right.
That's right, Elvin and the Chipmunks Present the.
Universe, Daniel and the Chipmunks. But you know, we are sort of asking this question all the time of what kinds of particles are out there, and what other kinds of particles can exist and do exist, and what are they for? And so scientists are hard at work at it. And one of the biggest places to do that, to search for new particles, is a place that you were work at, right, I know.
That's right at the Large Hadron Collider, which is not just one of the biggest places to do particle physics, it's like one of the biggest science experiments ever in terms of money spent and like actual physical size is an incredible accomplishment. It's sort of like the Golden Gate of particle physics.
You know.
I stand at the Golden Gate bridge sometimes and I'm like, Wow, look what humanity can accomplish when we all work together. And the Large Hadron Collider is similar to that. It's an incredible feed not just of physics, but also of engineering and organization and also politics that all these different countries from all over the world came together to build this incredible device that's helping us peer into the very very core of matter.
Yeah, it's a big science experiment. Although I thought the biggest science experiment was caviar. Daniel like, how much can you get people to pay for something that's salty and crunchy?
Oh you're thinking of the Large Caviar Collider, I think, which is still being constructed somewhere in Russia.
Yeah, the Large the other LHC. Yeah, they collide money and fish eggs to get new kinds of profits. But yeah, the LC is the biggest science experiment ever and also one of the most expensive. You said earlier that its about ten billion dollars just to find the Higgs boson, But the LLC is a larger project than that, right, Like, it's looking for other things, and it costs a lot more than ten bills.
Yeah, ten billion dollars is about the cost of the project. It depends a little bit exactly how you do the accounting. But you know, it costs like a billion dollars to build the tunnel, and a couple of billion dollars to make those magnets, and then billions more to build the detectors, the actual bean pipe and all that stuff. So altogether the whole project is a little bit more than ten billion dollars. And you're right. While many people think about the Higgs boson when they think about the large age on collider, it's actually a much broader science experiment. We were hoping when we turned this thing on, not just to find the Higgs boson, though we're happy to have done so, but to also find all sorts of other crazy stuff that might have been out there. Because remember, these experiments are like exploration. We don't know what we're going to find until we turn the machine on. That's why we build it, and so it's always a bit of a gamble.
Yeah. Well, although I think the Higgs boson sort of put it on the map, right, Like, I feel like probably very few people had heard of the LAC before the big discovery of the Higgs Boson about ten years ago.
That's right, that's when it made it onto the a list of particle physics experiments. Before that, it wasn't even getting invited to the caviar parties.
Is there an a list? Thought it only went up to about d Well.
You know, there are bragging rights for who has the most powerful collider in the world, and for a long time the Americans dominated it, and then the Europeans took over in the nineties, and then the Americans stole the lead back in the early two thousands, and now the Europeans have had it for a while. And you know, it's not just enough to have the most powerful collider in the world. You have to find something new. You have to make a big discovery that leads to a Nobel Prize. And so you're right, that's seeing the Higgs Boson really put the LAC on the map.
That's what I meant, Daniel, the d list. I meant, like the discovery list. Oh, it's a good thing. Yeah, But anyways, I guess a big question is besides the LAC what else has the Large Hadron Collider discovered? Like, I know, you set out to find lots of different particles, and the big one was the Higgs boson. But I bet people don't know that the LAC is looking and has discovered a lot more particles than that.
Yeah, we can do lots of really interesting physics with the LAT. It's not just for the Higgs Boson.
On the podcast, we'll be asking the question how many particles has a large Hadron collider discovered? I think probably a lot of people maybe get confused. They probably associate the age in the LAC with the Higgs boson. What do you think the large Lson commercial?
There you go, the long Higgs Boson commercial. Man, I can't skip this ad. What's going on? Click? Click click click click.
Yeah, the lofty higgs Boson commercial. Because you know, if I was the Higgs boson and I wanted to make a splash, the LAC has been a big part of that, right.
Yeah, that's true. The LHC has been a good part of the Higgs boson marketing campaign. Who was hiding for fifty years while people were trying to look for it, but finally it allowed itself to be discovered in twenty twelve.
So, as usually we'll we were wondering how many people out there had thought about what other particles the LAC has discovered. So Daniel went out there into the wilds of the Internet to ask how many particles has the LAC discovered?
And if you are a denizen of the wilds of the int and you wouldn't mind me knocking on your virtual door to ask you physics questions that you haven't prepared for, please write to us two questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. We want to hear from you, and we think you'll have fun.
Do you always start the day not not joke, the physics not not joke.
I didn't, but now I will.
We'll have the brainstorm, all right. Well, here's what people had to say.
I know of only one particle that the LEDG has discovered, which is the Higgs boton, but I cannot imagine that's the only one it has discovered. Ever, it would be quite an expensive machine who would only have discovered this one particle? But maybe that's actually the case. So my answer to you is only one.
I don't know the number, but for sure needs to be more. And I'd like to be more. I think it's time to build a new, bigger particle collider, hopefully here in US.
LHC must be the large hat collider.
Hadron is a particle and you're colliding them together, so maybe you're.
Smashing it up into smaller particles. I have no idea. Maybe three, maybe seven.
I think the LHC has discovered only one particle.
That would be the Higgs boson. I hope I'm not terribly off.
I'm going to guess that the LC has maybe discovered seven new particles.
I know the most or the most recent particle that I know of that was discovered at the LHC is the Higgs in I think twenty twelve. So I would say the number of new particles that LHC has discovered is one.
All right, there's a broad range here. Some people say one, that you've only had a one hit wonder the LAC. And some people have a certain number, like maybe seven or a few. A couple of people said seven. I wonder where that number came from.
I don't know, but I think if you just ask people to pick the number between one and ten, something like fifty percent of them say seven. So I think it's definitely a biased there. Yeah.
Wow, like we have an internal die, you know.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, we are bad random number generators. But there are some fun answers here. Some people give the large Hadron collider credit for discovering the top quark that was actually discovered by the Fermi Lab Tevatron, the previous record holder for the highest energy collider in nineteen ninety five, right, the other d lister, Yeah exactly, And I do like the person who supports building a new, bigger collider here in the United States, thank you very much, right to your congress person, or hey, cut us a check for twenty billion.
Dollars Techankly, it could happen, right, Like if someone like Besis suddenly, instead of going to space, wanted to discover a new particle, they could totally make that happen.
Wow, that's true. I never even thought about emailing Jeff Bezos and asking him to spend twenty billion dollars on a particle collider. But I'm doing that just as soon as we're finished here.
Yeah, he probably just has to reach into this pocket and pull out some change.
But you're right. The larger point is that the only thing preventing us from building a bigger collider and discovering more particles is money. Like we know how to do it. It's just kind of expensive because you have to dig these big tunnels and pay for really fancy magnets to bend the particles around in a circle. But the only limitation is money, which is understandable. These things are expensive. Sometimes it's frustrating though, because it feels like we could just be buying knowledge about the universe, like we just lay out some cash, boom, the universe will reveal some secrets to us.
I think the question is why does the universe charge so much? Like why can't the universe just give us these things for free? Like is it trying to sell caviar? You know, like it's I feel like it's maybe overpricing it a little. Do we have it like another universe we can maybe get a competitive bid on.
Yeah, we should negotiate with the universe. I don't know. I think we treat these things with value because we pay more for them, right, Like if you buy expensive shoes, then you're gonna think they're better shoes. And so we think the Higgs boson is super important because we spend so much on it.
You just admitted that you're using the Caviaar strategy here to overvalue physics knowledge.
But you know, we've also talked in the podcast about physics discoveries made with very cheap materials, like the whole two dimensional material that's something somebody discovered using literally scotch tape and a pencil. So you can totally discover things using you know, five dollars worth of materials, but some things do cost billions.
You've been price gouging humanity.
That's right. We only spend ten bucks on the collider. The rest we're spending on caviat.
And ball gowns and t shirts with tixedos printed on them. But I guess you know, it does cost a lot of money. I know it's expensive and maybe so maybe step us through this, like what's going on at the LAC, How does it work and why does it require so much infrastructure to make discoveries.
Yeah, so, the basic idea the large hadron collider, like the reason that the large had drunk collider, is a window into the universe. The whole strategy for using it to discover new particles is to rely on Einstein's famous equation E equals mc squared, where E is energy and M is mass. And the goal is that we are looking for particles with a lot of mass. The particles that we see around us electron and quarks. These are the lowest mass particles. As we talked about before, they're the stable ones. It's like the bottom rung of the ladder. Everything sort of like shakes down to the bottom rung of the ladder, the way like boulders tend to roll downhill and settle in the bottom of a valley. But we're interested in what the other rungs of the ladder are. Are there heavier particles out there? What are the heaviest particles? And we are limited in seeing those by the energy we can use to create them. So E equals mc square. It means if you want to create a particle with mass m, you need to put in as much energy as mc square to create it. So what we do with a large hadron collider is smash particles together, very low mass particles like protons, with a huge amount of energy, so we can turn that energy into the mass of some new kind of particle.
Right. I guess what's interesting is that you're trying to make these particles. Like you're trying to discover particles that are out there, and you're doing that by trying to make them Like you're not sort of like breaking things apart and seeing what's there. You're really trying to sort of create conditions where they pop out of the vacuum the nothingness.
Yeah, it's alchemy. We are turning one kind of matter, like normal everyday protons, into something new. It's not like we're taking the protons apart and looking for weird things in them. Sometimes these weird particles are called subatomic, which is a little confusing because it implies that they're like inside the atom, but they're not. You can smash two protons together and make something totally new, which is not like a combination of the bits of the proton. And the reason you can do that is that you turn the protons into pure energy and then back from energy into a new kind of mass. So, as you say, we're making something new, So we're discovering it, not in the sense that like it's sitting there waiting for us to find it. It's sitting there on the list of possibilities, waiting for us to bring the ingredients, which is energy around so that nature can make it for us.
Right.
It's like you're discovering it in the sense of like going to a new restaurant, taking the menu, and then like discovering new dishes that could be made for you.
That's right. We're like, oh, if we have enough money in our wallet and then we can afford this really expensive cavir Right, And so we are pouring energy into the collider because it allows us to look deeper, deeper onto nature's menu, so we can see what particles can be made. The amazing thing about the particle collider is that it's quantum mechanical, which means that when you smash these particles together, you don't know what's going to happen. You can predict the kinds of things that might happen, but for a given collision, you have no idea what might happen. It's like a list of possibilities. The cool thing, though, is that if you do it often enough, eventually you'll see everything on that list of possibilities. So you like exploring this menu of possibilities what nature might do just by doing the same collision over and over and over again.
Right, I do that sometimes I just go to restaurant and I order randomly from the menu over and over and over and over, and actually you try everything on the menu and also gain a lot of weight.
That's exactly what we're doing here. We're just going to the restaurant with our eyes closed, putting our fingers on the menu. And that's our strategy for ordering everything.
You're going to the cosmic diner and taking that menu and just putting your finger anywhere on it.
If we knew what was on the list already, we could look for it more intelligently. You know, we could design experiments to put in exactly the right amount of energy to make that particle we know is already there. We can do that kind of thing. But if when you don't know what is there, then you have to just sort of poke around blindly, hoping something new appears when you put your finger on.
It, hoping you get a good pitch. All right, well, let's get into how you actually see these particles at the large hydron collider, and let's get into what other particles they have found. 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 but 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. That's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Cut your wireless bill 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 speeds 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 four to 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 Bricks 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 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 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 applecar dot com. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, 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 maneuver 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 new two intense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
All Right, we're talking about what else has a large hadron collider the LAC discovered and Daniel. Technically this is not a sponsored podcast episode, right, We're not being paid by the LHC. Here.
I'm not a shill for big science. I mean i am, but I'm not getting paid to do it.
Well, technically, you're paying the LAC to do your work, right like that. That's how it works. The collaboration and scientists have to pay into it to use the facility and to get access to the data.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not paying personally out of like my kids piggybank. We're using government research funds and so it's the US government, just like it's the German government and the Italian government and the British government. All these governments are paying to support this international facility for scientists to use. And so in the end, it's all of us, right, it's all taxpayer money. So it's me and you and everybody down the street chipping in a few cents so that we can learn something new about the universe.
Right well, and then technically Basis is chippening more than we are.
So I think he pays zero taxes. Actually, so we're paying more than he is.
I think he pays from when he buys that yacht. I think he's paying more taxes than I ever will in my life. But we're talking about about how the LAC works. And so you slash all known particles like protons together, and out of that wall of energy that gets made in that collision, new things come out. And you're doing that over and over and over, trying to find what else the universe can make and what else will pop out.
That's right, We sift through all these collisions looking for something new, something that's not what we've seen before. We're very familiar with the old particles. We've been doing this for decades, and so what we're looking for is an anomaly, something surprising, something different, a new kind of thing that hasn't been seen before.
Right, would you be surprised if like a cow like appeared out of your collider.
We often use the example of pink elephants, you know, like when we turn on this collider and we really know what could come out. It could be pink elephants, it could be the Higgs boson, it could be nothing. You really don't know.
Oh, I see you've thought about this, you know, large mammal appearance just in case.
And of course you know you have to balance the charge. And so you would have a pink elephant and an anti pink elephant created together.
Ooh, like a gray elephant. What would be the opposite of a pink elephant, a gray mammoth? Maybe, I don't know, maybe a blue ant.
A blue an ye, And we'll have to develop a mammoth collider to investigate that one.
But then they touch each other. It's bad news.
It's bad news.
Yeah, So then you collide these and every once in a while new particles come out, but they don't last very long. Right, Like you're looking for things that don't just pop out and sit there on your counter. They disappear or change into other things quickly.
That's right. We are creating high energy density. We're pushing things up the ladder, and they exist very briefly and then they fall apart back into low mass, stable particles, the kinds of things that you and I are made out of. And you know, this is just what the universe does. You gather a bunch of energy together, it likes to spread it out. So we create these new heavy particles a top quark or a higgs boson. They last in that state. We know they exist, but they're only there for like ten to the minus twenty seconds. It's like the briefest moment in the sun before they decay back into lighter stuff.
Right, because often you don't even detect the particles you're looking for, like the higgs boson, And it's not like you had a detector that detected the Higgs boson. It's like you detect the things that the Higgs boson the keys into. Then you piece it back like, oh, this must have been the higgs boson that existed there in the middle for ten to the minus twenty seconds.
That's right. Technically we've never seen a Higgs boson. I mean they last so briefly. We have no detector capable of seeing it directly. All we can do is see what it turns into. As you say, it's like coming to a street corner and seeing the remnants of a car accident and figuring out what must have happened, but not actually seeing the collision itself. And so in the case of the Higgs boson, for example, the Higgs likes to turn into a pair of photons or a pair of bottom quarks, and those photons and bottom quarks have particular configurations and energy to tell us that they must have come from a Higgs boson. So we can never actually be sure for any given collision what it came from. We can make statistical arguments and say, oh, this one is more likely to be from a Higgs than from something else. That would also give you the same sort of signature in our detectors.
And so that's what you do. You're colliding protons hoping to get new particles. And so the question we started off was was what has the NAC discovered in those collisions? Now we know the big one was the Higgs boson, which was discovered almost ten years ago. So tell us about that discovery and like sort of the specifics of how it was found.
Yeah, so the Higgs boson is something we suspected was there. We looked at the patterns of all the particles and we said, this just doesn't make sense. And a guy named Peter Higgs realized that it would make much more sense, like it mathematically just clicked together beautifully if there was another particle. It's like if you have a jigsaw puzzle and there's a piece missing. You look at it, you can see the shape. You're like, hmm, there must be one, and so you hunder around under the table looking for that particular piece. It's much easier to find a piece if you know what you're looking for and you suspect it exists. So we already had the idea that the Higgs boson might exist and how it would be created and what it would look like in our detector. And we have a whole fun podcast episode about the journey to find the Higgs. It's long saga, lots of drama, lots of politics, but we ended up finding it at the Large Hadron Collider in exactly that way that we talked about, it turns into two photons. So the Higgs boson is this little particle and it decays in this complicated way that ends up giving two photons, one in one direction and one in the other direction. And we surround these collisions with all sorts of layers of detectors that tell us what came out of those collisions. So we saw a lot of these events with two photons, one photon one way and the other photon going the other direction. When you add up their energy, the energy of those two photons, it comes up to a certain number, and that's the mass of the Higgs boson. And so we saw a lot of these particular kinds of collisions that led to this pattern of photons that all added up to the same number for the mass of the Higgs, and we thought, hmm, that must be it. Right.
It's like you saw the footprint of the Higgs boson in these two photons, right.
Yeah, exactly. We can't see the Higgs itself.
Right, So I think that's one thing that's interesting about this is that you kind of have to have an idea of what you're looking for, right. You can't just like turn this on and then see what happens because there's so much stuff coming out and it's all probabilistic, so you kind of need to know what you're looking for, or you need to know about what size of a footprint you're looking for, or what would the footprint look like, sort of in order to actually discover these footprints.
You just put your finger on. A really interesting and sort of hot headed debate in the field right now, like a lot of people think that you're right that you need to know what you're looking for because these signals are subtle and you can't see things directly, so you need to know like how to look for things in order to anticipate them and discover them. And that's probably true for really subtle signals like the Higgs boson. If we didn't know to look for the Higgs boson, we might not have seen it, because in the end, the signal is kind of subtle. It's like this little bump. There's lots of other ways to make the same signature that we see for the Higgs. But other people, i e. Me and some folks that work with think it might be possible to discover some thing we don't anticipate that not knowing what's out there doesn't mean that we can't see it. We need to be sort of more clever about how to look for things to be ready for surprises. But we think that using some new techniques from like machine learning and anomaly detection, it might be possible to figure out if there's something new in our data, even if we don't know exactly what to look for. But you're right, it's more difficult and it would need to be a more obvious signal.
But I guess what I mean is you sort of need to know even for something where you're detecting anomalies, you sort of need to know what's normal so that you can tell what's an anomaly. Right, You need to have sort of an idea of what you might discover, or at least sort of like a good picture, and then you can tell if something is off of that or different than that.
Yes, it's all about understanding what the current theory predicts so we can find deviations from it. And that's what was exciting, For example about those muon G minus two experiments that were recently done at Formulab is that they had a really detailed prediction for what they expected to see when the muon wobbled around in a circle, and then they saw something different. They don't know what it is, and they don't need to know what it is, but they know that they see something different, which requires some new kind of particle. So that's an example of how you might see that there is something out there new to discover without knowing exactly what it is, seeing a deviation from what you expect.
And so that was the Higgs boson. That was a huge deal a while ago. And because it is such a fundamental particle in our model of particle physics, right, like it's the particle that sort of explains the masses of the other particles, and it's sort of in a way, sort of holds the universe together.
Yeah. Absolutely, and it's even more deeply important than that. It completes this longer project of bringing together electricity and magnetism and the weak force. You know, James Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism more than one hundred years ago, and then in the sixties somebody else brought together the weak force into a single force, the electro weak force. And it's all beautiful and mathematical, but didn't really work because it was missing a piece, and the Higgs boson was that piece. So finding that tells us not just how particles get their mass, but also that the weak force and electron mass batism are just two sides of the same coin. It's really an incredible triumph. That's like over one hundred years of theoretical progress.
Yeah, that's pretty cool. That's what I tell the Higgs all the time. I tell you complete me. So that's what maybe the last fundamental particle that humans have discovered. Right, I don't think we've found other fundamental particles there or at the head Large Heron Collider or anywhere, right, And we have been looking.
We have been looking, and we had high hopes, but you're right, we haven't found anything else. You know, when we turned on the Large Hadron Collider, we were able to explore new energy ranges. Like the previous collider went up to two trillion electron vaults that's like two thousand times the energy inside the mass of a proton, and the Large Hadron Collider goes up to fourteen terra electron vaults, so like it's seven times as much energy as the old collider, and that means it's like seven times the territory seven times. The new menus, you know, you go into in and out and you get like the secretcy secret secret menu. That's really exciting from like an explorational point of view. It's like simultaneously landing on seven new Earth like planets and seeing if there's life on there. It's a huge territory that's that nobody had explored before, so the possibilities were huge. We could have seen nothing, right, there's just nothing there. We could see only the Higgs boson, or we could have seen like a crazy number of particles flying out of the machine, probably not pink elephants, but the possibility was that we could have seen dozens of new particles that would tell us all sorts of crazy stories about the universe. Unfortunately we didn't. All we saw in terms of fundamental particles was the Higgs boson.
It's almost like you got a bigger table in a way, not just access to the bigger many, but it's like you got a bigger table and you told the universe all right, you know, surprise me, and it just kind of brought more of the same thing.
That's right. We went to the all you can eat buffet and it just kept serving us.
Mac and cheese. No, you didn't get a Higgs animal style.
No, maybe we made a mistake. We filled up on bread or something. I don't know what the problem was, but we were hoping to find ratons.
There's no like secret seafood crap buffet table in the back or anything.
If it is, it's still a secret because we haven't found it. We had lots of ideas also of what we might have seen. You know, we might have seen gravitons. We don't understand how gravity works as a quantum theory, and some people think that every time you feel gravity, it's because you're passing little quantum particles back and forth called gravitons. And if that is true, there was a chance we could have seen those at the LHC. And we looked for them but didn't see them. And there are lots of other really fun theories supersymmetry and heavier quarks and all sorts of weird new leftons. There's no shortage of ideas coming from the theoretical community about what we might have seen. But of course we didn't see any of those either.
Right, You had sort of ideas about how the universe might work. You know, given all the theory, and so you needed some experimental confirmation to make those theories kind of solid, right, Like to show that supersymmetry was right, or quantum gravitational physics was right. You needed to find sort of weird new particles in that space that we're looking for, but you didn't.
Yeah, but we didn't. It's just like with the Higgs boson. These things come from theoretical motivations, people looking at the theory and saying, you know, this would make more sense if we changed it in this way, if we added this piece, and then experimentalists go out and look for it and say, well, is it there, is your idea corresponding to the real structures of the universe or is it just sort of like a nice, pretty bit of math in your head. Because there's an important difference, right, We're not just interested in exploring the insides of our head. We want to know what the structures of the actual universe are, and so to do that we need to do these experiments. But our job is not just to like go off and check the boxes on theoretical ideas. I think we're also capable of discovering unanticipated stuff of finding weird new stuff out there that no theorist has predicted, that nobody anticipated. That blows up all of our ideas about the universe. That hasn't happened either, but I hold out hope.
Yeah. You always talk about the scenario where you do an experiment and you look at the data and then you see something and you're like, who order that? Like, which many did that one come from?
Yes, and that's happened in history, right, Like who ordered that is a literal thing somebody said when they saw that the mewon had been discovered, because nobody expected the muon to be there. It's not something we thought might be on the menu. It's just something that got delivered. And we're like, huh, I didn't order this, it's just sitting here in front of me. And so I fantasize about that, you know, sort of in a scientific way, Like you know, my dream scenario is finding something weird that everybody scratches their head over. Because you and I talk about on the podcast all the time, how we know there are basic things about the universe we don't understand, and what we need is a clue, something that points us in the right direction to think about new ideas, and so a totally weird, new anticipated discovery would be a great clue in that direction.
Cool, Well, we are standing by for you to discover new fundamental particles or to confirm fundamental new theories. But in the meantime, the LAC has been busy. It has made a lot of discoveries, and maybe it's found more particles than most people think. So let's get into that. But first, let's take another quick break.
When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of gogurt, 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 maneuver 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 us dairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
There are children, friends, and families walking, riding on passing the roads day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to get home safely. Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because they're people too. Go safely California from the California Office of Traffic Safety and Caltrans.
Hey, there, it's Ryan Seacrests for Safeway. After a summer of fun, it's time to get your home ready for fall. There's nothing better than stocking up on all your favorite household items and saving now through October. First shop in store or online for items like Crest Value packs, Fixed Day Quill and Niquo Combo packs, Pampers, baby wipes, head and shoulders bare and swift for pet kits. It's the perfect time for some last minute summer savings offer ends October first. Promotions may vary. Restrictions apply. Visit safeway dot com for more details.
With the Lucky Land slots, you can get lucky just about anywhere.
This is your captain speaking. We've got clear runway and the weather's fine, but we're just gonna circle up here a while and get lucky. No, no, nothing like that. It's just these cash prizes add up quick. So I suggest you sit back, keep your trade table up right, and start getting lucky.
Play for free at Lucky landslips dot.
Are you feeling lucky? No purchase necessary BGW gro void. We're prohibited by Law eighteen. Class terms and conditions apply.
All right. We're talking about the LAC and ordering things off of the universe menu at the what the Cosmic Diner. I think that is an actual diner, probably somewhere in America.
They probably don't serve caviar, though.
They still higgs Boson animal style. So we made the big higgs Boson discovery, and we don't have any sort of thing that fundamental yet since then. But the LC has been busy discovering more particles, right, actually a surprisingly large number of new particles.
That's right. The Higgs Boson is like the glamour front person of the particle discoveries. But we've been hard at work and we found all sorts of crazy stuff out there that you probably haven't even heard.
Of unless you listen to this podcast.
Right, that's right. We have talked about a couple of these discoveries on the podcast, and so those of you out there who follow it might not be surprised. But honestly, I was even surprised when I counted up all the discoveries. The numbers sort of shocked me.
Ooh, how many particles has the LAC discovered?
Fifty nine more particles than just the Higgs Boson?
Whoa fifty nine fifty nine?
It's a lot of particles.
There are that many particles.
There are that many particles exactly because there's other ways to discover particles than finding new fundamental particles. We can find new ways to put the old particles together.
Oh, I see, these are not like fundamental like building blocks of the universe we think, but just sort of like when you arrange particles in a different way, they sort of become new particles, right, They act like a new kind of particle.
Exactly, Like the proton is not a fundamental particle, right, it's made out of quarks. You put two up quarks and a down cork together and you get a proton. And that's really interesting. It's amazing, and the fact that it even works is something we don't fully understand because it involves its very complex and very powerful force called the strong nuclear force. You know, quarks have these weird things called colors, and they exchange gluons back and forth. It's in a crazy system. And so one thing we can do with the large hadron colliders figure out, like, are there other ways to combine quarks to make new kinds of particles? Can we shake quarks together and build out new things.
Like new kinds of protons? Maybe? Right, Basically it's just what you're making.
Yeah, like new kinds of protons, because when the collisions happen, Remember we're colliding protons and protons at a large hadron collider. But again, protons are not fundamental particles, So what actually happens when these protons come near each other is not that like one proton smashes into another one, and they totally annihilate. When you're at that energy, the fact that these quarks are bound together into a proton is sort of irrelevant because the quarks have so much more energy individually than the bonds between them, So it's sort of like what you're doing is shooting together like a triple beam of quarks in one direction and a triple beam of quarks in the other direction. So then what happens when they collide is that the quarks themselves are inter Now you have six quarks, you can mix the match, and you can make all sorts of weird crazy stuff, And because there's so much energy there, you can even pop new quarks out of the vacuum and make all sorts of new weird combinations.
I think it's these combinations that really tell you or let you explore or know more about the basic particles, right and how they're put together, because they all sort of tell depend on the rules of quarks and.
Gluons exactly, and we are trying to understand those rules. We want to know how quarks push against each other, how gluons pull on each other, and it's something that's very difficult to grapple with this whole field of the strong and nuclear force is very difficult because the force is so strong, and so it's very hard to do calculations because things get out of hand very quickly. One reason is that the strong force is weird in a really super interesting way. If you take two quarks and you start to pull them apart, you might expect that the strong force would get weaker as they get further apart from each other. That's the case with gravity, right Like as you get further from the Earth, your gravity gets weaker. That's the case with electricity. Like take two electrons. They will repel each other, but as you move them further apart, they start to repel each other less and less. The opposite is true with quarks. As you move them further apart, the force between them gets stronger and stronger. And that's what makes it really hard to do these calculations because you can almost never like neglect another particle. In the case of gravity and electromagnetism, you can make lots of simplifying assumptions because as things get far away, you can basically ignore them. You can never do that with the strong forces. Things get further away they become more important, and so these calculations are a big mess. They're really really hard to do. So, as you say, by understanding how these particles are fitting together, we're trying to understand what the rules are of how they fit together, not something we still understand, right.
I think maybe something that people haven't thought about is that quarks can combine in ways that are other than the proton, Right, isn't that a little weird to think about that? You know, like quarks could make protons, which make up you and me and part of what makes you and me, but it can also kind of fit together different ways.
It is cool, but it's sort of the beauty of the universe. And we see that same sort of thing happening in other places, like the fact that you can take protons and neutrons and electrons and you can fit them to together to make helium or calcium or neon or uranium. Those elements are all so totally different, but they're made of the same building blocks. So there's something really deep about the fact that the same building blocks can be arranged to make completely different things with totally different properties. And so the same is true at this deeper level that you can take quarks, you can put them together make a proton or a neutron, or you can do all sorts of other things, Like you combine just two quarks together. That's like a pion is made out of just two quarks, or a row mason is made out of just two quarks. So these things are really like legos. You can combine them to make all sorts of stuff. The thing is that we don't understand exactly how those rules work, so it's very hard to predict which combination of quarks fit together to make a nice particle, and which combination of quarks aren't stable will just like fly apart instantaneously.
Really can predicted. You have to kind of look for them in a way, right, because you found at least fifty nine different ways in which quarks can be put together.
That's right, fifty nine new ways. I mean, we have lots and lots of ways for quarks to fit together. There was this period in the early sixties called the particle Zoo, when people were building bigger and bigger colliders and finding new particles all the time. You know, the pion, the chaon, all these particles. These are the particles that gave us the clue about quarks. In the first place, we discovered all these crazy particles, we didn't understand them, and then people understood, Oh, all these weird new particles are built out of the same building blocks. They're all just built out of these little lego pieces called quarks. So, as you say, we still don't really quite understand how to predict what else the quarks can do. So it's very interesting to find those, to go out and actually look for them and see, oh, look, this weird combination works. That weird combination works. So that's been a big industry at the Large Hadron Collider is making new combination of quarks to help reveal how these particles do fit together, what the rules are.
And I guess maybe what's also interesting is that these new kinds of arrangements of quarks they're not common, right, Like most of the quarks together that we see are protons and neutrons, But these new kinds of other protons and arrangements, they're not common, and they don't last very long, right.
Yeah, just like the Higgs boson and the top quark, these things are not stable, they don't last for very long. They're a little bit more stable and depends exactly on the details. Some of them might even last, you know, like a millionth or billionth of a second. But you're right, you don't find them in nature. You can't like go drill into the earth to find these things. You have to create them in high energy density environments. You have to pour energy into one spot, so the quarks have enough energy to make these weird massive combinations.
And so each of these tell you a little bit more about how quarks and gluons can come together, which kind of tells you more about the rules of the universe. All right, so then maybe tell us also besides these composite particles, what else has the LC been discovered?
Yeah, so we haven't found more particles, but what we have done are more detailed studies of the particles that we do know. For example, we're really interested in questions like exactly how much does the top quark way? Like, the top quark is a weird quark. It's just like the upcark, except it's much much much more massive. It's super duper massive, and we'd like to understand exactly how massive is it. It's exact mass controls a lot about how things work in particle physics. So one thing we're doing is measuring that very very precisely to see if the mass that it has makes sense with some of our other calculations. So that's an example of the kind of thing we do. It's like a precision study of the particles we do know, so that we can anticipate anything weird. We can look for deviations and anomalies like we were talking about earlier.
Right, because we have this model of the universe, the standard model of stuff and matter, but you know, we think it's the kind of the right one, but there might be others, or we just want to make double extra sure that it's the right model of the universe.
Yeah, I would actually say we're sure it's not the right model of the universe. I mean, it works pretty well, it's kind of pretty, but we know it's not correct, Like there are things about it which just can't be right. And what we're looking for are the cracks in it. We're looking for hints as to that deeper, more fundamental, more true model. And so one way to do that is to say, well, I think there's a new particle out there, let's go look and find it. Another way to do that is to just test the wazoo out of it and say like, well, let's really see if it's correct. Let's see if you can find some deviations. So we have done stuff like that, and you know, at the Large Hadron Collider we talked about on the podcast, once they found this weird particle that uses Penguin diagrams and decays really strangely. Sometimes it decays to muons more often than it decays to electrons, which is not what we expected. And that's a sign that maybe there's some new heavy particle very briefly appearing and messing things up. So that's the kind of thing we can do. Instead of looking directly for new heavy particles created at the collider, we're looking for like their subtle influence on the particles that we do know.
We're looking at those cracks. You might sort of look into those cracks and find new particles there.
Right exactly. And that's the kind of thing that I'm excited about. As you said very intelligently earlier, if you want to find something new that you don't expect, you need to understand what you do expect very very well. And so that's basically what we're doing is flushing out exactly what we expect and double checking that we're seeing what we expect. I'm always hoping that we don't see what we expect, that we see something weird and new in the data that we can't explain with our current theory, but so far not yet.
Not yet, but maybe in the future. So maybe tell us now, what can we expect in the future from the LAC. And I think part of it is that maybe a change in the name due to an upgrade.
Right, Yeah, Well, we are going to be running the LEDC for like another ten years. You know, you pour billions of dollars into this machine. You want to get everything you can out of it. So we'll be running the largechandere On collider for at least another ten years, and we'll be looking for these really subtle hints, like the longer you run your collisions, the more you can see really really rare things, or the more you can see very small deviations from what you expected. Those alleviations might be nice clues that point us in the right direction. So we're going to be doing this for another ten years or so, really checking out all the detail. Likely we'll also discover a bunch more of these new combinations of quarks, ways to put them together to make weird stuff that give us an idea for how quarks and gluons work together. And it's possible that we could discover some new fundamental particle, some graviton, or some proof of supersymmetry. I think the chances of that really get less and less likely the longer we go on without having seen it, because one thing we can't do with the large Hadron collider is increase the energy. Like the energy is fixed by the size of the tunnel and the strength of the magnets, so we can run it for a long long time, but we can't like boost it up to any higher energy. And that's really I think what we would need to find a new fundamental particle, a new like really heavy, new kind of particle.
But if you do find one another one, then that makes it the two fundamental particles for the price of one, and that has your per particle costs, making it more of a deal.
That's right exactly, and we would love to deliver that deal for taxpayers around the world. And you talked about changing the name. We are actually talking about new versions of the large Hadron collider, And so for example, people are talking about the v LHC, the very large Hadron Collider, which really is a thing, but we don't know if that's going to be built and where it would be built. It's going to cost a lot of money, and so there's a lot of politics involved in figuring out who's going to pay for that thing and exactly where to put it.
Right, I think you had a better name for it though earlier. You should call it the test the Wazoo out of It particle Collider.
That's the informal working name on all the documents internally.
Yeah, then you can take the new particles was zoos. It's the particle was zoo. All right. Well, I think we'll stay tuned to see what else you discover in the next ten years. And I think maybe it was something that a lot of listeners might not know, which is pretty cool. It's that you can actually go to the LAC, you know, once things open up, hopefully after this pandemic, you can actually go there and they'll give you a tour of the facilities, and you can go to their gift shop and look around and see scientists at work and eating at the cafeteria.
You can buy yourself a Higgs Boson. It's less than ten billion dollars.
Do you sell caveard there too?
And no caviar, but yes, T shirts.
Well, it is in Switzerland, so they might have maybe.
I think there's a lot of caviar eating in Switzerland. Not that much at certain.
Just chocolate and coffee.
Yeah, but you can come and visit. There's a really nice science center, so come check it out. It's a beautiful spot. It's also nestled between two sets of mountains and there's fields of sunflowers or if you like skiing, it's right next to the Alps, so it's a gorgeous spot. If you have the opportunity to visit. I totally encourage you.
And we were not at all sponsored by Switzerland or the Hilar Shadrin Collider, just by listeners like you.
Who in the end are the ones footing the bill for this whole endeavor. Thank you very much everyone for paying your taxes.
Thank you Jeff Bezos. All right, well that's pretty cool, so stay tuned and we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, see you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe is a product of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Have you boosted your business with Lenovo Pro yet? Become a Lenovo Pro member for free today and unlock access to Lenovo's exclusive business store for technology expert advisors and essential products and services designed just for you. Visit Lenovo dot com slash Lenovo Pro to sign up for free. That's Lenovo dot com slash Lenovo pro Leo unlock new AI experiences with Lenovo's think Pad x one carbon powered by Intel Core ultraprocessors.
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 US dairy dot COM's last sustainability to learn more.
There are children, friends, and families walking, riding on paths and roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to get home safely. Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because they're people too. Go Safely, California from the California Office of Traffic Safety and Caltrans
