What if dark matter is more complicated?

Daniel and Kelly talk about a particularly quirky theory of dark matter that Daniel is searching for. 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?

  What is the universe made out of? This is the central question that animates my research and my entire career, and I've been working on it for decades. Humanity's been working on it for centuries or even millennia. Why haven't we figured it out yet? Well, turns out, like lots of things, it's complicated. And just when we thought we were getting our minds around what our kind of matter is made out of, it turns out that our kind of matter is unusual, it's weird, it's not the typical thing in the universe. The problem is so much bigger, so much broader than we even imagined. And understanding what the rest of the universe is made out of is going to take some real creativity, not just in thinking about what it might be made out of, but how we actually search for it.

• 5:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Today on the episode, we'll talk about a new quirky idea for what dark matter might be made out of, and how it inspired a whole new technology to look for these kinds of quirky particles. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinarily quirky universe.

• 6:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Weinersmith. I study parasites and space and look forward to an episode where I repeatedly mix up quirks and quirks. That's what's coming, friends.

• 6:20Daniel Whiteson?

  It's quirks and quirks, Kelly.

• 6:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Are you serious? I didn't even get the two words right?

• 6:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes. Nailed it.

• 6:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, man. Introduce yourself, dweeb.

• 6:31Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, I'm Daniel White, and I'm a particle physicist who likes thinking about aliens, and I have actually looked for quirks out in the wild.

• 6:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah, I'm excited that we're talking about your research today. But my question for you, because I read the outline to the end. Good job, Kelly.

• 6:50Daniel Whiteson?

  I think you protest too much a little bit there. I didn't doubt until you said that.

• 6:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, oh, oh, oh, let's move on. So, so the question at the top of your outline is, what if dark matter is complicated?

• 7:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 7:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Which made me think, what do you mean, what if? Like, when someone talks about a physics topic, I'm like, obviously, it's going to be complicated. So my question to you is, what physics topic is not complicated?

• 7:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wait, what topic should you be like, oh, this is complicated? I'm surprised. I didn't expect a physics topic to be complicated. This would be like, you know, I would be like, oh, today we're talking about biology, and the answer is going to be, it depends. And like, expecting people to be surprised. It's always, it depends.

• 7:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, a good example of something that turned out to be kind of simple is the Higgs boson. You know, before we discovered the Higgs, we had lots of different theories to explain how particles got masses. And then we also had lots of different Higgs theories, like, maybe there's one Higgs, maybe there's four Higgs, maybe there's these weird kinds of Higgs. And so we went out and we looked for it, and we found the Higgs. And then we studied it, and we've been studying it. And so far, the story is, it's the simplest version of the Higgs anybody imagined. We call it the vanilla Higgs, because there's nothing complicated about it, which is a little unfortunate, because we would love for it to be more complicated and interesting.

• 8:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, but, but A, didn't you have to build a super complicated machine that costs like billions of dollars to find it? Isn't that complicated?

• 8:25Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, in that sense, all of life is complicated, Kelly. Putting on a podcast is complicated. Sometimes going to the bathroom is complicated.

• 8:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my.

• 8:33Daniel Whiteson?

  But when I say, what if dark matter is complicated, I mean, what if it's not the simplest version of the story? You know, what we do in physics all the time is we say, here's a big question mark, we don't really know how to approach. Let's start by just assuming that the answer is the simplest version we can imagine, the simplest version that works, and we'll go with that. And if the data say otherwise, we'll adapt it, we'll develop it. Or if we just can't find the simplest version of it, we'll make it more complicated. But it's sort of like an Occam's razor approach, you know? Start with the simplest possible description, and then add flourishes as you need.

• 9:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, right. If you hear the sound of hooves pattering on the ground, assume horses, not zebras. Got it.

• 9:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. So we're going to dig into dark matter and all the various forms of it, and the ideas of what it might be in a minute. But today's episode is going to focus on a particular kind of weird dark matter that's fairly popular these days theoretically, and that's this little particle called a quirk. And so on today's episode, we are going to get quirky and talk about what quirks are and the quirky ways that we are looking for them. But first, I wanted to know if this particular weird little name for a hypothetical particle had crossed over into the pop-sai community. So I asked folks out there if they knew what a quirk was. If you would like to join this audience participation segment, we would love to have you write to us to [email protected].

• 9:59Daniel Whiteson?

  In the meantime, here's what a bunch of extraordinaries thought a quirk might be. Oh, they're odd little behaviors that people express.

• 10:07Speaker 07

  I would imagine it's something similar to a quark, maybe, but, you know, maybe it's something that is kind of interesting or funny about something that's their quirk. I'm pretty sure a quirk is a mutation that gives the person who has it supernatural abilities.

• 10:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  I love this. So based on the answers that we've received so far, it looks like they're falling into two categories, which are, uh, weird human behaviors, or very clever inferences, where they're like, oh, it sounds like quark.

• 10:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 10:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  So maybe it's related to that? And so I give you all a lot of credit for being clever.

• 10:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I had nothing to do with naming this particle. And it's not my favorite name, but it's true that it does sound related to a quark. And it is related to a quark. So, good job, Marcus, for naming this particle.

• 10:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wait, wait, you know, the guy who named the particle?

• 11:01Daniel Whiteson?

  I do. He's a physics professor at UC Davis and a friend of mine.

• 11:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, well, hi, Marcus. Does Marcus listen to the show?

• 11:09Daniel Whiteson?

  I guess we'll find out. Marcus, let me know if you listen to the show.

• 11:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so you were getting quirky. I'm gonna get quirky. Let's start by defining what a quark is.

• 11:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so quark with an A is the thing that we already know exists. And it's the foundation of matter. So remember that like we are made out of molecules. Those molecules are made out of atoms of the elements, you know, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, et cetera. Those elements all have the same structure. Those electrons surrounding a nucleus and inside the nucleus, you have protons and neutrons. Those protons and neutrons are then made out of quarks. In particular, two kinds of quark. There's the up quark and the down quark. And if you add two up quarks together and a down, or two down quarks together and an up, you get the proton and the neutron. So that's as far as we know so far. The quarks might have structure within them.

• 12:06Daniel Whiteson?

  They might be made out of tiny squiglyons or something. But as far as we know, that's the fundamental layer of matter so far.

• 12:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, and I am getting hung up on pronunciation. So you say it cork like the cork for a bottle of wine is how it sounds like you're saying it.

• 12:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I think that would be cork, and I'm saying quark. So it's like K W A R K, quark.

• 12:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Quark. All right, I'm still not, I'm gonna, I'll keep trying. I'll keep trying.

• 12:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Is this an unfamiliar word for you, years into the podcast? You're uncomfortable saying the word quark?

• 12:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, it's just now that we've thrown quark in there. It's now my, you know, my head gets, I get it too in my head sometimes. Anyway.

• 12:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Plus, you got your little East Coast accent going on there to distort everything a little bit.

• 12:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Makes everything a little bit more complicated, but a lot cooler.

• 12:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Meanwhile, I have the totally neutral West Coast accent, you know, the way English is meant to be spoken.

• 13:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Super boring, super boring. Okay. So we think this is a fundamental particle that makes up everything else. Where do we go from there?

• 13:11Daniel Whiteson?

  And there are other kinds of quarks. There's the charm and the strange, the top and the bottom, the six quarks in total. But the lightest quarks are the stable ones, the ones that hang around and you can use to build matter. So that's a lot of fun. It's a really interesting puzzle, like, why are there these quarks? What are they made out of, et cetera? But that's the structure of matter at the lowest scale. And again, we treat it as fundamental because that's the simplest version of the story. But probably it's more complex. Probably they're made out of something internal that we'll see when we build the Superduper Collider, et cetera. But for now, we can just think of them as fundamental because that story kind of works.

• 13:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 13:47Daniel Whiteson?

  And they're named from a poem, Finnegan's Wake. There's a line in there that says, "Three quarks for muster mark." And so this is like a word, I think, invented by James Joyce. And Murray Gell-Mann, who named the quarks as a concept, he pulled that line from the poem.

• 14:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  What? I didn't know that. Wait, and you're, I thought your friend Maurice named the more, what was?

• 14:10Daniel Whiteson?

  My friend Marcus, who I will now call Maurice, because he's a space cowboy and a particle physicist. No, he named quirks, but quarks, the thing we actually know exists, that we're trying not to confuse people about the difference between these two, even though their names are very similar, which is the frustrating thing. The quarks were named by Murray Gell-Mann, who won the Nobel Prize for coming up with the idea.

• 14:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it. Okay. And you really should have gotten a different co-host for today's show because if pronunciation is gonna be something that trips us up, we are doomed from the start. Okay.

• 14:42Daniel Whiteson?

  And the crucial feature of quarks is how they stick together, right? Because we don't see quarks out in the wild. We see pairs of quarks or we see triplets of quarks. Like you take three quarks, you make a proton or a different mixture, you get a neutron. You could also do pairs of quarks to make like a pion or a kaon, all sorts. There's a whole zoo of particles that are made out of pairs or triplets of these quarks. And the way they stick together is with the strong force. Same way that like the nucleus of the atom and the electron are bound together using electromagnetism. That's the way they attract and the reason they're held together. The way the earth and the sun are bound together using gravity. Quarks are bound together using the strong force, the strong nuclear force, which is the most powerful force we know of.

• 15:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  And that's, is that true for all six types of them?

• 15:28Daniel Whiteson?

  All six types of them feel the strong force. And the other particles, electrons, neutrinos, they don't feel a strong force at all. For those people who think about quantum field theory, they are not charged in the strong force. So they're just like neutral. The way that like a neutrino has no electric charge and so it can fly through an electric field without feeling it, electrons have no strong charge. So they can just fly through a color field, we call it, without feeling it.

• 15:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 15:54Daniel Whiteson?

  But the strong force is also much different from the other forces. Like electromagnetism and gravity, when things get further apart, the bond between them weakens, right?

• 16:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep.

• 16:05Daniel Whiteson?

  And you're used to that. And it even follows a cool geometric pattern, one over the distance squared. Just like if you shine a light, the intensity of that light gets weaker with distance. You get further away from a star, it gets weaker and weaker. And it makes sense. It's because the same amount of light is now going through the surface of a larger sphere. And the surface area of a sphere depends on the radius squared. So very cool geometric argument. The strong force ignores all of that. The strong force follows a different rule. It doesn't weaken with distance. After you get past a little distance, the force is constant. So things get further apart, but the force doesn't weaken. It's really, really weird.

• 16:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa, I'm trying to think about the implications for that. I feel like that would make all of the quarks kind of like pull in on each other?

• 16:51Daniel Whiteson?

  That's exactly right.

• 16:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Collapse in? Okay.

• 16:53Daniel Whiteson?

  It means that, for example, it takes an enormous amount of energy to have two quarks really far apart because they're far apart. And the force between them is still fairly strong. And the energy in that bond is the force times the distance. And so as they get further apart, the energy in that bond is huge. So it takes an enormous amount of energy to have two quarks and have them be far apart. And so it just doesn't happen. In fact, we've never seen a quark by itself because quarks just like to be together. What happens if you take two quarks and you pull, yes, cozy, right?

• 17:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 17:26Daniel Whiteson?

  What happens if you take two quarks that are like all snuggled up next to each other nicely and you pull them apart is that it takes a lot of energy. And the universe doesn't like high energy configurations. It likes lower energy configurations. It relaxes into lower energy configurations, like things cool down and balls roll down hills. Well, what it does here is it realizes that there's a lot of energy in this bond. And quarks themselves, the particles, are very, very low mass. So they're very easy to make out of energy. So the universe prefers to pop new quarks out of that energy, to turn that energy into new quarks to shorten the distance. So for example, if you take a quark and an antiquark and you pull them apart,

• 18:08Daniel Whiteson?

  then what will happen is a new quark-antiquark pair will appear in between them, shortening the distances between the quark pairs.

• 18:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Where do they come from?

• 18:18Daniel Whiteson?

  They just come from the energy of that bond. It takes a huge amount of energy to pull a quark-antiquark apart. And that energy just gets converted to mass because it's a lower energy configuration. It's actually higher entropy configuration, to be precise.

• 18:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nothing about physics is uncomplicated, Daniel.

• 18:35Daniel Whiteson?

  No, and you're right. The strong force is like the most complicated thing in physics. It's so powerful, it makes it really hard to do any calculations. And like anything involving the strong force is a big mess. But it's sort of like if you have a magnet and you have a north and a south and you cut it in half, then you get like a new north and a new south where the big magnet is now broken into two, right?

• 18:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 18:57Daniel Whiteson?

  And so what happens in practice when we create quark-antiquark pairs, like the collider, is that you have a lot of energy between them. And they don't just pop out one new pair of particles. They pop out like 10 or 100. So you get like a whole stream of particles. So this is what we call jets. And you might see this if you're reading about particle colliders. So we get these jets of particles produced. So when you create a quark in a particle collider, you don't see a single particle. You don't see a top quark or an up quark or a charm quark. You see a spray of particles produced from the energy of those bonds.

• 19:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's kind of fun.

• 19:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's pretty cool.

• 19:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's sort of like festive of you all to name and describe things that way.

• 19:38Daniel Whiteson?

  And so we know the quarks exist and we've seen them. In fact, we're drowning in them. We make them all the time at the Large Hadron Collider. They like get in the way of other discoveries because they're made so co-biously, jets are everywhere. But we want to understand the universe more deeply. And it turns out that quarks are a way to explain our kind of matter. So protons and neutrons and atoms. But most of the universe is not made out of that kind of matter. So if you want to actually understand what is the universe made out of? What are the rules it follows? What is its fundamental nature? You gotta think bigger.

• 20:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  But I've got a question first. Do you get jets of particles outside of like the Large Hadron Collider? Or do you only get them in particle colliders?

• 20:20Daniel Whiteson?

  You only get them in particle collisions when you break up particles. But that happens outside of the particle collider. Like the highest energy collisions on Earth are not made by humans. They're made when cosmic rays smash into the atmosphere. And those cosmic rays are just really, really high energy particles shot out from like the centers of other galaxies at insane energies, much higher than we can muster. And so you get these same kind of jets created in the atmosphere.

• 20:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Awesome.

• 20:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 20:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Man, describing it that way makes it sound like maybe you don't want to live in space where you could get hit with galactic cosmic radiation. But I'm not gonna bang on that drum too long. Yeah.

• 20:58Daniel Whiteson?

  You do not want a particle jet in the face, trust me.

• 21:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, no, that does not sound fun at all. Okay, let's take a break. And when we get back, we will stop talking about quarks and start talking about the other thing.

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• 26:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we're back and we're going to talk about our space cowboy's discovery of quirks. Thanks, Maurice.

• 26:15Daniel Whiteson?

  He didn't discover quirks. We don't know if quirks exist. They're just an idea, Kelly.

• 26:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, all right. Well, let's talk about the idea of quirks.

• 26:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So the idea of quirks is connected to the much bigger question of dark matter. Like, we have been studying matter for hundreds or thousands of years, but only recently discovered that most of the universe is not this kind of stuff. Right? Atomic matter is about 5% of the energy density of the universe. Stuff made out of quirks and electrons and stuff is unusual in the universe. Most of the universe is not this. You know, if the universe was a cupcake, dark energy would be the cakey part, dark matter would be the frosting, and we would be like the sprinkles on top.

• 26:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. I'm hungry now.

• 27:01Daniel Whiteson?

  And so the biggest chunk of that pie in dark energy, huge mystery. We talked about that in a recent episode. But today, we're going to focus on dark matter because dark matter is something we know is out there. And the question about dark matter is, what is it made out of? We've studied normal matter, atomic matter. We've drilled down into it. We understand what it's made out of, made out of quirks, et cetera. But we don't know anything about what dark matter is made out of. And yet, we know that it's out there.

• 27:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we know it's not a fudge factor.

• 27:28Daniel Whiteson?

  And we know it's not a fudge factor because we have overwhelming, independent, multi-pronged evidence for dark matter as matter. Remember, it was originally discovered because we were looking at galaxies, how they rotate, and wondering like, hey, is there enough gravity in that galaxy to hold it together? Because it's spinning pretty fast. And then they measured the amount of gravity they could see from everything that glows, all the stars, the gas. And there wasn't nearly enough gravity to hold it together. But galaxies are not tearing themselves apart. So that suggested there might be some new kind of invisible matter holding them together. And then we also saw some new kind of invisible matter bending how light moves through the universe. That's gravitational lensing. And we see evidence for a huge amount of invisible matter at the beginning of the universe

• 28:14Daniel Whiteson?

  because it left an imprint on the cosmic microwave background radiation. We see collisions between clusters of galaxies that separate this new kind of invisible matter from the luminous matter. And we can see that the invisible matter is there and separated from the luminous matter as its own kind of thing. And we look at the structure of the universe and how that's formed over time. And we can only explain that if there's a huge amount of invisible matter pulling gas together to make stars and galaxies. And that structure only forms if dark matter is matter, if it acts like matter, meaning that as the universe expands, it gets diluted in the same way that matter does. So we know it's there. We know there's a lot of it. We know it makes gravity. We know it's matter.

• 28:58Daniel Whiteson?

  The question is, what is it? Is it made out of atoms of a different kind? Is it made out of quirks of a different kind? Is it made out of squiglyons? We don't know. That is the deepest, biggest question in modern particle physics.

• 29:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so we were like super confident it exists. We can only measure it indirectly. We can't like look at it and pull it apart.

• 29:21Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right.

• 29:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Does it make sense to assume that it should mirror the matter that we know exists in any way? Because I'm going to assume that the similarity of the name suggests that we are assuming that dark matter has similar like things that make it up.

• 29:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, great question. Well, I think the right approach is let's come up with the simplest description we can that matches the observation and start there. And if that doesn't work, we'll add bells and whistles. And so the simplest thing to do is to say, well, look, all of our kind of matter is made of particles and described by quantum field theory. So what if dark matter is also made of particles? Just a different kind of particles? And also described by quantum field theory? And that could be wrong. That's just a guess. We have no evidence that dark matter is made of particles. It could be something totally new and different. We know that it gravitates. That's about it, right? We know that it clumps and it moves, so it's matter.

• 30:21Daniel Whiteson?

  But we don't know if it's actually made of particles. It could be made out of something else which isn't atomic, like in the sense that it's not made out of pieces, right? It could be that like, as you zoom in on dark matter, no new structure resolves. It just always looks the same, you know?

• 30:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's hard to wrap your head around.

• 30:38Daniel Whiteson?

  It is, right? And so we start with, maybe it's like the kind of thing we know, which again, could be wrong, right? But it's just a place to start. And so I think it's important in physics, especially in popular science, to be clear about what we know and what we don't know. So we're assuming, just so that we have something to do, something to look for.

• 30:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Somewhere to start, not just something to do. Implice that you're happy spinning your wheels, but you're actually, you're trying to make some progress with this starting point.

• 31:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, we want to go out and look for something. And so you need a specific idea of what you're going to look for. You can't just, you know, sit on your roof and smoke banana peels.

• 31:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  You can do both.

• 31:13Daniel Whiteson?

  And hope dark matter lands in your lap.

• 31:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, all right.

• 31:17Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, you can.

• 31:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Smoking banana peels and doing science doesn't have to be mutually exclusive, but okay.

• 31:23Daniel Whiteson?

  So one idea, the simplest idea is, what if dark matter is one kind of particle? And what if it has some kind of interaction with our matter, some new kind of force? And we haven't seen it before because it's a very, very weak force. Not weak with a capital W as in the weak force, but weak with a lowercase w as in like it's feeble. And we say that it has that kind of force only because that would make it possible for us to discover it. If dark matter only feels gravity, then we have no chance of ever discovering what particle it's made out of. Because an individual particle has basically no gravity. You know, gravity already is 10 to the 30 times weaker than everything else.

• 32:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Particles are super duper tiny, so measuring the gravity of a particle seems impossible. So we say, all right, what's the simplest thing we could actually find? And that's dark matter made out of one kind of particle that has a little bit of a force to it that could bump into our kind of particles and we could maybe see that. So there's a big program of research in that direction, like huge, quiet chambers of xenon underground, waiting for dark matter to come and bump into one of the xenon nuclei and we could see it. Really cool experiments, really amazing, seen nothing so far.

• 32:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Isn't, isn't dark matter everywhere? So wouldn't you expect it to be running into xenon like all the time if that was? You've explained this experiment on the show before.

• 32:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 32:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I am asking you to do it again.

• 32:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, you're right. We expect dark matter to be everywhere. We think that we are in the middle of a dark matter ocean. Actually, because it's flying through us, it's more like a dark matter wind. The problem is that the interaction between dark matter and matter has to be really, really small, or we would have seen it already. If the interaction between dark matter and matter was like other kinds of interactions, like electromagnetism or the strong force, it'd be happening all the time. It'd be obvious around us. We would have seen it forever ago. But for us to not have seen it has to be very, very weak. So even though dark matter is everywhere, the chances of a dark matter particle going through a xenon atom and actually interacting and bumping it are very, very small. For the most part, it is phased right through. They're a lot like neutrinos from that point of view.

• 33:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  How would you tell the difference between a neutrino that bumped into your xenon particle and dark matter that bumped into your xenon particle?

• 33:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, really hard to do. And that's one of the things that makes that search much more complicated is that neutrinos are everywhere. And we were hoping for a while that dark matter would have a higher rate of interacting with xenon than neutrinos. And so they would like sit above that. But we haven't seen them, which means that if dark matter does exist, it interacts less often than neutrinos. So then it becomes even harder to spot. You have to see more interactions than you expect from just neutrinos and make a statistical argument. So it's getting pretty tough.

• 34:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  The good news is we're a clever species and I think we'll figure it out. But we haven't yet. Okay.

• 34:20Daniel Whiteson?

  And one thing to do is to keep doing those experiments and make them bigger and bigger and more sensitive and try to make it more refined. Another thing to do is to go back and say, hmm, what if one of our assumptions was wrong? Maybe dark matter isn't the simplest possible thing, right? Maybe dark matter is more complicated. And I'm sure a bunch of folks out there are saying, well, how do you know dark matter isn't just made out of quarks? And it's not like tied up in some particles you haven't seen? And we have an answer to that. We know that dark matter can't be made of quarks because we know a lot about how many quarks there are in the universe. It's an incredible bit of science. But basically, as the universe was cooling very, very early on, there was a moment when the universe was about the density of the center of the sun.

• 35:04Daniel Whiteson?

  And during that moment, it could do what the center of the sun can do, which is fuse to make heavier stuff. And it did. It made helium and a little bit of lithium. And the amount of helium that it made is very sensitive to the density of quarks at that moment. And so because we can measure how much helium there is and we can tell how much was made in the early universe, we know how many quarks there were billions of years ago. And there's not nearly enough to explain dark matter. So dark matter can't be made out of quarks. But my friend Marcus, who you call Maurice, had another idea. He said, well, what if dark matter is more like our matter? Instead of imagining that it's just made of one particle,

• 35:47Daniel Whiteson?

  what if there's a whole bunch of particles with complicated interactions? Like more like a mirror of the kind of matter we know and love. And so he said, well, what if there's a version of quarks but dark, so like dark quarks? And so instead of calling them dark quarks, which I think is pretty cool, he called them quirks.

• 36:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  The Goth in me likes dark quarks.

• 36:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, right? It makes you feel like black lipstick or something.

• 36:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 36:10Daniel Whiteson?

  So dark quarks or quirks are quark-like particles that have a dark, strong force that binds them together. And so it's a different interaction, it's a different force, but it has the same sort of mathematical structure, et cetera. So you take the idea of quarks bound together by the strong force. You just copy and paste it over to the dark sector and say, we got dark quarks bound together with the dark, strong force.

• 36:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, but just to be clear, you, so you said, we know that they're not quarks because we know from the beginning of the universe, we've got that totally figured out. And so what does it? I think I still don't understand what it means to have a dark version of it, if it's definitely not a quark.

• 36:50Daniel Whiteson?

  It's definitely not a quark. It's just another idea for what dark matter might be made out of. And this particular theory has one more tweak to it. He says, well, what if we take these dark quarks, these quirks, and we make them heavy? We make them fairly massive. We make them like five or 10 or 20 times the mass of a proton, much, much heavier than the quirks we know and love. What he discovered is that something interesting happens. Let's remember what happens when you produce a pair of quarks in the collider. You pull them apart. Remember, there's a huge amount of energy in that bond. But because quarks are very low mass, they're cheap to make out of energy. What happens is you pop a bunch of them out of that bond. You get a spray of these particles.

• 37:32Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so now back to the dark sector, the dark quarks, the quirks. What if the quirks are really massive? So when you pull these two particles apart, you don't have the energy to make new ones. There's not enough energy in that bond to make new quirks because quirks cost too much. Well, what's going to happen is that they're going to come back together. So this is really interesting because if you did make a quirk and an anti-quirk at the Large Hadron Collider, what would happen is that they would be produced, they would start moving apart, and then they would come back together and they would oscillate back and forth and back and forth. So this would look very, very different from the kinds of particles we're used to seeing.

• 38:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  And because they're massive, should we be able to measure that?

• 38:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Because they're massive, they're too expensive to make out of the energy in their bonds. Their bond remains. And so then, yes, their mass means that we can see them oscillating. Instead of spraying it a bunch of other particles, like we never see quarks by themselves because they're so low mass compared to the energy of their bond, that they're surrounded by sprays of other quarks that pull themselves together to make other particles. Like we see protons and neutrons and kaons. But quirks are very expensive to make. And so when you do make them, you can see them by themselves. We think that it's possible to see individual quirks if we make them at the collider and the predictions are spectacular. You know, they have these simulations of what a quirk would look like.

• 38:58Daniel Whiteson?

  And it makes this like zigzag, almost this like oscillatory pattern in the detector, which looks like nothing else you would ever see in your collider.

• 39:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do we see that?

• 39:08Daniel Whiteson?

  So I decided to ask that question and it turns out to be harder to answer than I expected.

• 39:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Because physics!

• 39:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Let's take a break and when we get back, we will have the rare treat of hearing about research that Daniel has done.

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• 44:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we're back. And we are talking about Daniel's search for dark quirks. And Daniel, is Maurice a co-author on this paper? Since you guys are friends. And or is Marcus? Marcus was not part of this study.

• 44:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Marcus, the space cowboy slash physics professor, wrote the original paper on quirks. And there's been a whole bunch of papers following up on this idea. Because it's theoretically reasonable. Like, all you need is dark matter to have interesting particles with interesting interactions, like the strong force, and for them to be kind of massive. That turns out to be like, not a lot to ask theoretically. So the theorists are like, oh yeah, this could be real. And it makes a kind of spectacular prediction, which would be really fun to see. And so the experimentalists were like, ooh, that sounds like fun. Let's look for it. So it's become sort of popular in the community. And a bunch of people have written papers about it. The problem is that though it sounds spectacular and obvious, it actually turns out to be quite hard to find these things.

• 45:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  And what makes it so hard? Shouldn't those zigzags be easy to see in the data?

• 45:11Daniel Whiteson?

  I think those zigzags would be easy to see in the data if you knew where to look. Like, if I showed you data from the collider that produced quirks, I think you could look at it and be like, oh my gosh, look at that. That's something. Whoa, let's go to Stockholm. The problem is that we have lots and lots and lots of data. You know, we collide particles every 24 nanoseconds and produce these sprays of particles and analyze it. So there's just zillions and zillions of events. And so 50 years ago, we used to analyze this data with trackers. Trackers were people. They would like, look at an image of a collision and say, oh, here I see a particle. Oh, here I see a particle. Oh, there I see a particle.

• 45:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 45:52Daniel Whiteson?

  And you can find these pictures of these mostly ladies who sat there analyzing physics data.

• 45:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Awesome.

• 45:57Daniel Whiteson?

  And like, finding tracks. And that was cool back in the day when, you know, you just had like, a big piece of emulsion and a mountain top. And you collected it once a year and sliced it up and found the tracks. But when you're collecting data at 40 megahertz, you know, there's just not enough tracker ladies in the world to do this. And so we had to move to computerized tracking. And computers, you know, they're very powerful, but they also just follow your instructions. They do what you ask. Which means if you don't tell them to look for quirks, then they're not going to find quirks. And the way that we've written our computer programs to find particle tracks makes it impossible for them to ever see quirks.

• 46:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh. All right. And so you just need to tell your computer programs, go see dark quirks. And then they will.

• 46:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. Exactly right. Yeah, it's that simple. No, it's a fascinating puzzle because it's actually quite hard to write a computer program that will find these particle tracks and do it in a reasonable amount of time.

• 46:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 46:58Daniel Whiteson?

  And the reason is that you don't actually see the whole particle. Our detector is like a layer of cameras. And each one takes a picture of particles that are going by. And so you never see like, a smooth trajectory for a particle. What you see is like, a blip here, and a blip there, and a blip somewhere else. It's like if you saw Bigfoot running across your backyard, but you don't have video. You have like, a strobe light, and it takes a picture here, and a picture there, and a picture there. And then later, you put it together into like, okay, here was Bigfoot's trajectory. And so we have that. But we have like, 2,000 particles all at the same time. And so the job of the computer program is to go through all those little blips and to say, oh, hey, this set of blips, this was a particle. That set of blips, that was a particle. This set of blips over here, this was a particle.

• 47:43Daniel Whiteson?

  And to do that, it has to consider all the possible arrangements. Like, what if it's this set of blips? What if it's that set of blips? And when you have thousands and thousands of blips, the number of possibilities is overwhelming. It's just too much, even for very powerful computers, to consider all the possibilities. So what we do is what we always do in physics, which is we make simplifying assumptions, right? We start with the simplest version. We say, well, what if we knew something about the shapes of those trajectories? About how they move through space? That would make it easier to find them because we wouldn't have to consider all sorts of weird stuff. So years and years ago, when people were first solving this problem, they said, let's only consider one trajectory, which is a helix, which is how particles move

• 48:27Daniel Whiteson?

  through a magnetic field when they have an electric charge. And that's what these particles are. They're moving through an electric field. And so they said, let's only look for a helix. And so that made the problem solvable. It's still expensive. And a huge fraction of our computing budget at CERN is dedicated to just finding particle tracks. Even if you assume it's a helix, it's still hard and it's still expensive. And so that's the way we find particles now. But if there was a quirk in our data, our computers would ignore it. It would say, that's not a helix. I'm not looking for that. So, trash. And so that's like, exciting but frustrating because it means that, on one hand, there could be quirks and they could be in our data. And they could be ready to be discovered right now.

• 49:10Daniel Whiteson?

  If you only knew which collision of the zillions and zillions to look at, to put on your screen, your brain could probably pull it out and be like, buy my ticket to Stockholm. But it's frustrating because like, there's zillions and zillions of collisions, and no human could look through all of them. And so we needed to find a way to find tracks that were not helices. Find tracks that were other shapes.

• 49:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  And is there a particular shape you'd be looking for? So you said they go apart and then they pull back together. Would you be looking for like, a detector to get triggered? And then triggered again as the particle comes like, back together on the way back? Does that make sense?

• 49:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So that's exactly right. We were looking for a very particular, striking kind of pattern for it to move in this oscillatory way. For the particles to go out and then come back in, and then go out and come back in, oscillate. Or sometimes when they're produced, it produces a pair and they move out together through the detector, but they zigzag sideways. So there's all these really spectacular trajectories that we were looking for. And Marcus came up with this idea for quirks like, more than 10 years ago. And there were some folks at Berkeley who had an idea for like, how to do a shortcut to maybe find hints that there were quirks. But I wanted to do it a little bit more deeply. I wanted to actually find trajectories of these quirks. And so we used a recent machine learning algorithm

• 50:28Daniel Whiteson?

  to train a computer to find specifically this kind of trajectory. There's a machine learning algorithm that knows how to find particle tracks. And you never have to specify exactly what shape you're looking for. Like, lots of AI or machine learning, you just train it. So we gave it a bunch of examples of quirks that we simulated. And we said, hey, here's something you should look for. Hey, learn to look for this thing. We trained it over and over and over again. And then we gave it new data that hadn't seen before and that had quirks in it that we just simulated. And it was able to find them. And so this was our first paper. We said, okay, it turns out that thanks to machine learning, you can find particle paths that Are not the simple helix that most particles move in.

• 51:11Daniel Whiteson?

  You can learn to find other kinds of trajectories. And so now we have a tracker that's able to find quirks that we can run on the data from CERN. And if the quirks are in it, it will pull them out.

• 51:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, when are you going to start doing that? Why are you talking to me, Daniel?

• 51:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, the challenge is that it's expensive to run because CERN has a lot of data. And running an algorithm over that data costs a lot of computing time. And there's lots of people who think they have great ideas for how to spend that computing time, and they're all right. Everybody's correct. There are a lot of great ideas. So we have to argue that this is worth CERN's computing time to give us access to the data to run over it. And one reasonable objection is like, well, you know, what if it's not quirks? What if there's something else in the data that you didn't expect? What if it's not some helix, but it's something else new? Why just look for quirks? And, you know, this was my concern also. I was like, you know, I don't actually care about quirks. Quirks are cool. They would explain dark matter. Maybe they're real.

• 52:13Daniel Whiteson?

  But the more fascinating idea is what if there's something in our data that's unexpected? Not quirks, but like schmerks or, you know, blurks or whatever, something that doesn't move as a helix.

• 52:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  I hope you get to name something.

• 52:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Something that doesn't move in a weird oscillating pattern, just something that moves weirdly, something new and striking. Cause in the same way, if you saw that in our data, you'd be like, whoa, that's something new and weird. Your eyes, your brain could identify it, even if you didn't have a theory yet to motivate it. Cause you know, not all experimental discoveries have to be anticipated, right? It's not like somebody says, I propose particle X, go look for it. We can actually, as experimentalists, discover new things about the nature, right? Without knowing that they exist. And that's my personal scientific fantasy is to find something new and unexpected that when you see it, people are like, what? That makes no sense. Those are the best discoveries.

• 53:10Daniel Whiteson?

  So we thought about how to take our machine learning quirk tracker and generalize it, make it be able to find anything new, anything weird. And we were able to do it because the way the machine learning algorithm works is you never have to specify the thing you're looking for. You just have to train it. So we took another machine learning code and we trained it to find helices and we trained it to find quirks. And then we just generated a bunch of weird stuff, like all sorts of crazy trajectories. And we trained it to find those. So we showed it all sorts of insane examples. And then we asked, well, is it able to find unexpected stuff? So we came up with even crazier trajectories and it was able to find those.

• 53:52Daniel Whiteson?

  So now we have a machine learning based tracker that's able to find trajectories of particles we haven't even anticipated, for which there is no theory, which if we find it, some theorist is going to have to go, what? How's that possible? I'm going to have to go back to the chalkboard and figure out how to explain that, which would be amazing. And the other advantage is that now we don't have to just look for quirks. We can look for anything new and weird in the data. So, you know, maybe the data has something new and exciting in it, and maybe our tracker is going to find it. I certainly hope so.

• 54:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  So as I thought I understood it, LHC like gives out its data to anyone, whenever, like, or any of the scientists that are associated with the LHC. You can just like download the data. What you're saying is that it's not actually how it works. You need to use their computers to run your algorithm to analyze the data because it's just so much data. It's not like they can just like send it to you through a tube onto your computer.

• 54:48Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, the internet is just a series of tubes. So that is how it works.

• 54:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right.

• 54:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes and no. I can download all the data. I have most of the LHC data here on my laptop, but it's in a very reduced form. It doesn't have all of the little blips. It's like very, very simplified. And so the access I need is to rerun a really basic initial part of the data processing, which needs the data in like kind of its raw form, which is really, really big and way too big to put on my laptop or even to transfer anywhere. And so the ethos at CERN is bring the job to the data because the data are so big. And so there's a bunch of computers that do have access to that data. And so you need to argue for time on those computers that have access to like their early raw version of the data that has all these blips in it.

• 55:34Daniel Whiteson?

  So we can rerun this particle tracking and maybe see quirks or schmerks or blurks.

• 55:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  So when do you think you're going to get an answer on if they're going to let you run it?

• 55:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm, I need to know the answer now, Daniel. I'm excited. You got me excited about dark quirks. Quirks.

• 55:52Daniel Whiteson?

  There have been some initial conversations about how to do this inside the collaboration. And people are interested and excited. And we've got a little team that we're putting together. And so, yeah, I'm hopeful that we'll be able to run this and, you know, maybe something new will pop out.

• 56:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, and are you going to tell us first? Like, don't publish it. Don't publish it. Tell D K E U first.

• 56:11Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, we'll break the news here. If we discover something, you'll be the first to know.

• 56:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  I cannot wait till that day comes.

• 56:20Daniel Whiteson?

  So we're trying to understand the nature of matter in the universe. And we figured out what about 5% of it is made out of, though we still have lots of open questions. And we're trying to understand what the dark matter is made out of. Is it made out of some particle? Is it made out of wimps? Is it made out of something else? Maybe it's made out of something weird like quirks, these new dark quirks that have a dark, strong force. Or maybe it's made out of something else, something we can't even anticipate. And one of the big challenges is knowing how to look for something new, especially when you have so much data. But machine learning is really changing how we can analyze our data and make things that used to be impossible now possible.

• 56:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, you know, I really enjoyed this episode, not just because we got to hear about what Daniel is working on, but because we got to hear about like cutting edge, what people are thinking about and how they're trying to solve it right now. And I had a lot of fun today.

• 57:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on this quirky journey, everybody.

• 57:21Daniel 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.

• 57:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

• 57:34Daniel 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.

• 57:44Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 57:49Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 58:00Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 58:09Speaker 03

  This is Colin Cowherd from the Colin Cowherd Podcast. Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. All starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or a half ton Tundra to a Toyota's most capable and longest lasting trucks. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. For a great deal today to a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. The biggest game of the season, right here, right now. Starts Saturday strong. It's Big Noon Saturday on Fox. And here we go.

• 58:51Speaker 03

  It all starts at 10 Eastern with Big Noon Kickoff, live with an epic pregame.

• 58:57Daniel Whiteson?

  The crowd, the atmosphere, this is what makes it special.

• 58:59Speaker 03

  Then it's America's number one game. What a hit. The best pregame, the best announcers, the biggest games. Down the sideline, touchdown. It's Big Noon Saturday, noon Eastern on Fox.

• 59:11Speaker 05

  Small businesses are the pulse of every community. They bring people together, create opportunities and drive growth. That's why Chase for Business helps small business owners like you by offering personalized guidance and digital tools that can help your business grow. With our guidance and your determination, you can take your business farther and help build a brighter future for your community. Learn more at chase.com/business. Chase for Business, make more of what's yours. The Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. J P Morgan Chase Bank, N A, member F D I C. Copyright 2026 J P Morgan Chase and Company.

• 59:46Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 1:00:18Speaker 05

  Some days it's the little things you look forward to most. And with Pepperidge Farm's thoughtfully crafted cookies, there's always something worth savoring. Maybe it's a Milano made with premium chocolate between two delicate biscuits, a Sausalito baked with rich milk chocolate chunks and macadamia nuts, or the simple buttery goodness of a chestman. So pour the coffee, find a comfy chair and take a moment to treat yourself to a cookie or two. Pepperidge Farm, have a little taste.

• 1:00:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.