What are paraparticles?

Daniel and Kelly talk about recent mathematical innovations that suggest a third category of particles beyond matter and forces. 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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• 0:59Daniel Whiteson?

  How does the universe work? What are the rules that govern its most microscopic nature? For a few hundred years, we've been making progress on this question, mostly by taking things apart. And when we zoom into the universe at the smallest level, it seems so far like there are two different categories of particles: matter particles like quarks and electrons, and force particles like photons and gluons. For a long time, it seems like that has to be all there is. What else could there possibly be? But experiments aren't the only way to reveal the secrets of the universe. Another very fruitful path is to follow the math. When we ask what else the math allows, we sometimes get predictions for very weird phenomena

• 1:42Daniel Whiteson?

  like antimatter, or black holes, or Higgs bosons, which turn out to be real in the universe. So can the math show us another kind of particle? A weird third way beyond matter and forces? Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Mathematical Universe.

• 2:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I study parasites and space, and I think there are four kinds of particles.

• 2:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Are parasites the fourth particle?

• 2:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, if physics were any good, the answer would be yes.

• 2:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  See, what I think is that y'all like symmetry, and I think that if you decide there's three kinds of particles, that will be an odd number, and you'll have to decide there's another kind, so that it's even.

• 2:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, not a para-particle physicist, or a parasitical particle physicist, or any of those other varieties. But I do love understanding the nature of the universe and finding symmetry in it all.

• 2:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing. So are you one of those physicists who feels like there needs to be symmetry in these answers, or does it just kind of depend on the topic?

• 3:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, what a deep question to drop on me at the top of the episode. I think what we've learned so far is that there is symmetry in the universe. Like, all the rules we've discovered about physics seem to follow symmetric patterns. There's like reflections and translations, and you can generalize this into abstract algebra called group theory. So the universe seems to be well-described by symmetries in mathematics. Does that mean the universe is symmetric, or that's just the way we like to think about it? I mean, that's a deep question in philosophy. We're not going to answer it today. But I appreciate symmetry. I love it. I love the mathematical beauty of what we've learned about the universe.

• 3:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why should the universe be symmetrical instead of like, just a mess? Like, as an evolutionary biologist, like, it all being held together with like, duct tape and zip ties makes more sense to me than it being beautifully symmetrical. But why is it symmetrical?

• 3:50Daniel Whiteson?

  I think I have a natural preference for explanations that are simple, that are harmonious and parsimonious, right? Like, we think that the universe should be, in the end, described by one simple idea. And so we're constantly looking for that. And symmetry helps us restrain that. It helps us reduce the number of options. You know, like, instead of having to come up with 10 numbers, what if there's a symmetry that tells you that those numbers are all related? So there really is just one number that turns into 10. But you might also ask the basic question like, well, why do we expect the universe to be simple and parsimonious? And I don't have an answer for that. You know, just so far, that seemed to work. You know, looking for the simplest explanation so far

• 4:34Daniel Whiteson?

  has found us things that work in the universe. They predict experiments. They describe things we haven't seen yet. So many times in the history of science, we followed the symmetry in mathematics to make discoveries like antiparticles or like electromagnetism. You know, Maxwell looking at these equations and seeing a lack of symmetry and penciling in the piece he needs to make the equation symmetrical, discovering something real in the universe. Or Peter Higgs finding a piece that clicks together with all the other pieces to answer why symmetry is broken. So it seems to work is the only real answer I can give you.

• 5:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Interesting. You know, so I was, I'm reading this book called The Remedy right now, and it is about how like Koch and Pasteur determined that microorganisms cause disease. And the author was arguing that actually this kind of flew in the face of we should look for the simplest answer because the simplest answer at the time was that bad air causes all of these maladies. And so having one cause that explained all of this stuff seemed much simpler than, you know, tuberculosis is caused by this tiny organism and smallpox is caused by that tiny organism that we can't even see. And so the fact that bad air was simpler sort of made people cling to it a little bit longer than this more complicated answer that tended to be right. And so I think in almost every case, it makes a lot more sense to look for the simplest explanation first.

• 5:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  But you should not let it close your eyes to the more complex answers that might actually be the reality of the situation.

• 6:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, you should choose the simplest answer that works, that actually describes the universe.

• 6:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 6:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Not the simplest answer that doesn't describe the universe.

• 6:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 6:10Daniel Whiteson?

  But you're right, you don't know in advance what's going to work and what isn't. And so we often start from the simplest thing. Because why not, right? And if that doesn't work, then we move on to something more complicated. And that's how we get chemistry and biology and all sorts of other delicious, beautiful messes of science.

• 6:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 6:27Daniel Whiteson?

  That have yet to pull themselves together into a single parsimonious explanation. And that's also one reason why I am a physicist, because physics, I feel like, is closer to getting to a single answer than chemistry is. For example, I was always frustrated in chemistry with like, this rule for this thing and this rule for that thing and this other rule, except for this other scenario. And maybe I just have a bad memory and it's hard to hold all those things in my head. But I, I just really like to look, here's one equation, start from that, you can get to anything. That just always appealed to me.

• 6:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's so interesting. I think we live on very different sides of this gradient. So like for me, you know, you said biologists and chemists have yet to come up with a simple theory. I don't feel like that's what we're trying for at all. Like, why?

• 7:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Maybe that's why you haven't found one.

• 7:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why would you assume that there is one? Like, life is beautifully complex. You know, the it depends is where all the fun lives, I think. You know, you're like, oh, that's frustrating. And I'm like, no, that's, that's the exciting part. Like, what it depends on what? Life is complicated and messy, and that's what makes it beautiful.

• 7:27Daniel Whiteson?

  But isn't it beautiful when you find things that are true across all of life, right? Like DNA, for example, undergirds a lot of life on Earth, and that's really powerful to discover that and to understand it, right?

• 7:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 7:37Daniel Whiteson?

  It's not as fascinating as like, this one kind of frog does this one kind of thing on random Tuesdays, in my opinion.

• 7:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I, I will politely disagree with you. I think what, what, what the frogs are doing on Tuesdays, I am deeply interested in. But, but yes, you know, I think it's beautiful that, you know, the blueprint for life is stored in the same material, no matter what organism you're looking at. But we all do very different things with that material, you know, bacteria do horizontal gene transfer. They're swapping genes back and forth and, you know, we have to have sex to swap genetic material and we've got recombination. And I don't know. Anyway, that's where the it depends gets fun again.

• 8:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, we have made a lot of hay, in physics at least, in looking for symmetries, and then trying to understand when there are holes, is there something to fill that hole, right? The way we did with antiparticles and the way we did with all the quarks. And so often, mathematical beauty really does lead us to new discoveries, and that's what we're talking about today on the podcast, whether there is another bucket, another kind of thing out there in the universe that we can use to describe how everything works. Maybe it explains why those toads do that thing on Tuesday.

• 8:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ah, at the end of all of our banter, I'm like, how are we gonna get back on track? And you always get us there. Okay.

• 8:55Daniel Whiteson?

  It's sometimes a bigger step than I expect, but...

• 9:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  But you're good at jumping that chasm. So, all right. So today, we're talking about para-particles. And I had never heard of para-particles before. And so let's see if our audience is on the same page as Kelly. So we asked, what are para-particles? And here are the answers we got.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  I wonder if it's something to do with larger things showing particle-like behavior in certain circumstances. I'm so glad there isn't an exam at the end of the podcast.

• 9:30Speaker 04

  Piece of a particle, like a very small part of the particle.

• 9:35Speaker 05

  Some sort of entity that exists alongside the traditional particles.

• 9:39Speaker 06

  Somewhere between a real particle and a ghost particle.

• 9:43Speaker 05

  Like a virtual particle, in that it's enabling interactions with others.

• 9:48Speaker 07

  I think it's like a super, superposition. And it's one of those weird things about quantum mechanics that if you look at it, it just disappears off. They may be particles that we believe exist but have no proof for yet.

• 10:02Speaker 06

  Kind of like a particle, but not quite. Something that acts like a particle when certain Conditions are met. At something that's almost a particle. Para-particles rely on their neighboring particle for existence.

• 10:16Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm completely stunned by this one.

• 10:18Speaker 05

  The virtual particle pairs that spring to existence in a vacuum. Is a para-particle something that lives off of or takes advantage of another particle?

• 10:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is it a paralyzed particle? So lots of playing with what para means in other contexts. I like it. You all are very clever.

• 10:38Daniel Whiteson?

  But they missed the obvious. Nobody went for the connection to parasites.

• 10:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Guys, guys, I worked so hard, so hard. Oh, wait, no, no, that's not true. Somebody said relying on their neighbors for existence. That's they're parasitizing.

• 10:55Daniel Whiteson?

  You're right. Parasitical particles.

• 10:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Way to go, that particular audience member. Thank you for paying attention all this time.

• 11:04Daniel Whiteson?

  I was just glad that nobody went for the sort of anti-academic grifter line, the like academics are just parasites on society and they're sucking money and scams and don't really believe anything they're doing. All that bad faith nonsense you sometimes see in various corners of the internet.

• 11:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, wow. I feel like there's a bit of insecurity today. What?

• 11:26Daniel Whiteson?

  I just want to address the reality, you know, that kind of stuff is out there in the universe.

• 11:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's true.

• 11:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Anyway, I was very happy to hear all of these positive and constructive answers. Thanks, everybody. If you'd like to contribute your ideas for future episodes, don't be shy. Write to us to questions at danielandkelly.org. You can hear your voice on the podcast.

• 11:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing. All right. So let's dig in. So para-particles. So you said in the introduction that there are maybe three kinds of particles. Can we start by reviewing the first two kinds? Because I'm sure that you've mentioned in the past that particles come in matter and force flavors. But every once in a while, at the end of an episode, I'll discover my brain has reached capacity and maybe some stuff overflowed out the top. And so remind me, what are matter particles? What are force particles? And then we'll get into this third kind.

• 12:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, sure. No problem. Be careful with the word flavor, though. Flavor has a particular meaning in particle physics. It means something. Else.

• 12:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Guys.

• 12:19Daniel Whiteson?

  And it's not like, you know, cookie dough and mint chocolate chip. It's like the difference between electrons and muons and tau's are different flavors of leptons.

• 12:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Like, that's an actual, like, physics jargon term is flavors?

• 12:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, absolutely. And there's

• 12:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing.

• 12:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Subfield of particle physics called flavor physics. And then the people who work on the flavor of particles that have a lot of mass, that's called heavy flavor physics, which sounds like it should be a hip hop group.

• 12:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 12:45Daniel Whiteson?

  It really is a bunch of nerds.

• 12:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, you know, nerds can have hip hop groups. You don't have to be so judgy.

• 12:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, heavy flavor slave. Let's hear it.

• 12:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Love it.

• 12:56Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So today we're talking about one way to distinguish particles. And that's by their spin. So there are particles that make up matter. Me and you and everything that's out there and everything you've ever eaten are made out of quarks and leptons. So the up quark and the down quark make up protons and neutrons. You add electrons, which are a kind of lepton, and you can make any atom, right? And from that you can make any molecule and anything anybody has ever seen or thrown at their sister is made out of this kind of stuff, right?

• 13:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 13:26Daniel Whiteson?

  So this is what we call matter particles. And all these particles have something in common, which is their quantum spin has units of one half, which means they can have spin up one half or spin down one half. So all these particles, which we call fermions after Enrico Fermi. These are matter particles. They're particles with one half spin.

• 13:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Can you help me, like, visualize that? Like, are they actually spinning?

• 13:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm. You know, the answer to that question, Kelly, is nobody knows. Quantum spin is a super fascinating topic because on one hand, it's very different from real spin, like normal spin. Like, you take a ball and you spin it. We can talk about the angular momentum. We can talk about the velocity on the surface. A classical object has spin and it has angular momentum, right? And we know that that angular momentum is important to the universe because it's preserved. Like, if you spin a ball in space, it keeps spinning. And the reason that, like, our galaxy is spinning is because of conservation of angular momentum. The reason the solar system has the shape that it does, it's like sort of flat, the way that the galaxy is a disk, is because of angular momentum. Angular momentum is a really big, important thing in the universe. Things really do spin.

• 14:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Quantum particles don't spin in the same way because electrons are not tiny little balls. And like 100 years ago, when they were thinking about this, they were like, well, what if they spin? How fast would they be spinning? They tried to calculate like how fast the surface of an electron is spinning. And you get an answer that's like higher than the speed of light. So it's obviously nonsense. Whenever you do physics and you get an answer that doesn't make sense, you're like, something has gone wrong along the way, right?

• 15:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you've created a new field.

• 15:02Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. In this case, the answer is that these are quantum particles. They're not classical, so you can't think of them as existing physically the same way, where every part of them has a location at every moment in time. So they don't physically spin. You shouldn't think about these quantum particles as like little balls that are spinning. And so you might ask, well, if it's not spinning, why do you call it spin? We call it spin because it has a lot of the same properties as classical object spin. For example, it's conserved, right? And it's conserved together with other kinds of angular momentum, meaning that what the universe cares about is the total angular momentum, including spin. So you can convert like normal angular momentum, like the earth is spinning,

• 15:45Daniel Whiteson?

  into quantum angular momentum spin and back and forth. The universe requires you to conserve the sum of those two, which tells you they're like the same kind of thing. The same way that like energy is often conserved, but it's the sum of kinetic and potential energies, which tells you like, okay, these are two kinds of the same thing. Because what the universe cares about is the sum of them, not the individual ones. So we know that quantum spin is similar to real spin, classical spin, because the universe conserves the sum of those things. And quantum spin has other similar properties, like things that have quantum spin and electric charge have little magnetic fields. Because charges in motion give magnetic fields. So like an electron which is spinning has a little magnetic field.

• 16:29Daniel Whiteson?

  And that's why it's like bent by magnetic fields, et cetera, et cetera. So we don't really know what it is, but we know that it acts a lot like spin. So we call it quantum spin, which I think is a pretty good name, even though it's not spinning.

• 16:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, all right. So I usually need to hear things like four times before they stick in my brain. I think we're at like two, so be prepared to repeat that. But so to try to help me, all right, so fermions, they're, these are the mass or the matter particles.

• 16:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 16:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so I'm gonna think of fermions as like it's firm, matter, it makes up me. Although, you know, now you're gonna misspell fermions from here on out because it's not spelled like firm. But anyway, all right, that's how I'm remembering it. And so now let's talk about force. And so I always thought force was like a field and I didn't think of it as a particle. Anyway, so let's go on. So the bosons are our force particles.

• 17:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes. And let me also elaborate on the comment you made about field versus particles. There are two ways of thinking about what stuff is and how it's pushed. One is the field picture, which is really natural to a lot of particle physicists. There's an electron field and the electron is actually just a ripple in that field. And there's an electromagnetic field and photons are ripples in that field. And in that view, the fields are the fundamental thing and particles are just ripples in those things. They're like emergent phenomena from the fields and the fields can interact. And we talk about that picture a lot on the podcast. There's another way to think about things and say, you know, fields are just like a construct in our minds. We never see them directly. We only see them acting on particles and the particles are the things we can see.

• 18:07Daniel Whiteson?

  We see dots on the screen. We see electrons moving through wires, etc. So particles are the real things. And so from that point of view, we have electrons and they're little particles and we have quarks and they're little particles. And then the forces, we can talk about other particles. So we have like the photon. What happens when two electrons repel each other? They exchange photons. So this is the particle picture of the universe. Everything is made out of little particles and it can explain matter. It's a little bit more awkward, but it can also explain forces, right? In that picture, like electrons exchange photons. That's the way they attract or repel each other. And it's a little bit awkward because like, how exactly do electrons and positrons attract each other by exchanging

• 18:48Daniel Whiteson?

  photons? It's hard to imagine you could like attract Zach by throwing a ball at him, right? It feels like it would only push him away. But you know, this is the quantum world and you can do weird things like you can throw a photon with negative momentum. So when Zach catches it, he's pulled towards you. It's like a tractor beam photon.

• 19:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  And biology is too complicated. It doesn't make sense. What are you guys thinking?

• 19:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, yeah. And this is one reason why I think the field picture is a little bit more natural. But anyway, we can talk about these forces as mediated by particles. And these particles have a property, which is that they don't have half integer spin, like one half or negative one half. They have integer spin. So photon, for example, can have spin one, spin zero, or spin negative one. And the W boson, and the Z boson, and the Higgs boson, and the gluons, all the particles that correspond to the forces and how matter particles exchange momentum, they all have the same property, that their spin is integer values, you know, no halves. It's like plus two, minus one, this kind of stuff. So those are particles we call bosons. So the fermions and the matter particles, the bosons are the force particles in this picture.

• 19:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So now we've got through the two kinds of particles, and let's bring a little bit of pep into this conversation after the break. So we'll talk about the Pauli exclusion principle when we get back.

• 20:18Daniel Whiteson?

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• 23:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so we've established that we have two kinds of particles. We've got the Fermions, which are the matter particles and the bosons, which are the force particles. Why does it matter that we divide them in this way? Why can't they all just be particles?

• 23:52Daniel Whiteson?

  They are all just particles or fields equivalently, but they have very different behaviors and that behavior is really important. Specifically bosons can do something fermions will never, ever, ever do, which is bosons can be in the same quantum state and fermions never will. So you made this joke about PEP, the Polly exclusion principle, named after Wolfgang Polly, says that no two fermions can ever be in the same quantum state. So if you have two identical particles, like two electrons, they can't have all the same quantum description, which would be like their location, their momentum, their spin, their energy, all this kind of stuff.

• 24:32Daniel Whiteson?

  They can't be identical. They have to be unique. Every fermion has to have a different quantum state.

• 24:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Does it make sense to think of that? So are fermions our matter particles? Does it make sense to think of it as like two pieces of matter can't take up the same space? Or this is like a totally different thing than thinking about it that way?

• 24:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Two pieces of matter can take up the same space as long as they have something to differentiate them. So for example, electrons have two possible spins, right? Spin up and spin down. So in the ground state of an atom, for example, you can have two electrons with exactly the same energy, the same momentum, the same location, the same energy, the same everything. But one is spin up and the other is spin down. That's why you have two electrons in the lowest state. That's where that two comes from. Because there are two options for spin, you can't have two electrons both spin up and you can't have two electrons both spin down because of this Polly exclusion principle. It says you can never have two electrons in the same state. And that's why you don't get all of the electrons in the ground state.

• 25:35Daniel Whiteson?

  If you already have two electrons in that ground state, it's full. It can't take anymore. There's no third spin, right? So when another electron comes along, it has to have a higher energy, has to be in the next energy level. Cause the lowest rungs are filled and it's one electron per unique state, right? So the lowest energy level has two of those. The next one, because has more energy, has more options for like where the electron is around the atom. This P state, now we're getting deep into chemistry, so I'm beyond my expertise.

• 26:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right away.

• 26:05Daniel Whiteson?

  But that's why you can have more electrons in that second one. And then more in the third level and more in the fourth, because there's more options for differentiating exactly which version of that energy level you're in. And this is why we have chemistry. This is why gold looks the way it does. This is why we have water. This is why atoms bind together. This is why our whole universe looks the way that it does. Because fermions cannot be in the same state.

• 26:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Now, is this an observation of what's happening? Or do we understand why it has to be that way?

• 26:38Daniel Whiteson?

  It's still a little bit mysterious. Like, it's definitely an observation and we've never, ever seen it violated. And if it was violated, like, the whole universe would look different. Like, if somebody turned this rule off and said, hey, fermions, no problem. You can now share a state. All of matter would collapse.

• 26:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Bad news.

• 26:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. It would be bad news. So I don't recommend it. If you're sitting in the universe control room and you have your finger on that knob, call me, please, before you do anything. We do have some handwavy explanations for why it is. We don't have a really full, formal proof. We can't go from like, here are the fields. Here's how fermions will behave. What we can do is prove the negative. Like, we can show why fermions can't do this thing. Like, we can show that if fermions did this thing, it would lead to some contradictions. I'm gonna try to walk you through a handwavy version of that proof in a minute. But we couldn't have, like, started from scratch and really shown how this happens. And Feynman famously said that we don't have a full proof.

• 27:39Daniel Whiteson?

  And also, it's really challenging to give an intuitive explanation for this. Because, quote, "We do not have a complete understanding of the fundamental principle involved." Feynman was big on this theory that like, if you can't explain it simply, you don't really understand it. Which I think is really interesting as a hypothesis, because it kind of lines up with like, what we were talking about earlier. And it touches on something we were talking about, I think on the Discord of like, how on this pod, we're constantly trying to explain complicated stuff in an intuitive way without all the math. You can't just be like, here's a bunch of math. This math tells you what the answer is. We want to like, tell a story that connects with the ideas in your head. So you go, oh, that makes sense. I get it why it's this way and not the other way.

• 28:21Daniel Whiteson?

  And that's very different from the mathematical explanation or concepts that we often have in academia, and we teach in college and in graduate school, and that most physicists have in their minds. This is like an intuitive grasp of something you have to develop in order to explain it. And Feynman is saying that without that extra piece, this like, parallel explanation that's intuitive, you don't really understand it. And I think that's fascinating and maybe correct, but it's a pretty strong statement of philosophy for a guy who is famously against philosophy.

• 28:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And how do you think he would feel about the current state of things today? Although I'm gonna go ahead and admit that I hate questions where they're like, what do you think Benjamin Franklin would think about blah, blah, blah? It's like, I'm not Benjamin Franklin. And if he was raised in our time, he might feel totally different about things.

• 29:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. Feynman is a complicated character, because on one hand, super genius dude, lots of important insights, also lots of great explanations. And he did something which I think is really impressive that I've never seen before, which is he came up with an explanation or a concept, in this case, Noether's theorem, in one of his popular books, like, for a popular audience. And that explanation then got transformed into a full rigorous proof, which is now the go-to rigorous proof you find in like, formal physics books. Usually, things go the other way. You like, start with a full rigorous proof, and then you develop the intuitive explanation. But he actually came up with it for the general public, and then it turned into a rigorous proof. So that's pretty cool. Like, the guy definitely had talents in lots of different directions.

• 29:50Daniel Whiteson?

  He's also famously kind of a jerk. And so, he's sort of a problematic figure in that sense. I think if Feynman were alive today, he probably would feel grumpy that people had come up with stuff without him.

• 30:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Great.

• 30:04Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't know. Hard to say.

• 30:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, he's in our past. He's in the rearview mirror. Okay, so we have observed that fermions don't occupy the same state. We kind of understand why. Would be nice to understand better.

• 30:16Daniel Whiteson?

  And we've observed that bosons can, right? We see this all the time. Like, you put two photons in a box, they're very happy to sit right on top of each other, to be in exactly the same state. And this lets you do things like make Bose-Einstein condensates and macroscopic objects that have quantum properties, because all the photons are in the same state. And you can't do that with electrons. You put too many electrons together, they get this degeneracy pressure. They don't want to be in the same lowest state. So some of them have to be in a higher energy state. And that's where you get, like, pressure. That's why, like, white dwarves don't collapse, because the electrons inside them, if they collapsed, would have to end up being in the same lower energy state. And they resist that, they can't do it.

• 30:57Daniel Whiteson?

  And so, like, this has a real impact in the universe, and it affects how we do experiments and all sorts of stuff. And so, this is definitely real. And we have some understanding of how it works.

• 31:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so fermions are our introverts, and the bosons are our extroverts.

• 31:13Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. Electrons just want to be in their own house, like, watching their own TV show at night by themselves. And photons are always up for a party.

• 31:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so now we have a pretty good understanding of fermions and bosons, and what they can and can't do. How do we get from here to para-particles?

• 31:30Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so to understand how para-particles might fit into this picture, because it sounds like there are only two options. Either you have half integer spin, you know, one half, three halves, five halves, or you have integer spin, zero, one, two, three, whatever. What's another option? How could you possibly have a third category, right? And that was the prevailing wisdom for a long, long time, until very recently. But to understand where the loophole is, we've got to dig one level deeper into understanding why fermions behave this way, and why bosons behave the other way. So we're going to go through this sort of rough and imperfect proof of the polyexclusion principle, to explain why fermions behave one way, and bosons the other way.

• 32:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel's got pep. All right, let's do this.

• 32:14Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so imagine two particles. Particle one and particle two.

• 32:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  In typical physicist fashion, those are very boring names for them, but okay.

• 32:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, let's make them exciting names. What would be exciting names for these particles?

• 32:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm feeling if we name them like Frank and Rita, it's gonna be hard to keep track. Maybe one and two was a good idea.

• 32:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, wow. Backed off your criticism pretty quickly there, didn't you?

• 32:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, alright, you got me.

• 32:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Alright, alright, so particle boring one and particle boring two.

• 32:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Alright.

• 32:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Now, each of them can do one thing right now. They have two different options. They can be in state A or state B. Okay, so particle A can do two things. It can be in state A or it can be in state B. Particle two can also be in state A or state B. And then we can describe the full quantum state of the pair of the particles as saying like 1A2B. That means particle one is in state A and particle two is in state B, right?

• 33:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  You could also have 1B and 2A, right? Am I understanding?

• 33:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, absolutely. Exactly, and so let's do that. Let's take our particles 1A2B and let's swap them. These are identical particles, okay? There's nothing different about them. Every electron in the universe, for example, is the same. And so let's just swap them. So we go from 1A2B to 1B2A, right? Now, the quantum field theory of fermions, the math of fermions, because they have spin one half, when you do this, you get a minus sign. So you can't go from 1A2B just to 1B2A. You go to minus 1B2A. You get a negative sign in front of the quantum state. And this has to do with what happens when you're swapping them.

• 33:56Daniel Whiteson?

  And you're making a face that tells me I need to pause so you can ask a question.

• 34:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so we said that you can have 1A2B as one state.

• 34:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you can have 1B2A as another state.

• 34:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 34:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  But I thought that you were saying that actually you can't have 1B2A. It has to be negative 1B2A.

• 34:16Daniel Whiteson?

  You can have 1B2A.

• 34:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 34:18Daniel Whiteson?

  But if you start with 1A2B and then you swap them, you don't end up at 1B2A, which you end up with is negative 1B2A.

• 34:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 34:27Daniel Whiteson?

  That's like saying, you know, take your driver's license and flip it around, right? You don't necessarily get it in exactly the same orientation depending on how you spin it, right? Some things like a sphere, doesn't matter how you spin it, you end up with exactly the same sphere. It's perfect symmetry. Other things have like a handedness or an orientation, right? Like, or take your left hand and turn it around. It doesn't look exactly like your right hand, right? Maybe it looks like a mirror image of your right hand. It's like negative of your right hand. So this is the part where we're being like a little bit fuzzy and sloppy. But fermions, because they're spin one half, when you swap them, you get a negative sign in the quantum state.

• 35:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so that only happens with fermions, not with bosons?

• 35:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Only with fermions, not with bosons. And that's what makes this impossible. That's where we have a contradiction, right? Because say you have these two particles in the same state. So you started with 1A, 2A, right? Both particles in the same state.

• 35:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  You can't do that.

• 35:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 35:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no, you can with bosons.

• 35:25Daniel Whiteson?

  You can with bosons. Well, let's say we have fermions and we try to do that. Let's try to do that and see what happens. Okay, so we have 1A, 2A. We're like, we put two fermions in the same place, in the same state. Okay, well, now let's swap them. Well, what happens? Quantum field theory says we get negative 1A, 2A.

• 35:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 35:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Right? Because when we swap fermions, we get a negative sign. But these are supposed to be indistinguishable particles. So if you swap them, you shouldn't get any change because there's no real difference. You're swapping 1A, 2A, you have to get 1A, 2A. But quantum field theory says, no, you have to get negative 1A, 2A. So we have two different rules. One that says if you have particles in the same state and they're indistinguishable and you swap them, nothing happens. And the other rule from field theory that says if they're fermions and you swap them, you get a negative sign. Boom, that's a contradiction. So that tells us you just can't do this. You can't have fermions in the same state because then if you swap them, you get a contradiction. Quantum field theory says you're supposed to get a negative sign.

• 36:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Common sense says you can't get a negative sign if you swap things that aren't different.

• 36:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so the Pauli exclusion principle is a result of what happens with quantum field theory?

• 36:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, exactly. And you might think, well, what's this negative sign? What is going on there? Remember that this negative sign is part of the quantum state. It's not something we observe, right? A negative sign in a quantum state is not observable because every observable you make is only sensitive to the quantum state squared. Remember, quantum states can also be like complex numbers. You can have like a wave function has like 4 plus 2 i in it, and you can't observe those things. But when you square it, the imaginary part goes away. So we can't observe this. It's like a hidden, internal part of the quantum state we can't observe. And yet, the math is there, and it's real, and it tells us that fermions cannot do this thing because it leads to an inherent contradiction. Now, spin 1 particles, bosons,

• 37:17Daniel Whiteson?

  are different. Their rules, when you swap them, are different. If you swap 1a2b, and now you're talking about bosons, you don't get the negative sign. You just get 1b2a. Everybody's happy. So if you started with 1a2a, and you swap them, quantum field theory says you get 1a2a. Common sense says you get 1a2a. No contradiction. Everybody's cool. It's that negative sign, that unobservable negative sign in the quantum state that appears for fermions when you swap them, that causes them to never be allowed to be in the same quantum state, if they're indistinguishable fermions.

• 37:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so just to make sure that I'm understanding. So like, negative 1 and 1, they cancel each other out when you add them together?

• 37:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Or when you square them, you get the same answer.

• 38:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, and so I should be keeping that in my head. This isn't like we arbitrarily identified that some state is negative 1, and you could have called the states A, B, and C. Like, there is actually something about negative 1 and 1 that is different in an important mathematical way.

• 38:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And the important thing here is fermions have a different kind of spin, and that changes what happens when you swap them. It introduces this negative sign. And if you're curious about why that is exactly, this is the bit that's famously impossible to explain with intuition. We have math for it. It's called the spin statistics theorem, and even Richard Feynman couldn't come up with an intuitive explanation for it. So I hope you're going to excuse me for not having one either. But if you take us at a word for that, the fermions, when you swap them, you get a negative sign that's not observable, but it does prevent them from ever being in the same quantum state, then you can go from there to understand why the Fermi exclusion principle happens, and it's going to lead us to think about the third way that pair of particles might behave.

• 39:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  About that, then stick with us because we're going to get to it after the break.

• 39:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 39:26Speaker 06

  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 like 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 with what we're given 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.

• 40:10Speaker 06

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app,

• 40:15Speaker 03

  YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five star Trust Pilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 40:48Kelly Weinersmith?

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• 41:30Kelly Weinersmith?

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• 42:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Call 1-800-545-5979, or visit zepbound.lily.com.

• 42:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so, we teased you before the commercial break that we're going to explain to you how para-particles behave. Your wait is over? Daniel, tell us about para-particles and how they behave.

• 42:41Daniel Whiteson?

  So, for a long time, decades and decades, people thought that fermions and bosons were the only options. Not only because, hey, look, spin one-half and integer spin seem like the only choices, because like, spin one-third or spin two-thirds is impossible, but also in terms of the explanation we just gave, it feels like there are two options. Either you add a negative sign when you swap them, like fermions, which means you can't be in the same quantum state, or you don't, like bosons, which means you can be in the same quantum state. So it seems like there's no crack there. It seems like there's no room for another direction. And in the 1970s, somebody went through a bunch of math to prove that there is no third option under certain conditions. So like...

• 43:22Daniel Whiteson?

  If you live in a universe where space has three dimensions, then there is no other option. You have fermions and you have bosons, and that's it, zip and period. So people sort of put this away for a long time. They were like, yeah, well, that's done. Somebody proved it, dot, dot, dot. Nobody should ever spend time thinking about it again. And that's like a famous place to make a big discovery because I'm sure this happens in biology also. You have a paper which makes a big advance and then it gets sort of summarized in a shorthanded sort of way that ignores some of the assumptions that went into it. And the conclusions just sort of get broadened a little bit. And then people treat the lore as if it was real and complete. And people rarely go back and read the original paper to discover, oh, actually there are caveats here.

• 44:06Daniel Whiteson?

  So there are loopholes. And people who do and discover those loopholes and then explore them can like crack open a whole new area of physics sometimes.

• 44:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's why it is so critical to read and to read the original papers.

• 44:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And for those of you wondering what that sound is in the background, that's a big rainstorm in Virginia right now.

• 44:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  I love rain. Is that, was that a dig on Virginia?

• 44:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Why do you assume that's a dig? That's definitely not a dig.

• 44:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Because I know you.

• 44:33Daniel Whiteson?

  This week, I'm in Aspen for the Aspen Center for Physics and it rains every afternoon and I love it. The smell of it in the mountains is just wonderful. The thing I do love about mountain rain is that it ends also quickly.

• 44:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Well, well, this, our rainstorms don't last very long. And I am, the reason you can hear it is because I converted the tack room in the barn, the horse barn that we have on our property into my office. And so there's a metal roof above me. And so the metal roof really sort of makes the sound of rain much louder, which I love when I'm sleeping up here at night every once in a while. I have sleepovers up here with my daughter on Friday nights. But anyway, sorry about the background noise, everyone.

• 45:12Daniel Whiteson?

  No problem. And we now have enough background to understand paraparticles because very recently, two physicists at Rice University, which we both know and love, found some loopholes in this 1970s no-go theorem. The one that famously said, it's impossible to have anything but a fermion and a boson. And the loophole is, what if you give these particles some other kind of properties? Things that, like a minus sign, are not observable directly and disappear when you square it. Right? So like a minus sign is a great example because you square it, you get plus one. If you didn't have a minus sign, you can't tell plus one squared and minus one squared have the same answer. But they came up with another thing you can add to this particle, like another category,

• 45:57Daniel Whiteson?

  another part of the description, not a minus sign, but like a new dimension to this quantum field, a new attribute, a new label you can give it. And this kind of thing, also, when you square it, it goes away. So there's some technical details here, but the sort of way to understand it intuitively is that these internal states depend on the observer a little bit. So like you and I might see this electron differently because we're different observers and we might make different observations. So there's a little bit of like relativity there. So if you add this to some particle states in a weird mathematical way, you can create a new kind of behavior.

• 46:38Daniel Whiteson?

  So it's sort of like fuzzes up a little bit this notion of indistinguishable particles. Are the particles indistinguishable or not? So you might be wondering, well, we have electrons and we have photons. Are there things out there in the universe that follow this new weird quantum math? The answer is, we don't know. Not yet, at least. What they've done is show that there is another mathematical description of fields and particles that you can construct that has like a third kind of behavior. It's not a fermion and it's not a boson, but it is self-consistent and mathematical. Nobody's built one, but they just sort of like mathematically shown that as far as we know, the rules of the universe don't disallow this.

• 47:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I don't want to ever question the amazing research that comes out of Rice University. But, but it sounds like, okay, so they're like, well, there's this one thing we can't see and can't measure. And so let's add another thing we can't see or we can't measure. It's just like fire, or you know, like biologists can't be like, well, what if the viruses were wearing hats? So maybe we should look for what's a good combination of hat and viruses.

• 47:47Daniel Whiteson?

  You're right. This is like taking the quantum particles and saying, hey, we've only been thinking about them wearing cowboy hats. What if they wear other kinds of hats? What if choice of hats is another like degree of freedom for describing these particles? And it turns out, if you do that, it cracks this open a little bit and it lets you have another category. And so that's interesting mathematically. It's only interesting physically if it describes the universe, if the universe does this. In the same way that like, you know, Dirac looked at the solutions to the Schrodinger equation and he was like, oh, this is interesting. This allows you to have electrons, but also allows you to have positively charged particles. That doesn't mean the universe does it, right? It could have just been like a mathematical oddity, like, oh, the math allows

• 48:29Daniel Whiteson?

  this, but does the universe choose it? And it turns out, yes, the universe does choose to make antiparticles. And the universe, in many other cases, chooses to explore all the avenues of symmetries. We don't know if it does in this case. What we've shown is that the mathematics of our description of the universe do allow for a third category of particles, para-particles. But we don't know if they do ever exist in the universe. And if they do, we don't think they would be fundamental particles, the way that like photons, electrons are, because there are no fundamental particles we know of that fall into this category. You'd have to make like quasi-particles, the way you make like anyons, or plasmons, or phonons. These are things that

• 49:11Daniel Whiteson?

  follow the math of particles, but are waves, not in a fundamental field, like the electromagnetic field or the electron field, but a wave in something else, like a wave in air, or a wave in water, or a wave in electron gas, in some weird meta-material that solid-state physicists cook up in their dark little labs. And so it might be something that people can create in the lab someday in the future and show, oh, look, we've created this new quasi-particle that has a different kind of mathematical behavior than fermions or bosons. So that would be cool and something nobody had seen before. Doesn't mean we can make hoverboards, or we can make wormholes, or Anything like that yet, but you never know with fundamental physics, like what's this going

• 49:55Daniel Whiteson?

  to lead to? It's very deep. It's very much at the foundation of quantum field theory and our understanding of like the mathematics of it. So it's exciting when anybody makes any progress in that area. And it's a great example to push back on the nonsense you might hear online to like, physics hasn't made any progress since the 1970s. Like dude, we're making progress all the time. And here's a great example.

• 50:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  So are people currently working on experiments to try to find these particles?

• 50:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, more create than find. People are trying to engineer weird exotic materials that might have these behaviors. And this is the kind of stuff solid state physicists love to do. You know, they're like, what if we made super thin layers of graphene and then super thin layers of this? And could we force the electrons to act as if they're in a 2D universe? Or can we see super conductivity or whatever? So they're very clever at engineering materials to make quantum states behave in new ways. And that's the most promising way we might see something that's a pair of particle. It would be an emergent phenomenon, a quasi particle that comes out of

• 50:59Daniel Whiteson?

  the behavior of these weird exotic systems. And not exotic and like impossible or wrong in any way, just like not something we find in nature usually. But that's the cool thing about being humans. We're like constantly pushing the boundaries and saying, hey, can the universe do this? What happens if we do that? And it teaches us things about the universe. This is how we learn where the boundaries are by pushing them, right?

• 51:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Yeah. So when we have a guest on our show, you usually end the interview by asking them if an alien were to visit our planet from an advanced civilization, and you ask them if their thing exists on their home planet. That's your way of testing how confident they are that the thing actually exists. So Daniel, if aliens from an advanced civilization landed on Earth, do you think they would know about pair of particles and would think that pair of particles

• 51:49Daniel Whiteson?

  This is a great question and a fair one, since I just wrote a whole book on how aliens might think about the universe. Y'all should check it out. It's coming out in November. It's called Do Aliens Speak Physics? And I'm really excited about it.

• 52:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Two thumbs way up.

• 52:02Daniel Whiteson?

  My personal suspicion is that particle physicists are too up in their own heads, and they think that the whole universe uses their mathematical description of how things work. And that's just like too self-centered to put ourselves at the heart of the understanding of the universe. And likely, there's a bunch of arbitrary assumptions we've made, and probably aliens have a completely different description of how the universe works. And they're like, what? Why are you even using quantum fields? That makes no sense. Here's a much simpler way. But if they are using quantum fields, then I think this is an inevitable discovery they would make. And they might have even found other ways. Like, there might be four, 17, or 92 different kinds of particles. And they're like, what? Y'all have only found

• 52:46Daniel Whiteson?

  three? Come back to us. You can join the Cosmic Society when you're up to 10.

• 52:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  When you found para, para, para, para particles, then, then talk to us.

• 52:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And maybe they'll listen to this podcast, and they're like, ooh, particles and parasites. Maybe these guys are on the right track.

• 53:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh. Yeah. At least they'll think that we're interesting.

• 53:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Aliens, if you are listening, please don't zap us from outer space. Come talk to us.

• 53:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Tell us about your secrets. And tell us about your parasites, but keep them to yourselves.

• 53:15Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Thanks, everyone, for going on this journey with us into the heart of particle physics, how it works, what we know, what we don't know, and the hints that mathematics is giving us about what we might learn about the fundamental nature of space and time and matter and energy and aliens.

• 53:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  See y'all next time.

• 53:38Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 53:44Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 53:50Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 53:56Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 54:03Kelly 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.

• 54:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

• 54:16Speaker 06

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• 55:40Speaker 06

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• 56:44Speaker 05

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