Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseQuarks have flavor and color but what do they taste and look like?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It's the credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn four point four zero percent annual percentage yield. When you open a high Yield savings account through Apple Card, apply for Applecard in the wallet app subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Apple Card and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch Member FDIC terms and more at applecard dot com. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is US Dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digesters to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit us Dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
Here's a little secret. Most smartphone deals aren't that exciting. To be honest, they're barely worth mentioning. But then there's AT and T and their best deals. Those are quite exciting.
They're the kind of deals that are really worth talking about, like their deal in the new Samsung Galaxy Z flip six. With this deal, you can trade in your eligible smartphone, any year, any condition for a new Samsung Galaxy Z flip six.
It's so good, in fact, it will have.
You shouting from the rooftops. So get yourself down a street level and learn how to snag the new Samsung Galaxy Z flip six on AT and T and maybe grab a ladder on the way home. AT and T connecting changes everything requires trade in a Galaxy s Note or Z series smartphone, Limited time offer two hundred and fifty six gigabytes for zero dollars. Additional fees, terms and restrictions apply. See att dot com, slash Samsung, or visit an AT and T store for details.
Hey, Orge, would you say that you have good taste in movies?
I don't know if I have good taste in movies, but I feel like I like what I like.
But does that mean that you think those movies like taste good? I mean, what does it mean to have good taste in movies?
You mean, like if I ate a movie.
Yeah, exactly. Like are certain movies like delicious or like, you know, hard to swallow?
I think some plot lines are definitely hard to swallow. Yeah, but it's kind of an interesting question that you asked me. You're still of asking me, like, how can a movie taste? Or how can somebody have good taste in music?
Yeah? Exactly, Like why do we use the word taste to describe how we choose art or clothing or you know, living room furniture. It's not like you're gonna eat that stuff.
Well, it's probably just kind of a poetic analogy.
You know, right, it's a little bit of poetry. Right, We're saying, here's something we can't really describe, and we're going to relate it to something we can describe.
Hi'm Horehem, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I smash stuff together at the large Hadron Collider to try to figure out what the world is made out of.
And you are a listener with really good taste because you are listening to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
The most delicious podcast in the whole universe. But seriously, our goal on this podcast really is to take the universe and slice it into bite sized pieces so you can chew them one at a time and really digest each.
One, bite size installments of knowledge for your ears, taste buds.
Yeah, exactly. We want you to really be able to incorporate these ideas into your brain. Right, this is something you don't just swallow it like a pill. We want you to really, you know, take some time, chew it, enjoy it, gave understand like the top notes and the back notes and the I don't even know what I'm talking about here when it comes to names of their various tastes.
Take your phone or whatever you're using to listen to this and kind of swirl it around a little bit, you know, let this podcast errate a little bit.
Hey, I think this podcast has legs for tasting. That's what they say about wine. You swirl it around and you look to see if it has legs.
Oh, I don't drink that much wine.
Well, I'm also complimenting your legs.
Orge, Hey, did shave them this morning?
What I didn't want to hear that nobody wanted to hear that nobody wants to mint. Well, maybe some people out there do want a mental image of Jorge shaving his legs.
But I think the point is that there are words that physicists use sometimes describe physical phenomenon that is kind of weird to use, right, It's kind of it's kind of like they're used for other things in the English language.
Yeah, and we've talked about that a few times on this podcast. Recently, we did a whole podcast about spin in which you rightly insisted that we should have called it like spin, because it's not spin. It's like spin. But there's an important point there that we're sort of extrapolating. We're saying, here's something weird and unknown, but it's sort of similar in interesting ways to this thing we do know, and so let's give it that name so we can associate these two ideas in our head.
Yeah, I am a grumpy person when it comes to nomenclature, to naming things. I'll take that mantle.
I've heard you do this yourself about your own work. What do you mean Sometimes you introduce your comic and if somebody if you don't get that flash of recognition you say, oh, PhD comics. It's like Dilbert but for academia.
Yeah and yeah, I think analogies are useful in the English language, and that's why I use the word like.
But we relean on these heavily in physics. I mean, when we talk about things.
Being particles, metaphors or analogies metaphors.
Yeah, and I would admit that we often use metaphors when we should be using analogies. But that's basically all we do. You know, in physics we try to describe the unknown. And what can you do when you describe the unknown except related to the known? Right, So you're like, what is a particle? Like, it's kind of like a little spinning ball. Oh, it's kind of like a wave. You know, how does this thing work? It's kind of like this other thing. And that's the job of physics is to say, here's all these weird, disparate phenomena. Can we describe them using similar ideas? So there's this you know, there's a good intention there. It's not like physics is trying to deceive people by saying this has spinned and this is a particle and it has this flavor. We're doing our best to try to connect these things to ideas that are already in your head to make them easier to understand.
And so today on the podcast, we'll be talking about what do quarks taste like?
That's right, what do quarks taste like? And what do they look like? Because in particle physics, we describe quarks as having flavor, and we also describe them as having color, And so you might be wondering, like, what, but how does a tiny little particle have like a color or a flavor? Like can you taste one particle at a time? What does that really mean? These guys being literal, are they being metaphorical? Are they being analogical? What's the word there?
Yeah, poetic? You know, wrong?
Perhaps there you go, and we will be open to the possibility that physics has taken too many liberties in bending the English language to describe what we've learned.
Yeah. So, and there are a lot of examples like this in physics, right, especially particle physics, because you're dealing with some pretty weird and unknown things.
Yeah, we basically always have to do that when we're describing these tiny, little weird things. We call particles. We're always relying on things that we understand, even the whole idea of a field, you know, like we've talked about quantum fields and lectum magnetic fields. You know, you're relying on your understanding of how these things work. You know, a field in general, it's like I imagine like a field of wheat or a field of grass, you know, like thinking about how things change over a plane. So everything we do basically is some sort of poetic or non poetic extension of the English language.
Today were in particular talking about quarks, right, because quarks have both color, flavor, and spin. But they actually don't have neither color, flavor nor spin.
They have like flavor, like color, and like spin.
There you go, Yeah, there you go. Podcast done, Podcast over.
No, we're going to dig into exactly what that means. But I was curious what people thought. So I went around the campus a UC Irvine and I asked people. First, I asked them, hey, have you heard of a quark? And most people you'll you'll hear their responses. But if they hadn't, I asked them, well, would you believe me if I told you that these tiny particles had flavor? Or color.
Wait, if they had heard of them, you would ask them if they knew that they had flavors.
That's right, if they if they had heard of them. I asked them if they knew about quark flavor and color. If they hadn't, I said, would you believe me if I told you that they had flavors and colors?
Like a multi part question here? All right?
Yeah? Otherwise it was just too short a conversation. Have you heard of quarks?
No?
All right, well, there you go.
Those of you listening, maybe take a second to think about if somebody approach you on the street and ask you what a quarks taste like, or what's their flavor or color? What would you answer? Here's what people had to say.
Have you heard of quarks? Do you know what quarks are? I've heard of them. They're supposed to have colors and flavors. Do you know what quark colors and flavors means?
No, quork is a delightful like yogurt y kind of a thing. So that's the first thing that I thought of.
What the question is, do you know what quark flavors are?
Wow?
You're not talking strawberry blueberry? For the yogurt. I have heard of quark flavors.
Yes, I have heard of quarks another thing, don't know what they are.
Did you know that quarks come in different colors and flavors? No?
I wish I could say yes, but I don't have.
Heard of them.
What no quirky people.
Did you know that quarks, the fundamental particles, come in different flavors and colors.
I had also heard that, but I can't believe I did not.
All right, great, Yeah, they're one of the parts of protons and neutrons, right.
Did you know that they come in different colors and flavors? Can you explain that? Do they really taste and look different?
No, it's just a way that it's describe, and there's up and down, and I don't really understand too much how that works.
I would have a hard time believing that because as far as I know, we don't really see.
The quantum mechanic goal side of.
The world, so I don't know how that would work exactly. All right, A pretty delicious set of answers there.
That's right. Yeah. I was amazed to learn that there actually is a European yogurt product called quark that does come in various flavors.
Is that true?
That is true. I verified that via Google.
Well, technically that yogurt probably does have a lot of quarks in.
It, that's true. We should relabel everything in the grocery store as mostly.
Quarks, quarks and electrons.
Is that going to be a part of physics food company? Quarks and electrons? Yum, yum, yum.
That's right, you can put it. You can have a patent for pretty much anything, and you would dominate the entire global economy.
That's true, And that's something I think most people haven't really gotten their minds around the fact that everything they eat is just made out of the same particles, and it's made out of the same particles in basically the same numbers. You know, you have a spoonful of yogurt, and you have a spoonful of I don't know what's something healthy, ice cream or lentils or whatever. Then it has the same particles in it, they're just arranged differently. So the thingness that you're eating, the yumminess or the grossness, comes entirely from how those particles are put together, not what they're actually made out of, which endlessly fascinates me that was a bit of a digression. Sorry, But onto the topic of quarks being tasty. Maybe we should first remind people what a quark is and where it sits in the sort of hierarchy of particles, and then dig into their flavors and colors.
All right, Yeah, so let's break it down for people, or remind them what is a quarked anyone?
It's a delicious European o gret apparently, all right?
And what flavors does it come in? And what color is it?
It comes in strawberry and blueberry. No, A quark is, as far as we know, a fundamental particle, right, So if you look at the stuff around you, then you know stuff is made out of atoms, elements of the periodic table. You dig into those atoms of courses. A nucleus surrounded by electrons, and inside the nucleus are protons and neutrons, right, protons being positively charged and neutrons being neutral. But inside the protons and neutrons are these particles we call quarks. And there's either two up quarks and a down or two down quarks and an up, and that gives you protons and neutrons. So even the smallest level, everything is made out of these little pieces that are arranged differently. The same basic building blocks can give you protons or neutrons. You're just sort of different numbers of the stuff and arrange differently.
Right, Because I think most of us learn about the atom in high school, right, and we learn that there's little nucleus with protons and neutrons and then little electrons flying around them. But the thing you're saying is that those things inside the nucleus are not actually things. They're just kind of configurations of smaller things.
Yeah, well, there are things in the same level that you're a thing, right, You're a thing, and your configurations of smaller things, and those smaller things are configuration of smaller things, and on and on and on until we don't know when. In the end, everything is made out of these particles and there really are the fundamental building blocks of Like all the matter you've seen, all the matter you've tasted, all the things you see in the night sky. You know those stars out there, and they're made mostly out of quarks. The planet under your feet is made mostly out of quarks. Your hand that you're looking at right now is made mostly out of quarks. The brain you're using to hear this podcast is made mostly out of quarks, but two quarks, in particular upquarks and down quarks.
And they are, as far as you know, the fundamental in the sense that you as far as you know, you can't split them any further, or they're not made out of even smaller things themselves.
That's right, as far as we know, but that's mostly because we don't have enough power to break them further. And you know, there's an interesting bit of history that for a long time people thought protons and neutrons were fundamental particles. They were the smallest things we had found yet. And then people came up with an idea that there might be particles inside the protons and neutrons, and you know, they call them quarks. But inside the field, there was a debate for a long time about whether quarks were real, like, you know, are they really there or is it just something we use in our calculations that helps us figure out how the math works. And they're sort of a lively debate for a while until you know, we actually saw quarks by breaking open the proton and interacting with them directly.
Right, But you don't actually see the quarks, right, Like, you don't detect the quarks, you detect what they turn into or what they break into.
That's right. Quarks by themselves don't hang out very long. They have such powerful forces, the strong nuclear force, that they gather other stuff around them very very quickly, So you almost never see In fact, you never see a free qrk a naked cork just by itself. It very quickly just grabs energy out of the vacuum and dresses itself up. But they're very shy.
Who wants a bunch of physicists to see than they ca it? I mean, I think a lot of people can really.
Oh, I won't answer that question. I'm not qualified to speak to that question.
So you've never seen a qure by itself. You mostly see the bits of it. But from your theory you can piece together that at some point in that shower of stuff there a quark existed.
Yeah, exactly. And also on the other side, remember we're colliding protons. So when we start out, we collide protons, but protons are basically just bags of quarks, and we speed them up so much that what's actually interacting are the quarks inside the proton because the energy of the quark, the energy the quarks have when they're moving in the beams, is much much bigger than the energy that's holding the proton together. So you can basically just disregard that. So on one hand, you can think of the large Hadron collider as a proton collider, but really we think of it as a quark collider because it's colliding these bags of quarks against each other. So while we've never like individually seen a quark by itself, we have a lot of pretty direct evidence that they do exist.
So you're telling me you even name your own machines wrong, like your your machine should have been called the large QUARKI we.
Need you, man, I keep telling you we need you on these committees for the name because some of.
My services are available for a fee.
I'll put you in the budget next time.
Namer that's my name, or scientist.
What you just named yourself the namer? If you're that good, if you're gonna be the I mean, it's direct. I like it, it's simple. But if you're going to go for like I'm in charge of naming stuff for physics, you've got to be a little more creative than that, right, his grand naminess.
It's simple and direct. That's what I keep what I keep telling you guys, you need to be not poetic the namer of particles.
No poetic flourish is allowed here. Huh.
Well, so let's get into what a cork tastes like or what a quirk looks like. But first let's take a quick break.
With big wireless providers, what you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill, the price, your thoughts you were paying magically skyrockets. With mint Mobile, You'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When Mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan, they really mean it. I've used mint Mobile and the call quality is always so crisp and so clear. I can recommend it to you. So say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts. So dit your overpriced wireless with mint Mobiles deal and get three months a premium wireless service for fifteen bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month, go to mint mobile dot com slash universe. That's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Cut your wireless bill to fifteen bucks a month. At mintmobile dot com slash Universe. Forty five dollars upfront payment required equivalent to fifteen dollars per month new customers on first three month plan only speeds slower about forty gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxi speeds and restrictions apply. Mint Mobile for details.
AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested, so buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control. It's time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI. OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds, offers one consistent price instead of variable regional pricing, and of course, nobody does data better than Oracle so now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less, like Uber eight by eight and Data Bricks Mosaic. Take a free test drive of OCI at Oracle dot com slash Strategic. That's Oracle dot com slash Strategic. Oracle dot com slash Strategic.
If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It's the credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn four point four zero percent annual percentage yield. When you open a high Yield savings account through Apple Card. Apply for Apple Card in the wallet app, subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Apple Card and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch Member FDIC terms and more at applecard dot com.
All right, so we're digging into quarks today, and in particular this idea that a quark has flavor, it wears bling and.
No, it gets even funnier than that because there are other quarks out there, right, and those quarks are heavier, so they're just like the upcork and the down cork, but they have more mass. So we often refer to those other quarks as heavy flavor. And I remember in grad school telling my friends who are like biologists or you know, political science grad students, what I was working on. I said, I'm working on heavy flavor, And to them that totally sounded like.
A rap group Heavy flavor.
Yeah, I'm gonna drop some heavy flavor on you today. Man.
There is a well known YouTuber who raps and sings about physics. You've heard of him, met him? I've met him. But have you heard of him?
Yeah? Isn't it a woman?
No, No, it's a guy who does a lot of a cappella songs about physics.
Oh, yes, I have heard of him. Acapella science. He's fantastic. There's another there's a famous rap about the LHC that was done by a young graduate student. She's also pretty good. So this turns out there's a whole community of physics rappers out there.
Yeah, that's exactly what the world needs.
But back to the top of quarks. The idea of flavors is that there's more than just the upquark and the downquark. Those exist those make the proton and the neutron, but sometimes you can also make these other quarks. They're called charm and strange, top and bottom. And the thing that's interesting about the other quarks is that they're very similar to the upcork in the down cork. They're like copies of those quarks, they're just heavier.
So is that kind of what happened that at first you only had two quarks up and down, and then you discovered more quarks, so you had to come up with other names.
Yes, exactly if the first thing that up and the down, and then they found the strange cork, and after that they found the charm cork, and then the bottom and then the top quark.
Because I wonder if physicists thought that there were only two so they went with up and down, and then they're like, wait, there's another one. What do we call this one? Side? Left, right, front, back?
No, it actually did happen that way. There were these particles that were kind of weird, so they called them strange particles very creatively, and then when they discovered that the reason they were strange was that they included a new kind of quark, they called that the strange cork.
And then there was one that was just particularly charming, and you're like, let's call this one the charm cork.
So we were saying that every particle, every quirk has like two cousins or two versions of it. The down cork aligns with the strange cork. So then when they thought, well, there must be a fourth quirk to balance it out, they needed to make it somehow like above the strange cork the way like the way up is above the down. So they were like, well, what's you know, sort of in that category, but you know higher, So they went for charm. Oh I see, and you know this is where the poetry is. They were like grasping for some sort of relationship to try and describe these weird particles using you know, English, and so they did their best, and they came up with charm. They thought, charm is too strange. The way up is to down.
I can see that in like an SAT question. You know, up is to down as strange as to obviously charm.
Obviously charge that's exactly what we did. Yes, somebody was doing the SAT and that's how we need particles. And then when they found another one and it aligned again with the down cork, they called it the bottom, which is not a great moment of creativity, right, But once they called it the bottom, then they had to call the other one the top.
If you find another one, it'll be the lower and the under exactly.
I No. Interestingly, we've actually proven that there are only three different flavors of quarks. So when we say flavor of quarks, that's what we mean. We mean either this first group up and down, or the second group charm and strange, or the third group top and bottom. So there are three flavors of quark, and they're not strawberry, blueberry and vanilla there. You know that first group, the second group, and the third group.
Okay, So the idea is that first you only had two up and down, and you discovered more, and so suddenly you needed a name that tells you that separates all of these different versions of the quarks.
Yeah, and probably somebody was like, what can we do? How can we name it? Maybe they like went down for ice cream and they were looking at all the different flavors and they were thinking, all these things are all similar, but each is a little different, you know, And so I think they were grasping for some think poetic there they were trying to describe how these particles have relationships. But they're each a little tweaked version of the other one, and so, you know, flavor. It's not a perfect description, but it's not terrible either.
Well it's weird because it's not really a quality. It's not really a measurable quality, right, or quantity. It's just it's just like a category. It's like it's basically another word for category or another word for types.
Type. Yeah, yeah, exactly, it's trying to describe basically the type of type or the relationships between these three types, right, saying we have these three types of things, what's the relationship between them? And you know, to make it even more complicated, there's actually sort of like dueling ways to talk about this. Some people say, oh, there's three flavors of quarks. Other people say there's three families of quarks or three generations of quarks because they think that, you know, the cousin analogy works better than like the ice cream flavor analogy.
So there's there is debate even within the physics community. How good you guys thinks?
I think the fact that nobody can agree on how to call them pretty much settles the fact that we didn't do a great job naming them.
But I guess what I'm saying is it's not a property that's like on a spectrum, you know, like a you know, like a real flavor sweet. You can have something really really sweet or less sweet and everything in between. But a flavor for quarks is not really it's really more like strawberry or blueberry.
It's quantized. Right, You're right. You can't be halfway in between one type or the other. You can't be half up down and half top bottom, right, that's not possible. You're either one or the other.
Well, I guess. But then the question is do they have flavor? Like is there something about quarks and they're different flavors that is maybe analogous to real flavor.
I don't think so. I think it's a bit of a stretch. I mean, quarks do have flavor in the sense that they taste like stuff, Like the last thing you ate was made of quarks, and I hope it tasted good. But quarks themselves, you know, they have no and flavor in that sense. And this quality that we call flavor has, you know, only the most tenuous relationship with the quality that you and I think of as flavor.
Okay, so it's not like it's something about the way they react to other things, or it's not something related to how other particles feel them. It's just sort of a name they use for like when you go to the ice cream store and there are different types of things to choose from.
Yeah, exactly. And again I think it's trying to show that they're part of a larger category, but there are different elements in that category.
That they're also ad under the same freezer. Yes, exactly, basically, right, I think they're all sort of a here all together, and you can order one of them.
Yeah, that about sums it up. Quarks are all different varieties of frozen treats.
All right. So that's flavors. And so let's get into what color quarks are, because apparently quarks also have color in addition to spin, which they have neither of. But first, let's take a quick break.
When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite, but the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. 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. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
California has millions of homes that could be damaged in a strong earthquake. Older homes are especially vulnerable to quake damage, so you may need to take steps to strengthen yours. Viesit strengthen your house dot com to learn how to strengthen your home and help protect it from damage. The work may cost less than you think and can often be done in just a few days. Strengthen your home and help protect your family. Get prepared today and worry less tomorrow. Visit strengthen your House dot com.
There are children, friends, and families walking, riding on paths and roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to get home safely. Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because they're people too, Go safely California from the California Office of Traffic Safety and caltrans.
Quarks also have colors. You guys give colors to quarks, And so this one you're telling me is a little bit more more more than just poetic.
Yeah, I think this one really does convey something about how the property works, the relationships that has it really makes the more sense if you think about it in terms of color. And this relates to how the quarks interact with each other. I remember that these quarks are bound together inside a proton or inside a neutron, and you might ask, like what holds them together? And you're probably familiar with thinking about electromagnetism, Like electrons are negative and protons are positive, and so they feel these forces. That's what hold the atoms together. Well, what holds the proton and neutron together is a totally different force. It's the strong nuclear.
Force, right, So, and the strong nuclear force is one of the four fundamental forces. Right, there's other big forces that make particles push and pull on each other.
That's right. We have gravity, we have electromagnetism, we have the strong nuclear force, and we have the weak nuclear force. And actually we've already combined the weak nuclear force with electromagnetism, so you can think of it as three sometimes. But strong is its own.
Yeah, strong is it all this time I've been saying.
For you're like decades behind the time. Man, you should like talk to a particle.
I think I read that in a book that we wrote, Daniel.
I think I added a footnote that caveat somewhere in that book. Yes, it's called the electro Week because it turns out that the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism are really just two sides of the same coin. That's fascinating. And actually it's connected to the Higgs boson, which is also really interesting, but we'll talk about that on another podcast. But the strong nuclear force stands apart because, first of all, it's really strong, but also has this really weird property. Unlike electromagnetism, which can be like positive or negative, so there's two different charges there. The strong nuclear force has three different charges.
Right, And I just want to add a footnote here that I actually agree with the naming criteria you have here and that you called it the strong nuclear force because it's strong, Like that's a that's simplicity I can stand behind.
All right, I'll let people know that this one has your seal of approval, the name has approved. It not official yet, you're still the unofficial namer. Right, let's not jump the gun. But yeah, I'm working on it. I'm getting the paperwork through. Yes, the strong nuclear force has these three different kinds of charges. And you might be thinking three. That's weird, like this positive and negative? What else could there be? Not zero? Right? But there's three different non zero charges. And so instead of having just sort of one axis with positive and negative, you have to have sort of a weirder image in your mind because there's three different directions. You can go from zero instead of two.
And by charges, you mean like you know, if it's if it's the electromnetic force. You know, if I'm minus and your minus, we're going to repel each other. Right, So it's kind of like what the term.
Would never happen? Man, that would never happen?
Which part that we're both negative we repel each other.
Exactly.
I'm pretty sure we're pretty negative some those.
Well, as long as one of us is positive, it will all work out. But yes, exactly, two negatives repel each other and two positives repel each other.
But so it's kind of like a label, you know, like it determines what this force is going to do to the.
Two of us. Yes, exactly, it's just like a label. And electromagnetism, there's two possible labels, positive or negative, and as you said, the same labels repel and opposite labels attract. But in the strong nuclear force, there are three different labels, and the math is kind of weird. Like if you have particles that have all three labels and you bring them together, they cancel out, just like if you have an electromagnetism, you have a positive and negative and you bring them together, they cancel out to zero. In the strong nuclear force, you need one of each of these three different charges to bring them together to get zero.
So quarks. When it comes to this strong nuclear force, then you can be one of three things. And these three things are called color.
That's right, we call them color. We call them red, green, and blue. And the idea is that not having a color is called white, right, or colorless. And the idea is that if you add red, green, and blue together, you get white. And so it's trying to describe the mathematics of that, right, this weird business where you need one of each of the three things together to cancel it all out to get back to zero. The other thing that's like that in our world is color.
But wait, let's like a step back and let me let me understand this a little bit. So if I'm, for example, if I'm one kind of strong charge, Like if I'm red and you're blue, what does that mean between the two of us. Are we going to repel each other or attract each other?
Oh, We're definitely going to attract each other.
Okay, what if I'm like blue and you're green.
Then we'll attract each other.
Like what are the rules there between the three?
Right? And I see where you're going that you want to make this comparison with electrons and protons and understand this, like in terms of attraction and repulsion, that makes sense. But the strong force is just a different kind of beast. It's so powerful that anytime two quirks get near each other, any two colored objects, the energy between them generates more quarks and gluons and other colored stuff until they can combine to get something color neutral. And it's different from electromagnetism in another important way. See the particle that carries the electromagnetic force, the photon, it's neutral, right, it doesn't carry a charge itself, So the electron it can emit a photon and still be negatively charged. It doesn't change the charge of the electron to emit that photon because the photon is neutral. But the particle that carries a strong force, the gluon, it's not neutral. It carries two different colors. So what does that mean. It means that if a red quark emits a gluon, it changes the color of the quark, So it's like if an electron emits a photon and then becomes an anti electron or something else with a different charge anyway, So for the color force, it's not as simple as saying two red quarks can attract or repel. What happens is is that the interact like crazy, changing colors and shooting gluons everywhere until there's the right combination like red plus green plus blue to become color neutral or white. That's the only way the strong force is happy, the only way you can chill out.
But you're saying something weird happens when there's a you know, there's three of us, and I think this is a safer work podcast here, So let's get into what happens analogies for three.
We're not advocating any of these arrangements in your personal life, right, See that's right. What are you doing there? Or hey, you're using an analogy to get people to understand it? Right, You're like making you're.
Trying to analogy is children listening to this podcast?
You're trying to avoid a very obvious and useful analogy.
So let's say there's three kids who want to play together, and they're all different charges. You're saying, something weird happens, Like all the kids will want to attract each other because they're all different.
And together together they have no charge. Just like if a proton and an electron attract each other and they form a bound state, then from the outside they have no charge. Like that's hydrogen. Hydrogen has no net electric charge. If you bring together a red cork, a blue cork, and a green cork, then together they have no charge, no color charge. And that's what a proton and a neutron are. They're colorless, but they have colored things inside them. But those things cancel.
Out, so a pleasant mind you saying, cancels out. So like if I get a proton and an electron together, they add up to zero. Basically they become Nobody wants to be attracted or repelled by.
The Exactly, they're like a married couple. They're invisible in the dating scene. And in the same way. If for color, if you bring together one of each of the charges, except now there's three red, green, and blue, then you get something which has no colored charge. Right, it's colorless, it doesn't it's neutral from the point of view of the strong nuclear force.
Okay, but what if I just get a red and a blue together. What happens then then it still has a charge, which charge red and blue.
Yeah, it's a combination of red and blue, and there'll be a glue on. Those things will emit a glue on and glue ones carry two different colors. The math gets pretty hairy. But they will attract a green cork. And if they can successfully attract a green cork, then it'll be neutral.
So they like being in threes quarks.
Yes, because the strong nuclear force is so powerful that nature tries to make everything have no net color because thing because it's so powerful that anything that has color automatically just like creates particles out of the vacuum to balance that color out. Because there's so much energy in the strong nuclear force. And that's why we can't see quarks on their own because they have a cork color, and there's so much energy in that color, in that colored field that it pulls new quarks out of the vacuum to balance it out.
So that's what happens. If I get a red and a blue together, like a green will magically appear.
Not magically scientifically.
Poetically, a green will disappear quetically.
Yeah, the energy of their interaction will get converted into the mass of another quark, and then it will be complete, and it'll be complete. Yeah, and then it'll stop generating new particles out of the vacuum because that it'll be colorless. But there's another way. There's another way you can be colorless. Like if you're a red cork, then if you meet up with an anti red cork. Like you know, quarks have anti particles, right, quarks and anti quarks well, anti quarks have anti color. So red and anti red together make white and then.
What happens to them? They disappear or what?
No, they can form bound states. And we have particles that have just two quarks in them. They're called like pions. Pions are examples of like an upcork and an anti upcork bound together. That only works if that quark is like green and the other one is anti green or blue and anti blue or red and anti red.
I thought antimatter. When you touch it would matter, they annihilate and explode.
It can, yeah, but it can also form bound states.
This book wrote is totally wrong.
Daniel turns out there's a whole field behind that, right, it's just scratch the surface the same way that you know, like positive negative charges can annihilate, but they can also form bound states like hydrogen right, just the same way. Like two things that feel gravity, like the Earth and the Moon feel gravity towards each other, but they don't necessarily automatically crash because there's so much energy in the Moon's orbit that it's stable. Right, So even though there are forces between them that want to pull the Earth and the Moon together, the Moon is in a stable orbit. In the same way electrons can be in a stable orbit around a proton even though there's a force pulling them together. And upquarks and anti upquarks can form stable particles together.
Well, I think the point is that you're trying to make is that because when you have three cores of the different flavors and you bring them together, they sort of cancel each other out. That's sort of like different colors. Yeah, you're saying, that's sort of like when you get color, like real like a like a red light and a blue light and a green light, you're going to see that as a white.
Light exactly exactly. It's it should work the same. I mean, I'm not an expert on color. I defer to you as the artist. But that's the idea that the math of quark color, the way they add up, is very similar to the math of these real color, the colors of light. And so that's why they named it color. Not because these quarks actually look like anything. Red quarks are not redder than green quarks, but that the math of how color works when you put them together is very similar to the math of or how we think about how light adds up the color of light.
Okay, so that does seem more appropriately poetic maybe is the word for it, but I mean it still it is still I would say a little suspicious to name a phenomenon in physics using an analogy from another phenomenon in physics, which is how light of different frequencies mix together and get processed by our eyeballs. Do you know what I mean?
I know what you mean. Yeah, absolutely, But I think this one there is some poetry there. I really do appreciate because when I was learning about this for the first time as a graduate student, the analogy color really did help me understand that. I thought, oh, it really is light color. That's pretty cool, and so it helped me understand it and then I went further and I thought, well, maybe there is a deeper connection, because sometimes when things are similar in the mathematical structure mimics each other, then there really is a deeper connection. Like with spin, right, we talked about how intrinsic spin is really another kind of orbital angular momentum. There really is a connection there. But in this case, I don't think there is. I don't think there's really anything any connection between quark color and photon frequency that makes any sense. It's just a helpful guide for building the construct in your.
Mind, because I think the combination of red, green, and blue to make white is really just a human perception thing, right, Like if you actually take a photon that's red and a photon that's green and a photon that's blue, they're not gonna suddenly become another photon that's white colored because there is no white frequency.
That's right. Yeah, It's a product of like of how your eye sees color, right.
All right, So these quarks do sort of have a color. They don't really have a flavor flavor, but they do sort of have some something that is sort of light color.
Yeah, exactly. And it's so weird and so odd that it really is helpful to draw on something familiar, to say, this new property of particles we've never seen before is weird and bizarre and strange, but we have something familiar that you can use to base your understanding on. And I think that's pretty helpful.
So those are quarks and flavors. Now here's a question, though, can you have a red raspberry like? Technically you could have a like a red quark. Can be different flavors.
Yes, that's true. You can have red top quarks or red upquarks or red charm quarks. For sure. You can have red raspberry or red blueberry red. I mean we're totally mixing enough a red strawberry.
I don't know a red blueberry quark.
Well, they have blue raspberry, right, that's a thing. I never understood that. Oh right, I mean there are red blackberries and black raspberries and black and red blackberries, and I don't know. I mean, we should get on the biologists because they can name those berries pretty confusingly.
Also, well, I think the overall conclusion is that scientists, maybe you should have been in charge of naming.
Things, not without adult supervision at least. Right.
Well, I hope that clears that question for the people who wrote in with that asking for that explanation.
Yeah. I think people were reading about quarks and seeing this thing with flavors and colors and wondering what does that really mean? And I think on the whole it's confusing if you don't understand the technical aspect of it, because it makes people think of the familiar flavor and color that they have in their mind already. But once you dig into a little bit, you start to appreciate. If you think of it as just sort of a placeholder or a guide for how to think about this, you can appreciate what the physicists were trying to do. But on the whole, I think these physics words borrowed from other concepts are more confusing than they are helpful for the beginning student or the person just reading about a topic.
So lessen If physics confuses you, take a class and people will confuse you as much.
All right, everyone, And if you have a question about particles or the universe or something else really weird and strange, and you'd like us to explain it to you and show you how, maybe physicists are not totally insane. And crazy. Write us and ask us to explain your question to feedback at Danielandjorge dot com.
You promise we'll answer with charm and strange.
This some days our conversation goes up and sometimes it goes down. All right, Thanks for tuning in.
See you next time.
Before you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at feedback at Danielandhorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as Dairy dot COM's last sustainability to learn more.
California has millions of homes that could be damaged in a strong earthquake. Older homes are especially vulnerable to quake damage, so you may need to take steps to strengthen yours. Visit Strengthen your House dot com to learn how to strengthen and your home and help protect it from damage. The work may cost less than you think and can often be done in just a few days. Strengthen your home and help protect your family. Get prepared today and worry less tomorrow. Visit Strengthenourhouse dot com.
There are children, friends, and families walking, riding on paths and roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to get home safely. Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because they're people too. Go safely, California. From the California Office of Traffic Safety and Caltrans
