Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseCan quarks ever be free?
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Huh? You mean like some of them are heavier or more charged than others.
Oh, that's definitely true. But also not all of them have the same rights.
The same rights. I mean, is there a particle constitution that grants them certain freedoms?
Only some of them have freedoms. Electrons can be free, but quarks cannot.
Oh, man, poor quarks. Somebody had to hit the streets and protests for them.
That's right, I can see this. Clever signs already set the quarks free.
Hi. I'm Jorge, IM a cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics.
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm an activist for the freedom of quarks.
And welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we talk about all the amazing and crazy and wonderful and beautiful and insane things about our universe and try to explain them in a way that makes you laugh and hopefully makes you understand the way they work.
That's right. We talk about all the big things in the universe, the origin of the universe, how big is the universe? And we also talk about this are things in the universe, the little bits that make up everything around you.
I feel like it's kind of cheating that in physics or in particle physics, I get to work on both the biggest, the baddest, the most original, the cosmic questions, and also the tiniest. I feel like it's at both extremes of the universe.
Right, everything in between. You don't care.
That's chemistry, man, who.
Cares chemistry, biology, philosophy, live your happiness. That's right, Democracy, human rights, that's all beyond the scope of your physics research.
Yeah, exactly. And I don't mean to say nobody cares about chemistry. Chemistry is really important, otherwise we wouldn't have pharmaceuticals and all that good stuff.
I also said human rights that, but you don't seem to uh want a caveat human rights as well.
I'm more worried about backlash from chemists than people advocate.
Chemists have acids, acids and dangerous things that can kill you.
Yeah, but maybe it's just that you know that stuff is harder, it's more complicated for me. Physics at the streams, they're really tiny and they're really big. It's sort of the simplest questions, the most basic, and therefore the most interesting and also easier to grapple with.
Well, today we're getting into some things that are kind of the opposite of that, Right, We're getting into the nitty gritty complex details of the legality of particles, kind of what rights particles have.
Yeah, because when we study the universe, what we'd like to do is to take it apart. If I look at the banana in front of me and I say, what's this made out of? I mean, what particles is it made out of? And when you do that, you're sort of taking an intellectual leap. You're saying, this banana could get blown up into its constituent particles. You could break it up into these little bits. And that's an important part of how we think about understanding the universe, but it's not always possible to actually separate those particles.
Right, do you actually have a banana in front of you, Daniel, I have.
A metaphysical banana here in front of me.
Here, I'll pass you my banana using the Ray and Kylo ren teleportation system.
Just digitize the banana and email it to me.
Oh, there you go, there you go.
Somebody should develop a device that scans a banana, turns it into an electronic banana signature, and then at the other side, like three D prints of banana.
Right, using AI. Don't forget AI.
Using AI precisely because every kitchen appliance needs AI now.
But anyways, we are going to be talking about some of the rules that govern the universe at the smallest levels, because there are rules, and that's kind of what physics is a little bit all about.
Right.
Yeah, And once recently on a podcast, we talked about magnetic monopoles. How you could take an atom and separate its positive and negative charges and move them far away to infinity and they could ignore each other. But you can't do that with the north and south of the magnetic monopole, and today we'll be talking about a sort of similarly confusing, sticky topic in particle physics.
Right, it's a rule about the universe that physicists don't really know why it's there. Right, It's kind of another of the big mysteries in nature.
Yeah, I think that describes every rule about the universe. You know, we don't know why any of them are there. Some people write in and they ask me questions like that. They say, why is electromagnetism this way and not that other way? And I think, Wow, you're a physicist because that's the question we all want the answer to. We don't know.
You're a physicist because you don't know anything. You too can get paid for it like I am, because.
You embrace your ignorance and you want to ask why. And it's a deep question in physics, why is something this way not the other way? You know, maybe someday in the future of physics will be looking at the equations of the universe and will say, oh, it makes sense. This is the only set of equations we could possibly have, and so it has to be this way. Or we could be looking at the equations to say, well, this is one of ten to the one hundred possible universes. So why is it this way not the other way? We might not.
Ever know right, right again, you don't know.
That's the way you summarize physics.
In some we don't know. We have no idea, which is the title of a great book I've heard about which everyone should check out.
I don't know. I heard it has a lot of puns in it.
Oh, like the are they as good as the ones we have in our show here?
They're better because they're edited. Thank you, Courtney.
Well. Today on the podcast, we'll be tackling a pretty sticky subject, and it's the question of a special rule that governs one of the particles of nature. So today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question why can quarks never be alone? Yeah, So it turns out that one of the fundamental particles in nature, the quark, has some special rules that govern what it can and cannot do.
That's right. Quarks feel the strong nuclear force and electrons don't. And anything that feels a strong nuclear force is subject to that forces really weird properties. We've talked about it a few times in the podcast, how it has strange properties like color. But today we'll be talking about one very special property that really likes to stick these quirks together.
Yeah, and so the question is what weather coarse can be alone by themselves? And you know, does it mean alone like like psychologically like they feel alone, or is it like alone where they have to be they can't be in a room by themselves.
Yeah. You can't put them in solitary confinement for too long or they go crazy. Is this another kind of quirk you never heard about, Not the strange coirk or the charm quirk, but the crazy quark.
That's right, the inmate quirk.
No, that's not a laughing matter. Solitary confinement is pretty serious stuff. But we have found in physics, and as you said earlier, we don't know why, but we have found in physics that when you try to separate a quark, to pull it far away from everything else, to isolate it the way you could take, for example, an electron and put it in the middle of space, you just can't do that with a quark. It's physically impossible.
Wow, the universe doesn't allow it.
It would take an infinitema out of energy, which would then just collapse into a bunch more quarks.
All right, we'll get into that in more detail. But first, as usual, we were curious to know how many people out there, first of all, had heard of quarks and second of all new whether or not quarts can ever be alone.
So, you see, Irvine was closed for the holidays, and so these questions went to random strangers at coffee shops who were amenable to answering questions. And as usual at U see Irvine, ninety nine point nine percent of random students are willing to answer my questions. But the rate of acceptance at coffee shops is much much lower, which I think says something awesome about students at U SEEI.
So a physicist wearing sandals and scraggly hair is normal at a college campus, but in a commercial, regular coffee shop, you're seen with more skepticism.
Yeah, or you know, maybe it's just the slice of people that you encounter at a coffee shop are less open to that kind of stuff.
We'll surprised you did it twice, because they didn't kick you out the first time.
I had to go to a variety of coffee shops.
See, you try never to hit the same one twice. That's how you can.
They have my picture up on the wall now, and so they pressed that little red button under the counter when they see me coming.
Oh man, I can picture you walking into one in the disguise, just to try to get your coffee.
That's right, I'm disguised as a chemist sometimes.
Mmm.
You wear the groutch of marks, you know, glasses and nose and mustache. But no, way, that's already you.
No, I just put on a lab coat and safety goggles.
Right, lae, chemistry, I see you wear nice clothes. Is that what you're saying.
Physicists have to dress up to become chemists? Yes, that's definitely true. All right. So here's what people at that coffee shop had to say. And have you guys heard of the particle called a cork?
Yes?
Now, did you know the quarks can never be found by themselves? No, I've heard of it, but I don't know too much about it. You never did you know that you can never find a cork by itself? That can never be alone?
No?
Yeah? Did you know that quarks can never be alone?
No?
I did not know that.
Although there are two meanings for quark, I wasn't sure if you meant the yogurt meaning or the particle meaning I think can be alone.
Yeah, but I can't tell you what it is. Do you know that quarks can never be alone?
Is it an animal?
No, it's a tiny little part of them. Okay, yes, you know the quarks can never be by themselves. Actually I didn't know that. I guess I haven't looked into it deep enough. No, I actually think I have. And I have no idea why I wouldn't know that or what it is. Yeah.
Of course they're made up of blue ons, I believe, and they make up protons and electrons, and I think neutrons too cool.
Did you know that quarks can never be by themselves? They can never be alone?
Yeah, because they have to switch between because I don't I tried to study this, but I don't completely understand it because I know I can't remember as works are labeled red, blue, green, and.
They have to switch from zone to zone.
They always have to be occupied, and they can't exist by themselves.
You know what?
I do not know why?
No, I couldn't figure that out. Actually, qua ar kan No, I haven't all right, I guess not a lot of people had heard of the quark.
No, there's not a lot of familiarity about the quark the particle, though, one friendly person commented on quark the yogurt.
Oh again, all right, it must be a really popular brand of yogurt.
It's a whole it's a whole dairy product. I think it's not even just a brand. It's like a kind of thing, you know.
Well. I like how this person said, do you mean the particle or the yogurt? Because this person knew about both, and he's like, 's terrify are we talking? Are we talking food or physics? Here?
She was ready to talk about quark the yogurt or quark the particles.
Yes, it's a renaissance person right there.
Yeah, precisely. And there were some misunderstandings about quarks, people who think that they are made up of gluons or that electrons are made up of quarks. So definitely a topic that we should cover. Explain to people what quarks are and how they work.
Right, because obviously they're not made out of gluons. Everyone knows that.
No, of course, not glue is made out of glue.
That right. It's a sticky subject, of course. Yeah, So let's get into it. So, first of all, Daniel, what are quarks, and talk to me about this idea that they can never be alone.
Yeah, so, quarks are one of the fundamental particles. If you take matter apart, you'll find, of course that it's made out of atoms, and those atoms have inside them electrons whizzing around the nucleus, and then inside the nucleus we have neutrons and protons.
Even glue is made out of those same things.
Everything is made out of those things. Everything that you've eaten, at least, there are kinds of matter out there in the universe that are not made out of atoms, dark matter specifically, but everything that you've encountered, everything you've sat on, everything any human is ever eaten or thrown at each other is made out of atoms. And so it's pretty universal recipe.
Right, What if my kid ate some dark matter? Should I call the doctor or.
I think Sweden because you're getting a Nobel prize proving that dark.
Matter exists for feeding my child dark matter?
Are you talking about the dark matter that goes into your child or out of your child though, because that's a whole different topic.
All right, let's move on before somebody calls Social services of me.
No, But the amazing thing about this is that it's a recipe for all kinds of stuff. Like everything out there has the same number of protons, neutrons and electrons. I just can't get over this fact. Like every kind of material out there, every element, right has one proton per electron and just about one neutron per proton. So it's one to one to one no matter what.
It is, right, And so it's not just any particle or any random or insignificant particle nature. This is like the particle, right, I mean, you and I are made out of them. Everyone is made out of them. It's one of the big two particles that make up everything.
Yeah, and so the most of the stuff that's inside you is made out of these protons and neutrons. But the protons and neutrons are not actually themselves fundamental. They're made of these smaller particles, and those are the quarks, the upcork and the down quark. And you mix those together in one way, you get a proton. You mix them together another way you get a neutron. But of course the proton and the neutron, you know, those are the physical particles that we can see. We can interact with. We can separate them. You can have like one proton and have one neutron over here. And for a long time people thought that they might be fundamental. But then in the seventies, by shooting super high energy electrons at the proton, we found that there was structure inside the proton. We found that there were particles inside there. And so that's what the quarks are.
Right, And so that's what a quark is. And there's something funny about them because, for example, electrons can be by themselves. You can't have it like a think you can hold a single electron in your hand. For example, the quarks you're telling me have come as a kind of a special rule that they can never be alone.
Yeah. The way that we found out about electrons, you know, is that we separated them from their atom. We isolated them so we could study them. We talked about in the podcast. JG. Thompson ionized atoms and made beams of electrons before he even knew what he was doing. And the way we discovered the nucleus is the same way we separated it. We broke the atom into pieces so we could study it. But with the quarks, we've never been able to do that. What we've been able to do is poke the inside of the proton and see the quarks sort of bouncing around in there. We have been able to break up the proton into quarks, but we can't ever see the quarks by themselves. They are so much in love with being together. You always find them in pairs or triplets.
Well, I'm a little bit confused because you told me that. You know, at the large pattern collider, you take protons and you smash them together. But when you smash them together, you're saying they don't actually break apart.
We do smash protons together at the large hadron collide, right, I was not lying. And what happens there is that the quarks inside one proton interact with the quarks inside the other proton. But there's a rule about sort of the maximum distance that a quark can ever be from another quark. And so what happens there is you can have like two quarks go pair off to be their own little particle. The quarks can never leave by themselves.
Oh, so you smash protons together, which are made out of quarks inside. But when they smash it together, it's not like an explosion where everything flies off in all kinds of directions. The quarks. You know, you can't have a quark flying off from a collision by itself.
That's right, you can't do that. They always have to be found in pairs or in triplets. There's no way to find a quark all by itself.
Oh well, you've never seen it by itself, right.
Yes, you're right. In physics, we should never say never. We don't think it's possible. Nobody's ever seen a free quark. Nobody's ever isolated a quark by itself. Quarks are in that sense more mathematical than any other kind of particle because we've never seen them on their own. They only exist sort of as part of our model for what's inside all these particles that we think are made up of quarks. You got protons, you got neutrons, and you mix quarks and lots of other ways, you can get all sorts of other crazy particles, pions and masons and ata particles and omega particles and all sorts of crazy stuff. Right, bananons, you're just gonna try to slip that in there.
You would just go with it, But I guess paint the picture from me. Right. So at the large Hattern collider, you have protons kind of going at each other, right, They're coming at huge speeds, and in each proton you have three quarks kind of bound together. They're stuck together at each one, and then they the two protons smash into each other. They do, and you create this mess. And you're saying that you know, everything that leaves out of that collision, that explosion has to be paired of, like the no matter how you smash them together, somehow, they always the quarks always pair up when they fly off together.
That's right. And one possibility is that you just sort of rearrange the quarks. You say, I got three quarks from this proton, I got three quarks from the other proton, so I'll just pair them up. Maybe I'll get like three pairs of quarks and this is going to go fly off and make me three pions. That's one possibility. But sometimes if you put enough energy into these things, the quarks sort of try to go free. Like you push one quark off in one direction, another one off in another direction, and there and none of the other original quarks from the proton are near it, and it's like flying off into outer space by itself. Uh huh, But physics says no, and what yeah, And what happens there is that some of its energy gets converted into making a new quark. It pops a new quirk out of the vacuum, so that quark doesn't have to be by itself.
Wait what so you're saying one of the quarks after the collision was going off to the left, but because physics says no, it it disappears and it reappears somewhere else.
Say, for example, you have a quark going off really fast to the left and another quark going off really fast to the right, so the distance between them is growing. Well, what happens is that takes a huge amount of energy, and that energy gets converted into making new quarks. Like you create new quarks, one for the one going to the left and one for the one going to the right, so that each of them now has a companion, so they're not by themselves.
The universe is like you're going on by yourself here, I'll make you a companion.
Yeah, and that's because the strong nuclear force is super duper weird. And we'll talk about that more detail in a minute. I hope. But the short version is unlike electromagnetism, where as the distance between them grows, the force gets weaker and fades in the strong force, as the distance between them grows, the force gets stronger, so it takes more and more energy to separate them, and eventually there's enough energy to create new matter.
All right, let's get into the details of that a little bit more. But I think it's pretty considered of the universe not to be looking out for quarks like that.
You know, depends. I mean, if you're quirky, you just want some like me time, then it's not a curse.
Love is a curse, you're saying.
If you ever grew up in a house that's kind of crowded, you'd know that there's value to time by yourself. You know, you want time with your book. And just like nobody asked me to do something or ask me a question, you know.
My family is pretty quirky.
You got some strange quarks in your family and some charming quarks, you.
Know, of course. Right, all right, let's get into more of this kind of mysterious force that makes quarks just so they're not alone. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, I know, so it seems like the universe doesn't like for quarks to be alone, to the point where it even makes up new quarks when it needs to. Whenever it sees a quark going off to be alone, it makes a new quirk to pair up with it, which is pretty amazing. And you're telling me that this is all because of the force between quarks.
Yeah, one of the three or four fundamental forces of nature, depending how you count. We have gravity, which we don't understand quantum mechanically. We have electromagnetism and the weak force, which I think of together as boundaries as part of the electroweak force. And then we have the strong nuclear force, and this is a thing that holds the proton together and whole the neutron together. And also it's a thing that holds the nucleus together because there's little residual bits of it left over after you've made the proton and the neutron. But this force is really powerful and really different from any of the other forces.
It's called the strong force, right.
Yeah, not the strange force, though maybe they should have called it the strange.
Nuclear If you get a PC in the strong into the strange force, does that make you a doctor strange?
It absolutely officially does, and gives you power over time. It's happened to everybody.
Right, right, even the Benedict Cumber batches of the world.
Yeah. And you know, we like to categorize things in physics. We like to say, all right, these things are all similar to each other, and what connections can we draw between them? But we also like to contrast things. We like to say, oh, look, these forces are similar because they're all forces, but they have some big differences in them, and so those things can teach us like what kind of forces can there be in the universe?
Right?
And the strong force is different and basically every that it can be different from the other forces.
Really, huh, So it's one of the four fundamental forces, but it's very different than the other three or the other two.
Yeah, it's very different from I would say the other two. For example, gravity has one way it can push, right, it can only pull things together. And that's because there's only one kind of mass. You can have positive and negative mass. It's so gravity is only attractive. Right. Electromagnetism right works on positive and negative charges, and so it can both push and pull. It pushes if two positive charges or negative charges come near each other. It pulls if you have opposite charges near each other. Right, But the strong force is weird because it has three charges and we call those red, green, and blue, and so's it just it blows your mind and thinking like wow, there can be like three different kinds of charges, and it requires different kinds of math like to balance them out, to neutralize them, and all sorts of stuff.
Right, because I was just thinking that the one I think most people are familiar with is the electro mat magnetic force. Right in terms of they're being charges. We're so used to just they're being two right plus or minus yeah.
You're used to there being two, and it used to being there being two kinds of magnets right north and south. What if there were like three kinds of magnets, you know, north, south and east or something, and the east magnet was super weird and like it would it would be a really different force. Well, that's what the strong force is. It has three kinds of charges.
Like a plus, minus and x.
Well, red, green, and blue. And that's why you can have bound states of two quarks because you can have like a red and an anti red, or three quarks if you have like a red, green, and blue because red, green, and blue add up to neutral.
Well, I guess step me through this a little bit more because I know that you know, if I have a plus charge and a minus charge, they'll attract each other in electromagnetic forces, or if you have two pluses, they'll repel each other. So how does it work if you have three? You know, it's like two. I know three is kind of a weird thing.
Are you asking me how to have a three sume in particle?
I was trying to avoid that reference, But if you want to go there, let's go there.
I mean, it turns out to be pretty different. If two pluses and a minus or two minuses and a plus.
I see, it's a whole different genre.
Right, exactly. No, it's a very different kind of situation. And the weird thing is basically, anything that has color that isn't neutral will attract the other thing. So red will attract red, red will attract anti red. Well, red will attract green, green will attract blue, blue will attract anti blue. It's basically always a party when it comes to this trick board.
Wait, so, anything that has a color charge attracts other things with color charge.
Anything that has a color charge will interact with the other things that have a color charge. Whether or not they attract or repel depends on where they are, how close they are. Well, if you take a red cork and an anti red quark, if they're too close together, they will repel each other. If they're too far apart, they will attract each other.
Oh, I see, so they like to be sort of a specific distance apart.
Yes, they like to be a specific distance apart. Anything else takes more energy. So if you have a red cork and an anti red cork and you want them closer together, you got to squeeze them because they repel that. They avoid that. Similarly, if you want them further apart, you got to put in energy, And as they get further and further apart, it takes more and more energy. And that's the thing that's really weird about the strong force. Like with electromagnetism, you take plus and a minus and you pull them apart, the force between them starts to fade right as they get further and further apart, because like one over are squared.
But what about like a red and a green.
Same situation. I mean, there's some little details there for higher order calculations, but roughly it's about the same.
Huh.
So everyone wants to be with everybody else but not too close, but not too close. So why isn't everything just being pulled together? Why aren't my red quarks just totally you know, pulling the red quarks in my microphone or in the sun to.
Me because your red quarks are all in color neutral bound states, mostly protons and neutrons.
Oh, they're happy. They're happy three and a happy threesome.
They're in a happy three someome. Yeah, And you know why is the nucleus hell together? Because there's a little bit of strong force that leaks out of the proton and holds those protons together. So mostly they're in a totally happy state. But you know, sometimes a neutron decays and do a proton.
Oh, I see. It's like asking, why aren't all my plus charges in my body attracting the plus charges in the sun. And the answer is that my plus charges are all happy stuck with a negative charge inside of me.
Yeah, exactly. Most of your plus charges are in neutral atoms, and so the neutral atoms don't really interact unless you get really close, and then it depends on how close you are to the plus part of the minus part. But on average you're neutral, and so you don't interact with the electric charges in the rock or in your most or whatever.
So if I had like the power to create a red quirk right in front of me, like poof, I just made one in front of me, it would be super attracted to or maybe not would look for the closest single quirk and get attracted to that.
That's right, But it would take an enormous amount of energy to create that quirk and have it be really far away from any partner.
Oh, it's because the potential energy would be so big.
Precisely, think about the opposite. Say you had a quirk and an anti red quirk and you wanted to separate them. How much energy would it take to separate them to be like, you know, one galaxy away from each other. Well, every meter you separate them would take more and more energy. It's not like with electromagnetism, where once you get them far apart, they basically ignore each other. You know, a quirk here would feel a quirk and andromeda super duper powerfully. That would be you know, an incredible amount of energy. And that's the really weird thing about the strong force is that the power of the force doesn't degrade with distance. It gets stronger.
Oh, it took a spring. It's like a one like a mechanical spring.
Exactly, it goes it's linearly with the distance, just like a mechanical spring.
And so is that how you explain whether you can't find one alone in nature? Is that it's just it would just take too much energy.
Yeah, and that energy prefers to turn into matter. So if you did take a quark and an anti quark and you pull them apart, that would require a huge amount of energy be pouring energy into it to separate them, and nature prefers to not have that much unstable energy. It prefers to decay into lower energy states like we talked about another time, and it creates new quarks, and so it creates a new partner for those quarks you were trying to pull apart, so that no quirk is by itself.
Oh so, like like, let's say I grabbed one quark with my right hand and I grabbed the other core another quark with my left hand, and.
I hope you're wearing safety goggles here.
I always wear safety they're called reading glasses.
All right, So you're pulling your apart.
I'm pulling apart, and I have big muscles and I am just pulling them apart, and it's like, oh, it's really hard. It's really hard. And then at some point the universe just snaps, like it just you know, it'll just it'll be like the spring broke, and suddenly I'll have two quarks in one hand and two quarts on the other hand.
Precisely, yeah, and you can even generate more particles. In fact, what you just described is essentially my job. That's what we do with the large Hadron collider.
You wear safety glasses.
I do wear safety glasses. But we smash protons together and that pushes effectively the quarks away from each other. And when that happens, we see particles get created out of the vacuum. Out of that, that energy gets turned into particles, and you don't just get one. Sometimes you get a whole stream ten, twenty, thirty, forty fifty particles, depending how much energy you've created.
It's like the universe says, you know, it's too much effort to pull these two quarts together. It's too much effort to fight whoehes amazing biceps and muscles. I'll just pair up the quarks that in each each of his hands.
That's right, Jorge versus the universe.
Yeah, that's right.
No, think about it like tension in a string. You know, it stretches and stretches and stretches. Eventually it snaps, and it just prefers to be in a lower energy state, and that lower energy state means having those particles exist. We talked about it statistically on another podcast. You know, the universe prefers configurations where there's lots of possible ways for it to be, and so it will always decay to a low energy configuration where that energy can be pointed in lots of different directions. And if you create these particles, then there's lots of different ways to arrange them. Where so if you have all the energy just stored in that field between the cork and anti quark is one configuration. So just an entropy argument tells you why a very tense, single configuration, high energy state will decay to a bunch of particles.
And what is that distance at which the string breaks? You know, like if I'm pulling them apart, what is the distance at which it just pops and it becomes four quarts?
It depends on the energy. But you know we're talking femtometers. That's the preferred day distance for quarks. Quarks like to be you know, a few femptometers apart, and so push them further away and you'll start to create new quarks, right, and you put in really a lot of energy. You can create heavy quarks, you know, charm quarks and bottom quarks and that kind of stuff.
Oh wait, what if so if I pull it depends on how I pull them apart?
Well, the universe we don't know how it randomly decides, but if you have enough energy, it can create heavier particles, and not all the quarks sort of cost the same and energy. The upcork and the down cork are the cheapest quarks of the lightest ones, but the charm and the strange and the bottom these are heavier, so they cost more energy to make. So if you put enough energy, then you sort of go up the menu and you can make some of these heavier quarks do interesting.
And so what is it that makes the quarks pair up in threesomes, in pairs and what do you call it? Triplets?
The reason is that you can neutralize the strong force using three of these charges. It's because the strong force has these three charges. And so for example, two ups and a down and two downs and an up can give you a neutral object in color space in this strong nuclear charge. Right in electromagnetism, you can't imagine putting two pluses and a minus together to get zero. The math doesn't work. But in color space and strong nuclear charge, a red, a green, and a blue equal zero. And so that's why you can get a threesome of quarks because they can balance each other.
Out that's a stable configuration.
That's a stable configuration. So you can have pairs or you can have triplets. And recently people have been trying to figure out ways to get like penta quarks, like combinations of five quarks that are stable together. But that's sort of a cutting edge research.
So if I have a red and a green paired up together, that would be looking for a blue to join it.
Yes, precisely, it would be desperate for a blue to finish out its color party. And you know, the strong force is really strong. I mean it's strange also, but it's much more powerful than any other force we've ever seen.
Wow, you should call it the strong force.
Thank you. I think we will. You know, in comparison, it's more than one hundred times the power of electricity and magnetism.
At the same distance or at the same sort of you know, magnitude.
Yeah, precisely, at the same distance at one femtometer. It's one hundred times the power of electromagnetism. It's a million times the power of the weak force, and it's ten to the thirty eight times the power of gravity. So it's really the most powerful force we've ever.
Seen, even more powerful than my biceps.
Even more powerful, and it's really weird.
You know.
Nobody had ever thought about how a force could get stronger with distance, and it took some really clever mathematics to explain this. And there was a Nobel prize just for that idea, the idea that maybe this is how the strong force works. And that's a Frank will check Mit won the Nobel Prize just for explaining the strong force. All you have to do is add a minus sign to one equation, and that explained it.
Well, that's what I'll do. I'll just put minus science in all kinds of equations and hopefully one of them will get me a noble price.
All right, that seems like a great strategy.
May go for it. All right. Well that kind of explains why quarks can't be alone, sort of, I think. And so let's get into what it all means for the universe and for you and me and my quarks. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, so quarks can't be alone, although I feel like it's kind of a It depends on your definition of alone. Like what if a quark feels that one femometer is alone enough, then it can be alone.
Right, Yeah, that feels pretty cozy to me, you know, Like when my kids are fighting on the couch about who's getting on my space, if they're one themtometer apart, then.
That would be trouble.
That would definitely be trouble. Yeah, I don't really feel like I'm alone if I'm going to the bathroom and there's somebody one femtometer away.
From you, Well depends how big you are. You know, how big is a cork, Daniel.
How big is a cork? A cork is a point particle, So it really has no volume, really no meaningful size.
Yeah, so you're saying a fanometer is infinitely far for them.
Yeah, I guess, so that's a good point. Maybe they're like, you know, folks in a marriage feel like they're always having a shout across the house at each other. What what did you say?
Yeah, Okay, so quarks don't like to be alone caveat more than a fantometer apart, right, I guess that's maybe a better way to say it. And and so that's weird, and you're saying it's all because that's how that's just how the strong force works, Like after a fometer, it just decides to create more quarts instead, it's easier.
They're like stuck in a little valley, right, they just can't get out.
Right, And so that's a weird rule for the universe. But I guess that's just kind of the way the universe is, right, like, if it was any different, we wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be here yet, or there would be something else here. There'd be something else, maybe a funnier podcast. Impossible. Impossible, that's right. The laws of the universe prevent their u there to be a funnier science podcast.
I have calculated the maximum humor for a physics podcast, and we have reached it.
Did you put a minus sign in it? Though? Are you it's missing a minus sign?
Oh yeah, I'm gonna go back check my calculations.
Well, this is probably the funniest podcast about science with a cartoonist and a physicist that I have heard of.
Daniel and Jorge from southern California.
That's right.
Put enough caveats in and you're number one in the universe.
Put enough minus signs you'll get an over price.
That actually does work.
Yeah, all right, let's get into then what it all means. I mean, this seems like a weird rule. And what practically does it mean for physics and for us?
Well, I think not practically, but philosophically it means something pretty profound.
You know.
It means that forces can be really different from the forces that we're familiar with and this is a recurring story in physics that we think the world works one way and then we discover, oh, there's an exception. Actually, the except it is much more powerful than everything we've been thinking about. And so it's just another reminder that we need to open our minds and that probably there's basic assumptions we're making about how the world works that are wrong and we just need the counterexample to prove to us that there's something else going on. So it's just an example there, and you know, we'll always be asking the question like, why is this that way? Why is this the other way? Why isn't that work this other way I would have preferred? And I hope that one day we have those answers, But right now we're totally clueless. We're just like, we don't know. We're just looking at it and try to at least describe it, not even necessarily understand it. But it also has some practical consequences.
Yeah, step us through what does that mean for what we can and can make out of stuff?
Well, one of the tempting things about the strong charge is that it's super powerful. You know, it powers nuclear weapons and nuclear power and so you might think, wouldn't it be awesome to apply that to everyday life? You know, to have things like batteries that source as strong force. They could be super small and you know some version of electrical current and electrical power that's powered by color instead of electrical charge. Right, that would be super awesome, But you can't.
Because it's such a powerful force. Could we somehow harness that power to something practical, to like charging our cell phones?
Yeah? Could we carry that power around? And can we store that power and use it to transmit things? And we've done it very briefly. That's you know what nuclear bombs are and your power. But it's tempting to think about, you know, having like a current, like why couldn't you have a current of that kind of power? But you can't because that relies on isolating the charges.
Like a battery, you can separate the electrons and have them kind of flow along your wire to power your cell phone, But you couldn't do that with quarks. Like if you try to separate the quarks, the universe wouldn't like that.
Yeah, the universe is like uh uh a nice, Try.
Go snap it fingers in a Z pattern like.
Uh I see what you're trying to do there and nope, yeah, you get a big fat note. So it just means that there are things you can't do with that force that you can do with other forces. And and then one of them is, you know, build a version of electricity, which is too bad because it's such an awesome, powerful force.
It'd be cool to call it quarticity or.
Quarticity. I'm not sure that one's going to catch on. I don't even know how to spell that. Is it having a kt in it?
It has a minus sign hyphen in the middle. That's why I'm getting.
Well, that is a minus awesome idea.
O good, Well, why did you go with plus or minus? Why cann't you go with like it? That's a red red hot idea there. It's a cool idea.
It's kind of a blue green idea, but it also has consequences for me and for particle physics because it makes our job a lot.
Harder because it makes it hard to kind of separate these things and study them.
Yeah, if I am interested in understand what happened inside a particle collision, I got a look at the stuff that flies out because I can't see some heavy, new crazy particle that I hope was made in the collision. It doesn't last very long. I just see the stuff that flies out, and so i'd love if that stuff that flies out with sort of simple and clean like it just turned into two electrons or something I can measure. But very often in these collisions, because we're smashing protons together, we get quarks that fly out, and the quarks make these big streams of particles, and so instead of having one very simple, nice and neat quark that flies out, I have fifty particles that fly out, and it's a big mess, and they're interacting and they splash into the detector. And we call that a jet of particles because.
When you pull that quark apart, all that energy in the strong force turns it into a jet of other particles.
Yeah, all that energy gets turned into ten, twenty fifty other particles with other quarks, which then combine to make whole sorts of crazy particles. And so it's a big mess.
So you're saying it impede your rights as a particle, this is.
Yeah, it obscures the universe a little bit. You know. We'd love to pull these protons apart and study the quarks by themselves. You notice we don't have a quark collider, right, we have a proton collider, and that's why we're really interested in cork quark interactions. But we can't build a quark collider. We have to build a proton collider, and then we have to we can't see the quarks interacting and the quarks flying out. We have to see the mess that they make afterwards. You know, it's like you want to study preschoolers and and you know they leave a mess on them. You're like, you know, why can't these preschoolers just tell me what they're thinking?
Oh?
I know?
Instead, they just they wreak havoc wherever they go, and you have to try to reconstruct from their tantrums what might have been going on in their minds.
Preschoolers are complicated, and so are quarts.
Yes, preschoolers are complicated, and so are quarks, and so that makes our job a little harder.
Well, and so I guess that means then that that's just how the universe is. The universe has rules for quarks, and quarks don't really have alone rights, right, can ever be alone? Because the universe always wants them to be paired up or in threesomes.
That's right, And this one exception. Quarks quarks, they don't they can't be alone. But there's one time when they don't have to be in parsums. Parsums is that a word in apples or parsoms or bananasums, And that's when they're in a huge party. It's called the quark gluon plasma.
Wait what uh huh?
Yeah, if you create enough energy density, you pour enough energy into a tiny little space, then you can sort of free the quarks because you make this like big frothing mass of stuff where there's too much energy to bound these things together and they're sort of like bound into a huge mass. Instead, we do this experimentally by smashing heavy ions together, like the nucleus of a lead atom and the nucleus of a lead atom. Smash like hundreds of these things together, makes this big, big frothing.
Mass in which that suddenly it doesn't they're not particularly paired to another quark or two other quarks, but they're sort of like a it's like a giant, big party.
Yeah, it's like a plasma. The same way you got a bunch of hydrogen atoms they're happy with every electron being paired with a proton, but you squeeze them together enough and there's still overall balance of electrons and protons, but the electrons are sort of free to hop from proton to proton the same way you take protons and you squeeze them together enough and the quarks sort of smoosed together, and then they can sort of swap back and forth very quickly between states, and so it makes sort of like a big plasma of loups and gluons. Yeah, like it.
Oh, I see, So you can't have a quark by itself, but you can't have free quarks, but only if they're in a soup.
Yes, So basically they like to be in pairs, chiplets, or in a big party. And we've actually made that happen. We've collided these things together and created them in colliders. And we think that it happened in the very early universe, when the universe was hot and nasty and dense, that there was this quark gluon plasma. But these days they're mostly found isolated in these pairs and triplets.
I see, and can do do these soups? Do these crazy soup parties happen in nature or only in colliders.
Only in colliders. Now the universe is too cool for that to happen. Although some people think that maybe at the center of some kinds of stars there might be some quark gluo.
On plasma neutron stars.
Maybe neutron stars probably not dense enough, amazingly, But are these stars called strange quark stars that where there might be a quark glue in plasma. But nobody's for sure.
All right, So it can be free a quark, but it can be alone because it can only be free when there's a whole bunch of other quarks.
Right, yeah, precisely, So they can never be by themselves, right.
Can never be alone. But it can be free if it's not alone. Oh man, that's a tough tough trade off there would would you trade your freedom for some alone some meantime?
I don't know. I think the quirk's got to have its lawyer explain to it exactly what that means.
That's a new job description, particle lawyer.
Quantum lawyer.
I'm a quantum lawyer. Sounds like a scam.
Definitely a scam. Do not pay anyone for quantum lawyering advice.
All right, Well, that's another pretty interesting fact about the universe that at least I learned today. Is it all these rules that govern our most fundamental particles?
That's right. They control how your protons and how your neutrons are stuck together and why they are stuck together. So you should be grateful that all those quirks are stuck together and doing all that work for you.
We hope you enjoyed that.
See you next time, So enjoy your quarks and enjoy your quirk yogurt and talk to you guys soon before. You still have question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at 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.
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