Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWhat is a "Theory of Everything" and how close are we to discovering it?
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.
And friends and families walking riding on passing the 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.
Hey, Daniel, do you think physicists and scientists will ever come up with some equations that just describes everything the whole thing? You know, like one line of one line of symbols, just that sums up the entirety of all of existence.
The whole universe on a T shirt. I'm sort of two minds about it. Like one, I would love for that to happen because it means it would be a singular achievement in human intellectual history, you know, to like actually unravel all of the mysteries of the universe.
When which part to come up with it or to put it on the T shirt?
Yeah, to get down to the base layer of knowledge and reveal like the source code of the universe, that would be amazing. Other hand, that would kind of mean physics is over right, Like that's the fundamental goal of physics. And if we get there and then we're done, like what are we gonna do? So you know, we have a whole raft of physicists becoming cartoonists or something. So be careful.
So your fear is that you will be unemployed.
That's right. Don't work too hard. You know, if you get too productive, then you know, you work yourself out of a job. That's exactly the concern.
Maybe you'll just take a little bit extra time to figure it out.
That's right. I'll figure out the theory of everything, and I'll just keep it in a drawer in my office.
Right, and then the day before you retire, you're like Tull the Boom Nobel Price. Please before I die quickly, let's put Daniel out of a job.
Let's make this physicist unemployed.
Him worehand and I'm Daniel, and this is our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the.
Universe, where we take the entire universe and we roll it up into a burrito so you can eat.
It for lunch or put it on your T shirt.
That's right. Our goal is to take everything in the universe and make us that you can actually understand it. We're not eager to have you feel like you're in the presence of a great scientist hearing things you'll never really understand. We want to break things down so you can really understand them, you know, explain them to your grandma or that fat uncle of family reunions. That's the goal of this podcast.
Or show off to your coworkers at the next water couder break.
Yeah, or point out that they actually don't understand what they're talking about because you do, because you listen to this awesome podcast.
Today. On the podcast, we're going to tackle the biggest question in human knowledge, right.
That's right, the most fundamental, the deepest, the biggest question in human intellectual history. What is that question? Jorge?
Is it possible for humans to know everything?
Do you mean to know everything? Like? Where is that sock I lost in the eighth grader?
Yeah?
Everything, some formula that tells you where that'sal went?
You know.
No, a theory of everything does not include location of all lost socks. That's impossible. Right then we could just end the podcast right now, because that's just impossible. No, A theory of everything tries to describe the way things work, right, They can't possibly explain all the details of everything that has happened because there's a lot of chaos there. But you know, a theory of everything tries to say we understand the way everything works. We have a system that explains it.
Even the things we don't see or where we can't see.
That's right. It would have to be a theory of everything. It would have to be something that describes the universe at the deepest level, you know, sort of like the end of our quest to take the universe apart into its tiny little bits.
To understand it at every level.
That's right. Yeah, to have a theory which from which anything can be derived. Right, all the physics and biology, gen chemistry and economics and everything would just be the emergent phenomena that flow naturally from this one fundamental theory.
And then we'll know everything basically.
Right, except for where those thoughts are. Yeah. So I went out and I asked people, do you think it's possible, given the fullness of time and a bunch of geniuses in the future, that physics could eventually describe everything, explain everything in a single formula that goes onto a T shirt.
Do you think there's a theory of everything?
Here's what people have to say. Yes, yeah, you have freak.
Yeah.
With due time, I think research will elucidate everything that we're looking for.
Like I'm religious.
I'm a Christian, so I believe that there are some things that God made that just can't be described by you know, sciences.
So that's just what I believe. That cool, I think it could happen. That gives you such confidence.
It's math, and math in essence can describe everything. So in theory, we can use math to describe everything.
I think eventually that can happen, but it's gonna take a long time and.
Lots of work, all right. So some people felt pretty confident in physicists.
I know those people. I love those people. They also sort of terrified me, you know, I really appreciate they're like, well, physics has figured a bunch of stuff out, so I'm sure given enough time, they'll figure it out, you know, Like and the guy who said, like math describes everything, So of course that's kind of cool. But also it's a lot of pressure. You know, like if you feel like, well, physics can figure everything out, then all you have to do is sit in your office with pencil and paper and eventually all the answers in the universe will come to you. You know. It's yeah, it's a lot of pressure. So I appreciate those people having so much faith in us. But it's you know, if we do figure out a theory of everything, it's still a lot of work.
You want to leave a little bit of room for like, hey, maybe we won't do it.
Well, I don't know. And some people, some people definitely felt like it's impossible. Ye, No, there's a gap. There are things that humanity can never understand, you know. And there was the one guy who thought, well, God creates some things that cannot be understood, right, And then there's some people who just thought humans are not smart enough. And maybe he'd been watching too many political talktures or something, which you know, I might be of the same opinion if you watch enough of those things.
So it's like people generally had faith in physicists, but not in human beings in general.
That's right, yeah, yeah, And maybe those people don't realize that physics is just people, right, Physics is just people thinking. There's no like deep physics that's absent of humanity.
Right.
Everything we do in physics is a model inside our head, our attempt to understand the universe. But it's always going to be inherently human, right, it's nothing extra human about it.
Oh, you don't think people like Einstein had some sort of extra capacity than most people.
Oh no, I think Einstein was a super duper human. But we're all human, right, and we think about the universe in a certain way. We perceive it in a certain way. Things make sense to us in a certain way. I mean, imagine if we met alien scientists, right, what fraction of our human physics would be understandable to them? Skip over the part where we have to like develop a common language and you know, agree not to kill each other. And you know, you got a bunch of the best alien physicists in our room and the bunch of the best human physicists in a room. Everybody's wearing the same lab coat, and you know, start comparing notes. How does that go? Well? I think that's a really deep question, and I think probably we would learn more about the way the human mind works, like the human mind, than the way the universe works, because I'm sure a lot of the theories we built reflect the way we think and feel.
Do you think it would be sort of like if we got together with a bunch of chimpanzees and we're like, hey, guys, let's talk physics. How would that? You know? How that would go, and they were trying to explain to them calmto physics, and it just they just wouldn't be intellectually capable of grasping it, right, even if you could speak their language.
Yeah, they would probably just be throwing throwing poop at us while we're talking think about kind of physics, which you know, I think I've had that experience in the classroom, you know, lecturing to a bunch of people who's just totally uninterested. Never actually got to the throwing poop part of the equation. But sometimes I do feel like people aren't interested.
Did you just call your students a bunch of chimps?
None of my current students, of course, you know, they're all are. Yeah, they're wonderful. No, it's not a question of whether the aliens are smarter than us. I just think that the theories we've come up with as humans are going to be indelibly human. You know, there are product of a human mind. They cannot be separated from that. So I think it's until we meet alien physicists, until we find another intelligence with different set of biases and perspective and fundamental thoughts structure, that we can learn. What about the physics we've developed is just human and what of it is actually fundamental and inescapable.
It could be that we were seeing everything in the wrong way totally.
Yeah, absolutely, everything we've learned is filtered through our experience, our consciousness. Right, so we have these few If you have a different set of senses, you experience the universe differently, you think very differently about the way the universe might be structured. I mean there's a lot of deeply flawed sci fi movies which touch on this really important issue, like Arrival, right, you know, the Aliens and Arrival think about time differently, and so I'm sure their physics is built in a completely different way.
Ours is built on our limited experience.
That's right, Yeah, absolutely, and a limited, very limited grand funding.
Well, let's break it down. What does it actually mean to have a theory of everything?
Yeah?
Does it mean an equation? Does it mean a set of axioms you know, or statements? Or does it mean like a little computer to which you can input anything and it'll tell you what the universe would do?
Yeah, And it doesn't mean something which will tell you where your lost socks are.
Right, then, what's the point.
Why are we even doing this, man, Yeah, the entire physics enterprise is just to help you find lost socks. In my view, a theory of everything would be a set of equations that describe the way the universe works at its most fundamental level, meaning that from that anything else can be explained. You know, take for example, our current understanding of chemistry, right, molecules interacting, et cetera. Now can you use that to explain hurricanes, right, or weather, or you know, the solar system. Our current laws of physics and chemistry can explain things that are larger emergent phenomena that arise from those more fundamental aspects. Right. So that works.
So when you say explain, you actually mean like we see something, and then we can go back to your magic formula, and your magic formula would say, oh, yeah, I can see how that came to be. Or if I run it then we get the same result.
That's right. Or you can encode those rules into a simulation and predict exactly what's going to happen, or you can be super smart and do it in pencil and paper and say, these equations predict that hurricanes will happen, or these equations predict that planets will orbit the Sun in this way. All these things that we see that we experience, these are emergent phenomena, right. There are higher level events that arise out of deeper, lower level rules. Right, So there was actually happening. You know, when for example, you throw baseball, is all those particles are moving in tandem, and there's all this quantum field theory that's happening while that happens, and you know, you can describe the way baseball moves using a very simple parabolic formula. That parabolic formula can be derived from the lower level set of rules. So it's sort of like an onion.
You know.
We think about theories of the universe in layers. It's like the equations to describe the way things work in the macroscopic level, you know, baseballs. Then there's equations that describe how things work at the atomic level, and then there's equations to describe the way things work at the quark level or the electron level. Right. And so the idea is a theory of everything would be the lowest level would be one from which everything else could be derived.
In principle, it's like the rules at the very very very very center of the onion exactly.
If the universe is a simulation, right, then this would be like the source code of that simulation would be the basic rules for which everything results.
Hmmm.
It's like you can have a rule about economics. In macroeconomics, you know, people respond to their best interest where they go for the lowest price. That's a good theory, and it describes this complex phenomenon, but it doesn't actually tell you the most basic thing that's going on.
That's right, and the most basic thing that's going on is, you know, a bunch of particles are slashing around inside their head, you know, and you can describe at different levels. You could describe it at the particle level, which is very cumbersome because there's so many particles that doing those kind of calculations would be almost impossible. Or you can describe it at the biochemical level. You know, these dopamine and this sort of neurotransmitter and all these things are happening. A lot of these things you can describe at lots of different levels, and you pick the level that's most appropriate. Right, you want to solve a problem involving a baseball, You're going to do a simple parabolic calculation. You're not going to go with a heavy hitting quantum field theory calculation, right, But the theory of everything in principle could derive anything else, right, Right, You can derive those laws of parabotic motion from the deepest level, from the core of the onion. So that's the goal, the theory of everything describe everything that happens in terms of the smallest, most fundamental units.
Well, I think an even bigger question is how do you even know such a thing is possible? Like, how do you know that everything can be described by one equation or two equations or three equations? Right?
Like?
What makes a think it's possible to even understand everything?
I know, it seems like hubrist right, Like somebody ate a bunch of mushrooms and had a vision and now they're like, yes, I saw it, man, Like the universe makes sense man, Right, So it's either a weed field dream or enormous hubris. What makes us think is possible is that we're making steady progress. You know, I think about the way the world used to be a total mystery to people, you know, thousands of years ago, so much about everyday life was a mystery, And you know, we've cracked a lot of those nuts. You know, everything that we thought was strange or mysterious, so we had to attribute to some bizarre god with you know, unknown motives. We've understood in terms of natural phenomenon that which follow rules. So for some reason we don't understand. It appears that the universe follows a set of rules, and those rules are fairly constant, and so we can discover them by experimenting and tinkering and trying stuff. And humans seem to have the capability, the mathematical, the logical, the scientific capability to reveal these rules and then you know, use them for good or evil.
Right, So you're saying you have faith in physicists and humans.
I have some faith. I mean, look at what, look at what? We have a.
Conversation, Look upon my great or let's look upon.
My works mighty and despair. Now I love that poem Ozymandias because it's both positive and negative. Right, Yeah, you know, be jealous of what I've accomplished because you are so small, or if you think you're so great, remember that I was once great and have now fallen into dust. Yeah, so maybe that future physics looks at us and says they accomplish nothing. But I would say what makes us think is possible is that we're making steady progress. I mean, the kind of things we understand about the universe now are incredible compared to what we understood one hundred years ago, five hundred years ago, five thousand years ago.
But is there maybe a limit? And let's get into it, 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 you thought 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 mintmobile dot com slash universe. That's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Cut your wireless build 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 spees and restrictions apply. See 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 Applecard. 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 Applecard, apply for Applecard in the wallet app, subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Applecard owners subject to eligibility. Applecard and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch Member FDIC terms and more at applecard dot com.
So my favorite thing about a theory of everything is it's acronym its initials t OE. So really, when you're talking about the theory of the universe, you're talking about the Universe's big toe, right right.
Such a grand idea humbled by its.
Acronymy yeah, yeah, not a great pr move there by physicists.
No, now we have to find that secret circle of scientists who are in charge of naming this stuff, because they've got some real work to do. I mean, I got notes, let me tell you. I mean, the particles got ridiculous names. The theory of everything is a silly name. I don't even know what the history of it is.
Like.
Who was the first person to say theory of everything? I know that Einstein was one of the first people to like seriously go after it. Well, of course he didn't make much progress.
Why not the everything theory? Et?
Right?
Better?
The everything theory? Yeah? I like that? All right, you should file a trademark for that. You'll get one penny every time somebody said.
We talked about what it means to say a theory of everything, and what it could be and what we think one is possible. So what do we know? Like, why isn't what we know now a good theory of everything? What makes a thing that we don't have it yet?
Right? Well, we do know a lot. We've learned a lot about the universe. And one thing that persuades us that things might be understandable is that might be a simple theory of everything is that we're making a lot of progresses have been saying, But it's more than that. Every time we peel back a layer of reality and see what's underneath, the description that beneath it is simpler. Right, The level of complexity required to describe the universe keeps getting simpler and simpler. Like you know, for example, think about the objects in the universe. You want to describe everything in the universe. So there's like an infinite number of kinds of things. Right, there's gas and stars and hamsters and ice cream and lamas and cartoonists and all this stuff, and you can explain all that using one hundred basic building blocks. Periodic table. You can explain the periodic table everything that's in that using just quarks and leptons. Right, you can build any atom out of just quarks and leptons. So the number of pieces you need to describe basically everything we've encountered keeps getting smaller. So to me, that's progress. You were asking earlier, like why do we think it's this as possible? How do we know we get there? So we're making this progress and I feel like how will we know we get there when we get to the simplest possible theory, you know, a theory that has the smallest number of bits and the smallest number of parameters and has no hanging questions, no room to say, well, why this and not that, or why these two different things instead of just one thing. So when you can simplify it no longer, that's how you know you got there.
So it's kind of about the number of ingredients that we think things are made out of. Kind of, right, we went from one hundred elements in the periodic table of elements to like an electron and small particles. You're saying that maybe one day we'll get to one particle. Yeah, you know what I mean. Like, if you go from infinity to one hundred to three, the next step is just to one, right.
Right, Yeah, the goal is to get to one. Right, And the deepest goal in particle physics is to simplify the universe and explain it in terms of just one thing. And I've just had like a sort of a personal epiphany, which is I realized that one of the reasons that physics appeals to me so much is this attempt to simplify. Like in my life, I'm always trying to simplify everything, Like, can I get this simplify? Can I explain all these two different things in terms of just one thing? Can I just send one email to everybody?
Is there a rule that you know? It kind of tells me how to live my whole life?
Yea? How do I respond to a party invite or know? Is there a strategy for making small talk and that works in any situation?
Yeah?
I would love that.
You're always trying to look for the underlying rule something.
Yeah, I want the theory of every conversation, right, I want to know how to handle how to navigate a party conversation no matter what happens. That would be a fantastic theory.
Hopefully you'll figure it out before you start a podcast or something, a conversational podcast.
Oh, it's too late. Is there a basic building block of the universe out of which everything is built? I mean, because right now we have twelve basic building blocks, so we're definitely not there, right, Okay, we have six quarks and six leptons. Only three of those twelve particles are ever used to make atoms, and those twelve particles don't even describe like the dark matter and everything else that's out there in the universe. So not only do we know there are other particles that we haven't discovered, but we also have questions about these particles, like why are there so many? So it'd be great to narrow that down.
So you're saying that we think there might be a theear of everything because there's plenty of stuff still left to explain, basically, right, like, we're not there yet because there's a lot we haven't explained.
That's right, we're not there yet, and we've been making steady progress and at every stage things get simpler. So we suspect that if we keep cracking the nut, then we'll get simpler and simpler nuts, until eventually, maybe we'll get down to the one thing that bilt everything else is built out of, and that would explain everything.
Peanut of the universe.
If we find that particle and somebody names it peanut, I'm gonna blame you for that, or okay, that's right, it's because because then there's gonna be the anti peanut, you know, peanutonium, you know bound states of peanuts, and oh man, it's gonna be a disaster. But you know that's not the whole story. Right, There's particles, but then there's also forces.
So what do you think a theory of everything would look like like? It'd be like everything is made out of the peanut, and the peanut can form an electron if it stacks up this way, or it can form a quark if it stacks up this other way. Basically like the idea of the peanut and how it stacks up and how it gives rise to everything we see around us. That would be sort of like the theory of everything.
Yeah. Well, the current form what we use for to describe the deepest level of nature that we currently know is quantum field theory, and quant field theory works by describing the fields and the way the fields interact with each other. So the fields give us the particles because particle are excited states of these fields, and then the way the fields interact with us give us forces. And so currently you can describe everything we know about particle physics just by describing these fields and how they interact with each other, and so that we can write down in a single equation it's called a lagrongen, and from that lagronngen we can derive all the rules of how everything works, how everything interacts with each other, and from that you get electrons and quirks and atoms. That everything comes from this one equation, the lagronngen. But of course there are problems with it. As we said earlier, there's a bunch of different kinds of fields, you know, which generate all these different particles, and not everything is described by this lagronngen. So that's what it would look like, I think if it turns out that quantum fields are the fundamental building block of the universe. But you know, nobody really believes that.
But are we saying that maybe there's just one field that maybe results in these other multiple fields that's right, or like these other fields are just combinations of maybe one fundamental field.
Exactly. If quantum field theory is the right way way to think about the universe, then a theory of everything as a quantum field theory would be a single field. Yeah, and it could interact with itself and that could give all sorts of interesting stuff. In coming up with quantum field theories, we've made a lot of progress and bringing together lots of different kinds of things to describe them in terms of just one thing. You know, for example, we used to think of electricity and magnetism is completely different things. You know. Electricity was like zapping stuff, and magnetism was these weird rocks that pushed away each other or attracted each other. Until people figured out, oh, actually electricity and magnetism are two sides of the same coin. They go hand in hand.
They're like the same field.
Yeah, they are just two parts of that. There's two manifestations of the same field.
Right, so they go us to get it down to like a theory with one field. It's called the peanut field.
And all right, all right, all right, I'm on board with the peanut field.
Let's do it.
Let's describe the universe into so we got the peanut and we got the toe. We've got the mixed metaphor. Yeah, the universe a peanut or is it a toe?
Maybe you can eat peanuts with your toes and then you wouldn't eat socks. So hey, that solves all of our poems.
Let's leave folks for that visual and then take a quick break while you think about eating peanuts with your toes. 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 US dairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
There are children, friends and families walking riding on paths and roads every day. Remember they are 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.
With the United Explorer Card, earn fifty thousand bonus miles, then head for places unseen and destinations unknown. Wherever your journey takes you, you'll enjoy remarkable rewards, including a free checked bag and two times the miles on every United purchase. You'll also receive two times the miles on dining and at hotels, so every experience is even more rewarding. Plus, when you fly United, you can look forward to your United Club access with two United Club one time passes per year. Become a United Explorer Card member today and take off on more trips so you can take in once in a lifetime experiences everywhere you travel. Visit the explorercard dot com to apply today. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC subject to credit approval offer subject to change. Terms apply.
All Right, So we were talking about the theory of everything and currently we have quantum fields, and we were saying that the theory of everything, if it was described using quantum fields, would be a single field, and that field would generate all the particles because they would be excited states of that field, and it would describe the way those particles interact with each other and form other sorts of bound states, which would be more complex things like electrons, and everything would be made out of these one fundamental particle which came from this field, the peanut the peanut field.
You're saying is that you're saying that even if we have let's say in the future twenty years from now, you know, I discovered the peanut field and it describes the other all the other fields that we know about right now, you're saying, we still wouldn't know if that was it, if that was like the ultimate theory. Well, it's hard to know for sure when you're done.
Something is the ultimate theory, right, I mean, say we have the peanut field, and it solves all the open problems in physics, and Jorge goes and collects like five Nobel prices for discovering this thing. Right, it unifies quantum mechanics and gravity and it explains everything we know and dark matter and all that stuff.
It tells us what happened at the Big Bang, right exactly whether we're in a multiverse.
Right, and this is totally possible.
Right.
But then you have that theory you write on a piece of paper, and you're gonna have questions about that theory, right, Like, say, for example, the theory has a number in it, you know, because all of all of our theories currently have numbers in it, you know, like speed of light, or there's basic physical units, but then there's also sometimes just numbers like one or four, two or pi or whatever, and you have to wonder, like what do those numbers mean? Do those numbers reveal something deep about the universe?
Right?
Like if your pena theory has the number you know, five in it, then that tells you that the universe is fundamentally like five ish in some way, and what does that mean? And that's a question, right.
Like why does the theory if everything, have the number five in it? Yeah, so does it have to have a number? What if my theory is so pure and amazing and abstract that it just doesn't have any numbers in it?
Right exactly? So your pena theory has the number five in it. And then a few years later, some clever scientist comes along with her theory that has no arbitrary numbers in it, right, mm hmm, and she's like, actually, my theory is simpler than Professor Jorge's theory, and so he's got to deliver me all of his Nobel prizes. And so, you know, that's how we judge theories. We judge them by their simplicity. And that's sort of what I was talking about earlier, Like it's our human desire to explain the universe in terms of a simple set of rules.
Right.
Maybe aliens think about things differently and they don't look for one single equation to describe everything, or a simplest equation, or maybe what they think is beautiful is a huge chaotic mess of an equation, and for some reason, that really satisfies their itch to understand the universe.
Right.
I think there must be something deeply human about this whole process, and it's a bias we can't see because we've only ever talked to humans about it.
Interesting, like, maybe aliens are happy with this crazy theory that explains where socks are, and you know, do you know what I mean. Maybe it's not reductive, it's maybe just like super complicated, Yeah, because it exclans all the little.
Things exactly that could be that could very well be, and they could be. Like you guys are totally wasting your time. I don't even know why you care, right, Yeah, And you know, there's another possibility we haven't even talked about, which is that there is no deepest level, right, it could be that it goes on forever. Things just get smaller and smaller, and like particle A is made out of little bits of B, and then you can make b's at a little bits of C, and C is made out a little bits of D. And Okay, so I shouldn't be on the Particle Physics pr name and committee obviously because I can't come up with clever stuff on the top of my head. But it could just go on forever.
Then, wouldn't it stop a p for peanuts?
I mean absolutely?
Yeah?
But I mean, what could be smaller than the unit one?
You know what I mean?
Like, what could be more fundamental than one than one field in one particle? You can't split one, right.
If you discover at some level that everything in the universe could be described in terms of one field. That's great, But where does that field come from? Right? Is that field the fundamental thing in the universe? It was like the first thing made and first thing coded in the simulation? Or is it itself an emergent phenomena from something simpler. Just because there's only one kind of particle doesn't mean it's not made out of little bits of another kind of particle.
Right, It could be made out of two halves of something else.
Yeah, exactly, you know, two units of subpeanuts that come together to make the glorious peanuts.
Or you're saying it could be sort of infinitely divisible. You mean, like, you know, like peanut butter, Like maybe the universe doesn't have a peanut, is just this continuous yummy smooth.
I think in the future you should have lunch before we record these podcasts. Yeah, it could be, right, It certainly could be. Although it seems so far. Everything we understand about the universe is that it seems to be quantized. You know that it's the smallest level. Everything is quantized. So we think that particles or quantized excitations of quantum fields rule the day. But you know, it could be that as you get deeper, that you get some sort of scale invariant matter that looks the same no matter how close you get up to it, right, that it doesn't resolve into tiny little bits, it's just infinitely smooth. Yeah, that could totally be a possibility.
Well, you got into an interesting idea a little bit before, which is, why do we even want the theory of everything? Is it really going to help us cure cancer? Or is it really going to solve global warming? If we figure out these super quantum fields? What's motivating us as a species to look for these simplifications.
I believe that an artist, a cartoonist is demanding practical, immediate benefits for my for my profession. To excuse me, you didn't even mention the possibility that there could be like a deep human need to understand. You know that it adds to the experience of being human to reveal mysteries of the universe.
Right.
It doesn't need to necessarily give you a better widget, right, or cure cancer. It's just for me at least. It's a deep desire to understand the world around me. I mean, I don't know if it comes out of evolutionary desires to understand how things work, so I can like better protect myself from a saber tooth tire or something. But humans have a deep desire to understand the way things work, to reveal the rules and manipulate them, and so I just really want to understand. And you know, of course along the way, like funding for basic research has always yielded tremendous technological advancements. I mean, we wouldn't be recorded as podcast if it wasn't for funding for basic research. So I can sing the praises of basic research for decades because of all the spinoff it's generated, incidentally, accidentally, right, not intentionally, but fundamentally. The reason we want to do is just because we have this deep desire to know, right, to understand the way the universe works. I mean, if somebody told you, hey, jor I have the theory of everything? Do you want to know it? You wouldn't be like piss off, I'm busy making a peanut butter sandwich. Right, that would be an important moment, that would be like a deep thing to understand. So we've made a lot of progress and understand the theory of everything. You know, we have boiled down matter into twelve particles. We have described all the forces in terms of just a few. You know, we unified electricity and magnetism, and then we also unified that with the weak nuclear force. We have one force that's called the electro weak force that describes electricity and magnetism and the weak force. We still have the strong nuclear force, which we haven't understood how to put together with the other ones, right, And then we still have gravity, which is a whole other mystery we can talk about a whole other podcast, which resists all efforts to give it a quantum description and unify it with everything. And even Einstein was not able to bring gravity to heal. And then of course there's lots of things in the universe we don't understand which are not described by these bits. So we made a lot of progress and understanding, but we still have a lot to go.
So your basic message is keep physicists employed. Is that the kind of that's right?
Public funding into physics, yes, exactly, it's worthwhile.
People got a long way to go. People think that we scientists have everything figured out. You know, we can have these amazing phones and amazing technologies and airplanes and rockets. You know, people sort of assume that why do we need more physics, but there could be a whole lot of amazing things ahead of us.
Right, yeah, exactly. And you know folks a thousand years ago who were surrounded by mysteries. There's a lot of opportunities there for scientists to explain the way things work. These days, it's pretty unusual if you walk down the street for you to see something that you don't think has a scientific explanation, right, Like very few people see miracles or ghosts or things that they think are outside of the realm of science. And that used to be every day and now it's like pretty rare. I mean, people go to magic shows just to have that experience, right, But there are lots of things that we still don't understand. They're not things that appear in your everyday life. They're at the particle level, or at the tiny little level or the cosmic scale. But there are huge questions about the universe that we still have to unravel.
All right, Well, I hope you guys enjoyed dipping your toes into this topic.
Yeah, we hope you enjoyed this slice of everything and peanuts and peanut butter, The peanut butter, theory of the universe. It's spreading.
It's really jiffy. See you next time.
Thanks for listening. If 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 at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at Feedback at danielandorhe 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. 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.
There are children, friends, and families walking, riding on passing the roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to get home safely. Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because the Go Safely California from the California Office of Traffic Safety and Caltrans.
Traveling to see your fave sports team is cool, but traveling with AMEX Platinum for the big game is even better.
Right this way.
With access to dedicated card member entrances that select events, you can skip the line, change one, and with access to the Centurion Lounge, you can catch the next game on the way home. That's the powerful backing of American Express.
Terms apply. Learn more at AmericanExpress dot com.
Slash with AMX card member entrance access not limited to AMEX Platinum card
