Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseIs it possible that matter could be made of something that's not particles?
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Hey Daniel, have we figured out yet what dark matter is made out of?
Checking?
Checking?
Checking?
Nope, not yet.
Well have a new theory. I think it's made out of everyone's lost socks.
Oh man, it's not lost.
Socks, not even in the really dark socks.
No, there just aren't enough socks in the universe to explain dark matter?
All right, it's not made out of socks. But have you found the particle.
Yet it's made out of you know, no sign so far.
You just need to think outside the box.
Well, we're trying to be open minded. I mean, we're open to any kind of particle, but what if it's not even made out of particles? Then maybe asking a particle physicist is the wrong approach.
I am Jorhem, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comments.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm particularly good about thinking about particles.
And welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we think about everything in the universe and its particles. We try to take all the big questions about life, the universe and everything and break them up into their smallest, microscopic little pieces so that we can all understand them.
Because we all have a certain curiosity about what things are made of. We see all the things around us and we wonder, hmm, is that made out of what?
And it's fascinating how taking something apart is somehow explaining what it is. Right, you look at something and you wonder what is that thing? Well, let me zoom in and see what it's made out of, because that'll give me some insight into what it is.
Yeah, it is kind of strange that breaking something tells you what it is. Yeah, I guess it tells you what's inside or what the little bits it's made out of.
Art.
Yeah, and it works for physics, not so much for society. Like you meet a friend and you want to understand what's their motivation. You don't like slice them up into little pieces. Oh boy, that's dark. But in physics we do that. We say, if we try to understand why this wave works the way it does, or why this hurricane turned left instead of right, we think that we can explain it by breaking it into its smallest pieces and then somehow reassembling it mentally, understanding how those small pieces work together to make the emergent phenomena of the thing at the larger scale.
Yeah, because there's a lot of stuff out there in the universe, and by now we know that a lot of it is made out of atoms, and those atoms are made out of protons and neutrons. And electrons, and those protons and neutrons are made out of quarks, and that's pretty much it. We sort of know what most regular matter is made out of.
And this approach has worked pretty well. You know, one hundred or so years ago, we had all these weird kinds of stuff, different kinds of metals and gases, and they all had different behavior, and we didn't understand why why does this thing conduct electricity and this thing is active and that thing is not. And now we found that explanation precisely by peeling back a layer and digging deeper and understanding what's going on inside. And it's all those atomic orbitals and electrons moving around, which precisely explains that behavior and answers those questions. So, you know, we make fun of it a little bit, but this approach has been spectacularly successful.
Yeah, And it's actually, when you step back, it's a little maybe surprising or interesting that it is made out of little bits like matter, and everything we know about is made out of little tiny lego bits that you can break apart.
It's pretty weird because things seem smooth like you look around you, and things seem pretty much like continuous it's weird to imagine that when you zoom in suddenly it looks different, that it looks like it's made out of these tiny dots. Is incredible that you can make something smooth out of something that's not smooth.
Yeah.
The universe, I guess at heart, is chunky, like chunky peanut butter. It's not smooth.
Yeah, it's incredible. Well, it tells you that what you see with your eyes, your idea of the universe, just from interactions at this sort of size of stuff and speed, is not fundamental to the universe. That you need to dig deeper and peer into the smaller, smaller distances to understand what the real rules are.
Yeah, and I feel like this idea is kind of really ingrained now for those of us who know a little bit of physics and science. It's just that it seems natural now to think that everything is made out of little, tiny pieces.
Yeah, and that's why it's fun, I think, to go back to the Greeks and hear their discussions. You know, they had no data, no evidence, but they were open to lots of different ideas about how the world might work, Like maybe it's made out of four smooth elemental things, fire, air, water, and earth. Right, maybe it's made out of some tiny bits, or maybe they had all sorts of crazy, bonkers ideas. But the cool thing about those ideas is that they were trying to be as open minded as possible. They were like trying to span completely the space of possible universes we could live in.
Yeah, so everything we see around us is made out of those little tiny bit quarks and electrons. But it turns out that that's not all there is in the universe. There's a big part of the universe that we can't see. Yeah, and that makes us worry that maybe we've been led down the rose Garden path a little bit. Maybe our success in describing the kind of matter that we are made out of, me and you and hamsters and ice cream and lava has led us to overgeneralize and to imagine that that's the same pattern that applies to everything in the universe. But maybe it's not so. Today on the podcast, we'll be asking a really fundamental question. We'll be asking can you have matter that's not made out of particles? Whoa?
Whoa?
You just put me out of a job, man.
What do you mean your job is not to explain things.
Well, you know, if fifteen percent of the matter in the universe is the kind of matter that's made out of particles and eighty five percent of it is something else, that maybe eighty five percent of the physicists should not be particle physicists.
Well, I guess what you mean is that we know that the regular matter that we know about, you know, things made out of electrons and quarks and protons and neutrons, only accounts for fifteen percent of the matter in the universe.
Yeah, it's fifteen percent of the matter of the universe and five percent of the energy of the universe, because two thirds of the energy in the universe is this other thing called dark energy.
Yeah, but there's a whole eighty five percent of matter in the universe that is not like the stuff we know about.
That's exactly right, And we're spending a lot of time trying to figure out what it is made out of. Is it this particle? Is it that particle? But sometimes people wonder maybe it's not a particle at all.
Yeah, and that's crazy to think about that. Maybe there are things that are not made out of a little bit. What does that even mean?
What does that even mean? And that's why you have to go back to the Greeks and wonder like, well, what are the ideas that we left, you know, more than one hundred years ago on the side of the highway, once we decided that everything was actually made out of atoms and smaller bits, right to sort of go back to that original grab bag of ideas and consider other alternatives.
Yeah, like, maybe you could have matter that's not made out of particles, like things that have mass but not constituent little pieces. Is that what non particle matter would mean?
Yeah, well, we need to be open to other ideas. We don't know what kind of things could be in the universe. Particles is kind of a bonker's idea, So we just need to be like open to brand new ideas. Maybe it's made out of totally smooth stuff that isn't broken into little bits, or maybe it's made out of something else where. The particles aren't as discreet, you know, they're not counted by integers but by real numbers.
All right, So this is a pretty mind blowing question, and as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had thought about this question, or might even have ideas about whether it's possible. So, as usual, Daniel went out there into the Internet and asked listeners if they thought that matter could be made not out of particles.
That's right, So thank you to everybody who participated in this exercise in speculation. If you would like to similarly speculate for our podcast, please write to us to questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
So think about it for a second. Do you think you can have matter that's not made out of particles? Here's what people had to say.
So I think that we don't actually know if dark matter is made of particles, So dark matter may not be made of particles. And also if there is something that makes up the particles on understand the model, then probably the particles themselves are not made of particles.
Well, nobody really knows what dark matter is, so I guess that might be something that's not a particle. The only other thing I can think of is something like strange matter.
My initial assumption is that baryonic matter has to be made of particles, maybe, I think, but maybe not like dark matter, because as I understand it, we have no idea. We have no idea.
By the book.
I'd say that all matter that we deal with on a regular basis is made of particles like quarks and protons and electrons, but maybe dark matter if you really consider that.
Matter, dark matter, and dark energy.
So far, all of the matter we know is made up particles actually feels, but let's not get into that. We think that the dark matter should also be madeup particles, but we haven't found any of that kind yet, So nope, I don't think there is any matter that's not made of particles.
Matter by definition is a group of particles, so there cannot be any matter not made of particles. All right, some pretty technical answers there. We have a pretty educated audience.
Yes we do. Good job listeners. A lot of folks are keying in on this question of dark matter, so good job.
Yeah, and they even talk about some pretty cool neat like strange matter. Is that a thing.
Strange matter is a thing. It's matter made out of strange quarks. We had a whole podcast about that, and strange stars that might be filled with strange matter. It's pretty awesome. But it's definitely made of quarks, which means it's made of particles.
Even strange matter is made out of.
Quarks, made out of little strange particles. It's pretty strange.
So I guess the question is can you have matter that's not made out of particles? And so maybe steppos through here, Daniel, is everything we know about made out of particles so far.
So far, everything that we've been able to understand has been made out of particles. So set aside dark energy, and set aside dark matter, and focus on just the five percent of the universe that science has been studying for the last few hundred years. That portion of it, the stuff that's made out of atoms, all of that is made out of particles. Right, So I'm made out of atoms, and you're made out of atoms, and stars are made out of atoms and gas and dust and everything that we see and all that stuff we're familiar with that's all made out of atoms. And then you break those atoms apart and you have protons and neutrons and electrons flying around them. Break those protons and neutrons apart, and inside them you have quarks. And that's as far as we've gotten. But everything that we know, everything you've ever eaten, everything you ever stepped on, everything your little brother ever threw a you across the room has been made out of atoms, which means it's been made out of particles.
Yeah, all the stuff you can see and touch. And it's even more amazing that even the act of touching something is also made out of particles. Like forces are also made out of particles.
Yeah, the way particles talk to each other is with forces. And you can think about the way that happens in two ways. One is having fields. You know these fields that every particle has, like an electron has an electric field. But another way to think about those fields is in terms of particles. Like what happens when two electrons get close to each other is they exchange photons. They shoot photons at each other. A changing electric field is a photon. A photon is a way of carrying information about an electric field, for example. And so even your fridge magnet uses photons to communicate when it moves and everything. All particles shoot other particles at each other to push, to pull, to do any kind of communication. So it really is a particle universe.
I was just wondering, is even energy made out of particles?
Is energy made out of particles? While that's an awesome question. You can imagine it to be made out of particles in some contexts, like light is a form of energy, and that's definitely made of particles. When you think about heat, for example, that's the vibration in the crystal lattice of a solid. We talked about how you can think about that in terms of virtual particles like phonons and rotons, and so in lots of cases you can understand energy in terms of particles, usually when it's discrete, usually when it's like quantized, and that usually happens when something is confined or contained in some way, it's in a solid, or it's in a system. When things are just flying out in space, just raw energy, that it's harder sometimes to think about in terms of particles.
So I guess energy doesn't have to be made out of particles. It can be any value.
I'm trying to think about an example of energy that isn't quantized, where it could be any value. And I suppose you can think about like an individual photon, photon flying through space. It is a particle, but it can have an arbitrary amount of energy, all right, But you can only have one or two photons, So that's still a particle. But another example is dark energy. Dark energy is most of the energy in the universe and we have no idea what it is. It might be some new kind of field, it might have a particle associated with it, but we really just don't know.
So it's kind of strange then that you can have energy that's not made out of particles, but then once it gets transformed into mass, then it does then to clustering little bits.
Yeah, And one thing to realize is that particles is sort of something we do. It's a way that we have to understand the universe. It's like something we have done to organize our understanding of the experiments we've done and our thoughts about the way things work. There might be other ways to think about the universe to explain the phenomenon we've seen, not using particles as sort of a mental picture. If you talk to people in philosophy, you know, they recognize that what we're doing in particle physics is sort of building mental models which may or may not reflect what's actually happening deep down in the universe.
Well, I see, it just sort of looks like particles to us. But maybe if you drill down even deeper. Maybe you could even get rid of this idea. Yeah, And there's actually a divide in the field about whether particles are the more fundamental thing or whether fields are the more fundamental thing. Like on one hand, people say, well, particles, they're just like excitations of a field. The real fundamental thing in the universe are these quantum fields that feel space. And what is a particle. It's just like a place where that field is wiggling a little bit. It's a little bit of energy in that field. As you were saying, other people say, no, no, no, fields, you don't see them ever directly.
They're not the real thing. It's particles that are real and fields are just another way to talk about virtual particles. So there's sort of a division like what is the most fundamental thing in the universe? Is it fields or is it particles?
So I guess if you ask the field people, then they will tell you that most of the matter in the universe is not made out of particles. It's made out of fields, which are not quantized.
Yeah, they would say that, you know, particles is just a special case of a field. The real thing in the universe is fields. And sometimes you get energy in them, and then energy can move around in like discrete units. And sure you can call that a particle if you'd like to, but I really just like to think about the whole field. Why focus on the one individual particle? And we started from the particle picture because we found particles like you know, JJ Thompson more than a hundred years ago. We found this electron started to think about things made out of tiny little bits of sort of a natural ideas, definitely a more natural idea than imagining that everything was just like an excited state of fields that fill the universe. And so yeah, person who thinks that fields are the fundamental thing in the universe would say, particles, they're just like you know, they're a step along the way. There's nothing real about them.
So well, I guess is that how you would define it? Is like when a field gets excited and wiggles and it sort of gets a little bit of a lump there.
Well, this is the deep, dark, dirty secret of particle physics, which is that if you ask like five particle physicists what is a particle, you might get five different answers. Right, so nobody even really agrees on what it means to be a particle. You know, you have the experimental people who say, well, I don't know what you want to think about them theoretically, but I know that I shoot one at another one, and I can measure how they bounce off each other. So it's this thing in my experiment. Somebody else might say, yeah, it's just an excited state of these quantum fields that I use in my calculations. And a mathematician might say, oh, well, I can use this group theory to describe the transformation from one thing to another place in space. So really, particles are like a physical manifestation of a mathematical construct, you know, or a string. Theorist might say, A particles that's way too big. You need to drill much deeper and think about like the tiny vibrating strings that make up everything in the universe, including particles, including fields, and so nobody even really agrees about what a particle is.
And it could be that they're all right, right, Like, it could be it's not that they're all wrong, or that one of them is right and the rest are wrong. It could be that, you know, a particle is all these interesting things.
Yeah, I think most likely they're all right, and they're all wrong. You know, particles are definitely something weird, and why we're struggling is because there's something new to us. They're not like anything we've experienced before. And what we're doing all the time in physics is trying to describe the unknown in terms of the known, and so we're making analogies where like maybe it's like a string, maybe it's like a tiny little grain of matter, maybe it's like waves in the ocean, and all of these analogies fail because particles or whatever it is that makes up the universe are fundamentally different from anything we know, and so you know, they're all like successful in one respect and unsuccessful in another. And if we ever do gain a true, deep understanding of the nature of the universe at it's lowest scale, we're going to discover why that is, Like, oh, it's this other weird thing. And sometimes it does look like a particle, and sometimes it does look like a field, and sometimes it does look like a string, and sometimes it does look like something that's none of those things. So I look forward to the day that we have a deeper understanding of the nature of the universe and we discover how all of these ideas fit together into that larger picture.
Yeah, and you might be right and wrong at the same time. It sounds like a pretty indefensible position.
I'll be quantum, right, all right.
Well, let's get into whether or not matter can be made out of not particles, and whether or not we know that any such matter exists. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're asking the question, Daniel, whether or not matter cannot be made out of particles. This is a really strange question to ask grammatically, I guess, can matter be made out of not particles? Or can matter not be made out of particles? Is a strange grammatical conundrum.
How we're going to answer the science question if we can't even get past the grammar question, right, Yeah.
Well we can just say we're right and wrong. It's both grammatical and ungrammatical.
We span the space of all possible answers. Yeah, Now, this is a really fun idea. I like to think about it as non particle matter or not particle matter. But there's actually a phrase for it now in the theoretical physics community. They call it unparticle matter M.
And how is that different than non particle matter?
I don't know. I think it's just fun to use the word on It sounds like the opposite, or like it's anti in another way, different from anti matter.
I see you sound hipper.
You know, when they make the science fiction movie about it, I think the focus groups are gonna think that's got like more of an edge to it.
It's like conscious uncoupling. It just sounds you know, more inspired or trendy.
Yeah, or it's just more mysterious. But it's a fun idea, and it's something people have been thinking about for like the last ten to fifteen years. Seriously, like, can we figure out a way to talk about matter so that it's not made out of particles.
I guess maybe a first question is what would make something qualify as matter in the first place. Is it that it has mass or that it feels gravity? What would be the specific definition there?
Boy, man, this is a deep episode. If we're going to talk about what matter even means, I think it needs to be some sort of localization of energy. And you know, I would say mass, because usually that implies having mass, But a photon, for example, is a particle. I don't know if you would actually call a photon to be part of matter, but it has energy, and you know, it's a localization of energy that moves through the universe. It's consistent, it's discrete, it transformed in ways that make sense. But here I think we're trying to talk about matter in the sense of things that have mass, because really this is motivated by not understanding where most of the mass of the universe is coming from, what it's made out of. So I think we should talk about, you know, stuff, things that have mass to them, that have substance, that have gravitational energy.
So I guess that would be a good definition. Is that it feels gravity or are you talking about like whether it's hard to move or to push it or both.
Yeah, both. I mean, I think we can accept Einstein's equivalence principle and suggest that inertia and gravitational energy are related. And so we're looking for how to build some stuff somebody that has mass to it that changes the shape of space around it, but it's somehow not made out of tiny little particles.
Like a blob. When you look at it closer, it doesn't resolve into little bits, like it's just stuff that's there, but it has mass exactly.
And the technical phrase for this is that it's scale invariant, and what that means is that as you zoom in, it never looks different, like you look at matter under the microscope. And if you imagine cranking up a microscope, you had some super powerful one, you could crank it up really powerfully. You would eventually see that the cookie or whatever it is that's under your microscope is not smooth, but it's made out of tiny little bits. You can actually see the shape of the atoms and the crystal lattice that form them. But non particle matter or unparticle matter or whatever this is, this blob would always look the same under your microscope. No matter how much you.
Zoomed in, it would always look kind of fuzzy. I guess, like a liquid.
Yeah, it would always look kind of smooth. If you like mathematics, you can think of this as related to fractals.
You know.
Fractals are these patterns which have structure to them. They're not totally smooth, but as you zoom in, you just see more and more of the same structure. It's not like you zoom in past a certain scale and then that's it. You found, like the base lego unit it's made out of As you zoom in, you just keep seeing more and more structure.
All right, So then what are some ideas for this? Like theoretically, what are some possibilities for having matter that's not made out of particles?
So in two thousand and seven there was this guy at Harvard, Howard Georgia is a famous particle physicist. He had an idea theoretically for how you could like build this thing out of weird fields. So you take fields which are like the things that fill space currently. You know, we have the electromagnetic field. We have fields for all the particles, the quarks, and the electrons. He said, what if we have it at a new field, but the energy in this field is sort of different, and that it doesn't come together to make a particle. It never sort of coalesces into these discrete units with fixed mass that you could treat as particles. So he wrote this paper and he called it unparticles, and it's sort of set the theoretical world on fire for a few years.
Really, what does that mean? He burned down the house. People freaked out, and also, was this far made out of particles?
Well, theoretical physics can be a little bit driven by fads. You know, somebody gets an idea and people are excited about it. So other people write papers and people like, ooh, that's exciting, and then they write papers and the whole community sort of like moves off in a new direction for a while because they think, ooh, somebody's cracked open a new idea we can build on and we can come up with something new, because you know, they're a little bit stuck, like particle physics has not figured out what the universe is made out of. We've been sort of going in circles a little bit for the last ten or twenty years. There are folks out there who think everything we're doing is wrong, we're barking at the wrong tree. And so anytime somebody comes up with something that seems really fresh, something novel, that's like creates a whole new area where you can play, like a new kind of toy to add to your mathematical toolkit. Then it's fun. And so people started writing papers and there were like hundreds of papers written about unparticles for a few years.
Hmm. Were they interesting or uninteresting?
They were pretty interesting. And they built on each other.
You know.
They had unparticles and they had unresonances and unmatter and unprotons. Basically they attacked an un onto everything and everybody got a paper out of it.
It was like the I mac and iPad of the nineties Factor Craze.
Exactly.
The eye particle.
All right, well, what's the basic idea. Is it like a field that can wiggle in any way, It doesn't have to wiggle in little clumps.
Yeah, exactly. And these are still quantum fields, and so they should still have discrete units of energy in them, and so you still have blobs of energy that move around in the field. But you can't call them particles because they don't have definite masses like all the particles were familiar with. We don't really know what a particle is. But one thing we do know is that particles all have the same mass. Like an electron here is an electron there. Every electron has exactly the same mass, and that's sort of like the identity of the electro. It's what makes the electron different, for example, or from the mwon, which is very closely related but has more mass. It's what makes the up and the charm and the top quarks different, is that they have different masses. And so for particles, they have a fixed mass. That's something everybody can agree on. These unparticles, they are little wiggles in some new field, but they don't have a definite mass. You can have one of any mass, and the mass of an individual one of these unparticles can change as it moves around.
And is that theoretically possible? Like does it work with the math? Can you make such a feel that has varying anything and still sort of fit or play with the other fields in your physics equation?
Yeah, And that's what they got so excited about, because how are George I sort of figured out the fundamental theoretical basis for this. He put together a field that exactly had those properties, that had either particles with varying mass or you can also think about it as like particles with all possible masses, like a spectrum of masses instead of having discrete masses like this number and that number have a whole different set of masses. And so yeah, he figured out like the fundamental theoretical mechanics of how to make that work, how to do the calculations, and think about like, well, can unparticles interact with particles? What does that look like? What does the force look like where it's emitted by a particle and then absorbed by an unparticle. So he sort of laid the groundwork and everybody else went off scurrying to follow up on it and build other ideas on top of it.
Everyone's like, wow, that's unbelievable. But you know, I guess it sort of almost feels like a more natural idea, Like when I think of a field or a field of errergy, it sort of makes sense that it can wiggle anyway at once, it can have any value. It's almost like the weird part is that regular quantum fields behave with particles? Ye, why would a feel that premieres the entire universe be constrained to only have, you know, bumps that look like electrons and all of them should look the same. Couldn't you have electrons of different masses?
Yeah?
Absolutely. I got two things to say to that. One is, I totally agree particles are a weird idea. And I imagine, you know, what was it like when democratists proposed that the universe was made out of Adams thousands of years ago? Did the Greeks hear that idea? And they think that's bonkers, man, that's ridiculous and just sort of discarded because it seems so weird and so counter to their experience. Right, And so you're right, particles are weird. But the second thing I have to say to that is that the universe is weird. Right. A lot of times we've discovered things in the universe that don't make sense to us, that don't seem natural. We shouldn't just be on the lookout for natural solutions to our questions, because the reason we're doing science is to have a rigorous way to figure out what the actual answers are, regardless of whether they're what we expected or even really know how to understand. So we've got to open our minds to all sorts of different kinds of ideas. It might be particles, it might be unparticles, it might be something totally different.
Are you saying the universe is unnatural unexpected on universe? That would be two in one word.
Exactly. That cancels out to just the verse. Yeah, we're dropping verses here, folks were freestyle and physics.
That's right. We are the eminem of physics here.
The DNJ And Yeah, so we had this new theoretical tool and nobody really understood, like, well, what does it mean and what would it be like? Can we figure out if these things are real? And so then it's sort of moved over to the experimental side of the question. People started trying to play with like, well, how would we find these things? What would they look like? Can we isolate them with experiments? And so that was a lot of fun to think about.
All right, well, let's get into this idea of un particle matter and whether or not it can even exist and whether we have even any evidence that it can or does exist. But first let's take another quick break.
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Terms and conditions apply. All right. We're talking about matter that is not made out of particles? Is that even possible? Could you have matter out there? Fields of energy that can take any former shape or any level of matterness and if it even exists, Daniel, does it even exist? We have any clues about whether it exists or how could we even look for matter that doesn't look like particles.
Yeah, we don't have a lot of clues that it does exist, except that we have a big unsolved mystery, right, And that's what a lot of our listeners were referring to in the questions on the street, and that's this question of dark matter. You know, we know that the matter we've been studying for hundreds of years is made out of particles, and it's very well explained in terms of particles. And so this particle picture of the universe has been sort of like transcendent. It's like taken over the way we think about physics and the universe and everything. But remember that it just describes the tiny little slice of the pie. And we've made this mistake many times in the history of science of overgeneralizing, of understanding one thing and then assuming that everything is the same way. I mean, even the original discovery of particles that happened. Remember JJ Thompson. He discovered then and he thought, oh, well, maybe this is the only particle. Maybe everything is just made out of electrons, and that seems ridiculous to us. Now we know there's lots of particles, and now I'll have to come together. But that was just an example of overgeneralizing. And it's the same over generalization to say, look, we have all these particles. They describe five percent of the universe. Maybe they describe everything. It just seems like a really sort of leveraged bet. And this other chunk of the universe is dark matter. We've tried to describe in terms of particles and figure out what that particle is, but so far we failed over and over and over and over again. We're well past the point where we thought we would figure out what the dark matter particle would be. So it's a good idea to think about other kind of matter that dark matter might be.
Mm.
Yeah, I guess there's a whole bunch of matter out there in the universe that doesn't seem to play with our kind of matter. So is that sort of a clue. Does the theory sort of suggest that maybe a reason that we haven't seen it with our particles is the fact that it's not made out of particles.
Yeah, exactly. That is definitely one explanation, and you know, we shouldn't poop on it too much. Like there is a theory of dark matter made out of particles, which still works. It makes sense and it's very well tested, but we haven't found that particle yet. And remember what we know about dark matter. We know that there's a lot of it, right, eighty five percent of the matter in the universe and twenty percent of all the energy in the universe is dark matter. So we know that it creates gravity, and it holds galaxies together, and it's shaped the whole structure and formation of the shape of the universe. We also know a lot about like its temperature. We know that it flows through the universe, but it's not moving really really fast, because that would change the whole structure of the universe if it flowed around and got really smooth. And we know that it sort of acts like this fluid. It's like a fluid with no pressure, with no viscosity, because we think it doesn't like bump into itself. So we have this picture which explains everything we see if dark matter was made out of a massive little particle, but we can't seem to find that particle. We keep doing experiments looking for that part, you know, experiments like waiting for dark matter to bump into a big, heavy, quiet blob of xenon underground, or creating dark matter and colliders, or waiting for dark matter to smash into itself and give off a tiny little flash of light. And we haven't ever seen any of those things. And all the theories we had about this dark matter particle, a lot of them predicted we would have seen it by now. So we're sort of trying to get more creative about the kind of particle it could be that explains all this stuff and all hangs together. But definitely an important idea to keep considering is that maybe it's not a particle at all.
Right, but maybe you know, just because we haven't seen it or interactive with it, doesn't mean that it's not made out of particles, right like it, Yeah, could be a particle. It's just a particle that doesn't like our kind of particle or that doesn't field all the other forces.
Absolutely, it's still very much could be a particle. It could just be a particle that feels no other forces other than gravity and so basically just ignores us. You know, we had this great question on the podcast last week or so, somebody said, what would you do if you had a box of dark matter? And I said, you know, I would shoot particles at it because I would want to see do those particles bounce back at all? And essentially that's a way of trying to like probe it, trying to like zoom in on what it is, because shooting tiny particles that something is sort of like using a microscope to study it. That's what the most powerful microscopes are anyway, they're like scanning electron microscopes. They shoot little beams of particles that's something to try to understand the shape of its surface based on how things bounce off of it. And that's how the original particles were discovered, right, Like, how did we figure out that matter had nuclei in it? Rutherford shot particles at something and saw that occasionally they bounced back. So that's how you sort of like zoom in on something and understand its nature. So we're trying to do that with dark matter. But we haven't sort of found anything that bounces back. It hasn't interacted with our particles yet. But yeah, it could still just be sort of a snobbish particle that ignores all of our particles.
That could be her a new theory, Daniel the snob particle.
Maybe it just doesn't want to interact because of the pandemic. You know, it's just following good social distancing.
Hmmm, socially responsible particle.
Yeah.
But the other explanation is that maybe it's not made out of particles. And the reason that you know, this imagined experiment where you're shooting a beam of particles at a blob of dark matter, the reason that you don't see anything is because it's made out of this field. Dark matter is made out of this field of unparticles, and so there aren't like these discrete units, these lego bricks which if you shoot particles at the right energy you sort of find the gaps between them, because in the unparticle field, there are no gaps between them. There's like an infinite number of kinds of unparticles in there, all with different masses and sort of like filling it up and to make a sort of a smooth, continuous shape that you can't probe using particles.
Wait, so how would dark matter being not made out of particles explain why we can't interact with it like, wouldn't there still be energy and mass there for our particles to bump into, or are you saying that it's kind of like it could be there, There could be energy in mass, but it's so kind of spread out and smooth that our particles don't really know what to do with it.
Yeah, it has to do with the other interactions that this stuff has. Because remember, while dark matter has energy in mass and so it feels gravity, that's basically something that's negligible at the particle level, Like the gravitational pull of dark matter on any particle is basically zero because particles have such small masses and gravity is so weak that we can't even understand like the gravitational effect on a single particle. And also, we don't even have a theory of gravity that works for particles. Our theory of gravity only works for sort of like larger objects. We have no quantum theory of gravity, so you can't really interact with dark matter on the particle level using gravity, which is the only way we know how to interact with dark matter. So all of these studies where we're trying to probe the nature of dark matter are assuming or hoping that there's some other kind of interaction, there's some new interaction between the particles we're shooting at the dark matter and the dark matter itself. And so if that's not true, if there's no interaction, then doesn't really matter if it's particles or unparticles or zoo particles or zim particles. You just can't probe it using particles if it doesn't interact with those particles at all.
So it's kind of two things. It could be an unparticle and it could also separately just be ignoring us. Yeah, there's almost like two problems there.
Yeah, exactly, And we sort of set aside the is it just ignoring us one because if that's the case, the whole field is hopeless. Like if dark matter is something new particle or un that just has no interactions with us other than gravity, it we'll never really figure out what it's made out of because gravity is just so weak, it's so difficult to use as an instrumental tool to understand what dark matter is made out of. That this question of like what dark matter is made out of it is basically hopeless. So we sort of set that aside because it's impossible, and we say let's assume dark matter has some kind of way to interact with us, and let's try to look for that way to interact and then use that to figure out is made out of this kind of particle or that kind of particle or an unparticle.
Well, I feel like maybe you're sort of saying that maybe there's stuff out there that could just be like pure energy almost right, because energy also sort of has mass, right, energy is mass? Energy does bend space like mass does. And are you saying that maybe this unparticle matter is basically just like a buzz of energy or localized energy.
Yeah, exactly, It's more smooth and continuous than localized. If you like to think about particles, you can imagine as made out of lots of particles, all of different sizes, and so that no matter how you zoom in, it always sort of looks the same. But you can't really like break off a piece and say here, I have one of them, right, The mass of the particles themselves sort of always changing, and so yeah, it could be that dark matter is made out of this new, weird kind of stuff that can't be broken off into these separate lego pieces, but instead is made out of these like weird kinds of bits of stuff that are constantly changing what their mass is?
Wow, it's undecided.
It's difficult to grapple with. And I can't tell if that's because we spend so much time thinking about the universe as made of particles that it's hard to think about something made of anything different, or if it's just because it's difficult to think about mathematically cool.
Well, all right, well, so where is the field right now? Like you said, it was popular back in the early two thousands, and there was a lot of buzz and a lot of people were blown away. But where is it now? Do we have any progress or results?
I guess you could say we have some unresults. People have figured out how unparticles could be made in colliders. So you smash two protons together and if those protons have some interaction with this unparticle field, then it could deposit some of that energy into that field. And you know, particle colliders were used to making new particles. In this case, we'd be depositing the energy into the unparticle field. Make this like you know, localized blob of stuff which you can't call a particle, but you might still sort of get a clue that it exists in our detector in the same way that you can see invisible stuff in our detector. Because it bounces off of visible stuff. You might like create some particles and some unparticles and they shoot off in opposite directions, and by seeing the particles you can infer by conservation of momentum that the unparticles must have been there. So if people figured out a way that this could be produced in colliders, and you might be able to get a clue that it had happened, even if you can't see the unparticles directly, and we looked for them and we didn't see them. So so far there's no experimental evidence that unparticles are a thing or that they exist at all. And theoretically, the fields sort of moved on. There was this like big flurry of papers in two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, and then everybody sort of got tired of the idea and they moved on to some new idea, and there haven't really been a lot of papers about it recently.
I guess you would expect to see it in a collider, like if you collide to particles and some energy just kind of magically disappear, right, or like, yeah, you know if energy disappeared in varying quantities, because I think right now, when you smash particles, you always get kind of these discrete or you can account for everything, and everything seems to fall into these neat boxes. But if you found that, you know, energy sort of disappeared at weird grades, then you might be like, oh, maybe there is a field out there that can absorb these varying energies.
Yeah, that's exactly right, And so we're looking for something out there which is invisible, right, but absorbs our energy. So the energy, as you say, seems to disappear, and it would operate differently from other fields that we know about their invisible, like neutrinos or other things where we know energy can disappear into because as you say, those are particles and so they're discrete in a certain way, and sort of the statistical spectrum of what these results would look like is different for unparticles and for neutrinos. Just for that reason.
All right, Well, it sounds like we have no evidence for unparticle matter, but we can completely rule it out yet.
Right, that's right, we can't completely rule it out, and I think theoretically it's a great exercise. It's the kind of thing we should be doing, stretching our minds and making sure that we're not too focused on one sort of category of ideas. It could be that we look back on physics in one hundred years and say, man, those guys spend a lot of time going down, you know, a wild goose chase and looking for the wrong thing before somebody sort of pulled their head out of the sand and said, hold on a second, what about this other idea we haven't thought about in a couple hundred years. Has anybody really worked on that?
Yeah, but that's kind of how science works, right, Like you have to, you know, follow your gut for a while, sometimes in one direction, before you either find out that it's a dead end or that you were onto the right thing.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And that's why, sort of at the highest level, science needs to have diversity of ideas. You know, we need people following the hottest, sexiest, best idea we have so far, but we also need people nurturing crazy ideas, stuff of the fringe, stuff which might eventually become something mainstream and really useful, but today is sort of like, ah, I don't know what did that really work? And so that's why it's important to sort of have breadth in our ideas as well as depth of exploration.
Yeah, well, my money's still on socks, Daniel, although I have a new theory on socks or non sock socks.
Yeah, next time I tell my kids to put socks on, there going to say, I'm already wearing unsocks. What do you need?
Yeah, there you go. It's the original sock the on sock. All right. Well, that was pretty interesting and it sort of makes you question the nature of matter and existence itself, you know, like what we think of as things we know and what we know what they're made out of, could not be true for maybe the rest of the universe. We are still just in a small corner of it.
Yeah, And that's the exciting thing about exploring the universe is the surprises is discovering the universe works differently from the way you expected that there is a whole new way of thinking about the very nature of matter and how the universe is put together. That's in our future. Maybe it's five years from now, maybe it's fifty years from now, but eventually we we'll figure this out and we'll have a new way of thinking about our place in the universe.
Yeah, it's like meeting people who don't wear socks. You're like, what, how's that even possible? Doesn't your shoes smell after a while?
Who know?
Yeah, we're in southern California, sandal wearing people. We don't even buy socks.
You go, all right, well, thanks for joining us. We hope you enjoyed that. See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases, Many farms use anaerobic 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.
There are children, friends and families walking, riding on passing the roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to get home safely. Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because they're people too. Go safely, California from the California Office of Traffic Safety and Caltrans.
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