Listener Questions #52

Daniel and Kelly answer listener questions about how AI is impacting math and physics, what we really know about the wood wide web, and what happens when matter annihilates. 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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• 4:53Daniel Whiteson?

  When AI solves math for us, it feels less fun. Is that true for physics, or is math the only one?

• 5:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Bungee and trees form a wood wide web through which resources flow. Or so I've heard in pop sci books. But is this really so?

• 5:12Daniel Whiteson?

  I got nothing that can match wood wide web, Kelly. It's amazing.

• 5:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know, I didn't come up with that, Daniel. Yeah, no, that wasn't me. That wasn't me.

• 5:21Daniel Whiteson?

  When particles and their opposites meet and annihilate, can they become a Higgs or a Z boson, or is a photon their only fate?

• 5:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whatever questions keep you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's answers will make it right.

• 5:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe of listener questions number 52.

• 5:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  52.

• 5:56Daniel Whiteson?

  52 is not prime, and it doesn't sound like it.

• 5:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is not prime, and it doesn't, that's right. Do we point that out for all?

• 6:03Daniel Whiteson?

  It's supposed to be 51. 51 sounds prime, but it's not.

• 6:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, but I feel like that's a point you should have made in episode 51.

• 6:15Daniel Whiteson?

  This is only for the deep math nerds, okay? They'll get it.

• 6:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, all right, good, good. Hello, I'm Kelly Weinersmith. I study parasites and space, but not primes.

• 6:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who likes to think about aliens, and I like primes, but not prime rib.

• 6:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah, I have, I'm fine with prime rib. I have to admit, when...

• 6:38Daniel Whiteson?

  You were figuring it out on the fly there. You're like, how do I feel about prime rib, actually?

• 6:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, well, so here's my somewhat embarrassing opinion about eating meat, which is like, you know, I love like chicken breast, I love kind of, I love cheeseburgers. But anytime there's something that reminds me of the fact that it came from an animal, like a rib in the middle, I have a little trouble with it, which I think speaks poorly of me, because it suggests that I am trying to disconnect from what's, where my food is actually coming from, which is why I try to not eat a lot of meat. And if I do eat meat, I try to eat it from one of the local farms where the animals had one bad day, as opposed to a lifetime of bad days.

• 7:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, I think you are morally troubled by eating meat and trying to avoid facing it.

• 7:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  I absolutely am.

• 7:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, yeah. No, exactly. But, you know, I think that everybody who eats meat should acknowledge, like, the source of it and should be cool with that. Or you shouldn't eat the meat. But anyway, that's not the topic we intended to talk about today. Vegetarianism and morality. I used to be very, very strictly a vegetarian, and militantly so. I used to walk around with a t-shirt that said, "I think, therefore, I am vegetarian."

• 7:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa, you were one of those in your face, I'm going to be kind of annoying to be around vegetarians.

• 7:59Daniel Whiteson?

  I definitely was.

• 8:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  I was a vegetarian for a long time, too, and then I was feeling sleepy a lot. And I realized that after I had a little meat, I stopped feeling sleepy, which probably meant I should have found like the right supplements, but I was definitely missing something. But I'm married to a man who's been a vegetarian for over a quarter of a century. And so we don't eat a lot of meat in our family, anyway. So, all right, we have gotten off topic.

• 8:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, today, we're going to throw you some red meat and talk about topics that are in the news, the hot topics in academia, in the public, all about AI and science. Is AI unraveling the scientific enterprise and ruining our lives?

• 8:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh, Zach talks to me about what's happening in the world of math and AI all the time. So let's go ahead and segue directly into our first question. And this is a question from Isaac, who is a mathematician in Irvine, California.

• 8:50Speaker 07

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. My name is Isaac, and I'm a mathematician from Irvine, California. I have a question for Daniel. You always talk about wanting to meet aliens, as they might reveal the secrets of the universe to you. It doesn't sound that such a reveal might take away your pleasure as a human physicist from figuring out the mystery yourself. But in mathematics at the moment, this is precisely what is happening, except the alien is the AI. Many old, famous conjectures and open problems are being solved by human mathematicians prompting the AI in precisely the right way. These mathematicians are being honest about this and posting papers online, saying it was the AI who had the clever idea, and the human is just writing it down in a more digestible form.

• 9:33Speaker 07

  The rate at which this is happening is overwhelming and accelerating rapidly. Many mathematicians are lamenting this state of affairs, as it is taking the joy out of what we do, both out of intellectual curiosity and, more practically, for a living. It is also causing many young mathematicians, especially grad students, to rethink a career in academia. It is causing quite the existential crisis at the moment. So my question is, if an AI were to reveal the secrets of physics to you, as it is doing in mathematics currently, would it take the joy out of knowing the answers? Would the feeling be different if it was an AI doing the revealing versus an alien? If so, why? Thanks again for everything you both do.

• 10:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Now, Daniel, do you know Isaac? Is he like in the math department?

• 10:17Daniel Whiteson?

  He is in the math department here at Irvine. He's one of my neighbors and he's a listener to the podcast. He started listening, I think during the pandemic when he got interested in physics and philosophy and started listening to the podcast and is now writing papers about physics and philosophy and using crazy number systems. I think it's called the hyper reels to write physics theories in new ways. So the guy's all in and he thinks deeply about this stuff.

• 10:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's amazing, man.

• 10:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's really cool.

• 10:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, Isaac sounds awesome, but so let's go ahead. Can we start with like what's happening in math before we get to physics?

• 10:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so what's happening in math is that AI specifically chatbots, Claude, ChatGPT, et cetera, are becoming really, really good at proving theorems. You know, math is very logical. It's like a bunch of Lego pieces you click together and the rules are very crisp. It's very easy to check if the answer you have is correct. You know, you could just like plug in the numbers. Does the equation work? And this is exactly the kind of thing that AI is good at. It's good at learning the rules and it's good at playing the game. And something that's astonishing is how quickly this has been changing. Like a few years ago, you could put a math problem into ChatGPT and it would hilariously get it wrong, you know? But it's been rapidly getting better and everybody's sort of astonished at the pace

• 11:36Daniel Whiteson?

  at which it's become very, very useful. And what we've seen in the last few weeks is AI solving massive open problems. So it used to be like, you know, solving little problems here and there, confirming things, but there are these sort of open problems in mathematics, some of them with bounties on them for like a million dollars for anybody who solves the problem. They're called the millennium problems. And one of them is called the Navier-Stokes equation, which is a description of how fluids act and there's sort of mathematical questions about how it behaves and does it behave well? And can you prove this or that about it? And it's been an open problem for decades and lots of people spent like, you know, the half of their career on it and failed.

• 12:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 12:14Daniel Whiteson?

  And OpenAI heard that some mathematicians were making some progress on it and they put tens of thousands of AI agents on it for just a few days and they cracked a part of it, which is sort of astonishing. And so what we're seeing in math is that AI has astounding capabilities to do the things that only math professors used to be able to do and now is superhuman in at least some of those categories.

• 12:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  This probably goes against all of the best practices that you and I talk about on our show, but I'm going to say it anyway. I saw a headline that said something to the effect of, you know, the Navier-Stokes equation has been solved, but we have learned nothing.

• 12:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 12:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I, I thought the, I'm guessing the point of the article, and again, this is like we're on the show, we're never supposed to say, I read the headline and that was it. But, but I was assuming that the point of the article was that when you solve one of these problems, one of the points of solving the problems is that you come up with new procedures and those new procedures can then be applied to other problems. Is that one of the problems with the fact that this was solved? And what does this do to the math community? Like, if the point isn't actually solving the problem, it's to get a new tool. Have you actually done anything if you haven't come up with new tools?

• 13:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I wouldn't say that the new tools are directly the target. I think it's understanding.

• 13:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 13:29Daniel Whiteson?

  That's the goal. Like what is the job of math? What are mathematicians doing? They're not fear improving machines. They want to understand the universe and the nature of mathematics. And, you know, what does that mean? Well, like there are patterns in mathematics and linking those patterns together and drawing high level conclusions and insight about the nature of numbers and et cetera. That's the job of mathematics. That's what they're doing. They're not just like, is this theorem true or not? And so I think an issue with these millennium problems is that traditionally the question that the millennium problem is asking is not the interesting thing, as you were saying, which interesting is the journey, the things you learn about math on the way to it.

• 14:13Daniel Whiteson?

  And so these were valuable problems because people would try to solve them and fail. And then they would try again and they would have to invent new tools, as you said, but those new tools often led to new understanding of mathematics, connections, you know? And what do I mean by connections? Well, like, you know, an easy to understand one is like understanding the relationship between geometry and algebra. Like, think about how you can write down two equations on a piece of paper and you can solve it for a solution, right? Two linear equations, two equations, two unknowns, you can solve it. There's like a single solution sometimes. Well, that turns out to be exactly the same as drawing two lines on a sheet of paper and seeing where they intersect because each equation is a line and the solution is their intersection. And maybe that's obvious to you, but it took people hundreds of years to realize that

• 14:57Daniel Whiteson?

  like geometry and algebra are the same thing. They're deeply connected in this way. There are different ways to express the same ideas. That's the kind of understanding we're talking about, but of course, much, much more sophisticated, right? And that's what mathematics is about. It's not about is this theorem true, yes or no? They were using these theorems as motivators, as targets, as ways to inspire people to develop new ideas, but the targets themselves are not the metrics. And I think the math community's response is essentially like, okay, you took down that target, but you didn't get any understanding. We didn't learn anything. Like the proof to this thing is like, you know, 150 pages of unintelligible stuff with no insight at all.

• 15:38Daniel Whiteson?

  And so it's sort of like, you know, the way Kasparov was beat by Deep Blue and he was beaten in a brute force manner, like very powerful computer tries lots of different options, can do so really quickly. And so it can beat Kasparov.

• 15:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  And Kasparov was a chess champion and this is when Deep Blue, the AI program, beat him.

• 15:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Thank you, yeah. But it doesn't yield any insight into chess. Like you can't watch the machine play and be like, oh, that's interesting. Here's a whole new strategy we hadn't considered. What you learn from that is like, oh, if you have a really fast computer, you can try all the solutions and you can come up with one that works. And so in the same way, I think the math community is a little frustrated that these problems have been taken down and people treat it as if like, oh, math is solved now, but it's not, right? They pick these destinations to make the journeys interesting. The destinations are less interesting without the journey. I talked to another math prof at Irvine. I asked him what he thought and he said that like, it's cool that AI can do this and

• 16:36Daniel Whiteson?

  it makes things faster, but that the limitation in math was never like, what theorems are true? We already have more knowledge of mathematical truths than we understand. What we lack is understanding. So like getting more effectively data about like which the arms are true or false doesn't mean more understanding. If anything, this inspires the need for more mathematicians to understand the mathematical truths that would be pumped out more quickly by AI.

• 17:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  So is the task now then to like, go through the 150 pages or whatever that the AI program came up with and see how it did it? And that's where the insights are going to come from?

• 17:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 17:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  And just because a problem comes down, doesn't mean you can't try to find another way to solve it, right?

• 17:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 17:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 17:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And maybe there are insights in there, but maybe there aren't, right? Maybe it's like, oh, you can brute force this problem in this really boring way that doesn't apply to anything else. Like, okay, cool. Thank you, but it doesn't teach you anything. Or maybe there are great insights, you know, but it's still going to take some human to go through it and think about it and try to extract some understanding of it.

• 17:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 17:39Daniel Whiteson?

  So that's what's happening in the math community. I think that's what Isaac is reflecting. And there's also this question of like, you know, who's getting credit for it? If you just like dump a problem into ChatGPT and you write a paper, you know, is that really yours? And those are sort of sociological questions about how academia works. But what we haven't seen so far is a similar thing in physics, right? Physics has not been solved by AI yet.

• 18:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  You're next though, Daniel. You're next. You can't take the ecologists out of the loop, man. We got to still go outside and catch the squirrels, but you guys are next.

• 18:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Uh huh. Yeah, well, if AI can build a large Hadron Collider, I think it can catch a squirrel or two. But, you know, in my field, I'm in experimental physics and we also have targets, right? Car targets like, what is dark matter? How big is the universe? What is everything made out of? And yes, you can get insights along the way. You know, you can develop a better process, new tools, you know, bigger accelerators, whatever to solve them. But really the targets I think are better aligned here. Like, we actually want to know those answers for themselves. We build experiments to learn those answers. Some people really like building the experiments. Some people really like developing the methods and that's cool.

• 18:51Daniel Whiteson?

  And that's all changing because that's all being rapidly transformed by AI. But the questions themselves are inherently interesting, maybe in a way that's different from in math where they, you know, they're not that excited about this question. They just thought it was a hard one and so useful target. Whereas like, I really do want to know what dark matter is. And if AI could figure it out, or equivalently, if the aliens could come and tell me, like, I would want to know. If AI like had a box with all the answers to all of my questions on my desk, it would not sit there closed. I would not think, let's, you know, let's not because it'd be more meaningful to figure it out ourselves. No, no, no, that box is getting insta-opened, right? You know, even if it's some like horrible Twilight Zone episode where like every time

• 19:34Daniel Whiteson?

  I open the box, 10 people die, like I'm opening that box, you know? I want to know these things.

• 19:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm not surprised. You would vaporize all of humanity to understand physics better. We've established this, but okay.

• 19:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. I would turn them into cheeseburgers for Kelly to eat, you know, to up her iron intake or whatever.

• 19:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 19:50Daniel Whiteson?

  But, you know, I'm never going to be faced with that question, so I can speculate about this totally irresponsibly. But the point is that we are deeply interested in these truths themselves and the process along the way is fascinating, cool, and it's fun journey sometimes, but I think we're more interested in the actual targets than the mathematicians are, you know? And maybe other people disagree, but I think in physics, we'd want to know the answers for sure.

• 20:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Isaac noted that AI might be impacting how many people are considering careers in mathematics. Do you think AI could eventually impact how many people want careers in physics? Because maybe, maybe you only need five people to open the box now.

• 20:31Daniel Whiteson?

  No, no, the trend is the opposite. You know, think about how many mathematicians or physicists there were before we had computers, right? There were fewer and we had something called human computers. Like Einstein had a guy who would help do his calculations. And in physics, we had people we called human trackers, who would like, look at outputs from detectors and find particle traces. And we replaced all of those with computers that were much more powerful than humans, much faster. What happened? Did we fire a bunch of physicists and mathematicians? No, we created new opportunities. And so there's so much more physics and math that we could do. And the fields have exploded. The fields are much larger because the tools gave us more capacity to ask and to answer questions.

• 21:15Daniel Whiteson?

  And that's what's happening now is that we are changing the process, the day to day work of what it means to do physics and math, because the tools are becoming much more powerful. But that just means we can ask more questions. We can answer more questions. And so I think the possibilities are much larger now, especially in physics. You know, I saw somebody post on Twitter that they were leaving physics thanks to AI because they came to climb a bunch of mountains and the AI has built escalators. And I was like, I thought, that's interesting. Maybe this guy came into the field because he liked climbing the mountains. He wasn't actually interested in the view. Whereas like, you know, I'm a physicist. I want to know the answers. So I want to get to the top of the mountain. I'm happy to climb it.

• 22:00Daniel Whiteson?

  It's fun to climb it. I enjoy it, but I also will take the escalator because I want to know what's at the top. And the other thing to note about that analogy is that like, I think the mountain is infinitely tall. So it's not like, oh, you spoiled it because now we got to the top, there's nothing else to do. Like when we get to the current top, we're going to discover, oh, that's not the peak. There's more stuff to figure out. There's an infinite number of questions to ask. So there's no shortage. So I'm excited about the future where AI has empowered us to more rapidly do work. But it is changing what it means to be a physicist. And I think we're seeing a separation between folks who enjoyed the process and are good at grinding. Like, let me, you know, climb really hard.

• 22:43Daniel Whiteson?

  And that's gone now because grinding is done much better by AI. And the people who are interested in the questions and wanting to sort of like, just use the tools to ask those questions about the universe, they are becoming more empowered. And so I think that's the transformation. But I don't think it's the first time academia has been transformed by the creation of new computational tools. I don't think it'll be the last time. And so I think for those of us who are excited about the answers, it's thrilling to have tools that bring us closer to them.

• 23:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, well, let's see what Isaac has to say about your answer.

• 23:16Speaker 07

  Thank you, Daniel and Kelly, for answering my question. The thing I appreciated most about your answer, Daniel, was your tone of positivity, not just from the pleasure of finding out the answers, but also that these AI advances will actually encourage the need for more mathematicians and physicists rather than fewer. In general, I would characterize the mood in the mathematical community as quite pessimistic or conditionally optimistic. So hearing your contrasting opinion was very uplifting for me. I also appreciated your distinction between AI's impact thus far on math versus physics. And also the distinction between potential impacts on experimental versus theoretical physics. Your discussion of OpenAI's recent solution to the Navier-Stokes equation and the ensuing

• 23:59Speaker 07

  lack of understanding was very insightful and accurate. My hope is that the AI companies will soon tire of using math as a marketing tool for their product. As I do have faith that, once this technology is primarily in the hands of professional mathematicians, it will indeed prove to be a useful tool for our furthering our understanding and developing our theories. Once again, I appreciate everything you both do for communicating science and encouraging curiosity.

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• 29:00Speaker 05

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• 29:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, on to Woodwide Web. And I love that you thought that I came up with that, but.

• 29:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Where does it come from? Let's give somebody some credit.

• 29:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's been around since 1997, when a nature paper commented on another nature paper and they, yeah. We can get into that.

• 29:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Everybody who works on mushrooms seems like a really fun guy.

• 29:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, stop it, stop it.

• 29:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Let's introduce David. Do you want to bring us back? Or do you want me to?

• 29:43Daniel Whiteson?

  I thought we were already back.

• 29:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, okay, we can be back with you. Okay. All right, now that we've. Where are we?

• 29:49Daniel Whiteson?

  But let's hear the question from David.

• 29:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thank you, yes. Hi, Daniel and Kelly. This is David Naylor. Hey, thank you so much for taking my question. I love your show. Just wanted to ask you about something I recently read about in the news that I thought was really cool.

• 30:04Speaker 03

  I saw this article that discussed mycelium networks and how both nutrients and rudimentary bits of information sharing could take place between both trees and fungi. And I wanted to get your thoughts on this subject. Thank you so much.

• 30:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so David had a question about how information is shared between trees and fungi, but I want to take a step back and reconsider the initial part of his sentence, which was about nutrients being shared between trees and fungi. Because in 2023, or around 2023, there were three review papers that came out, all of them pushing back on this popular science narrative about how trees and fungi pass resources back and forth. So

• 30:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, no. Did the Popsi articles not get the nuance right, Kelly?

• 30:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, they didn't. No, they didn't. But it actually looks like some of us, some scientists, might be playing a role in how this has been sort of perpetuated incorrectly. So Yes. So in 1997, as we alluded to a moment ago, there was this paper that came out that found that carbon can pass from one tree of one species to a different tree of another species. And it appeared to be getting from one tree to another through the fungus that connected it.

• 31:22Daniel Whiteson?

  So but back up like trees breathe the air and photosynthesis and they take CO2 out of the air and they keep the carbon and they use the carbon to basically build themselves. So trees are machines to pull carbon out of the air and assemble their cellular structures. And so now you're saying that the carbon in one tree can end up in another tree?

• 31:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, thank you. And so the important thing is that fungus get their carbon from trees, some sorts of fungal symbionts, symbionts just being like organisms that sort of interact with one another. They get the carbon from the trees and then the fungus provide things like sugars to the trees.

• 31:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm. How cozy.

• 32:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  How cozy, right? And so one of the trees was in shade, which meant it couldn't get as much light. So it couldn't make as much of its own carbon. And it appeared to be getting carbon from a tree that was not shaded. It was getting more light. It was able to make more carbon. And it looked like the fungus was connecting them and was shuttling the carbon over to the tree that needed it.

• 32:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, wow. Cool. Like a tree internet.

• 32:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yes. Right. And so this paper came out in Nature and another scientist who studied something similar called this connection, the wood wide web.

• 32:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Nice. Love it.

• 32:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  So this was in the 90s when the internet was becoming like, you know, more a part of our lives, but you know, it still stands today.

• 32:38Daniel Whiteson?

  And were people speculating that trees have like tree mail also between themselves?

• 32:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no. I don't know. I don't know.

• 32:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And maybe, you know, they're recording their own side casts. Who knows what's going on out there?

• 32:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel, I'm cutting you off. I'm cutting you off, man. All right. So here's the problem. Okay, so this this wood wide web idea has escaped into, you know, the popular consciousness. And there's three parts to it that are worth examining. So one, the idea is that fungus are connecting multiple trees in the forest.

• 33:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 33:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Those connections are shuttling resources between those trees. And then there's another idea called like the mother tree. And the idea here is that mother trees are able to shuttle resources specifically to the seedlings that are their offspring.

• 33:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, all right.

• 33:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. And so you see these ideas in popular science a lot. And it's, you know, people talk about how it's made the forest more magical and that it's like, there's this implied altruism where trees that are making extra carbon are then shuttling it over to trees that need it. And fungus are the intermediaries making all of this like happy huggy stuff happening. But these three papers that came out in 2023 are pushing back against it. So all right, I know, I know. So all right. So the first claim.

• 33:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Science has been ruining everything since 1542 or whatever.

• 34:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. You can get a shirt for that at smbc-comics.com. So the idea here is fungus is connecting different trees. Resources are shuttling through that. So some people have gone out to try to see like, okay, are long strands of fungus connecting trees that are kind of far away? And you can go out into the forest and you can dig up some soil and say, okay, I found a fungus of a particular genotypes. And I also found that fungus of a particular genotype at another tree. So they're connected. But the problem is, yes, your face, you're hmm, that was a different hmm than the first few.

• 34:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I didn't follow that leap. Like, just because you find a computer in my office and a computer in your office doesn't mean they're connected.

• 34:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right, exactly. Yes. And so like when an earthworm moves through the soil, it can break a fungal connection between trees or when like, you know, an insect moves through the soil. So just because you find the same fungal genotype at multiple trees doesn't necessarily mean they're connected.

• 35:01Daniel Whiteson?

  But did the original results have some sort of smoking gun where they like, you know, labeled carbon in one tree and saw it appear in another tree or something?

• 35:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so they did. They did. But here's the problem with that.

• 35:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Wait, really? That's how they did it? I just totally made that up.

• 35:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  You're very smart, Daniel.

• 35:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Or maybe biology is just kind of easy.

• 35:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my God. You know, between the puns and the biology shade, I'm almost done with you for today, Daniel.

• 35:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Hey, I threw in some MSNBC red meat for you.

• 35:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, that was, that's nice for Zach, for my husband, not for me.

• 35:33Daniel Whiteson?

  No solidarity over there.

• 35:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  We're connected.

• 35:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Tell us what we learned from the earthworms.

• 35:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Okay. Well, all right. So, so as you noted, you can track where carbon is going by radio labeling it and seeing where it ends up. But one of the problems there is that, one, you often can't be 100% sure that the same fungus is connecting multiple individuals. And two, resources diffuse across soil in like a source sink dynamic sort of way. So you could have carbon moving from, you know, an area where a tree is making a lot of it to an area where a tree is making less of it. And it doesn't necessarily need to be passing through the fungus to get from one place to another.

• 36:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Wait, trees take carbon from the air and then it just diffuses out of the tree? I thought it like, it's part of the wood, right? Isn't wood basically cellulose, which is made out of carbon? Why are they losing their carbon?

• 36:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, part of the deal with trees and fungi, like their symbiosis, is that the trees extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then they use that carbon to build themselves and they give some of that carbon to their fungal symbiotes. And so I guess the idea is that some of that carbon doesn't stay with the fungus.

• 36:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, I see. Interesting.

• 36:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. So some, one of the ways that people try to study this is that they will like for a quote unquote, control tree, they'll put a tree in a mesh bag.

• 36:49Daniel Whiteson?

  A control tree. I'm sorry.

• 36:53Daniel Whiteson?

  The one tree that controls them all. That's what it sounds like, the control tree. All right.

• 36:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. Well, so, so say you were trying to do an experiment and you wanted to see if some chemical that you put in tree one made it to tree two through the fungus.

• 37:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 37:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  You would want to have another tree in the area that didn't have a fungal connection so that you could confirm that it didn't end up taking up that chemical. And that would be a way of saying, oh, the fungus is important in making sure that stuff gets from tree one to tree two. Does that make sense?

• 37:23Daniel Whiteson?

  So you want a positive signal where you see it happening with the fungus and you want an absence of a positive signal without the fungus?

• 37:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Exactly.

• 37:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Got it. Okay.

• 37:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. So

• 37:32Daniel Whiteson?

  See, biology is not that hard.

• 37:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 37:37Daniel Whiteson?

  You got nothing to say to that, huh?

• 37:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm just, I'm just moving on because otherwise we're never going to get to the end of this. So, all right. So they put these trees in mesh bags. But the problem is, these mesh bags have to have a very fine mesh so that you can make sure that the fungus can't get in to connect with the roots of the tree to transfer the nutrients.

• 37:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 37:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  And if you have a mesh that is that small, that might mess up diffusion through the soil. And so like, whatever chemical you injected in the tree, maybe could have made it to the other tree, even if there was no fungus there, just because of the way stuff moves through the soil on its own. Does that make sense?

• 38:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Turns out biology is complicated, actually.

• 38:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thank you. We were gonna get there. We were always gonna get there. So this stuff is really hard to study in the lab, but it's also even harder to study in the field. So most of the evidence that we have is from the lab. And we do know that it is possible for fungus to connect multiple trees and transfer things between them. And part of how we know that is from orchids, which aren't trees, but like, there are some kind of orchids that have lost the ability to produce their own carbon. They don't have, they don't make chlorophyll anymore. They're white, or sometimes like multiple other colors that are not green. And they connect to fungus and they steal carbon from other trees through the fungus.

• 38:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. Interesting.

• 38:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  So we do know that fungus can be used to sort of transport things like carbon around. But then the question is, is it like, A, preferentially going to the seedlings from a mother tree? And B, for things like big trees in a forest where there's a lot of other stuff going on, is it an important contribution to the like nutrients and stuff that they need to survive? And so for those claims, there's some evidence in the lab. Sometimes the evidence in the lab is even mixed. And in the field, there's very little evidence, in particular, very little evidence for this mother tree idea. And there was a whole book called Finding the Mother Tree. And the review papers that I read were like, no, there's really like no evidence for this.

• 39:41Daniel Whiteson?

  And people should understand the difference between seeing something in the lab and seeing something in the field. Like, there's lots of things which work in the lab because it's a really simple environment on purpose, so you can understand the simple version of it. But to be relevant to what's actually happening in the world, right? It has to work in the complicated environment of Earth. And that sometimes, like, the answers can be very different, right? In the field and in the lab.

• 40:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, massively different.

• 40:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Because biology is really hard, actually.

• 40:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thank you. And another thing to note is that often when you read about this in like popular science articles or books, it has a like nice altruistic kind of feel to it. But it's worth noting that things like chemicals that trees produce to kill other trees that they're competing with can also pass through these like fungal networks.

• 40:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, wow.

• 40:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  And it's not necessarily the case that, you know, when messages are being sent that help another tree, it's not necessarily the case that one tree was trying to help another tree. So for example, sometimes if a tree gets attacked by an insect, it will release chemicals that attract parasitoids that will then go kill those insects. And there's some evidence that the chemicals that it's releasing are also initiating responses in nearby trees. And so it's, it might be tempting to think, oh, this one tree is trying to tell the trees in the area, hey, I'm getting attacked. You might be next. You should also start responding. But it could just be that the other trees are eavesdropping. They're like, over evolutionary time, other trees have been able to queue in on a tree

• 41:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  essentially screaming because it's being attacked and being like, oh, I'm next. I should start producing this compound so I can get a head start on things.

• 41:26Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, if trees screamed when we chopped them down, do you think we would chop them down so much?

• 41:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  We'd have probably a very different relationship with trees, I think.

• 41:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Unless they screamed all the time for no particular reason.

• 41:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  That, yeah, unless they were crying wolf all the time.

• 41:42Daniel Whiteson?

  This makes me think about the morality we're constantly overlaying on these questions is like all this altruism and like helpfulness and whatever. It's fascinating how we're trying to like anthropomorphize these trees, right? And think about like judgments and feeling good about the forest. You know, it just makes no sense. You know, as an example, like if a tree killed and ate another tree, it could still be a vegetarian, you know, but that wouldn't make it like good in some way, right? Anyway, my whole point is that like putting these anthropomorphic moral questions onto trees just is really a distraction.

• 42:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, absolutely. And one of the review papers was arguing that we need to stop like personifying trees and trying to like, you know, lay our human values on top of what we're seeing happening in a forest because they mess with our ability to actually understand what's going on.

• 42:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 42:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  And, you know, these kinds of studies are important because they can inform things like forestry projects. So if it is the case that like a mother tree has an outsourced impact on the other trees in the area, you might not want to cut the mother tree down, even if that's the best tree for producing, I don't know, toilet paper or lumber or something. Like, it might change the decisions that you make if one tree is having an outsized effect on the other trees in the forest. So, you know, these kinds of things are important, but also these papers were pointing out that we have gotten way ahead of ourselves in the narrative about what's happening in forests. And to some extent, I think there's been this desire to not pull back because it's making people more excited about forests and making them think that forests are more magical.

• 43:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Maybe they care more about conserving forests. And so a question that I've been seeing the field grapple with is like, well, is it really doing any harm? And I would say yes, because the truth almost always gets out eventually. And if the public feels like they've been lied to, I think you've done more harm than good in the long term. And it's always, I think it's always in our best interest to lead with what we really know and what we don't know.

• 43:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Everything you've been taught is a lie, man. It's a very powerful message and it works.

• 43:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, and so your point is we need to be honest from the beginning. Is that what you, yeah, yes.

• 43:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly.

• 43:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, absolutely. Yeah, so these three papers were, have been trying to push back on like, look, here, this is really complicated. We don't have a lot of data in the field. We do know that some stuff can pass through fungus from one tree to another, but like, what are the implications and who's benefiting and how often that happens and how much it matters for the trees? These are all questions that we understand kind of in the lab, but we get mixed results in the lab and we understand the results even less in the field.

• 44:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Which means we don't understand them at all.

• 44:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, we understand them a little. You got to start somewhere, but like, but yes, these things are very difficult because ecology is very difficult. Designing these experiments requires a lot of cleverness and, you know, trying to tease apart when you're in a complicated environment, one effect out of like, you know, a sea of stuff that's happening can be really complicated.

• 44:42Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, well, let's send this conversation over to David and see if we have scratched his itch.

• 44:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thank you so much for that answer. I really appreciate it. It sounds like this topic has a lot more study and perhaps debate needed to get to the final answer, but it was a lot of fun hearing the both of you talk about it. That's one thing I really appreciate about the show is, quite frankly, it's, it's your candor. I like that you seem to really want to help the greater community to understand the delicate nuances that come with the study of the natural world. So thanks again for all you do.

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• 50:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, next up, we have a question from Chris about matter and antimatter annihilation.

• 50:15Speaker 03

  Hello, Daniel and Kelly. I have a question about the result of matter/antimatter annihilation. My understanding is that when matter and antimatter meet, the electric charge cancels out, but the mass needs to go somewhere. So it gets converted into energy, and that energy gets dumped into the electromagnetic field, and the result is photons. Do I have that right? If so, do we have any idea why the energy goes into the photon field and not, say, the Higgs field or the Z boson field? They're both electrically neutral, right? Thank you so much for your answer.

• 50:48Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Thank you, Chris, for asking this question. I get this kind of question a lot, and it's a wonderful opportunity to clear up some misunderstandings about annihilation and matter and antimatter.

• 50:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, and let's start with what is antimatter. I know on the show, we've had some really interesting conversations about like, why do we have more matter than antimatter? What happened early in the universe to bring that about?

• 51:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 51:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  But let's start at the beginning. What is antimatter?

• 51:12Daniel Whiteson?

  So particle physics is about seeing patterns. You know, we're trying to understand what is the nature of the universe, and the way we do it is by like, looking at all the different kinds of particles out there, and looking for patterns among them, symmetries, clues as to what might be like the next layer of reality even deeper. The way that we like, look to the periodic table, and we saw patterns, and they give us clues about atomic structure. Now, we're looking at the pattern of the fundamental particles, and we're looking for clues that we hope will reveal like the squiglyons underneath, or whatever it is. And so we're very sensitive to these patterns. And one of the fascinating patterns is that every particle that has a charge seems to have a partner. It's like a mirror symmetry, where you can take a particle, and you could say, okay, I found a particle with a negative charge. Is there the equivalent particle that's exactly the same, but with

• 51:57Daniel Whiteson?

  the opposite charge? And the answer seems to be so far, always yes. So this is matter and antimatter. It's a little bit confusing, because we call one matter and one antimatter, but it's really more a relationship. It's not like there's anything matter-y or antimatter-y about any of the particles. It doesn't matter if you have positive or negative charge. You can be matter and be positive. You can be matter and be negative. The matter/antimatter thing is a relationship. The electron and the positron, which have opposite charges but the same mass, have that relationship. They're a matter/antimatter pair. And which one you call matter, and which one you call antimatter, doesn't even matter. We call some of them matter because they're around in the universe, and the antimatter is gone.

• 52:40Daniel Whiteson?

  The thing to understand there is that it's a relationship, and every particle we've found so far has an antimatter partner.

• 52:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  And longtime listeners of the show will not be surprised that physicists came up with a kind of confusing name for this stuff, but Daniel is here to help lead the way.

• 52:56Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm not going to defend physics against your shade-throwing about naming, because it's totally fair. So the second topic we're dealing with today is annihilation. This is something you hear about a lot. It's in pop sci, matter and antimatter meet, and they instantly annihilate and turn into pure energy, man. Wow. And that's a little bit misleading. You know, you should think about particle/antiparticle annihilation just the same way we think about particles interacting, right? So when we have matter/antimatter annihilation, what happens is like, an electron comes in, a positron comes in, they turn into a photon. So it's not pure energy. It always turns into some other kind of particle. And so what's happening there is you have two particles coming in, electron and positron, and one particle coming out, right? So the particles that came in, they're gone. The

• 53:41Daniel Whiteson?

  amazing thing about particle physics is that it's not chemistry, where you're rearranging the little pieces into new organizations. It's alchemy. You're changing the kind of matter, right? The electron and the positron are gone. They no longer exist. You're transforming them into a photon.

• 53:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is it a photon plus energy, or just a photon, and that's?

• 54:01Daniel Whiteson?

  It's just a photon. A photon is just energy, though. It's energy in the electromagnetic field.

• 54:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 54:07Daniel Whiteson?

  And so this is the typical thing for particle physics, is that the interactions turn two particles into one, or one particle into two. So it's two to one, or one to two. So examples of two-to-one processes are like electron plus positron gives you a photon, right? But you can also turn this around. It's like a little tinker toy. You can turn around in any direction. You can also do like, electron absorbs a photon, stays an electron. That's a two-to-one process. The photon is gone.

• 54:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  So that would not be annihilation?

• 54:38Daniel Whiteson?

  That's not annihilation. That's right.

• 54:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 54:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Or you can have a positron absorb a photon and stay a positron. It's fundamentally the same process, just in a different order. But the one where we have matter and antimatter come in and disappear to turn into a photon, that's the one we call annihilation, has a special name. But they're really all different manifestations of the same fundamental thing, which is two particles interact, one particle come out. Now, the interesting thing about annihilation is that none of the original particles come out, right? Whereas in the other ones, like electron plus photon gives you electron, you start with an electron, you end with an electron. So it feels like it's the same electron. It's not really the same electron. You know, it's like you have two particles come in, one particle comes out. It doesn't have to be one of the particles that was originally. It can be, but it's

• 55:25Daniel Whiteson?

  really a fundamentally different particle now, because it's like, absorb this photon. So when none of the original particles survive, and you get something new, we call that annihilation. But it's, you know, it's just one example of kind of things particles can do.

• 55:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  When you have an electron plus a photon, and you get an electron, and that electron is different, is it different in some, is it, how is it different?

• 55:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, well, you know, every electron is the same. In some sense, they're all identical fluctuations of the same field, but it's a different fluctuation now. It has more energy.

• 56:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 56:00Daniel Whiteson?

  So, you know, it's not the same electron in that sense. And this philosophical question of like, can you trace the same electron through the universe, or whatever, you know, I think is putting like, a classical framing on something which really is quantum.

• 56:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 56:15Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, because these particles can disappear, appear all the time. So tracking an individual one doesn't really make any sense.

• 56:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 56:22Daniel Whiteson?

  So you could also do the opposite. You can go from one particle to two, like a photon can turn into an electron and a positron. That's exactly the opposite of annihilation. We call it pair creation.

• 56:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why don't you call it anti-annihilation?

• 56:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Because we're not as smart as biologists, Kelly, that's why.

• 56:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I knew that.

• 56:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. You can also have an electron emit a photon. So it goes from electron to electron plus photon, right? And so the ones where we have particle/antiparticle come in and turn into something else, we call those annihilation, because it sounds cool. But it's really just an ordinary interaction, where neither of the initial particles survive. You can also have annihilation without particle/antiparticle, like you can have an electron and anti-neutrino come together, and they turn into a W particle. So that's not a particle and antiparticle, but both of the original ones are gone, right? So that's just another example of an interaction. Basically, the point is, anytime you have an interaction, the initial particles come in, new particles come out. Sometimes, some of the new particles

• 57:24Daniel Whiteson?

  are the same as the old particles. Sometimes, they're not. They doesn't have to be. There's all sorts of rules about it. So that's the basics of matter/antimatter, annihilation, and particle interaction. We don't think of annihilation as special. It's just one example of interactions that's gotten a lot of popular attention.

• 57:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so pure energy, that phrase is just like?

• 57:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 57:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hocum.

• 57:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, you know, really what's happening here is that it doesn't have to be matter, like electrons and positrons can turn into a photon, which we don't consider matter. It's radiation. And so a photon is just made of energy. There's no mass to it. But it's not like it's energy disassociated from any sort of field. It's always energy in a field. You have the electron field, which has an electron, a positron in it, has ripples, they come together, they annihilate, it dumps that energy into the electromagnetic field, then it ripples. So yeah, pure energy is sort of misleading. It turns into a photon. And Chris's question is, does it have to? Can it turn into something else? This is an excellent question, Chris, and you're totally right that it can turn into something else. For example, the electron and positron

• 58:31Daniel Whiteson?

  can turn into a photon, and they most often do because that's the most powerful interaction they have. But they could also turn into a Z boson, right? There's nothing preventing that. The Z boson has net zero electric charge. So it satisfies all the accounting rules, or you have to conserve electric charge. You come in with a positive and a negative, so the total charge of the initial state is zero. So the total charge of the final state has to be zero. So you need something with zero charge. And the options are photon, we know that happens, Z, that definitely happens, or a Higgs. We haven't seen that happen, but we're pretty sure that it does happen. And so electron and positron can turn into anything that's neutral that satisfy all of the particle physics accounting rules.

• 59:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  So is this one of those amazing situations where the listener is 100% correct?

• 59:19Daniel Whiteson?

  He is, and he's even more correct than he thought because the same insight he had applies to other situations, like two quarks can annihilate, and they can annihilate into a photon, or a Z, or a Higgs. They can also turn into a gluon because they have that kind of interaction. So there are other things that you can turn into. So yeah, Chris, you're 100% right. And when people talk about annihilation and they say pure energy, they're really probably referring to photons, but it's more general. You could turn into a photon, a Z, a Higgs. And more broadly, you should just think about annihilation as one kind of particle interaction. It feels important whether or not the initial particles end up in the final particles, but it's not really.

• 1:00:01Daniel Whiteson?

  And from a particle physics point of view, we sort of give up on the initial particles anytime there's an interaction. And whether the final particles share a label with the initial particles doesn't really matter. We don't think of them as the initial particles anyway.

• 1:00:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Well, let's ship this answer to Chris and see what he's got to say.

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. Thanks for answering my question. That was very interesting. I knew that pure energy was just a scam. I'm also very intrigued by what you said about the photon interaction being the most powerful interaction, but I suppose that's for another show. Can't wait to hear more particle goodness. Thank you very much.

• 1:00:36Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Thank you, everybody, for asking these questions. We really do love hearing from you. And we love that you are curious about the universe, and I'm just happy to be along for the ride.

• 1:00:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  We massively appreciate that you come to us when you have a question about, you know, how accurate a topic is, or you want to dig in a little bit more deeply. Thank you for trusting us with your questions. We appreciate it.

• 1:01:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us.

• 1:01:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

• 1:01:14Daniel Whiteson?

  He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, D and K Universe. Come engage with us.

• 1:01:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  You can email us at [email protected]. We really do want to hear from you.

• 1:01:30Daniel Whiteson?

  And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

• 1:01:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

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