Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge explore whether the fundamental forces can be linked together, and whether they all acted as one in the early Universe.
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Hey, Orky, I have a question for you about forces. For me, you're asking the cartoonists about forces. Yeah, but it's not a physics question. It's a Star Wars question.
Oh then yeah, I have a master's degree in Star Wars. It's like a JD but it's more like a Jedi.
Nice. So there's like a dark side and the light side to the force, right, uh huh? So are these really two separate forces, like unified by a physicist into a single force?
Kind of? They're like two sides of the same force. That's how they call it. That's why it's called the dark side and the light side of the force. Venue.
So they're sort of like doing physics in the Star Wars universe.
I think it's more of a fantasy, although you just made me think like could there be physicists in the Star Wars universe? I mean, somebody had to design those spaceships.
Maybe it's just engineers.
Maybe the Jedi are engineers, force engineers. That would explain everything. You can be a Jedi. E. Hi, I'm Horam Cartooniz. I'm the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I'm still forcing myself to try to understand physics.
Yet the force yourself? I said you were doing it out of pure joy and curiosity.
I am, But sometimes you got to force those ideas into your head. It's like reformatting your brain.
Disc because it'll fit, or because there are too complex what's going on.
Because they're not always intuitive. You know, the way that we see the universe and experience it isn't always the way it makes most sense to describe it mathematically, So sometimes it takes a little bit of a brain reformat to make it all work in your mind.
But if you have to force it doesn't mean you're donate the wrong way. Shouldn't it all flip?
Dude? I'm not sure intuition and like sitting around the night staring up at the stars, is enough to figure out how the universe works. It needs some sort of method because sometimes the answers are really counterintuitive.
Well, it worked for a long time, didn't it, using our intuition staring up the nice guy? It worked for thousands of years until maybe.
Recently, depending on your definition of worked. I mean it also led us to big misunderstandings in how the universe worked, thinking that the Earth was at the center of everything, for example, not really understanding all of the effects around us.
Well, it's led us somewhere, and we're hoping that it's correct. Isn't that right?
It's led us today here to this podcast, the culmination of all human wondering.
That's where we are, the climax of science. We are the end result of all human curiosity, knowledge and inquiry right here, right now. This is what it's come down to. Now, Daniel say something profound.
We are a flee on the shoulders of science.
I think somebody said that already.
I'm a flea standing on the shoulder of the person who said that.
Already. We're just fleas on the universe of podcasts.
I think exactly. I hope nobody scratches this off.
That's right, sucking up the blood of advertising money. But anyways, speaking of this podcast, Welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we guide you on the journey of humanity from being totally bewildered and confused about the universe we find ourselves in to slowly piecing together a picture that makes sense, combining ideas and merging concepts into a unified understanding of how the whole universe works. What are these laws that underlie everything? How do they come together to make the universe that we love and experience?
That's right. It is a lovely universe full of questions and mysteries, and we are the fleas that are making you scratch that itch of curiosity about how it all works, what's going on and what are the forces or force behind the motion of the stars.
Wow, we're the Flea's Huh, that's not very glamorous.
Flea's good, isn't it. He's a basis for Red Hot Chili Peppers, so you can be a cool flea.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Isn't the Flea also a superhero? You're thinking about the Tick?
I think you're thinking of the Tick? Yes, wrong, Although there should be a superhero called the Flea.
Is the Flea the name of a musician in Red Hot Chili Peppers?
No, he's he's got control of the Flea Force, both the dark side and the lights side of the Flea Force.
What are you talking about? I'm totally lost.
I think we lost our way here a little bit. So let's scratch our way back and say that the podcast is it's about all questions out there, even the ones that have to do with superheroes and not superheroes.
And as curious humans in the universe, we look around and we see all sorts of stuff happening. We see lightning, we see magnets, we see rain, we see stars. We want to understand each and everything. What is the story behind it, What is the mechanism, what is the microscopic explanation for what's really happening. But we don't want a bunch of individual stories. Here's the law for like being, and here's the law for magnets, and here's the law for rain. We want one understanding. We want to unify everything down into a single law that explains the whole universe, because we think the universe does follow a.
Law that's right. It's been one of the most amazing discoveries of humankind and of science to see that behind the chaos of motion around us, there are apparently fundamental laws which govern everything. And those laws can sort of be boiled down to a simple set of equations that describe only a few forces in the universe.
And we can make progress in understanding these things by doing more experiments. But we can also make progress just by looking at the mathematical structure of these forces and say, hmm, what's the relationship between them? Why do so many of them have the same sort of force equation that's like one over are squared. Why is this one different from that one? We can look for patterns between them the same way that we've used them to explain the things we see in the universe, sort of like a mathematical exploration of how the universe works.
Yeah, and I guess that's sort of been the history of science in general, right, Daniel, in the sense that, you know, the world is pretty complex when we see it around us, but little by little science has sort of found the commonalities, found, the patterns found, the underlying laws that seem to govern different phenomena, and it all sort of turns out to be due to a simpler and ever simplifying set of equations and concepts.
Yeah, that's been the trend, and it's sort of incredible. I mean, philosophically, you have no guarantee number one, that the universe does make sense. Number two that we could figure it out, you know, that it's within like the realm of human intelligence to solve this puzzle. And number three that there even is a single unifying law that describes the universe. You might have had a scenario where like different things are run by different laws that just don't overlap or draw dotted lines between them. But so far, the trend seems to be towards unification, towards simplification, towards a single underlying law, one we haven't yet been able to uncover.
Right. I guess it could have been that, you know, the universe worked in such a complicated way that it would have been the equivalent of like us being fleas or having the brain of a flea and trying to understand what we know now of the universe. Right Like, it could have been the universe was too complicated for our brains to even try to understand or figure out how it works.
It could still be right, because we certainly have not figured out the whole universe. We don't know if that's just because we haven't had enough time, or smart enough human hasn't come along, or if the universe is just beyond our ken. It might be that, like the kind of mathematics we use to think about the universe is not appropriate and we're not capable of the sort of higher level math that describes reality.
When you're saying, we could still be fleas, we could still know our general analogy.
Exactly. It might be, for example, that it requires higher intelligence or more brain power, or a different kind of mathematical explanation, you know, one that doesn't favor simplification in terms of little mathematical stories, but more like tabulation. It might be that our ais are more capable of sort of grocking the way the universe works than we are. And then you have fun philosophical questions like, well, if you build an AI that understands the universe, do you also understand it right?
Or it could be that maybe fleas can understand the universe what we do. Is that possible, like for them to have maybe some quirk in their brain that makes them capable of understanding the universe but not us.
It's certainly possible. I think it's very unlikely with fleas because their brains are so simple, but takes. You're saying ticks can do it. There are other things on Earth that are definitely intelligent in different ways from humans. I mean, crows can count, Octopi have really interesting intelligences. You know. We think that their neural computation is mostly happening in their legs, so like their consciousness is a little bit more distributed. That might lead them to a different way of thinking mathematically and maybe an easier way to understand the universe. We just don't know what the deepest nature of the universe is and what kind of brain is best to explore.
So just ask an octopus maybe to explain physics to you.
You might get eight answers.
Though, yeah, it might get wrapped up in all the tentacles of the answer. But yeah, it's been a journey for humans to boil everything down into a single sort of set of equations. Now, how far can we go? That is maybe the question we're asking today. So today on the podcast we'll be tackling the question did all the forces used to be one? One?
What?
Daniel? One force, one band, one rock band, one octopus.
I'm going with the flea theory of the universe. One flea, explain.
Everyone, flea? Huh? But then what was the flea on?
What is the shoulder of the universe? No, it's boiling it all down to one force, is the question?
So, like all the forces used to be one? Meaning first of all, that the forces can change like a force can change.
Yeah, we think the forces operate differently at different sort of temperatures. And the universe is definitely cooling. So as the universe cools and expands, it goes through different phases, and so the forces look different as we move through those different phases of the universe.
So we have some forces that we think govern the universe and how things move in it. And so the question here is was there a time in the universe when they were basically the same thing or when they were sort of acting the same way exactly?
And can we recreate that scenario in our particle colliders.
Well, as usual, we're wondering how many people had heard of this question, this idea and do they think that all the forces could have been one before?
Thanks very much to everyone who plays in this audience participation segment. We love hearing your voices, and if you're out there and would like to hear your voice on the podcast, right to me. Two questions at Danielandjorge dot com.
So think about it for a second. Do you think all the forces used to be one? Here's what people had to say.
I think we have a pretty good idea that strong weak and electromagnetism all used to be one force back in the first gazillionth of a second of existence. Gravity, we don't know. We may not even be a force like the others. That's still an open question.
My simple answer would be yes, whether you believe in creation or you believe in some other form evolution, everyone believes that there was one moment, one singularity, one moment, one thing that set everything in motion. So yes, all of the forces used to be one.
I wonder if the four forces that there are, electromagnetism, weight force, and strong force all seem to be very similar. But there's something different about gravity, I think so. I think that the first three you potentially used to be one, but gravity, there's something different about that.
Of course, the force, the one that unifies, keep together all the universe, and the only master Jediyes able to control, that's for sure the original force for all the other forces. Well, not in seriousness, I suspect that that is what physicists had been trying to do for a long time, to unify the forces.
And although the idea of all the forces coming from one sounds very evolutionary and very tempting, I think a lot of smart people have not been able to figure it out how to solve that, so I'm not sure at this point.
I feel like all the forces would have necessarily had to have been one at the origination point, But what happened after that or how long they stayed one before becoming separate and distinct?
I have no idea.
All right, A wide range of answers, from religion to star Wars, which is a religion to some.
People, to faith in physics to figure it all.
Out our faith, not the Jedi, the physics Jedi doctor Yoda and his theories of the universe. All right, Well, a wide range of answers. Some people think that maybe yes, or maybe not one, or maybe we'll never.
Know all reasonable answers.
All right, Well, let's dig into Daniel. What are the forces?
So first, just to put it in context, remember that physics doesn't just deal with forces. We also deal with stuff like we see stuff out there in the universe, particles, whatever, But those particles are being acted on by forces, and so when we want to when we want to simplify the universe, really the end goal would be to explain, like what is the most basic stuff in the universe can be explained in terms of like one kind of stuff, and can be explained all the motion the interactions of those things in terms of one force. So this is sort of like half of the larger physics school to unify everything down to like one kind of particle and one kind.
Of force, And so far we boil it down to a handful of forces, right.
That's right, So we have three or four or five forces, depending on how you count those forces are like electricus.
Why does you count within tentacles?
Well, then you're counting in base eight, so you're still going to get the same number.
It just kind of seems like you're guessing you're sounding very undefinitive. You're like three or four or five or maybe six or seven, perhaps kind of maybe eight.
It depends on how this is presented to people, and I've learned that a lot of people have had this presented in elementary school or in high school sort of very different ways. And so if you ask people like how many forces are there, sometimes you hear three, sometimes you hear five. And so I just wanted to be inclusive and will clarify it. So if you think most broad we have sort of five forces. There's one electricity, two magnetism, three the weak nuclear force for the strong nuclear force, and then the fifth sort of question MARKI one is gravity. So in the sort of broadest sense, you have five.
I see, I like that designation question marking. Like we'll just call it maybe the biggest most significant concept in the universe that bend space and time. We'll just call it question marking.
Well, we have a lot of question marks about gravity, you know, like is it even a force? How does it all work? Can it be described quantum mechanically?
Dot dot dot dot, YadA, YadA, yah.
YadA, YadA, YadA. So particle physicisen't sort of put that one aside, be like, you know what, let's worry about gravity another day and just think about the other four the things that we know are actually forces, because you know, gravity, we don't even think it is a force. It doesn't cause acceleration to just bend space time. So the other four are things we definitely think are forces, and those are the ones we're working hard to unify into one idea.
But does this Traditionally there are four other forces besides.
Gravity, right, yeah, exactly, So you.
Just listed them, So should we go one by one. Yeah, what's electricity or what's the electric force? Yeah, so this is just the force between particles that have charge. Right, two electrons will push away from each other, or an electron or proton pull on each other because they have electric charge. You could also say that's sort of like what electric charge is. Electric charge is a label we put on particles that seem to feel this electric force. So some things have no charge, like the neutron or the neutrino. Some particles do.
Have charge, like the electron, the positron, the proton, and these definitely feel a force. Like you can make an electric field and use it to accelerate particles through that field. We definitely see that happening in the.
Universe, and an electric field would have to be generated by other particles would charge in them.
Right, Yeah, exactly. So one particle creates an electric field and that operates on other particles and pushes and pulls on them.
And by pushing it pointly, you mean like if you just leave them there, they'll they'll start moving. Yeah, exactly exactly.
They accelerate f equals MA forces require acceleration, and the m in there is an inertial mass of that object. And so basically anytime we see acceleration, we're like, okay, there's a force there, what's causing it? And historically we see electricity in lots of places, static electricity, lightning right now, of course we generate electricity and all of those really very disparate phenomena. Those different early human experiences can i be explained using a single theory of electricity and electric forces.
Now, Like, what's an example of everyday life where we see the electric force, Like when our hair stands up. If you rub a balloon and you put in your hair, that's the electric force acting on your hairs.
Right, that's definitely the electric force acting on your hair. Exactly, you have like ionized particles on the balloon and on your hair, and they're attracting each other.
Okay, what's another example of the electric force.
Batteries, Right, Batteries create an electric potential to create current flow. Or if you stick your fingers in the socket not recommended, you'll definitely become acquainted with.
The electric force, but you'll get a zap, but it's not necessarily going to push or pull your.
There's a lot of energy there that's pushing and pulling on those electrons to create the current, right, and so that energy will get deposited into your skin in a very unpleasant way.
But yeah, won't push or pull push a whole bunch of electrons onto you, yeah, or through you. Now, what about like the atom, like the electrons hanging out near the nucleus which has positive protons. Is that the electric force keeping the electron orbiting around the atom?
Yeah, that's exactly it. There's a force between the electron and the proton, and that's what's attracted them together. You know, in the early universe, electrons were moving really really fast, and then when they slowed down, the proton had enough electric force to pull on that electron and to bind it into an atom. So that's definitely because of the force between them. The same with it, Like the Earth is bound into the Sun's orbit by the force of grond gravity. Gravity turned off, the Earth would just fly off into space. If you turned off electricity, electrons would fly off into space and leave their protons behind.
Right, or at least in a question mark you kind of way. I guess, Now, how is the electric force different than the magnetic force or force of magnetism? Because I always kind of feel there's the same thing.
Maybe, well, they are definitely very closely connected, and we'll get into that when we talk about the unification of the forces, because that was the first big success of that whole program of trying to explain multiple forces in terms of one idea. But historically, like a long time ago, in terms of like basic human experience, magnetism and electricity seem different. You know, there are magnets out there in the world, and you don't get a spark when you touch them. You don't have to have charge to have magnetism, So like kitchen magnets, right, or like maglev trains, these are all examples of magnetism out there in the world.
But they aren't they sort of maybe the same as the electric force, like I always thought, maybe like a magnet repels or is attracted to my fridge somehow because the negative electrons and my magnet are somehow attracted to the positive spots in the fridge. Or are you just talking about like what we thought before.
Now, of course, we definitely know that electricity and magnetism are very closely related, so closely related some people are taught that they're the same thing, and you clearly have an understanding of them as two sides of the same coin. But yet historically they were different. And it wasn't until James Maxwell noticed that the mathematics of electricity and the mathematics of magnetism, like you wrote down the equations of the two, they were very, very similar, and there's this like beautiful symmetry between them, and that they were interconnected. That things with electric charges can make magnetic fields, magnetic fields can generate electric fields. The two things definitely seem linked. So in your fridge magnet, where does that magnetism come from, Well, it's nothing in the universe we know of that like just generates magnetic fields the way that an electron generates electric fields. All the magnetic fields in the universe come from the motion of electric charges. For example, atoms have spin and electrons have spin, and these things have charge, and so that generates a magnetic field because moving charges generates a magnetic field. So all the little atoms in that fridge magnet all lined up with their quantum spin, generating little tiny magnets with north and south poles. So it comes from the charges. In the end, there's a very deep connection between electricity and magnetism.
Yes, And would you say maybe the difference is that electricity or the electric force is of course between charges that are plus or minus, but the magnetism force is maybe the force between like moving electrons. Like if you have a moving electron over here moving in a circle, it's going to somehow influence other electrons around it to also move in a circle. But yet they have to be moving to do that.
Yeah, and I think you've put your finger on one of the biggest differences between electricity and magnetism. Mathematically, they're structured very similarly, but there are sources of electric charge in the universe electrons, for example. Similar source of magnetic charge in the universe. If they did exist, they'd be called magnetic monopoles, be like a particle with a magnetic north or a magnetic south. But we've never seen those things. We've only ever seen electrically charged things like electrons generating little dipoles like magnet with a north and a south. So I think basically what you're saying is that all magnetism in the universe is actually generated by things with electric charge, And that's totally correct as far as we know.
So, like before, we thought it was something else, but really it's just maybe another part or another aspect of the electric force.
Yeah, or there are two sides of the same coin. Right, Electricity and magnetism are really one thing. You could say it's all electric whatever. You can call it electromagnetism to reflect that there's two sides of it. But yeah, mathematically it makes much more sense to think about it as one thing because electric fields cause magnetic fields, magnetic fields cause electric fields, and even light is like an oscillation between electra and magnetic field back and forth. So it makes much more sense you click them together.
It's like magnets.
Yeah, it's like treating the front of an elephant in the back of the elephant is totally separate things, like, obviously they're connected, right, It makes much more sense to just think about the elephant and not just the two separate pieces.
Unless it's like a weird Siamese elephant. Does that happen for other species? I don't know. I think so maybe aren't there like two headed snakes.
I'm going to google two headed elephant when we're done here.
Okay, but why wait? So we've talked about some of the basic forces around those electricity, magnetism, and now let's dig into the nuclear forces that govern how things move in the particle level inside of the atom, and then we'll see if maybe they're all just the same force underneath it all. So we're gonna explore that be first, let's take a quick break.
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Hi.
I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientists at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe.
In our heads. We're looking at a whole new.
Series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives looked the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret, When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, we're forcing our way into a discussion of the forces and whether or not they can all be described as one force, either now or maybe in the past history of the universe. Do they have the same origin? All the forces that we know about, And so we talked about the electric force and the magnetism force, which turn out to be the same force. Kind of right, You sort of see it now as the same.
We definitely see it as one concept. We originally discovered them sort of separately and then realized that it made much more sense if you click them together into one idea.
Well, you keep saying it's a concept or an idea. Is it a force or not?
Yeah, it's a force for sure. Electromagnetism is a force. Absolutely. It causes things to accelerate, and you can think about it either in terms of the electromagnetic field or if you liked the particle picture, you can think about as exchanging virtual photons back and forth to carry that momentum.
Okay, so that's one force, electromagnetism. Okay, So then how do they realize that the electric force and the magnetic force were the same thing or part of the same force.
This is really an example of the triumph of theoretical physics because it wasn't an experiment. It wasn't like somebody went out and did a bunch of experiments and then had an Aha moment when they proved that electricity and magnetism were the same thing. It was just a guy sitting in his study like writing out equations and noticing patterns. So this is the Scotsman Maxwell figured out a way to write down a bunch of different laws like Ampeer's law and Gauss's law and Kulam's law and all this stuff describing different parts of electricity and magnetism. He figured out a way to write it all in very similar way, and he noticed, like, oh my gosh, we're talking about this thing called the electric field and talking about that thing called the magnetic field. But the math is so similar that basically the same equations for both things. And that's what led him to the discovery that there really are two parts of something larger, but.
They weren't exactly the same. Right. They didn't describe like the electric like the magnetic the you know, the force. The equations for magnetism didn't describe how electricharges move. So what do you mean they were similar? Like you could get one from the other, or you could have them all on the same equations and they would be okay with each other.
What do you mean, Well, the law for like how you generate a magnetic field and the law for how you generate an electric field. You write them down mathematically, they look the same. You just like replace electric field with a magnetic field, and now you have the other law. It's like finding replace E for B. But they work the same. But that doesn't mean they're the same. If you can write them down using the same mathematics. That's a strong hint that maybe they are closely related. And it's not just that they have the same mathematics, but they're very closely linked. Like the magnetic field appears in the laws for the electric field because like, changing magnetic fields will cause an electric field, and changing electric fields cause a magnetic field. So not only is the mathematics for each one similar, but they appear in each other's equations.
But then this appearing in each other's equations, didn't they have to figure that out experimentally, Yeah.
And that's something we knew that, Like, for example, you could generate a magnetic field by changing electric fields, right, and that's something we already knew. But Max will actually notice that there was like a flaw in this symmetry. He's like, you know, the equations we have are really beautiful and symmetric and they match each other perfectly, except there's a missing piece. There's like a hole here, Like if the equations were a little bit different, they would be even more beautiful and symmetric. So he said, like, hm, maybe we just missed something, and so he corrected one of the existing laws is Ampier's circuit law, and added a term, the term that tells you get electric currents from changing magnetic fields, and he sort of like predicted that this thing was real and then it went out there and did the experiment and found it. So like the symmetry of the mathematics by itself led him to discover something physical.
It kind of seems like he was looking at physical things that other experimental is found and then he kind of pieced it all together from his couch.
Yeah, exactly, he was sitting in his study and had this like moment of insight. It must have been really incredible. And so really what this shows you is that they are part of this larger concept that it just makes much more sense to treat them together rather than trying to pull them apart. It's like taking the Earth and drawing a dotted line through half of it. Like, yeah, you could do that, you could talk about the northern hemisphere in the southern hemisphere, but it really makes more sense to talk about the whole Earth.
And so what we thought were two forces were actually one force.
Yeah, actually we're just one force. And this is really important work because it not only did it help us unify and like reduce our list of forces down by one, But it also was like the groundwork for relativity. You know, understanding that light was a wave in electromagnetic fields, and the questions about the velocity of that wave is what led to like attempts to measure the velocity of light in different directions and the whole puzzle of how light moves at the same speed for all observers and basically led to relativity. So if it hadn't been for Maxwell, we wouldn't have had Einstein's.
Breakthroughs are you saying Eislein was the flee who stood on the shoulder of Maxwell.
I think he was a giant standing on the shoulders of another giant.
Let's just hold flea. He's a giant flea standing on the shoulders of another giant flee exactly.
And this one more really important lesson in this unification that we're going to see happen again and again then we hope to see again in the future. And that's the unification of the strength of the forces. Like magnetism in general feels weaker than electricity, Like electricity just seems like a more powerful force. And if you look at like the force equation for like how an object is affected by electric fields and magnetic fiel fields, they're a little bit different. The Lorentz force law that maybe people out there know if they're electrical engineers or whatever. It tells you that the force on electron depends on the strength of the electric field, and the force from magnetism also depends on the velocity. Like as things move faster, the force from magnetism has a stronger effect.
So what does that tell you about the forces?
So what that tells you is that as you approach the speed of light, these two forces get the same strength. Like at very very low speeds, very velocity is close to zero, magnetism has almost no effect, but electricity is still very strong. But as you approach the speed of light, magnetism grows in strength to be the equal of electricity. That's why light is so perfectly balanced between electricity and magnetism. The energy flows back and forth because the magnetic fields and the electric fields are the same strength at the speed of light. And that's the clue about the history of the universe, because as we look back in time in the universe, things get hotter and denser, higher velocity, electricity and magnetism basically become the same thing, so at the speed of light, I eat. Earlier in time, these things really were much more unified.
Wait wait, I thought they were already unified. You're just saying, like, back in the beginning of the universe, they were more balanced with each other. But now that things are cooler, like one of them is obviously is stronger than the other.
Yeah, exactly. You can still unify them today into the same mathematical framework. But they were more in balance back in the early universe.
Everything was better before, back in the good old days when electronics moved at the speed of light, back in the Big Bang, didn't have all these kids with their tiktoks.
But if you think about in terms of history, there's like a moment in the universe when basically everything is moving at the speed of light, very very early on, and back then electricity and magnetism had the same strength. But as the universe cools, magnetism gets weaker because it depends on velocity and electricity doesn't, and that's when the two split. That's the pattern we hope to see in the other forces that as we rewind the universe backwards, we go deeper into our history, higher speeds hot temperatures, denser material, maybe things get to have the same equal strength.
Well, they have the same strength, but that doesn't mean they're more or less unified. Like you just said, like as things cool, they split, but did they really split. It's more like they preserved its strength as the universe cooled. But that doesn't mean that they're like it's only became different. It just sort of looked different to us.
Yeah, it looks different, exactly. It's like cracks, like the symmetry is broken a little bit.
They're not so indistinguishable or they're more distinguishable.
Yeah, they're more interesting thing exactly. And if the forces do have the same strength back in the early universe, that's a clue that maybe.
I mean they were the same back in the beginning of the universe. There were still different or two sides of the same coin. There was just you're just saying that they were equal in magnitude.
Yeah, they were equal in magnitude, and so the differences between them were less apparent, and so it's like even more arbitrary to draw a dotted line between them in the early universe. Now it makes a little more sense because like they are two different sides of the same coin, and those sides are quite different, right. I mean, they still click together into one idea, but the sides are quite different. But back in the early universe it sort of made no sense. It's sort of like the Earth right again, with the hemispheres. If the Earth wasn't spinning, you could split it in any way, it wouldn't make any difference. Now that the Earth is spinning around exactly one axis and no other axis, there is a north and a south hemisphere, right, there is a way that makes sense to split it up. In the same way. Electricity magnetism used to be much more balanced, and so drawing a dot line between them really made no sense. Now that the symmetry is broken between them, it makes sense to draw a line between them, even though we still know they're connected.
I'm not so sure about that analogy. It feels a little force, but I think maybe the overall point is that we used to think that we had these two forces, electric and magnetic forces, but we figured out they're the same, and then it's not the last time it happened, right Like, there was a third force that we thought was a separate force, but then we figured it out. It's also part of the same thing.
Yeah, that's exactly where the story continues. And again scotsmen with impressive beards play a big role.
Is that the formula is that why you have a beard, you have plans to move to Scotland.
I'm really not a fan of Haggis, so the whole plant is not gonna not gonna work out for me.
You're not a fan of Haggis, but you're a fan of the Higgs. I'll take a bowl of haggs, but not a Haggis. I'll take Higgs for dinner, but not Hagis. You know, they're made of the same thing, aren't they isn't has technically made or has to the Higgs boson in it.
The Higgs gives Haggis its mass, that's true.
Oh, there you go. And then the Haggis gives your stomach its mass and indigestion. It's all interconnected. It's all part of the same meta Chlorian forces.
Yeah, and then you make dark matter the next day.
There you go. It's all connected me all right, So then what's this third force that we ended up unifying with the other two.
So the next force on the list is the weak nuclear force. The weak nuclear force is the one we think about in terms of like radioactive decay, where the proton turns into a neutron, for example, and shoots off an anti electron, or when uranium cracks open all of these things. This is due to the weak nuclear force.
Well, what do you mean? How is it a force?
Like?
What's it pushing or pulling?
So some particles out there have electric charge and they're pushed and pulled by electric fields made by other particles with electric charges, but not everything out there does have an electric charge, like neutrinos don't have electric charge. But every particle out there has weak charges. This is like another label you can put on a particle. There's actually two different kinds of weak charges. It's not a one number, it's two numbers you need to describe the weak force. Every particle has this pair of weak charges that create these weak fields, and these weak fields push and pull on other particles.
Meaning like if I'm a neutrino and I'm flying through space, I don't have an electric charge, so I don't feel the electric or magnetic forces. But if I come near maybe another neutrino or another kind of particle that does feel the weak force. What's gonna happen. Is it gonna pull me in, Is it gonna impart some velocity on me, repel me, or track me? Or is it something different? Like how is it involved in the k of particles?
So the weak force can both push and pull, and it's much more complicated than electricity because it has two charges, so you have to know like a combination of those two charges. We did a whole podcast episode about whether the weak force pushes or pulls. The answer is it depends, but it can do both. And so the weak field is much more complicated than the electromagnetic field in that way, which is very simple. So it can do both push and pull. And the fascinating thing is that no particle escapes this field. Not every particle feels the strong force we'll talk about later, or electromagnetic force, but every particle feels the weak force. As far as we know. Dark matter, if it's a particle, does escape the weak force, but every particle we've discovered feels the weak force. And ther other question was about radioactive decay, like how is the weak force exactly involved in radioactive decay? And the answer there involves like the particles that we think about in terms of the weak force, like for electromagnetism, we think about in terms of these fields, or sometimes we think about those fields as virtual photons like electrons or exchanging momentum using virtual photons. We have a whole episode about how that happens that came out recently. In terms of the weak field, we have three different particles. There's two W particles that actually have electric charge of their own, and the Z and so particles can decay into other particles by giving off a W or giving off a Z, and when that happens, we say that the weak force is responsible. So, for example, if an upquork gives off a W boson becomes a down quark, and that's what needs to happen for a neutron to decay into a proton, then we say the weak force has decayed that neutron into a proton.
I feel like you're saying a lot of words. I wonder if some of our listeners are getting lost. I guess you're saying, like, maybe the weak force isn't a force in the same way that we are used to it for electric and magnetic forces, but you see it mathematically when things decay or they transform at the quantum particle level from one thing to another. Maybe you see these other particles popping into existence.
Well, it definitely is a force. It can push and pull, pulling and pushing. It can do it for any particle. For example, a neutrino passing through a wall. It can get bounced off by an electron or by something in the nucleus using the weak force, in fact, only using the weak force, because the neutrino doesn't feel the electromagnetic force.
Right, we got that. But when you say it's involved in the ky what is it pulling or pushing?
So forces don't just push and pull, right, These are interactions between particles that can also transform those particles.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. So that's a different concept. So you're saying a force isn't just about pushing and pulling, it's also about transforming.
Forces are fields that fill the universe, or if you like, virtual particles, and they also allow particles to transform from one kind into another. For example, you can have an electron and a positron annihilate themselves turn into a photon, and that photon can turn into like a muon and an anti muon. Right, that's using the photon, so it's using the electromagnetic field. It means the energy of those two particles gets dumped into electromagnetic field and then back out as in other particles. Again, that's an example of like converting one kind of part to another using the electromagnetic field.
Oh, I see, you're saying. The weak force can push in pool things, but it can also kind of act like a little like placeholder for energy between particles as they transform between things.
I guess a force turns out to just be like a feature of a field. Fields can apply forces to particles, but it's not all that they do, you know, like your bank will change money, but it also like lends it out and does all sorts of other stuff. So fields are more complicated than just pushing and pulling on particles. The forces are features of those fields, but those fields can do lots of other stuff too, like transform particles and let them interact.
So you're saying, like the weak force is really like let's just think about it as a field. They can also push in pool, yes, okay, all right, And then later we found out that the weak force is actually part of the electromagnetic.
Force exactly, and this is the story of Peter Higgs in a way that's like kind of amazingly and oddly parallel to what happened with Maxwell. That Peter Higgs actually doesn't have a beard. I lied xwell as an impressive beard.
But Peter here he shaved or not?
Yeah, And I guess actually, technically everybody has a beard, even if you just shaved, you have a tiny little beard, right.
I think you mean maybe half the population gets beard, Yeah, exactly. I think you're missing Yes, I think you're missing a lot of people here.
So he was looking at electromagnetism and the weak force, and he was trying to do the same thing that Maxwell did. He's like, can I put these together into a larger mathematical framework. Can I click all these complicated feels for the weak force and electromagnetism together to make a bigger idea?
All right? And apparently he was able to do that. And now we've reduced the number of forces even more, And so can we keep doing that? Can we unify all of the things we see as forces in the universe as one, including maybe gravity? Question markie? And so let's dig into this big question of unification. But first let's take another quick break.
Hi.
I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science.
Podcast in America.
I'm a neuroscientists at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret, When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories. I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast Asks, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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We think of Franklin as the dodling dude flying a kite and no rain, but those trimmens of them the most important scientific discoveries of the time.
I'm Evan Ratliff.
Last season, we tackled the ingenuity of Elon Musk with biographer Walter Isaacson. This time we're diving into the story of Benjamin Franklin, another genius who's desperate to be dusted off from history.
His media empire makes him the most successful self made business person in America.
I mean he was.
Never early to bed, an early to rise type person. He's enormously famous. Women start wearing their hair in what was called the coiffor a la Franklin.
And who's more relevant now than ever.
The only other person who could have possibly been the first president would have been Benjamin Franklin.
But he's too old and once Washington been doing.
Listen to on Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Jake Alburn. We have a new limited series of my podcast Deep Cover out now, all about George s the Republican congressman from New York who told a lot of stories about his life and his credentials, many of which turns out were not true.
That's like, you know, mister Ripley needs catch me if you can. I mean, the guy who'd wind everyone.
He was very ambiguous and sketchy, quite quite honestly about what the company did and how it made so much money overnight.
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My phone is literally blowing up inquiries about saying, is George going to jail?
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Like why listen to Deep covered George Santos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
All right, we're talking about unifying all the forces in the universe, and it seems like physicis are doing pretty good. Like we started with four apparent forces, and now we're down to two apparent forces because you unified the electric magnetic forces into one and then you modified those two in with the weak force to get the electric weak force.
Right, Yeah, that's right. Higgs connected electromagnetism and the weak force by putting them together into a larger idea. And in the same way that like when Maxwell tried to do that with electricity and magnetism, he noticed a missing piece and then went out and found that it was actually real out there in the universe. For Higgs, what he noticed was it was a missing particle, Like these two forces didn't actually click together perfectly because you know, like the W and the Z, these particles that come from these forces, they're very very heavy, and the photon has no mass, so he's a little bit of trouble fitting them together, which is why you had to add a piece the Higgs boson, and then later we discovered it. So it's another example of like mathematics leading us to a clear picture of the physical universe, which is super fascinating. And it's also a continuation of that same story we were telling earlier about how things come together or are more balanced at higher energies. Because the weak force, why is it so weak? After all? It's weak because the particles that transmitted this field that carries it is very massive. These particles, the W and the Z, are super duper heavy. They weigh like eighty or ninety times the mass of a proton, which is what makes the force weak, right.
Which is kind of counterintuitive, right, Like why if the particles of it are so massive, why a force weak?
You can think about it like it takes a lot more energy to get this field into play. You have to create the wiggles in this field takes more energy because the field itself has more mass, Like it's bigger, it's lazier. Yeah, it's a figure, and so it's lazier exactly. But what happens if you dump a lot of energy into this field, Like what happens if everything is moving at nearly the speed of light, then it doesn't really matter anymore that the W and the Z have massed because you have so much energy, it's like irrelevant. You know. It's like if you're a billionaire, then paying your traffic tickets doesn't really matter, whereas if you're a normal person, paying your traffic tickets can be really expensive, but billionaires will just park anywhere because ninety bucks means nothing to them. So back in the early universe, when there's lots of energy floating around, you couldn't tell the difference between the strength of the doctor magnetic force and the strength of the weak force that had the same strength back then.
I think what you're saying is like to activate the weak force, you need a lot of energy. And so that's why tweak. It's like it takes so much energy you hardly ever see it. Right, Like two particles are like, no, this is too much work to interact through the weak force, forget about it. But you're saying, like me, at the beginning of the universe, things were so hot and so crazy that like the we force got at debated all the time, which means that it was actually not a week.
Exactly, And so that helps us bring these things together. Like as you run time back together, magnetism joins with electricity to have the same strength keep running time backwards. Then the weak force joins with electromagnetism. Now those three all have the same strength. So this picture of like the forces merging together as you rewind time or if you think about it forwards, like as the universe cools, it sort of like crystallizes and breaks the symmetries and these things crack out in different ways.
But again it's conceptual because they don't really break apart, right, Like they're still the same there's still the same math equations. They just start behaving differently.
Yes, exactly, They're not like getting a divorce or anything.
Right, I mean, it's not like they're transforming into something else. It's just like the weak force gets lazier basically. Yeah, but there's sort of analogous to phase transitions, like water is water is water, but sometimes it acts like a solid and sometimes it acts like a liquid and sometimes like a gas. So in different temperatures you different rules to describe them, and so as the temperature universe cranks up, use different laws to describe the physics that's happening because there are different phases there. But ultimately you can use the same equations for the weak, the electric and magnetic force. It's you're saying, like, there, now there's three sides of the same coin.
Yeah, exactly, and so now we'd like to continue that program and also add the strong force, Like wouldn't it be awesome if we showed that all these things are just different sides of the same four sided coin or something.
That's a pretty sauce coin there, So let me let's reac out for listeners. What is the strong force?
Yeah, so the strong force is the force between quarks, for example, and the strong force, like the other forces, acts between things that have its kind of charge. Every kind of force has its own charge. Electric forces are things that happen between things with electric charge. Weak forces are things that happen between particles that have the special weak charges, and there's also a strong force with its own strong charge. And some particles have this strong charge we call it color, and other particles like electrons and muons and neutrinos don't, so they don't feel the strong force. And the strong force is crucial to our universe. It's what binds quarks together to make protons and to make neutrons and the building blocks of the nucleus of the atom.
And that's where it's pushing and pulling it. It's basically pulling the quarks together, or like if you try to separate to quarks, that's the force that keeps them stuck.
Yeah, exactly, It's what binds quarks together. And we think back in the very early universe, there was so much energy that quarks were flying around free. We call that the quark gluon plasma. But these days, when things are pretty distant and cold, everything is stuck together. The quarks don't have enough energy to escape those bonds. The strong force is very very powerful.
Ideally, or to keep simplifying things, you want to show that the strong force is actually also part of the lectro weak force.
Exactly. That would be great. Nobody's figured out how to do that yet, like the game that Maxwell and Higgs played, and we're successful at trying to put these things together into a larger mathematical structure hasn't worked so far. Like people have tried it and they've jammed them together, but it's not really pretty. And the extra bits that it predicts, we haven't seen those yet, in the same way that we saw the Higgs boson or saw the displacement current.
Well, what do you mean it's not pretty? What happens? You get ugly equations, You get ugly equations.
Yeah, what we're looking for is the kind of symmetry we saw with electromagnetism, like, oh, look, these equations. If you write them in this way, they're symmetric. It's the same. You can replace electric fields and magnetic fields. The equations are the same. Or with the weak force you put them in this larger structure of group theory, we show you can rotate one equation into another equation, and so the strong force has its own symmetry within it. But we can't really click that symmetry together with the other symmetries to make it into like some larger machine where the gears all rotate nicely. Meshed together.
Well, when you mixed electric and magnetic forces, you figured out that there's really just electric charge. When you mix the weak fource in that you also have to get rid of weak charge or that's still around.
No, that's still around. And you know, we could live in a universe with magnetic charge that's not a product of the unification. The unification allows for them to be magnetic charge. It just so happens to that we've never seen one in our universe. It's a mystery of why there are no magnetic monopoles. You don't have to give up a charge when you unify.
And so so now the electric weak force, it's like this one equation, one force, but it's at the same quantum field. Different fields, but they're all somehow connected through the equations.
They're different fields. The same way you can talk about an electric field and magnetic field. You can still talk about the field of the W and the Z, but there's a symmetry between them. They're differently part of one larger thing, and as you rewind the universe, their strength balances together. And one mystery about the strong force is that as you rewind time and make things hotter and denser. The strong force doesn't get to be the same strength as electricity magnetism in the weak force, it's still different. Those two lines sort of don't cross as you go back to the early universe, which the mystery is sort of like a problem for unifying them.
Now, I'm wondering if, like the lack of unification here with the strong force, does it mean that the strong force is totally independent of the other forces. Part of the reason you could mix the other two into one equation was that they're all sort of, I guess, depend on each other, right, intertwined.
They were all intertwined, and we definitely show that they're all part of the same sort of larger structure. What we'd like to do is do the same thing with the strong force, but we don't know, Like maybe it really is just its own thing and it comes from somewhere else, and the universe has a couple of things to it.
Right.
The whole assumption that you can describe everything in terms of one force, well, that is an assumption, right, It would be sort are pretty But it might be that there are two forces in the universe, the strong force and the electroweak force, and they sort of like to push the question markie and the question marky stuff. But there is one really other tantalizing clue, which is if you add a bunch more particles particles we call supersymmetric particles, ones that are partners of our current particles, that changes the way all these forces behave and it makes it so that if you do rewind time and heat up the universe, that the strong force and the electroweak force do end up at the same strength. So that's sort of like a clue. It makes people feel like, oh, wait, maybe there's two problems here that solve each other, you know, like maybe supersymmetry is real. These particles do exist and they help unify the forces early on in the history of the universe. So far, we haven't seen any of those super symmetric particles, which has been kind of a disappointment, but it would have been awesome because it would have helped us unify the strong force with the other forces.
Wait, so these supersymmetric particles that you just mentioned, they were never real. You just sort of like invented them and you try to make them work, but they you never saw them in a collider or anything.
We don't know if they're real. They're just an idea, and if they exist, they answer all sorts of other questions about the nature of the universe et that particle physicists are interested in. But they also change the way the strong force behaves at high energy in a way that make it to have the same strength as the electroweak force. That's just like an added bonus. So we don't know if they exist, but if they do, then they help you unify the forces.
But we haven't seen them yet, right, They've been searching for like decades.
Yep, we haven't seen any of them. Maybe they're just too heavy, or maybe they don't exist. We don't know.
I guess maybe the larger question is like why is it important for them to be the same magnitude? Like why can't you just have a one big one and a little one, or why do they all have to be, you know, the same strength.
They don't have to be the same strength. But that's part of the simplification, Like how many numbers do you need to describe the universe? Well, it's sort of cool if you need fewer numbers. You only need one number to describe the electro weak force, like the very strength of the parts of the electro weak force can all be explained with how the universe cooled and cracked. But you only need one number to define its strength.
Wait, what do you mean only one number? Like at the beginning of the universe the forces were indistinguishable.
Well, they were part of a larger thing, but you only need one number to descrive its strength because they were in balance, right, Like magnetism and electricity had the same strength at the speed of light. You don't need separate numbers for them, And the same thing with the weak force.
But you could still have two numbers. Like that's something I guess you know what I mean, Like that something happened in these conditions that make them lose a degree of freedom.
Yeah, that's exactly the right way to think about it. That, Like you had this unification and then it cracked and then broke into two, and then you have another degree of freedom. You sort of gain a degree of freedom as the universe cools and the symmetry is broken between.
Them, whereas before maybe they were act together. It's maybe more what you mean.
Yeah, yeah, exactly right.
You know the universe, these forces were all sort.
Of in sync exactly and We don't think it's coincidence that the strength of these forces was the same number back then. They're parts of the same thing, they have the same strength. That doesn't seem like a coincidence, right. You don't need two numbers to describe one phenomena, especially if the numbers are.
Equal now in terms of making the ultimate progress, which is like finding out that even gravity is part of these forces, I think scientists are maybe envisioning a time in the universe, maybe very close to the big bag, where maybe even gravity was part of these forces.
Yeah, maybe we don't know, and it's very speculative because we haven't even unified the strong force with Electroweek. But the idea is that maybe back when the universe was so hot and so dense, that even gravity, which is crazy weak, was as powerful as these other forces, that maybe it was all just one. And that's the you know, very speculative theory of quantum gravity or theory of everything combines a strong force electra Week and gravity together. But that's like double question Markie, I see.
So what you're saying like maybe a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, there was only the force. Is that kind of what you're saying as a physicists.
That's a beautiful idea. We don't know if it's true. We've seen the first two chapters, like electricity and magnetism join together to make electrimagnetism, the weak force joins to make electra week. We don't know if the next season strong force will unify and if the sequels, you know, gravity comes in to link up together.
And with the New Hope, they joined electric and magnetic forces. Then the Empire strikes back was the weak force joining and then maybe we're still waiting for the return of the Jedi engineers. Yeah, exactly, right, unify the rest together.
Return of quantum gravity exactly. And it might be that back in the early universe there was only one force and then it cracked as the universe cooled and passed through the different phases, or maybe it didn't, maybe there were multiple forces to begin with. We don't know.
Well that would mean that even today, they're all still all the same force. They're just you know, acting in different levels kind.
Of Yeah, exactly. They all respond differently to the universe cooling. But it'd be beautiful we could figure out a way to describe them all in terms of one force.
Absolutely, So what's needed right now? More experiments or more theory or both.
Either we're desperate, like either we need new ideas, like new mathematical ways and looking at what we've already seen, the patterns that we've disco or we need new experiments to show us more of the pattern so we can get better ideas. We don't know which way is the path forward right now, and in the history of physics is sort of leapfrogged each other. Experimentalists discover a bunch of new particles and nobody understands. Fearis fit them together into a new idea and then predict new stuff. Experimentalists discover some more stuff. It's sort of gone back and forth right now. We don't know which direction is the best to make progress.
It does sound a little desperate, but I wish you the best of luck physicists, or as they say, may the force be with you, May the force be one, May the funds keep flowing. All right, Well, another interesting conversation about how you know, little by little we make progress and making sense of the universe, simplifying the equations, making them all work within the same framework. And it seems like We've made a lot of progress, but it sounds like maybe we've hit sort of a brick wall for now, and maybe you just need to force yourself through it.
We need some clever fleas to sit on shoulders.
That's right, you just need bigger fleas.
I'll put them my next grand proposal.
There you go, make it a clever acronym, Force Leapton's Engineering astronomy.
Done.
All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
For more science and curiosity, come find 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 iHeart Radio, 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 by 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 maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I mean neuroscientists at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship.
Between your brain and your life, because the more we know about what's running under the hood, that or we can steer our lives. Listen to Inner Cosmos with Savid Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Guess what Will, What's that Mago.
I've been trying to write a promo for our podcast, Part Time Genius, but even though we've done over two hundred and fifty episodes, we don't really talk about murders or cults.
I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy. We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food? And how do dollar stores make money? And then of course can you game a dog show?
So what you're saying is everyone should be listening.
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