Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseScientists recently discovered a supposed fifth force of the universe. Is it real and what does it mean for physics?
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Hey Daniel, if I wanted to win a Nobel Prize super quickly, like right now, what would I have to do?
Are you in some sort of hurry? You're applying for a new job or something.
I might be applying for some new cartooning jobs, and I figured that might help.
Or are you looking to apply from my job? Is that what's going on here?
Anyway?
If you wanted to win a Nobel Prize super quickly, you'd have to discover something new.
You mean, like a new particle. You know.
That sounds good, but actually we kind of see new particles all the time. They're just like different versions of the particles we already know. So I'm not sure that would cut it.
So what would I have to discover? Then?
Maybe like a new force of nature?
What if I discover the force like in Star Wars.
Well, it depends on where you're applying for your job, if you want to discover the dark side or not.
Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist. I'm the creator of PhD comics.
Hi I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. Though I've never discovered a particle, nor have I ever won the Nobel.
Prize yet yet, Daniel.
Career and over yet.
Hey, that's right, you've got you still got a lot of podcasts record here. That's right.
Every podcast I do decreases my chances of discovering a new particle or finding or earning a Nobel Prize.
That's right. But remember, we are discovering new friends through this podcast every time.
And we're helping everybody else discover the amazing, crazy, wonderful truths about our universe.
That's right, So welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeart Radio.
In which we take the things that actual working scientists are doing and revealing and learning about our universe and explain them to you in a way that you can actually understand and maybe even makes you chuckle.
Yeah. And we often try to talk about what's out in the news recently, you know, the latest discoveries, the latest headlines that are catching people's attentions out there about exciting new things that scientists and physicists and cosmologies have found.
Yeah.
And something I take as a real vote of confidence in our ability to explain things is when something appears in the news about science and a bunch of listeners write it and say, huh, can you explain this to us? And that's just what happened this weekend. I got a torrent of emails from listeners asking us to explain something exciting that they saw in the science news.
Do you think people had options here Daniel, Like, I could ask all these different physicists, but I know Daniel, so I'll ask him instead.
Well, Daniel actually writes back, So maybe that's why they saw in these emails, or maybe they just blasted everybody. And you know, I just thought we were special.
And we don't charge a fee. That's the best part.
That's right. We do down onload malware into people's laptops when they email us. But wait, I'm not supposed to say that online. Yeah, welcome to Daniel and Jorges botnet about the universe.
That tried We do it to jin up our listener numbers.
No, there was an exciting piece of news over the weekend, and dating back for a couple of years, it's been a trend here and some exciting results dribbling in about a potentially enormous discovery.
Yeah. I saw that this weekend and I was very curious. It was in the front page of CNN, and my favorite part about that was that it showed two scientists and lab codes doing something next to a really exciting machine. So I thought, wow, that's that must be science.
It's got to be science because they're wearing lab codes exactly every time I'm about to get a really good idea. I rush over to put on my lab code to make.
Sure it's extra science y, just in case someone takes a picture of you.
Nobody's ready ever going to take a picture of me doing science. But let's not keep our listeners and the dark anymore. Let's tell them what this article is about.
Yeah, so over the weekend there was there were some big headlines about a new discovery that was done I think in Europe that might potentially kind of up in our understanding of the universe.
That's right. The headline of the article has to do with finding a fifth force of nature.
Yeah, which is maybe more exciting than finding that fifth Beatle.
Hear well, depends if the fifth Beatle gets a share of all that money, it could be a much bigger deal.
They can buy a new force that money.
Yeah.
And you know, sometimes you'll see something online it's like, wow, that sounds like an amazing discovery, but you don't know, is this just the science journalist drumming it up for clicks, or is this actually a real turning point in the history of science. And a lot of times you'll read that and then it'll sort of fade and you never hear about it again, and you wonder like, huh, was that actually a thing?
Yeah, it's hard to tell the difference. And so today on the podcast we'll be asking the question is there a fifth force of nature? What's the right context here, Daniel that makes it epic? Is it force of nature? A new force of nature or a new force of the universe or reality? Or what are we talking about?
Yeah, I think the common phrase is a force of nature. But you know that also like makes you think of like a hurricane or clauses in legal documents that let you, you know, get out of things, acts.
Of God, etc.
But or just a really motivated person. You're like, Wow, she's a real force of nature.
Somebody must have discovered her while wearing a lab coat.
Yeah, no, I think in Hungary.
No, for me, it has to do with these sort of fundamental forces I guess of the universe. You know, to me, there's not really a difference between nature, reality, and the universe. These things are sort of interchangeable unless we're talking about the Marvel Comics universe or the DC universe or the Star Wars universe, or they're fictional universes. But for the real universe. What we're trying to do is understand how it works and understand how many forces there are.
And so that was a big deal. And do you think it got a lot of play in the media, that people afforded it a lot and ask questions about it.
Yeah, I think so. Our listeners certainly seem to have picked up on it, and there were a lot of interest. Is this real? What does it mean? Can you help us break it down? And so to sort of get a broader context for whether this had penetrated into, you know, the community in general, I did something a little bit different with our street interviews. Rather than walking around campus at UC Irvine, I just went to a random coffee shop in Orange County and I asked random folks if they had heard about this discovery, and even if they knew about the original four forces of nature.
So these might be a little bit more caffeinated than the usual answers.
A little bit more caffeinated, a little bit less ram and noodle infused, perhaps I less academic, less academic exactly, you know, a broader section of the Orange County public.
So think about it for a second, those of you listening out there. If someone asked you at a coffee shop, what is the fifth fourth? Think about what you would answer. Here's what people had to say. No never, I've never. I didn't even know what that is.
No, no, no, I'm not talking.
No no.
I saw an article, I saw the headache. No no, Well, I don't know what the four forces about it?
I know, ben't you knew that song birth, Wind and Fire.
Like wind fire, earthquakes and then also.
Swattered?
All right? I guess maybe they hadn't checked this is the front page of the CNN yet a lot of people, it seems.
No only one person had even heard of the article, and very few people could even really comment intelligently on the four forces of nature. I got a lot of sort of ancient Greek ideas, like earth Wind Fire.
I thought they were talking about the rock group earth Wind and Fire.
They really were a force of nature.
What would be the fifth force in that case? Earth wind, fire, sun, politics, ramen noodles.
Yeah. So I'm not sure that everybody else out there understands the ramifications of this potentially mind bending, earth shattering, universe upturning discovery. So maybe we should really start at the beginning.
Yeah, I guess it wasn't like we interrupt this broadcast for an important physics announcement.
Lab Code have landed on the Moon and discovered the fifth force.
Yeah, it wasn't like a stop depresses kind of thing.
Yeah, we didn't have President Trump commenting on this discovery yet looking.
Up at the sun to see if that's where.
The fifth force was.
No comment, But that was the headline. The headline was scientists discover a new force of nature, right, like like if you didn't know there were forces, they just found a new one.
Yeah, and so that sounds like a big deal. But I thought, since people out there might not be terribly familiar with the forces that are out there and what means to be a force and what we think of from a physics point of view as a force, I thought maybe we should start by talking about what the four forces actually are.
Yeah, the ones that we do know about, right, the fab four of fundamental forces.
That's right.
Although physics, you'll be shocked to discover that there is not consensus agreement among physicists about how many forces we've discovered. Oh geez, some say three, some say four, some say five.
There's controversy about how many there are now but they but now they've discovered another one.
This controversy about that too.
All right, well let's get into it, Daniel. Let's talk about the forces we do know about. So what are the four or three fundamental forces in the universe?
So off the bat, we think about the four fundamental forces as gravity, the strong nuclear fource, the weak nuclear force, and electromagnetism. If you had to ask me, or if you are costed me on the street and ask me what the four forces were, that's what I would say.
You wouldn't say there are only three.
Well, you know, from a particle physics point of view, we've done a pretty good job of showing that electromagnetism and the weak force are really one and the same. They're just two sides of the same coin. In fact, in particle physics we refer to them as the electroweak force. So that's from that point of view, you have three forces, gravity, the strong force, and the electroweak force.
But traditionally the weak force is kind of its own thing, and it kind of is because it has its own like particles that interacts with right, it doesn't use the photon like the electromagnetism force does. Right, mm hmm.
But you know, if you want to talk traditionally, like historically, electromagnetism is a new thing. There used to be electricity and magnetism. They were identified initially as totally separate phenomena and then later understood to be two sides of the same coin and merge into one that we now call electromagnetism. So, you know, years and years ago you might have said five fundamental forces, that we merged that down into four. Now we've merged that down into three. So I think three is actually the best description of you know, what we currently understand. But that's not a widely held opinion.
I see. Is this like the Greeks thought that maybe there were only three forces like women, fire were actually the same.
Yeah, except that we actually have more data than the Greeks did. We can cruvee this pretty conclusively and mathematically.
Yeah, okay, so there are three and or form we'll say there are three point five forces. About that split the difference.
This is not the kind of thing you want to compromise on. It's not a negotiation. I'll give you three point seventy five plus you get the house on weekends.
Maybe you should maybe you would grab more headlines that way.
No, And to remind people, electromagnetism is a force you're familiar with. It's responsible for electricity, for magnetism, and also for chemical bonds. Its basically what holds your body together. It's what makes the wall seem solid, you know. It's it's responsible for most of the forces you actually feel.
And the weak force is not when you come and commonly feel, but is sort of related to the electromagnetic force.
Yeah, it's very closely related to electromagnetism. The particles that contribute to the weak force are the W and the Z, and you can think of them sort of like heavy photons. Because they're heavy, it makes the force very weak and it makes a very short distance scale. And so this one really only comes into play for things like neutrinos and radioactive decay. And I was actually talking to a particle theorist this morning who said he didn't even consider the weak force a force because you can't really feel it, not even weekly, not even weakly. Yeah, but I consider it a force as a it's one of the fundamental forces of nature, part of.
Electric separate because but it gets lumped in with electromagnetism because like the math and the photon and the bosons all sort of act the same way, or they all fit into the same mathematical box. Is that kind of why you think they're all the same.
Yeah, it just makes much more sense mathematically if you put them all together in the same box, and you can show that you start from a certain set of particles and they get rotated sort of by the Higgs boson and turn into the particles we have. We should do a whole interesting podcast episode about electroweak symmetry breaking. But just briefly, you know, we have these forces of electromagnetism and the weak force, and they're responsible for some of these physical effects. But then of course there's also the strong force and gravity.
Right, and so the strong force is the one that holds the nucleus together, right, Like without that one, all of our nuclear would just fall apart.
That's right. Remember, the nuclei are protons and neutrons, and protons are positively charged and so they repel each other, and the neutrons are neutral, so they can't do anything to really help. So from an electromagnetic point of view, the nucleus shouldn't even hang together. We did a whole podcast episode about how the strong nuclear force holds the nucleus together. So without the strong force, we wouldn't have nuclei, we wouldn't have fusion, we wouldn't have stars. It's pretty important.
And gravity that's the heavy one, right.
Yeah.
Gravity is the weakest force actually by all of these things. But it's something you're familiar with because there are big sources of gravity nearby, and so gravity will pull together anything that has mass. You, your friend, your neighbor. You guys actually feel gravity pulling on each other. You just can't really sense it because it's so small. Most of the gravity you feel is with respect to the Earth or if you're the oceans, with respect to the moon.
Okay, so those are the four or three and a half forces. Electromagnetism, weak force. Wrong, first, gravity and that's what we've known for a long time, right, I mean at least maybe fifty two hundred years, is what we have known there to be in nature. Like, that's it. You can't two things can't pull or push on each other any other way. These are the four ways that they can do it.
Yeah, and it's important to understand that these are descriptive. They're just a description of all the stuff we've seen happen. It's not like they come from from some deep principle of nature where we've derived a rule that there have to be four forces or there can't be any more. You know, you could see tomorrow some new physical effect that can't be explained by anything else, and that might be a discovery of a new force of nature. It's just that so far these forces have been able to describe everything we've seen. But again, there's no theoretical limit. There could be like one hundred forces and the other ninety six are just super duper duperor feeble. We can't even sense them.
Oh, I see, up until Saturday, there was no indication in any of the up until you went into that Starbucks to ask people questions. There's no indication from any experiments that humans had ever done that there was anything else going on in the universe. Basically, right, like, we hadn't seen anything that couldn't be explained by these four fundamental forces, precisely.
And that's the way we like to do science. Right, you see something new and weird, first thing you do say, can I explain it with the things we know, because if you can, then that's the most likely explanation, just Okham's razor. And then you know, if you can't, then you consider, well, maybe there's something new. I have to add, something new to my theory, a new particle, a new force, a new something to explain this new phenomenon that nothing else I know can't explain.
And you guys felt pretty confident that there were only these four because I mean, you've done so many experiments over the last seventy years, you know, smashing particles over and over and over and over, that it didn't seem maybe likely that there were more forces.
Right, I would have guessed actually that there were. You know, if I had to guess, gun in my head, are there more forces? I would have guessed yes. And that doesn't happen to hold a gun to your head, Danniel somebody in a lab code, I'm sure Brad Pitt from in the dramatic movie version to My Life, you know.
Where physics lubbed the movie.
And the reason is that there's a lot going on in the universe that we know that we don't understand. You know, we wrote this book all all the things we don't know about the universe, and one of them is that there's dark matter out there. And if there's dark matter, that means there's a new particle, and a new particle probably has a new kind of force, because we know that dark matter doesn't interact with normal matter in any way that we're aware of other than gravity. But we think that dark matter probably does interact with normal matter in some way in order to account for how much we see of it in the early universe. So I would have guessed that there's a new force out there, like a dark photon particle that mediates some new dark force, But we don't have any actual evidence for it. It's just a suspicion.
I see all the experiments he've done pointed to these four forces, but there are still things out there in the universe we don't understand.
Yeah, and as always, there are patterns in the things we do understand that suggests something is missing. Let's say, you know, this would be a lot simpler if you found this new particle. Do you know, until Saturday, we didn't have any evidence for that.
All right, let's get into this new discovery and what the news article was all about and whether it did revolutionize our un understanding of physics. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, so what was the actual article about that came out this weekend that said that they found a new force of the universe? What did they actually discover?
Yeah, so the article was misleading in several ways. You won't meet surprised to learn. And the first thing is that this last weekend wasn't really the most important moment. There's been a series of papers from the same group in Hungary announcing discoveries for the last few.
Years, so they've been teasing this.
No, they've been trying to replicate their experiments. So maybe the most important result came out in twenty sixteen when they first saw evidence for what might be a new particle, and this paper from recently just sort of confirmed it in a different system. So let's talk about what happened in twenty sixteen, because I think that's really the most important result.
Okay, let's go back in time. So what was the actual experiment in who were these scientists and what did they actually discovered?
Yees.
So it's a group in Hungary and their experiments called the Atomkey Experiment ATOMKI. The short version of the story is that they see some things in their detector that they think are consistent with a new.
Particle, meaning something that they had never seen before.
Yeah, and something that, as we were talking about before, they cannot explain using the fundamental forces and particles that we know about.
So that sounds exciting, it is. Yeah, they've been doing it since twenty sixteen, like they've been talking about this for a while.
Yeah. In fact, they've been doing this kind of physics for quite a while. But this particular experiment is interesting. What they do is they take a proton and they shoot it a lithium nucleus and then it turns into beryllium. Because that's one more atomic number up. So the nucleus sort of absorbs the proton. But it's not just brilliant. It's like excited beryllium. It's like has extra energy. So it's like wiggling and dancing.
Should we picture a dance that the beryllium is doing? Which are the Fortnite dances? Is it doing?
You're the cartoonist, you're the visual person, So I want to see a doodle of dancing beryllium.
When we're done, it's doing the Charleston. Let's go with that.
And just like you know how electrons can get excited up from their ground state and then jump down a state. When you jump down the state, you give off energy, and so they what we expect to happen is this beryllium jumps down back into the ground state and gives off energy in terms of a photon.
Oh I see, so the proton not just transforms it into a new element, it forms it and gives it kind of extra surplus energy. Yeah, then it has to get rid of.
Yeah, because the proton that comes in has a bunch of energy. It's not just a at rest proton just sort of hanging out comes zooming in with a lot of energy, and then the beryllium nucleus which is then formed, has this extra energy. It wants to get rid of it, and so what you expect is for it to shoot off a photon, and then that photon would turn into a pair of particles, an electron and a positron, And you can measure the energy of that photon by finding the electron and positron and sort of adding them back up.
Why doesn't the photon just keep going as a photon, as a little bit of light. Why does it have to turn into an electron and an anti electron?
Yeah, they can. Photons like this can fly across the universe and just go forever. But these guys have a special trick for measuring it. And the way they measure the energy the photon essentially is to induce it to turning into an electron and an anti electron, so they can it helps them measure the energy.
How do you induce a photon to not be a photon?
Well, every time a photon goes through matter, it interacts with all the electromagnetic fields inside that matter, and that tends to make it pair produce that we call it turning from a photon into a pair.
Of particles, you kind of like slam it against something.
Yeah, and the key thing is that when you do that, you measure the energy of it, and you can measure the mass of that particle. And photons, of course, don't have any mass, so you expect that you get this electron and this positron, you add them back up to reconstruct what the photon was like, and you calculate what its mass was. You should get zero. But what they see is a bunch of events where it doesn't add up to zero. It adds up to a different number. It adds up to a blob all around the same number, around seventeen mega electron volts.
So where did this mask come from? Wait? So photon doesn't have mass, so you expect it to split off into an electron and an anti electron. You're saying that that has to add up to zero.
The mass of that pair has to add up to zero. Yeah, But sometimes they see something that they can't explain, which is the mass of that pair adds up to something which is not zero, which means that the particle that carried that energy didn't have zero mass, it had non zero mass. And so essentially what they think they've seen is like another version of the photon, a different particle that does have mass.
Oh, they think that the photon they're seeing is not a.
Photon precisely, they think they call it the X particle.
Good branding.
I was wondering if you'd like that or not X sort for like mysterious. We don't know if it actually becomes something real, and I guess they'll give it a real name.
I think that means that they're doing physics with the exit the end.
So that's the basic thing is that when they plot this so the mass of this hair of electron and positrons, they see a bunch of near zero where you expect to see photons, But they also see a blob all clustered together around seventeen mega electron bolts. And that's the kind of thing you would expect to see if there was a new particle there, something which wasn't a photon. But beryllium was emitting this X particle when it went down to its ground state.
Oh like sometimes or usually it gives gives off a regular photon, but sometimes you get a lot of measurements of something that doesn't look like a photon.
Precisely, and that's exactly the kind of thing you would expect to see if there really was a new particle there.
But it's not like there's something terribly different going on here. I think maybe that's the weird part for me is like, like I was following you, it sounded like things I've heard before, but suddenly you're telling me that, like an irregular atom decaying, suddenly there's this weird new kind of particle coming out.
Yeah, that's precisely what they're suggesting. And remember that to be consistent with everything else we've ever seen, it'd have to be pretty subtle. If this was happening a lot, or shooting out some really powerful rays, or happening really often, then we would have noticed on it already. We studied atomic nuclei in great detail. We have a pretty good understanding of how this works. So for this to evade all other previous experiments, it have to be pretty subtle.
Not something in particular to the beryllium or the lithium. It's just something that nobody that had flown under people's radar. It's not like these they were taking like super exotic matter and doing experiment with experiments with it with and they found something new. It's like they were doing something pretty what sounds pretty regular run of the mill physics.
Yeah, and what they did last weekend, this new result that just came out is that they reproduced the same results using helium. So instead of beryllium, they excited helium into a new state and when they saw a decay, they found a few of these examples of this X particle that looked just like in the beryllium.
Decays, like helium and helium balloons have some sort of secret particles in them.
Yeah, but you know, if it's real and it's actually there, it's just turning into electrons and positrons and you can't tell the difference. So if this thing is real and then yeah, it could be happening around us all the time, but it wouldn't make much difference to your world. I mean, the world with four forces or five forces doesn't look very different to you.
And what did they say in the paper. Are they just saying like, hey, we look better than everybody else and so we found it, or are they saying, you know, nobody's looked in this range before, or are they saying this is an interaction like a reaction that nobody had studied closely before to see it.
Well, nobody else has ever seen this before. Only this one group from Hungary has seen this before. Now, other people have done nuclear physics experiments. Other people have looked at beryllium, other people have looked at helium. Nobody's ever seen this before. Now, when they put out the paper in twenty sixteen, nobody really paid it. They were like, huh, whatever, that's interesting, but it's sort of in conflict with other results because nobody had ever seen this thing before. But then a group of theorists here at you see Irvine, actually Jonathan Fang and Tim Tate, they read this paper and they thought, that's interesting. Can we find a way to explain this result in terms of a new particle that also doesn't break all the other results that we've seen. Can we find a reason why all those other experiments wouldn't have seen this particle.
Yet they looked at it. And Jonathan's a friend of ours, right, You're a friend of Jonathan, And I've met Jonathan and he's been in our videos that we've made for YouTube before. Yeah, which is why it was like I saw the article and then I saw his name. I was like, what, yeah't know.
This guy, because it was his paper that got this group a lot of attention. They published their paper, nobody really paid attention. But then Jonathan showed that their result could be consistent with a new particle and also be consistent with all the other experiments. Essentially, Jonathan found a way to explain away all the other results because all the other experiments have slightly different configurations or use a different energy range or a different kind of particle or different kind of detector. So Jonathan found a theory that explained this new result and also was consistent with everything we've seen before, and that is what made it exciting.
I feel like that's really gutsy, you know, like you read a paper with a crazy idea that probably clearly sounds like they just made a mistake to be like, Nope, I'm going to sit down and I'm gonna double down and find a theory that might explain this weird circumstance.
Yeah, I think it actually sort of went the opposite direction. They were like, well, here's a crazy result. It's ruled out by all these other experiments. Right, let's do the calculation, let's estimate, let's see if these other experiments actually are in conflict with this one, or if we can find a way to wiggle this one out. And I think it started as an exercise, and then they realized, Han, there really is an opening there. There's a way that you can explain this new result that doesn't conflict with the other ones. And that's when they got excited.
You mean, it was kind of like Jonathan was sitting on a Sunday and he's like, I could do the crossward prusse today, or I could just you know, pass some time working out some equations for this experiment.
I don't know.
I think it was an exercise at the time. He was working with his post doc Flip Tondo, who's also a friend of ours on the podcast and is now a professor e C Riverside, and they were just sort of working through this as an exercise and then discovered, Hey, maybe this overlooked piece of evidence from Hungary is actually evidence for a new force of nature. That was an exciting moment for them.
Interesting. So if he hadn't done that, then people might have just ignored this experiment.
Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think it was the attention of this Frankly world class group of theorists, and this reasonable argument for how it might be a big discovery that pointed the world's scientific attention to this group in Hungary.
All right, well, we'll have to ask Jonathan over a beer or something how he got in, how he found this article, and what made him get interested in it. But yeah, let's talk about the result itself and whether it's significant and whether it is actual new force of nature. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniels, So have they found a new fifth fourth? Or I guess four and a half fourth of the universe?
I would say it's way too early to tell. I mean, first of all, I don't think we can even really conclusively say that they have seen a new particle. And then there's the follow up question of if it is a new particle, is it a new force?
Also, so you have doubts about or you want to see more evidence about whether or not even found anything. And then there's actual deeper questions about whether it actually means there's a new force.
That's right, this result only comes from one team, this team in Hungary. And before you really believe that a particle exists, do you want to see it replicated by an independent team. You want to see another group that has a different setup and maybe different potential biases, make the same measurements and see the same thing. I mean, if it's a real thing in nature, you should be able to see it in more than one place. It's like when we discovered cold fusion, that group in Utah. Other groups immediately went out to see if they could reproduce it, and nobody could, which is how we knew that it was bogus. And that doesn't mean necessarily malfeasance, you know, it doesn't mean that they're lying to us. But there's a lot of ways to accidentally bias your results or introduce a mistake. And that's why we cross check things in science.
So where are we at now? Have people tried to replicate it or has just nobody tried? And so that's why it's an open question, Like it doesn't sound like a super difficult experiment, isn't Like you don't need billions of dollars for it.
You don't need billions of dollars. You need some sort of particle accelerator so you can get these protons up to the right energy, and then you need a detector that can, you know, transform this particle into your positiveronto electron pair and measure it precisely. And you also just need time and interest. And so there are a few groups out there that are interested in potentially reproducing this measurement using slightly different equipment, but nobody has done it yet. And until that happens, I don't think anybody in science is really going to take this result seriously.
Well, it's kind of a weird incentive, right, because like, if I'm a physicist, what's my incentive to being the second guy who confirms first guys or first girls or gals experiment, you know what I mean, Like it's like it's a weird thing to jump into, you know, because you want and get all the glory, and if you disprove it, then you know you would you probably wouldn't get much of glory either.
That's an interesting question, and I think that goes to like who would get the credit for this kind of discovery, you know, And should it go to the Hungarian folks? Should it go to Jonathan and those folks for recognizing the importance of this, Should it go to a new team that verifies it. Should you split it three ways? I'm not sure.
Should it go to me for having a podcast about it?
I'm not sure. And you know, there's also a question of sort of priorities and credibility. You know, everybody out there has a lot to do in science and a long list of experiments they'd love to get done, and given infinite funding, sure I'd like to see this thing happen, But you know, is it the most important thing that these other groups can be doing with their time? And also does anybody really believe this result? This Hungarian group has sort of a I mean there are whispers and hallways and physics departments about a checkered past from this group, claiming discoveries which didn't pan out.
Oh man, gossip gossip.
There is physics gossip. And you know there's people who have now retired and I think passed away, who use the same facilities and made a lot of claims about new particles they thought they discovered, which then sort of went away and are no longer part of this team, of course, because they've passed on, But it sort of lingers. The questions linger about whether results from this facility can really be trusted.
I like to see that TV show gossip Girl for physics.
And you know, in the end, the results speak for themselves. Either you believe them or you don't. And importantly, nobody has found a flaw in their work. People have combed through the details and nobody's found a mistake. And also people have worked really hard to try to explain the results using just standard physics, using the four forces we know, and nobody's been able to. So it's either a very subtle mistake or it's real.
You're kind of saying that it's suspect, but if it's a hoax, it's a really good hoax.
I'm not saying it's a hoax. Right, A hoax implies that these folks are tricking us. I think they're doing to work.
Oh, I see right. But if it's a mistake, it's a really well hidden mistake. If it is a mistake or not.
No, And it's really easy to make subtle mistakes. You know, these detectors only see a fraction of the events, and so you have to make some assumptions about the ones you missed, and it's very easy to introduce biases. We have lots of examples in particle colliders, for example, where we see bumps in our data and we think, oh my gosh, maybe that's a new particle, and it turns out it came from a complicated series of influences from this and that and the other, which produce a bump in your data. So it's easy to produce false bumps. And so what you really just need is a totally independent cross check. And you would need that for any group, right, even if this was a very well respected group from Harvard, you would definitely need independent confirmation before you believed it.
All right, Well, let's get into the details a little bit. I think we have time and talk about so the idea that Jonathan proposed, or that this group proposed at the same time, was that like, maybe this is a new particle that we're seeing. Maybe this particle has a new force of nature attached to it.
Yeah, And that's really sort of just interpretation. All we know is if this particle is real, it decays into an electron and positron pair, and that means that it has to have integer spin because the electrons and positrons are spin half, and so they have to add up to either spin zero or spin one or whatever into your spin. And that's the kind of particle we call a boson. Bosons have integer spin.
And so this looks like it's a boson.
That's right, And so the most conservative thing you could say is if this is real, it's a new boson.
Is a photon a boson.
A photon is a boson, the W, the Z, gluon. All these particles are bosons. Every boson we know of is associated with a force. Photon carries electromagnetism that W and Z carry the weak force, Gluons carry the strong force. If gravity is a quantum force, it would have a graviton, which is a boson. So there's this association between bosons and forces.
Okay, and you think so, you sort of know it's a boson because of the spin, But do you think it might be a new boson because it weighs differently than all the other bosons you know about precisely?
But I think there's some disagreement in the physics community about whether every new boson has to be a force. For example, we discovered a new boson a few years ago, the Higgs boson. Is the Higgs boson represent a new fundamental force of nature? Some theorists say yes. Some theorists say no, because the Higgs boson also doesn't just fall out of requiring what we call a local gauge symmetry, which is fancy jargon for having a certain kind of math.
But how do you know? It's not just like a W boson that weighs differently, or like a boson, a W boson that ate too much for lunch, you know what I mean?
This is much much lighter, right. The W boson is about, let me do some math, four thousand times heavier than this new X particle. So it has to be a W boson on a strict diet it's like intermittent fasting W boson.
It's a W boson that to skip lunch.
Well, that's a good question.
Do you also call that in a different like like a W boson that weighs less would still be a new boson.
A W boson that weighs less would still be a new boson. Like we are looking right now for new versions of the W that have different masses. That would be a different particle, because the mass of the particle really shapes its identity. It's part of what we call a particle. And you know, like finding a heavier version of the electron, that would be a new particle. It's who they are, it's who they are. And so there's not an agreement about whether every boson really represents a new force or not.
Even if you find a heavier W boson, that doesn't mean there's a new force. It just means you found a heavier W boson.
That's right. But of course it sounds cooler to discover a new force than a new particle, and so I think that's why some people have described in the media is like discovery of a new force of nature sounds sexier. It focus grouped better, than discovery of a new particle of nature.
You would get more collects if you say we found a new force than you say and then if you say we find a new boat to skip lunch.
That's right.
But it could be it could be that there is a new fundamental force out there and this boson carries that force, and that this is the first piece of evidence for the discovery of this new particle, which is the clue to the new force, which tells us something about the you know, the way the universe works.
Oh, I think you would get a lot of clicks if you wrote the headline as you won't believe what this boson is like now with this new diet.
That's right, But you know there's also competing forces here. Because physicists are trying to discover new forces, we're also trying to get rid of forces. You know. One of our goals is to describe all the forces in terms of one mathematical structure, like we combined electricity and magnetism into electromagnetism and then with the weak force into the electro week. We'd love to find the grand unified force that encapsulates everything. So on one hand, we want to find more forces, and then on the other hand, we want to sort of shoehorn them together into one framework.
It's like when you're trying to clean up your kids room and you got everything sorted in the closet, and then the kid comes up and says, look, I found this toy, and you're like, great.
Well, It's sort of like when you're trying to sell the jigsaw puzzle. First you want to get all the pieces and categorize them, and then you want to see if they fit together into one nice picture. But you can't do that if you don't have all the pieces, and so we desperately want to figure out are there other pieces out there that we're missing because we know this a lot about the universe we haven't understood.
When you get a headline like this, you're both kind of excited but also like you've grown a little bit, like, oh, that means that means we're behind. But hey, isn't it exciting that we're behind.
We're always behind. It's not like there's a schedule for discoveries of the universe. We're never going to understand everything behind.
I wanted my jet packs yesterday yesterday.
No, we are always going to be behind, So it was always exciting to hear about more physics to understand.
All right, well, it sounds like the answer here is stay tuned. It sounds like maybe they found something amazing, or maybe they found something but it's it's not that revolutionary, or maybe they maybe they didn't find anything. Maybe it's just something that the that people are overlooking.
Yeah, stay tuned for independent confirmation till we get that. You really should just put a pin in it and think about it as a cool result that maybe we'll understand one day.
Right until then, we still only have three and a half funda mental forces.
Three point seventy five. That's my final offer.
Let's make it three point six in the weekend and this podcast Daniel.
Done, especially after account for lawyer's fees on the forces.
All right, well, hopefully that answered people's curiosity and questions about this headline that came over the weekend.
Yeah, so thanks for sending in your questions. If you see something in the science news that you don't understand, please send it to us at questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. We'll break it down for you.
And remember Daniel answers Twitter and email. But he doesn't answer Instagram install what instead? You know what the kids are using? But I think you do? Answered? TikTok? Do you do?
Do you do?
You use the TikTok?
I don't know what that is, but I definitely do it.
Loll the kids are doing it.
I mean.
I'll put a lab code on and make one of those ticker talkers.
Oh there you go. Well all right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that and see you next time.
Thanks for tuning in and thanks for lending us your brain for fifty minutes. Before 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 on 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 digesters to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
As a United Explorer Card member, you can earn fifty thousand bonus miles plus look forward to extraordinary travel rewards, including a free checked bag, two times the miles on United purchases and two times the miles on dining and at hotels. Become an explore and seek out unforgettable places while enjoying rewards everywhere you travel. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC subject to credit approval Offer, subject to change Terms apply.
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