Can we see what's inside the electron?

Daniel and Kelly explore the nature of of matter and whether we can crack it open without spending billions on bigger colliders 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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• 1:47Speaker 04

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:25Daniel Whiteson?

  What's the point of building bigger and bigger colliders? Other than the obvious fun and awesomeness of it all, it's a machine that opens up the subatomic world. It's not just because we like to see things go boom, though of course we do, but because we want to know what happens when you pull things apart. What's inside me? What's inside you? What's inside everything? At the root of it all is a desire to dig as deep as we can into the very nature of matter, to hope to reveal its inner workings and understand how it all comes together to make our amazing, crazy, and delicious world. Is the universe made of quarks and leptons and dark matter? Or is it made of strings, or schmings, or bada bings? Right now, we don't know.

• 3:10Daniel Whiteson?

  We might never know. Or one day, we might build a collider powerful enough to show us the universe's fundamental Lego bricks. Then we can turn to the philosophers and ask them, hey, so what does this mean, dude? But what if we don't get the billions to build a bigger collider? Is that the only way forward? Can we find some other clever way to get this information through the universe's back door? That's what we're going to talk about on today's episode. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, brought to you by all the tiny particles that make it possible.

• 3:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I'm a parasitologist who also studies space, and I'm wondering if today we're going to be talking about something that Daniel studies during his day job.

• 4:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and my job is to play with taxpayer-funded billion-dollar toys.

• 4:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ooh, my job usually involves playing with fish vomit. I think your job might be better.

• 4:18Daniel Whiteson?

  I hope nobody's ever paid a billion dollars for fish vomit.

• 4:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  There are some important questions that can get answered with a lot of fish vomit, but yeah, probably not a billion dollars' worth. I'll give you that. Maybe a million dollars' worth. So you work at the LHC, and we're going to be talking about research happening at the LHC. Is the thing that we're talking about today, is this a question that you're working on? Or what does your lab do exactly, Daniel?

• 4:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Mostly I take naps in my office. Isn't that enough?

• 4:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I'm sure everyone feels great about where their taxpayer dollars are going right now.

• 4:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's a fair question. What does Daniel actually do all day? We should have a whole episode where I talk about my research, but very briefly, in the last 10 years or so, I was looking for dark matter at the Large Hadron Collider, smashing particles together, hoping to make dark matter particles, which would leave an invisible signature, which is really hard to pick out, and using machine learning to try to filter those patterns out from all of the noise, which is a fun challenge. But then dark matter sort of became too popular at the Large Hadron Collider and everybody was doing it. And there wasn't a whole lot of opportunity to like do new clever stuff. So more recently, I've pivoted to looking for weird, unexpected stuff. Like, we know that dark matter is out there. We should be able to see it at the collider.

• 5:34Daniel Whiteson?

  So let's go look for it. That makes sense. But what would be even more exciting to me is to find something that nobody expected, a discovery that makes people go, what? That's impossible. Or that's crazy. Or huh, how could that even be? Something that nobody expected. And that's hard to do because you sort of have to have an idea for what you're looking for in order to go looking for it. But we use some cool machine learning tools, anomaly detection, and all sorts of other algorithms to try to make mathematical what we're looking for, what we're not looking for, and to figure out clever ways to look for it. So that's one of the things that I'm focusing on more recently is looking for anomalies.

• 6:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's always so interesting to me, the way the questions that we ask are influenced by things like, well, what are other people asking? And too many people are asking this. And so I'm going to move on to something else. And there's a lot of like, social and funding things that go into the decision about what to study. I guess it makes sense. We're all humans doing work.

• 6:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, there's definitely a lot of that. But I think people also underestimate how personal science is. Like, people ask questions because those are their personal questions. And we all benefit from that, like the fact that some people are weirdly into fish guts.

• 6:46Daniel Whiteson?

  We learn cool stuff about the universe because of that. And because some people want to stay up late looking To telescopes or get their socks wet in the rainforest counting spiders. Because different people enjoy different kinds of activities and have different questions. We get to learn about lots of different kinds of science. And so, you know, there's no like magic sorting hat that tells people what science to do. They just follow their instincts and also, you know, look for opportunities for sure. But I think it really reflects the sort of breadth of human curiosity. All the different kinds of science that we have, and I think that's all wonderful and delicious.

• 7:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  I absolutely agree. Limitless human curiosity. You can be interested in fish vomits, leeches, or dark matter, or anything in between, and even chemistry.

• 7:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't go that far. You know, I was gonna say dark matter fish vomit, like maybe dark fishes vomit up dark matter vomit. That would be pretty awesome. That would be like where our research overlaps.

• 7:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh. Yes, I hope somebody will fund the intersection of our research interests. Let's write to the NSF and find out.

• 7:50Daniel Whiteson?

  But more broadly, there's something really cool about the Large A Joon Collider, which is that it lets you do lots of different kinds of things. People have the idea that the Large A Joon Collider is like an experiment that I do, and then somebody else gets the turn, they do an experiment. In reality, it's the same experiment, it's just running 24/7, collecting very, very general data. And people can ask different kinds of questions about it. People can be like, hey dude, we found a new particle. People can be like, hey, are the particles we've seen, do they behave the way we expected? Or also like, is there anything weird in the data? You can ask all these different kinds of questions with the same data from the same setup. And so it's very general and very powerful in that way, which I love because it lets you pivot easily from different kinds of questions.

• 8:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  So what is the experiment that's constantly running in the LHC? And I'm always gonna call it Hadron and embarrass myself. So I'm just gonna call it the LHC to avoid that.

• 8:43Daniel Whiteson?

  What's embarrassing about saying hadron? Is it because it's so close to another word you're afraid of saying?

• 8:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, it is.

• 8:50Daniel Whiteson?

  That's not family friendly?

• 8:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  You called out Wiener Smith. It's true.

• 8:56Daniel Whiteson?

  The Large Wiener Smith Collider. Yeah, what is the experiment? Essentially, it's just a big camera around a collision point. You smash particles together and then you try to capture all the debris that comes out to get as much information about the collision and the aftermath. So you can piece together what happened because you can't see the actual collision directly. Like when the quarks annihilate, you don't get to see that happen. You just get to see what they turn into. So we have these layers of detectors around the collision point to take information about those particles so we can reconstruct their trajectories and their energies and their angles and all sorts of stuff and figure out what happened. And we just do that for every collision, no matter what.

• 9:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  And is it like today, we're just running electrons through there? Or it's like whatever particles happen to be in there, we're going to run into? Or, you know, is there like a certain combination? What do you start with?

• 9:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, we just go outside and take a scoop of stuff, toss it in the collider and see what happens. Like, oh, my gosh.

• 9:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  You're like biologists.

• 9:50Daniel Whiteson?

  We're colliding fish vomit today. No, the collider is very sensitive and very carefully tuned. So you have to put the right stuff in and tune it. Most of the time it runs protons. And so you just start from hydrogen. You kick off the electrons, you give them energy and you separate them using their charges. You have pure protons and you collide those. The previous collider I worked at in Chicago, the Tevatron collided protons and antiprotons. So you had to make a source of antiprotons, a whole other factory. That was too complicated. So for the next collider, the Large Hadron Collider is just protons and protons. But sometimes we do other stuff. Sometimes we put lead in there or gold atoms and smash them together because you can ask all sorts of interesting questions when you have like zillions of protons smashing together.

• 10:34Daniel Whiteson?

  It's called heavy ion physics. So yeah, the Large Hadron Collider is pretty flexible. You can collide other kinds of stuff, not just protons. Probably not fish guts, though.

• 10:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, it's disappointing, but I guess we'll keep talking about physics anyway. And so is it like, you know, Fridays are the gold days? Or just somebody like gets a grant and that's the day you do the gold ions or whatever instead?

• 10:53Daniel Whiteson?

  No, it's like 95% protons. That's the main physics. And then occasionally we'll do a run with gold or with lead or with something else. But it's mostly just proton-proton physics. That's the bread and butter of the Large Hadron Collider. And it's decided at some very high level of committees. CERN is like a collection of dozens of countries. And so everything's decided by committees that take forever. And so it's very bureaucratic. Even the way we publish a paper is very bureaucratic. We have 5,000 authors on a paper and everybody gets to read it and comment on it. So you know, you put a paper through and somebody's like, "Add a comma." And somebody else is like, "Remove that comma." Somebody else is like, "No, add that comma. Put that comma." It's very slow and frustrating. But it's also wonderful to work with people from all over the world.

• 11:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  You have a very nuanced viewpoint on it. That's great. I do get frustrated by those bureaucracy like, "Who cares about the comma? Let's just get the paper done." But on the other hand, I'm sure you get lots of great ideas you wouldn't have gotten otherwise if it was just two people working together on the paper.

• 11:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. But the particle collider is very powerful and it lets you do things like look for new kinds of particles directly. But also, I think this is underappreciated is that there are indirect ways to discover new particles without actually seeing them. And that's the thing I want to talk about today is how we can use that potentially to see inside particles, to learn about what's going on inside the particles we think might be fundamental.

• 12:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Well, and today we're going to be talking about how can we see what's inside the electron? And we asked our amazing listeners, who are always insightful, to tell us what they think the answer is to how can we see inside an electron? So let's go ahead and hear what they had to say.

• 12:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Is that in order to see things at that scale, we would need a solar system-sized particle collider?

• 12:33Speaker 06

  If we wanted to try to see inside of it, we'd probably have to smash other particles into it. We just have to smash them together like we do everything else. To see inside an electron, we would need to probe it with something that has a wavelength that's smaller than the electron. I thought that we couldn't. I thought electrons are fundamental and there's nothing in there. We could crash them together with high-energy particle physics. Can we actually see inside of an electron? You can't smash electrons together. So maybe you do it with neutrinos? We might only be able just to look at the outside of it and there might not be anything different.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Different on the inside. I think that electrons are fundamental particles. By colliding it with other electrons or other particles and seeing what comes out. Its various quantum states, when probed multiple times with perhaps light, will generate some sort of semblance of a structure. With a very powerful microscope and a lot of imagination. Get some pliers and a set of 30 weight ball bearings. It's all about ball bearings nowadays. Okay, I'm pretty certain Daniel's job is smashing particles together and seeing their guts when they pop out. So that's my guess, or maybe the answer is math, but that's not nearly as exciting.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  I'm imagining something like X-ray crystallography, like Rosalind Franklin saw the structure of DNA, but much, much more sensitive. I mean electron microscope, it's right there in the name. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I see where this is going. Are you asking for more funds to build an even larger particle collider? As far as I know, there's not an inside of the electron to see.

• 14:19Daniel Whiteson?

  You like collide electrons together. And when they hit each other, they like form an ex- a big explosion, like a big, like a big electron explosion. And when, and when that happens, it will, there's like a giant microscope over it. And there's like somebody looking through the microscope and they like see what comes out of the explosion. Hmm, magnets. Thanks to everybody who's sent in these answers. If you would like to play for future episodes, don't be shy, write to us to [email protected].

• 15:02Daniel Whiteson?

  We want to hear from you and we want your voice on the podcast. I love that so many people said smash them together. These are particle physicists, folks after my heart.

• 15:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  They've been listening to you, I think. They've been listening to the show for a while. I like the one person who said it involves ball bearings. I think a lot of really great scientific questions involve ball bearings. That was a good guess.

• 15:23Daniel Whiteson?

  If you don't know, use some ball bearings, right? They can't hurt.

• 15:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, no, no. And they're always fun to play with. Although I always lose them.

• 15:31Daniel Whiteson?

  But these folks are basically right on the direct approach. Smash it together, see what comes out. If you have enough energy, you can break the electron open. That's basically the short answer, and they're right. But nobody got the indirect answer. The more subtle, the clever, the backdoor way to maybe see what's inside the electron without actually breaking it open, which I'm very excited to talk about.

• 15:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I'm very excited to hear the explanation because I looked at the outline and I was like, I have never heard about this before. So this will be exciting and new for me. Let's start from the very beginning. You know, we're all made of molecules. Molecules are made of atoms. Give me some more detail. What background do we need?

• 16:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I just love this question because I love like looking at the stuff around us and wondering like how it comes together. What's the recipe for my coffee? What's the recipe for those fish guts? How do we end up in this universe? You know, and to me, unraveling what things are made of is really like looking at the matrix, you know, finding the source code for the universe is something really deeply satisfying. So it's no surprise that I am a particle physicist instead of like a rainforest spiderologist. But I hope other people out there also find that exciting. And we get to live in a time when we haven't railed so much of nature. You know, thousands of years ago, people were like, I don't know, maybe there's four kinds of stuff, who knows? But, you know, we figured out what used to summarize like, okay, we're made of molecules, we're made of atoms. That took us thousands of years to figure out.

• 16:49Daniel Whiteson?

  It's just like obvious high school chemistry by now, but it's also hugely revealing about the way our universe works, you know? And it tells you something already really powerful, which is that you have a huge complexity of stuff, right? Like, how many different kinds of things are out there in the universe? Ice cream and blueberries and mushrooms and fish guts and planets. So many things, maybe infinite numbers of kinds of things. Definitely a huge number.

• 17:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Even white chocolate, unfortunately, but yeah, there's a lot of stuff out there.

• 17:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Hey, I already said fish guts. Okay, don't be redundant. The amazing thing is that you can build all of that with like a hundred atoms, right? It's kind of incredible. You put those hundred atoms together in different ways and you get lava, or you get kittens, or you get hamsters, or you get whatever. It's incredible that this huge complexity is built out of simplicity. And the complexity comes from the arrangements of the stuff. I think that says something really deep and powerful about the nature of our universe. And so I want to dig deeper, but I want to pause for a moment and like appreciate how far we've come, even just when we get to the atom, right? Because the universe could have been different. It could have been that like, everything's made of its own kind of particle, and there isn't simplicity, or as you get lower, there's more and more kinds of stuff. And so I'm

• 18:02Daniel Whiteson?

  grateful that we live in a universe where as you dig deeper, things seem to get simpler. And it's tantalizing, because it tells you like, ooh, maybe keep going, there's a really simple answer waiting for you. It's all 42.

• 18:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  And as someone who studies behavior, I also think it's awesome that we live in a time where you can get a bunch of nations together to agree that we're interested in the fundamental nature of the universe, and we're going to invest in something like the LHC. It's just, I don't know, it's an amazing time to live for a lot of different reasons.

• 18:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it is. And so for anybody out there who happens to be in the US Congress, for example, I think funding for particle physics is great for lots of reasons. One is the huge return on investment in terms of transforming the nature of society economically and militarily and all that stuff, but also just for the sheer knowledge, you know, like, it's worth it. Anyway, let's dig deeper. So we have molecules. Molecules are made of atoms, it's like roughly 100 kinds of atoms. Inside the atom, of course, is the nucleus and then electrons. Nucleus is made of protons and neutrons. And so now we have structure inside the atom, right? And don't take that for granted. There's an amazing correlation between the structure of the atom and the behavior of the atom. All this complexity we're talking about,

• 19:14Daniel Whiteson?

  all the fascinating different behavior, like, why are metals metallic? And why are some things active and some things inactive? That all comes from the structure of the atom. And you could almost have guessed it. If you looked at the periodic table, you said, oh, look at these different kinds of atoms. Why are there so many different ones? And why are there You could have guessed that it comes from internal structure, that the atoms weren't themselves fundamental, meaning they weren't just made of their own stuff, they were made of something smaller. So we had a very strong clue already. When you look at the periodic table, there was more structure deep down. And it's amazing that when we dig in, we find that structure and we're then able to explain all of those patterns we saw, right? It's incredible.

• 19:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  I feel like you just said that chemistry is important and I'm feeling a little uncomfortable. But we talked about this. There was a listener question about why is carbon so important for life forms? And that did come out of a long discussion about, you know, what we can learn from the periodic table. So it's important, even if it's chemistry.

• 20:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Now, I would say it's redundant. All you need to know is the structure of the atom. And chemistry should just follow naturally from that, if you knew what you were doing.

• 20:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's always about physics.

• 20:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. Anyway, so now let's dig inside the nucleus, right? We have the protons and the neutrons. Protons and neutrons, we know are made of smaller particles. They're made of quarks. And the mass of the proton is fascinating. You know, like, basically, the proton is the mass of hydrogen. That's what the hydrogen is, basically, just a proton. So fix that in your mind as like the unit. And in particle physics, we use units of G E V, giga electron volt, to talk about mass. It really is G E V divided by the speed of light squared, but we just set the speed of light to equal one, because otherwise it's such a pain in the butt. Anyway, so the proton has a certain mass. And if you dig into the proton, and you ask like, well, the proton is made of the quarks, does that mean I can get the proton mass by adding up the mass of the quarks? The way you feel

• 21:02Daniel Whiteson?

  like if you take your car apart, the mass of the car is equal to the mass of the parts of the car, right? Well, that's not true for the proton. And this is going to be very important later. The proton's mass is made of things with much, much smaller mass. Like, you add up the mass of the quarks that make up the proton, you get like a few percent of its mass. So where did the rest of its mass come from? Well, remember, mass is not stuff, right? Mass is internal stored energy. And there's a lot of energy between those quarks, holding those quarks together. And that energy inside the proton contributes to the proton's mass, the same way like shining a photon into a box of Mirrors makes that box more massive, even though what you've added hasn't added any

• 21:45Daniel Whiteson?

  actual mass on its own. So the proton is pretty massive, but it's made of very low mass stuff. And a lot of its mass doesn't come from the mass of the things it's made out of.

• 21:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  This mass is internal stored energy thing. I remember you blew my mind when we were talking about that in the where does energy come from episode. So if folks want a bit of a deeper dive into that concept, they should check out that episode.

• 22:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. So we've zoomed in now inside the protons and neutrons and protons and neutrons, both made of quarks, just different arrangements. You got up quarks and down quarks and two up quarks and a down makes one of them to down quarks and up makes the other one. Honestly, I don't even remember which is which I can never keep that straight. But you could look it up.

• 22:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't bother memorizing stuff like that either.

• 22:31Daniel Whiteson?

  I often remember this stuff, but I feel like if you confuse it too many times early on when you're learning it, then it's forever scrambled in your brain and I will never be able to disentangle them and always have to look it up.

• 22:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  And this is why I'm never going to try to say Hadron because I've gotten it totally confused. And there are some people in my life where I said their name wrong so many times, I will never be confident that I'm going to say it right. Where I'm just like, hey, you, I've known you for five years. I don't want to mess it up now that we're face to face.

• 22:57Daniel Whiteson?

  You remember my name though, right?

• 22:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hey, you.

• 22:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Putting you on the spot here. All right.

• 23:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's Whitson, right?

• 23:08Daniel Whiteson?

  In French, they call me Whitson. I was actually one time waiting for an appointment at a bank in France and they came out and said, Monsieur Whitson. And I was like, that's not me. And they kept calling him and calling him. I was like, who is this moron? We're going for your appointment already.

• 23:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  You're holding everyone up.

• 23:24Daniel Whiteson?

  It was me.

• 23:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, man.

• 23:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Like, oh, c'est moi. Anyway.

• 23:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  When I go to doctor's appointments, including to the like, OBGYN, where you think that people would be comfortable saying the word wiener. It's always like when they call people out from the waiting room. It's like, oh, you know, Miss Smith, Miss Jordan, Miss Godlewski, Kelly. When they get to me, nobody wants to try to say wiener Smith, even at the OBGYN. But anyway, that's all right. I go by anything. It's all fine.

• 23:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Maybe they think you're Burt Simpson. Playing a prank on them.

• 23:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, maybe. Nobody would actually do that. We did one. We went to go pick up our turkey for Thanksgiving at Whole Foods and they called to the back, the Wiener Smith's are here for their turkey. And then 15 minutes later, we hadn't gotten the turkey. And I was like, hey, could you call them in the back and see what's up? They called back and they said, what about the turkey for the Wiener Smith's? And I heard the person on the walkie talkie go, oh, my gosh, you are serious?

• 24:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Then we got our turkey. All right. I've gotten us off track. Daniel, get us back on track, please.

• 24:29Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. So we're zooming inside matter. Inside your frozen turkey, you have molecules and atoms, and those are made of protons and neutrons and electrons. And the protons and neutrons are made of quarks. So we've zoomed all the way down and everything that you've ever tasted or eaten or thrown at your family members on Thanksgiving is made of quarks and electrons, right? Down to this very basic, two kinds of quarks and one kind of electron can make basically everything. So the particle physicist's cookbook has three ingredients. And the most amazing thing, the most mind blowing to me is that everything in the universe is made of the same ratio of that stuff. It's like one proton to one neutron to one electron, which means the same numbers of quarks and electrons in everything. It's just the arrangement of stuff.

• 25:12Daniel Whiteson?

  But, you know, we're never satisfied just knowing that. It's not like that's the answer. And so we're always interested in the question of like, is there something deeper? Is there something inside the electron? Is there something inside the quarks? And we haven't talked about it today and probably won't, but obviously there's a huge chunk of the universe, dark matter, that's not made of quarks and leptons. So we know there's other kinds of matter out there. Definitely not the end of the story.

• 25:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, and you said leptons, which we haven't talked about yet. What is a lepton? Is a lepton like a quark, but it jumps a lot?

• 25:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm stretching.

• 25:45Daniel Whiteson?

  No, it's a particle that slept in.

• 25:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, nice.

• 25:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Sorry for the terminology. There's a category of particles that the electron belongs in. And the electron has cousins, the muon and the tau that make up the other leptons. But we could also just say quarks and electrons.

• 26:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Because that's what makes up the matter that we are made out of. There are other quarks out there and there are other versions of the electron out there, the muon and the tau. But our kind of matter is made out of two quarks, the up and the down, and the electron. Got it. Okay. So after the break, we're going to talk about why we think that digging into the electron is worth doing. Do we have any evidence to suggest there's something else making that up? And we'll discuss that after the break.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  That sound? That's the National Squash League. Pro teams, the world's best players, and rallies so fast you'll forget to breathe. Season four is in full swing and every match streams free on YouTube. Big hits, bigger rivalries, and a front row seat from wherever you are. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.

• 27:03Speaker 04

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by Miguel. Man, I'm a black and Mexican kid from San Pedro. And I grew up in Inglewood as well. I never liked to be boxed in. Both of my parents colored outside of the line. I mean, even them being together at the time in L.A. was just not typical. And so I think that has always been a part of my DNA. There's a defiant something in me that feels like what we get to do with what we're given

• 27:46Speaker 04

  that's greater than us is to maybe connect people to ideas that they wouldn't naturally, you know, connect to. That's really me. I'm just kind of like defiant with love, though. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Hoda Kotb from Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Have you started your holiday shopping yet? This time of year always feels like the list just keeps growing. Gifts for family, gifts for friends, stocking stuffers, plus all the everyday things you still have to buy, like groceries and gas. That's why being a little strategic about the spending on gifts and those everyday needs is key. With the Chase Freedom Flex card,

• 28:30Speaker 04

  you can be a little savvier. Finding the right gift feels good, and maximizing cash back feels even better. Freedom Flex offers plenty of ways to earn more. You get 5% cash back on popular rotating quarterly categories, 3% on dining and drugstores, and 1% on all other purchases. So while you're checking names off your holiday list, those gifts can be a treat for you, too. This holiday season, let Freedom Flex reward you. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. So sign up for the Chase Freedom Flex card. Learn more at chase.com/getflex. This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval.

• 29:15Speaker 04

  Offer subject to change. Terms apply.

• 29:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we're back. Okay, so we've dug into protons and neutrons. We know that there's quarks that are making them up. Do we have any indication that if we dig farther into electrons, we will find that electrons are made up out of something?

• 29:40Daniel Whiteson?

  We have no really direct smoking gun, right? What we do have is a sort of history and some hints that encourage us. Recall when we were talking about the periodic table, we saw all these patterns in the periodic table, and we were wondering, hmm, could that be explained by internal structure? Could these actually all be made out of smaller bits? And the patterns come from how those bits arrange themselves and come together naturally from the different ways that they can click together or whatever. And now we know the answer is yes. So we can also look at the current list of particles that we don't know what's inside and ask, are there patterns there? Are there unexplained phenomena, things that seem suggestive that maybe these are built out of the same smaller bits? And the answer to that is, oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 30:24Daniel Whiteson?

  There are huge, obvious screaming patterns that suggest very strongly this is not the final answer.

• 30:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  And if you were to find something fundamental making up electrons, what would you name it?

• 30:38Daniel Whiteson?

  The white sun, of course.

• 30:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  The what is on?

• 30:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. Yeah, I hope I'm around to do that. And I suspect the particle physics community would overrule me. That happens occasionally. You get overruled, like the electron discovered by J.G. Thompson. He didn't call it the electron. He wanted to call them corpuscles, like little bits of matter. But people were like, yeah, no, we're going to go with electron.

• 31:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, as long as they don't name it like A or B, like, what was it? Jupiter's rings? It needs to be something exciting, but okay. All right. So tell me more about these tantalizing patterns.

• 31:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So we mentioned earlier that there's more than just the electron, right? The electron has cousins. There's the muon and the tau. So there's three kinds of electrons. The electron also has a partner, the neutrino, which isn't part of our matter, but it's part of the universe. It's something the universe can do. So in total, there are six of these lepton particles, the electron, muon, tau, and then the three neutrinos that correspond to them. So that's interesting. And you might ask like, well, why are there three? These particles are all so closely related. The muon is just a little heavier than the electron. The tau is even heavier. It feels like, you know, patterns in the periodic table. There's like three columns of these particles. So that's already very interesting and suggestive.

• 31:54Daniel Whiteson?

  It makes you wonder like, are there three ways to click together their internal bits? And this is how it happens? Three ways for some string inside of it to vibrate? And that's just one of the really interesting patterns. That whole pattern of like six particles, three pairs of two, is also reflected in the quarks. We talked about the quarks, the up and the down. That's one doublet of quarks. The up and the down go together. There's a copy of that doublet, the charm and the strange, very similar to the up and the down, but heavier. And then there's another copy of that doublet, the top and the bottom. So all in all, the quarks have six, and it breaks into these three columns of two particles, exactly the same way the leptons do. So you have this structure, which is interesting and suggestive, and then you have it repeated

• 32:39Daniel Whiteson?

  in another set of particles. And the amazing thing is that the quarks and leptons are very different. The quarks feel the strong force, the leptons don't. The quarks make up the nucleus, the leptons make up the stuff that orbits around it. We don't actually know what the relationship is between quarks and leptons, yet there's this very strong symmetry between them. It's like if you go into a suburban street and you see like all the houses on the left have this one floor plan, all the houses on the right have this other floor plan, but they're similar. You might be like, oh, okay, well, this is obviously built by one company and they got two floor plans, right? It's the same deal. It's like the universe can do this or it could do that. And probably they're built out of the same bits, you know? Like, for example, the charge of the proton is plus one and the charge of the electron is minus one. Those two things cancel exactly.

• 33:24Daniel Whiteson?

  For that to happen, there has to be some relationship between the quarks and leptons. Can't just be chance that the quarks add up to make plus one and the electron adds up to make minus one. So there's definitely some connection there, but we don't know what it is. So all of this, to me, are very obvious clues. And in a hundred years, when we know what's inside the electron and the quarks, people will be like, God, it was so obvious. How did you not see it, right? But right now, we don't know. We know that we have these patterns and it could be that the universe is just this way, that all this stuff is fundamental and the universe is made of these complex bits with these weird patterns. And there is no explanation, but I refuse to believe it. I think that everything out there should be explained.

• 34:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  So if we've got, you know, three different kinds of neutrinos, they've got up and down quarks, charm and strange and top and bottom. Charm and strange was a good naming thing. When we break the electron into its component parts, do we expect there to be two parts, then, to match with what we're seeing with the neutrinos?

• 34:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, good question. We don't know. It could be made of two things, could be three things, could just be made of itself. Whatever is down there is going to be very different from what we've seen before. And, you know, when we saw the proton, it was made out of three things. And it's interesting, it's made of three things because of the way the strong force works. There's three colors and one way to get a balance is to have all three colors. You know, it's not just like a plus charge and a minus charge. It's red, green, blue. And if you have a red, a green and a blue, it comes together to make a color neutral object, which is stable. So one reason why the proton is made of three is for that reason, because of the structure of that force. So we don't know. What force is holding together the quarks or the electrons? And that's what would determine how many pieces there are and how they interact.

• 35:07Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, and so it could be that the electron is fundamental. It's just made of itself. And when the coders of our simulation put together the universe, they started with electrons. And that's it. And there's just nothing else inside. But it could also be that it's made of smaller stuff. The frustrating thing is that you can never prove that something is fundamental. Right? You can prove it's not by breaking it open and seeing what's inside. But all you can do is not discover that it's made of something. That doesn't prove that it is fundamental. Right? It just shows that, well, maybe it's fundamental. Or maybe it's stuff that's so small you can't see. Or it's bound together so tightly you can't break it open. So you can never actually prove that it's fundamental.

• 35:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  The universe can be very frustrating that way.

• 35:52Daniel Whiteson?

  And it might also be, this is really philosophical, that there's nothing fundamental. Like, maybe the electron is made of something else, schm electrons. And those are made of something else but electrons. And those are made of something else. And those are made of something else. And your instinct is, well, there's got to be something at the bottom. Right? There's got to be a bedrock layer of reality. Maybe, but that's just a philosophical hunch. You know, we have no evidence that there is. There are theories out there in philosophy that the universe could be an infinite ladder of particles with no bottom. Right? It just goes on forever, which would be great for particle physics. Because like infinite funding, right? Just keep digging.

• 36:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Infinite Nobels, yeah.

• 36:32Daniel Whiteson?

  There you go. There you go. But that could be our reality, right? It's possible. But there also could be a bedrock, and that's what I hope for. I hope that we get someday to some set of particles that's so simple, so basic, so obvious and beautiful, that we think, okay, this must be it. It would make sense for the universe to have this be fundamental. Because it'd be very unsatisfying if the answer is what we have today. The answer is, well, there are 12 matter particles and there are five force particles. And that's just it, there are 17, and that's the basic elements of the universe. And that's what we start from. And like, really? Come on, it's got to be simpler than that. We have this tendency towards simplicity. And I just hope that the march continues. But there's no guarantees.

• 37:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I got to be honest, before you and I started talking regularly, I also held out hope that there were like simple, beautiful, elegant answers. And then you told me about the weak force.

• 37:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  That was the moment for me where I'm like, I don't think any of this is gonna make sense. We're just gonna have to keep muddling our way through, but hopefully I'm wrong, so.

• 37:33Daniel Whiteson?

  I ruined your view of particle physics. You used to think of it as like a shining cathedral of simplicity and beauty. And then you're like, man, this is a mess.

• 37:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's all held together with zip ties and duct tape in there. I don't know what's going on.

• 37:45Daniel Whiteson?

  It is. Yeah. But you know, at least now we understand why the weak force is a mess. It used to just be like, gosh, this is kind of ugly. And now we see, oh, it was beautiful. And it was shattered by the Higgs boson in this precise way. And that's at least satisfying. We can explain it and we can hark back to an earlier day in the universe before it all got messed up. There is something satisfying there, and I hope we get that kind of explanation.

• 38:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Sounds good. I'm sure the more I learn, the more satisfied I'll become.

• 38:11Daniel Whiteson?

  That's so nice of you.

• 38:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  You, you make a strong effort to be interested in biology. We're both supporting each other here. So let's talk about the methods that are currently being used to try to break electrons into smaller pieces, if that's a thing that exists.

• 38:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. All right. So the most obvious thing is what the listener suggested, which is like, hey, let's smash it open, right? Take two electrons or an electron and a positron, doesn't really matter. Point them at each other, give them a lot of energy and bounce them off each other. See what happens. Like this method works also for things like toasters, right? Want to know what's inside your toaster? Take two toasters, throw them at each other at really high speeds. You're going to have a shower of stuff that comes out and you can sift through the debris and be like, oh, look, there's two springs and there's two handles. And okay, this must be what the toaster is made out of.

• 39:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  And ouch, I should have unplugged it first.

• 39:03Daniel Whiteson?

  That's a long extension cord.

• 39:08Daniel Whiteson?

  And there's something fundamentally different about the way it happens for quantum particles, but the spirit is the same. I mean, if you smash two toasters together, you're not destroying parts of the toaster and converting their mass into energy and transmitting them into something else. The bits that come out of the toaster collision are the same bits that went into the toaster collision. In a quantum collision, you can annihilate the particles like even electron and a positron, they can annihilate into a photon and then turn into something else crazy. What comes out isn't always what went in, right? So you're not always learning about what's inside the electron if you annihilate it.

• 39:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  So say you smash two toasters into each other and you expected to see like screws and springs and stuff like that. We don't even know what we should expect to see when you break the electron. And so if, you know, things we had never seen before came out of the toaster like-

• 39:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Fish guts.

• 39:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Fish guts, exactly. How would we even know what to do with that? And so like, how do we know what to look for or how to measure it if we've never seen it before?

• 40:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, good question. It would be amazing if we discovered these fish guts all the way down.

• 40:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm skeptical.

• 40:10Daniel Whiteson?

  The simplest version of what we do is that we start at low energy and we know what we expect to see. Like if you shoot two electrons at each other at fairly low energy, they're going to bounce off each other in a way that's similar to like what happens if you shoot two baseballs at each other. They're going to bounce off and you can calculate the angles they're going to come out at and the energy. And they're quantum particles, so you can't predict an individual one, but you can predict the distribution. And so if you have what we call elastic scattering, which means you're not breaking the particles open, you're not changing the configuration, they're just bouncing off each other, is very predictable. So you start with that and you see the distributions you expect, the angles that you expect. You're like, okay, that's cool. And then you increase the energy. And like with baseballs, at some point, when you increase the energy,

• 40:54Daniel Whiteson?

  you're going to get what we call an inelastic collision, which means the baseballs shatter or they stick together or something else happens, right? And it's an energy threshold because the baseball is held together with energy, right? It's bound together. And if you have a high enough energy, you can break those bonds. If you don't, you don't. So below some energy threshold, you're not probing inside the baseball. You're probing the baseball's behavior itself. But above some energy, it's inelastic. And then the distribution changes. Yeah, maybe a baseball comes out, but first of all, it's mangled. It looks different and the angles look very different. Like if you collide two baseballs and they stick together, they don't come back out at you in the same way. Or imagine if you're doing it like you throw a baseball at a wall.

• 41:37Daniel Whiteson?

  And if you throw it at low energy, it bounces off. It doesn't break the wall. Throw it at high enough energy, baseball just doesn't come back, right? It just goes through the wall. So that's very different. And so that's what you look for to see if you're probing inside a particle. You shoot it at higher, higher in energy and you look for deviations from the distributions you would expect from elastic scattering to see that you're starting to do inelastic scattering. You're starting to probe maybe what's inside the particles instead of probing the particles as a whole.

• 42:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Have we found an energy at which we can shoot electrons at each other where it looks like we're transitioning from elastic to inelastic scattering?

• 42:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Unfortunately, not yet, but this is exactly how we discovered the structure of the proton. We shot electrons and protons at each other and at low energy, they bounce off elastic scattering. At higher energy, you start to destroy the proton and what's happening is the electron is now interacting with the quarks inside of it. And so at some energy, you start to just get like shrapnel from the proton and it's definitely not elastic scattering. So you can tell you're doing inelastic scattering. For people who want to learn more about these experiments, they're fascinating and amazing. They're called deep inelastic scattering, so you can Google that. And if you get to high enough energy, you actually start to see elastic scattering from the things inside the proton.

• 42:53Daniel Whiteson?

  And that's, for example, how we know we have three quarks inside the proton because you shoot electrons at the proton and you start to get elastic scattering as if there are three tight little dots of objects that you're interacting with. Because at high enough energy, the bonds of the quarks are irrelevant. If your energy of your probe is larger than the energy of the bonds between the quarks, you're just shooting it at three quarks. And sometimes they bounce off in exactly the way you would expect from elastic scattering between electrons and quarks. So it's this incredibly beautiful transition from elastic to inelastic to then three times elastic scattering. It's really amazing.

• 43:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  That must have been so cool to realize that you, instead of a proton, now have three other things that have popped out and be like, the answer is three!

• 43:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 43:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't know, that sounds really cool to me.

• 43:38Daniel Whiteson?

  It is really cool, but for a while, people didn't believe it. They were like, okay, well, that's cool and that's clever, but that's just mathematics. Like, is that real? And for a long time, people called these partons, like parts of the proton. And nobody believed that they were like actually physically real things inside the proton until somebody predicted like, okay, well, if these things are real, these quarks are real, they should be able to do other things also. Like make other states bound together. And somebody predicted one of these states. And the day they saw this in the experiments, this new state made of just these quarks together. That's when everybody started to believe, okay, quarks are real. It's called the October Revolution. It was a very dramatic moment. Yeah, absolutely. In physics and a guy I worked with tells a story about his father, who was also a particle physicist,

• 44:23Daniel Whiteson?

  getting a phone call that day in October and like leaping out of the shower naked and dripping wet because he knew it was going to be exciting news to take that phone call. So sometimes there is drama in particle physics. And so that's what we saw for the inside the proton. We know the proton has structure and that's how we know. And we can try the same thing, shooting electrons at each other. But so far we've seen no structure.

• 44:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  And have we gone up to what you would consider to be very, very, very high energies doing these experiments?

• 44:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, we've done the highest we can, right? The Large Hadron Collider is the highest energy collisions of protons and protons. And before that, we had a high energy electron collider. You know, we've built these things as large as we can. The limitation is just money. Like there's no fundamental limitation to building a bigger collider. We know how to do it. It just costs a lot of cash. You've got to build a tunnel. You've got magnets, you've got little accelerating modules. We could in principle, build one that circumnavigates the moon or, you know, the galaxy or whatever. It would just cost a zillion dollars. And even I think that's probably not a good way to spend your cash. But it's awesome sort of to think that like, we could just buy this knowledge of the universe. Like it's out there. We're in the candy store. We have the money in our pockets.

• 45:33Daniel Whiteson?

  We're just like, mm, I feel like that Snickers bar is too much money.

• 45:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Maybe we should figure out what causes cancer.

• 45:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. Save some kids from dying. Exactly. So one approach is like just build bigger colliders. But the problem is we don't know how big it has to be. Like until you see the inside of the electron, you have no idea. Is it right beyond our capability? If we built it a little bit bigger, could we see it? Or is it going to require a solar system sized collider or galaxy sized collider? Or use black holes or just like a revolution in collider technology? So we don't need to make them so big and expensive. Some folks are working on that. So it's an exploration game. The same way you don't know when you Land on an alien planet, is it going to be all dust and rubble? Or are there aliens waiting for us? And you want to land on as many planets as possible? We don't know. When we build a collider, are we about to see inside the electron? Or is this thing way too small and we're not going to see anything?

• 46:23Daniel Whiteson?

  You just don't know.

• 46:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Well, so we've talked about direct methods of trying to figure out if electrons are made of smaller parts. Next, you are going to tell us about the indirect method that you queued up for us as a super exciting thing earlier in the episode. And when we get back from the break, we're going to learn all about it.

• 46:49Speaker 01

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• 47:18Speaker 04

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by Miguel. My small experience with the discrepancy in the business of music made me angry in the best way. And I wanted to, I wanted to finish. So I started really like leaning into my therapy, trying to get down to like what matters now. Somewhere Miguelito felt like he didn't have a place to say how he felt. And music was the place that I went to, to say how I felt. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app,

• 48:03Speaker 04

  YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Hoda Kotb from Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Have you started your holiday shopping yet? This time of year always feels like the list just keeps growing. Gifts for family, gifts for friends, stocking stuffers, plus all the everyday things you still have to buy, like groceries and gas. That's why being a little strategic about the spending on gifts and those everyday needs is key. With the Chase Freedom Flex Car, you can be a little sad. Finding the right gift feels good and maximizing cash back feels even better. Freedom Flex offers plenty of ways to earn more. You get 5% cash back on popular rotating quarterly categories,

• 48:46Speaker 04

  3% on dining and drugstores, and 1% on all other purchases. So while you're checking names off your holiday list, those gifts can be a treat for you, too. This holiday season, let Freedom Flex reward you. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. So sign up for the Chase Freedom Flex Card. Learn more at chase.com/getflex. This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Offer subject to change. Terms apply.

• 49:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  We're back. And during the break, I asked Daniel if the indirect method required bigger colliders. And he said the answer is no, which means maybe this could be the key with existing technologies for figuring it out.

• 49:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly.

• 49:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm super excited. How do we do this indirectly?

• 49:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So particle physicists love smashing stuff together and they love making bigger and bigger colliders. And that's all fun. And everybody would prefer to do it the direct way. It's the most fun. It's the most obvious. It's the cleanest. The data is beautiful. But hey, it's expensive. You know, it's hard to build new colliders. And so we also try to be resourceful and we try to find other ways to discover things without having to build the collider to make them directly. So we have these indirect methods of discovering things. Essentially, if we can see the influence of some new particle, for example, on the particles we already are able to make in the collider, even if we don't have enough energy to make that new particle, it can still influence the particles we have. So for example, before we discovered the top quark, we were pretty sure it was there and we pretty sure we knew where it was,

• 50:25Daniel Whiteson?

  like how much mass it had because of the way it influenced the particles we were able to make at the lower energy. So we can play this indirect game of seeing the influence of new particles out there on the particles we see. And that's one way to discover new particles without like having the energy to make them. But we can also do something similar to see inside the electron using a very clever trick of studying the Higgs boson. So you remember the Higgs boson is the particle, it messes up the weak force, but also it gives mass to all the particles. Like it gives mass to the electron, for example, by interacting with it. So without the Higgs boson, the electron would have no mass. It would be a speed of light massless particle, similar to the photon, but with charge, of course.

• 51:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Once you have the Higgs boson in the universe, the Higgs and the electron interact. And so the electron that we see is not the pure electron, it's the electron interacting with the Higgs field. And that interaction is sort of like a big pulsing ball. The energy is sliding back and forth between the electron field and the Higgs field, back and forth constantly. And that basically counts as internal stored mass of this thing. This thing, which is a combination of the electron and the Higgs field. We talked in the charge episode about how fields are coupled together, energy sloshes back and forth between them. That's what's happening with the electron field and the Higgs field. So the thing that we see is not really a pure electron. What we call the electron is actually a combination of the electron field and the Higgs field. And that thing has energy inside of it because of this interaction.

• 51:53Daniel Whiteson?

  And that's where the electron's mass comes from. Still with me?

• 51:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I'm trying to connect what you just said and thinking about what we were talking about before. So is this interaction going to give us more energy than you would get if you were just smashing electrons together? No, that's not what we're going for. We're just expecting the interactions to be different in a way that is informative.

• 52:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. You can't like use that as a source of fuel to like push things further or anything. But what's really fascinating is that the electron has a different mass than the muon, for example, right? Muon is the cousin of the electron. Muon has a lot more mass, interacts much more strongly with the Higgs boson. And so the Higgs boson interacts with the muon more intensely, so the muon has more mass. And that's really interesting because it means that by studying the interaction between the Higgs boson and a particle, you can understand how much mass it should have. Like if you knew the strength of the interaction between the Higgs boson and the electron, you could predict the electron's mass. You'd be like, okay, I know how much these two fields couple together, so I can calculate

• 52:56Daniel Whiteson?

  how that little pulsing ball of energy should be, and I can predict the electron's mass, right? And the same way you know, okay, the muon interacts more strongly with the Higgs, so we should have a higher mass, and the top quark, crazy interaction with the Higgs, huge mass for the top quark. Top quark is like 200 times the mass of the proton, which is much more massive than the electron. So enormous variations in the amount that the Higgs boson interacts with this stuff. So, say you knew how the Higgs boson interacts with these particles, you could predict their mass, and then you went out and you measured their mass, and what if you saw a discrepancy? What if the Higgs boson interacts with the electron, and it should give it a mass of like 0.1, but you go out and you measure the mass, and it's 0.5, or it's 10.0?

• 53:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Then you'd be like, hold on a second, the electron has more mass than it's getting from the Higgs boson. We think the Higgs boson is giving the electron a certain amount of mass, but when you go out and measure it in the universe, it has more mass than that. What could that mean? Well, we've seen that before, haven't we? The proton is made of three quarks, and those quarks get their mass from the Higgs boson, but the proton gets most of its mass not from the Higgs boson, but from the interaction of the quarks. And so in a similar way, if you measure the mass of the electron, and it's heavier than you can explain with the Higgs boson, that means that it's got some energy inside of it, some bonds that are holding its bits together, that its mass is not just coming

• 54:21Daniel Whiteson?

  from the Higgs boson, its mass is coming from the interaction of the things inside of it, which means there are things inside of it. Ha ha, look at that.

• 54:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ha ha! But that doesn't tell us how many things are inside of it, or the nature of the things inside of it.

• 54:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't throw cold water on our discovery. Oh my god, we just had an aha moment, we revealed something about the universe, and now you're not satisfied.

• 54:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm sorry. No, no, I'm excited, I'm excited. I'm just trying to figure out how excited I should be.

• 54:46Daniel Whiteson?

  No, you're totally right. The indirect method is not as exciting as the direct method. It tells us that there is something inside of it, and it can tell us something about the nature of those bonds, but you're right, it doesn't tell us what it is, it doesn't Show it to us. It doesn't give it to us to play with.

• 54:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  But has this been done?

• 55:01Daniel Whiteson?

  So this is what we're working on, and this is something we can do with a Large Hadron Collider, because we can study the interaction of the Higgs boson and various particles. The way we do that is by measuring how often the Higgs boson turns into those particles. Like you create a Higgs boson, does it turn into a pair of bottom quarks, or a pair of top quarks, or a pair of electrons, or a pair of muons? The rate at which it interacts with these particles determines how often it turns into those particles. So electrons, very, very low mass, low interaction with the Higgs, very rare to see a Higgs turn into electrons, very difficult. But you run the collider long enough, you'll see it, and you'll be able to measure that. And then we can compare that to the mass of the Higgs. So we don't have that number yet, because the Higgs decays to electrons very, very, very rarely, because they're so light.

• 55:44Daniel Whiteson?

  But we're starting to be able to measure that for other particles. So we've measured it for the top quark and for the bottom quark, and those numbers are as we expect. So the Higgs boson decays to the top quark in a way that suggests that all of its mass comes from the Higgs boson. I mean, you would have heard about it already if we discovered something inside the quarks. So far, the numbers don't indicate that there's anything inside the top quark or the bottom quark. We haven't been able to probe the other particles, because they're lower mass, and therefore the Higgs decays to them more rarely. But that is something we can do. And we have 10 more years to run this collider and get all that data and analyze these things. And I just think it's cool that we have sort of these backdoor methods to be like, "Well, let's look to see if we can figure out if there is something there

• 56:26Daniel Whiteson?

  before we actually build the collider to break it open and show it to us."

• 56:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so say you had an electron, a muon, what is the third, a tau?

• 56:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Tau, good.

• 56:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right.

• 56:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Tau.

• 56:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  A tau. Oh, man, I was so close. I should have stopped.

• 56:39Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm rounding you up to an A+.

• 56:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, thank you. Great. Oh, yay. Okay, so you've got these three things, and you interact them with the Higgs. If the answer for their mass differs in some predictable way, like, you know, one is always 25% higher than the other, and then the other one is another 25% beyond that, could you guess how many there were in there? Like, you know, there's probably three, and then there's an additional one in this one, and an additional one in that one. Like, could you get a handle on, like, the relative numbers of things that way?

• 57:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that's exactly the game we'd love to play. You know, look at these things, look for patterns, look for clues. If we saw this, there would be instantly a zillion theories explaining it, you know, to match all those numbers, which would be really fun. And, you know, we need that kind of inspiration. We need this kind of data to give us a clue to come up with these ideas. There are lots of theories of electron compositeness, you know, things that could be inside the electron, but nobody's any idea if any of them are true. Maybe the most famous is string theory. String theory says all the particles are just strings oscillating in different ways, which is cool and very beautiful, but strings are so tiny that we could never see them with a direct method. Like, we would need a ridiculous collider to see strings.

• 57:50Daniel Whiteson?

  And, you know, not everything that's inside the electron could be seen even with this indirect method, because it has to couple to the Higgs boson in order for this to work. It has to directly get its mass from the Higgs boson, the constituents of the electron. It could be that the constituents of the electron don't get their mass from the Higgs boson, and the electron itself is some, like, effective approximate description of it, and it gets its mass directly from the Higgs boson, unlike the proton, for example. So there are ways that this could fail, but it's an exciting way to see inside the electron, anyway.

• 58:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  So is this the kind of thing where, like, tomorrow the news could be saying, oh, my gosh, using the indirect method, we are now sure that the electron is made up of stuff? You said something about a decade's worth of data. Is this the kind of thing where we're gonna need 10 years to figure it out, to, like, see a signature?

• 58:34Daniel Whiteson?

  We're gonna need a while. This is hard. You're measuring something that's very, very rarely happens, and then you want to measure very precisely, which means you need a bunch of examples. But this is what we're good at, you know? We are good at using machine learning to extract this information from the data to get the most juice out of the dollars that we have spent on it. And, you know, this is what particle physicists do. We're like, blocked by this wall, so let's see if we can find a way around it. And I'm impressed with the cleverness. I mean, I didn't come up with this idea.

• 59:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Somebody else thought of this, and it just goes to show you the ingenuity of humanity. You know, there are questions we have, and we will always push to find the answers, even if it seems impossible, or impractical, or ridiculously expensive. We will find a way to get there.

• 59:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  So you said that the LHC right now mostly has protons shooting around. So are we even collecting the right kind of data to use the indirect method right now? Or is that happening at like a different collider?

• 59:25Daniel Whiteson?

  The proton shooting around is a good way to make Higgs bosons. One thing the LHC is really good at is making Higgs bosons. It was built to discover the Higgs. But it was also built to discover lots of different versions of the Higgs because we didn't know in advance how much mass the Higgs would have and so exactly the best way to make it. So proton collider is really good at discovering things you don't know much about because it can make lots of different kinds of things. Now that we know more about the Higgs boson, people are talking about making a Higgs factory, which is a machine that makes zillions and zillions of Higgs. It's like perfect for making Higgses. And it does it by colliding muons, actually. So you make beams of muons because muons interact with the Higgs more than the electrons do. This is a good way to make lots of Higgses.

• 1:00:07Daniel Whiteson?

  It's really hard to make muon beams because muons don't last very long. They decay back into electrons. But people have figured that out. So that's one thing on the docket for the next collider is maybe make a big muon collider Higgs factory. So you can study these things in incredible detail. So that'd be exciting, but of course, you know, that costs a few bill.

• 1:00:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah, I would like to make a discovery there where people can say like, well, we need to make more Wiener Smiths. Make more Higgs, like that's a person. And it's just so great that his name has become, you know, used in that way. But anyway, maybe one day there'll be people wanting to make more Wiener Smiths, but maybe not.

• 1:00:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Maybe one day. And I hope that in a hundred years or a thousand years, people know more about the structure of matter. And they can talk about the fundamental bits and we can smoke banana peels on the roof and talk about why the universe is made out of squigglyons and what that even means and why are the two of them? And, you know, to me, these are fun philosophical questions and we don't even get to ask them yet because we don't know what those answers are. And I hope to live long enough to see some of that.

• 1:01:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, but it's cool that we live in a time where you can devise the experiments to ask these questions. But we've gotten this far down the ladder, so I'm excited.

• 1:01:12Daniel Whiteson?

  The ancient Greeks would be very impressed, I hope.

• 1:01:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think so, yeah. I mean, even though this isn't about fish guts or fish vomit, I still think this is very cool.

• 1:01:20Daniel Whiteson?

  In a way, it is about fish guts because it's about all of us.

• 1:01:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, man, that was poetic.

• 1:01:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Thank you.

• 1:01:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Modern day Sagan over here.

• 1:01:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, everyone, for going on this journey with us into the dark heart of matter and understanding what makes up our universe and what we know about it.

• 1:01:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  And if you have a question about the universe, you can send it to us at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you.

• 1:01:53Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 1:01:58Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 1:02:04Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 1:02:10Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 1:02:17Kelly 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.

• 1:02:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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