What is toponium?

Daniel and Kelly explain how top quarks talk to each other and potentially form new states of matter. 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?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  This is Danielle Fishel from Pod Meets World. Every purchase is a financial decision, so it's worth asking. What am I getting out of this? If you're using the Chase Freedom Flex Card, you can maximize your cash back on things you need. Groceries and gas, cash back. Dinner, cash back on that, too. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. 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 J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Offer subject to change. Terms apply.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hey there, extraordinaries! Kelly here. So I absolutely cannot believe this is happening, but my book, A City on Mars, is Barnes & Noble's nonfiction pick for August. I am so excited. So if you swing by your local Barnes & Noble, there's likely a display near the front of the store with my book. And of course, it's on Barnes & Noble's website as well. So to learn about where we're likely to settle in space, whether we can make babies in space, why astronauts love taco sauce, and the legal status of space cannibalism, head over to Barnes & Noble and check out A City on Mars. Can we settle space? Should we settle space? And have we really thought this through? Thanks, everyone!

• 2:03Daniel Whiteson?

  We smash particles together at the Large Hadron Collider, not just because it's cool, or because we want to know what the universe is made out of. It's all those reasons, but also, we want to understand how those basic bits of matter come together to make up our world. Why do they interact this way, not that way? Can they fit together in some new way we've never seen? The story of particle physics discoveries is a story of cycles, swinging between confusion at the many kinds of particles to insight about how they come together. Today, we'll be tackling a topic that has received a lot of attention recently in the news: toponium. What is it, and what does it tell us about the nature of matter and energy?

• 2:46Daniel Whiteson?

  It turns out to be the latest chapter in a rich history of discovery, betrayal, and urination. Yes, that's right, I said, urination. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

• 3:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hi, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I study parasites and space, and I do not know what toponium is.

• 3:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I do know what toponium is, and I'm also looking forward to declaring the discovery of white sonium.

• 3:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that would be great. So I await that day, I'm sure it will come. But my question for you today is, what is your favorite name for a physics thing? What do you think is like the best name physicists have come up with for something so far?

• 3:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm, I think one of my favorite names is the rate of change of acceleration, which is called jerk, which is, you know, also a fun word, but it's kind of, you know, you get jerked around, it kind of makes sense.

• 3:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I like that. All right, good. Good job, physicists. You got one.

• 4:02Daniel Whiteson?

  But before you applaud us too much for giving Jerk a cool name.

• 4:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  A biologist named it, didn't they?

• 4:09Daniel Whiteson?

  They went a little crazy after Jerk. And rate of change of Jerk is called Snap. And the rate of change of Snap is called Crackle. And the rate of change of Crackle, you want to guess?

• 4:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Pop.

• 4:20Daniel Whiteson?

  It's pop.

• 4:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no.

• 4:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  I bet that was named by children of the 80s. Isn't that when Rice Krispies hit their zenith of popularity?

• 4:31Daniel Whiteson?

  That's exactly right. Physicists trying desperately for cultural relevance.

• 4:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sorry, guys.

• 4:39Daniel Whiteson?

  But, you know, we do our best to be relevant because in the end, we are trying to understand the way the world works, where it's all made out of what you are made out of, what your breakfast cereal is made out of. And more than just what it's made out of, but what it can do. Because your life isn't dominated by fundamental particles, but by those particles put together in interesting, weird, delicious and hilarious ways.

• 4:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I like the delicious ways. I think that's my favorite.

• 5:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  So you sent me an outline and said, we're talking about toponium. And I was like, well, this is yet another one of those instances where Kelly gets to learn on air and ask stupid questions. Because I have no idea what this is.

• 5:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Intelligent questions, intelligent questions.

• 5:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Intelligent.

• 5:18Daniel Whiteson?

  That's what you're here for.

• 5:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. I'm continuing to earn my pod in physics.

• 5:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Absolutely, yes.

• 5:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  We are also offering a pod in physics to our listeners. And so let's go ahead and hear what they think toponium is.

• 5:29Speaker 04

  The particle with the most protons, neutrons, electrons crammed into it to make it the biggest, biggest, top of the table element.

• 5:37Speaker 05

  Theoretical matter that has a top quark in it or something like that. Probably some type of metal like strontium.

• 5:46Speaker 06

  That sounds like an element. I don't know, but it sounds like a chemical element. I'm going to assume that toponium is related to physics and not biology. So there's a good chance that it's a mathematical equation.

• 6:00Speaker 07

  It's the opposite of bottomium. Obviously, a mineral developed for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and then stolen by James Cameron for an upcoming film.

• 6:10Speaker 08

  Matter, perhaps purely theoretical, composed of top quarks only. Toponium is the top quark matter fraction of unobtainium after quantum centrifugal separation of unobtainium ore.

• 6:24Speaker 09

  The theoretical element with no protons and no electrons gets its own special row at the top of the periodic table, thus, toponium.

• 6:32Speaker 10

  Toponium or not toponium? That is the question.

• 6:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Rare element, I would say, perhaps a hypothesized element that hasn't been discovered yet.

• 6:42Speaker 11

  I've never heard of toponium, but it ends in -ium, so it makes me think of deuterium or tritium, some sort of combination of things. But the only top I know is a quark, so it's not some weird combination of only top quarks, is it?

• 7:00Speaker 12

  I don't know, but if it doesn't sit on top of midium and bottomium, I'm going to be very disappointed.

• 7:06Daniel Whiteson?

  These are wonderful answers.

• 7:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, as always, but yeah, this one in particular had a lot of funny answers. And I'm guessing that's because a lot of people are in my situation, which is to say, no idea, Daniel, absolutely no clue.

• 7:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And they're trying to reverse engineer it from the name, which is smart, but assumes that physicists give names to things in logical ways that can be reverse engineered, which isn't always true.

• 7:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Big mistake, big mistake. That's right. It's either confusing or wrong or misleading, something like that.

• 7:36Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, well, let's not keep people in suspense anymore. Toponium is a fascinating new thing recently explored by the Large Hadron Collider, and it has to do with how quarks can come together, which is a whole fascinating area of physics that explains how I'm built and you're built and how the whole world around us comes together. Plus, it's filled with crazy stories of physicists being outrageous.

• 7:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing. And so when you say recently, do you mean like this decade or yeah, what do you mean by recently?

• 8:06Daniel Whiteson?

  The toponium paper came out last year.

• 8:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, wow.

• 8:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, this is a fresh, hot off the press. And a bunch of people emailed me and said, hey, can you explain this? I don't understand it.

• 8:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 8:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Because probably the paper was too hard to digest. And even the science communication articles about toponium, I felt like they talk about it, but they don't really convey the crucial ideas that I want people to understand about why this is exciting area of research.

• 8:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we are here for the one hour version of all of those things. So let's start from the beginning. What is a quark? And you gave me the ability to explain this to my daughter the other day. We were talking about quarks and I felt pretty cool that I could go ahead and kind of explain it, but let's hear it from you.

• 8:45Daniel Whiteson?

  So quarks are something we discovered about 50 years ago. They're what make up the protons and the neutrons. So you know, you and I are made out of molecules. Those molecules are made out of atoms. Every atom has a nucleus in it with protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons. But those protons and neutrons are not fundamental. They are made up of other smaller particles called quarks. And in particular, there's two quarks, the up quark and the down quark that make up the proton and the neutron. But we didn't know this for sure until about the late 60s and 70s. And how we figured out the protons and neutrons are made of quarks is a really fun story and a tricky one because we can't see quarks by themselves. We have to infer their existence. There's a lot of really cool mathematical puzzles that had to be solved to even suggest

• 9:29Daniel Whiteson?

  that quarks might be there. So to set the stage, we have to go back to like the late 1940s. What was the state of particle physics in the late 1940s? Well, we knew about electrons. We knew about protons and neutrons. We also knew that there were photons out there, right? Like we'd seen photons, Einstein and Planck and those guys revolutionized quantum mechanics with the photoelectric effect and the idea of photons light as a packet. And in cosmic rays, we'd seen a few other weird particles like muons and pions. But things seemed kind of tidy, like we had a few particles that all came together to mostly explain everything we knew. People felt like, hey, we're maybe on the verge of like nailing this, you know? Narrowing things down.

• 10:10Daniel Whiteson?

  We've gone from like infinite complexity of chemistry down to like 100 basic building blocks in the periodic table. Now we were down to like three objects, protons, neutrons and electrons that made everything, lava and kittens and ice cream and podcasters and everything. People felt like, oh yeah, we're on track. And then came the 1950s where everything got weird.

• 10:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  When you start to feel confident, the universe kicks you in the face.

• 10:37Daniel Whiteson?

  And this came about because we had a revolution in particle physics technologies. Beforehand, we mostly relied on the universe to accelerate our particles. So many of the discoveries we're making of weird particles were cosmic rays, super high energy particles that hit the upper atmosphere and then showered. So people would like send balloons up into the upper atmosphere or leave like big blocks of photographic material on the tops of mountains and then slice it super thin and expose it.

• 11:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Fun fact, the first chicken sandwich to go to space was sent up on a balloon by KFC. Anyway, done, move on.

• 11:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. You can accomplish a lot of things with balloons.

• 11:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 11:16Daniel Whiteson?

  These balloons are amazing also because they start out like pretty big on the ground. And then when they get to the upper atmosphere, because the pressure is so low, they become enormous, like mind boggling, like football stadium sized balloons.

• 11:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 11:28Daniel Whiteson?

  When they're in the upper atmosphere. It's incredible. Anyway, we've been doing particle physics that way. It's just like, hey, let's let the universe accelerate stuff and watch it as it smashes into the atmosphere. And that was useful. And that's how we saw muons and kaons and other kinds of particles. But then folks figured out better ways to accelerate particles here on Earth. So cyclotrons and synchotrons, all these cool technologies to bend particles in a loop, give them a kick and get them going to pretty high energies. Let us smash particles together and open up a whole golden era of discovery for particle physics.

• 12:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  And these things are amazing. I got to go in the synchrotron facility in the UK on Harwell's campus.

• 12:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Cool.

• 12:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  And it was so cool. They speed up X-rays with magnets. And they were showing me how all this stuff works and it was, I'll never forget it. Anyway, cool facilities.

• 12:15Daniel Whiteson?

  They can't speed up X-rays with magnets. That doesn't work because X-rays are neutral. And so they don't feel magnets, but they probably generate X-rays from high energy particles accelerated and bent by magnets.

• 12:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  That is right. Thank you. I appreciate the correction.

• 12:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's very cool technology. E. O. Lawrence won Nobel Prizes for this kind of stuff. It's why we have Lawrence National Lab, two Lawrence National Labs, actually. He's a really smart dude. Anyway, by smashing particles into other particles, we started discovering a bunch of really strange particles, particles we literally called strange, like kaons and other kinds of pions and all sorts of stuff. It was like every time you turned on the accelerator, you discovered a new particle, which is crazy. That just doesn't happen these days.

• 12:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  That is crazy. What you said, particles we literally called strange. There is a particle called the strange particle?

• 13:04Daniel Whiteson?

  There is a particle that called the strange particle. It's a strange quark. But initially, there were particles that we classified as strange. We described them as strange. These are kaon particles. And these particles were strange because they sort of lasted a long time and then decayed, which people hadn't seen before. It turns out that's because they were decaying via the weak force, which is pretty weak. And so it takes a while for it to work. But we didn't understand that at the time. But it was an exciting moment because like every time you turned on the accelerator, you made a new particle, you could name it. It must have been a really fun time to be a particle physicist.

• 13:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 13:35Daniel Whiteson?

  And they call this time in particle physics, the particle zoo.

• 13:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  I really love zoos and I feel like I might be disappointed if I saw a particle zoo instead of a zoo zoo, but it sounds fun. I can imagine physicists being like children, enjoying the particle zoo.

• 13:51Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm glad you take it that way because I think it's actually intended as shade against biology.

• 13:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. What?

• 13:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Because this is the era in particle physics where we were seeing a bunch of stuff we didn't understand and we were just naming it. And so I think they were like, we're basically doing botany. You know, we don't understand anything. We just give stuff names.

• 14:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  You guys suck.

• 14:13Daniel Whiteson?

  But it's an exciting time to be an experimentalist because you're discovering stuff that isn't predicted. It's not like, here's what the Higgs boson will look like. Here's how you find it. Go do it. Check the box. Or here's the top quark. It's like, well, we're not understanding anything you're doing. Stop discovering new particles, please, because we're confused. But you know, for an explorer, that's an exciting time. That's like, well, we were just, you know, collecting new stuff nobody understands. And it was a big puzzle. So people have found all these particles and they were wondering like, are they all fundamental? Are we discovering a bunch of new stuff that isn't made out of other stuff? Is there a pattern somehow? So it was a big theoretical puzzle, like what explains all of these new particles? And people started thinking about it and trying to organize it and like, hey, are there patterns here? Can we look at the masses?

• 14:58Daniel Whiteson?

  How many particles are there? And a few clever people came up with some ideas to explain all of these particles. It was called the eightfold way.

• 15:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, all right. So I'm, I'm just about done stuffing the anger that I'm feeling down about that earlier comment. But you're making me wonder, the word particles. Is it part of calls because it's part of other things? Was that why you guys named it particles?

• 15:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm, that's interesting. The etymology of the word particle itself. I think it comes from the concept of particle just being a tiny bit of stuff, like the smallest particle. You know, particularly small stuff.

• 15:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, got it. All right. So sorry, moving on. The eightfold way.

• 15:40Daniel Whiteson?

  The eightfold way, yeah.

• 15:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  This sounds like something you would learn in a martial arts class, the eightfold way. So why, why was it called the eightfold way?

• 15:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's like the Tao of physics or something.

• 15:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 15:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Because people were looking for patterns and they were starting with the assumption that all these particles might be the rearrangement of smaller bits, a smaller number of basic pieces. So imagine you have like three different kinds of Legos. And then you ask like, well, what can I build out of these Legos? Okay, they click together this way or that way or this other way. But if there's a small number of them, there's a limited way they can come together. And so people imagine, well, what if we have like four different kinds of Legos? What can we explain? And they noticed that if you arrange the newly discovered particles in a certain way, that can be explained by having four different elementary pieces that all click together. For example, these pieces all have different electric charge.

• 16:33Daniel Whiteson?

  And so it predicts like a distribution of the electric charges of all the particles you can make with these basic pieces.

• 16:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so does that mean they went looking then for the four basic parts that would make up the rest of the stuff?

• 16:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Not initially. First thing they did is they said, well, what's missing? Like, are there ways that you can put these four basic pieces together to make a particle we haven't seen yet?

• 16:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 16:55Daniel Whiteson?

  And Gell-Mann famously stood up at a conference and said, you know, I predict the existence of this new particle. He called it the omega minus, which would be a pure combination of the particle we later call strange quarks, so three strange quarks put together. And he even predicted what the mass of it would be. And then they went out and looked for it and they found it. And that was very compelling. That's like, okay, make a prediction. You know, this isn't just mathematical. But at the time, a lot of physicists were like, you know, we haven't seen these particles. We're just seeing the combinations of them. And while it's compelling to say, look, I see their patterns in the particles that are consistent with them being made out of a small number of more basic elements. We haven't seen them directly. And so people just thought of them as like, you know, a mathematical calculational tool.

• 17:39Daniel Whiteson?

  The way people are down on string theory these days, right? They're like, yeah, well, string theory can solve quantum gravity, but we've never seen the strings or how do we really know? It's just mathematics. So people sort of dismissed it as like just a mathematical tool. They called them partons. They weren't like real particles.

• 17:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  And in that case, were they called partons because they were part of something?

• 17:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 17:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  But that's okay, but that's not true for particles.

• 18:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that's right. Partons are like part of something. But it's a special word because they're like, hmm, it's not real. You know, it's just like math. It's not something that you could actually see or interact with. It's not necessarily part of the physical universe. That's how people felt about it in the late 1960s. They were like, this is pretty compelling, but we don't know.

• 18:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 18:21Daniel Whiteson?

  We also had competing names for them. Murray Gell-Mann, who won the Nobel Prize for this stuff, called them quarks. But there was another guy named Zweig, who came up with the same idea at about the same time, actually a little earlier, but he wasn't as influential. And he called them aces.

• 18:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, which name do I like better?

• 18:37Daniel Whiteson?

  I think aces is cool, actually.

• 18:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Quarks is fun. Aces is cool.

• 18:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Quarks comes from a James Joyce novel, actually.

• 18:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 18:45Daniel Whiteson?

  A three quarks for Mr. Mark is a nonsensical phrase in that novel. And that's what inspired Murray Gell-Mann.

• 18:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, cute. Okay, that's pretty cool. Was Gell-Mann generally a very like literate dude or into literature?

• 19:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, he was. He was sort of like a Renaissance man, widely read.

• 19:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So now we've got quarks instead of aces. And so, you know, you mentioned string theory. And so one, I remember when we were talking to the string theorists a couple of months ago, they were saying that they're not sure that we'll ever be able to test some of these ideas.

• 19:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  But luckily, I believe, we eventually got to the point where we could test for some of these ideas for these particles. So what was the jump that allowed us to do that?

• 19:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So so far, we've only seen the combinations of these still hypothetical quarks macroscopically in our detectors. And so in order to probe them, people followed in the footsteps of Rutherford. Rutherford, around the turn of the century, tried to understand the structure of the atom. Before we knew, like, hey, there's a nucleus inside of it, he tried to understand, like, where is all this stuff in the atom? And what he did was he shot stuff at it, right? So he shot particles at a gold foil, and he saw that sometimes it bounces back, and sometimes it goes through. And that led him to conclude that matter is not evenly distributed in the gold foil. It's concentrated in these tiny little spots, these nuclei, right? So he did something similar to understand the structure of the proton, right? What's inside the proton?

• 20:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  And when we get back from the break, we'll find out what we did.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  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 rising star Sienna Spiral.

• 20:42Daniel Whiteson?

  What is so fascinating to you about impermanence?

• 20:44Speaker 13

  Everything about us, everything we do is is temporary. And I just got terrified of that, you know, what we do with our time and how I feel like the way the world is today and how fast paced it is and how much we don't even acknowledge anything around us, how I felt temporary to the people around me and how that made me scared and how much I wanted to last and make an impact on people. And I guess to change the way I looked at things and to change myself and to change how I guess I approached everything in my life. It's important that things are impermanent, because nothing would feel special. And enjoying, you know, learning to love with knowing it's not going to last.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 22:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so we just talked about the experiments that Rutherford did to show that atoms have sort of structure, like there's a nucleus. So now let's talk about how we figured out the structure of the proton.

• 22:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. We basically copied Rutherford's strategy, and we've been doing that for decades, which is shoot stuff at it and see what happens.

• 23:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Pew, pew, pew.

• 23:03Daniel Whiteson?

  And by the angles at which stuff comes out, you can tell the structure of something. So that works for gold. You can shoot particles of gold and see the nucleus. How do you probe the proton? Well, one thing you can do is smash protons together. That's really messy because protons are big bags of goo. So to make it a little bit cleaner, what people did is they shot electrons at protons because electrons don't feel the strong nuclear force. They only feel electromagnetism and the weak force, and we think they're fundamental so they don't break up into other stuff. They're cleaner. So it's really like poking your finger at a proton the best way that we can. And so these were experiments done at Stanford in the late 1960s. They're called deep inelastic scattering, if you want to learn more about them.

• 23:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Deep because they're very high energy and they're probing the structure of the proton. Inelastic because what happens is not that the electron and the proton bounce off each other, but that the electron shatters the proton and interacts with the stuff inside of it. In physics, we distinguish between elastic collisions, where things just bounce off, and inelastic, where we've like changed the structure or broken something or things stick together. Those are inelastic.

• 24:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  I feel like it should have been explosive and not explosive, but...

• 24:12Daniel Whiteson?

  That's because you're thinking about diarrhea, right? That's a good way to categorize diarrhea, not...

• 24:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  I am a biologist. I think we have eight different ways of characterizing feces or something like that.

• 24:22Daniel Whiteson?

  The Bristol scale, I've read it, yes, absolutely.

• 24:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah, you married a poop person.

• 24:26Daniel Whiteson?

  I did? Wow. I'm gonna take that in the positive way it was intended.

• 24:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Good, good. I adore Katrina. All right.

• 24:34Daniel Whiteson?

  We had a biologist over for dinner the other night and she just moved down here from Stanford and she had to bring all of her poop samples. So she had to drive them down from Stanford to Southern California, 150 pounds of poop and dry ice.

• 24:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's a lot of poop.

• 24:47Daniel Whiteson?

  And they had to keep the windows down because the dry ice of sublimates into CO2, which will kill you if you keep the car closed, into a literally crappy flaming disaster.

• 24:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I once took a box of infected fish brains across the Atlantic and had to declare it. And anyway, that was an adventure. Biologists go on so many adventures. Okay, so inelastic, it breaks it apart.

• 25:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm-hmm. And so this is late 1960s and we probed the structure of the proton with electrons and we saw three hard centers. The way Rutherford saw like one hard center for every atom, we saw three hard centers. Like, we can tell by the angle at which the electron comes back out, whether it's really bounced off something hard or mostly flown through. And we can tell by the rate at which that happens that there are three hard centers. So Google "deep inelastic scattering" if you want to learn more about that. But that was proof to us that protons do have structure inside, that there really are physical things inside the proton. It's not fundamental.

• 25:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  And at this point, we're all of the physicists like, all right, awesome, I'm totally convinced.

• 25:52Daniel Whiteson?

  No, unfortunately. People were still reluctant. They were like, hmm, yeah, I mean, I guess so. But like, are they real physicists or conservative folks? In the sense that they, it's hard for them to like, accept a new idea. You need a lot of data. And so at this point, we actually only had three ideas in mind for quarks. The up quark and the down quark that make up the proton. And then the strange quark, which make up these new weird particles, like the omegas and the kaons. So we had three particles. And theorists were like, three is weird because the up quark and the down quark make a very nice pair together. But then having the strange quark by itself, that's strange. And it makes all sorts of bizarre calculations and the physics doesn't actually work. There's nothing there to like, balance the strange quark. You predict all sorts of weird behavior. So they said, well, you know, for things to make more sense, there should be a fourth

• 26:37Daniel Whiteson?

  one. There should be a partner. This is another great example of like physicists following their mathematical intuition. They're like, the universe should make sense. It should be orderly. This whole puzzle would look more sensible. It would make more sense to me, sort of mathematically and aesthetically, if it were complete. So physicists said, we think that there's a fourth quark out there. And they called it the charm quark. So this is a purely theoretical prediction to solve some theoretical problems, right? We have three quarks, up, down, strange, and they predicted the existence of this charm quark, just to solve these theoretical problems.

• 27:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is there an interesting story behind why they decided to name it charm? Still upset about that particle zoo thing.

• 27:20Daniel Whiteson?

  The reason they named it charm is that they liked it. And it brought some new symmetry to the sub nuclear world. You know, there was this imbalance and it sort of was there like, balance the strange quark. And so, you know, some people call it the charm quark. Some people call it the charmed quark. But yeah, sort of like a lucky charm to make the universe make sense.

• 27:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Like it would be charming if the universe made sense?

• 27:41Daniel Whiteson?

  It would be charming, wasn't it? I find the universe pretty charming.

• 27:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, sure.

• 27:44Daniel Whiteson?

  It's both strange and charming at the same time.

• 27:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, we agree.

• 27:48Daniel Whiteson?

  So then the race is on to look for this new particle. Does the charm quark exist? And the theorists predicted that if it does exist, you can't see it individually. You can never see quarks by themselves, but it would click together with itself in this way, so that a charm quark and an anti charm quark would come together to make a new particle, a particle we could call charmonium.

• 28:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, it sounds like

• 28:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Right?

• 28:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Charmander. I feel like now we're in the world of Pokemon. But, uh, all right, charmonium.

• 28:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so if you take a quark and you bind it with its antiparticle, you call that onium. So charmonium would be a charm quark and an anti-charm quark. And so this is one of the most dramatic and colorful stories in the history of particle physics. There were folks at MIT trying to discover this thing at the same time, people at Stanford trying to discover this, looking for charmonium. And they had very, very different devices. So Burt Richter at Stanford had a whole accelerator, and he could collide electrons and positrons together. When that happens, it annihilates and can turn into some new particle, which can then decay. And this is a very effective way to discover new particles if you know already how much mass that new particle has. Because then you can tune your beams, your electron and positron beams,

• 29:01Daniel Whiteson?

  to have just the right energy. So you're making a bunch of these new particles, and then you can see them decay. So Burt Richter could discover this thing in like a day if he knew what the mass was. So they scanned the mass from low values to high values, and they didn't see anything. So they were like, hmm, that's weird. At the same time, across the country, Sam Ting was doing a very, very different experiment. He was shooting protons on a target, hoping that charm quarks would come out and would make charmonium and then would decay in a way that he could see it. It was a much lower rate experiment, but it was more broadly sensitive. Like, he didn't have to know in advance, what is the mass of this thing? If it was there, it would be made. But the data was sort of petered out very gradually. And so he was desperate to win this race.

• 29:45Daniel Whiteson?

  He knew he had a very effective technique, but it was going to take a long time. And while Burt Richter was very fast, but he needed to know where to look. And so Sam Ting really wanted to win this race and win the Nobel Prize. So he needed as much beam time as possible. And so there's a story about how he made sure he got enough beam time. And it's not a story that I know to be true, but it's a story that exists in particle physics popular culture. And I think we should find somebody to fact check this. But the version of the story I heard from a particle physicist when I was an undergrad was that the person Sam Ting was sharing beam time with kept having electronics difficulties, like they would come in, they were supposed to be have time in the beam, stuff wouldn't work. Oh, it's down. Oh, Sam, you can use the beam. Hmm, how nice.

• 30:30Daniel Whiteson?

  And apparently they installed a video camera and they discovered that someone was urinating on the competing experiment at night.

• 30:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 30:37Daniel Whiteson?

  So that the electronics wouldn't work. And then Ting and his experiment got more time.

• 30:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wait, okay, hold on. All right. So

• 30:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Yep.

• 30:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why? Why? All right. You've you've explained why. This is crazy. But okay, so

• 30:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Nobel Prize, that's why.

• 30:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, right. I guess if you needed any reason, Nobel Prize is the reason. But but like, why pee on it? Why not just like pour a little bit of your water on it or something like, because pee has a smell. You're more likely to like, get someone to

• 31:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 31:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  realize something wonky is going on. Like, why not just pour a little of your coffee or your wine on it? This is weird.

• 31:10Daniel Whiteson?

  It is weird. And that's the detail that makes me suspect maybe this is an urban legend.

• 31:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 31:15Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, because that's the detail that makes the story juicy.

• 31:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 31:18Daniel Whiteson?

  It's like a little bit gross and animalistic and whatever. And I've spoken to other particle physicists about this, and some of them suggest that this story might be made up. And it might reflect like anti-Asian racism in particle physics.

• 31:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 31:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Because, you know, particle physics for a long time was Western Europeans and Americans and Chinese physicists have contributed great things. Made a lot of discoveries, but they haven't always been as accepted. And so it could be that this is just a product of that. And so, you know, I tell you this story because it's out there, not because I know that it's true. But that's not the end of the drama. There's reported bad behavior on both sides of the aisle.

• 31:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, all right. So what did the Richter lab do that was piss poor?

• 32:00Daniel Whiteson?

  So Sam Ting starts to see evidence of this particle, but it's still data is collecting very slowly. You know, it's like you're waiting for the water to drain and you're seeing the land features that emerge. And the water is just raining very, very gradually. And the longer you wait, the more precise your results are. But obviously, you also open the door to your competition. And so Sam Ting eventually decides, okay, we have enough data, we're going to publish. And he sets a press conference for like, you know, a few days later. And then Bert Richter knows somehow exactly where to look, tunes his collider to exactly

• 32:36Daniel Whiteson?

  The mass of the particle Sam Ting is about to announce runs data for one day, gets enough data to discover this particle, writes the paper the same day, and has a dueling press conference the same day as Sam Ting. So you have MIT announcing, we discovered this new particle. We call it the J particle and Stanford same day discovering the same particle, and they call it the psi particle.

• 32:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh, so many questions. Okay, so is the idea here that the Richter lab got some like whiff of the data coming out from the Ting lab? And that's how they figured out the mass to look for? How would that data have slipped out? I guess there's lots of ways.

• 33:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, a phone call from somebody in the Ting lab, you know, somebody disgruntled or like an ex-partner of somebody in that lab. I don't know, but you know.

• 33:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Loose lips sync particle ships.

• 33:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Loose lips share Nobel prizes. Exactly.

• 33:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  So that they did get to share the prize? Did they both get it?

• 33:28Daniel Whiteson?

  They shared the prize and the particle shares those two names. So even to this day, we haven't decided like who gets primacy. So we call it the J slash psi particle.

• 33:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, it should have been like Rick Ting or Tingter. Yes, why did Ting name it J and Richter name it psi?

• 33:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Because the character in Chinese for Sam Ting's name looks a little bit like a J.

• 33:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, cool.

• 33:50Daniel Whiteson?

  And if you look in the detector, when you create one of these particles at Stanford, it looks a little bit like the Greek letter psi.

• 33:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, fine, good names, descriptive. So that means we have created charmonium.

• 34:02Daniel Whiteson?

  We have created charmonium, exactly. And this was all announced on November 11th, 1974. And this is what particle physicists called the November Revolution. Because at that moment, everybody who had any residual doubts about whether quarks are real finally gave it up and they're like, okay, this is it. We're in a new era where quarks are real because we predicted the existence of this quark and what it would do. And then people went out and found this thing. It was all very, very compelling. The quarks are real. They are the underlying fabric of all this stuff because we had predicted and discovered charmonium, a kind of quarkonium.

• 34:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do you all realize you were like 50 to 60 years behind the first November Revolution? When the Weimar Republic came into existence?

• 34:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, thank you very much. We have our own parallel stories.

• 34:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, all right, all right.

• 34:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Not quite as dramatic, but like Greg Lansford, he's a physicist I know at Brown. His father was a particle physicist also, and Greg remembers being a kid in the early 70s and his father getting a phone call and his mom saying like, it's a phone call about something called charmonium. And his father like leaps naked and wet out of the shower to go get this phone call because like, this is a big day. And that made an impression on Greg.

• 35:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 35:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Actually, I read this story in Greg's thesis in the acknowledgement section, which is super fun. I don't know if people realize, but like every famous scientist out there wrote a PhD and their PhD has an acknowledgement section, which is very personal and written when they were young and like really fun to read. So you should like go read like Paul Dirac's acknowledgement section, you know, it's all out there.

• 35:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  And it's always amazing to hear that anyone ever reads any theses ever.

• 35:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Because in our field, it's like, oh yeah, just, just put it in the thesis. It doesn't matter. No one reads those anyway.

• 35:47Daniel Whiteson?

  That's true. So I tell you this whole story to give you a flavor of like how we learned what the universe is made out of, but also in the context of toponium, right? This is the beginning of quarkonia. This is like, we can't see quarks directly because they're never by themselves, but we can see what quarks do together. And quarkonia is when you take a quark and you combine it with the anti-quark and you make a special particle out of that. And so that's charmonium is really the beginning of this quarkonia era.

• 36:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  So does, does charmonium evolve into toponium? Because I like, I want to lean into this Pokemon thing. Is that what it evolves into? No?

• 36:22Daniel Whiteson?

  No, charmonium is very unstable. It decays very quickly, often into like an electron positron pair.

• 36:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  So it would be a mistake if you were like, charmonium, I choose you.

• 36:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly.

• 36:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 36:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. But there are other quarks out there. So at this point, we have up, down, charm and strange. And people are like, oh, that's nice. That's cute.

• 36:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  I was about to say, oh, you physicists are cute, but we just finished a story about, you know, possibly y'all peeing on each other's experiments. So that's less cute.

• 36:51Daniel Whiteson?

  But people were wondering, hmm, is there another set of these particles? Right? Is there an additional pair? Because we had up-down charm strange. And on the lepton side of the world, you know, with the electron, with the muon, those guys had a third column. We had the tau particle. So people were like, well, if there's three kinds of leptons, are there also three kinds of quarks? So they predicted the existence of this pair, and one of them was called the bottom particle. And so then the hunt was on in the 70s for what we call bottomonium, right? A bottom, anti-bottom pair come together to make a particle we now call the upsilon. And so this was discovered at Fermilab in 1977. And people were like, oh, wow. So bottoms are real.

• 37:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  As a mom, I can tell you, I always knew bottoms were real. But in the outline.

• 37:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Another poop joke. Wow, I'm impressed.

• 37:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, that's a heiny joke. But anyway, but so the outline says bottomium. And you said bot- botone, you added some syllables. What is, what is it? Let's, let's, how was the longest we could make it? Bottomonium?

• 37:59Daniel Whiteson?

  I think it should be bottomonium, right? Because the particle is a bottom particle, and then you add onium. So bottomonium.

• 38:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Bottomium? Bottomium.

• 38:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it. Bottomonium. That's pretty cute.

• 38:11Daniel Whiteson?

  And then there's a whole spectrum of particles that include the B quark. They're called B mesons, where you can combine Bs with ups or Bs with downs or Bs with strange, all sorts of particles you can make if you have the B particle. And now we've seen all those particles and we studied the wazoo out of them. There's a whole experiment at CERN called LHC-B, which exists just to study the bottom quark and all the weird stuff it does with other particles.

• 38:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So let's take a break. And when we get back, let's focus on top quarks and answer our question, what the heck is toponium?

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• 41:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, we're back and it's the moment you've all been waiting for. Daniel is going to lead up to his explanation of what is toponium.

• 41:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Right. And so far, we've been setting the context, right? We've been explaining what quarkonium is, what charmonium was, what bottomonium is. So now we can say what toponium would be if it exists. Toponium, if it exists, should be a bound state of top quarks and anti-top quarks, because charm and anti-charm make a particle, bottom and anti-bottom make a particle, up and anti-up make a particle. Why can't you make a particle with top and anti-top?

• 41:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  And that would be toponium based on the naming scheme, yeah?

• 41:49Daniel Whiteson?

  That would be toponium, but the top quark is different from all the other particles. It wasn't discovered until the mid 90s, 95, because it's super duper massive. Like, the quarks are all very, very light, except for the bottom quark, which has five times the mass of the proton, which is like, that's very heavy for a quark. But the top quark is much more massive than the bottom. It has 175 proton masses. So like, an individual top quark has more mass than like, the nucleus of a gold atom. And this is why it took us 20 years to find the top quark after the bottom quark was discovered.

• 42:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wait, if the top quark is so much bigger, why was it so hard to find?

• 42:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Because it takes much more energy to make it. Like, the bottom quark, you can make it a pretty low-energy collider. You only need like, protons accelerated a little bit. But to make the top quark, you gotta really zoom those protons together, have enough energy to make two top quarks, because you can never just make one. You gotta make a top and an anti-top. So it's a huge amount of energy. There's a whole set of colliders built under the assumption that the top quark was gonna be like, maybe a little heavier than the bottom, and then they didn't find anything. So it wasn't until the Fermilab Tevatron in the late 90s that we made top quarks and saw them. And that's actually what my PhD thesis was about. Seeing the top quark and measuring its properties back when we'd only ever made a few of them.

• 43:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, oh, wait, were you the first one to describe the top quark? Or like, after it was seen?

• 43:11Daniel Whiteson?

  I was not the first one.

• 43:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 43:12Daniel Whiteson?

  No, but I remember the day I was an undergrad, when my particle physics professor came and said, hey, today's a big day. We're announcing the discovery of the top quark, because it took 20 years to find this thing. It was really exciting when people found it. I mean, we knew it had to be there to complete the symmetry, but it took a long time, so it was really exciting. But the top quark's mass doesn't just mean it takes a lot of energy to make. It also means that it's really, really, really unstable. Like, the top quark decays really, really quickly. Like, when you create it, it only lasts for like 10 to the minus 23 seconds. Like, it basically almost instantly decays into a bottom quark and a W and other stuff. So it only briefly exists.

• 43:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  That is pretty incredible. That's something that exists for such a short amount of time we're able to measure and capture at all.

• 43:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, and so we've never seen a top quark directly. We've only seen what it turns into, an indirect evidence for its existence, right? It's like we've seen the hair and the footprints of Bigfoot. We never actually captured one and like hung out with it.

• 44:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Bad example, Daniel. Bigfoot doesn't exist. Do top quarks exist? You hope so.

• 44:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, we've seen its hair and footprints, so we think that it exists. We're pretty confident. And so other quarks last much longer. Like, a bottom quark will last much longer, long enough to hang out, find an anta bottom quark, and form a new particle, bottomonium. Top quarks don't do that. Top quarks decay almost instantly, so there's really almost no time for it to form a toponium, right? Even if you have a top quark and anti-top quark, and they're near each other, it takes time for things like find each other, settle down to a bound state. It's like if you have a proton and an electron.

• 44:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Been there.

• 44:48Daniel Whiteson?

  It takes them a while to figure out that they're a match and to settle into hydrogen. Like, in our universe, it took hundreds of thousands of years for things to cool down and settle into neutral hydrogen. So for a long time, the lore was toponium is impossible because top quarks don't last long enough. They explode into other particles before they form toponium. So we were stuck at bottomonium. That was the concept people had until about last year.

• 45:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa. Okay, wait, so you told us that you can't see top quarks happen too fast. You can't see, what are they called, negative top quarks?

• 45:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Anti-top quarks.

• 45:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Anti, thank you, anti-top quarks. Have we actually seen toponium? Or is this another hair and footprints situation?

• 45:34Daniel Whiteson?

  So have we actually seen toponium? We've seen a sort of maybe version of it. We haven't seen top quarks and anti-top quarks like settle down into a new stable particle that compares to like the JPSI or the upsilon, these other bound states of quarks. But people had this idea last year that, you know, maybe top quarks don't have time to settle into some new state, but maybe they can talk to each other. Maybe they like exchange some gluons and influence each other. Maybe there's some like crosstalk between the top and the anti-top after they're made and before they decay. So maybe they don't have time to fully settle into like a cozy homey existence together, but they at least, you know, exchange a few DMs. That was the idea. And so we looked for evidence of this at the Large Hadron Collider.

• 46:17Daniel Whiteson?

  What we did is we said, well, what would top quarks look like if they didn't exchange any information? And then what would they look like if they did exchange some information? And it turns out if they talk to each other even a little bit, then it makes their spins point in different directions. All these particles have fundamental spins. Spin is not something we understand deeply. It's just like an arrow we put on these particles to represent some kind of angular momentum they carry. But if they talk to each other, then their spins can change a little bit. And spin is something we can measure of a top quark. We don't see the top directly, but we see what it decays into. And so from that, we can deduce what the spin was from like the angles of the stuff that flies out of the top quark. So you measure the spin of one top quark and you measure the spin of the anti-top quark.

• 47:00Daniel Whiteson?

  And then you ask, are those spins more likely to come from top quarks that did talk to each other or top quarks that didn't talk to each other?

• 47:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm just gonna note, I didn't like stuff my anger down far enough because I'm still keeping track of every time you're like, well, we don't really understand what this means and we haven't actually seen this other thing, but go ahead, keep pooping on biologists. But anyway, I'm glad you guys maybe saw this. Who knows? But you don't understand it.

• 47:22Daniel Whiteson?

  So we looked at all the data. We studied a huge number of top quarks and it looks like they do talk to each other. There's evidence there that the top quarks do interact and it changes the direction of their spin as they decay. And so people called this toponium and sort of toponium with an asterisk because again, it's not like a stable particle in the same way that other quarkonia are, but it is an interaction. And so they gave it a name, eta sub t, like a top quark kind of inspired particle. And it made a big splash. And because, you know, people were excited about the work they did, they fluffed it up in the popular literature. And so in a lot of popular science articles, you see it as like, as if we have discovered this new stable form of matter,

• 48:05Daniel Whiteson?

  or this new way for top quarks to come together to make a particle. That didn't happen. What we did see is top quarks, for the first time, interacting with each other before they were decaying, which is still a big deal.

• 48:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. So if I'm trying to put this big deal in context, so we have a better understanding of how our universe works now. But if we needed such a fancy collider to make it happen, how often is this happening? Let's first talk about our planet, and then maybe like elsewhere in the solar system. Where would you expect to see it happening?

• 48:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, great question. You know, top quarks are probably created naturally all the time in cosmic rays. We talked about how we built particle accelerators because we didn't want to have to rely on cosmic rays. But it's not because cosmic rays don't have enough energy. Cosmic rays are hugely massively energetic. They're much more energetic than our particle colliders. They're just harder to control. And the really high-energy particles are rarer. So colliders are good at controlled experiments. But if you want to go really high-energy, cosmic rays are the way to go. So all the time, top quarks are made in the atmosphere when protons smash into other particles way, way, way above the clouds. But, you know, they last for 10 to the minus 23 seconds. And probably, they're created in pairs, and they talk to each other a little bit before they decay. Does this

• 49:17Daniel Whiteson?

  make any difference in the world? If we lived in a universe where top quarks didn't talk to each other before they decayed, would ice cream taste worse? You know, would biologists be less awesome? No, biologists would still be awesome, and ice cream would still be delicious. I think it's a very, very subtle effect.

• 49:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thank you, Daniel. That's good. I've forgiven you. The anger has gone away.

• 49:36Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. That was my goal, I guess. But, you know, it satisfies our curiosity. We want to understand all the details of how these fields come together. How do they interact? Are there any surprises? Because we expected to see this. And if we hadn't, we would have been surprised. We would have said, hmm, something's going on that we don't understand, and dug into it more. Maybe that would have been evidence that there is some other field preventing tops from talking to each other, or some other particle out there that's doing something. Anytime you see something unexpected, it's a sign that there's something new to learn about the universe, a thread to unravel. So this is just another example of scientists like being clever and trying to find ways to ask the universe a question we can't ask directly. We can't see quarks directly, so we had to be indirect and understand how they click together to make particles.

• 50:21Daniel Whiteson?

  We can't see top quarks directly, so we had to see how they decay and infer their existence. And so now we're trying to figure out like how top quarks talk to each other by looking at the patterns of those decays. It's all very subtle stuff. But to me, it's a testament of like the cleverness of experimentalists, you know? You have a question, you want an answer to it, you gotta figure out a way to force the universe to share that data with you. And you know, that's the joy of science is like outsmarting the universe, forcing it to answer your questions.

• 50:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  There's such a beauty in cleverly designed experiments. And are you still working on Toponium?

• 50:55Daniel Whiteson?

  So I don't personally work on Toponium, but there's still people definitely studying this and digging deeper into it. And so you expect to hear more about it in the coming years. But I think I want to underscore the point that you just made, that there really is beauty and creativity in experiments. I think people often feel like theoretical physics is where the thinking is, and experimental physics is like where the engineering is, like, yeah, build the thing, get it to work. But also there's creativity in experimental physics, right? You need to be creative, figure out like, hey, how do we see this thing? How do we force the universe to reveal this? How do we trick it? How do we corner it so that we learn the answer to our question? A lot of the great discoveries in experimental science come from somebody being really clever about finding a new way to answer a question people have long had.

• 51:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  I love hearing stories about how science is done and the culture of science and seeing how human nature layers upon it. You know, we heard a story about one person maybe stealing someone else's data or a piece of their data to make their discovery, someone else maybe peeing on someone's experiment. And here, it sounds like there's even within the field of physics, a hierarchy for who's the smartest, who's the most clever, whose field is doing the like best stuff. And I think it would be very nice if we could remove some of that, but in the meantime, it is a, it's a human endeavor and we do do beautiful things.

• 52:13Daniel Whiteson?

  It is, absolutely.

• 52:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 52:15Daniel Whiteson?

  And there's jealousy and there's backstabbing.

• 52:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 52:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And there's people spreading terrible stories about the other folks, you know, these anti-Stanford stories and anti-MIT stories and all of that stuff. And, you know, you can't remove that from science because science is by the people of the people. It's for the people, right? If we made it sterile and it was all done by AIs, it'd be a lot less fun.

• 52:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, it is a human endeavor with all of our foibles sort of layered in.

• 52:38Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, well, thanks for taking this journey with us on the human discovery of quirks and the latest research on how top quirks talk to each other just before they perish. And thanks, Kelly, for pushing down your anger at my shade at biologists.

• 52:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  My anger has left me because you said something nice about biologists. And at the end of the day, we're both friends and it's okay.

• 53:00Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Thanks, everybody. This podcast serves to educate and it's a cheap form of therapy.

• 53:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  The cheapest form there is. Thanks, everyone.

• 53:18Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 53:23Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 53:29Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 53:36Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org.

• 53:43Kelly 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.

• 53:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy, write to us.

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• 55:30Speaker 21

  What's that?

• 55:31Speaker 18

  My fresh detector.

• 55:32Speaker 21

  Uh, your what?

• 55:33Speaker 18

  There it is.

• 55:34Speaker 21

  What is it detecting?

• 55:36Speaker 18

  Fresh produce, fresh meat.

• 55:39Speaker 21

  Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 55:44Speaker 18

  Apparently, we celebrate.

• 55:46Speaker 22

  At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off. Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.