Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel talks to Matt Strassler about how everything is vibrating, and his new book "Waves in an Impossible Sea" (Part 1)
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Hey, Daniel, are we made out of particles or waves?
M That depends on what depends on what you mean by particle and what you mean by wave.
That's a very particular answer.
Well, I'm not just gonna wave my hands when I answer a question.
I would have thought that a particle physicists would have leaned into the particle answer.
Well, I do have kind of a particle brainwave about it.
I think you're just trying to wave me off in particular. Hi, I'm Joorham Mack, cartoonist and the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I'd like to think I'm also a wave youler physicist.
I don't think I've ever heard that word.
I just made it up. Man, aren't physicists great at naming things?
Wouldn't be more privatecy you're a wavy physicist or a waiver physicist.
I got wavy hair and I do sometimes waver about my decisions.
There you go, waves dominate your life and you didn't even know it.
I'm waving and everybody right now, yeah.
She'd waveright in. But anyways, Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we try to dig deep into the nature of the universe around us. How is it all put together? How does it all work when you zoom in on the tiniest little bits. What are they actually like? Are they little bits of sand? Are they weird quantum ripples? Are they both? Are they neither? Are they something else completely different? Our goal in this podcast is to tackle these questions directly and do our best to explain everything we do and don't understand to you.
That's right. It's an amazing universe full of mysteries out there for us to look out and ponder about and ask questions about. But sometimes the biggest mysteries are within us, inside of us, and they're about our very nature of how we exist.
That's right, because we are part of the universe. When we ask what is the universe made out of? How does it actually work? We also want to understand ourselves. One of the deepest goals in physics, but something we don't often say directly is that we want to understand how everything works so well that we can understand ourselves that we could build up from our picture of the microscopic world, the tiny little quantum particles, all the way up to our microscopic world, which means us and ice cream and blueberries. Somehow, we hope that revealing the nature of the universe on the tiny level will give us a crack and understanding why we're here and what to do with ourselves.
Yeah, and it's a huge challenge to connect what's happening at the microscopic level to what's happening at the cosmic and universal level. That is the goal of science, to make those connections and give us a sense of the big picture of how it's all put together.
That's right, because we assume that there is a way it's all put together, that the universe is following rules, that it has a nature that we could know, that we could understand, that we could maybe even describe with our primitive human mathematics and predict and manipulate it in a way that might improve our lives. That at least is the goal of trying to understand the universe. Whether or not we've made any progress is another question.
It seems like we've done pretty well. Like we discovered our bodies, then we discovered we're made out of cells, and then we discovered those cells are made out of molecules, and those molecules made out of atoms, and then those atoms made out of particles. I feel like We've drilled down pretty deep into the makeup of the universe.
Yeah, that's pretty impressive how far we've gone and how we've been able to make some connections between how things happen on a small scale and what we experience on a larger scale. Even just like the idea of germs and disease that tie up, any little bugs swimming around in the air and in our bodies can have a big effect on our experience. The whole germ theory is sort of a triumph of the idea that the microscopic world controls the macroscopic world.
Wait, do you mean like a virus can have an impact in our lives?
News flash?
Isn't it all made up by scientists?
M I'm not even going to touch that.
Yeah, you don't want to touch those viruses.
I'm not going to take a deep breath of that. But at the forefront of human knowledge, what you described as the latest bit of our understanding, you know, the particles that make us all up. What are those really? We had a whole podcast episode where we dug into the question, like what is a particle? Because a particle, in some sense is an extrapolation from things we find intuitive in our world little bits of stuff, the particulates we think make up our world just sort of like extended down to the very very tiny. But what we find when we get down there is that particles obey very different rules. And it's almost a bit of a scam to use a word that relies on our classical intuition to describe something that happens at the quantum world.
WHOA, WHOA are you saying that physics it's sort of like a scam.
I'm saying physics has been kind of lazy in using its words, and that we're often borrowing words that have like intuitive baggage that's misleading. And when we talk about particles and we talk about waves, we're often not really clear about what we actually mean when we're talking about these things, and I think we're often misleading people.
It seems like we drilled down right beyond the atom into the particles that we're made out of, but then we sort of hit a wall in terms of our understanding, because once you get to these tiny quantum particles, you get to ask, like, what are these particles, what are they made out of? What's their origin?
Yeah, and we have a mathematical description that works really really well. Quantum field theory can describe these interactions and make predictions and tells what's going to happen in our experiments. With challenging is developing an intuitive picture in your mind for what's going on the microscopic scale, and that's always going to be challenging because what's happening down there has no analog in our experience. There are some similarities, like, yeah, electron is a little bit like a little bit of stuff, and ripples in a quantum field are a little bit like what happens in your bathtub when you splash your hands around. But those are like stepping stones towards a real understanding. They aren't the deepest, most intuitive understanding of the world.
Yeah, what's going on at those deep levels? And what is matter and energy actually made out of? And so to the on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question is the universe made of waves?
Are you made of waves? Man?
I am a little wavy, I guess right now. I think I'm in a lull for sure.
That it feels like that question through you for a wave.
Yes, I wasn't able to serve my way to a quick answer. I wipe out, wipeout.
I think this question is interesting because we know fundamentally that all the laws of quantum field theory are wave equations, Like at the heart of it, everything is described in terms of waves. But we have this intuitive sense that we're made of stuff, and we like to think of ourselves as built of little bits of stuff, maybe lashed together with forces. But it's hard to imagine ourselves as like made of waves, that you and I are both just like waves in the universe.
Well, I feel like you know someone who listens casually to physics, You know, you sort of grow up learning about this idea of whether things are made out of particles or waves, and you know that there was a big debate at the turn of the last century, and then you sort of learn about the idea of the wave particle duality, like things are both particles and waves.
I think the wave particle duality is well intentioned, but very confusing and often misleading, because it gives people the idea that electrons or part or photons or whatever switch between being waves and being particles, Like they are both, but sometimes they're being a particle and sometimes they're being a wave. I think that's very confusing and misleading.
Well, it's definitely confusing, but I guess you know, as a casual consumer, I've always just accepted that things are like two things at the same time, Like, isn't that kind of the nature of quantum physics, Like things can be two things at the same time, and if you look at it one way, it's a particle, and if you look at another way to wave. Isn't that kind of the basic thing that physicists have been teaching.
I like that you apply quantum superposition to like our understanding of it, Like, well, I understand it this way, and I understand it that way in a quantum mechanical sense, Like I have two ideas in my mind at the same time.
Yeah, it's a bad point and a good point at the same time. It's both deep and shower at the same time. I am both smart and dumb when it comes to quantum physics.
I'm going to give you a good explanation and a bad explanation at the same time, both in your heads. No, I think what's confusing about that is that physicists say that, but they mean something specific when they say the word particle, and it mean something specific when they say the word wave, and I don't think it's understood that way.
What do you mean? What do they mean when they say particle? When do they mean when they say waves?
When they say particle, really they just mean you've made a localized measurement of something, not that it's like converted into a little bit of stuff and it's not flying along through space with a definitive path and location and momentum and velocity and all the things you expect of a little bit of stuff. And when they say wave, what they really mean is it still has uncertainty that you haven't collapsed it. You haven't asked the universe to tell you where it is, you haven't made a measurement it. Really, it's all still just waves. Even this idea of a particle being localized in one spot like a dot on a screen, a measurement you make, that's also a property that a quantum wave can have. It can collapse into one localized spot.
And so that's where this question comes from. The universe made out of waves. Are you sort of making the argument that the word particle doesn't make sense and it's really all just waves.
In the end, the word particle makes sense. If you give it a sensible definition. But everybody seems to have a different idea of what particle means, so it's sort of like an overloaded word that's more confusing than clarifying.
Oh I see, So people shouldn't like major in a field if the name is confusing or misleading, is that what you're saying, or devote their whole careers to it.
M I see, you're walking me down the garden path here. Absolutely, yeah, exactly. You shouldn't have like a PhD and a professorship in a word that you don't even understand what it means.
Yes, I totally agree.
That would be ridiculous. Anybody who did that should be mocked and ridiculed.
Yes, mocked, ridiculed, and also given a podcast.
Absolutely totals agree.
But yeah, I mean, if this idea that everything is a wave and the word particle doesn't make sense, doesn't that sort of challenge your whole you know, feel, the research and the whole particle collider idea.
I'm just going to switch over to being a waveular.
Physicist, yeah, or a wavy physicists.
Yeah, we're just going to collide waves from now on.
Man Waveler, I don't even know how to process that word. Why would you use that word?
It seems like the natural adjective version of waves.
But is it an adjective wave? You aler, Yeah, if you're a particle physicist, that doesn't mean that particles inadjective.
Particles describing physics? There, right, I guess I could be a particular physicist.
Yeah, that's what I mean. That's why Waveler feels so weird.
Oh I see, all right, Well, in the conversation with our guest today, he introduces another word wave cull because he also doesn't like the word particle.
Oh my goodness, Why don't you just have everyone come up with their own words? Hmmm, And let's do science that way.
That's basically what we've done so far, and it's not working very well.
Everyone's like, I came up with a word. He's fine, No, he's fine.
It's the basic principle of language that words are suppose to have meetings. But we've been pretty bad about that in physics.
Well, I vote for wavy wavy physicists.
All right, I'm going to position my department for a change of my title.
Well, today we're doing something a little bit interesting, which is we're jumping right into an interview that you did with a professor of physics who has a new book out.
That's right, my colleague, professor Matt Strassler. He's a theoretical physicist and listeners to the podcast might already know him because he's the author of a pretty well known blog on particle physics called of Particular Significance. He should be called of wavular Significance.
Yeah, it seems like he might be invalidating his own blog.
And he's an excellent writer for a general audience. And he's got a new book out called Waves in an Impossible See, where he shares his vision for how the world works on a microscopic scale.
Interesting he didn't name it Wavecles in an Impossible Sea.
Gole, I suggest everybody get a popsticle and go enjoy the book.
Yeah, there you go. All right, Well, what are some of the things you talk about with professor Strasler.
We try our best to sketch out the argument in his book, walk you through the principles that lead you to a new vision for how the universe works, from relativity to fields to waves, and how that's all crucial for getting a real understanding of how the Higgs field works.
I see it's not just a being hand wavy about things. Well, I can wave to dive into it. So here's Daniel's interview with Professor Matt Strassler, author of the book Waves in an Impossible Scene.
Okay, so then it's my great pleasure to introduce the podcast. Professor Matt Strasler a friend and colleague. Matt is a theoretical physicist and an author. He's been a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies, a professor at University of Pennsylvania, University Washington, and at Rutgers University, as well as a visiting professor at Harvard. He's very well known in the academic particle physics community for his many new ideas and influential concepts, such as the possibility of a hidden valley, which isn't about a new kind of ranch dressing, but the idea that significant parts of the universe could be mostly shut off from us, hidden by our limited ability to interact with them. He's also widely respected for his scientific writing. His blog of Particular Significance is an example of scientific writing for a general audience at its finest this isn't just more the same, where you'll find a few tired analogies recycled. Matt writes with a unique voice that demonstrates his deep, intuitive understanding of the physics, which he can convey with a crisp but logical and accessible explanation. Listeners to the podcast who write to me to ask for more details on virtual particles or the Higgs field will often get a response back that includes a link to some of Matt's blog posts, because it's some of the best explanations out there for these weird and tricky concepts. So I was very happy to hear, of course, that Matt decided to write a book, and having just finished reading it, I can tell you that it lives up to my hopes. It's clear and compelling journey through the complex topics that gives you a new way of looking at the world and thinking about the common replicated ideas you often hear about waves and particles and fields and mass and all that stuff. So Matt, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks so much, Daniel, it's a pleasure to be here.
So tell me first why you decided to write a book. What question is this book an answer to?
Well, I think, as with many books, the question that the book ended up being in the answer to is not the question I was originally trying to answer. Not that the questions aren't connected. But as you and many of your readers and listeners will know, there was a big event in particle physics back in twenty twelve, and that was the discovery of the famous Higgs boson, which is a type of particle that the news media likes to call the god particle, and most physicists think this is a ridiculous thing, but so much for science journalism. We're stuck with that. And the thing which was one of the tasks of science journalists and scientists at the time of that discovery, and before to explain why it was that physicists were looking for the thing, was to explain why it's important to do that. Why are we spending a substantial amount of money and a lot of people's time to go looking for this one type of particle who cares?
Right?
So obviously this was something that scientists thought a lot about how to explain what is fundamentally a tricky concept. And there were some explanations that were really not so great, But there were a few that were not bad, and one of them that took on a life of its own, and sort of, you know, people started to take it kind of seriously at the level that it started appearing often in science journalism and even started appearing in long form books about the Higgs particle. Correctly explain that the Higgs particle isn't really the big deal here. The Higgs particle was a means to an end. We were trying to understand something much deeper, which is called the Higgs field. The Higgs field is something that's present throughout the universe. It has an enormous impact on our lives, a secret impact, but nonetheless something we can't live without. And so the better explanations said, Okay, don't worry about the Higgs particle. That's just a means to an end. We really want to understand the Higgs field. Then the next question was, all right, well, if the Higgs field is important, why is that And the answer is that it has something to do with how certain elementary particles get mass. And mass turns out to be essential in our universe for us, because if electrons didn't have mass, there would be no atoms. I don't need to explain beyond that point how important the Higgs field is.
I like Adams. Atoms are good. Yeah, I'm planning to have atoms for dinner tonight, for example.
You may have them for the rest of your life. I certainly hope so, so, yes, we can't really do without them. But then came the next question, which was, all right, if the Higgs field gives mass to things, how does it do it? And that's where things went a little off the rails again, not because anybody was trying to, you know, pull the rug over people's eyes or somehow try to mislead, but to actually explain it takes some cleverness and it takes a little while, and so if you're asked to give a sound bite, you can't quite do it. So the SoundBite that people came up with was that the way it works is kind of like this. The Higgs field is like a substance that fills the universe, like a soup, or like snow, or like molasses.
I've heard the molasses one many times.
Yeah, the molasses is a great one.
Right.
You kind of imagine yourself swimming through molasses and somehow breathing through it, and it slows things down, just as molasses would do or soup. What do you try to get through it? It slows you down, And because it slows things down, that's how it gives things mass.
And to be clear, this is the common popular science explanation that we're not happy.
This is an up the bowl. And the reason it's unacceptable is that it not only mis explains how the Higgs field works, but it does so in a way that contradicts probably the single most important principle of physics that you have to understand to be able to understand pretty much anything about how the universe works, and that is the principle of relativity. That's the principle that explains why the Earth can go round the Sun for billions of years without slowing down and crashing into the Sun. That's the principle that explains why light can move across the universe and atoms can move through the universe all you know, over enormous distances. And if you abandon the principle of relativity because you want to try to explain how the Higgs field works, you're giving up something even more important to explain something and not even really explain it, so that.
Just doesn't make sense. I hear that question from our listeners all the time because they hear this explanation and then they're like, wait a second, having mass doesn't mean you slow down, Like you can be really massive and fly through the universe without slowing down. Exactly, how is the Higgs slowing things down? And they're right, and that's making any sense? And then I link them to your blog. But this was the initial motivation you're saying for, like, why you wanted to write this book. You felt like it was a missing part of the story here. Is that what the book ended up being about.
Also, well, in a way, yes, in that I think it does provide for the first time a complete and coherent and correct explanation as to what the Higgs field is actually doing, and in particular, not only does it not have anything to do with slowing things down, it doesn't have to do with motion at all, and it gives mass to electrons via an indirect route, which in order to understand one has to first understand what the electrons actually are, and that, in the end, in a way, is more what the book was about, essentially by necessity, because in order to explain what the Higgs field does. I had to really explain how the universe works in its most basic sets, and that requires understanding relativity, not in detail, not with the math, but the basic conceptual framework. And it also requires understanding a little bit about the basic framework of quantum physics.
All right, I have a bunch more questions for Matt about how the universe works and how we can really understand the Higgs field correctly. 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 you thought you were paying magically skyrockets. With Mintmobile, You'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When Mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan, they really mean it. I've used mint Mobile and the call quality is always so crisp and so clear I can recommend it to you, So say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts, So dit your overpriced wireless with Mint Mobiles deal. And get three months a premium wireless service for fifteen bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month, go to mintmobile dot com slash universe. 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.
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Okay, we're back and we're talking to Professor Matt Strassler, author of the new book Waves in an Impossible See, who wants us to really understand how the universe is all made of waves and how that's crucial to understand how particle physics and the Higgs boson works. And I will say that I was surprised when I started reading the book because I expected it to be about how the universe is all made of waves or how the Higgs field actually works. And then you start off with galleo in relativity and I'm like, wow, we are going back to the beginning. Matt is rebuilding all of physics for us. But by the end I could tell why you had done it, because you relied on crucial details in that understanding to give a cogent explanation for how this all works. So kudos to you.
Thank you, Daniel. But as you say, the key to writing the book in a way was to I mean, obviously, the universe is enormous in many different senses of the word, but you could write ten books explaining it. The key in a sense was to pick out those things which were most critical and explain them really well, and to try not to explain too many things, but to really go to the heart of the matter in hopes that you know, a reader would come away not understanding everything, but understanding few things really well, so that at the end what the Higgs field is doing and how it gives mass to things would make sense. And I try to do it without watering things down. You know, I'm not using math in it, but I am trying to make sure the concepts are a complete story.
Absolutely, And for those of you who want to understand the Higgs Field in a deep, conceptual and intuitive way, really encourage you to get the book and to read it carefully and to think about it, and to write us with questions if something in there doesn't job with your understanding, because that's a learning moment. On today's podcast, I hope that we can get a sketch of these ideas. Of course, we can't do justice to the whole book and all of its careful explanations. But maybe we could do an abbreviated version to give people an idea of this important way of thinking about the universe that makes the Higgs field make actual sense rather than molasses sense. So let's start at the beginning. You started with relativity for a reason, because we need to understand relativity to understand what it is the Higgs field is doing and is not doing. What is the prince of relativity that people really need.
To understand well in a way. You know, the word relativity comes with Like most words that we physicists use when we try to explain what we do to the wider public, it comes with baggage. And the cultural baggage of the word relativity couldn't be heavier, right, I mean, we're talking Einstein. But what most people don't realize is that the principle of relativity goes back to Galileo and the year sixteen thirty two. And this is when Galileo wrote down for a reading public that you cannot tell just by looking around you, or by watching other objects around you, or by doing simple experiments how fast you're moving. And this is hard enough for us to think about. I mean, you know, if you're in a car, if you're moving thirty miles an hour, of the car bumps around a little bit, whereas if the car isn't moving at all, well you don't feel any bumps. So I mean, we're used to the idea that if you're traveling faster, the bumps are more and you can tell how fast you're moving. But we forget that at this very moment, where I am seated in my chair and many of your readers are seated in their chairs or doing something that means that they're not moving relative to their room. They are nevertheless going around the axis of the Earth as it spins. They are going round the Sun once a year at twenty miles a second. The Sun and Earth and the whole Solar system are going around the center of the galaxy at one hundred and fifty miles per second, and we don't feel it. And this was Galileo's realization based on some experiments that he did, but it was central in the history of human thought because up until that point there were many brilliant thinkers, including Taycho Brahe, who was the person who collected the data that kept then used to figure out how the solar system works, and bri was after Copernicus by fifty years. So Copernicus said, you know, the Earth goes round the Sun, but people didn't necessarily believe him because, as Brahe himself said around sixteen hundred, look, I mean, if the Earth were moving, we'd feel it. And he was wrong, not because he was dumb, but because this principle of relativity is so weird and so counterintuitive that whatever space is, whatever the empty space that we call the vacuum or just deep space is, we can move through it as though it's nothing. And then you might say, well, okay, maybe it is nothing. What's the big deal? And that's a perfectly good answer until Einstein comes along and says, no, it can't really be just nothing, because it can Expand I mean, when we say the universe is expanding, we don't mean that there's stuff flying out into empty space. We mean empty space is growing. And when we say gravity is a manifestation of the shape of empty space, we're saying that empty space is something that can bend. And the Big Nobel Prize of twenty seventeen, the big discovery of twenty fifteen was the observation of gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are ripples in space, so you can't really explain away the idea that, okay, the reason we move through space without feeling anything is that space is nothing, because then you have to explain how can nothing ripple and stretch and do all these crazy things. So now you have a puzzle. How can it be that Galilee is right that you can't tell how fast you're moving even though you're moving through a substance or something that acts like a substance. I mean, maybe it's not a substance. We haven't ever you know, bottled it and sold it in stores. But it's very strange that this should be true. So this was a place to start because it forces us to confront a sort of fundamental confusion that we seem not to be able to detect whether we're moving through this substance, but it does seem to be a substance. And this has been confusing since the time of Einstein. I don't know whether I should say he was confused about it. That I think would be unfair, but he understood this was a fundamental puzzle or conceptual Maybe puzzle is even the wrong term because it's not clear it needs a solution, but it's a conceptually strange thing about the space that makes up the universe.
And just to make it like explicit, the thing that's confusing is, if you're moving through space, why can't you measure your speed relative to space? If space is a thing, right, if it has properties, it can ripple, it can expand, and you can put numbers in it, why can't you measure your velocity relative to space, which would give you, like a way to absolutely measure your velocity around the Sun, or around the galaxy, or inside a ship or inside a car. That's the central puzzle here.
In a way, there's two interesting puzzles, and they're related, and yet the answer to the two puzzles is contradictory or seemingly contradictory. The first puzzle is why can we move through space without slowing down? If it's a substance, I mean, we can't move through air without slowing down. That's why airplanes need engines, and you can't move through water without slowing down. That's why submarine isn't itine? And one potential answer to that has to do with the idea that we are made from waves that the objects, namely the electrons and quarks and other fundamental particles, really should be understood as waves. And one way to see that is that if you ask yourself whether you and I could move through solid rock, Well, that's a ridiculous idea, right, killed instantly if we tried to do that. And yet seismic waves from earthquakes they just go right through the earth. In fact, scientists use them to probe the inside of the Earth. The waves go right through Why because they're part of the rock. They're the rock doing something right. Sound waves it's the same thing. Why is it that an airplane needs engines and sound waves don't need engines. Soundways can travel thousands of miles and they don't slow down. Why not, Well, they're the air in action. So the idea that we might be made from things that are really sort of the universe in action waves in some sense of the universe arises very naturally from these observations. Maybe the reason we don't feel any friction, any drag when we move through the universe is that we're kind of made of it in some general sense.
You're saying we are wiggles in the universe. The way seismic waves are wiggles in rock.
I will qualify that by saying there's a little more complexity to it, but that's the basic idea. Now, the simplest ripples in empty space are precisely gravitational waves, and we're not made from those. But it is possible for space to have sort of unseen properties, unknown properties which could have waves in them, and we might be made from those. That's a way of possibly interpreting what we're made of. And for example, in string theory, although this is not limited to string theory, that is a common way of understanding space. It's more complicated. Specifically, it has extra dimensions and weird shapes, and so there are properties of space that are not obvious to us, at least through our senses, and waves that have to do with those properties might be the things that we are made from. That's speculation. But the idea that we are made of waves that are somehow made of things that are integrated into the universe, that follows from the math that we use today. In a sense that's less speculative. It's a way of interpreting the math that we already have. And so that's one puzzle and one possible solution that oh, okay, the unuse really is a substance. It's got these properties, there are waves in those properties, and we're made from those waves. Okay, great. We can still worry about the fact that it's not so easy to build objects out of waves that you and I are familiar with. You've never seen a cathedral built from sound waves, and you've never seen an elephant made out of seismic waves. There is this question how are you going to make things out of waves? But we'll come back to that because that's the question of quantum physics and how electrons could be waves in the first place. But there's a second puzzle that has to do with space. So again the puzzles that had to do with space. The first one was how can we move through it if it's a substance without feeling any drag, without slowing down. And one solution is we're made of waves of this substance. Okay, great, But then you ask yourself, fine, it's a substance, Let's go feel it, Let's make a bottle of it, let's track.
It down, let's measure our velocity relative to it exactly.
And there are many ways that you can think of doing that. So for us moving through air, that's not difficult. You use a wind meter that tells you how fast the air is moving relative to you, or vice versa. If you want to know how fast you're moving through the water on a boat, just put your hand in the water and you'll feel, you know, the water will pull your hand in some direction, and which direction it pulls your hand in and how hard will depend on how fast you're moving through the water. That's not quite a fair comparison, though, If I've just told you that we're made of waves of that stuff, right, So then you want to ask yourself, well, supposing you were a creature made out of ocean waves, how would ocean waves know how fast they're moving through the water. Which is a weirder question, and we're not used to asking that, but you can ask it. And one way that ocean waves can tell is they can look at other ocean waves as they come by, at least in principle, right, if you're made out of ocean waves and here comes your friend made out of ocean waves, they're coming in a different direction, how fast are they moving? And you can tell from looking at how they behave how quickly you yourself are moving through the water. And one way to say this is hidden in the notion of the speed of sound. So, in air, when we measure the speed of sound and we say it's eleven hundred feet per second, well it's a speed. What is that speed relative too? And the answer is it's relative to the air. The speed of sound is eleven hundred feet per second relative to the air. And so if the air were blowing by you at some velocity, if there's some strong wind, well, then the sound waves going in the direction of the wind will pass you faster. Then the sound waves go in the opposite direction because they're being pulled along by the air as it flows by you. And if you're a supersonic jet, you're out running your own sound. The sound is moving eleven hundred feet per second relative to the error, and you're moving faster. But with light, when we talk about the speed of light, what is that relative to And in the analogy that we've been talking about, you might imagine that, well it should be whatever it is one hundred and eighty six thousand miles per second relative to space, or whatever it is that that fills space, that makes up the thing in which light is a wave. But that's not how it works. Somehow. The way the universe works is that the speed of light is measured relative to an observer who is trying to measure it, and not relative to space. And the importance of that is that it allows for something bizarre, which is that no matter how fast you're moving, no matter how fast some object that's emitting light is moving, the speed of light when it passes you is always the same from all directions and from any source. That's not true for sound, it's not true for ocean waves. And those facts are directly tied with the fact that you can tell whether you're moving what relative to the substance of air or water. But the way it works for light, despite all the analogies between waves of sound and waves of light, and of course our ability to perceive them, it just works differently.
All Right, we're gonna get even deeper into this, but first we're going to take a quick break.
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Guess what, Mango? What's that?
Will?
So?
iHeart is giving us a whole minute to promote our podcast, Part Time Genius.
I know.
That's why I spent my whole week composing a haikup for the occasion. It's about my emotional journey in podcasting over the last seven years, and it's called Earthquake House.
Mega Mango, I'm going to cut you off right there.
Why don't we just tell people about our show instead?
Yeah, that's a better idea.
So every week on Part Time Genius, we feed our curiosity by answering the world's most important questions, things like when.
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One?
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I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientists at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
We're looking at a whole new.
Series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret, When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories. I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected the questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back and I'm talking to Professor Matt Strassler, author of Waves and an impossible see is that a consequence of the nature of space, you always measure the speed of light to be the same thing because you can't measure your speed relative to space. Or does it go the other direction that because you have to measure the speed of light the same for all observers, therefore you cannot measure your velocity relative to space.
It's a great question because in a sense, the cause of relation isn't clear. Yeah, we know these are facts, we know they are related, but we don't fundamentally know which things should be considered sort of primary and which things should be considered a consequence. And so, just to bring everything full circle, what Einstein was doing when he proposed that the speed of light was a constant from all observers point of view, which had not occurred to anyone prior to him, was deeply tied with this inconsistency between what relativity al Galileo says that you should not be able to measure your speed and what light waves tell you, which is well, light is a Wave's just like sound as a wave, so there should be some substance relative to which light speed can be measured. You can't have it both ways, because if light does have a speed relative to a substance, and you can measure your speed relative to the light, then you can also measure your speed relative to the substance, and then Galileo's relativity is no longer true. You can tell how fast you're moving through the universe. And what Einstein said was maybe Galileo's principle is still true, and there's something of out the way you're thinking about light waves that is fundamentally different from how it works for sound waves.
So it's really Galileo's theory of relativity that Einstein protected correct or rescue.
That's right, that's exactly now. Einstein's theory of gravity is a bigger deal. And not to say this was a small deal. I mean, saving Galileo's relativity was a major achievement. But it's important to understand that fundamentally, what Einstein was doing was saving Galileo's principle at the expense of the notions of space and time, which seemed obvious, in order to make it possible for light to do something that seemed impossible. And it does leave us with this notion of space as this substance like thing with respect to which we cannot measure our motion.
And we don't really have a great explanation for why that is right. We can see that as a consequence of the speed of light being constant for all observers, but we don't have like a ground truth, the fundamental reason and for why a space has his property based on what it is right, sort of going backwards, we're saying it just has this property because we know it can't do this thing.
Yeah, I mean, it's an experimentally derived fact in the end, right, it was Einstein's idea that maybe space and time works this way. But the reason we know it's true is one hundred years of experiments and doing things like building giant particle accelerators, which would not work at all if these facts weren't true in detail. So the fine tuning of an engineered particle accelerator requires that Einstein's formulas be correct to many decimal places, and so these are not speculative ideas anymore. Even though when Einstein wrote the down at that time it was a proposal, he didn't know it was true, But it turns out that it is.
But there's a difference between being well established and being understood. Absolutely can say, well, we know this is correct and describes the universe, but gosh darn it if we don't understand what it means about the universe right.
Correct, there are many speculations about what it might tell us about space and time that would take us far afield from the story of this book. In my book, I've tried to avoid speculations and stick to the things that we know, because I think it's really important for anyone who wants to read this speculative stuff. I mean, there's wonderful ideas out there, which most of which, of course will turn out to be wrong, but they're based on these fundamentals, and so you really have to understand the fundamentals to grasp what deep problems physicists are grappling with. And what's wonderful and exciting and challenging about what I've just told you about space is that you don't need to be a mathematician or an expert in physics to understand the problem, to understand how deep a puzzle this is. And that's part of why I thought a book like this could really work, And I think it's important that as many people as possible appreciate just how spectacular these types of problems are. It shouldn't hurt your head to learn about the problem, and yet it should hurt your head when you try to understand the problem in just the same way it hurts mind. It's not as though these things are hard because it's difficult to understand what's strange. They're hard because any human being, including the experts, find this strange.
And so I want to share with listeners the picture that you paint in second half of the book how the universe works, so that we can better understand the Higgs field and the context of this discovery of space and light and how things wiggle, and you were mentioning it earlier, how everything is made out of waves. This is all super wonderful and fascinating and making me rethink how the universe around me works and how it's all made of tiny waves. But before we dig into the rest of this and understand the Higgs boson, we're going to have to pause here and pick up this discussion in the next episode, part two of my conversation with Professor Matt Stressler, where we'll talk about how the universe is actually all made of waves and why that's vital to understanding what the Higgs field is and what it does, how it gives us all mass. So hold on to your thoughts about how the universe works and check out Matt's book Waves an Impossible See, available everywhere right now. See you next time for the second part of this conversation. For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media, where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Insta, and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down 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 asdairy dot COM's last sustainability to learn more.
We're just days away from our twenty twenty four iHeartRadio Music Festival, preceded by Capital On.
The biggest headliners in live music will be taking over to Mobile Arena, Las Vegas.
Lost some special surprises of moments you are not going to want to miss.
Stream only on Hulu.
The iHeartRadio Music Festival.
And listen on iHeartRadio.
The most anticipated live music events of the year.
This y Friday and Saturday, starting at ten thirty pm Eastern, seven thirty Pacific.
Hey everyone, Jake's story Elli hear from John Boy Media. I want to tell you about my podcast, Waken Jake. I've been a sports nut my whole life, and there's nothing I love more than talking about it. If you're a sports fan, waken Jake is the place for you, covering all the hot topics from the sports world. A lot of baseball, a lot of postseason coverage, mock drafts, awards, guest interviews, all of it. New episodes every Monday and Wednesday. Come watch along on the waken Jake YouTube channel or listen on the iHeartRadio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
