Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseOne day in November 1974 that changed particle physics forever.
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Hey, Daniel, do me a good physics story.
Oh you came to the right place.
Okay, but don't tell me you say, a story about amazing physics. I want something with drama.
Oh, because like the universe isn't dramatic enough for you.
I mean I want a story with like intrigue and sabotage and conflict and you know, people fighting and you know, revolutions.
Oh, I see you want like Jason Bourne in a lab coat.
Yeah you know, don't you look like Mat dam or Tom Cruise. You can make a movie called Thesis Impossible.
All right, you asked for it. I have got a juicy story for you.
Hi. I'm More Hamm, cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel Whitson. I'm a particle physicist, and I like to imagine that my dramatic life would be well adapted to a telenovela.
With a lot of twists and turns and evil twins, twin particles. I guess there are twin particles, and physics.
There are twin men, though we don't know which ones are good and which.
Ones we could be the evil twins.
That's right. And lots of dramatic revelations that your advisor has other grad students you didn't even know about.
Dum dum. Well, Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. They product of iHeartRadio, in which we.
Take you on a tour of all the drama in the universe, the black holes, the neutron stars, the tiny particles, the discovery of those particles, and try to make you understand what scientists are thinking about, what people on the very forefront of human understanding are puzzling over today.
Yeah, because we like to talk about all the amazing things out there to discover and all the things that we have discovered, and sometimes we like to talk about how we discovered these things, because you know, sometimes the story is pretty dramatic or you know, interesting, or tells us a little bit about how signs work.
That's right, because you can look back at history and say, oh, if I'd been around, I would have discovered the electron. Or it's pretty simple actually to figure out what the photon is, and it's a quantum mechanical object. But when you're standing there.
I think you might be alone there, Dawn. Yeah, I don't sit around thinking, you know, I could have discovered the electronic.
Hey, Einstein won the Nobel Prize for interpreting other people's experiments that were already published. It's like, you know, sit around for an afternoon, read some papers, Nobel Prize.
Nobel Prize changed the course physicality.
So if you know how to do it, if you know where to go, it's pretty straightforward. But when you're standing at the forefront of human ignorance and you don't know what the solution is, it's much more complicated. So I think it's really worthwhile rewinding our understanding and remembering, like what were people thinking at the moment, Why were the questions they were asking, what was confusing? What was simple? What were the ideas of the time.
I think what you're saying, Daniel, is that there's a fine line between a thought experiment and just making stuff up.
That's right, and that's why I prefer to do real experiments in the collider and actually ask nature questions.
All right, Well, today on the program, we'll be continuing our series about how particles weren't discovered. You know, particles of things that matter and all the things in the universe are made out of How did we actually discover these things and know that they existed, and know what they looked like, and know how much they weigh and what they like to wear in the morning.
I don't even know how to respond to to that. I'm imagining a photon getting dressed or something. But I think this is really fascinating because currently we have fantastic theoretical understanding of all the particles, how they fit together, what they are, and of course lots of outstanding questions. But there's a wonderful history there. Each particle was like a hard fought victory. Each one was like, how do we figure out that this particle is also there? And you know, in the end, our theory has to describe experiments. We've developed this theory in order to describe all the crazy experiments that we've seen that revealed the existence of those particles. So it's a lot of fun to sort of reimagine and understand how each one was.
Discovered, because you know, I think looking at history now and looking at science now, it's kind of hard to believe sometimes that there was a time where we didn't know anything. We didn't know any of these things. We didn't know that electrons existed, or plutonsic existed, or protons existed, or what they wore in the morning, And so it's kind of interesting to kind of put yourself in the mindset of the people who didn't know anything, but they discovered what actually reality.
Is like absolutely, And it gives you another fun exercise, which is to imagine somebody in a hundred years, how would they look back at what we know now. They will have hopefully a grasp of you know, the shape, the size of the universe and why it's accelerating them, maybe what the smallest particles are, and they'll look back at us and they'll be like, oh my gosh, those guys knew nothing about the universe. How did they even go to work?
We were making stuff off on podcasts.
And.
I like to think of it, you know, human knowledge as one of these exponentially growing graphs, and at every point it seems like, wow, we know one hundred times what we knew fifty years ago, and then in fifty years we will again dwarf human knowledge. So I'm looking forward to that.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to being dwarfed.
There are positive exponential graphs, not just negative ones.
So we've done this podcast episode on electrons and positrons and photons and muons, and so do they On the program, we'll be asking the question our quarks discovered? Is this a quirky story? Daniel?
You know, this is one of the most dramatic stories in all of particle physics. There really are crazy things in these stories. You know. There is sabotage, There are competing public announcements. There are arguments about how to name particles. There are stories about leaked information being slipped from one experiment to the other. What. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. No, there is real drama. I mean, I'm waiting for the six episode mini series on Netflix about this set.
Of murder explosions. No, we didn't get that far.
That's right. Tiger Kings becomes particle kings.
M oh, I see like the true crime woh, that could be the new genre of Netflix true physics. But as usual, we were wondering how many people out there know the story of how quarts were invented, because, you know, quarks and just a quick recap, there are the mini particles that everything else is kind of made out of. Most of everything else, protons and neutron are made out of quarks, and so these are pretty fundamental particles, right Daniel. They're not just like you know, some novelty.
That's right. They're not just some random thing you pick up in the store on the way home and then throw away unused. They are the things that make up me and you. I am made out of atoms, and those atoms have neutrons and protons at the center, and all those neutrons and protons are made of quarks. Yeah, and all the matter that you've ever tasted and touched and tripped over or thrown at each other is made of quarks and electrons. So they're pretty important.
Yeah. So, as Daniel does, he went out into the streets and ask people if they knew how quarks were discovered. Now, as usually we'll think about it for a second. Then put yourself one hundred years ago and ask yourself if you know how quarks were discovered. Here's what people had to say. Some scientists in the ageon collider found it. I don't. I actually don't know how they were discovered.
You know, I've been learned about that. Was it electron cloud chamber or something.
No, that'sn't not for quarks, that's for something else, positons or something.
Seeing a particle accelerator, of course I don't know. All right, that's cool.
I don't even know what they are, So I just discovered by incleision of items. I mean, see, I don't I don't remember the name of the machine, but this collision of all right. Not a lot of deep knowledge of history of physics out in the public, No.
Not so much. There's some pretty good answers here. I like the guy who knows how positrons were discovered in cloud chambers, and you know, people giving credit to the Hadron collider, which is, you know, not too far off that certainly were discovered in collisions.
Interesting, so you know some knowledge. It seems like some people thought courts were discovered recently.
Of like the lac. You know, this thing is twenty years old. Tops and the quarks we've known about since the sixties and seventies, so it definitely was not the large Hadron collider responsible for discovering.
Quarks, right, And I'm just curious here, how did you get these questions? Did you ground into the street before the pandemic or or during the pandemic? Do you have now like a six foot selfie stick with a microphone? I, shockingly, I actually work on these things kind of far in advance, so that.
I'm prepared for a pandemic. I have a stockpile of questions, I asked people on the street.
I see you have a federal stock pile, the.
National Strategic Reserve. A random question.
All right, good, So people were still feeling optimistic about science. All right. It seems like not a lot of people know the stories, and you're saying that it's full of drama and interesting twists and turns. So tell us the story, Daniel set the scene, What was it like back then? And what year are we talking about?
So let me take you back to nineteen forty seven, A dramatic in a world, A cold winter blew into Chicago. Now you have to sort of rewind back to before the clues were found for quarks, and back in nineteen forty seven, we actually had a pretty clear picture we thought of how the universe looked. We felt like.
Like we knew things were mid out of atoms, and atoms were meant out of some bits inside.
Yeah, we knew there were atoms. We knew those atoms had protons and neutrons and electrons. We also knew they were photons. And we felt like, hey, that's a pretty good picture of the universe. And I think a lot of people in physics felt like that might be it, Like maybe you know, we're coming up to the last end of the road and we're going to answer all the questions, and that's going to give us a sort of last sense for what the universes meant.
Like there can't be anything smaller than these particles. These are it. These are the basic building blogs of life, the universe and everything in it.
That's right, But of course there were a few loose threads, right, There were a few things which didn't quite fit into that picture. And that's a lesson. Right, every time there's a little loose thread, one thing that doesn't quite fit into the hole you wanted to. You should pull on that thread, you should mix that metaphor, until you figure out the secrets of the.
Universe, you should just ignore it, repress it.
And some of those those threads were things like muons. Like remember we talked about how muons were discovered, and when they were first found, people were like, what who ordered that? We don't need those muons?
I see, they're not part of the atom, for just particles that seemed to have been there, but they weren't part of regular matter exactly.
That was the kind of clue we're talking about. And there were other particles like pions that were found in cosmic rays and people are like, huh, what are these particles about? We don't need them to build matter. Interesting, but they can't exist. Why do they even exist? What's the idea?
I see? And so you see them, but they're not part of most of things. So I guess that's a weird thing, right.
It's a pretty weird thing. But it also gives you a clue. It gives you a clue for like what kind of particles can be out there? And in the end, remember, what you're looking for is an answer to the deepest question right to understand like the nature of reality, So you want the full menu, And those few little threads then turned into I don't know what's the metaphor here, a whole rug, I suppose, or a whole.
Pilot yard, a giant haystack.
A giant haystack. Because originally we had these weird unstable particles muons and pions just from looking them come down from the sky and cosmic rays. But then people build particle acceleerate. They weren't satisfied just to sort of look at a high energy particles that we already found in nature. They wanted to create their own collisions, to explore these things with more control. So people build particle.
Accela smash things in front of them, not just yeah wait till they come raining down.
Yeah, you want to do it on your terms. You know, you want to have control to say, I want to turn up the energy, I want to turn down the energy. I want to collide this kind of particle, that kind of particle, right.
I want to see what it feels like when I stick my hand into it.
I mean that's a basic curiosity, right, And so what they found when they built these accelerators, was a whole lot of new particles. They found chaons and strange particles and all sorts of stuff. We talked a little bit about strange matter on the program recently. And this is an era we call the particle zoo because basically every time they turned on the accelerator they found some new part of that.
Did you guys have a theme song a jingle like particle Zoo, Particle zoo.
Raw, welcome to our particles.
Yeah, so I guess you didn't have particle accelerators, but you thought, hey, let's see what else happened when things smashed together, because that's I guess that's what you knew was happening in the atmosphere.
Yeah, we had a sense that these things needed more energy. Right, these unstable particles were heavier, meaning that they contained more energy, and then they decayed down to lighter particles. So to try to create new heavy particles, you want to create localized energy density. You want to smash two particles together. So you got a little like blob of energy right there, maybe enough to create something new. And so that's what these first particle accelerators did was create these high energy density situations where you could create these new particles, and we found zillions and zillions of.
These because at this point you sort of knew about equals mc square and then you knew that you know, things can matter can come from pure energy.
That's right, you can create new matter. I mean it's alchemy, right. People have been trying to do this for thousands of years, and we actually were able to do it. By smashing particles together at high energy, you can create new kinds of matter and that's exciting, right, like, wow, look, every time you turn it on, you've created a new particle, and then you get to name it after your puppy or whatever. But it's also confiding after their puppies. I don't have a record of that. No, Back in that day, they were mostly naming them after Greek letters, so you got lots of you know, sigmas and thetas and upsilons and this kind of stuff. But it was also confusing.
Maybe they named their puppies after Greek letters.
Probably after them, lots of puppies named upsilon and theta.
Yeah.
But you know, once you once you sort of your dream is satisfied, you've created all these new particles, then you're looking at it and you're looking for patterns. You're like, Okay, why are there these particles and not other particles? What does this mean about the nature.
Of the universe, Like, how are they related?
Yeah, because we don't want an answer that says, oh, there's nine hundred and forty two different kind of fundamental particles, right, we suspect that the answer is a small number of particles. We want to explain the whole universe using a small set of pieces, right, like the legos. We want to build everything out of a small number of basic blocks in nine hundred and seventy four.
And we often talk about how we had the periodic table of elements and how that was kind of something that told is that when you have a lot of these things out there in the universe, there's probably some kind of pattern or some kind of underlying building block to them.
Yeah, every time you see unexplained phenomena, weird patterns, trends you don't understand, it's probably an emergent phenomenon from the arrangement of smaller bits. Just like in the periodic table. You see all these patterns, and that tells you that there's something else going on, and You're absolutely right. Every feature of the periodic table comes from how the electrons sit in their orbitals around the nucleus, and so people suspected. They're like, well, maybe all these new crazy particles we found are reflective of something smaller, something tinier, and all these patterns that masters these particles and the way they interact come from how those little bits are fit together. That was sort of the nugget of the idea.
I see. And so they found the pattern right in all of these particles in the particle zoo. They're like, wait a minute. The lions are sort of like smaller versions of the elephants, and the zeros are sort of have four legs, just like the lines kind of thing.
Yeah, So we had a decade of discovering new particles, and then in nineteen sixty one, a theorist came up with an idea. He said, well, I notice that if I categorized the particles in two ways, one by their electric charge and the other way by their strangeness. And remember, some of these particles are strange in the sense that they last a lot longer than you would expect. And you can listen to our whole podcast episode about strangeness, and so people postulated this new property of particles strangeness, and they give particles strangeness zero, like the proton and the neutron, or strangeness one or strangeness two, and then they just made a.
Table meaning like it's strange because given how massive it is, how much in ways, it shouldn't be around this lone.
Yeah, Like, chaons last a lot longer than you would expect, and the reason is that they have strangeness. Then the universe likes to preserve strangeness, so it tries to find a way for the chaon to decay to keep the strangeness into products, and that takes longer. It's a weaker interaction.
But protons are pretty stable and they're supposed to be stable, so they have zero strange.
Yeah, protons have no Now we know that strangeness actually reflects the strange quarks inside of it, but at the time they didn't know. They were just like, this is a property these particles, and a lot of particle physics, it's just like writing down properties we observe and wondering where they come from and wondering if we can see patterns and then explain those patterns in terms of something deeper. So at the time, you know, they knew the charge of these particles, they could measure that, and they'd sort of invented this idea of strangeness just by observing how the particles decayed and labeling them strangeness one, strangeness zero. And then they noticed this pattern. They called it the eightfold way because they noticed that if you arrange the particles according to strangeness versus charge, that they formed these octagons, right, and they formed these triangles and all these really interesting geometric patterns.
All right, So they found a bunch of particles and they found a pattern, maybe a clue to what all these particles mean.
Yeah, and they found these gemeasric patterns, and that suggested to them that, like, you know, maybe there's something going on here, maybe there's a reason for all these patterns. And the theorists that came up with this eightfold way found a hole in those patterns, like there was one triangle that was missing a corner. They said, okay, well, maybe there's a particle there. You would have to have this strangeness and this charge to be in that corner. And he predicted its existence and then they found it like, oh, you were right, this new particle does exist. So that was the first clue that maybe this pattern really reflected.
Something because it wasn't just imaginary, like they weren't just imagining things. You could actually find particles using these pattern Yeah, just.
Like with the periodic table. We started putting it together and we noticed some holes. We're like, where's this element number or whatever that we don't see in nature. It turns out, you know, it does exist, you can create it. It's just very unstable. In the same way they were able to fill out these triangles and these octagon of the eightfold way.
All right, well, let's get into what this pattern actually meant or means and how it helped them make sense of the particle zoo. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, then, so they found a bunch of particles and they saw that there was some kind of pattern to the meaning that there was something going on here.
Yeah. Yeah, every time you see a pattern, that's your first clue because it lets you sort of play games with what's going on underneath. Right, you want to find some way to explain a very complicated set of things. You've observed ninety two different particles with all weird masses and behaviors in terms of a smaller set of objects, And so finding that pattern gave them a clue as to how to put that together.
And so they came up with the idea that maybe there are even smaller particles that kind of put together to make these bigger part of les.
Yes, exactly, And that's sort of the idea that particle physicists are always looking to, right, like everything is made of smaller bits. That's like the oldest idea in particle physics. And so they thought, well, we have all these particles, can we explain them in terms of smaller bits? Right?
They're like we're particle physics. You only have particles.
That's right. That's right, that's our handm.
Like when you have a particle, everything looks like a particle tea.
That's our hammer. So everything's a nail exactly. And this idea actually came up independently by two different theorists, and they came up with the same idea that they could be these three little particles that, if you put them together in different combinations, explain all the particles that we see.
But not all of them, right, Like some of them like the muon. Isn't the meon kind of like an electron and can't be split?
Yeah, they don't explain all those particles, like the muon is not made of quarks. But all those particles discovered in the particle Zoo, the pions, the chaons, the sigma particles, all those kind of particles, they could explain all these new ones in terms of these little basic particles. And so Murray Gelman came up with this idea and he called them quarks based on a word that he saw in a James Joyce novel. And at the same time another theorist named Zwig came up with exactly the same idea mathematically and published it, but he called them asians.
See mean, mathematically like the mass predicted there would be three of these.
Well, at the time, all these particles were only made out of these three quarks. Now we know that there were up quarks, down quarks in strange cores. Right up and down is what you need to make the proton and the neutron. You add in strange to make all these other strange particles like the chon and the omega and the sigma particles. And so at the time they only needed three and the particles they were creating only used those three lego pieces.
Oh, I see, but now we know there are more.
Now we know there are more. Yeah, the story goes on and on.
All right, sort of mathematically to explain the ones they had, they thought there were three.
That's right. And they discovered that if you postulate the existence of these three particles, that you could put them together in pairs and triplets to explain all the particles that they were seeing. So it's like peeling back a layer of reality and saying, oh, all of these things are just different ways to combine these basic building blocks. And not only could they explain all the particles that we had seen. They could show which particles we hadn't yet seen, Like, oh, nobody's tried this combination that would give you this particle and predicting it, and then we find it. And that's exactly what happened with this omega minus particle that we mentioned earlier.
That's what they found. They've found articles that were predicted by these aces and quarks.
Yeah, exactly. And so that's pretty convincing. And you know, if you ask me, I would have believed it, Like at that point, I would have been sold on this quark idea. I would have been like, well, this, this explains it. It describes all the particles we see, It simplifies things, it holds together.
But you hadn't seen them. I guess there were just sort of like an idea that seems to predict things, but you hadn't like directly seen them.
Yeah, and so most physicists were like, all right, that's a cute idea, but is it an idea or is it real?
Right?
Is that what's actually happening inside these particles or is it just a nice thing you can calculate in your mind. And this sort of a deep philosophical question there about whether any of our theories are more than just ideas we calculate in our mind, and whether we actually see anything directly. But physicists were skeptical.
I guess they're like m aces. I'm not sure I would call that an ace.
Yeah, And I don't know the history of why quarks took off instead of aces. Actually like aces better than quarks. Quarks. It's kind of a weird Quarks sounds like yogurt, you know.
I think yogurt sounds like quarks. There is a yogurt called quarks. I guess why would you call them?
Know, it's it's a positive thing, you know, it's celebratory in some way. Or it's like, hey, look we found the little less bits, like the number one particle. I don't know. It sits in a nice spot somewhere in my brain.
I see. But maybe Gelman was probably thinking like, hey, these are weird, odd and new. Let's find it a ward that's kind of weird odd in you.
Yeah, perhaps perhaps. And I guess the field liked his idea better because quarks is now what we call them.
Really, it was totally just a name popularity content.
YEA I don't. I've done some reading to try to figure out, like why quarks took off. It might not just be a name popularity. I think Gelmont had a larger personality and was more famous and influential, and so, you know, it's a bit of a political thing.
Doesn't it depend on who published first?
Yeah, but you know it was just about the same time.
But sometimes like the second counts, right, the minute counts.
I think that's ridiculous. But we'll hear a story later on this program about two discoveries announced on the same day.
All right, so they were theoretical and some people didn't believe them. But then what happened? How did we say, hey, look, quarks are real.
So then we got some actual evidence because they did some experiments, and experimentalists said, well, if these things are real, we should be able to see them, meaning we should be able to take a proton and shoot particles at it and see this internal structure. I mean, if protons are not just like tiny perfect dots or perfectly smooth, if they're actually made of three like hard nuggets bound together, we should be able to see them. If we shoot electrons adament with high enough internet and.
What made them think that the proton was deconstructible or breakable, but not the electron.
Oh boy, that's a good question. We don't know if the electron is deconstructible. We are doing experiments to try to figure that out. We had a podcast episode about whether the electron has stuff inside it. I guess the short answer is, we don't know, and we're trying to see if the electron has stuff inside of it. We've never seen any evidence.
They're just like, hey, let's match these two things together and whatever.
Yeah, but the theory went that the proton was built out of quarks, and so that's what they were testing. The suggestion was you could maybe see these things inside protons. Nobody suspected that electrons were made out of quarks, and we know today that the electron doesn't feel a strong force and so it can't be made out of quarks. We don't know why and what the difference is that the whole other podcast episode. But anyway, they used electrons because they're cheap and fast and small to shoot at protons to try to see what was inside them.
I guess protons are heavier.
Protons are much heavier than than the electrons. And the idea was that maybe they had this structure, and so you shoot electrons at a proton, it will bounce off, but if you shoot it at high enough energy, then it can get to break it. They had to break it. You can get between those bonds, right. A proton we now know is made out of quarks that are held together by really strong bonds. But if you shoot at it with electrons that have energy more than the energy of those bonds, then those bonds are sort of irrelevant and you can bounce off the end vidual quarks.
And so they did that. They shot the proton with the revolver in the library, and they found that the protons split into three.
Yeah, they found not necessarily that it's split into three, because remember these quarks can't be alone, and so if you break up a proton, it just the quarks inside of it just form a new proton and new other particles. But what they found was that there were three sort of hard centers in the proton, three places where if you hit it just right, it would bounce back at a great angle rather than passing through.
Oh, they were looking at the bounce rate.
Yeah, they were looking at the bounce rate and the bounce angles essentially, and so if the proton is a totally solid sphere, then you'll always sort of get the same angles, whereas if the proton is mostly transparent with three hard nuggets in it, then often it'll just go Your electron will go right through it, and sometimes it'll bounce off.
But how did they know there was three of them? Like, can you could they actually aim electrons with that sort of sub.
You can't aim. It's all statistical. You can't aim at an individual quark. You can count how many hard centers there are by how often you get a hard bounce back. And you know, this is very similar to the way the nucleus of the atom was discovered back in the day or on the turn of the century, before we even knew that the atom had an electron with a nucleus in it. Rutherford discovered the nucleus in this exact same way. He shot particles at nuclei and found that mostly they went through, but occasionally they bounced right back, and that's how he discovered the nucleuss.
We're still not convinced they saw these hard centers nugad centers, and physicists are still like, yeah, I don't know if that those are cool.
Yeah, it amazes me. I don't understand what physicists were thinking at the time. Like you had this beautiful idea of these tiny particles that explained this big mystery that had been going on for twenty years about the particle zoo, and then you had this evidence that these particles really were made out of smaller particles, and still physicists were like, ah, I don't know. And I think part of it is that they couldn't see the quarks on their own, right. They couldn't like create independent, standalone quarks and study them like with all the other particles.
They're only looking at X rays and not at you know, holding the bones in their hands.
Yeah, and you know, quarks, you can't see them by themselves. They can never be on their own. They're always tightly bound into these in combinations of other quarks into other particles. So maybe that's what motivated this skepticism. But you know, I would have been on that train long before this.
Hey he would have been wearing the cork hat. Yeah, yeah, all right, So it sounds like it was still sort of an idea, maybe a little unproven. People were unconvinced. But then something amazing happened, and so let's get into that. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel, tell me about the November Revolution. It sounds like the October Revolution. Does this happened? A month later, or is this a totally different thing.
I know, it sounds like something that should have happened at you know, at the Alamo or something, but this is a revolution or with stars and you know, and a Korea, And as far as I'm aware, nobody died on this revolution. But this is sort of the day that physics changed its mind, went from like, quarks are an idea to quarks.
Are a real thing, and there's an actual date.
It's an actual date. Yeah, and that's because that's the date of the dueling press conferences that are the end of the story.
Yeah.
And the idea was, if quarks are real, maybe there are more of them, Like we only needed three up, down, and strange to explain all the particles that we've seen before. But how do we know there aren't more quarks like a fourth quark or now we know there are six quarks? And there are actually some theorists that said, you know, it's weird to have three because the up and down are sort of a pair that go together. What about the strange cork? Like where is its partner? And you can associate the down cork and the strange cork they have the same electric charge. Where's the partner of the upcark? Right, where's the version of the upcork that has its electric charge?
You mean the Catholics weren't like, three sounds good to me. Sounds like a trinity to me.
Yeah, there are reasons. Three seems nice. But also, if you have quarks at off, it's weird to have an odd number. And so they predicted this fourth quark. They said, well, we predict there's another quark out there, and they called it charm. And this quark would be a heavy version of the upcork. So the way the up and the down are a pair, this quirk, the charm and the strange would be a pair. So this pair, the charm and strange are like the heavy version of the up and down.
There was a fourth beetle missing.
They're like, yeah, there was a fourth beetle. And this sold some complicated theoretical problems, like people are trying to do some calculations and the calculations didn't work unless you had this other quark also in the calculations. It was sort of the first clue that maybe the universe made more sense math if you had another one. Yes, math, And so then then people went off to look for it.
So then November tenth in nineteen seventy four, people were like, didn't know what was coming.
No, So then people went off to look for it. And there was a guy on my team named Sam Ting. He had an idea for how to look for it. It was a very nice experiment, very clean. He was shooting protons at a target and he was hoping to create essentially this quirk and it's anti cork. He was hoping, if you smash protons into this target, then occasionally you create a charm cork and an anti charm cork into this new particle, and then he could see that new particle. And it was a very nice experiment, except it had one weakness, which is that it was sort of slow. Like he wasn't making a lot of these every day. It was going to take him like a year year and a half to get enough of these things where he could claim discovery.
In partic of physics, you have to do things a lot, and then from the sort of the statistics, then you say, hey, look that bump in the data looks is probably a particle exactly.
And so he ran his experiment and he was cranking it up, and his bump was building up and up and up and up. Now, meanwhile, on the other side of the country at Stanford, there's a guy named Bert Richter, and Bert Richter had access to a much more powerful machine. This is a collider that would smash electrons and positrons against each other. And this this thing was capable of discovering a new particle in like an hour. But the problem was he'd have to tune it to exactly the right energy. Like if you knew exactly the energy you needed to create this new particle and you tuned the beams, boom, you could produce like one hundred of them in an hour and be done. But you had to know how to tune the beams. If you didn't know where to look, it could be you know, you could be searching forever.
Like Stanford had a huge microscope, but they just didn't know where to look.
Yeah, they had a huge microscope, but they were searching a beach, right and they had to like put it here, put it here, put it here. If they knew where to look for this new particle, they could prove it existed right away.
Where's same thing maybe had a giant sister which was slow, but you know it would cover a wider range exactly.
And so they were racing and bert Richter and his team did these scans. They started low energies and they scanned up and they didn't see anything. And then they scanned down and they scanned back up and they didn't see anything. They didn't see anything. And meanwhile Sam Ting is accumulating this data and he knows exactly where bert Richter needs to look, but he doesn't want to tell him because if bert Richter finds out this one piece of information, then he can scoop him in just a day.
So these two guys across the United States, they knew what each of them were doing and what they could do.
They knew what the other one could do. There's a lot of controversy about exactly what they knew about each other's experiments and with the connections between them. And there's also lots of crazy stories here, like I have heard stories that Sam Ting was so desperate to get time to run his experiment that he actually sabotaged other experiments that were using the same ways they had to share time with them. And there are stories that the other experiments kept having these weird electronics problems and every time they would come in after a night their electronics were fried. So finally installed a video camera and they're like, what's going on. And the story goes that Sam Ting would come in every evening and piss on their experience. This is the story. Their story is. There's video evidence. I have never seen this video. This is pre internet. I do not know if this story is true.
What do you smell it? When didn't they'd be able to tell that somebody was doing this.
It's an interesting story and it actually reveals something I think about the time because at the time, field of particle physics was dominated by white American dudes mostly, and Sam King is a Chinese guy. He's at MIT, but he's sort of an outsider, and so there's you know, maybe shades of racism in this story. It's not clear whether this story is true, but it's a story that exists and is out there, and it's sort of is the flavor of the time. Because Sam Ting finally accumulated enough data, he's planning to announce his result, he you know, calls a press conference for the next day, and this is like November tenth, right, and meanwhile, at Slack on November tenth. They figure out exactly where to look.
And they figure it out, or they figured it out from Sam.
We don't know, Like there are stories that maybe there was a leak. Sam certainly didn't tell them, but somehow they knew exactly where it'll look. They turn, they turned the collider. There, they ran the experiment, they got the plot, they wrote the paper the same day. It is all one day. Next day. They also call it press cur at the same time now on November same time, So you have two press conferences, two parts of the country making announcements of the same discovery at the same moment.
But Sam was in Eastern Times, so he went.
I don't know, I don't know if it's down to the minute.
That's a bit suspicious, you know, like they've been looking for years and then suddenly the day before this guy's about to go to public, they'd find the right parameters, I know.
And so they didn't talk to each other, and so they gave the particles different names, like Sam called it the j particle and the guys at slack called it the side particle this Greek letter, and so we had the same particle discovery announced by two different groups on the same.
Day and so and you told me they they called the official name for this particle is the J side particle.
Yeah, we never resolved this dispute, Like people still argue about it that there are people in the J camp, people in the side camp, but the official name is J SI, which is like such a cop out.
And to this day there are people bitter that it's not called the SI slash Jar.
Probably probably, and people who think it should just be the J particle, and people who think it should just be the side particle.
They should just call it off and call it something totally.
But they did give them the Nobel Prize for this, the nineteen seventy six Nobel Prize, and they shared.
It all right, So that's a good happy ending for everybody. That we're all happy.
Probably, No, I think there's still a lot of grumpiness in the field over this. But the end of the story is that this is what really led people to believe that quarks are real, because we predicted a new one and then found it, and that told us that quarks are not just like an idea for how to explain all the particles we've seen so far. They really are sort of a more basic fundamental building block of the universe.
And they saw it on its own, or they saw it kind of in the same way of hitting something inside of something else.
Can't see the charm cork by itself, but they were able to create a particle which is made of just charm quarks. So it's a charm cork and an anti charm cork put together. That's the jape side park.
I see see that they should just end it controversy and not call it a name. Just call it the charm, a charm, a particle.
Somebody else wanted to call it orthocharmonium like a real Yeah, seriously, that was the technical proposal.
Forget it, forget it. Let's not leave us up to physicists exactly exactly.
That's what happens when you leave it up to the physicist, right, But I.
Guess that what you're saying is the point is that quarks are real, and that's how they were discovered.
Yeah, it was a sort of slow accumulation of evidence. People were not convinced for a while, but then seeing them inside the proton and discovering that there was a new one, finding it actually out there in reality, like it's real. That's really what convinced people. And since then we've thought of quarks as real and we've gone on to find some more.
That's right, There are now six ques, that's right.
Just after the charm quark was discovered, just a few years later they discovered the bottom cork. That was the fifth one. And you know, we don't like odd numbers of quarks, and so then people thought, well, there must be another one that goes along with the bottom cork, and so they called it the top quark. And there was actually competing names for those two. Also, there was a whole camp of people who wanted to call them the truth and beauty quarks instead of top and bottom.
Wow, even more confusing.
But the top quark took a long time to discover. We'll do a whole podcast episode about that. They were also dueling press conferences for that discovery.
Well, I guess you know, there's all sort of points to how science is made. You know, first it starts off with just looking at what's out there, and then people reading these papers and thinking about what it could be, and then it involves then more people then taking those ideas and proving them right.
Yeah, I think that's it's a wonderful process. And I love how you can sort of see that happen many times in science. You go from like all the stuff around us to the periodic table, and then from the periodic table down to protons, neutrons and electrons, and then you know, you get an idea that there are other particles out there, and then you boil that list down to basic quarks and the hope is right. The idea is that maybe we can do that again. And now we have this new list of particles, all these quarks and all these leptons. We don't understand what the patterns are there. We don't understand, you know, why we have all of them. We're sort of at the new particle Zoo. It's like the quark and lepton zoo. We don't understand it, and we're looking for that new idea, the one that will maybe explain how these particles are made out of even smaller ones and they have.
To subsuit the mini and farm.
Maybe aces will come back.
Right, I guess, but we should probably come deuces now they're smaller.
I think that has another meaning. Maybe we should avoid I don't think I want to drop a duce some particle.
Physicians, but you could. If you're the discoverer, you get to name it.
Tell me about your deepest scientific goals. Well, I want to drop a deuce on the field.
I want to call it the poop particle.
Then I could finally align my research with my wife's research.
There you go, all right, family, whites and unity, that's what size it's all about.
Yeah, but you know we're far from that. We don't have any ideas for what could be underlying the quarks. We don't know your question earlier. Are electrons also made out of smaller things? We know they're not made out of quarks. We don't know why. We don't know any connections are. The One thing we do know is that there are not more quarks out there. Really know that there are six. And that's it. That's it, that's it, that's the end of the story. We don't know why six, you're for sure?
For real? For sure for real because more would violate the loss of physics or what Because we have ways.
To tell how many quarks there are, and that's from how they talk to the Higgs boson. Interesting because the Higgs boson talks to all the particles that have mass. So if there were more quarks and there are no more ways to talk to the Higgs boson, well, if there were more quarks, we would be making the Higgs boson more often at colliders. So by the rate at which we make Higgs bosons, how often we make one, we can tell how many quarks there are out there. It's a really powerful subtle argument.
Well, you know, I wouldn't put it past nature to still have an ace.
Obviously, maybe nature will drop a deuce on the field.
Yeah, I mean, we'll poop all over your theories as usual. All right, Well, that was a pretty interesting history, and it's so exciting to put your head in the minds of these scientists who were at the forefront, staring at the big unknown and trying to make sense of all the weird things that we find in nature.
That's right, and what seems obvious to us now was confusing and bewildering at the time. And there were lots of other explanations and competing ideas that we now no longer recall. And so while history seems like a linear story, there are lots of twists and turns and false starts. Even inside so quarks and lots of aces and.
All right, well, thank you for joining us, see you next time.
Thanks for tuning in. 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 Danielandhorge 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. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's last sustainability To learn.
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