Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseListener Questions 17: hamsters, black holes and higgs fields!
Daniel and Jorge dip the french fries of knowledge into the mysterious condiments of the Universe and answer questions from listeners like you!
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VGW group fordware prohibited by Law eighteen plus. Terms and conditions apply. Hey Daniel, I've been thinking about black holes.
Watch out, that's a real rabbit hole.
Yeah, I'm definitely sucked in. But here's my question. Can you make a black hole? Out of anything, like even rabbits.
Hm, theoretically you can, but that's a lot of rabbits.
But you don't actually need a lot of rabbits, right, Like, you can just take a few rabbits and squeeze them together a lot, right, as.
Long as they sign a release of liability, I suppose anything as possible.
Well, I got their pawprints. I think that counts right. But I guess my bigger question is, does that mean you can make a black hole out of anything?
Yeah?
I think so, even dark matter?
Yeah, anything with energy?
How about a black hole out of photons?
Absolutely? And you know the truth is, I'd rather you sacrifice photons than rabbits.
What are their light rabbits? I am Hoorhem, a cartoonist and the creator of PHV comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor a UC Irvine. And I'm at least forty seven rabbits.
You weigh forty seven rabbits, or you own forty seven rabbits, or you are forty seven rabbits in the costume of a human.
I think philosophically, I'm somewhat equivalent to forty seven rabbits.
An intelligence or ability to eat carroc.
Yeah, you know, you link two rabbit brains together, you get something which is much smarter than just two rabbits. So now you have forty seven rabbits. It's like rabbits to the forty seventh power.
Oh my goodness, that is one massive bunny brain. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we apply our human brains and our bunny brains and our hamster brains to the deepest and biggest questions of the universe. We don't hold back. We tacklesquestions like how did the universe get here? And where is it going? What's it made out of? And how does it all work? Because we think the universe is comprehensible. We don't know why, but human brains have somehow managed to chisel into the mysteries of the universe and gain little shards of understanding. And our goal on this podcast is to take those and explain all of them to you, as well as the deepest, biggest open questions that remain for humans and buddies to unravel.
Yeah, because it is a pretty mysterious universe full of questions and things that we have yet to discover. From what is most of the universe made out of? To what is the fundamental unit of space and time and matter in this cosmos?
Or is there even a fundamental unit of space and time in this cosmos? Or is it just rabbits all the way down? One of my favorite things about asking questions of the universe is that anybody can do it. You look around you in this weird, wild, crazy, violent, beautiful universe, and so many things are puzzles, So many things beg you to ask questions about them.
Yeah, Daniel, are we allowed also hair brained questions? There's in rabbits? Sorry, I just had to get that in because I realized after we had our earlier exchange that that was such a litw hanging fruit for a pun and a joke.
I know, I can't believe you didn't hop up to that joke earlier.
I'll keep my ears out for funnier jokes. But yeah, it is an interesting universe, full of questions, and full of inquisitive minds with questions about the universe. Because I think we all look out there into the cosmos, into the night sky, and we look at ourselves and we got to wonder, like, what's going on? How does it all work? What's it all made out of?
That's right, and we are not the only ones actually thinking about the overlap between cosmic questions and small furry creatures. Last night I got a fun question over email from a listener, Evan Cleeve, who wanted to know something deep and important about the universe or really?
What was the question?
Well? I had to read it to you word for word, because otherwise you won't believe it. It says, Hello, Daniel, I have a very serious and important question. How many hamsters floating in space would it take to have enough mass to come together gravitationally to achieve nuclear fusion and become a star? The world needs to know.
Well, that's the kind of world I want to live in, where everybody needs to know how many hamsters you need to make gazze a hamster sun? Is that what you would call it? A hamster star?
A hamstar, a ham star? Exactly? Yes. But I swear that we had written this cold open about rabbits and black holes before we got this important question from Evan about hamsters and stars, and it just goes to show you how there's some sort of connection between rodents and massive space objects. Science needs to probe this a little more deeply.
I think, yeah, who knows how many flying hamsters that there are out there in space? Right? Like, we literally don't know. There could be a lot that's true beyond the observable universe. It could be just all hamsters to the edge of the universe.
Most of the universe could be hamsters.
You're saying, yeah, we could be living in a hamstar. We don't know.
I think we're all hamstars.
Really, this is a pretty hammy podcast for sure. Do you have an answer? Did you calculate how many hamsters you need to achieve fusion or is that even possible? Can you make a star out of hamsters?
Oh? I have an answer, And you know, given the urgency and clear importance of this question, I cleared my afternoon and shared an emergency task force just to address this question. I pulled in international experts of planetary scientists, fusion professors, hamster owners, you know, and we met for a entire afternoon, did some calculations, and you know, essentially to make a star that achieves fusion, all you really need is enough stuff. You get enough mass together and gravity will pull it together and create the conditions you need for fusion. And the minimum threshold there is about eighty times the mass of Jupiter, which is about one point six times ten to to twenty ninth kilograms, So it's a big mass.
Wow, I'm glad that was a productive afternoon and you didn't just sit there spinning your reels in a hamster wheel.
No.
I didn't just weasel out of this question. I really took it seriously.
Wait, you're saying that if I had an eighty jupiter's worth of hamsters, it would become a sun.
It would become a sun. Now, technically that calculation is done assuming they have eighty jupiter's worth of hydrogen, and you know, hamsters are made of heavier elements. There's carbon in there this other stuff, but mostly the same calculations will work.
Really you can, like, if you had, you know, eighty jupiter's worth of carbon, it would turn into a star. That's not necessarily the same, is it.
It's not exactly the same, but approximately as long as it's lighter than iron, then gravity can do its thing and compress it. It won't burn for nearly as long as a massive hydrogen will but carbon and oxygen will still fuse, and you'll get further up the periodic table.
I see you need gassy hamsters, not iron hamsters.
That's right.
You can't have Tony Stark hamsters. That wouldn't work.
Yeah, hamster iron man would be a different answer.
So you need a about eighty jupiter's worth of hamsters to ignite a hamster.
That's right. And since hamsters are about thirty grams each, averaging over the various kinds of hamsters, that means it requires about five times ten to the thirty hamsters. That's five point three million YadA hamsters.
M that's a lot. You know, you'd be counting them and then you'd be like, YadA, YadA, YadA.
It's a YadA hamsters for sure.
All right. Well, I guess that's good that there aren't wat hamsters on Earth, because then we'd be toast.
Or the hamsters would literally be on five.
Well, those are the kinds of questions you get on the internet, and Daniel, you get those a lot, right, and you always answer them.
That's right. We answer every question you send us, the serious ones, the deep ones, the silly ones. We write all our listeners back because we think that science is just part of being human and we want everyone to get to participate. So if you have a question about the nature of the universe or how many rabbits it takes to form a black hole, please write to us two questions at Dani Andorge dot com.
Yeah, and Daniel always ask us this emails, but sometimes we answer those questions here on the podcast live in front of thousands and thousands of people.
Yeah.
Sometimes people ask a question and I think, ooh, I bet a lot of folks would have that question, let's dig into it on the podcast, or it just sounds like a lot of fun, and so we select some subset of those questions to be explored right here on the podcast.
Yeah, So today we're going to go full hamster on three pretty interesting questions we got over the internet about electrons and when they radiate light, about the curvature of space and equals mc square, and also about the Higgs field and how long has it been around?
That's right, And these are just questions from people being curious, people trying to fit together their pieces of understanding into a larger mosaic. So they can have in their minds the entire universe, and when two pieces don't quite fit together or don't give you that satisfying click, that's when you're doing physics, when you're applying your knowledge and trying to understand the whole universe at one. So if you get stuck in that situation, please write to us so to do.
On the podcast, we'll be answering listener questions number seventeen. So we've done seventeen of these listener questions podcast, Daniel, that's about something like fifty something listener questions we've answered live.
Yeah, that's right exactly. And I'm really glad that the listeners get to hear their questions get answered, and they get to participate in the science process because this right here, this is science happening.
Wo I feel like you just demoted science. Like if this counts as science.
It's a big tent, man, it's a big, big tent.
We're way in the outskirts of the tent, like halfway in getting wet on one side of our body.
I'm not about science gateskeeping man. Science is for everyone.
All right, Well, let's crash the gates and let's go full science. Here and well, the first question we'll tackle here is from Tim, who has a question about electron radiation.
Hello, Daniel and Joyey love the podcast.
You're doing great work.
While discussing a listener question, you mentioned that electrons moving up and down antenna generate photons. That sent me down a Google rabbit hole where I found that synchotrons use electrons going around in a circle to generate X rays.
Similar concept, but it got me.
Thinking why do electrons bound to atoms going around in a circle not produce photons as well? Can't wait to hear the answer and look forward to hearing from you.
Keep up the good work. All right, thank you for that awesome question. I'm not quite sure I understand the question though, Daniel.
The question is about when electrons give off light, and we did a fun episode with listener questions where we talk about essentially how electrons make photons. Like somebody asked how you get an electron to shoot off a photon? What makes that happen? And when answering that question, we explained that the way you get an electron to radiate is essentially you accelerated, you wiggle it like the picture I have in my mind is that the electron is surrounded by an electric field. An electron attracks positrons and it repels other electrons, and it does so using its electric field, So its electric field sort of fills space around it. What happens when you wiggle that electron is that the electric field also wiggles. It's like a ripple in that electric field. It doesn't change instantaneously, and so that's what we call a photon. So the answer we gave there was that to generate a photon, to get an electron to radiate a photon, to shoot off a little piece of light, all you have to do is accelerat it. But his question is, what about electrons in atoms? Aren't they moving in a circle, which is acceleration, So why aren't those electrons just shooting off photons all the time?
Right, Okay, I think I got it. So you're saying electrons generally, if you wiggle them, if you accelerate them, they give off light. And then is that just electrons or anything that you know electromagnetic?
Anything that has electric charge will give off a photon if you accelerated, So a muon or any other particle that has electric charge, if it accelerates, it will give off a photon because its acceleration changes the electromagnetic field and the information moving through that field. That's what a photon.
Is, man, Right, And then it loses some energy or is it always just giving off photons in every direction forever?
No, it loses some energy exactly. That's how an electron essentially breaks. Right. An electron changes direction by like pushing off a photon in the other direction. Like, how can an electron turn, Well, the only way for it to like change its trajectory is the same way you would in space, which is throwing something out the back. So an electron turns in space changes direction, which is essentially acceleration by tossing a photon away. So, for example, if you want electrons to move in a circle the way we have in some accelerators like signotrons, for that to happen, electrons have to constantly be radiating off photons to push them in the circle.
Mmm.
And you were saying, that's kind of how antennas work. Electrons wiggling inside of an antenna, and that gives off the photons and the electrical signal.
Yeah, in both directions, you can generate photons using electrons by taking them and using current from your signal to wiggle the electrons, and that generates photons. And that's exactly what an antenna is. That's how, for example, those tall towers from radio stations generate radio waves as they have like electrons moving up and down those antennas, and the frequency of the electrons motion is the frequency of the photon that they generate. It's very simple and direct connection between the motion of the electron, the motion of the electric field that it's connected to, and the photon, which is just wiggling of that electromagnetic field.
M all right, So I guess the question is that if a wiggling electron gives off a photon, then wouldn't electrons wiggling around an atom also be giving of photons all the time?
Yes, And it's actually a really deep and important question about how atoms work and something that people struggled with for decades in the early part of the century. Because remember that the first picture of atoms, and the one that Tim describes, is sort of of electrons moving around the nucleus like in a little orbit. The sort of Neils Bore picture of the atom was that it was sort of like a little planetary system. You have these electrons whizzing around like little classical objects, like tiny little balls, moving around in a circle around the nucleus. And if that were true, if electrons actually were moving in those little circles around a nucleus, they should be radiating, they should be losing energy, they should be giving off photons, and if they would, then they should just fall right into the nucleus and they should collapse. So if you do the calculation, it suggests that like the hydrogen atom should only last for like ten to the negative twelve seconds. But of course we see that hydrogen is stable. Electrons can hang out in these atoms and they don't collapse and ten to the negative twelve seconds. So this was a big puzzle in physics, not just for tim but for like the brightest minds in physics for many years.
Right, because that's the classical view of the atom. Right. It's like you imagine or you draw a little dot, and then you draw some electron dots like whizzing around in like elliptical orbits around the nucleus of the atom, right, And so if that picture is true, then you're saying that that would not be sustainable because you know, the electrons are moving in a circle, which means they're accelerating and decelerating, and that means that they should be giving of light all the time exactly.
And this is just what I was talking about earlier. You like take your understanding of something and you apply the rules to it. You say, well, if this picture is true, then why doesn't this happen, or why doesn't that happen? Right? That's the core of doing physics, of doing science, of trying to link together all of your understanding and make sure that it all like fits together in a way that makes sense, because you shouldn't have different rules for different situations. And so that's the fundamental question that Tim is asking is why doesn't the electron essentially collapse into the nucleus instantaneously?
M All right, So then what's really going on here? Why don't the electrons moving around the nucleus of the them give up?
Like The reason is that they are not really little classical objects. They are not really tiny little balls in orbits that are moving with circular motion the way that we imagine them in that picture of the atom. They are fundamentally very very different and strange objects. They are quantum mechanical objects that don't have a path. An electron is not like a tiny little object that really is moving along some path in space and time. We just don't know exactly what it is. It doesn't have a path, it doesn't have a well defined location as a function of time. It's a quantum object. It's fundamentally very different, right.
I think you're saying that the electron orbiting around the nucleus of the atom is not really orbiting, right, Like the center of mass or the center of the electron is not really like going in a circle. It's more like kind of stationary, right, Or it just has sort of a mathematical equivalent of orbiting.
Yeah, it's not even really mathematically equivalent to orbiting. It's like not really orbiting at all. The way to think about it is not as a tiny little grain of matter in motion around the nucleus. It's something really totally different. It's a quantum object. What you should think about is that the electron is a tiny little packet of energy, you know, just the same way the photon is a little packet of energy in the electromagnetic field. The electron is a little packet of energy in the electron field. So what you should think about it instead is like a little blob of stuff. And as you said, it's in a stationary state. It's like in a stable configuration. It's like if you've trapped this little thing in a container. It's just hanging out in there. It's not actually in motion. So the best way to think about this is a little pack of energy sort of in its lowest possible state. Mmm.
So then I guess why do we always use the word orbiting and like, you know, when we talk about electrons and then the end we always say, you know, the electron is orbiting? Is it because it's sort of like an analogy, you know, like an orbit is kind of like a stable energy level.
Yeah. I think we probably shouldn't use the word orbit because it's very leading, but I think it's historical. It shows the sort of the development of our thinking. We started from a classical idea and we've been gradually moving more and more towards these quantum ideas. So now we talk about you know, orbitals which represent like energy densities. Still that is sort of suggestive because you're suggesting the electron has a location it just has like a probability to be here and probability to be there, when really the location of the electron and its motion is not well defined until something actually interacts with the electron. And so often these classical analogies are easier to understand, but they're often misleading as well.
All right, well, then it sounds like the answer to the question is that electrons and atoms don't radiate photons because they're not really accelerating, right, They're not really moving, and so nothing would sort of prompt them to shoot off a photon.
That's right, And sometimes they do shoot off a photon. Remember that there are electrons in like higher energy states. There's a ladder of states there, and if you're in a higher energy state, then you can actually move down to a lower energy date. And the way you do that is you shoot off a photon. So, for example, anytime you see a gas that's like glowing, you know that's gas that's been energized. The electrons have extra energy and they give off photons and go down to a lower energy But most items the electrons are at their lowest energy level. And one really interesting thing about quantum objects like an electron is that they have a minimum energy level. Like the electron can't go into the nucleus. It can't like settle down into a zero energy state, because there's a minimum energy to every quantum field. This is called the quantum zero point energy. So the electron can't collapse into the nucleus because it's already at the lowest possible energy level.
I see. All right, So then electrons and atoms can radiate photons, but it's not because of the wiggling or the acceleration. It's because they jump from one energy state to another. Yeah, all right, Well, hopefully that answers Tim's question, and so let's get into our two other questions for the episodes, one about the curvature space and equals SIMC squared and the other one about the Higgs field and or not we can live without it. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we are answering listener questions today, and our next question comes from Pete, who has a question about energy and the curvature of space.
Hi, Daniel Jorge, my name is Pete. I have a question about spacetime curvature according to general relativevity. We know space curves and the presence of matter or energy density, But can we detect the curvature of space or ripples in space time from just energy density alone and not through the effects of matter like black holes and neutron stars and stuff. Given that E equals mc squared, you would think that energy has tremendously more influence throughout the universe than just matter. But can we detect gravity waves from things like supernova or quasars? Thanks very much, I love your podcast.
Awesome, Thank you, Pete. Daniel. I feel like I need an episode that explains these questions much less trying to answer. I feel like I need a listener questions Questions episode about this one. You picked some pretty tough ones today. Did you do that on purpose?
Yep, I thought you needed a challenge. No, I just thought these were fun. Some of these made me go off and do some research, which is always something I enjoyed doing. One of my favorite things about this podcast is that it gives me an excuse to go off and read about areas of physics I've always been interested in but never had time to dig into.
All right, well, let me see if I can interpret this question. So I think Pete is saying that we know that gravity and mass bend space and curve space, right, and we also know that energy does that too. So I think his question is can we detect this bending of space from just energy, because there should be a lot of energy in the universe, especially if equals mc squared, because that means that the energy is much more powerful than matter.
Yeah, exactly, I think that's the question because general relativity doesn't just say that mass bends space. Mass does bend space, but mass is just an example of the category of stuff that can bend space, which is anything essentially with energy density. And it's actually for those general relativity nerds out there a little bit more complicated, there's a stress energy tensor, so it's also dependent on like how that stuff is arranged, but it's close enough to say that anything with energy can change the shape of space, not just matter. Matter as an example of energy. So I think his question is why don't we see space being bent by energy? Because does equals mc squared suggests that energy should be super powerful in.
The universe, right, Meaning like if I see a neutron star giving off a lot of light, do I see space bending because of all that light coming out of it?
And I think it's useful to sort of dig into the second part of this question first, like this question about E equals mc squared and what that means. It's certainly true that mass contains a lot of energy. Right equals mc squared means that mass is very dense with energy because the C squared is a big number. Right. C is the speed of light, which is three million meters per second. So you take a little bit of mass and you multiply by a big number squared to get how much energy is stored inside that mass. And we know that, for example, because you can make like a huge bomb with a tiny little bit of fuel. By getting that energy out of mass, that's how nuclear weapons work. Right. So we know that mass is very very dense with energy.
Right, And I know from our conversations that basically you can also say that mass is just energy, right, Or in a way, mass is just like a measure of energy. Yeah, So it's all sort of the same thing anyways, exactly.
That's the point I want to make, is that what is that mass anyway, It's really just the energy inside the object. Like most of your mass doesn't come from the stuff that makes you up, the little quarks and the electrons. It comes from the energy of those objects being held together. So your mass, how much your bending space is actually just from your internal energy, Like the bonds between your objects is what gives you mass and helps you bend space. So even if you're just looking at a neutron star or a black hole, the reason it has mass is because it contains a lot of energy. So basically, every time you're seeing space bend, it's just because of energy.
Right.
Well, I think most of my mass comes from French fries, but there's a different topic altogether.
I don't think this is a term in Einstein's equation for French fries, but maybe you should have added one.
Well, he was German, so I think he's born to sausages or something.
What is the French fry density of the verse anyway, another deep question of physics we can't answer.
How many French fries do you need to make a star?
I don't know your star. How many French fries have you eaten?
Well, that's probably more than the number of hamsters.
In the universe, more than the number of hamsters you've eaten.
I hope somethings they eaten with ham then we get a black hole. But I think what you're saying is that mass is energy, and so you know energy is causing the bending of space out there. But I think maybe Pete's question is more like, can we see the bending of space just from energy that's not associated with mass?
Right?
Because there is energy that's not related to mass too, right.
Yeah, there is absolutely. Like you take a photon, A photon is just energy. It has no mass, right, So lots of radiation can be massless, like gravitational waves are also a form of radiation. They have no mass, but there's a lot of energy there and so I think his question really is like, can you just take photons or gravitational waves massless energy and use that to bend space?
Well?
Oh wait, so I thought a gravitational wave was a bending of space. Are you saying that the bending of space can cost the bending of space?
Yeah? Absolutely. That's the crazy thing about gravity that's sort of nonlinear that way, right, sort of keys off of itself, and that's one of the things that makes it so difficult to develop a quantum theory of gravity, Like gravitons would interact with other gravitons, and you know the way that like photons don't, right, photons don't interact with other photons. That's one reason why electromagnetism is easier to calculate and think about than other theories like the strong force where gluons interact with other gluons, or gravity where things get nonlinear for similar reasons.
M all right, well then Pete's question, I think is can we detect the bending of space from just photons and or all that energy flying around the universe or is that somehow in a different category of space bending.
Yeah.
I think there's two different answers here. One is like, is it possible. Could you do this? And the other is like, why don't we see it more happening in the universe today? And to answer the first one, we think that you could in principle, if you took enough lasers that were powerful enough, and you focused them on a single point so you overlapped huge number of photons in a tiny little space, then you would create a black hole.
Mmmmm wait wait, if you shoot enough photons into one space, you might create a black hole. That sounds crazy, right, Nobody would ever try to do that, would they?
Supervillains out there take note in your layers underneath volcanoes. We are giving the prescription today for how to create a black hole. At the Large Hadron Collider, we shoot protons together at very high energy. The idea is the same. If you have enough energy in those collisions, you might have enough energy density to create a miniature black hole. Same idea with photons, just different kind of particle. If you build enough big lasers and overlap their beams in one tight little spot, you could create a black hole. Now people have done the calculation, and you'd need to have like a single laser pulse have the same amount of energy that the sun produces in a tenth of a second. So we're not talking about like the kind of lasers that humans can build currently. We're talking about like enormous alien terra scale projects lasers to build a black hole.
Oh wow, Well, first of all, I feel like you just admitted to being a supervillain, Daniel.
No, no, no, I'm a consultant for supervillain. Isn't that what all these listener questions are really about.
You're just a betting the villains, that's right.
For money, I'm just a scientist answering hypothetical questions about how to build a doomsday device, that's all.
That's right. You're just asking for a friend, a supervillain.
Friend, while stroking a cat in their lap.
All right, So it is possible to bend space with just energy, with just photons, and you can even make a black hole if you overlap enough photons in one spot. Now, the other part of Pete's question was why don't we see more of that in the universe, because like, there's a lot of light in the universe, there's a lot of you know, radiation being emitted and seeing everywhere. Do we see a general bending of space from that energy?
So the answer is that radiation does contribute to the overall gen mineral bending of space. Like when we measure the curvature of the whole universe, we measure how much energy density there is, like per volume, and that affects the whole bending of space. And part of that budget is radiation is like includes the photons and the gravitational waves and all the other kinds of radiation that are in every unit of space. So the answer is, yes, that happens, and we can measure it. We can measure the radiation component of the universe, and we know that it does contribute to the bending of space. But there isn't very much radiation in the universe. Like if you look at the pie chart of the energy budget for the universe per unit of space, it's mostly not radiation. Most of the energy in the universe is dark energy. Some other fraction of the energy in the universe is matter. Very very tiny sliver of the energy of the universe is in the form of radiation. So it's there, it contributes, we can measure it, but there's just not very much radiation in the universe.
Now, m I see, So you're talking about like a specific type of energy, which is like light or radiation. You're saying, that's a pretty small percentage of the matter and energy, right, Yeah, except the non dark energy stuff in the universe.
Yeah, exactly, Well, you have to include the dark energy. Dark energy also contributes to the overall curvature of the universe. And you know that's super interesting, Like we have just about as much energy per unit volume as you needed the universe to keep the universe to be flat, so that the overall curvature is basically zero. That's something we don't even really understand very well. All the energy adds up to like exactly the right number to make the universe have like flat curvature, which is weird. But photons and gravitational waves and other kinds of radiation are a tiny little sliver of that. But the interesting thing is that that didn't used to be the case. There was a time in the history of the universe when radiation dominated the energy budget.
Mmm, right at the beginning of the universe, right.
That's right, Very early on, the universe was like crazy lousy with photons, Like photons were everywhere. It was mostly photons. They were bouncing around, they were being created. The place was hot and dense. So the first like fifty thousand years of the universe we think was radiation dominated. Then of course things cooled down, and when things cool down, that radiation turns into matter and then doesn't oscillate back into radiation. So for example, a photon whizzing around becomes an electron and a positron, and maybe those guys go off in opposite directions and don't recombine to make an electron. And because the universe is cooled and more dilute, there aren't like other particles for them to annihilate into, so instead of matter and antimatter annihilating each other, they just sort of like go their own ways. And then we have the universe being matter dominated for like ten billion years. So the universe was radiation dominated, but only for a very short while in the early universe, right.
I think you're saying that right now, like where we are now in the history of the universe, the universe is too cool or not bright enough to really see the effects of like right energy space bending.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
But there is dark energy, but that's kind of a different kind of energy. Like we don't love dark energy in with all of the other types of energy. Yeah, exactly, even though it has the word energy in the name.
Well, it is a kind of energy, but it's not a kind of radiation or a kind of matter as far as we know. So if you have those categories, dark energy is most of the energy in the universe. It's like seventy percent. The rest of it is matter and radiation. But of the matter and radiation portion, most of that is matter. So, yeah, there is radiation in the universe, but it's a tiny sliver. And the history I think is super fascinating. In the first fifty thousand years it was all radiation, then the next ten billion years was matter dominated, and the last four billion years or so have been dark energy dominated. So we seem like these different phases of time where different components are dominating the energy budget of the.
Universe until we expand our serverable universe and then it's hamster dominated universe.
Right, Hamsters belong in the matter of category, the radish category, or are they their own kind of energy? All of the above. It's a hamster powered universe.
Or none of the above. It's right, We're all just a giant wheel spinning because of the.
Hamster's feels like it sometimes.
All right, well, I think that answer is Pete's question, can we detake the curvature of space from just energy? And the answer is yes, But right now it's pretty faint, although it used to be much more significant. So let's get into our last question of the episode. This one's about the Higgs field and whether or not we can live without it. So let's get into that, But first let's take another quick break.
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All right, we're answering listener questions and we're at our last question. Of the episode. This one is from alex and Ward from Belgium, who are a father and son question asking.
Team Yeah, or maybe they're a hamster and rabbit, but who knows.
Talking hamster and rabbit. Do you think they're eating French fries, Daniel or Belgium fries? What do they call them in Belgium?
I think they call them palm freed. And if they're eating them, they're probably eating them with.
Mayonnaise, which is awesome. I am definitely in the mayo with fries camp. What about you?
Oh my god, are you serious? Wow, we're gonna have to reevalue it his entire friendship.
Yeah, I love it, And if that's the end of our friendship, then I'll stand by that. Lying on the sand. It's delicious.
No, Mayo is delicious on basically everything. I like mixing them together. Actually, at a little catch.
Up, I think you're a magic thought.
That's right. I mix the light and the dark sides of the force.
The matter and the anti matter of condiment. All right, Well, alex and we have a question about the Higgs field.
Hi, Daniel, M Jorge, you're Alexander and what's two huge fans from Belgium we love your book and podcasts. Alexander, who is twelve years old, read in a science magazine that the Higgs Field was created sometime after the Big Bank, and he asked me the following question about that.
If the universe started expanding at the Big Bank, and the Higgs Field was created after the Big Bank, and the information cannot go faster than the speed of light, and then expansion of space goes faster than light, then shouldn't there be a place in the universe where there's no Higgs Field even today?
A really hard question and I really have no idea. Maybe you can help, thank you.
Or it is a pretty tricky question, and I'm glad we're here to answer father's questions. Yeah, should we tackle purity next?
And that's right, we are the backup parents online.
And the Birds and the Bees and the Hamsters.
I think that's a different podcast, though, we should you stick to our specialty.
Yeah, you should go listen to Creature Feature for that one. All right. Well, the question I think here is I'm trying to wrap my head around it because it's a little tricky. I think I think he's saying that if the Higgs Field was created after the Big Bang, shouldn't there be a part of the universe with no Higgs field? Because I think he's thinking that maybe there was a big emptiness, or there was larger universe, and somewhere in the middle there was a big bang which started the creation of the Higgs field, and so shouldn't there be parts of the universe without a Higgs field? Do you think that's what's going on in his head.
Yeah, I think that's the question. And so there's a bunch of interesting stuff there, like this idea that the Higgs field is created after the Big Bang and where it was created and then how it spreads out through the universe. Has a bunch of fun ideas there to disentangle.
Hmmm, all right, well let's recap really quickly. What is the Higgs field in the first place.
Yeah, So, the Higgs field is this thing we discovered about ten years ago. We suspected it existed for like fifty years, but only found confirmation at the Particle collider in twenty twelve. And it's a field that we think fills the whole universe and interacts with particles in a way that gives them mass. So the reason, for example, an electron doesn't have zero mass, is that it flies to the universe and interacts with the Higgs field, which changes the way it moves so that it looks like it has some inertial mass. It means that it takes a force to push the electron to speed it up, or also forced to slow it down. So the Higgs field affects how particles move in a way that gives them mass.
Cool, and we knew about it for a long time, but we discovered that recently. So that's the Higgs field. But what does it mean that it was created after the Big Bang? Like it wasn't always there, or was it there but not active.
This is actually a really interesting and deep question that goes to like how we think about our physics. We are trying to find the deepest rules of the universe. We think that maybe, as you were saying before, there are like fundamental rules to the universe, like the equations that govern everything. Now we don't think we have found those equations. We have a standard model of particle physics that works really really well, but we don't think that the equations we have are like the ones that are really fundamentally true. We think the equations we have sort of work for the conditions that we have studied, and we don't think that they're like the deep and true equations. So what that means is that the laws we're talking about, including like the existence of the Higgs field, are really just like effective laws. It's sort of like if you are living in ice and you've been studying the way ice works, the crystal structure of it, and how it moves and how energy moves through it. The laws of how the ice works are not like fundamental to the universe. They're just descriptions of how the ice works, the physics of that ice. And so in the same way we suspect that the universe used to be hotter, used to be denser, and so it's effectively different laws of physics were at play. So when we say the Higgs field was created, what we really mean is that the universe cooled down to a point where it makes sense to talk about the Higgs field, where higgs field is like a useful mental idea for doing physics.
I see, It's just we don't know if the Higgs field is a fundamental thing. You're saying, like there may be like higher laws or something, but at least from what we know and what we can see around, the Higgs field is a pretty good description of what's going on.
But that's not always the case exactly. We're pretty sure that it isn't the case. Like, if you try to take our theories and apply them to really really crazy scenarios at the very beginning of the universe, they just don't work. So we're pretty sure that our laws, including the Higgs field, are not the true laws of the universe. They're just the ones we have found that describe the situations we've been able to explore. So if somebody says the Higgs field was created, I think that's a little bit misleading. What they really mean is that the universe cool to a point where the Higgs field makes sense as a way to think about the universe.
Mmm.
But I guess the weird thing about it is that the Higgs field feels really fundamental, right. It gives things mass. So does that mean that at some point we didn't have mass, It like mass didn't make sense in the universe.
It could be It could also be that there are just different rules, different ways to get mass, or it could be that, like mass is not an important concept, you know, everything that we're talking about in the universe, we don't know if they are fundamental, like essential elements of the universe or just emergence stuff that like comes out of the complexity of the universe. And you know, that's easy to think about for some things, like, for example, we have ice cream in the universe. Ice Cream feels important, especially in a hot summer, but it's not fundamental. You can imagine there could be universes without ice cream, right, no big deal.
Well, I beg to different Daniel, what's the universe without ice cream?
It might not be worth living in. But you know, there are other things to difference rise into. But you can also take that same logic and applies to other things in the universe, like the Higgs field or even like space itself. Right, we talked in the podcast about whether space itself is actually fundamental to the universe, or if you could have a universe without space. And we physicists feel like, well, we don't really know the true nature of the universe. We've just been studying this one particular slice of the universe in a certain energy range, a certain temperature range, because that's the one we live in, and we know that our theories we try to do calculations don't work at higher temperatures, and so we suspect that some of the stuff that seems fundamental is actually just emergent. It's just like an interesting property that comes about, but isn't like deeply true about the universe.
I guess, going back to Alex's question, you're saying that the universe at some point cooled down enough to where the Higgs field came into effect, basically, and so I think his question is like, did that happen everywhere at once or did the universe sort of cool differently in different places, and so what does that mean? Or is it cooling right now in different places differently such that there are spots with the Higgs field and spots without the Higgs field.
Yeah, that is a really cool question. I think the origin of his confusion is that he imagines that he field was created in one place and then would have to spread out through the universe. And he's right that because information travels at the speed of light and space expands faster than the speed of light, that if that were the case, then the information wouldn't be out through the whole universe, and it would be parts of the universe without the Higgs field. But as you say, we don't think the Higgs field was created, it just in one place. The universe cools simultaneously everywhere. Remember, the Big Bang is not like the explosion of a tiny, little dense blob of matter in the early universe. It's the expansion of the entire universe simultaneously. It happened everywhere at the same time, and it's happening still. This expansion, this dilution, this cooling of the universe, still happening everywhere. And so we think that the whole universe cooled at once, and this moment when the Higgs field was relevant probably happened all over the universe. Now, it may have happened at slightly different times. There were different quantum fluctuations in the early universe, so some bits were a little hotter and some bits were a little cool So some parts of the universe probably got the Higgs field before other parts of the universe, as we say, but it would probably wasn't a very big difference.
But you're saying there was a moment in time in the universe where there were spots, like patches of Higgs field some places had it, in some places maybe didn't.
Yeah, and I can remember. We're not talking about like the physical creation of something. We're talking about the universe transitioning from sort of a phase where you can talk about the Higgs field where it makes sense, to a phase where it doesn't. And we don't really know what those phase transitions are like. You know, is it like going from a solid to a liquid where it's really sudden and in one moment at one set of rules applies, like motion through a crystal. In another moment you're doing fluid dynamics, Or is it very gradual the way like gases turned into plasmas. So we really just don't know what that transition is like. We don't have no idea what the physics was like on the other side. That's one reason we want to, for example, build bigger particle colliders to recreate those conditions and like see the physics in those scenarios. Does the Higgs field still work? What kind of theory do we need to describe super super high energy scenarios. We just don't know.
Man, you just had to work in a commercial for your job in you like more funding to find out the answer.
Hey, Look, if we're talking to supervillains that have the capacity to build planet busting black holes, and yes, I'm going to pitch a twenty billion dollar project.
Excuse me, great, But yeah, you know, I was thinking that the universe sort of all cooled everywhere at once, and so maybe there was a time from what we know that there were patches of Higgs field or no Higgs field. But now as what we know and what we can see, it's all pretty cool down and everywhere that we know has the Higgs field.
Yeah, everywhere in the universe. There are big variations of temperature from here to the center of the Sun, for example, But we think that all those places are still described by the same physics where the Higgs field is important. So we think that there's a Higgs field all the way through the whole universe as far as we're aware.
I guess we have to add that caveat like it's there as far as we know. It's as far as the observable universe, right, Like they could be that maybe our observable universe is in a patch of cooler universe, and there might be patches of hotter universe elsewhere without a Higgs field.
Yeah, if past the edge of the observable universe it's really hot and dense, crazy with hamsters eating French fries, then possibly the Higgs field does not apply.
Yeah. Wow, So I guess the answer for Alex is that there are no patches of no Higgs field as far as we know in the observable universe. But you know, who knows what's out there beyond the observable universe?
That's right, who knows what those hamsters are dipping their French fries into mayonnaise, ketchup ice cream, some weird combinations.
They're crazy and no coincidence. Both hamsters and Higgs started with an h So I'm sensing some sort of connection here.
Maybe that's right. Maybe it was a hamster field all along.
That's right. Yeah, twist ending call En night Shimealen.
That's right. It's not about the journey, it's about the hamsters you made along the.
Way, all right. Well, I think that answers to Alex and Ward's question. There might still be parts of the universe without a Higgs field, in which case nobody has any masks there, and so you can eat all the French fries you want.
That's right. You have the physicist approval to eat all the French fries you want.
No.
Technically speaking, if there are portions of the universe too hot for a Higgs feel to apply, then we have no idea what mass even means out there, So be careful and stick to your diet.
All right. Well, that answers all three listener questions. Thanks again for sending in your questions and sharing your curiosity with us and with everybody else.
Yeah, we think that everybody should be asking questions about the universe, and everyone's questions deserve answers. So don't be shy. Unleash your intellect upon the cosmos and wonder if things fit together, if things make sense to you. Because you might ask a question that cracks open everything.
You might ask the question that breaks the hamster wheel off the universe. 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 product of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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