Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge answer questions about anti-muons, Daniel's research, and dimensional weapons.
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Hey Daniel, I've got a question for you.
Oh, let's hear it. I love questions.
Yeah, I'm not sure you like this one. I've seen you cringe every time people ask you this.
Hmm, all right, now I'm curious. Let's hear the question.
All right, are you still actively doing research?
Oh? You're right. I used to hate that question, but actually now I've learned to love it.
But yeah, you have, what changed? You genually started doing research?
Well? Instead of grinding my tea at the suggestion that it's not possible to do outreach and research, I just take it as another chance to talk about my research. And hey, I love smashing stuff together, so I love talking about it.
Wonder if people assume podcasting takes.
A long time, if only they knew.
Hi am poorham May, cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and an actor researcher at uc Ermine, and I love smashing together podcasts with my cartoonist friend.
Sounded like you say you're an actor researcher. I thought, whoa, that's pretty cool. You do acting as well.
I do my own math stunts, unlike Leonardo DiCaprio.
I didn't know that Leonardo needed a stunt man.
Oh yeah, he couldn't write the equations himself on the board for don't look up, so they had to hire somebody to do his math for him. But me, I live that danger, man. I take those risks every day with my body.
Did you audition to be Leonardo DiCaprio's you know, wrist standing?
I didn't even know that was a thing, But if I had known it was a thing, I definitely would have signed up for it. Absolutely.
Yeah, you live right next to Hollywood, why not? You could be Robert Downey Junior's wrist You could be.
I think I look a little bit more like Robert Downey Junior than Leonardo DiCaprio anyway, But I don't think I look much like either of.
Can say, I mean not that to say about how you look, but you know, you just don't look like Robert Downell Jr. Or Leonardo the copy mmmmmm. You look like a handsome Daniel Whiteson.
Like if Woody Allen needed a math double, then I would be his math double.
Oh lot, I don't think you want to double for Woody Allen on any set.
No, that's true. Yeah he's off the list.
But anyways, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio in which.
We take all the risks by diving deep into the unanswered questions about the universe. We don't shy away from the dangerous math and the difficult questions. We ask them straight up and wonder what the answers are. How big is the universe? How old is it? What's happened to it? What is it made out of? And most importantly, can we explain it to you?
Yeah, because it is a very perplexing universe, full of things to wonder about, and we like to take you right up to the edge where scientists are taking all the creative and scientific risks trying to figure out how everything works. This makes it sound like science is kind of risky, Daniel, do you have insurance for doing science? Is there a science insurance?
I spent three years on this paper and it turned into nothing. Pay me. Oh, I wish I would have so many payouts.
I think it's called tenure. That's pretty good insurance, right.
That's pretty good safety net. Although you know tenure doesn't guarantee you funding. You could have a job but no money to do any actual work.
But you still get paid.
You do get paid as long as you still do teaching, that's true. But there are sort of intellectual risks involved in science. What we do is research. It's a sort of exploration. We don't know that there will be interesting answers until we go out and look. The same way, you don't know what's waiting for you when you first land on the surface of some alien planet. Is it filled with all sorts of incredible creatures or is it just a desert of rubble. You don't know until you go and look, and sometimes you hit the jackpot, and sometimes you come home with dust.
M I mean, it's not like a casino, like a science like a nature casino, a bunch of scientists pulling the lever on the slot machine of the universe.
There's an enormous element of luck, absolutely in making a discovery. You know, there are people who are really clever and have good ideas about where to look for the next big thing in the universe, and then there are folks who just stumble across it.
Well, I'm an artist and a cartoonage, so I don't know anything about risky risk at all. What are you talking about. I'll take ten years sure.
Yeah, you left one risky career for the ultimate risky career.
Absolutely, well, I do have insurance, yeah, actually have cartoonist insurance.
Yeah, you've insured your right hand against injury.
It's called marrying someone with a stable job.
Patronage. I think they call that patronage.
Yeah, patronage, matronage actually maybe, But anyways, scientists ask a lot of questions about the universe because we're trying to figure out how the universe works. But they're not the only ones who have questions about the things around them.
All of humanity is trying to push forward the envelope of knowledge and understanding and mystery. Just find looking around us and wondering how things work. It's not just those of us with a tenured job who can take naps in the afternoon. It's everybody who wants to know how the universe works. And everybody out there asks questions about the universe.
Yeah, and it's not like only the scientists asks really cool and interesting and valid questions. Everybody can ask these amazing questions. And in fact, there's a huge amount of or lab between the questions people have every day and the questions that scientists at the forefront are asking.
Because we're a lot more ignorant about the nature of the universe than you might expect from the fact that you can rely on technology and flying airplanes and all that stuff. There are some pretty basic questions that we just don't know how to grapple with, so we mostly avoid them and work on other stuff it's easier to tackle. So sometimes you ask us a really hard, basic question like what is space? How does time work? And you get a blank stare because it's the kind of thing we just don't know the answer.
To makes you want to know what you're doing to earn that tenure.
Daniel, You know, sometimes I get great ideas while napping.
While napping interesting, and then you wake up and you forget it.
I keep a pad of paper actually next to the couch, and sometimes I wake up and I look at the scribbles. I'm like, I have no idea what that says. And other times I'm like, Hm, that seems like a good idea. I'm going to go try that sounds like.
There's an episode of Seinfield where he has the same thing and he spends the whole episode trying to figure out what he wrote down in that path.
And so don't leave us in suspense. Did he get a great science idea? Did he launch a new experiment and win a Nobel prize?
Yeah? Yeah, that was a season feel out. And now everybody has questions, and they're all awesome questions, and sometimes we get those questions here on the podcast. People write to us or contact us through social media, or they hang out at our discord and that's where they ask the questions.
That's right. We welcome all of your questions. If you are curious about the universe, or there's a science concept you haven't heard explained to your satisfaction, please write to us to questions at Danielandjorge dot com. Everybody deserves to understand the universe, or at least understand how little we know about.
The Yeah, so to be on the podcast, we'll be tackling listener questions number twenty eight, the Annihilation Comfabulation special that didn't quite work out.
That's right. A lot of these questions have to do with smashing stuff together, blowing things up for science, which in the end is something I love to do.
Mm you like blowing things up for science or you like smashing things for science. I thought we had this conversation Dani. It's not the same thing unless you blow up the entire world, in which case, please don't do that, And I guess it won't matter anyways.
You know, I think it's an artificial dichotomy. I think there's a spectrum between smashing stuff together and blowing stuff up, and you're just trying to force an artificial separation between them.
I think you're I think you're wrong.
I think there's a spectrum between right and wrong.
Actually, I wonder what the legal authorities say about that.
Yeah, you either go to jail or you don't. So that's definitely a quantum distinction, right.
That's just for you. Either smash things or you explode things, or you can smash things that then explode, but it just then it's the question. It's not like a quantum superposition.
But to continue our argument from the last episode, that's exactly why we smash stuff because then then explode and we look at what comes out.
So yeah, absolutely, Wait did you say and that it explodes.
Yeah, protons, we smash them together and then they explode.
Oh boy, well, I guess we came to an agreement. It's not the same thing. It happens one after the other. I think it's what you just admitted to.
Yes, time flows forward, I do agree, all right.
Anyways, we are answering listener questions once again, and this is our twenty eighth episode, which is amazing, and this one has a theme of annihilation. I guess that's on everyone's mind these days.
Yeah, everybody's thinking about blowing stuff up or smashing stuff together or something on the spectrum between them.
Yeah, or something in Europe causing everyone to blow ourselves up. So we have some awesome questions here about electrons annihilating with muons, about Daniel annihilating I guess his career prospects maybe, and also maybe an alien civilization coming to annihilate us. So some pretty grim and interesting questions.
Yeah. So thanks everybody who submitted these. Please don't be shy. If you'd like to submit questions for answering on the podcast, please write to us two questions at Danielanjorge dot com, or come join us on the discord, or enjoy my office hours, or write to us on Twitter anyway you like it. We love interacting with our listeners.
Okay, so our first question comes from David Smith, and he has a question about I guess shaking hands with himself.
Hi, Daniel and Jorge. I recently listened to the episode about particles and their antiparticles, and I was a little surprised by the statement that Daniel made that generation two particles won't canceled with generation one particles. In other words, you can't have a cancelation or an annihilation between a positron and a muon. It made me wonder, say, hypothetically, there was a stable object that was made from generation to antimatter, and these objects came into contact with normal matter, would the opposite valance shell charges cause the objects to tend to stick together. If so, how strongly would that attraction be? For example, if I shake my generation to antimatter Doppelganger's hand, would I be able to pull it apart? Afterwards? Thank you?
WHOA pretty interesting question here from David. There's a lot to unpack here. I think there's antimatter and also multigenerational particles here to unpack.
Yeah, he's responding to a conversation we had about annihilation of matter and antimatter, and we talked about how electrons, for example, can annihilate with their opposite particle depositron to turn into things like photons. That's something people are familiar with. But we commented that a positron can't, for example, annihilate with a muon, which is like the heavier version of the electron. We call it a second generation particle. Electrons are the first generation. Muons are the second generation. And so while an electron can annihilate with a positron, a muon cannot annihilate with a positron.
Well, let's think at one step at a time. So an electron has an anti version of itself, called the anti electron, but you guys give it another name. You call it the positron. So a positron is just an anti electron.
Most of the anti matterparticles we just call anti whatever, But the positron, because it was the first one discovered, got a special name.
M okay. So then, and it's the same as the electron. It's that that it has one charge flipped, where all of the charges flipped.
I forget, it has all of its gauge charges flipped, and so the weak hypercharge and everything else, all of that is flipped for the positron. Relatives to the electron. Most important is the electromagnetic charge, which goes from minus one to plus one. So the positron has plus one electric charge.
Well, there's only three forces, right, so it has three charges flipped, the electromagnetic charge, the strong the color right, and something else.
Right, So it has all of its charges Flip the electric charge. Obviously, the electron also feels the weak force, so it has its weak quantum numbers flipped. The electron doesn't feel the strong force. It doesn't have color, and so the positron also doesn't have color.
Mm okay. So if I take an electron and I mash it up with an anti electron, it annihilates, right, It turns into pure energy, meaning like photons.
Yeah, it can turn into a photon. It can actually also turn into something like a z boson. But yeah. The point is that that electrons matter no longer exists. It's not like you've taken the components of the electron and the positron and you've rearrange them like some sort of chemical reaction where you move atoms from one place to another. The matter that made up the electron and the positron does not exist anymore in the universe. It's converted into a photon, which has no mass.
And also there's the idea that particles have sort of heavier versions or cousins or generations. So the electron has a heavier kind of twin version of itself, right, called the muon, which is exactly the same same charges as the electron, just more mass.
Yeah, and this is something we don't understand why these particles exist. But you see, there are all these symmetries and reflections in particle physics. You know, one is like a particle has an anti particle, and now we're talking about a different sort of direction in which particles have reflections of themselves. So every particle has a heavy version of itself. The electron is the heavy version, the muon. Even the quarks have heavier versions. So there are three of these generations, generation one, two, and three. The electron is the first generation, muon is in the second generation, and then the even heavier version is called the taw.
All right, well, I guess the mystery then is that because I think, you know, the electrons matches with the positron because they have opposite charges, and so they can attract each other and so they get really close to each other. And that's when they annihilate, But didn't the same thing happen if like an electron met with its anti heavier cousin, wouldn't they have the opposite charge and still attract each other.
That's exactly what Dave's asking, and you would expect that that might work because it does satisfy the principle that they have the opposite charges. But to David's surprise, that's not allowed in particle physics. A muon and a positron cannot turn into a photon because while that does respect conservation of charge, it doesn't respect all of the rules of particle physics, and there's kind of a lot of them.
Oh yeah, what are these rules?
One of the rules, of course, is conservation of charge, and so just stepping through the reaction here, you start out with like a muon which is minus one charge, and a positron which is plus one charge. So that adds up to zero total charge. So there's no problem then turning that into a photon because the photon also has zero total charge, so you've conserved the charge. That's cool. But there's another rule, and that rule is that you have to conserve the number of electrons. Like electrons cannot just be created and destroyed willy nilly. You can't change the number of electrons in the universe. That's one of the rules.
So somehow like the number of electrons in the universe has to be the same.
That's right, And that seems weird because like, hold on a second, what happens when you annihilate an electron and a positron. Aren't you destroying an electron? Yes, But the reason that works is that positrons count as negative one electrons. So in that reaction, the number of electrons is plus one from the electron minus one from the positron, so in total zero electrons, and then when you make the photon, you still have zero electrons. The problem when you try to do the muon in positron reaction is that that reaction starts out with minus one electrons from the positron and ends up with zero electrons because you just have a photon. So it violates this rule you have to have the same number of total electron, right.
But I think maybe what's probably confusing to David is that a muon is pretty much it is like an electron, right, It's like an heavier electron. So why can't it count as like a plus two you know what I mean? Like, why can it be or count as as an electron just with extra energy?
The answer is, we don't know. This is what we observe for some reason, there's an important difference to the universe between electrons and muons. That's basically what makes a muon a muon and not just an electron with more mass. This is the muon nyss of the muon, because the universe doesn't just count the number of electrons and as a separate count for the number of muons, and the same rule applies there. You can't just create and destroy muons willy nilly. So the answer is, we don't know why this seems to be important, but we think it's a clue. You know, in particle physics all the time we're looking for things that are conserved, what are the rules that the universe follows, and then try to back that out to figure out what that means about the nature of matter. In this case, we don't yet know.
Well, I feel like you're telling me that an electron can't annihilate with an anti muon because we've never observed it. Kind of right, But have you actually like looked.
You're right, we have never observed it, but we are looking very very carefully, and there are dedicated experiments looking just for this. They shoot a bunch of muons and electrons, or equivalently, they look to see if muons can decay directly to electrons without producing any neutrinos. And so these are very careful, very high precision experiments, and nobody has ever seen this kind of reaction.
So the answer could still be yes, that an electron could annihilate with an anti muon.
Maybe that's right. The answer could be yes, it might be possible for it to happen. And in fact, there is a little wrinkle here, which is that neutrinos count in the sort of number of electrons a number of muons category. For example, an electron neutrino counts in the electron category, which is why for example, like a W can decay into an electron and a neutrino. Which really interesting is that we have seen neutrinos violate this rule. We see neutrinos change from like muon neutrinos to electron neutrinos or town neutrinos, so we know this rule is very very strong, but not one hundred percent absolute. We know neutrinos break this rule. We've never seen electron and muons break it, but we suspect that it might be breakable.
Wait, what do you mean that neutrinos break it? How do they break it?
Well, we have this rule that you can't just change the number of electrons in the universe. We can't just change the number of muons in the universe. Neutrinos count in those same categories. That's what it means to say we have three different kinds of neutrino. That's an electron neutrino, a muon neutrino, toau neutrino. Right, And we do the same kind of accounting for neutrinos as we do for electrons and for muons, So we don't see muons decay to electrons. We don't see muons annihilate with anti electrons, but we do see neutrinos jump from generation to generation. You can have a muon neutrino which then just changes its flavor to an electron neutrino as it flies through space, which seems to break this rule that the number of electrons the number of muons can't change.
I guess it's confusing because you're saying the heavier neutrino is called the electron neutrino.
Well, we don't know what the masses of these particles are. But there's a first generation neutrino, which is the electron neutrino, in a second generation neutrino which is the muon neutrino, and a third generation neutrino, which is the town neutrino. We don't yet know exactly what the masses of those neutrinos are and if they follow the rule that the first generation is lightest and the third generation is heaviest, we don't yet know.
Oh, I see, But do you know that the neutrina jumps between generations, So maybe that's not a heart and fast rule.
For everybody exactly. In fact, that sort of proves that this rule is not like deep and fundamental to the universe like it almost is. Even neutrino oscillation is pretty rare, So it's something the universe likes to do to keep these categories and keep these numbers in balance, but it's not absolute. The way, for example, conservation of momentum is or conservation of electric charge seems to be absolute. We've never seen any violation of conservation of electric charge, all right.
Well, to get back to David's question then, is what would happen if he met a version of himself but where all the electrons are somehow made up of heavier electrons muans, they'd be like a heavier version of him, but also an anti wait, an anti heavier version of him. That's a lot of caveats there. So it's like, you can make atoms out of anti particles, right, and you can also maybe make them out of the heavier particles. So what would happen if you met an anti heavier version of you?
It's a super awesome question, and I love that you thought about this. My first concern though, if we're being like hyper realistic about this, is that second generation matter like muons, is not stable. An electron can last forever, it can orbit the nucleus and be here for billions of years, but a muon is heavy, and heavy particles like to decay, So a muon will decay into a neutrino and a w which then turns into an electron and another neutrino, and so neutrinos only last for microseconds. So the muonic version of you is going to very quickly decay to the electronic version of you plus a bunch.
Of energy, so you get to say hi really quick.
Okay, So let's imagine that you say hi super quick, you high five the anti muon.
Version of you in a fraction of a second.
It's not going to be the typical annihilation you expect from like high fiving. The antimatter version of you is just like hitting another kind of matter, except that the anti muon version of you does also have the opposite electric charge. Now, when you and I high five, our hands bounce off each other because the atoms repel each other. And part of that is because we both have electrons with negative electric charge, and electrons repel other electrons. But if the anti atoms have negative nuclei and positive muons in their outer orbits, would they stick to would they attract the negative electrons in our hands? Honestly, I'm not sure, but I doubt it. The whole atom is overall electrically neutral, and so if it's not the negative electron repelling them, then it's gonna be the negative nucleus that can also repel.
So basically nothing would happen, you would high five anti heavier version of you.
Yeah, I think the anti mu and you could successfully high five you in the brief or seconds that they exist.
Well, again, that's maybe, right, Like, it's possible they could annihilated. You haven't observed that, right.
That's right, it's possible they could annihilate. But if they do, it would be at a very low level. You know, like one in ten to the forty anti muons might annihilate with your electrons, so that's pretty small. But a tiny fraction of you might go up and smoke.
Well, no, a tiny fraction of the anti muine self would annihilate. But maybe all of you would annihilate, right, because you're in the minority.
Uh, how are you in the minority? Isn't there one of you and one antimu on you?
Well, the anti Meu on you version is much heavier.
That's true, but that doesn't matter. It's still it's a particle to particle annihilation because heavier particles and lighter particles can come together and annihilate.
M all right, So some fraction of you would min annihilate. Maybe in either case, maybe just don't try it. That would be the safest thing.
I ask this person, how did you end up being so muonic? That'd be a fascinating question to answer.
Well, you only have a fraction of a second to ask them that. Are you going to waste it high fiving your antime you own self or asking them borings physics questions.
Oh, maybe we should ask them the difference between smashing stuff and blowing stuff up.
Well, they would probably just take the anti position. It would be a fruthless discussion. All right, Well, I think that answers david question, and so let's get into our two other awesome questions about annihilation. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, we are answering listener questions here. Today we answered a great one about anti muons and meeting your anti muon self. Now we have a question here from Bob, who has a kind of a personal question for Daniel.
Hi, Daniel, my name is Bob. I'm a longtime fan of your podcasts. On occasion, you interview other scientists about their work, but I and other fans were in the dark about your research. Would you consider doing a podcast to talk about your major research. You could be the guest speaker and Hoor could interview. I could try to read your research, but for sure that's a lost cause for us listeners. You could bring your ideas and findings to a layman's level, like you always do. I think that would be informative and a lot of fun, and I hope you think so too.
All Right, got some fans out there, Daniel.
At least somebody's trying to read my papers.
Even if they can't. Well, you write a lot of papers, right, like ten or twenty a year or something.
Yeah, it varies a little bit. My research group and I we put out like ten or twenty papers every year.
Yeah, yeah, so it'd be hard to keep up.
I guess it's a lot of fun. I have a group of like eight grad students and a few post docs and some undergrad researchers, and I collaborate with lots of really fun and smart people around the world. So I have a good time thinking about these questions about the universe and how to use clever techniques to try to make crazy discoveries or use artificial intelligence to try to help us sort through these crazy data that we collect.
Well, break it down for us, I guess, Daniel, because I know you do some machine learning, and you also do some dark matter stuff and also some particle physics stuff, maybe step us through from the beginning, Like what did you do for your thesis?
That's an interesting question. When I was a grad student in the late nineties, the most exciting thing in particle physics was the top quark because we had just discovered it in nineteen ninety five. We'd seen the top quark after twenty years of looking for it. Remember, they had built like two different accelerators specifically aimed at finding the top quark, neither of which found it because it was so much heavier than they expected. So it's finally discovered at Fermilab in ninety five. So when I started particle physics a few years later, the name of the game was understand this particle, measure its properties, and see is it the top quark that we expected or is it something new and weird. So for my PhD, I looked at some particular decays of the top quark when it turns into lighter particles and try to understand if it was looking the way that we expected it to look.
So you were getting your degree at Berkeley, but you were working in Chicago.
Yeah, in particle physics, you're a nomad. You just followed the biggest accelerated around. So I spent two years taking classes at Berkeley and then I shipped out to Chicago to do my research at the accelerator.
And the top corek. How do you make a top quark?
Yes, smash two protons together and they blow up. At the tevatron, we smash protons and anti protons together and they come together with a lot of energy, and sometimes they annihilate into gluons, and then those gluons can make a pair of top quarks, a top quark and an anti top quark hmmm.
And then just so you measured like the remains of the annihilation, and then what did I tell you about the top quark?
So we measured how often the top quark was made, and then we calculated how often did we expected to be made, like how likely is that process happen? How often do you expect to get top quarks? And what we found is that it's made exactly the level that we expected, which is why I didn't to win a Nobel prize for my pass.
Wasn't the top quark the one that people that it was like heavier than people expected or something, or not as heavy as people expected. Were you part of that or was that before you?
That was just before my time. The theorists predicted that the top quark would be like about as heavy as the bottom cork, which is like five protons in weight, So they built a collider in Japan just to look for that and didn't see it. So then they thought maybe they would discover it at Cerne, and they didn't see it there. So finally at the tevatron in Fermulab they did see it, and it came out to be about one hundred and seventy five times the mass of the proton. So the theorists were way off and they're predictions, and so the advice there, the lesson learned is don't listen to the theorists. Just go out there and look for stuff and you'll find surprises.
Right right. Well, but you went to looking for stuff and just could kind of confirm what they had found before. Was that enough for a thesis or did you have to come up with something like a new idea.
It's a great question you ask, and it really goes to the heart of something of a conflict within particle physics. A lot of folks who are doing research these days are answering questions posed by theorists. Theorists say, I think the top quark will be produced at this level, go and check, and then experimentalists go and check. And you might ask, is that enough for a thesis? Well, you know, it's a lot of work to get an accelerator to run, and to build a detector to capture these collisions, and to make that detector work and calibrate it and analyze the data and do all the statistics. There's definitely a thesis level work, but I think that there's something else that experimentalists could do, which is not just look for the things that the theorists predict, but go out and see if there's something else out there that they didn't predict. Actually be explorers. There's sort of a pendulum in the field which swings between the theory leading the field and the experiments leading the field. Right now, I think the theory is leading the field because they have big ideas about what we should look for, and I'd like the experiments to lead the field a little bit more. I'd like this to be sort of exploration driven.
M Well, I guess it's kind of hard though, right because in particle physics, I mean, there's so much stuff that comes out of these collisions. You sort of need a theoretical basis just to kind of make sense or to find things in these and all that data, right, Like, you have to look for deviations. You can't just look for like random things.
That's right, because there's so much data. If you just look for something weird, you're guaranteed to find it. And so you do have to be a little bit careful about how you phrase the question, and so you can't just look for like is there something strange you have to think about what kind of strange thing could we discover, you know, and you have to put a little bit of a box around the kind of things that you're looking for. And the useful analogy is like, say you land on an alien planet and you're looking for life. What kind of things are you going to look for? Are you only going to look for cats and dogs and roses? Pretty sure not going to find that. So you got to broaden it a little bit and think about, well, what kinds of life am I looking for? What are the essential signatures that I'm searching for? And so in the particle physics context, what my group is trying to do is think about what are the kinds of discoveries that we could make that maybe wouldn't be anticipated. What are the things that we're not looking for but that we could discover and would pretty clearly be a new particle. That was the question we asked about ten years ago when we started working on this project.
So I guess you did that for your thesis. Do you remember the title of your thesish?
The title of my thesis was something really boring like Measurement of the production of the top quark in the EMU channel or something like that.
He sounds so excited. Well, I'm sure it was awesome and would make great reading. And you did a post dog, and did you also work on that for your post doc?
For my postdoc, I doubled down on that exactly, and I measured the mass of the top quark using a fancy news statistical technique, and we got the most precise measurement of the top quark mass in that kind of data that anybody had ever had before, which is a lot of fun. And you know, as a postdoc you have to sort of like take one swing and hit a home run. You have like three years to demonstrate that you're a good young scientist with smart ideas and you can turn those ideas and your energy into science. So you can't take like a risk that's going to take ten years to develop. You have to do something that you know how to do and that will immediately pay benefits so you can get the faculty job.
Right, right, which you did. You went to UC Irvine, And then did you switch focus or did you sort of continue to try, because then that's when you join the LHC. Right, you switch from Fermi Lab to the LHC, and they were doing other things. Did you also have to switch from the top quark to other things?
I did. I moved away from the top quark because I wanted to not just study the things that the theorists were predicting. I wanted to go out there and find new stuff that wasn't being looked for. I figured that was the exciting thing about the Large Hadron Collider. You had new high energy collisions that nobody had ever seen before. When you turn that thing on, all sorts of crazy stuff could come out, and it could be what the theorists predicted. But I felt like more likely the discoveries would be something that they hadn't even thought of, something crazy, something unanticipated. And that was my scientific fantasy, is to discover something weird and new that made everybody go, huh, that can't be right mmmm.
And So maybe talk to me about this idea about like, how do you look for things that you don't know are there? Because you know there's so much data coming out and so many different kinds of explosions, you sort of need to know what you're looking for so that you can look for deviations. That's kind of how particle physics usually works. How do you even look for things that you don't know are there.
You're right, you need to know what to look for. But our idea was that you only need to know sort of the category of things to look for, and the kind of things you should look for are the kind of things that you're good at seeing. And so the large hadron collider is really good at seeing heavy particles that then decay into lighter particles. For example, the top quark is a heavy particle and it decays into electron, some muons, and quarks, all of which we can see when we measure those particles and put them together, we can see, oh, there was a heavy particle that was made. It shows up as like a spike in your data. So all you need to do then is look for heavy particles decaying into lighter particles in ways you didn't expect. There are some people out there who predicted heavy particles decaying into pairs of electrons or pairs of muons, for example, and people are looking for those, and those are good ideas, But I thought, what about heavy particles decaying into weird pairs of objects? Like what about a heavy particle decaying into a Higgs and an electron or something weird like that. Why aren't we looking for those things? Because we'd be good at finding them, and if we looked in our data they would be pretty obvious.
Right, But do you still need some theory behind it? Right? Like you have to have a theory that says how often you should expect to see those kinds of weird things? Or were you thinking about like totally unexpected, not even in the theory things.
I was thinking totally unexpected, not even theoretically anticipated. Actually took this idea to a theorist at you See Santa bar and I said, what do you think about looking for these and he said, it's impossible. You will never find these things. I have three reasons why. Quantum Mechanically, it's impossible for that particle to ever be made. And I thought, hmm, well that's cool, because then I could discover it. I'm going to also blow up quantum mechanics.
That's kind of that's kind of risky, Daniel though. It's like I think unicorns exist. I'm going to spend the rest of my life looking for unicorns, even though people tell you it's impossible and then you might not find it.
Yeah, but you want to take a little bit of risk with your science career. And one thing that motivates me is that we know so little about the universe. We know there are big surprises out there, and we're scratching our heads about how the universe works. It's going to take somebody thinking outside the box to stumble into something new and interesting. And you know, I saw that same theorist a week later at a different conference and he said, you know, I was thinking about that idea of yours, and actually I now have five different theories that could all predict that particle, so you should go ahead and look for it. And the lesson I took from that is the reason no nobody's predicting these weird particles is not because they don't think they exist. It's because they just haven't bothered to think about them. Because you know, the theory community, they're all very smart, but they tend to sort of follow a certain mainstream and all sort of think in the same direction. And so I think that experimentalists have this job, this opportunity to think outside the box and you know, be open to the universe's surprises by looking for stuff that maybe other people think is weird.
So is that something you're doing right now is looking for these unicorns.
Absolutely, yeah, we are looking for unicorns. My plan for the next twenty years is to one by one look for these things, because then either you'll find them and you say, wow, look I found this thing. Nobody expected to came into this weird pair of particles, or at least you'll rule them out and you can say conclusively like there are no weird resonances produced at the LEDC. Even that negative statement is some knowledge about the universe.
Mmmm.
Cool, Well, I hope you find that unicorn. And also one thing that's interesting about your research is to use machine learning or AI.
Yeah, my background actually is in physics and computer science. As an undergrad, really interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence. My brother is a professor of artificial intelligence, so it's something I've really been interested for a long time. And we have a lot of data that's produced by our colliders. It's like head a bytes of data every day, and every collision we get like hundreds of millions of pieces of information. And the way you can tell the difference between like oh, this was a unicorn or was not a unicorn is sometimes very subtle correlations between those measurements, and artificial intelligence is very good at handling very high dimensional data and summarizing for you, boiling down the crucial information, helping you make decisions right.
It's also good at making fake tom cruises for TikTok videos, which blows my mind. But you're saying you can actually use AI to kind of replace physicists almost to analyze the data from colliders.
Yeah, almost ten years ago now, I went over to the computer science department here at U SEE Irvine, and I said, our networks are kind of dumb. We were using neural networks already, but they weren't very smart. We found that if you gave the same problem to a physicist, they could usually do better at finding new particles or understanding what was going on. And so they took on the challenge and they said, well, your networks just aren't deep enough. And at the time there was this revolution in neural networks people probably heard about called deep learning, or basically you just make your networks have more layers so they can learn more complex functions. And they had deeper networks, and their networks were actually smarter than our physicists, so they did a better job than we were doing at pulling this information out of our data, and that was kind of a big breakthrough in particle physics. People realized that we should be using deep learning because these colliders are expensive. It coused billions of dollars to collect this data, so we might as well get as much as we can out of it.
Wait, do you actually feed it like the raw data from the collider or the post filtered data, or just like the numbers that a physicists would look at.
So these networks can't handle like the actual ocean of raw data, like drinking straight from the fire hose. But what we were able to do was give them sort of more raw data than the physicists usually take, like at a lower level, higher dimensionality than physicists usually analyze, and they were able to reverse engineer a lot of the quantities that physicists use to analyze these things.
What do you mean, like can detect the Higgs boson from the data for the Higgs boson discovery.
Without saying, hey, here's the calculation you should do on these photons. You just sort of give it all the information from the event and it figures out. It learns how to discriminate between Higgs bosons and non Higgs bosons, and if you peer inside a little bit, you can sort of tell what it's doing. And it's found a lot of the same kinds of calculations that physicists do when they think about these problems.
Right, right, And the advantage is it doesn't drink as much coffee as they.
Post and it works all night.
You can enslave it until it enslavers you dan.
But one of the challenges, of course, is understanding what it's doing. There's lots of examples of neural networks being trained to solve a problem and then it turns out it's solving it not exactly in the way you expected. You may have heard about this case when they trained a neural network to tell the difference between wolves and dogs from pictures and it did really, really well. But then they discovered that what it was actually learning was that the pictures of wolves had snow in the background and the pictures of dogs had grass in the background. So if there was snow in the background, it called it a wolf. And that's not exactly very interesting, right. They didn't tell you anything about the difference between dogs and wolves. So we're trying to understand what our networks are doing to make sure that what it's learning is really physics, it's not just some nonsense about the data, like whether it was snowing that day?
All right, pretty interesting. It sounds like you're going to put out a lot of physicists who don't yet have tenure out of a job.
Maybe I collaborate with a lot of young physicists. They're great folks, lots of really fun ideas and have a good time.
He totally just avoided that common All right. Well, hopefully that explains what you do for your research, Daniel, And I guess if people want to find out more, do you have anything like do you write this up anywhere and the accessible way? Or is it all just scientific papers? Or I guess One thing I find is you can usually read the introduction to papers, and that usually get and the conclusion, and that gives you a pretty decent overview of things without having to get into the nitty gritty.
Is that how you read papers? Or hey, are we now learning you never actually read papers, you just read the abstracts.
Well, it depends, right, Like, if I just need to know what's going on, I'm not going to read all the details.
I'm taking that as a yes. No, I haven't readen anything accessible at this level about my research. It's mostly heavy duty science writing and then this kind of accessible writing, but I haven't really bridged that gap.
Well, as you said earlier, you have office hours and you can actually talk to Daniel in our discord channel, so go ask him questions if you want to know the difference between a wolf and the talk.
I guess well, thanks Bomb for asking about my research. I appreciate it.
All right, let's get to our last question here, and this one is a doozy. It's about aliens and multi dimensional weapons, so let's get into that. But first let's take another quick break.
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All right, we are answering listener questions here. And they also to do a theme of annihilation like blowing things up or blowing Daniel's career up. I guess, yeah, how did you? Why did you love the one about you? In this annihilation theme?
Because that is my job. I'm annihilating protons all the time.
All now, I see you're not annihilating young researchers career by inventing AI that does.
The job now, facilitating their careers rightly, giving them new tools to do the job.
Better, giving them more nap time. Right, Well, we have one more question here for today, and this one is pretty interesting and it comes from Chris from Chicago.
Hi, Daniel and Jorge, thanks for taking my question. It concerns a scenario in the book Death's End, which is the final book and the Three Body Problem trilogy. In this book, it's noted that dremely advanced civilizations used dimensional weapons against potential threats in the universe to eradicate them, meaning that in the beginning of the universe, it started out as an eleven dimensional universe, but over time, civilizations that were able to make themselves into lower and lower dimensional beings used a weapon to drop a dimensional bomb on a particular part of space to effectively end their existence. It would be akin to someone setting off a two dimensional bomb in our aero space and then from the point of the explosion, three D space collapsed into two D space infinitely from the point of origin. So my question is, could an advanced civilization as described in this scenario use a weapon that sets off a quote unquote lower dimensional bomb to collapse dimensional space time to the next lowest dimension. Thanks for making science accessible and helping me and my kids understand and explore the universe.
Cool, Thank you, Chris, great question, and it's awesome he listens with his kids.
Yeah, exactly. I wonder if he reads books called Death's End with his kids also.
Well, that's then it's actually a positive thing, isn't it.
M Yeah, I suppose, so the end of.
Death Life's beginning.
There's lots of alien invasion and catastrophe for humanity in this book though.
Mmmm, well you just describe most Marvel movies. So and people let their kids watch that all the time. So it sounds like we've moved past that point.
And welcome to the parenting podcast.
Yeah, do not listen to parenting advice from a cartoon. I sent a physicists. But anyways, so his question, I guess, is there that there's a scenario in this book and the third book of this famous and best selling trilogy of science fiction books, and what's the trilogy called.
The first book in the series is called The Three Body Problem.
I think it's called like the Three Body Trilogy, right, or that's what they call it.
Yeah, you're right. The whole series is sort of called the Three Body Problem trilogy. There's three books, The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and then Death's End. Death's End is the last one.
Wow cheery titles.
Yeah, so they're super bestsellers, and they are translated into English by Ken Lu who's also an excellent award winning science fiction writer and hugely popular. I've heard them described as Chinese Star Wars.
Wow. I don't know if that's a good way describe things or not.
Well in the sense of, like, you know, the cultural impact. I think. I mean, if you wrote something and they described it as the new Star Wars, I think you'd be pretty happy about that.
Hmm.
Interesting. Well, so in this I guess in the third chapter of the of this trilogy, at Death End, there's something that happens with aliens, like they try to kill us. I guess.
Yeah. So the first book sets this up because we discover distant aliens that live around this world that has multiple sons, and that's why it's called the three body problem. And then the next two books are all about how you deal with aliens and aliens attacking. And we actually did an episode recently about this idea of the Dark Forest that maybe the universe is filled with dangerous civilizations and it's not a good idea to get in touch with folks, because then they'll try to come and kill you. So death's end is the flimax. And that's when like the aliens come and they invade and our solar system is attacked.
Whoa, And then that's where the lightsabers come in.
Or these are Chinese lightsabers. So I don't know how that translates ice fireworks.
Maybe they're fireworks, that's right, yes they're light fireworks. But then somehow the concept here is about multidimensionality. So you mentioned in this question that in this universe of the book, I guess we know that the universe started with more dimensions and slowly they've been collapsing or what.
The idea in this book is that they have some weapon which can collapse space from a certain number of dimensions to one fewer. So you take space that's three dimensional like our space, and you collapse it to two dimensions, so things then have to live like on a surface instead of living in a volume. The idea in the book would be that this would be an effective weapon because you're smashing anything that used to be in three D. You're smashing it now down to two D, which makes it pretty hard to survive and So in the long arc of the history in this book, the universe art out like ten dimensional, and there were these beings that were fighting each other. And one way they would fight is that they would make themselves nine dimensional and then would collapse the universe from ten dimensions down to nine before their enemies could adapt, then crushing their enemies.
Wow, that sounds like the most complicated way to toot way to war here. But I guess maybe step us through a little bit. What a dimension is. I guess a lot of people, you know, as we talk about it in our books, a lot of people when we think of dimension as like another realm or like a doorway into something else. But really physicists just think of it as another way to move.
Yeah, dimension has been co opted to mean like a parallel universe or another realm or something like that. It's not another place, it's an aspect of our universe, you say, it's a way that we can move. So our space, we think, has three spatial dimensions, which means you can move in three different directions like up, down, forward, backward, left, and right. Those are three different dimensions. And if space was four dimensional, that'd be like another direction that was perpendicular to all three of those, right, that didn't overlap. That was like a unique way that you could move Our space, we think is three dimensional plus then there's the one dimension of time, which people sometimes fold together into space time. But that's what a dimension.
Is, right, And actually string theory thinks that there are maybe dozens or if not hundreds of dimensions, but they're just so small we can feel them or see them.
Yeah, lots of theories of physics make more sense if space has additional dimensions more than the three that we can see. And some string theories like eleven dimensions, some twenty six. There are arbitrary number of dimensions and other theories. They're all there because the math makes more sense in those dimensions, not because we have any evidence in our universe that those dimensions exist, but just as you're putting the theory together, it works better if space has more dimensions.
Right, So then in this book, I guess there are many, or there were many other dimensions, but they're not small. I guess they're assuming that in these other dimensions in the book, they weren't like smaller little loops. There were like actual other directions you can move around in and grow in be in.
Yeah, when theories develop ideas about our universe, they have to try to match our experience. And so if they're going to have a theory with eleven dimensions, they can't make those other dimensions the same as our dimensions. That have to be weird or different. So as you say, maybe our kind of matter doesn't move along those dimensions, or maybe those dimensions aren't infinite the way X Y and z R they're like weird little loops. But in this book, it seems like these aliens used to move and live in these other dimensions, so probably they were infinite dimensions. You imagine like an eleven dimensional universe with eleven different directions, you can move as far as you wanted.
I guess somehow in this universe that the book is in or describes, aliens figured out how to like collapse themselves to a smaller number of dimensions.
Mm hmm. They've like adapted to living in a smaller number of dimensions. Like if you could make yourself a thin sheet of paper and still somehow have all of your biology and all of your synapses work. If you could do that, then you could safely collapse the universe down to two D and you would survive, and anybody who wasn't prepared would not survive.
Like you could just shed in a dimension or something. But that would be weird, right, Like it seems almost unthinkable, Like how could we somehow adapt to being just two D? Like all of our organs are three D. If you just match them together, they wouldn't quite work the same way.
Yeah, I think it would be a pretty big engineering project, right. You have to think about how things flow, you know, like how fluids flow in your body, and you know the tangle of arteries you have. You can't just like lay that stuff out. I don't know if you've ever seen that exhibit in the museum where they've plasticized human bodies. You can see the incredible tangle of organs and the neurons, and it's definitely a three D setup. So you can't just like lay it flat. You'd have to definitely reorganize it. It would look more like a circuit board, right. A circuit board is like a two D representation of relationships between things, so that you try not to cross things.
And so somehow these innings can do that, And somehow they also figured out a weapon I guess that can destroy dimensions or collapse them.
Collapse dimensions. Yeah, and they use it on the Solar System and like Jupiter is flattened into a disc. It's pretty dramatic stuff.
But how does it work? Like, you know, you shoot it or you like aim it, or you send like a plane that somehow absorbs dimension, Like do they talk about how that works?
Yeah, they take a two dimensional plane and they shoot it into the Solar System and anything it touches gets converted into two dimensional matter.
Whoa sort of like the Phantom Zone and the Superman Original movie? Right, is that what you mean? It's like a like a mirror that floats around in space and if it touches you, you're now trapped inside the mirror.
Yeah. I'm not exactly clear on how big this two D plane was that they shot into the Solar System, but it touched Saturn for example, before touch Urinus, because Uranus was on the other side of the Sun when this thing came into the Solar System. So yeah, it's definitely like you get touched and then you get collapsed.
And I guess the premise is that some of these aliens have this technology, and I guess they can go from any dimension to a lower dimension, right, And so because we're in three D, they send us a two D fire m exactly.
They smash us down to two dimensions.
They flatten us. But there are three D two or they used to be higher D.
It's not clear to me in this book what dimensions those aliens are. They definitely used to be higher dimensional, like they started out ten dimensions, and it's pretty hard to imagine, like re engineering a ten dimensional being down one dimension. Now imagine re engineering it down eight dimensions to two dimensions. That seems impossible. But hey, it's science fiction for a reason.
Yeah. All right, Well, I guess the question from Chris is whether this is possible because he has could an advanced civilization set off a dimension weapon to collapse spacetime? So I guess is there any kind of basis for that, like can you just collapse dimensions in space time?
Well, you know, the first caveat is is we just really have no idea how space works, how many dimensions there are, and what the rules are. We're just really beginning to discover, you know, what space is and the shape and structure of the universe. So we're early days but with our current understanding, that seems pretty flat out impossible. You know, something that you can do with the universe is you can change like how much space curves. You could put mass in it, which bends it. You can change its shape, but changing its fundamental topology like how it's connected and the dimensions, there's no way we know that can do that, Like, no amount of mass or energy can change the fundamental shape of the universe or the number of its dimensions. I mean, you could make these dimensions bigger or smaller, but you can't rule them out entirely.
Right, Well, I guess there's two questions. One is I mean, technically it is possible to take something in our world that's three D and make it two D. Right, it's called squishing.
It's called's qishing it just.
Like iron it right, Like you you squish it, it will become TWOD It'll be I mean, it'll be super messy. But technically you could do that, right, you just wouldn't trap it to move into D.
And we did a fun podcast about whether there are two D objects in our universe, And there's some fun systems where like electrons are trapped into a plane and they move around in new weird ways following two D quantum mechanics, which pretty interesting. So, yeah, that's something you can do. You can't have two D objects in a three D world, right right.
But I guess maybe the question is is it possible or would it maybe require like an infinite amount of energy to just get rid of a dimension.
I think the most you could do if a dimension was curved is that you could enhance its curvature, right, And so you could take a dimension which is like rolled up, and you could make it basically have zero radius, so you could shrink it down to almost zero. The way you enhance the curvature in a dimension is you just add energy, right, Energy curves space, and so I guess in principle, if a dimension is not infinite, if it's already finite, then you could get it to collapse. You could shrink it down by pouring in a lot of energy. I don't think you could change an infinite dimension like our X, Y, and z. I don't think you could collapse those because you can't bend an infinite sheet into a sphere.
Right right. But I guess, you know, I think what you're saying is that you know we know that space is expanding right now, like the whole universe is expanding, and so it could also contract, right. I think maybe the constant might be, like you collapse only one of the dimensions, Like somehow you've figured out how you know, space expansion works, and you can somehow collapse one of the dimensions or maybe even expand it. And so if I could do that in an area, then everything that was in that area would collapse into two dimensions or would it continue to be the same. It's just that to us it would look squished them in one dimension.
Yeah, you could definitely use space to squish stuff, right, Like, pour a lot of energy into something, space will bend and you could use that as a press, like a one dimensional black hole or something crazy like that.
Yeah, one dimensional black hole. Yeah, that's what this kind of would be, right.
Well, I think that's the way you could compress stuff that wouldn't change the dimensionality of space itself. However, right, space would still have that higher dimensionality. It just be that you'd have created like a two D object in a three D space that wouldn't actually compress space. Like if the universe is infinite and goes on forever. There's nothing you could do to remove one of those dimensions. If the universe, however, isn't infinite, if it like loops around on itself, like we've talked about, maybe in the shape of a donut or a sphere, then you could potentially collapse one of those dimensions to have a very small distance. Wouldn't actually technically be gone, but it might practically be gone. It might be infinitely.
Small, right right. Well, I remember in when I took math classes and talked about like matrix transformations that you know, certain transformations have something called a null space, right where you essentially get rid of a dimension when you transform something by that matrix. Could you imagine something like that being done to the loss of the universe.
Well, when we talk about transformations and we're talking about space, we're really just talking about looking at space from differ from points of view, like transform your point of view, you transform your coordinate system. You don't usually transform space itself, though we don't understand why or how. It's just sort of born with certain features. Those features are like the number of dimensions and also the shapes of those dimensions. And we don't think that in any way for energy or mass to change those things. It could change the radius, it could compress it or expand it, but it can't change that fundamental nature as far as we know. But I do think it's a really creative thing to think about, like, and that's the kind of thinking that's going to make some theorists out there go, hmm, maybe there is a way. Actually I used to think that was impossible, and then a week later I had five ideas. So it's a great creative thinking, and I think it's a really awesome part of this book, not something I'd ever heard of before.
All Right, Well, then, to answer Chris's question, the answers to cult at advance pizations at the collapse dimensions as a weapon doesn't seem likely to Daniel, but maybe. I guess you're gonna think about it.
Check back with me in a week. We'll see.
And I guess another question is are there ewoks in this third installment of the Star Wars the trilogy?
There are two d Ewoks?
Too many? Too many ewoks, is what you're saying to the ewoks is too many Ewoks?
I love the ewoks. Man who hates ewoks? Really, what kind of person you have to be to not like ewoks.
I just started a theory that originally maybe the ewoks were supposed to be wookies, but somehow that it got changed at the end or something.
Oh wow, executive producers did their job.
That might be just a fan theory, though I don't know.
Well until then, I think that Saturday and the rest of the Solar system are safe from being collapsed into two D objects.
For now, you still have some room to move around in all right. Well, that answers all of our listener questions. Thanks again to everyone who submitted questions. If you have questions about the universe, about anything we talked about here on the podcast, please let us know we'd be happy to answer them.
Thanks very much to everyone who writes in and interacts with us. We love hearing your questions.
We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.
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