What is weak hypercharge?

Daniel and Kelly break down what it means for particles to have charge, and how that translates to charges for the weak force See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

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• 1:40Daniel Whiteson?

  The universe is beautiful and amazing and strange and confusing, and we struggle sometimes, or a lot of times, to make sense of it. One reason is that we have a limited vocabulary to explain it to ourselves. Not just limited to the words that we choose, but the concepts that we find familiar, the things we accept as explanations. Most of physics is about explaining the weird, bonkers rules of our universe in terms that do make sense to us, like eating some new weird fruit nobody's ever tasted before, and then describing it in terms of familiar childhood staples. It's a little bit like an orange, but with hints of cherry and blackberry.

• 2:24Daniel Whiteson?

  That's what we try to do, for example, with photons. We say, oh, they're kind of like waves, they're kind of like particles, even though we know that neither of those fully capture the alienness of the photon. But today's episode isn't about oranges or about photons, at least not directly. We're going to dig into another basic concept and try to understand what it really is: electric charge. What is it? Where is it? Why do some particles have it? Why do some have more than others? How is it connected to electric forces? And once we have something of a handle on that, we're going to see if we can extend it to something less familiar: the weak force. How do charges work for those other forces? And why oh why did physicists

• 3:08Daniel Whiteson?

  call the charge for the weak force "hypercharge"? Is it weak or is it hyper? Make up your minds, physicists. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Hyper Extraordinary Universe.

• 3:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I am a parasitologist and "weak hypercharge" is a phrase that makes really no sense to me.

• 3:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel Wetton. I'm a particle physicist, and so I should understand weak hypercharge, but it still gets scrambled up in my head.

• 3:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, that's all right. We're going to clear it all up today. And so you and I are very well organized people, so we record our episodes a few months before they actually come out. So for you and I, it actually has recently become the new year. So, welcome to 2025. Do you believe in resolutions?

• 4:08Daniel Whiteson?

  I believe in self-improvement. You know, I think people can take positive steps to change their life. I'm not one of those naysayers who says people never change, because my life has changed significantly in various ways over the years. So yeah, I think it's good for people to have introspection, think about their life, think about how it could change in the new year, especially when you're reaching out to folks who are in your community or used to be in your community. You know, personal connection is the thing that makes life wonderful. So, reach out to somebody you haven't talked to in a while and make that connection again.

• 4:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  That is a way deeper answer than I was expecting. Like, so my resolutions aren't usually like, think about how you could improve your personality and do something better, or reach out to an old friend. It's like, I want to get done. Is my 2025 resolution. I want cute little baby ducks.

• 4:56Daniel Whiteson?

  That's not a resolution. That's a wish list.

• 5:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  I resolved to build their habitat and make time in my life for, you know, a happy, relaxing pet.

• 5:07Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm going to improve myself by adding ducks.

• 5:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, it will make me happy. That's a happiness improver. Getting baby ducks and renovating my kitchen. Those are my 2025. I guess they're goals now instead of resolutions. Do you have a resolution you want to share then? Or a goal?

• 5:23Daniel Whiteson?

  I do have a resolution for the year and it's about the podcast and its response to an email I got on January 1st at 8:00 a.m. Where somebody wrote in and says, Happy New Year. Unfortunately, I can't listen to the show anymore because of the perpetual giggling.

• 5:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Which of course just made me giggle. And I thought to myself, man, who doesn't like a podcast with giggling in it? And so this year I'm going to lean into the giggling.

• 5:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  I resolved to giggle with you a lot over weak hypercharges and strong forces and all sorts of other things. We're going to have a blast.

• 5:58Daniel Whiteson?

  But it made me wonder about giggling because, you know, I have a bit of a deeper voice and I've always thought of myself as more of a chuckler than a giggler. And so I don't know. What are your thoughts? Where's the distinction between giggling and chuckling?

• 6:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  After we record an episode, our editor does the editing. He sends it to us. We listen to it to make sure we didn't get anything wrong. And I was listening to my laugh and I was like, I've got a really like sort of obnoxious dude-ish kind of laugh. But I don't care. It's unique. I'm happy and that's all I care about.

• 6:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Your laugh is not obnoxious. It's expressive. You know, you are really showing us how funny you think something is. It's very sincere. It's very New Jersey also, though.

• 6:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  It is. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was born in New Jersey and I'm proud of that. And yeah, I don't hold back. And so I don't feel like either one of us do what I would call giggling. But whatever, we're having fun and let's resolve to lean into it.

• 6:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Absolutely. And I think a key to understanding difficult concepts is to giggle a little bit, right? You can't just always go deep on these concepts. You gotta lighten the mood a little bit. That's kind of our brand, right? Like make a few mom jokes along the way, throw in a few dad puns, keep it light as we go deep on the topic.

• 7:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Couple of jokes about Uranus.

• 7:08Daniel Whiteson?

  So hey, if you're here to learn some deep concepts about the universe and you are allergic to giggling, you might've found the wrong podcast.

• 7:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sorry. There's gotta be something else out there for you.

• 7:20Daniel Whiteson?

  But we are going to go deep into topics and especially today, we're going to dig into one of my favorite concepts in physics, not just because it tells you something about how the universe works, but it shows you the mechanics of how physics as a field struggles with, tries to grapple with something alien, how we start from intuitive concepts and we build this precarious scaffolding to help us understand something even weirder and translate it back into something we might be able to make sense of.

• 7:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I'm super excited today because you sent me the outline for this topic and there's a bunch of things when I was reading it through that made me think, oh gosh, I thought I knew the difference between like charge and force, but maybe I really don't. And I think a bunch of that's going to get cleared up today and I'm glad that I'll be giggling along the way. And you know what's good for giggles?

• 8:04Daniel Whiteson?

  What's good for giggles, Kelly?

• 8:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  The hilarious answers we get from our audience. I mean, we get lots of great serious answers, but we also usually get some pretty funny ones when folks don't know what it is. So let's go ahead and giggle at lots of amazing answers.

• 8:16Daniel Whiteson?

  So today we're talking about electric charge and the weak force and specifically weak hypercharge. So I went out there to our volunteers and I asked them if they knew what weak hypercharge was. Think about it for yourself. Do you know what a weak hypercharge is? Here's what audience members had to say.

• 8:33Speaker 06

  I reckon it's some sort of parameter or property, it might even be a mathematical concept to describe the weak force.

• 8:40Speaker 07

  The weak hypercharge is the value assigned to a particle participant.

• 8:43Speaker 08

  It's either some extortionate tax imposed by a cowardly government, or it's something associated with the weak field which mirrors the electric charge in the electromagnetic field.

• 8:57Speaker 09

  Hypercharge combines with isospin to somehow give a charge under the electro weak force. A charge state of the weak force.

• 9:08Speaker 10

  I have no idea. Weak and hyper? Sounds like my childhood.

• 9:14Speaker 10

  It's related to quantum physics.

• 9:17Speaker 11

  I have no idea what the hypercharge part would be and how I would tie it to the weak force.

• 9:22Speaker 12

  The weak hypercharge is the charge of the weak force. It encapsulates a particle's in some particular force along with its spin and maybe some other information.

• 9:35Speaker 13

  I don't know what the weak hypercharge is, but it sounds like there's a stronger version of it somewhere. Well, that's pretty easy. That's when you try to do a hypercharge on a car and it's so weak, it doesn't really charge.

• 9:46Speaker 10

  A single factor that enumerates both like a particle's electric charge, its weak charge, and I don't know, it's magnetic.

• 9:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So I chuckled at sounds like my childhood and the one about attacks put on by a cowardly governmental agency. So thank you, everyone, for the giggles and the serious answers as well.

• 10:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, and some of these serious answers are right on the money. So I was very impressed.

• 10:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I'm not surprised. We have a brilliant audience.

• 10:17Daniel Whiteson?

  And good looking too. Wow.

• 10:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's I think it's called the halo effect when somebody is good at one thing and then you just assume they're good at everything else. They're probably also like fit and fast.

• 10:26Daniel Whiteson?

  They smell good. Yeah.

• 10:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Mm hmm. Way to go, guys. All right. So let's start like super back at the beginning. Let's make sure we're all on the same page with just even what is charge?

• 10:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. Oh, wow. I'm supposed to answer that question?

• 10:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  You're the physicist. Yeah. What is charge?

• 10:44Daniel Whiteson?

  So yeah, let's begin with charge and let's just talk about charge descriptively first before we get into the philosophy of like, what is it, man? We know that electrons have negative charge, protons have positive charge, right? Electrons are minus one, protons are plus one. So already we know something about charge, which is that it's associated with the number line, right? It's a number. It can be zero. It can be positive. It can be negative, right? It also can be fractional quirks have two thirds of a charge or minus one third of a charge. So it's not an integer, right? So it's associated with the real number line. We don't know if they're rational or. Irrational charges, we've only ever seen fractional charges.

• 11:27Daniel Whiteson?

  But this tells us something that charge lies along this spectrum. It's important to keep that in mind because later on, when we get to the weak force and the strong force, that's no longer true. But let's stay on the safe ground of electricity. Particles have this thing we call charge, can be positive, can be negative. And there are mirrored versions of it, like there's the electron that has negative one charge. And then there's another particle, the antiparticle of the electron, which is a version of it with positive charge. We call that the positron. And every particle we've observed that has a charge, there's also a partner particle that has the opposite charge. The antimatter version of it has the opposite charge. So a quark might have one third charge, but the anticore would have minus one third, for example.

• 12:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm thinking of like a number line and we've got electrons with negative one and we've got protons with one. Are the magnitude of those charges the same in the different directions? Even though electrons are smaller and protons are bigger, they still have opposite charges?

• 12:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, and way to put your finger on one of the deepest mysteries in physics right there. Because electrons and protons have opposite sign charges and exactly the same magnitude. It's like electrons are minus 1.00000000 infinite zeros. And protons are plus 1.00000000. And how do we know they match exactly? Well, if they didn't match, you couldn't have neutral atoms, right? You use a proton and an electron to make hydrogen and then it's neutral. And it's crucial that hydrogen is neutral, right? Like hydrogen gas clouds are what forms most of the universe. And the dynamics of that and the reason that gravity can pull them together to form stars is because it's neutral. Electricity, which is much more powerful than gravity,

• 13:12Daniel Whiteson?

  has been literally neutralized because these things cancel each other out. But as you say, the electron is much smaller than the proton. The electron is, we think, fundamental, made of nothing but electron. The proton is made of three quarks. Two of them have two thirds charge, one of them has minus one third charge, which add up to plus one. Why is that? Why does the electron exactly balance this combination of quarks? Why isn't it like off by a little bit? Because in our theory, those are just two different numbers. Like, there are parameters in our theories, knobs that you could change, and we think still have a valid universe, but a very different universe. We don't know why these two knobs happen to be set in exactly the way

• 13:56Daniel Whiteson?

  so that the charge of the proton and the charge of the electron balance. It's like if I asked you to pick two random numbers between zero and a zillion, and you picked the same number twice, or the number and its opposite. Like, what are the chances of that? So it's a screaming clue that there's a deep connection between the quarks and the electrons, but we don't know what it is.

• 14:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so a positron is an electron with a positive charge. And that positive charge, is that positive charge now plus one? Like, the same quantity of charge as a proton? Yes, you're shaking your head. But it's not done with quarks?

• 14:34Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right.

• 14:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right?

• 14:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so an electron doesn't switch its charge to become a positron. The universe can do two things. The universe can make electrons. The universe can also make positrons. And remember, electrons are ripples in a field, right? The way like photons are ripple in the electromagnetic field. Electrons are also ripples in a field. They're ripples in the electron field. So we have two different fields that sound very similar. Bad naming because this, the electron field and the electromagnetic field. Ripples in the electron field are called electrons, or it turns out that same field, not a different field, the same field can ripple in another way, and that way is a positron. So the electron field can ripple to make electrons,

• 15:17Daniel Whiteson?

  or can ripple slightly differently to make positrons. And this is something Dirac noticed years and years and years ago when he was looking at the math for electrons in field theory. He was like, hmm, if the universe can do this, why can't it also do that? In fact, I predict that it does. Then a couple of years later, boom, we found positrons. So you're right, positrons have the same electric charge as protons, but they're fundamentally very different. Positrons, we think, are fundamental particles, ripples in the electron field that are different from the way electrons make that field ripple. And protons are a combination of three quarks, each of which is a ripple in its own field.

• 15:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. All right.

• 15:57Daniel Whiteson?

  So this is all descriptive, right? We're talking about what we've seen in the universe. We've seen this charge, we've seen that charge. And explaining in terms of fields makes us wonder like, well, what is this thing anyway? Like, why is it that some fields have charge? Like, the electron field, when it ripples, it has a charged particle. But when the photon field ripples, it doesn't have a charge. Photons are neutral, right? So it makes us wonder like, what is charge anyway fundamentally?

• 16:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, go on. What's the answer? I'm dying to know now.

• 16:28Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, I was curious because I was like, is that just me? Like, interested in philosophy and physics? Or is a biologist like, well, we described it and we've given it a name, so let's move on. So I'm glad.

• 16:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, no, I'm following you. Let's go down the rabbit hole. Let's go one more level of why.

• 16:41Daniel Whiteson?

  And so we don't fundamentally know what charge is, but we have a bunch of interesting clues. And when I was growing up, thinking and learning about charge, I used to think about charge as a property of a particle that could be like removed from it, you know? Or it's like a description of how the particle is, you know? Like, if you paint something red, okay, now it's red. But you could also paint it blue and it's still the same thing, right? Like, you take an apple and it's red, you paint it blue, it's blue now, but it's still an apple, right? Or is it a fundamental part of the thing that helps define what it is? Is it something that you can take off of it? Like, you can peel an apple and then you still have an apple, right? Even though it's peeled? Can you take an electron and remove the charge from it?

• 17:23Daniel Whiteson?

  And have like a peeled electron and uncharged electron? You know, or is the charge fundamentally part of the electron? This is something I was always wondering about as I was learning about particle physics as a kid. And it's not something we have a solid answer for, but thinking about it in terms of fields helps. And so let's go back to thinking about particles in terms of ripples of fields. And I'll show you the role the charge plays in the field picture. And it gives you a very different feel for what charge is fundamentally.

• 17:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  My first thought was, okay, is charge going to be just like an arbitrary thing that humans use in our definition for an electron? Like, charge and mass? Or is it going to be like, you use the example of painting it red or blue? And that doesn't change anything fundamental about it. But I think the fact that when you change the charge and you get like a positron, but they annihilate each other, they're behaving totally different. And so that feels different than just painting it red or blue. But okay, now let's talk about fields and see if we can dig into that deeper.

• 18:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Because the fields picture of physics is going to tell us that charge is not a property of particles. It's actually a relationship between fields.

• 18:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  I should have seen that coming. The fields always throw me off, but all right.

• 18:34Daniel Whiteson?

  So remember in the fields picture, we still have particles or things we call particles. We have a different mental image for what they are. They're not little bits of stuff. They are ripples in these fields and these fields fill the universe. And sometimes these fields can interact with each other. So now let's talk about forces. What happens to an electron when it's flying through space and encounters an electric field? Well, it accelerates. Either it slows it down or it speeds it up, but it changes its velocity. That's what an electric field is. That's what an electric field does, right? And that means that there's a force on it. You accelerate something, you have to put a force on it. That's F equals ma. But a neutral particle like a neutrino flying through the same electric field totally ignores it, right?

• 19:16Daniel Whiteson?

  It will fly right through. It has no charge and it ignores the electric field. Yeah, it's there, but it doesn't interact with it. It doesn't matter to it. It does not accelerate the neutrino. So you shoot an electron through an electric field, it accelerates. You shoot a neutral particle through electric field, nothing happens.

• 19:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  So electric fields exert force on electrons, but electric fields don't exert force on neutrons.

• 19:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. Electric fields exert force on any particles with charge.

• 19:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 19:44Daniel Whiteson?

  And you might think, okay, well, that's a useful way to describe what an electric field does. It's actually a description of what charge is. Charge is a label we put on particles that are accelerated by electric fields.

• 19:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so charge is the ability to be sped up or slowed down. Can you get slowed down by an electric field too?

• 20:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, absolutely. You can get slowed down. Yeah, if you flip the direction of it. So charge is a label we put on it. Like, let's say I give you an electric field, they give you a bunch of particles, I don't tell you anything about them. You throw them all into an electric field. Some of them slow down, some of them don't. The ones that slow down, you say, oh, this notices the electric field. I'm going to put a label on that one. This notices the electric field in the opposite direction. I'm going to put the negative label on that one. This one ignores the electric field. I'm putting a zero on that one. All right, so charge is a label we put on particles that sense electric fields. So now let's go back to the fields picture. What's happening there? The electron is flying through space. It's a ripple in the electron field.

• 20:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Now encounters an electric field, which is energy in the electromagnetic field. What happens is those two fields are coupling with each other. Energy is going from the electromagnetic field to the electron field. Right, it's accelerating the electron or it's decelerating, whichever. But energy is passing, these two fields are coupling together. So instead of just having like one field sloshing through space, doing its own thing, and another field sloshing through space, doing its own thing, think of them as like tied together. Right, there's a connection between them. It's like having two guitar strings, but now you have like a rubber band connecting them. So when one oscillates, the other one's going to oscillate also. That's what charge is. Charge is a coupling between two fields for two different fundamental particles.

• 21:29Daniel Whiteson?

  So when the electron moves through space, it makes ripples in the electromagnetic field. And if there's a field there, it pushes on the electron. It sloshes back and forth between electrons and the electromagnetic field. And charge tells us how that works. If you have a zero, then there's no coupling. If you have a one, then they are coupled. If you have a minus one, you couple the opposite direction.

• 21:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, all right. So first, we're talking about strings, but this has nothing to do with string theory.

• 21:57Daniel Whiteson?

  No, we talk about strings because strings follow the wave equation and so do the fields. Wave equation is everywhere.

• 22:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, great, perfect. When we're talking about electron fields, we're talking about a bunch of electrons acting together. When we talk about electric fields, what is an electric field made of?

• 22:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Electric field is energy in the electromagnetic field, which is just another field in the universe, the same way the electron field is. And ripples in that field are photons, right? And so in the particle picture, you have electrons which shoot photons back and forth at each other. And that's how electrons repel each other. In the fields picture, you have ripples in the electron field which couple to the electromagnetic field and exchange energy that way.

• 22:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, all right. I've caught up.

• 22:46Daniel Whiteson?

  So that's another way to think about charge. Charge here is a coupling between fields, right? It says this field connects to that field. This field connects to that field. These two fields don't connect at all. You put a zero. So instead of thinking of charge as something attributed to the particle, like the charge is the electrons, it's the relationship between the electron and the photon, or the electron field and the electromagnetic field. Are they connected? If so, put a one. Are they anti-connected? Or do they ignore each other? So charge is how the fields couple. But it might not just be our description. It might be something important to the universe, because this is something the universe respects.

• 23:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  And let's talk about R E S P C T after the break.

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• 25:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  We're back and we're talking about fields respecting each other. And where are we going with this?

• 25:53Daniel Whiteson?

  So you might think, all right, well, if we are just putting label on particles and it's just a relationship between fields, then these are just numbers. We made them up and they shouldn't have any special properties. Right? But we know that charge has a really interesting special property, which is if you count up all the charges on all the particles in some system and then you let it do its thing, you let physics happen for a second, for a billion years, whatever, and you come back and you count up all the charges again, and you might have, you know, some of the electrons are gone and now you've made protons or whatever. The particles have all changed, but the total number of charge has not changed. Charge is conserved in the universe. Every microphysical process, an electron radiates a photon

• 26:37Daniel Whiteson?

  or electron and positron annihilate, none of those violate electric charge. So you can do zillions of them and they don't add up to any violation of the electric charge. It's exactly conserved in the universe. In a way, very, very few things are exactly conserved. And for physics, that's like, whoa, that's a big screaming clue that this might be an important thing to the universe, not just something we made up.

• 27:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  So first of all, I'm finding myself wondering if there are more religious people in physics than there are in biology. The more we get into this, it feels like something is making these things be symmetrical. Maybe you've hinted at the fact that the universe could not be otherwise. Like when we were talking about the big bang and why are there electrons? And we've lost the positrons. And if we had equal numbers, everything would annihilate and there'd be nothing, right? So this is the only thing that could have arisen from the chaos, this symmetry. Is that the right way to be thinking about it? Or are we going in a different direction with this conversation?

• 27:35Daniel Whiteson?

  No, this is definitely the right part of your brain to be using here. Because the whole juice of physics for me is like, let's reveal what the rules are. And then let's be awed that the rules are what they are. And wonder if they could have been different, right? And my whole fantasy is that we will work hard to unify all of our understanding of the universe and be left with an equation. And then it will be self evident. We're like, oh, yeah, I can see how this is the only way you could put a universe together. There is no other way to do it. Of course, it's gotta be this way. The alternative is you get to some equation and you're like, huh, well, I mean, I see how that works. But you could have also made this a six or that a nine. Like, why didn't we live in that universe? Then you got a bunch of open questions.

• 28:19Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't know which is going to be the outcome.

• 28:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Either would be interesting.

• 28:23Daniel Whiteson?

  But along the way, you have these moments where something emerges from the math that you didn't build in. Right? You didn't say, I'm going to create this concept of charge and I'm going to insist that it's conserved. You just discover that, right? It's like it comes out in our experiments. We notice a charge is concerned. And then we also see it in the mathematics. And that seems like, ooh, you are digging deep into the firmament of the universe and you clanged onto something hard and you're like, whoa, there's something here. Let's dig out this corner and see what this is. And it turns out there is a really interesting, very, very deep realization here, which I don't think has penetrated nearly enough into like the broader culture of what it means for something to be conserved.

• 29:06Daniel Whiteson?

  And it also connects to our goal of uplifting overlooked women who've contributed to science. Because there's a very influential theorem from the mind of Emmy Noether. She was a mathematician working Around the same time as Einstein and she just like dabbled occasionally in physics on her coffee breaks and came up with these incredible realizations. You know, just while goofing around before going back to real stuff like mathematics. And her theorem tells us that every time something is conserved in the universe, like electric charge or momentum, for example. That's because there's a symmetry in the universe. There's something the universe respects.

• 29:45Daniel Whiteson?

  And so for momentum, it's fairly straightforward. We have momentum conservation in the universe because the universe doesn't care where something happens. The rules are the same everywhere. So you set up some physics experiment, you do it, you get an answer. If you had set it up 10 meters to the right or 10,000 meters to the left, it shouldn't matter. The rules of the universe should be the same no matter where you are. There's no like absolute origin to the universe. You can't tell where you are in the universe. That makes sense, right? There's a symmetry there. That symmetry is why we have conservation of momentum. So Noether connected these two ideas of symmetries and conservations. And we could do a whole other episode where I try to explain the mathematics of that in an intuitive way. But today's episode just accept like every symmetry means a conservation.

• 30:30Daniel Whiteson?

  And now we have a conservation of something, electric charge. So you're like, okay, well, Noether tell me what's the symmetry, right? What is the universe respecting here? And it turns out, this is incredible, that what it's respecting is some weird internal angle that electrons have. Like when we say electrons are ripples in the field, that's true. But the mathematics gives us another degree of freedom, like electrons ripple through the field, but they also have an angle to them as they go. And this angle is mostly unimportant, like you can't measure it, doesn't matter, you can't see it. And you could have a universe where the electron angles are just like willy nilly. But if you insist that the universe respects this angle,

• 31:12Daniel Whiteson?

  that it's symmetric with respect to this angle, that you can change this weird internal electron angle and not change any of the physics, the same way you can change the location or direction of an experiment and always get the same answer. The only way to do it, if you have electrons in the universe and you want that symmetry preserved, this weird internal angle, is to have photons. You can only preserve this symmetry, this weird electron angle, if you add photons to the universe. Electrons can't do it by themselves. So it's sort of like you derive the existence of photons. You're like, okay, I have electrons and they have charge and they have this weird angle inside them. If I insist, for whatever reason, that this weird internal electron angle

• 31:56Daniel Whiteson?

  has a symmetry, that the universe is the same if I spin that angle, then I gotta add photons. Otherwise, it doesn't work. You can derive the existence of photons just from this requirement. And of course, we know that photons are what do the thing that charges do, right? They're there to provide the forces. So there's this deep connection between charge and photons and this bizarre internal angle that electrons have. And we don't quite understand it, but we know that for some reason, the universe really wants to be symmetric with respect to this internal angle that electrons have. And that's why we have charge conservation in the universe. And you have to have photons to make that whole thing work.

• 32:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so first, when we were talking about symmetry, I was thinking that positrons were the symmetrical thing with electrons. And so that's asymmetrical thing with electrons. But there's another symmetrical thing with electrons, which is this angle.

• 32:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Absolutely.

• 32:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  You said we can't measure the angle. So how do we know this?

• 32:54Daniel Whiteson?

  You can't measure an electron's angle directly. It has to do with like what fraction of its wave function is real and what fraction is complex. And you can't measure complex properties of an electron. But it exists and affects how the wave function propagates. So we can make predictions based on it in a statistical way. So you're asking like, how do we know this angle is real? Well, it's sort of like asking, how do we know the wave function is real? We can't see it directly, but it's Important part of our model. So yeah, it's a deep question of philosophy like, is this real? It's a necessary component of the model which predicts the outcome of experiments since that makes it feel real ish. But is anything that's complex valued actually real? I don't know. I mean, technically mathematicians are like, real numbers are real, complex numbers are not

• 33:38Daniel Whiteson?

  real. But I think we mean real philosophically there. So anyway, that's a long way of saying, yeah, we don't know.

• 33:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. Yeah, I feel like 50% of the conversations you and I have gets down to what is real? What exists? I don't know. So you can have symmetry with respect to charge and with respect to angle. Are there other features of electrons that have symmetries?

• 33:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So there are lots of these pairings from Noether's theorem. You know, one of them is like, where are you in the universe? Doesn't matter. That gives you conservation and momentum. There's also angles, like, hey, what if you send your x-axis this direction or that direction? Doesn't matter. No, the universe has no preferred angle. That gives you angular momentum conservation. And there's also symmetries with respect to time. Like, do the laws of physics change over time? We don't think so. That's where energy conservation comes from. So all the big conservation laws can be translated into symmetries or vice versa. And you can actually think of them as sort of two sides of the same coin. And all of those, I think, are clues. They tell us like, how the universe works. Like, if energy is conserved, that means

• 34:42Daniel Whiteson?

  that the laws of physics don't change with time. That's kind of a big deal. And in fact, it turns out energy not exactly conserved in our universe because the laws of physics are changing slightly with time as the universe expands and dark energy is increasing. And that changes a factor that we include in the laws of physics. So that's a whole other rabbit hole. But this one is exactly conserved. The universe conserves electric charge exactly, which means this weird internal electron angle that seems bizarre and just sort of like abstract is important to the universe. The universe respects it. It's built in deep, deep to the mechanics of the universe. I feel like that's a clue. That's something hard we're clinging on in the firmament of physics.

• 35:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  So protons and electrons have opposite charges of the same magnitude, but they don't have the same mass. Does that tell us something about mass not being conserved? Or am I clinging to a not relevant factor here?

• 35:40Daniel Whiteson?

  The mass of these particles is a totally separate topic. And you're right, mass is not conserved. Electrons and positrons do have the same mass because they're ripples in the same fundamental field. But yeah, mass is definitely not conserved in the universe. I mean, we destroy mass all the time in the Large Hadron Collider. You know, the protons, you use their mass to make new stuff that has lower mass and higher velocity. You also gain mass all the time from energy. You go out and feel the sun, the photons that your body absorbs, increase the internal energy of your molecules and gain mass. You charge your Tesla, it gains mass. So yeah, mass is definitely not conserved in the universe. But this concept of charge turns out to be a little bit more general than even electric charge.

• 36:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Like, we've talked about charge as a way that the photon, the electric fields couple to each other, right? But also somehow deeply connected to the universe. And that turns out to be the simplest way to think about it. Because you have just like, one kind of charge can be positive or negative, and just one field, the photon field that it couples to. And, you know, muons couple to the photon field, and quarks couple to the photon field. Anything with electric charge couples to the photon field. But the other charges for the other forces that are mediated by other fields and particles turn out to be, in a generalization, a more complex version of the same basic idea of thinking about how fields couple to each other.

• 37:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so how is that a more subtle point than what we had talked about before? So we had already talked about how protons have two, two-thirds quarks, and then a negative one-third quark or something. And so... With what you just said, what did we learn that was different than what we had known before? Because I think I didn't catch it.

• 37:22Daniel Whiteson?

  No, we didn't learn anything new. I'm just now trying to set us up to think about the other forces in terms of this framework. So we introduced this new way of thinking about the electric charge, like not as paint you put on some particles and other particles, but as a relationship between fields, right? Now let's try to use that same sort of intellectual framework and think about the other forces, the other kinds of charges in the same way. Because implicit there is the idea that forces and charges are linked, right? Electric charges are how we used to label particles that feel forces in electric fields. There are other forces in the universe and some particles ignore them, some particles don't. So for example, the strong force, strongest force out there, electrons totally ignore it.

• 38:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Electrons that have electric charge have no strong charge. So if I'm going to give you a bunch of particles and you're going to throw them through a, what we call a color field, that's the field for the strong nuclear force, electrons fly right through it, doesn't matter. But if you threw a cork through there, all sorts of crazy interactions, oh my gosh, it gets accelerated like crazy. So now we have another kind of label, right? Like, okay, well, every particle has a label for whether it ignores electric fields or not. It also has a label for whether it ignores color fields, fields from the strong force. But instead of thinking about it as a label on the particle, think about it as a way the fields interact. So the electron field does not interact with the gluon field.

• 38:50Daniel Whiteson?

  That's the analogy in the strong nuclear force of the electromagnetic field, right? We have these gluons. And so electrons just don't interact with gluon fields. You can have intense buzzing energy in the gluon field. Electron field is not linked to it at all. They oscillate completely independently. But a cork field in that same region of space where the gluon field has a lot of energy, those are tied very strongly together and so they buzz together.

• 39:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so we talked about charge as the direction of the response to the electromagnetic field. That's our baseline.

• 39:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm hmm.

• 39:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  And now, when you move on to strong force, it's no longer really helpful to think of negative and positive because it's just like, do they respond to these forces or not?

• 39:32Daniel Whiteson?

  You're right that we shouldn't think about strong nuclear charges as zero positive or negative. But it's not true that they're simpler. It's not just like a yes or no. In fact, they're more complicated. There are three different axes along which you can have a color charge. So for electric forces, it's just one axis, right? And you're either zero positive or negative. For the strong force, there are three different ones. And they call them red, green, and blue. And so, for example, you can have a quark that's green or an anti-green quark, or you can have a red quark or an anti-blue quark. And so it's more complicated than the electromagnetic field. It's a generalization of it. The fundamental ideas are the same.

• 40:14Daniel Whiteson?

  But instead of like a single number, zero, negative one, whatever, you have like a vector. You have like three different numbers. You have a green, a red, and a blue charge. And if you're zero in all of those, that's what we call colorless or white. So for example, the proton has quarks inside of it. And each of those quarks has a charge. But if you have a red, a green, and a blue, the math works out that they add up to zero.

• 40:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so electrons have a red, a green, and a blue.

• 40:44Daniel Whiteson?

  You mean protons?

• 40:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, no, I thought you said protons do respond to the force, but electrons don't.

• 40:48Daniel Whiteson?

  So quarks respond to the force. Quarks are charged, right? But quarks can add up to neutralize themselves to have zero color charge. The same way that like an electron and positron together have zero electric charge. Three quarks that make a proton have zero color charge. So if you have a red, a green, and a blue quark together, the math adds up that they add up to zero total charge. So they're not three totally independent directions in this weird way. So there's two different ways that you can have zero color charge. You can either have one red, one green, one blue. Or you can have red and anti-red. So for example, a quark and an anti-quark can come together to make a colorless object, which is like a pion.

• 41:33Daniel Whiteson?

  All these particles we call mesons are two quarks together in a colorless state. They have no strong charge at all. Same with a proton and a neutron. It's not that you can make it with three quarks. You can also make it with six quarks for really crazy particles. But most of the stuff we see in the universe is either three quarks together, colorless, or two quarks together, overall colorless. And it's not just one gluon field. Because there's so many different colors, you need eight different gluon fields. And the gluon fields each have two colors. So you could have like a red-green gluon, or a blue-anti-red gluon. And the math is very complicated. It's really crazy.

• 42:14Daniel Whiteson?

  But it's an analogy to the way we think about electric charge, and electric forces, and the interactions between the fields. So you have these eight gluon fields filling the universe with all their color, and they interact with quarks, but not with electrons.

• 42:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, they interact with quarks, but at the level of a proton, they usually cancel out. So a whole proton usually doesn't respond to the strong force, and electrons don't usually respond to the strong force.

• 42:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, that's exactly right. And these quarks also have weird internal angles to them, and the universe likes to conserve those. It's more complicated than just conserving one number, because it's a three-dimensional color thing. But the universe conserves strong nuclear color, which means it's symmetric with respect to all those weird internal quark angles. So that's also very similar to electromagnetism.

• 43:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so I think I've followed all that. After the break, let's talk about the weak force.

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• 45:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  We're back. All right. So we've talked about charge and force as it relates to electromagnetic forces and the strong force. And so now let's get to the weak force. We're two thirds of the way through the episode. We're at the weak force of our goal of talking about the weak hyperforce. So tell me about the weak force.

• 45:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Right. So the weak force, super fascinating because it touches everything in the universe. Like there are some particles out there with zero electromagnetic charge, right? Like neutrons or neutrinos, they ignore electric fields. There are particles out there with no strong charge, right? Electrons ignore the strong force. There's nothing in the universe that ignores the weak force. Everything out there, except maybe dark matter, which we haven't figured out yet. It might not be a particle, da, da, da, da, feels the weak force. It's fascinating. It's like unavoidable, but it's also super duper feeble. Right. It's the weakest force out there, except for gravity, probably not a force anyway. But it's much weaker than electromagnetism and the strong force. But it's pervasive.

• 46:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Even neutrons are responding to the weak force.

• 46:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, neutrons respond to the weak force, protons respond to the weak force, neutrinos respond to the weak force. Absolutely. Yes. And we can think about the weak force in the same sort of framework as we thought about electromagnetism and generalize it in the way we did also for the strong force. So the weak force, like the strong force, doesn't just have one charge. It has multiple charges, right? So remember electromagnetism, which seemed complicated at the time, was actually nice and simple because it was just a number, right? It's like negative one plus two thirds. What's the big deal? Well, weak forces have two charges. And because they were discovered at different times and then like adapted from different theories, historically, the names for them are a disaster. We don't just have like weak charge one, weak charge two, or whatever.

• 47:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Or even the strong force is like nice colors, which unify it. So that's why we have two different charges and they're called weak isospin and weak hypercharge.

• 47:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  I hate you guys.

• 47:19Daniel Whiteson?

  It's terrible. And I hate the word weak hypercharge because to me, hyper suggests like it's strong, it's intense, it's powerful, it's overwhelming, but then it's weak. So you're like, what is it? More powerful? Is it less powerful? I can't even tell. It's like super big tiny something. What?

• 47:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I'm not sure I understand what isospin either means.

• 47:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, that's even worse.

• 47:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  And the colors were throwing me too. I think you guys need to start back at the drawing board. But all right, all right, let's work with what we've got.

• 47:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Isospin comes from another theory which kind of failed and then was adapted later on. It was like, hmm, maybe this could be reused. Like this happens in physics all the time. Somebody studies something for like 20 years. It seems like it's going to work out. The universe says, no, thanks. That was a nice idea, but no. And then somebody else comes along and says, well, maybe I could adapt that actually to answer this other question. That's what happened with string theory. String theory was originally an attempt to explain color forces and the strong nuclear force, and it failed. But then it turns out to explain much more deep things. So that can work sometimes, but you know, come up with a new name.

• 48:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 48:23Daniel Whiteson?

  So these two different charges and every particle now has two numbers, right? You have your isospin number and your hypercharge number. And these numbers are a little weird, like isospin electrons have minus a half and neutrinos have plus a half. And so muons, for example, have minus a half, tau's have minus a half, but all the neutrinos have plus a half. And hypercharge is just like another number. And electrons and neutrinos both have hypercharge minus one, whereas quarks have hypercharge plus a third.

• 48:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Could you have predicted what these charges would be? Once you knew about the weak force or are these things where you had to measure it and then you were like, huh? Negative a half. Wouldn't have guessed that, but now we know. That's a feature of the universe. Like, can you predict these things or do you just measure them and then work with that?

• 49:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, great question. Electric charges, we definitely just measured. Weak charges are much harder to measure because the weak force is very weak. And these are numbers that we came up with later to explain particles we've already seen. Because there's a deep connection between the weak force and the electromagnetic force. Right? These things are not totally separate. We've unified them into one theory called electro weak. And this is really interesting because it turns out that electromagnetism is just part of the weak force. So remember how the strong force had like a bunch of different gluon fields to handle all the complexity? There are four fields in the electro weak force and one of them is the photon and the other three.

• 49:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Are fields that we call the weak force. There's two W fields and then the Z field. And the electric field is like the weird sibling in the electro weak force. Because it's so simple and well preserved, like the universe preserves electric charge and respects this weird symmetry. But more broadly, the weak charges are not conserved. So for example, isospin, not conserved in the universe. Hypercharge, not conserved in the universe. The universe doesn't respect this symmetry. This is how Higgs made his discovery because he saw that the weak force does not respect these things. His whole theory is in a context we call electro weak symmetry breaking. The weak force is kind of a big sloppy mess.

• 50:37Daniel Whiteson?

  But electric charge turns out to be a weird combination of isospin and hypercharge. You have this big messy weak force where nothing is conserved. Everything is very weak and flimsy and sloshing around. But if you look at it from just one angle, you take one slice of it, you say, oh, this is beautiful. This is the photon field on electromagnetism and everything is perfectly conserved in this one weird slice of a larger messy field. So it turns out electric charge is connected to weak hypercharge. It's like a combination of hypercharge and isospin together.

• 51:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so the weak force is actually measured in four different ways. One of which is the electromagnetic field. And that is conserved.

• 51:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 51:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  But the other three are a freaking mess.

• 51:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 51:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we don't understand why and we don't think that we are misunderstanding something. It's just actually not conserved, which maybe tells us something about what's important about the universe. Was the conservation for the strong force? Yes, conservation for the strong force, these three kinds of weak forces. You don't get conservation.

• 51:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Because of the Higgs, the Higgs messes up those other fields. In fact, that's how Higgs knew the Higgs was there. He's like, oh, how do you mess up these three fields and not the photon? I'm going to invent this thing to mess up those three fields and not mess up the photon. That's the Higgs boson. And that's how we knew that that was there because the weak field is messed up in this weird, particular way that preserves one corner of it. It's like if you have four siblings sharing a room and three of them are total slobs. And somehow, one of the siblings is like military corners on the bed, not a piece of dust on the floor. And you're like, all the way down to the edge and you measure it like down to the micron, you have like an electron microscope and you can't find a tiny little bit of dust that goes past that barrier.

• 52:30Daniel Whiteson?

  And you're like, wow, there's something going on here. That's what Higgs saw and he's like, all right, I'm going to invent this mechanism that messes up this part of the universe and not that part at all and doesn't even touch it.

• 52:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so Higgs has a field and a boson, right?

• 52:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, that's right. The boson is a ripple in the field, so it's really just one concept.

• 52:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  So we've got the Higgs field. What is the connection between the field and the weak force?

• 52:52Daniel Whiteson?

  So the Higgs field is another field and it interacts with all of these fields and it messes up the symmetry of the weak field. So if you didn't have the Higgs field, the weak charges would be perfectly conserved and the internal angles of the weak field would be crystal and beautiful, just like the other forces. But the Higgs field messes up the weak field. It breaks electro weak symmetry in a way that messes up those fields and breaks the conservation of weak hypercharge and weak isospin. So separately, these two things are not conserved, but this one combination of them is preserved by the Higgs boson.

• 53:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so the Higgs field messes up the three different measurements for the weak force. And remind me what a weak hypercharge is, now that I've got that in my head.

• 53:33Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, and weak hypercharge is one of these charges of the weak force. So the electro weak force, weak plus electromagnetism, has three charges, electric charge, weak hypercharge, weak isospin. Electric charge is actually a special combination of those two. The Higgs field messes up the conservation of it generally, right? They're not separately conserved, but this combination of them, electric charge, is conserved in the universe. So we have this fields description of all the ripples of energy in the universe and we know which fields talk to which other fields and that's what we call charge. And fields can talk to To each other in different ways, right? They can talk to each other through the photon field, in which case they both have electric charge,

• 54:17Daniel Whiteson?

  because that's what it means to send energy through the photon field. It means you have an electric charge. You're coupling to the photon field. Or they can talk to each other through weak fields, because all particles have weak hypercharge or weak isospin. Or they can talk to each other through the gluon fields, if they couple to the gluon fields. And that's what it means to have color charge. So weak hypercharge is an example of how matter fields, fields that describe electrons and muons and quarks and all this kind of other stuff, can interact with each other through these force fields, through the electromagnetic field and the gluon fields and the W field and the Z field and all these other fields that help particles interact with each other. And so it's fascinating that electric charge is conserved and strong charge is conserved,

• 55:01Daniel Whiteson?

  but weak hypercharge is not, right? The universe messed that up, created the Higgs boson, gave it this weird energy. But I hope that this gives you like a different view of like what charge is. It's not just about electricity. It's not a label we put on particles. It's about how fields talk to each other. And a lot of particle physics is understanding how energy sloshes back and forth between these fields. And like, you can ask deep philosophical questions, like what is an electron anyway? And our description of electron isn't just a particle flying through space. It's a buzzing and a rippling in the electron field that's also constantly coupled to the photon field and energy is sloshing back and forth between them. And that's what we mean by the electron we measure in the lab. And when we talk about a quark, it's got a cloud of gluons around it.

• 55:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Or you can think about it as a ripple in the quark field, constantly sloshing energy back and forth via gluon fields. That's really what charge is about. It's about coupling of the fields. And the weak hypercharge is a great example because it shows off how the universe can be beautiful and symmetric and crystalline. And then sometimes it can just be the messy sibling leaving dirty dishes under its bed.

• 56:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, a total disaster. Yeah, so I feel like I thought that I understood charge and force going in, and it's totally different. I'm thinking about it now in a totally different way than I had before, which is really exciting. One quick step back. Isospin is also not conserved.

• 56:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Isospin is also not conserved, yeah.

• 56:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so did we decide that we wanted this episode to be about the weak hypercharge because it's a funny name?

• 56:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why are we emphasizing that charge as opposed to talking about isospin?

• 56:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 56:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  And the weak hypercharge? Because they seem to be telling us the same thing, as far as I could tell.

• 56:41Daniel Whiteson?

  No, you're right. Weak isospin and weak hypercharge are on the same footing. Two reasons why this episode started out about hypercharge and not isospin. One is it has the word "charge" in it, so I thought that would at least give the listeners a clue when we're asking them about it. Like, otherwise, what is this thing? It's just a bunch of words physicists invented. And also because at least one person wrote in and said, "Well, I was reading the Wikipedia page on weak hypercharge and what is this? Can you explain it?" So I thought, "All right, let's try to dig into this."

• 57:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Perfect. Those are two great reasons. Okay, now I'm with you and I am never gonna see the world the same way again.

• 57:14Daniel Whiteson?

  And for those of you who want to learn more, all the mathematics of these fields and how they interact is described with this beautiful piece of theory called group theory, which shows you how these things rotate and how energy flows between them. It's a great example also of how mathematicians will develop a new branch of mathematics just for fun. They're like, "Hey, this is cool. Let's create these rules and then just play games with them for 100 years." And they totally did that. Then 100 years later, physicists are like, "Oh, my gosh, these games you've been playing, just like, you know, sipping tea and being nerds?" Turns out to be a perfect description of this complex mathematics of these fields we discovered. "Thanks, guys," and just plugged it right in. And now group theory is like at the heart of our understanding of the universe.

• 57:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Were the mathematicians just devastated when they found out their work was applied? And then, like...

• 58:04Daniel Whiteson?

  "Oh, we'll have to move on and invent another irrelevant game."

• 58:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Oh, it must have been a bad day for the mathematicians.

• 58:11Daniel Whiteson?

  I think there are two kinds of mathematicians, those who are disappointed and those who are excited.

• 58:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, those who have a little bit of physicist in them and those that don't.

• 58:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep. Takes all kinds.

• 58:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, because in the end, you know, the dotted lines we draw between math and physics and philosophy, these are just the way humans like to categorize people, right? As you always say, there's a spectrum.

• 58:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep. Ugly. Nature and humanity don't like to be in categories.

• 58:35Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Well, thank you for joining us for this tour along the spectrum of complexity of all the forces, from the crisp and beautiful nature of electromagnetism to the messiness of the weak force. I hope that helped you get a new view of how the universe worked, and I hope we giggled just the right amount.

• 58:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Bye, everyone.

• 59:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 59:06Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 59:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 59:18Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 59:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 59:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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