Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary UniverseDaniel and Kelly answer questions about the Big Bang, figs and Higgs!
What if another universe shared our Big Bang? Why do figs have a waspy tang?
Could the Higgs make the Big Bang? Relte? Why is dark chocolate so much better than white?
Biology? Physics, archaeology, forestry, and today fortunately no chemistry.
Whatever question keeps you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's answer will make it all right.
Welcome to another Listener's Questions episode on Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Hello, I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I'm a parasitologist who loves questions.
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist with a deep voice. That's even deeper because I was shouting at a UCI basketball game on Saturday.
Oh, and you said you were sick. Recently, There's been a lot of things happening to your voice.
So I hope you enjoy an extra baritone version of the podcast today.
It'll be fun. I just spent four hours on my tractor this morning plowing our roads. So what is the most exciting power tool you've ever used, Daniel.
Other than the large hadron collider. That's a power tool, isn't it.
Yeah?
Thirty three kilometers around accelerates protons to nearly the speed of light, but it can't cut through a two by four.
Yeah, okay, but I guess you win. I was feeling pretty cool about my tractor, but now I think you win.
I want a particle beam to melt the snow off my sidewalk. No, that's a collective tool. What power tool have I personally used that's most impressive? Hmm, that's a good question. We have like a cool machine shop here at UCI, so we have some pre impressive power tools that can, like you know, put rivets into stuff. Or we have the metal cutting bandsaw, which terrifies me. Oh my gosh, every time I go near that thing. I'm wondering, is today the day I lose a finger?
Wait, because you're using it? Or do you just mean, like even walking by it freaks you out?
Even walking near it? You know, I've seen enough videos of somebody like tripping and putting their hand out and then zoom and then it's gone.
In our place, we try to buy the like safest power tools. Have you seen the videos where like it's a table saw and they put a like hot dog into the blade and it immediately stops and everything disappears. So like everything we have at our property is like the safest version. Like our tractor is low to the ground. It's got double tires so that it's less like lit a flip over. Does an electro fishing boat count as a power tool, because now I'm thinking that maybe that's cooler than a tractor.
I don't even know what that is. Electro fishing boat. It fishes electrically.
It puts an electrical current in the water to stun the fish, and then you catch them in a net and you put them in a live well, so it's that flowing water that's well oxygenated. People who work in fisheries use these to survey a different population. And once we were stunning the water and a fish got past the people with the net, and I thought, I would like save the day because we really wanted to catch this fish. So I reached in to get it and I forgot.
I was like, you made a shocking discovery.
I made a shocking discovery. That's right. That's why it's probably not smart for me to use big power tools, but I use them anyway.
I am awed by the power of these tools and amazed that people used to build whole civilizations without them.
Yes, Oh, that's so amazing. Yeah, when I think about the Pyramids, like, I know, that's like a cliche example, but holy crow.
Well, people have lots of questions about how the Pyramids were built. We know it wasn't ancient aliens. We know humans have been in genius and modern day humans are ingenious about thinking about the universe and asking questions about it. And we love on this podcast hearing about your questions, not just answering the questions in my mind or in Kelly's mind, but answering the questions on the tips of everybody's tongues.
All right, so let's start to me. This is a very exciting day because we have questions from a lot of different countries represented, well, almost a few different countries represented. So let's start with Brazil, and let's hear Marcella's question.
Hello, Daniel and Kelly, how are you doing. My name is Marcella. I am from Brazil and I was talking with a friend about the Big Bang and if we were to reproduce it using the exact same seed, so the particles would interact in the exact same way, moved in the same exact directions, would that create a clone universe? Or is there no such thing. I'm very curious about this. Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to hearing from you on the podcast.
All right, Daniel, So let's start with what is the Big Bang? To make sure we're all on the same page, because I feel like this is one of those topics that I hear about and I seem to remember you telling me that the popular conception of this idea is like totally not right. So let's make sure we're all on the same page.
Yeah. It's amazing to me and kind of endlessly frustrating that this incredible concept in science that's been so talked about is still so widely misunderstood. That like, the mental image most scientists have of the Big Bang is very different from the mental image in the public's mind. And I had a long conversation with Zach about this when we talked about one of his recent books on cosmology about this discrepancy and how these things go awry. But briefly, most people, when they think about the Big Bang, imagine a tiny dot of matter in empty space, and then an explosion of all that stuff flying out, filling out that once empty space and zooming through the universe and then fourteen billion years later, things are still flying out. That's what people imagine. And I wonder, when Marcella is talking about a single seat to reproduce the Big Bang, the particles flying in various directions, if this is what she's imagining, because in contrast, the scientific view of the Big Bang is quite different. There's no dot in empty space, and also wasn't the beginning of the universe. The Big Bang is a time thirteen point six billion years ago when the universe was very hot and very dense. But crucially, there was not a dot in empty space. It was filled with this hot dance matter. It was everywhere. The whole universe was filled with hot, dense stuff. There was no empty space. It also wasn't the beginning of the universe. It's just the earliest moment we can think about, or we can describe with our laws of physics. So ditch the idea of a hot danse dot exploding into space and imagine a whole universe filled with hot, dense matter.
Okay, yeah, I think that differs significantly from what I was told when I first heard about the Big Bang. All right, so let's take the scenario that you just laid out for us. If everything was exactly the same as it was about fourteen billion years ago, and then you hit play and you started it again, would you get the exact same thing.
Yeah, this is such a great question, and I think it's so important philosophically because it makes us wonder about whether the life we're living is random or determined. And if it's determined, is that mean I'm just a robot and I was predetermined to say this thing on the podcast and to make these dumb jokes, And so I'm not responsible for all my terrible humor.
You're not getting out of it. It's your responsibility.
That was my philosophical backdoor. Anyway, It's a fascinating question and one that's been debated for a long time in physics, and in classical physics, the answer is yes, the past perfectly predicts the future. It determines the future. The classical way to think about this is like a billiard ball. If you shoot the cue ball at the eighth ball, and you do it again and again with exactly the same setup, you should get the same answer. Because the laws of physics tell you exactly how momentum travels and exactly how that bounce happens, and even at the microscopic scale, if you think about the atoms. As long as you're talking about classical physics, then the past completely predicts the future. There is no wiggle room at all. The universe is like a clock. It's like a big mechanism, and the current state addicts the future, and the current state can be predicted by the past. So if you have two universes with the same setup and you just hit play, as you say, they should end up fourteen billion years later with exactly the same mushroom over here and the same blueberry over there. If the universe is governed by classical physics.
And the same Daniel on a podcast like all the way to those details like no free will at all.
No free will at all if the universe is governed by classical physics, because otherwise where can it creep in? Right, You either have to add some sort of dualistic thing where you have like, yes, the universe is controlled by classical physics, but there's a special thing where people get to make decisions, and there's this like an unexplained force somehow where my brain decides how neurons fire and how my hand moves. You know, there's no room at all for wiggles in classical physics. Right, you throw the ball the same way twice, it will fly the same way twice if you've captured all of those details. And that's tremendously difficult, like to imagine setting up a whole universe with every particle moving in exactly the same direction. But you know, it's a philosophical question, so we get to be unrealistic in practice. If you are building universes, it's going to be very, very difficult to have exactly the same starting conditions. But that's what Marcella is asking about, because she's not interested in is it hard to make two universes start the same way? She's interested in if you do what happens, and yes, you get exactly the same Daniel on the same podcast, not liking chemistry or with a growing interest in biology.
Oh good, good answer, and hating white chocolate. So I really don't want to lose hope that there's free will out there, and so I'm going to cling to my knowledge that general relativity and quantum mechanics don't always agree. So probably at a different scale, this deterministic stuff breaks down and so what happens if you're thinking about the quantum realm.
Yeah, so then people say, oh, okay, well, the universe is not classical. There's quantum mechanics, and electrons don't obey these rules of classical physics. They aren't like billiard balls. And as you zoom down to the microphysics of the universe, there are different set of rules and quantum mechanics dot dot dot randomness, dot dot dot free will. But there's a lot that's being lost in those dot dot dots. And there's important subtlety about quantum mechanics which is deterministic also just in a different way that I really want people to understand. So quantum mechanics does not say that if you shoot an electron at some experimental setup, you'll get the same answer twice, even if the initial conditions are the same, which is different from classical physics. Classical physics says throw a baseball the same way twice, you get exactly the same trajectory. Quantum mechanics says you throw an electron at a wall, you don't always get the same outcome. But quantum mechanics does say you always get the same probability distribution of possible outcomes that is deterministic. So quantum mechanics is not like, hey, the universe is random. Do anything you like, folks. Right, there are still rules, it's just the rules don't govern the individual outcomes. Instead, they govern the probability of various outcomes. So if you'd like to think about two options, if an electron can go left or right, and quantum mechanics is very specific about the odds of going left or the odds of going right.
But once you have many, many, many of these sort of decision points where it goes left or right, things can get very different between for example, the moment the Big Bang happened, and now like we wouldn't necessarily have Daniel with a deep voice on the show today if we started everything again from the exact same materials.
Yeah, and that's exactly where it gets messy, these decision points, right, Like, if we throw electrons at the wall, quantum mechanics says they have the same probability. But then you're suggesting, Okay, now let's ask where the electrons are, let's observe them. They end up in different places. And we duck into this recently with Scott on our listener questions episode. But it's interesting to play another philosophical game and say, well, what if we don't ever ask, like, take your universe, make it quantum mechanical, started from the same initial conditions, run it forward fourteen billion years, but never make an observation, then those two universes are this same quantum mechanically. They have the same probabilities distribution of outcomes because nobody's ever collapsed those wave functions, and so because you never made any choices, quantum mechanics is completely deterministic about the probability distributions of the various outcomes fourteen billion years later. And so if you let the universe stay quantum mechanical, you never collapse it into classical physics or make observations, then the deterministic of quantum mechanics says, the answer is that you get the same universe, the same quantum mechanical universe. Or if you like to think about many worlds version of quantum mechanics, you get the same set of possible universes in the future if you haven't picked one at any moment, and you're making that face because you're wondering, like, how is it possible to not pick one. Doesn't the universe force you to do that?
Well, that's one of the things that I'm wondering, But I could see this on multiple levels, I think. Right, Okay, So if the electron can go left or right, and you know, say, getting from fourteen billion years ago to now, that has to happen, you know, a trillion time. Why during those trillion times in a quantum mechanical universe, would the electron always make exactly the same decision as it made initially. Why wouldn't each time it would be a separate coin flip to make the decision and you could end up somewhere else. Why does observing it mess that up?
Because there is no coin flip until you observe it. Like if you shoot electrons through this double slit experiment but there is no screen, then the electron could have gone through the left or could have gone through the right. You don't know. Even after the experiment is over, you haven't collapsed the wave function, the probability still remains. And if it only ever interacts with quantum objects and influences those that, then those probabilities are just propagated. Say, for example, we have our double slit experiment, the electron could have gone through the left or the right, and that I don't have a screen. Instead, downstream I have two more double slit experiments which capture electrons that went left, to capture electrons that went right, and does another split. Now I have four possible outcomes for the elector and could goone left, left, left, right, right, left or right right, and all the four possibilities exist now downstream from that, at another set of experiments, Now I have eight possible outcomes right now, say I do this for fourteen billion years, right, I have a huge number of possible outcomes for this electron. And because I never had a screen, I allowed all those possibilities to propagate forwards. And if I start from the same initial conditions, I will always have the same possible set of outcomes for that electron. Same thing for the whole universe. If there's no screen. Now, how can you avoid having a screen?
Right?
Because electrons will hit something, and the universe has planets in it and there are people in it and whatever. And this is where we don't know the answer, because we don't understand the distinction between quantum things which don't force the collapse of the wave function and can happily allow superpositions to propagate in classical things like my eyeball or your brain that do force individual outcomes. Because I can't be in a superposition. I can't be Daniel who saw the electron on the left side and Daniel who saw the electron on the right side simultaneously. I'm a classical thing. And this is where we don't have a philosophical answer to the question of why does the wave function collapse sometimes and how does an observation work? We don't know. So to answer Marcella's question, like, if you start from the same quantum state I mean, the same probabilities, same undetermined reality, and you let that propagate forward, you would get a clone of the universe's quantum states today, which includes all the uncertainties and all the unknowns, because quantum mechanics is deterministic about the probabilities. Right, But you were right, the collapse can't be cloned. If people do experiments and there are observations in those universes, then those will be individual coin flips, and those are drawn from those probability distributions, but they are fundamentally random, and so they will go different ways. Like a ball bouncing down one of those games, it's going to end up in a different slot, and that's going to cascade down the road. So if you have quantum mechanics and you have collapsing wave functions, that it's essentially impossible to end up with the same universe twice fourteen billion years later starting from the initial conditions. But if you never collapse the wave function, then you get the same quantum mechanical probabilities for all those various outcomes.
All right, that was trippy, but I think I followed it. Let's see what Marcella thinks.
Hey, Daniel and Kelly, thank you so much for answering my question. It was very trippy. Indeed, I think I prefer classical physics. I don't really understand it that deeply, as I am a psychology major, but I feel like it wraps around my head a little bit easier than quantum physics. Quantum physics is a whole different realm. But it was very interesting to listen to you guys discussing it and learn a little bit more about this. I will have to take this to my friend now, with whom I had this conversation in the beginning, and we're going to discuss and if I have any further questions, I will definitely send it your way. Thank you so much.
Guys. All right, we are back and we're zooming out from the whole universe and the Big Bang, and now we're going to answer our some questions about the gooey treats that we all eat.
And we're talking about wasps, which makes me very happy. So we have a question from Petrie. Let's go ahead and listen.
Hello.
My name is Petrie and I'm from Waterloo, Canada, and I recently learned a little bit about figs and wasps. And my question is am I really eating dissolved wasp carcasses when I eat figs? Thank you?
So I'm very excited to hear your answer to this question because just the other day at dinner, as I was enjoying fig one of my son's friends said to me, Hey, you know you're eating wasp babies, right, And I thought to myself, that is a very cool little popsie fact. I wonder if it's true or if Kelly would throw cold water on it. Petrie and I are both very curious to know whether or not we're eating wasp babies.
Well, this is a question about biology, so the answer has to be it depends, because nature's never that easy. Let's dig into the biology here. So first of all, there's over seven hundred and fifty species of fig trees, and almost all of them have their own wasp that pollinates them, and so there's a lot of different kinds of these and so the answer that you're going to get in the end depends on what species of fig it is that you're eating and how it was cultivated.
All right, First, I have some questions. Yeah, okay, seven hundred and fifty species of figs. I've had like three different kinds of figs, like the black figs and the tiger figs. Are there a lot more figs out there that I should learn to enjoy? Or are these all like invisible variations on bloe?
There are people who forage on wild figs, and they would tell you that each one is its own unique flavor escapade that you should go on. And so.
I like flavor escapades. That sounds great, It does.
Sound great, but I can't say that I have tried them. I've just tried, like, you know, the typical figs that you get yeah, okay, but the biology is trippy. Okay, So because they're seven hundred and fifty different species, this works in a lot of different ways, and so I'm just going to give you like an overview of how it works a lot of the time, but if you dig into a particular system, the details probably different. All right, So here's the deal, right.
So give us a background on like what it means for a wasp to pollinate a fig, because I'm familiar with like bees and pollen a little bit, but like tell us how it works for figs and why they have to use wasps.
Okay, all right, So figs, So usually you think of flowers getting pollinated. A fig is a flower, but instead of it opening outwards, it actually kind of closes in on itself and it's got a little tiny hole at the bottom called the osteole, and and it's ready to be pollinated. It secretes a smell that attracts the wasps that pollinate it.
All right. So usually for fruit, you have like a flower and then it's pollinated and then you get the fruit laders, like you'll see cherry trees bloom and then later you have cherries. But you're saying figs are the blooms themselves.
Yes, and then they ripe it.
Wow yeah, wow, Okay, fascinating plants are nuts. Nuts are plants. It's amazing.
Oh my gosh. This is deep. So there's this little hole at the bottom, and when it's ready to get pollinated, it attracts the wasp. And the hole is so small that when the female wasp, and it's always a female in this case, when the female wasp goes in there, she has to like squeeze in and her wings fall off and sometimes part of her antennae fall off. She's really like wedging herself in there because she's.
So desperate to eat this smelly thing.
To lay her eggs in the smelly thing.
Oh, to lay her eggs in my delicious tree.
Yeah. Yeah. This is just the beginning of the gross pyramid or the gross ice, if you will. So she wiggles her way to the inside of the fruit. And if you've opened up a fig, you've maybe noticed that the inside has a little bit of an open space, and so she gets to that open space. And you might have also noticed that when you open up a fig often there's lots of little seeds in there. So the good news is that when you bite into a seed and you feel something crunchy, it is the seed. It's not the wasp, So like, don't start panicking already. So the mom gets in there and all of the little like projections and the inside of the fig are as I understand it. They're like ovaries, and so they can either get pollinated, and the wasp has pollen on her, and we'll get to how she got that pollen on her towards the end of the story. But she's got pollen, and so in some of those little ovaries she deposits her egg and then induces the fig to make a gall where her offspring will develop.
Tamika, what a gall? What's a gall?
Oh? Man? I love galling insects. We need to get my friends. Got Egan on the show one day to talk about galling insects because he freaks out because they're so great.
Gallic is different from galic Gaalic is like French.
Right, yeah, right, this is gall Gall. A plant is manipulated into producing a compartment in which an insect will grow, and that compartment is called a gall. Yikes, And they take lots of different crazy forms, some of them are super fuzzy. Some of them have spikes. This is not in the figs. This is in like oaks and stuff. But here it's just a tiny little compartment that the insect grows in.
So the fig manipulates the wasp to crawl in, and the wasp manipulates the fig to make a little nest for its baby.
Yes, while it is also depositing pollen. There's all of these little like projections in the gall Some of them are the right height for eggs to get laid in, and some of them are not, and those get pollen on them. And so you get some insect babies inside of these projections, and then in some of them you just get the production of like seeds. Is that making sense so far?
Yeah? Absolutely? Okay, right, so they're like sharing this thing, like you grow some of your babies and I'll grow some of my babies. So basically figs and wasps are like siblings that grow up together.
This is a mutualism, so they both benefit. The listener should let us know if you want a whole show on this, because I would love an excuse to read about the evolution of like how this came into being. But that is not the question I was asked to answer. So we're going to stay on focus.
I want a whole show in this, depending on how gross this gets and whether this ruins figs for me in the end.
All right, stick with me, Stick with me. Okay. So the mom, when she's done pollinating and laying her eggs, dies and that's usually the wasp that people are talking about you eating. And the good news is at the point where this process is happening, the fig is not usually ripe enough that you would pick it and eat it. So the mom dies and then the mom essentially gets digested by the fig, so it releases this enzyme I think it's called fiking ficin, and it digests the mom, and I think it just uses that protein for like its own stuff.
So the fig eats the wasp.
So the fig eats the wasp.
Wow, what amazing.
There's other wasps in there, right, because you've just created a bunch of goals, right, And so those gulls hatch and the males come out first, and often more than one female wasp gets in and lays her eggs. Sometimes it's only one, but the males come out first. And the reason it's important to know if it was one or more moms is because what those males do is they open up the gulls that contain the females and they start impregnating those females.
Which might be their sisters, which might be.
Their sisters, and often it is their sisters.
And so gross problematic, wasp men problematic, that's right.
Work on that wasps, work on it. So the females get impregnated, and then the males, having done that job, start chewing their way out of the fig to create exit holes for the females.
I'm losing track of who's eating who here.
Oh, you know, there's a lot of bags and forth right. It's a mutualism. It's give and take. And so the males they start chewing these exit holes for the females who have wings, and they manage to get out. A lot of times the males like chew these exit holes and then they get like picked off by ants that are like waiting on the outside of the fig to eat these other insects. Because nature is just mean, and so the males are like sacrificial. Some of them never get out of the fig. A lot of them that get out of the they get eaten by ants. And while they are being consumed by ants, that gives the females a chance to go off.
Is this the whole job of the males to dig the women out and pregnate them and then let them miscave the wasp or do they have a life cycle outside of the wasp.
Well, that's it, that's it. Yeah, they impregnate the females, they help them get out, then they sacrifice themselves and die. That's it.
So if you're a male wasp, your whole existence is inside a fig. Your fig is your universe. Yes, that's crazy.
And so if you are eating a wasp in a fig, I think you're probably eating the males m that get left behind in there. So the females they get impregnated, and before they go out and leave to go find another fig, the fig that they're in starts producing pollen, and the females go and they collect the pollen. They've got like a little compartment and they collect the pollen, they hold onto it, and then they go off in search of another fig.
Why did they do that? They just do that to be nice to the fig, or there's a benefit to them.
This is why I would love to have a whole show on this. But the quick answer that I found when I did a little bit of research was that when females get into a fig and they lay their eggs but they don't do any pollinating, the fig trees are more likely to drop that fig. So it's like they're punishing the wasp for not pollinating it. But there's got to be some cheating. So, like, you know, if two fig wasps get into a fig and one pollinates and one doesn't, then how do you punish the one that didn't pollinate?
Wow?
And so I'd love an excuse to read more about it, but it sounds like there's some punishment going to like maintain this mutualism. There's consequences if you don't play along.
Mutualism is that the grown up word for symbiosis that I learned as a young biologist.
So symbiosis means a long term interaction between two organisms. Sometimes it can be bad or sometimes it can be good. And so mutualism is when it is good. When a symbiosis is good for both partners.
I see, even though they eat each other, the fig eats the wasp, the wasps eats the fig, it's good for both of them.
It's good for both of them, that's right, right. That's like a general overview of how it works. And so now let's get into the specifics. So figs have been cultivated by humans for something like eleven thousand years.
Wow, how do we know that?
We know that because we have found figs and archaeological digs and it looks like it's been going on for about eleven thousand years.
Figs and archaeological digs like remnants of fossilized figs, or like depictions of people eating figs or what does that mean?
I think it's remnants of fossilized figs.
Wow. Incredible.
But again, if we did a whole hour on this, I'd be happy to find a lot more. All right, And here's where we really get out of my area of expertise, and this is in how plants reproduce. But here is my best guess at answering the question. Okay, so through that process of cultivation, we have come up with some figs that don't produce seeds at all. So you've had seedless watermelon. Probably this is sort of the same idea. I think what's happening is you like pull a branch off, and then you stick a branch in the ground and it'll just start like propagating that way, and so those fruits will still ripen, you can still eat them. And if they don't have seeds, then they didn't need a wasp. And so a lot of the figs that you eat in grocery stores have been propagated that way and have never encountered a wasp.
Wow.
There are also some figs that you can induce to ripen by spraying them with plant hormones, and even though the wasp wasn't there, it will go ahead and ripen and then you can eat it.
So figs in the wild originally had this complex dance with wasps to evolve and propagate, and that gives us natural selection and all the kind of useful stuff. But humans have intervened and been cultivating figs and taking them out of their sort of natural cycle which might exclude the wasps. Is that what I'm understanding.
Yes, And it wouldn't surprise me if in those seven hundred and fifty fig species there were some that had dropped the wasp and get pollinated in some other way, because plants are just kind of crazy. But yes, in general, you need the wasp. But when we took this system and cultivated it as many cases as we can, we try to cut that wasp out. And that wasp also has environmental conditions that can't live under. So when it gets too cold, for example, and you're growing a fig too far north, then you probably don't have that wasp at all because the wasps can't survive, but you could still get fig fruits.
So it sounds like I'm unlikely to be eating wasps if I'm eating like cultivated figs that I'm buying in the grocery store. Whereas if I have a fig tree just like out in my backyard and I'm eating bows, am I more likely to be eating wasps?
Depends on where you live. I think it was the common fig and we took it from Turkey the country to California. We didn't bring the wasp with us. Initially, the fig trees weren't doing what they thought they should be doing, and so we ended up figuring out what was going on, and then we brought the wasp over. And so there's some parts in California where the wasp can survive and the wasp does its thing, maybe even in Irvine. I don't know.
Irvine probably has a law against it somehow.
Glad to know. It's a bureaucratic sort of city. But if you go farther north, probably aren't the wasps. There's other ways of like injecting the pollen in and pollinating without the wasps. But I believe that figs from like Turkey in southern California, you've got the wasps, and so they might be in there. But I think it depends on like the species, depends on where you are. It's really complicated. So the answer I think is it depends. I heard in a couple different sources that dried figs tend to come from Turkey, where you do get the wasp pollination, and so the dried figs are maybe more likely to have wasps in them than a fresh fig from northern California or something. The answer is, it depends what happened to your fig?
All right? Well, my last question then is can I tell, like, if I bite into a fig, can I tell if as a wasp? But it's a crunch. Differently, I mean, should I notice? Does it matter?
No?
I would not think too hard about it. They're like teeny tiny I mean, if you've looked at like a seed in a fig, those are super tiny. I you know, imagine something like living inside of one of those or something like really tiny. I mean, if you looked really close, you put it under a microscope, maybe you would see some remnants. But just pop the thing in your mouth, put some goat cheese on it and some honey, smile, and don't think about the wasps that have brought you this amazing fruit.
I think you're right actually that the smaller the insect, the less gross. It is. Like, if I imagine a wasp basically filling out the inside of the fig, and I'm biting the figure, I'm basically eating an entire wasp. That's super gross. Yeah, but I know that everything I eat is covered in all sorts of microbes and mites and little critters All the time. As I'm speaking, I'm probably consuming some tiny flies or whatever, and I'm honestly grossed out by that. So I'll just shrink those wasps in my mind until I don't worry about eating them.
I think the FDA, for a bunch of different kinds of foods, has criteria for how many like insects or insect parts are allowed to be in there, like per gram because insects are, like, they're just really hard to avoid. I think a lot of us are eating insects, whether we mean to or not, whether we're vegan or not.
Cockroach legs and everything.
Ugh, No, I don't want to think about that. Cockroaches do creep me out. You found my kryptonite.
What about tiny littlelady bad ones, super tiny microscopic cockroaches.
Yeah, if they're so small that I can't see them, I'll eat them. That's fine.
We'll do a blind taste test one day. I'll sprinkle tiny cockroaches into a platter of hummus and mix it in and see if you can tell.
I am not inviting you to parties anymore. But I've been writing parasitologists to ask them if they infect themselves with parasites, and one of them did tell me that they mixed some beetles in with hummus so that they wouldn't know that they were eating the beetle that was infected by a tapeworm when they tried to infect themselves with the tapeworm. And I was like, wow, So anyway, hummus will always be for me. I guess the food that you hide things in.
There's got to be a Beatles joke. There is there a Beatles song that sounds like it's about insects.
Here comes the infection, It's a stretch. Here comes the wasp in your hummus. Yeah, I don't know. I don't really like the beetles.
So lucy in the hummus with cockroaches. That's the Beatles song you never heard before.
Oh all right, Petrie, did we answer your question? My friend?
Hello, Daniel and Kelly, thank you very much for answering my question on the podcast. And I would like to say that your answer was very thorough and detailed and much more explicit than I bargained for, and I thought it was absolutely fantastic.
Thank you.
All right, Daniel, let's bring on the Funk.
We are zooming back out from tiny microscopic things that might gross you out to imagining the fate of the whole universe as controlled by tiny microscopic particles. See all the connections we're making today. Next, we're answering a question from Tim Funk about the Higgs Boson and the Big Bang.
As I was listening to listener questions, episode fifty eight about the Higgs fields collapse.
It made me wonder, could a Higgs field collapse be just like the Big Bang? Thanks? All right, so this is great. We've got a bit of a Big Bang theme going on. So we've already talked about what the Big Bang is. What has happened since the Big Bang? Daniel, It's been a while.
Yeah, that's been a while. A lot of stuff has happened. Let's summarize the whole history of the universe. I think it's important to understand what's happened since the Big Bang in order to answer this question, because we'll see that the Higgs field collapse can be considered it's just like one more stage in the history of the universe. So we talked about the Big Bang as starting from this moment when the universe was very hot and was very dense. And what happens next is that the universe expands, it spreads out. You get new space created everywhere between in these particles, and what that means is that the universe is getting more sparse, right, it's getting less dense. So the universe goes from more dense to less dense. So we get a universe that starts out young, hot and dense, and as it expands it cools and becomes old, cold and sparse. Right, And this is actually fascinating how the different parts of the universe react as the universe expands. Like matter, when the universe expands, just becomes more dilute because you have like more volume and the same amount of stuff. You don't get more protons made, you just have more space, and so the proton density goes down. Same thing is true for photons. You have the same number of photons, more volume, so lower density of photons. But photons also get red shifted. They get stretched into longer wavelengths as the universe expands, which means they lose energy. So the energy density of photons goes down faster than the energy density of matter. Matter loses energy density because you know, space is expanding, but photons lose energy density faster, which is really interesting, not just because hey, if you're a nerd, this is cool, but because it tells us something about dark matter. We can measure the energy density of dark matter over time, and we see that it decreases the same way as matter, not the same way as photons, which is one reason why we think dark matter is matter. People say, oh, it's just a fudge factor in galactic rotations, but like man, it plays a crucial role in the whole history of the universe in so many ways.
Does dark energy respond the same way as photons, then.
Dark energy does its own super weird third thing, which is that it doesn't get diluted at all. It is constant density. You double the volume of space, you double the dark energy. It's weird. It's just like an inherent property of space we don't understand at all. But as the universe expands the amount of dark energy increases because the density is constant, totally weird and crazy.
We got to add that to our episode list.
It's fascinating. And so what's happening quantum mechanically is think of the universe as space filled with quantum mechanical fields, and you have like electron fields and photon fields, et cetera. And as the universe is expanding, these fields are losing energy, and so they go from being like totally filled with energy, like an ocean of frothing energy inside these fields, to being mostly empty, with little blips of energy here and there. And so it's at that point we can start to talk about particles. It's like take the ocean and drain it, and now you have a bunch of drops left over on the bottom. Those you can call particles. Doesn't really make sense to talk about particles before that. It's just a big frothing ocean. And so the universe cools, and these fields deplete, and they lower with their energy density, and they go down, down, down, down down. They never actually get all the way to zero, right, they get down to some sort of quantum minimum energy. No field and quantum mechanics can actually have zero energy because of uncertainty.
I follow you there, now, can you tell what the Higgs field is?
Right? So what role does the Higgs field play in the sort of evolution of the universe and its future? So all these fields we talked about are similar in one really important way, which is that they want to relax to zero, right. They want to go down to zero energy density. That's sort of the most relaxed state. And as the universe is expanding and cooling things relaxing, they head down to zero particles and never get all the way to zero, but they all head down to zero. The Higgs field is different. It's weird in this one particular way, which is that it doesn't relax to zero. It relaxes to some non zero state. It's like if you had a guitar and you plucked all the strings and they all relaxed back down to like not vibrating at all, but one of them relax down to like vibrating, or relax down to being bent. Actually is a better analogy, because the Higgs field relaxes not down to non zero kinetic energy, but non zero potential energy. So like if one of your guitar strings after you pluck it, it relaxes down to a position which is not straight but a little bit bent. That would be weird, right. That's the Higgs field. So as the universe cools, all the fields go to zero or close to it, except for the Higgs field, which gets like stuck in this higher energy state. And that's what Tim is asking about. He's asking about if that field could collapse, if that field could eventually decay all the way to zero, because we don't understand the Higgs field well enough. It's pretty new that we even know it it's a thing, and that we're measuring all of its properties to know if it's stuck in that state and stable or just sort of temporarily paused there and eventually going to relax down to zero. Like when I say it prefers to relax at a non zero state, that's a hypothesis based on what we've seen so far. We don't actually understand the field well enough to know long term where it will eventually relax.
And we don't know why it stays at the non zero state for as long as we've been watching it, right, that's also a mystery.
Yeah, well, we can describe it mathematically. We can constru dructive field that has those properties. You just have to give it sort of a weird potential energy form. But then the question is like, well, well why does that field exist? Yeah, that we don't know. This is just descriptive so it's possible to accommodate mathematically, but that doesn't answer the philosophical question of why the universe is this way. But if the Higgs field does collapse, it means the whole universe changes in its fundamental nature, because the Higgs field is why particles have mass. For example, electrons have mass, and quarks have mass and all this kind of stuff, and that only happens if the Higgs field has that energy. If the Higgs field collapses down to zero, those particles lose their mass. Electrons suddenly massless. Now they start moving like photon. They move at the speed of light, same with quarks. So every atom unbounds right, all matter in the universe would explode and travel outwards at the speed of light. It would be catastrophic for life as we know it. The universe would go on, it would just have very different nature. The effective laws of physics that we're used to would be totally different.
But to stick with Tim's question real quick, how would that be qualitatively different than the Big Bang?
Yeah? So Tim's question is would the Higgs field collapse be like the Big Bang? Well, I mean it would be big, and it would be dramatic, and in some sense it makes a lot of sense to think of it as part of the Big Bang, not just like the Big Bang, but sort of like a natural extension of the Big Bang, because the Big Bang, again, is not just like a moment in time, it's the expansion of the universe. In some sense, the universe is still big banging because the universe started out very hot and dense and the expansion that follows is what we call the Big Bang. So the Big Bang is still kind of happening, and if the Higgs field collapses, that's sort of like the natural next step, Like the Big Bang is all these quantum fields gradually relaxing down to zero. The Higgs field got stuck for a while, but if it collapses down to zero, if it's not actually stable, then that's just like you know, episode seven of the Big Bang. So it's not a lot like the initial stages of the Big Bang, where everything was very hot and very dense and a very very high temperature, so hot we can't even really imagine it. It's more like the end game of the Big Bang, the closing chapters, when things are finally relaxing closer to zero.
So just so people like me can sleep at night, we don't necessarily know that the Higgs field is going to go to zero. It's just if it did, it would be bad. But it's not necessarily going to happen because we just don't know.
It's not necessarily going to happen. We don't know. We're making measurements right now with the particle colliders to try to understand the Higgs field and better, so we can get a better handle on the chances that it could collapse. We don't really know it. On the other hand, you might ask, well, what could trigger its collapse? Like if the Higgs field is stuck in this state and that's metastable, it's like it could stay there, or it could get knocked off, you know, sort of like a ball balanced on the top of a hill. It could veer off, or it could just hang out there if nothing touches it. Well, one thing that could trigger it are very high energy particle collisions creating moments of energy density. Who knows right, that could trigger the Higgs field to collapse. So you know, yes, we are trying to study it so that you can sleep better at night. But you know, as with all experiments, there are existential risks here, and those experiments could potentially maybe possibly dot dot dot. The lawyer Shay insists, I had a bunch of qualifiers here trigger the Higgs field collapse.
I thought that you got into this field because you didn't want to do anything catastrophic. You've somehow managed to up maybe do something even more catastrophic than anyone has ever done before.
Yeah, I know, I know the irony is not lost on me. But the good news is if the Higgs field does collapse, that collapse would propagate out at the speed of light, and so it all happened very quickly. There'd be no long, slow biological torture where you're eating from the inside out by wasps like some sort of weird fig You would just stop existing instantaneously and you wouldn't even know it.
If the wasps are bringing about the end of days, we've got a chance to fight back, But it sounds like we don't have a chance with your end of day's scenario.
Maybe we just need to evolve wasps that can fight the Higgs field or prop it up, right, yea, some sort of mutualism there between the Higgs and the wasps. Problem solved, Yeah, exactly. I mean they're focused on the figs. It's just like one letter off to be focused on the Higgs.
Oh my gosh, Wait, doesn't Higgs have two g's.
Yes, Higgs's have a little bit.
Farther off, but it's close. This is why I think interdisciplinary discussions are so important, you know, because we're solving everything here.
That's right. Nobody's ever had a podcast about the Higgs figs before we're breaking new grounds.
Oh my gosh, Higgs liked figs. There's got to be a biography or a biographer we could ask.
Somebody must know the answer that question.
Is Higgs still alive.
Unfortunately, Higgs died in April of twenty twenty four, so that question, if it's not already answered, we will never know the answer.
To the mysteries abound. All right, Well, well, Tim, have we answered your question? Yeah?
I think I got it.
It did raise more questions that I'll say for another day. I really appreciate the reminder that the Big Bang continues to be not the greatest choice of names, and that carries along a lot of misconceptions by using those particular words. Otherwise, I think I'm calmly reassured that if death by Higgs collapse, whatever happened, is probably the best way for us to go.
Thanks all right, Thank you everybody for asking these questions, for writing in, and for powering this whole show with your curiosity. You know, the reason we do this is because you are curious about the universe, because you desperately want answers to how the universe works, how the guy and creepy bits of biology work and how the fundamental particles in the universe can affect everything on the grandest scale. And we'd love to hear more from you. Please do send us your questions to questions at Danielankelly dot org. Everybody gets an answer.
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