Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseListener Questions 63: Hawking radiation, mass, and anti-strings
Daniel and Jorge answer questions from listeners like you! Send your questions to questions@danielandjorge.com
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Hey Daniel, if you could throw anything into a black hole, what would it be?
I guess it'd be something I don't ever want to see again, like a bunch of white chocolate.
You know that doesn't get rid of the concept of white chocolate. People can still make more.
And I'll keep throwing it in the black hole until they learn.
But if you throw a white chocolate into a black hole, does it make it a white hole?
If it eats matter, it's a black hole. A white hole would be making matter.
So if you ever see a white hole out there in space, it's's basically a white chocolate fountain.
If there's somebody on the other side throwing all their white chocolate into a black hole, then yeah.
Or does a dark chocolate get turned into white chocolate on the other side.
What a cosmic tragedy that would be.
What if you're in like the five percent of the universe that doesn't like white chocolate? What if it's cosmically loved except for a certain household in Irvine, California.
I don't want to meet those aliens. Hi.
I am moorhy Man Cardoonas and the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine. And yes, I'll meet the white chocolate aliens.
Aliens are made out of white chocolate, or they like white chocolate.
If they're made out of white chocolate, I'll feel so sorry for them that I'll definitely meet them just out of pain.
Well, they probably feel really safe around you because they know you won't eat that.
That's true exactly, But they might melt in the sun. You know, that stuff is just not really very substantial.
M They need like sunshields or something. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio, in.
Which we take a deep look at both sides of the universe, the matter, the dark matter, the white chocolate, the dark chocolate, the stuff that we're curious about and the stuff that you are curious about. We think that everything out there in the universe is a delicious mystery and it deserves to have a bite taken out of it.
That's right. We try to delve into the deep, dark mysteries of the universe as well as its shiny bright facts, the things that scientists and work hard over many years to discover and figure out how it all works.
And one of the goals of the podcast is to take you along on that journey. Puzzling out the nature of the universe is not just something professional scientists should do, it's something everybody should be thinking about. We should all be thinking like a physicist, even if we're not thinking about physics problems. But those physics problems are fascinating and are deep and are consequential. Where do the universe come from? How does it all work? How will it all end? Where is our place in it?
All?
These things are questions that everybody has, and we hope to work together to find the answer. And that means you should also be asking questions.
Yeah, because questions about the universe are all as they affect us on an everyday basis, and they make us all curious about what our place in it is? And where does this all heading?
Some sort of white chocolate apocalypse? That's where we're headed.
Wait, is that a dark vision of the future or a bright vision of the future.
I think people's reaction that will tell us a lot about who they are deep down. Yeah.
So if they like white chocolate, they're optimists and happy people. Some of us will run screaming from that kind of person.
But I'm not the kind of person who runs screaming. When I get emails from listeners, I love those emails. I love hearing your questions about the universe. I love thinking with you about the edge of your knowledge or the edge of human knowledge, which listeners often creep right up into. So please don't be shy. Send me your questions to questions at Danielandjorge dot com. We write back to everybody.
Yeah, and sometimes we take those questions and we try to answer them here on the podcast, or at least we talk about them, which sometimes involves an answer.
That's right. Some of the questions I get over email. I think lots of people might have this question, and so I'd like to share the question and the answer with the whole podcast community. Other questions I have no answer to, and so I just hope that we can fill some time with jokes and speculation in lieu of an answer.
So today podcast we'll be tackling listener questions number sixty three, and today we have three pretty awesome questions. One of them is about Hawking radiation, the only one is about making new matter in the universe. And then we have a question about the ultimate particle.
And the ultimate anti particle.
Oh wait, is the ultimate antiparticle just the first particle?
That's basically Brett's question.
You all right, let's dig into it. Our first question comes from Andrew.
Hi Daniel and Jorge. This is Andrea and I have a question about Hawking radiation. I was interested in something you said in another episode about it being impossible to detect, and I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about that, and especially in terms of analysis and detection and instruments and experiments. For example, have any lab experiments or simulations already been done to look for Hawking radiation? If we could develop an instrument, because I imagine this is just very theoretical at this point, but if we could develop an instrument to use on a real black hole in space to analyze the Hawking radiation, what would that require and what would that look like? Also, would only some kinds of black holes be feasible for this kind of analysis, like maybe the one at the center of our galaxy is too massive? So thank you very much for taking my question. I love the show.
Awesome question. It's all about Hawking radiation. You know, have we detected it? Is it just an idea that we have or is it a proven concept? And if we haven't detected it, how would you measure it? And what's at the source of Stephen Hawkins is superpowers.
I think that was just his sheer sex appeal.
He emitted rhiz waves.
That's right, rhiz particles. Actually it's quantum. Yeah, this is a great question because I love the sort of forward thinking, like how can we actually figure this out? What technology would we need? How can we make this practical? Like me Andrea really really wants to see a black hole and study it, and this is like one of the only ways we can really do that.
Well, maybe start with the basics, like what is exactly Hawking radiation and have we seen it?
Hawking radiation is a super fascinating concept because it's like a first step between our current understanding of black holes, which is basically just what general relativity says that matter falls in it creates an event horizon inside is a singularity. Nothing can escape. Black holes are truly black according to general relativity. But we know that general relativity can't be an ultimate description of the universe because it's ignoring quantum effects. And we know that quantum effects have to be important when you get really really dense and really really small things like a singularity. But we don't have a theory of quantum gravity. Something that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics. It gives us like a description of a quantum black hole. But Stephen Hawking did something like take a first step in that direction, and he figured out that if you have a black hole in our universe, it follows the rules of general relativity, but also has to follow the rules of quantum mechanics. And he was able to bring the math together to make it play nicely. And it predicts that these quantum black holes are not truly black. They actually faintly glow with radiation, and that's the Hawking radiation.
M Wait, so he was actually able to make quantum mechanics play nicely with special or general relativity. I thought that was sort of impossible.
It's hopefully not impossible, because that would mean the universe can to be understood. It's so far not been a cheet in a comprehensive and coherent way, but there are places where people have made a few inroads. And so we call this semi classical because he didn't make a complete theory of quantum gravity. He just pulls some really clever tricks in order to do this one calculation without actually knowing the theory of quantum gravity. So it's a really slick sort of mathematical maneuver that he did, well, what is it exactly? So what he did is he thought about what happens to quantum fields near a black hole. Now you often hear in popular science this sort of handwavy description of Hawking radiation, and the description goes something like a particle and an anti particle and made near the event horizon. One falls in the other one is Hawking radiation. That's not what's going on as far as we know. In fact, we don't have any understanding of the particle picture of how this works, because again we don't have that theory of quantum gravity. We don't know how gravity affects these tiny particles. What Hawking did instead was think about fields near the event horizon. A lot of fields have this property that they can do two things. They can make particles and they can make anti particles, or for example, electromagnetic fields can make fields of all sorts of different frequencies. And what he did was he said, well, how do we think about those fields near and event horizon? Because when you solve field equations, you're thinking about how waves move through those fields. And the map that he did showed us that near an event horizon, there's something weird that happens to those fields. And basically there always has to be an outgoing wave in order to make the mathematics work.
Well, what do you mean like an outgoing wave? What does that mean? Outgoing in which directing like away from the black hole.
Like awave from the black hole exactly. And so that's what's interpreted as outgoing Hawking radiation, the generation of particles from the energy of the black hole. That's what this radiation comes from.
Now, where does this idea that there has to be a radiation come from? Is there no explanation to it?
You can try to make some intuitive sense of it, but we don't have any microphysics explanation of it. Like we want one. I can hear that you want it. I'm sure listeners want it. I desperately want it, Like what's actually happening? We don't have that understanding because we don't understand particles and gravity. There's another way to gain some intuition about it, which is thermodynamically. Think about black holes as having a temperature. Right, everything in the universe that has a temperature glows, so black holes also have a temperature. Then they must also glow and black holes because the information that falls in them have to have an entropy and therefore to have a temperature. And so that's another way to think about what hawking radiation is. It's like the black body radiation of a black hole.
But wait, it sounds like you have to treat the black hole as a whole if you're talking about entropy and things like that. So then how is it quantum as well?
Yeah, the quantum aspect has to do with these waves, these quantized fields that surround the black hole, and Hawking radiation comes from when you have quantum fields and an event horizon together, you get this generation of waves that come away from the event horizon. That's what hawking radiation is.
So it's just I mean black body radiation that happens when like something hot rock in space. It's just the molecules and atoms in it are very excited and so they generate photons that shoot out. Is that kind of what's happening, Like the black hole is just randomly shooting photons.
Yeah, that's our microphysics understanding of normal black body radiation. You're totally right. There's like motion within a rock, for example, it has some temperature to it, and so photons will escape, and that's well described by black body radiation. In terms of a black hole. We don't know what's going on from the microphysics point of view. We don't understand the event horizon and can't think about that in terms of particles, so we have no picture to provide for like what's generating this radiation other than these mathematical solutions to the wave equation near an event horizon. You can think about it thermodynamically also to interpret the black holes having a temperature, but you don't really know what that temperature means. It doesn't reflect necessarily the kinetic energy of particles within the black hole. We don't know how to interpret that because again we don't have that theory, so we're kind of blind theoretically there.
Well, what about this idea that you do see in popular culture and popular science a lot that you know, at the edge of a black hole there's two particles being created. One of them falls in, the other one spews out, and that's kind of what is hawking radiation. Does that not happen or we don't know if it happens.
That could be what happens, but we don't know how particles operate near an event horizon. We don't know if gravity is a classical force which would require these particles to collapse their probabilities, or if gravity is quantum, which means that it can interact with the various possibilities of the particles. And so we don't know how to do those calculations. So we don't know what happens to particle anti particle pairs near to vent horizon. So yeah, the answer is we don't know.
That could be correct, so they could maybe explain what is hawking radiation.
There is definitely an explanation for hawking radiation if it is a real thing in the universe. We just don't have it. And yes, it could be that one, but there's no theory behind that. That's just like a handwavy cartoon.
And what's wrong with handwavy cartoons, Daniel, You can't see my career you're talking about.
Yeah, they're wonderful, but they're not necessarily accurate and you can't use them to do calculations or anything. That's all they are is just a handwavy cartoon.
Are there other possible handwavy cartoony explanations, or is that the only one that we have?
I mean, in popular science you'll see all sorts of descriptions of Hawking radiation, most of which are wrong. The ones that are most accurate either rely on this thermodynamic description or Hawking's actual calculation using boundary conditions for waves near an event horizon.
But you're saying they're not wrong, we just don't know what the real answer is.
Yeah, that's right. It's like the universe has a number in its head between one and a million, and you might say, well, Daniel, is it seventy four? And we're like, well, I could be seventy four, but yeah, I mean, who knows.
But so far, Hawking radiation is a concept, right, Like, do have we actually ever measured this at all or seen it? Or is it just sort of an idea that physicists think is happening at black holes.
It's currently still just an idea. We've never seen Hawking radiation, and it would be really challenging to ever see it because hawking radiation is extraordinarily faint for large black holes.
Are you saying that we haven't seen it so we don't know what it is? So it's basically a handwavy cartoon.
We have lots of theories we have not proven, like string theory, which is much more than a handwavy cartoon, because there are physical principles and calculations, you can make predictions, et cetera, et cetera. So not everything that hasn't been observed is a handwavy cartoon. But yeah, we have never seen hawking radiation. And the challenge is that it's super duper faint. Like, larger black holes are colder, which means they glow more faintly. So the smaller black hole is the hotter it is, the brighter it glows. So, for example, a black hole that has the mass of our sun, which is already a pretty small black hole, but have a temperature of sixty nano kelvins, which makes it very dark and very cold, and any glow it has would be very very faint.
Wait wait, wait, what does it even mean to for a black hole to have temperature? Like if a rock is a temperature that means it captures, you know, the movement of the molecules inside the rock somehow, right, like a hot something hot means that all of its molecules are moving a lot. They have a lot of kinetic energy. What would it mean for a black hole?
Yeah, we don't know. I mean, Thummer dynamics is often not about the microscopic picture. You don't have to understand what's going on inside to have these macroscopic descriptions of entropy and temperature, etc. Are the religious sort of like high level summaries for what's going on inside. Sometimes you can make these connections, like for the ideal gas law, between the microphysics and the macrophysics. But no, we don't know what temperature really means for a black hole. There are some arguments about information and entropy and connecting it to temperature, but that's a whole rabbit hole that Andrea didn't ask us about. In this case, you should just think about the temperature as determining the glow of the black hole. Higher temperature glows in higher frequencies.
It glows via the Hawking radiation, yeah, exactly, which we don't know is real or not.
We don't know if it's real or not, but it makes predictions. You have this temperature and use the black body radiation curve, you can say, okay, a sixty nanokelvin black hole would emit this number of photons at this frequency, and you can look for that. But the thing is it's very very faint, and so it's very hard to see for a couple of reasons. One, black holes are really far away. That's a good thing if you want to survive, but a bad thing if you want to study them. And number two is black holes are usually surrounded by other really hot stuff that's glowing very very brightly. So you're looking for a very faint glow from something otherwise very bright and very far away.
How faint are we talking about, like basically the equivalent of how much a rock that is sixteen nanokelving how much it would glow in the infrared, which is probably like almost nothing at all, almost.
Nothing at all, Yeah, exactly. Now, Andrew asks like, how could you possibly ever see it? Well, you know, you'd need super duper sensitive deep infrared sensors. You need to be near enough the black hole. You could capture some of these rare photons. Then you might be able to pick it out because it would have a different spectrum than the rest of the stuff, like the stuff around the black hole, the accretion disk of hot gas. It's going to glow mostly like in the X ray because it's very hot, and so if you look at the very red end of the spectrum and you have very sensitive devices, then you might be able to pick this out.
I wonder if it would get washed in the cosmic background the noise of light, right, like, aren't we bathed in infrared light just from the universe sort of glowing?
Yeah, exactly, we are. That's a great point. The temperature of that light is around two point seven degrease calvin, so that's very hot compared to black holes, which tells you that this would be much fainter and much much much redder. Now black holes get small, then they do get brighter. The temperature goes like inverse mass, and so if a black hole was left on its own, it would very faintly glow. It would lose mass and then get brighter. And because it's getting brighter, it's losing mass faster, so you have this runaway effect where eventually a black hole evaporates and near the very end, when it's very very small, it gets quite hot, and then the Hawking radiation would be visible. So seeing a big black hole would be difficult. Seeing a disappearing black hole would be much more possible.
Well, as it gets smaller, it becomes hotter, So you're saying it would be a mid more photons, But would it actually be brighter because it's also smaller. I wonder if if maybe those things would balance out and it would just be as faint like a tiny black hole a million kilometers aways. It's about as fant as a giant black hole that's colder, isn't it.
The event horizon does shrink, which reduces the intensity, but the temperature increasing overwhelms that, and so we expect a smaller black hole to actually be brighter. It's not just that the frequency of the radiation goes up, but the intensity of it also will even though the event horizon is getting smaller. So smaller black holes might evaporate in a way we could actually see, and people have looked for this in the night sky because if there were small black holes made during the Big Band, their lifetime might be a few billion years. And if they're just sort of like scattered out in space, not near some huge source of mass, they could be isolated and they could be evaporating, and they could glow with these brilliant pinpricks of light. People have looked for them, nobody's ever seen one, But that doesn't mean that we won't.
Like what size are we talking about? Like I imagine maybe there's like an optimal size for us to see them, because if they're too small, they're too small to see, But if they're too big, they're too cold to see. Is there are wonder if there's an optimal hawking black hole size to see.
The lifetime of a black hole is very, very long, if it's any size at all. Like if you took a black hole that had the mass of our sun and you put it in empty space, it would take ten to the sixty three years to evaporate. Most of that time it would be glowing so faintly its mass would hardly be dropping. A lot of the progress is made near the end because of the runaway effect. A much much smaller black hole, of course, could only take a few billion years. So smaller black holes are better for observing Hawking radiation. And that's why people are thinking about primordial black holes, because stellar collapse or galactic centers these produce huge black holes. If you want to see Hawking radiation, you need little ones. That's why people are looking for black holes that come from the Big Bang, where it might have made a whole spectrum of black holes from super massive ones to super duper tiny ones.
But don't they also say that at the Large had Drink Collider years you're sort of making black holes.
We are looking for black holes at the Large had Drunk Collider. One idea might be that gravity doesn't behave the way we expect. If you get things really really close together, gravity actually gets very very strong. We've never really tested gravity over extraordinarily short distance scales, so it might be that if you smash two protons together, when they get really close together, gravity gets really strong and it forms a tiny black hole which would then almost instantly evaporate but leave a spectrum of Hawking radiation which we could see in our detectors. So we looked for hawking radiation at the Large hair Drunk Colider but never seen it. So there's lots of ways you might see hawking radiation. But yeah, and so far now.
But do you expect there to be black holes and in these collisions you're creating, or I mean, is it surprising you haven't seen a hawking radiation at the Large Hadron Collide.
Whether you expect to see them depends on a bunch of theoretical questions we don't have answers too, like are there additional spatial dimensions? What are the parameters of those dimensions? You need those spatial dimensions to explain why gravity gets stronger as things gets closer. And so if for some scenarios we would have expected to see the black holes already, in other scenarios, we wouldn't have expected to see them, and so the answer is a bit muddy. Also, those calculations are even more hand waving than the Hawking radiation calculations themselves, Like some listeners might think, hold on, you just told us we don't understand gravity for particles, So how can you talk about the gravitational force between two protons when they're really close to each other. And the answer is we can't. People have done a bunch of back of the envelope, sketchy, hand wavy cartoon calculations. We don't really know whether those are right. So it's just sort of like a oh, we should look for this in case it's there. It's not so much that if we didn't see you, we're sure it's not there. There's lots of reasons why it might not happen.
All right, So then the answer for Andra is it's all a handwavy cartoon. Andre. It's like asking for an explanation of something that we're not sure exists or know how it works.
Kind of, but we hope one day to see this. If we do see hawking radiation, that confirms something important. It tells us that black holes are quantum objects, that they are following the quantum rules of the universe. They are not pure, general relativistic black holes, that black holes are not completely black. That would be a huge breakthrough.
How bright would these black holes getting snuffed out in the cosmos? Beat? Would they be visible to the naked eye or only if you're wearing special glasses or do you need like special telescopes.
Yeah, this is the kind of thing we use telescopes to look for, because you need to see these photons a very specific frequency range, which is usually not in a visible range. Usually they're in the infrared.
All right, Well, I guess we need to keep looking at the sky right then, to to see if we ever see these slashes.
That's right, More particle colliders, more telescopes, more technological eyeballs to understand the universe.
Wait, did you just try to hawk more particle colliders?
Hey, you're hawking your book on every episode, so I can hawk particle colliders.
All right, Well, thank you Andrew for that great question. Now let's get to our next question, and it's about making new matter in the universe. So let's get to that. But first let's take a quick break.
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Where we're answering listener questions here today and our next question comes from answif.
Hi Daniel and Jorge. This is ons from tomb to Finland. I'm a big fan of the pod and I've been wondering how difficult is it to generate new matter from energy. You have previously talked about how unstable particles are able to summon or pull their counterparts out of thin air that reaches table configuration again after a collision in the Large Hadron collider. Doesn't this mean that new matter is generated from the collision energy. Would it be possible to scale up this process to keep multiplying the number of stable particles to produce macroscopic amounts of new matter? Can we only go in the direction of lower mass particles this way, or would we be able to somehow generate all different elements of the periodic table. I'm imagining a space station orbiting the Sun, generating billi materials and resources to become self sustained and starting expanding just by using the available unlimited free energy. I think it's about time to get this project started, don't you agree?
Thanks guys.
I'm pressing a theme here, Daniel. These are all particle questions.
I'm not organizing them anymore. I'm just answering them in the order they come in. It's just a particle week over here at the podcast.
But this is an interesting question, I guess the question is, like, what's actually happened when you collide particles, because I know we've talked about it being sort of this magical act where you know, two things kind of become pure energy and then matter pops out. And I guess the question is is the matter that pops out like new matter or is it possible to create new matter?
Yeah, it's a really fun question and a great question, and it goes to the heart of like what is matter anyway? And if you think about the universe the way particle physicists do. You know, we have all these fields, and you can take energy from one field to another field, and when a field ripples and a certain in way, that's what we call a particle. Then you could just think about energy sliding around from one kind of field to another. So you collide one kind of particle with its antiparticle and that turns into a photon for example. That's energy moving from like the electron field into the photon field. Now that photon can turn into something else even heavier than the original electrons, like a muon and an anti muon. That's the energy sliding from the photon field to the muon field, and those different states can have different amounts of mass, Right, So the electron has low mass, the photon has no mass, the muon has high mass. Mass is just stored internal energy of some of these states. So mass is not like a special thing or hard to make in the universe. It's just a kind of energy that these fields can have.
How would you define what matter is? Or does it not even make sense to use the word, like maybe we should just get rid of the word.
No, it's a good question. I think there's a couple of concepts of what matter is, which is separate from the idea of mass. Right, And when we talk about matter, one sense in which it makes sense is like the stuff we're made out of, stable stuff which hangs out in the universe building blocks for our existence. Right, we are made of matter, We eat things made of matter, and you know, quarks and electrons come together to make all this amazing complexity that's matter. Sometimes also extend that though, to other related particles that are not stable, Like we think of a muon as a matter particle, but muons last four microseconds before they decay into other stuff. You can't build anything out of muons. You can't have life made out of muons or a meal made out of muons. So I think the concept of matter comes from the stuff of our experience, and then we extend it to also similar particles. So since everything we're made out of is fermions spin one half particles, we tend to call all spin one half particles matter, and other kinds of particles like photons, we call them force particles. But that distinction is a little bit arbitrary.
Like, basically, it's all parts articles in quantum field. But is there a distinction between the ones we call matter and the ones that we don't call matter? Like is mass is the thing that makes something be matter?
The distinction is the spin of the particles. Like, all the particles we call matter, those are fermions, there's spin one half particles, and all the particles we call force particles those are spin one or spin zero particles.
Like are there particles that we don't call matter but that still have mass?
Yes, absolutely there are, like the w and the z bosons. These are spin one particles. They're not fermions. We don't call them matter, but they do have mass. In fact, they're quite massive. They have the mass of like eighty or ninety times the mass of a proton, extraordinarily massive particles, but we don't call them matter. They are the particles that communicate the weak force. But yeah, we don't call those matter particles. But they do have mass, So you can have mass not be matter.
And can you be madder without mass? Are there things that we call matter that don't have mass?
Oh, that's a great question. Until recently, we didn't know if neutrinos had mass. Those are in the matter category because they're fermions. Now we know they do have masks, but have an extraordinarily small, tiny, tiny, tiny amount of masks. But no, there are no particles what we call matter particles which are massless.
And why do we pick the spin of these particles to be the thing that distinguishes it as matter? Is that significant to like our existence?
I don't think it's fundamentally significant. I think we just noticed that the stuff we're made out of is comprised of spin one half particles, and that forces tend to use spin one particles to communicate. But again, matter and forces, you know, these are sort of colloquial terms. I think the way you put it is pretty good, like everything is just particles in a quantum field, and there's lots of different kinds of quantum fields that can do all sorts of weird things. Some of them are spin one, some of them are spin half, some of them are massless, some of them are not. There's all sorts of weird different kinds of fields out there.
So then I wonder if the answer ons if is that there's just thing is matter, you know, like there's only energy that slashes around between these quantum fields, and sometimes it's energy ends up in a quantum field that we just happen to call matter.
Yeah, exactly, And so he's totally right that new matter can be generated from collisions. Like you pour a bunch of energy into a collision, you can make something heavy. You can turn that energy into mass, right, and that can make new matter. So yeah, and principle, you could like take two protons and smash them together and make like a gold nucleus if you had enough energy. It's pretty unlikely. And most of the time when you make something that's massive from something that's low mass, it's unstable. Like if you make a w boson or a z boson, these massive particles, then it don't last very long because the universe doesn't typically like to have a lot of mass or a lot of energy in one place. It tends to prefer configurations with lots of possibilities. Which tend to prefer configurations with lots of options, lots of quantum possibilities, And those are the ones with low mass particles. That's why things decay. That's why muwans decay down to electrons or w particles don't last very long.
Yeah, like to have all of my mass in one spot.
Either exactly diversified, diversified, diversify.
Right, No, it just cuts a slimmer figure.
And that's why most of the stuff were made out of it. Are the lightest particles out there because they can't decay down any further. Electrons and upquarks and down quarks are stable because there's nothing below them on the ladder. And so yeah, it's possible to take the light particles, give them energy, smash them together, make heavy particles, but typically they will not last for very long unless you're lucky and you happen to form something which is stable, like an iron nucleus.
Well, I wonder if it's if it's more of a philosophical question, you know, does the term new matter even make sense. What does the word new here mean? Like it didn't exist before, but you know, the energy that making that matter, it sort of existed before, it just it came from a different field.
Yeah, that's sort of like the particle of theseus question, you know, like is this particle new or is this particle not new?
Or what does it mean to have an old particle? Like is there such a thing? Right?
Particles never retire, man, they work forever, so their age is a matter. I think he's asking about new matter in the concept of like new elements of the periodic table, Like could we create elements of the periodic table we've never seen before by smashing particles together?
Oh, like you think as if asking about creating an element we had never seen before.
Yeah, he says, generate all different elements of the periodic table. And to me, the question is like, well, what are all the different elements? We don't even know? There might be some really heavy new ones that are very stable, that are very massive we've never made before. And so yeah, and so if one way to do that is to smash stuff together and see if we can make those heavy elements we haven't been able to do that yet.
Well, I guess maybe the question then is what's the biggest or heaviest element we have made out of scratch in a particle collision? And I think he means like spontaneously making something right, not just like you know, like building up a matter, like by adding one proton at a time.
I think the heaviest thing we've ever made is element one eighteen, But that's not really what he's asking about. To do that, you take lighter elements and you like gently toss protons into them, hoping not to smash them apart. So that's one technique. But if you just like start from two protons and smash them together and hope to make something like element one forty seven, that's not something we've ever done. When we smash protons together, we don't ever get helium, for example. It's possible, yeah, absolutely, but it's very delicate because you put too much energy and you just destroy the protons and you get the quarks interacting, you get fragments of the protons flying out.
No, but I wonder if he means, like, you know, you take two protons, you accelerate them, you smash him, you create pure energy like the old protons are gone, even the old quarks are gone, and then somehow all that energy somehow reforms into a complex atom.
Yeah, that's possible, right, and be careful again with pure energy. That's something we say sometimes, but really what's happening is that energy is going into another field. Typically it's photons or z bosons or something. But yeah, then that field can dump the energy back into quarkfields, which could form protons and make a crazy heavy element. That it's totally possible. It's not something we've ever done. It's very unlikely. Requires a lot of things to go right, all at the same time, but there's nothing saying it's not possible.
Well, I wonder if you've done it, you just haven't notice or measured it or look for it.
Yeah, that's absolutely possible too, because in these collisions we get huge sprays of particles, more than we can ever track or count, and we're not like sifting through them usually to look for new, weird heavy nuclei.
The collider is not suddenly covered in gold. Do you haven't notice that? Or white chocolate? Perhaps? Would that be a tragedy if you like went to work one day and everything's covered in white chocolate.
You're like, no, it's an exciting day every day at the particle collider. Are we going to make a black hole? Are we going to cover the Earth in white chocolate? Who knows?
Let's turn it all who knows. Let's find out exactly.
Let's go as the kids say.
So, then what's the answer for answer here is that it is possible to make a matter. It's just kind of unlikely.
Yeah, the answer is that it's totally possible. And I love your vision of a space station orbiting the Sun building all sorts of crazy building blocks, but I'm not ready to invest I.
See you need to see. The proof is in the white chocolate pudding.
Yeah. If this was physics Shark Tank, I would not be in.
Ooh, physics shark that. I like that.
Let's make that show, all right, listen, BTE listeners on to pitch us as a startup projects.
Oh, I think they have that already. I think it's called the National Science when they all right, well, great question, and sev. Now let's get to our last question of the day, and this one is about the ultimate particle and possibly it's anti particle. Let's dig into that. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're answering listener questions and our last question comes from Brett him.
My name is Brett On forty from the United Kingdom. I'm currently studying an integrated Masters and Bachelor's degree in my spare time, and I have a question for the podcast. I've been thinking about ultimate particles, God particles and fundamental particles, and I was wondering if there is a true ultimate fundamental particle that everything else comes from, we also have an anti version of itself. And also, if we can't see them now, is it possible that they're all used up in the Big Bang? And if so, would we be able to see any evidence in the CMB. And finally, third part of the question, would it be the case that different configurations of the particle make up the ones that we see in the standard model. I realized this is a bit more than one question, but thank you for your time and thank you for your responses.
Hey, Brett, congrats on studying for your master's degree in physics in your spare time. That's awesome.
Yeah, that's a pretty cool masters and bachelor's degree at the same time. Well, the question is kind of cool, I guess, you know, because in popular science you hear talk of the god particle, the ultimate particle, or maybe finding out that the whole universe is just made out of one particle. And I think Brett's question is if we ever find such a particle, would it have an anti particle version of it?
Yeah, super awesome question, Brett. The short answer to your question is, we have no idea because we don't know the inside these particles, but we can talk about what the current theories do predict. You know, we suspect strongly that what we're looking at now, the electrons and the quarks are not the fundamental description of the universe. We think that probably there's some deeper explanation that accounts for all the weird patterns and like baroque details of all of these.
Particles, sort of like you know, when we discovered the elements, we found out there was some sort of order to them that explain why gold behaved differently than carbon, for example.
Yeah, exactly, there are these patterns, these features to the particles that we see. We don't understand them. There are strong hints that they might be made out of something smaller, something simpler that explains all of these weird details. Also, we know that our theory breaks down at a certain point. We have really high temperatures or like we'd had in the very early universe, we know that our current theory just doesn't work anymore. You need to fold in gravity. We don't know how to do that. So at some point our theory breaks down, and that very high temperature also corresponds to very short distances. So the point of the story is we think our current theory is not complete. We hope to figure out one day what's there. And your question is, basically, when we do, will that be some sort of particle antiparticle or is it possible for everything that made out of something that doesn't have an antiparticle.
Well, I guess maybe take a step back and let's think about whether it's possible. Like, is it possible that everything that we know about electrons, quarks, they're all actually made out of one particle.
Yeah, absolutely, that's possible.
What wouldn't mean for the fields right right? Like don't we talk about the electron having its own quantum fields and quarks having their own quantum quark fields. That mean those fields don't really exist or just sort of like made up of other fields.
It would mean that those fields are effective instead of fundamental.
Wait what was that word you said? If they're deffective?
Yeah, an effective field is one that's not fundamental. For example, if you want to think about like pressure waves in a material, you can write that down in terms of a field theory wave equations for how oceans work. But we know that oceans are not a fundamental field in the universe, right, We can still think about waves in the ocean as if the oceans are a field. But that's just like useful mathematics that describes a lot of complex stuff, sweeping it under the rug without really understanding the details. So we don't know whether the fields we have now are fundamental fields or they're just effective fields. It could be that there is no electron field, that there's something deeper the squiggly on field or several squiggly on fields, and when you zoom out a little bit and so you can't see the squigglions anymore, they act like an electron field. So you can use the electron field as an effective theory. It works, it's helpful. It lets you do calculations, but it might not be a true description of the deepest nature of the universe.
Whoa so like all this time we thought the electron field was fundamental and like basic feature of the universe. But no, it could just be an illusion kind of.
It might be an emergent phenomena. Right, this is something we see all over the universe that you can describe things lots of different scales. So you can talk about galaxies without understanding the particles inside every planet, inside every rock. Right, you can zoom out and find simple mathematical laws. Kepler discovered those without even understanding gravity. Right, you can find simple mathematics that lots of different length scales, distance scales, energy scales in the universe. That's sort of a mystery, like why that's even possible. But yeah, you can zoom in or out in the universe and find mathematical laws. We don't know if we found the deepest layer yet, or if there even is a deepest layer, or what that looks like.
Well, what would make more sense? I guess would it make more sense for there to be like all these multiple fields electron field, quark fields, muan fields, or would it make sense to just have one field to rule them all.
It's a great philosophical question. We don't have a scientific answer for it, right.
What do we have a song?
Though we don't have a song or a scientific answer for it. Maybe there is a song for all the particles. I don't know. But you know, if this is the fundamental theory, there is nothing below it. That means that there's a lot of unanswered questions, you know, like why are there three copies of every particle electrons, muons, and towels. All sorts of questions that are out there that would be unanswered. And you might just be like, h, I don't know, that's just kind of the way it is. You'd be much more satisfying if we found a simpler explanation, because simplicity is always more satisfying because there are a few work follow up questions. But we don't know. The universe is not required to be satisfying to our minds.
I wonder if you could maybe like start with one field and then try to invent or figure out how that one field could give rise to all the other fields. Is that something that people have done and discount it or is that basically what string theory is or what?
Yeah, that's basically string theory. String theory says the whole universe is meant out of one kind of thing, a string, and that string can do lots of different things. They can vibrate in different ways, so it's sort of like a meta field theory. Instead of having ten different quantum fields or eighteen quantum fields, you have a string which can oscillate in different ways, and different modes of those strings correspond to the different fields that we see. So string theory can describe everything we see out there. It can even unify gravity and quantum mechanics and describe everything.
But I wonder if you need to get that complicated, because I know string theory is super complex, right, It has like a bazillion dimensions to it. Couldn't you just start with like the danulon or something and then try to create one particle that's not a string, like a bri rating, just a particle, and then try to come over with the rules that would make electrons and quarks.
Yeah, you definitely want the simplest explanation, right. The reason that people do string theory is that it is kind of the simplest way people have made all these pieces work together because there's a lot to describe. You know, we have all these different particles. The string or the Danielon field, whichever has to be able to do lots of different kinds of things. That has to be able to wiggle, like an electron and a muon and a towel, and the neutrinos and the quarks and all the force particles, and it has to be able to explain quantum gravity, so you need gravitons in there as well. And string theory is sort of the simplest way people have ever made that work. A simpler theory can't explain everything that we see so far, and it's pretty simple. You just got one.
String, Well, I guess then the question is can a string in a string theory have an anti version of itself?
Yeah, that's a really cool question. And you know, somebody might one day come up with a theory of some fundamental thing that explains everything and has an anti fundamental thing. But this current idea of string theory doesn't have anti strings. The whole idea of anti particles, I think is sometimes a little bit misleading. It tells people that, like, there's an opposite kind of matter, instead of thinking of antimatter as an opposite kind of matter, thinking of it as like a complementary kind of matter, or think about it as like fields can do two different kinds of things. Your favorite band can play rock, they can also play alternative. The electron field can wiggle in an electron like way, you can also wiggle in an anti electron like way. It's just another thing the same field can do. They're just strings. They can wiggle to make the electron field, which then can make electrons or anti electrons. So the short answer is there are no anti strings in string theory. You don't need them because the strings can make the field, and the field can do either the particle or the anti particle.
Well, I know and we've talked about before how like an antiparticle, something is just the same thing except what the charge. Charge is flipped. And so I guess maybe I wonder if the question is do strings have a charge? Is such a thing as charge in string theory? Or is charge something that comes from the different vibrations of the string?
Yeah, charge is something that comes from the different vibration of the string, because the same string can make a charged field like the electron field and a non charge field like the electromagnetic field. And so that tells us something about like what charge is in the universe. Currently we imagine charge is conserved in the universe. But if charge things are made up of the same stuff, is not charge things, And you could might imagine you might be able to convert one to the other. You might be able to destroy or create charge by getting this string to winggle.
Differently, it sounds like maybe you're saying, you know, if we ever discover the ultimate theory of everything, it wouldn't have charges, in which case it wouldn't have an anti version of itself.
Yeah, I think I'd pull back on that a tiny bit. I'd say it doesn't have to have charges. It might. There's no guarantee the string theory is the right description of the universe. There's lots and lots of problems with string theory and lining it up with reality and figuring out which string theory to use, et cetera. Somebody might come along with a much better, you know, rubber band theory of the universe or the whohe on theory of the universe that might have antijoheans in it. Who knows, So I'm not ruling it out. I'm just saying we don't know, but our best current theory doesn't require anti strings.
Right, you can rule it out. But I wonder, like, if you do get to that theory, like the whoreheon theory of everything, and there's a plus Horhey and a minus horhe, if them wouldn't just ask like, why is there a plus ori and a minus warge? There must be something even deeper explain the plus and minus warges, right, in which case you couldn't call the ultimate theory.
Maybe, And you'll have a hard time ever proving that you have the ultimate theory because you can almost never distinguish between the two scenarios of we have the ultimate theory or we don't have the ultimate theory, but we don't have the power to see inside this one. You know, it's a question of resolution always, like can you zoom in far enough to tell what this is made out of? Can you tell whether it's made out of itself or something smaller? But you could also end up in a situation where you have a theory with a plus Jorge and a minus Worge, and you understand why that there's a symmetry to it's a balance to it, or there's some sort of structure to it that demands requires a plus and a minus. So it might be that the question is answered on its own without going to a deeper theory.
But who knows, well, I guess for it to be and have an anti version of itself, you would have to kind of pick one as the dominant one, right, kind of like because we only call antimatter antimatter because it's not the same as the kind that we're made out of.
Yeah, and that's not something we understand in our universe, Like why we tend to be made out of one half of this symmetry and not the other half. That's a huge open question.
Well, any theory of everything that has me at the center of it. For me, I think that's the ultimate theory.
That's everything.
Let's just stop right there. Yes, if I'm at the center of the universe, let's not look any further.
Forget Aristotle, forget Copernicus. We have the hooreey theory, the whoregey centric theory of the universe.
That's right, Yes, that's all you need.
Nobody tell the Catholic Church.
And at the core of it is just to handwavy cartoon.
It's a good way to live, man.
Yeah, I know, all right. Well, I think that's the answer for bread, which is that it is possible if we find the God particle, the ultimate particle of matter in the universe, and forces that it might have its own anti particle. It's anti God particle. Would it be the anti god particle or the godless.
Particle, the devil particle? Yeah, who knows?
But the dog particle I like that better. Yeah, But then are we made out of dog particles or God particles?
I want to be a cat particle. I don't know, but I love that Brett is thinking about this. I want everyone out there to think about the deep nature of the universe. You don't have to be a professional physicist or even on your way to becoming one. This is a mystery that belongs to everyone.
Yeah, we hope everyone has questions and also anti questions.
Are our answers anti questions To Zach.
Canada, they're definitely anti answers most of the time.
Well, I hope when we collide our anti answers with your anti questions, we're not annihilating your curiosity.
That's right. We're just creating positive whorehs all.
Over the place and hoping it matters.
All right, Well, I think that answers all of our questions. Thanks to everyone who sent in their questions. We always enjoy talking about these adventures into people's curiosity. We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.
For more science and curiosity. Come finet us on social media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Instant, and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth. You're probably not thinking about the environmental impact, but the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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I'm a cleaning lady, a single mom with three kids and an IQ north of one sixty, so helping the cops solve the murder It's literally the easiest part of my day.
ABC Tuesday the series premiere of falls most anticipated new drama High Potential.
That big brain of hers is going to help us close out a lot of cases.
Haylen Open is the new base of investigation.
You're a single mom pretending to you.
I am not pretending. I'm just out here super copping.
High Potential series premiere Tuesday, ten ninth Central on ABC and stream on Hulu.
