Was the Big Bang left handed?

Daniel and Kelly dive into the left-right asymmetry of hands, life, particles and the Universe itself. (This version was edited to reflect that 2d space has handedness and methane is non-chiral.) 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:05Speaker 05

  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.

• 2:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Unraveling the nature of the universe is a bit like solving a murder mystery. You have to look very carefully at all the clues. You have to pull really hard on any thread that looks weird, that's unexplained, because any of them might be the key that solves the whole mystery. Throughout history, whenever we've seen something we didn't understand, it's often turned out to be a big screaming clue about the next deeper layer of understanding reality. When we saw patterns in the periodic table, they were obvious but unexplained for many years until we were able to dig deeper and discover that they all came out of how electrons arranged themselves in shells around the nucleus. The similarity of the shape of the coastlines of Africa and South America? A big clue that over millions of years,

• 3:27Daniel Whiteson?

  the continents themselves were in motion and these two had once been joined. So amazing realizations can come from refusing to ignore little tiny clues that bother you at night. So every time we see something that doesn't make sense, we should dig deeper and look for a reason. And that's especially true when there's something that we don't understand about the whole universe, when we think it should have balance, but instead it's out of balance. Why is there more matter than antimatter? Why are some forces weaker than others? Particle physics is filled with these kinds of mysteries. And today on the podcast, we'll be digging deep into one unexplained choice the universe seems to have made billions of years ago,

• 4:11Daniel Whiteson?

  between being righty or lefty. Life is left-handed, particles prefer to be left-handed, though most humans are right-handed. Today on the podcast, we'll be asking, was the Big Bang also left-handed? Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary left-handed universe.

• 4:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener Smith. I study parasites and my family is 50% left-handed and 50% right-handed.

• 4:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I'd give my right hand to be ambidextrous.

• 4:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, okay, that doesn't really make sense the more I think about it, but I would love to be ambidextrous, too. How does it fall out in your family?

• 5:04Daniel Whiteson?

  We have one lefty, a bunch of righties, and my mom was ambidextrous. She could write with both hands and some things she liked to do with her left hand, like cutting with scissors, and other things she liked to do with her right hand, like stirring a bowl of soup.

• 5:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Interesting. I don't do anything with either hand well. Like, my penning didn't go well, my writing's illegible from either hand, but you know, I can type okay.

• 5:25Daniel Whiteson?

  And who in your family is left-handed?

• 5:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Zach and we think Ben.

• 5:28Daniel Whiteson?

  So Zach's a member of the secret society of left-handers.

• 5:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  And the secret society of redheaded people. Yeah, so he's involved in lots of secret societies. He's maybe in charge of everything.

• 5:40Daniel Whiteson?

  I wouldn't mind having cartoonists be in charge of most stuff. I think that would be a great way to run the world. What's the name for that? You have democracy, oligarchy, cartoonocracy?

• 5:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I don't know, but I can tell you that he doesn't run the household because he might not be competent to do that. And so I don't know that we should give him too much more power. And I don't think he wants more power. So I think maybe rule by the cartoonists, this one in particular, is maybe not a great idea. What would it be like if the world were ruled by physicists?

• 6:13Daniel Whiteson?

  We would spend a lot more money on particle colliders. Oh, my gosh, yes. We would know so much more about the universe.

• 6:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  But we'd spend less money on soap.

• 6:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sorry.

• 6:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Fair, fair.

• 6:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Nobody in office would be wearing a suit, that's for sure.

• 6:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's for sure. That's a world I can get behind.

• 6:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, we seek to find balance between the physicists and the cartoonists and the left-handers and the right-handers and everything in the universe, which is why on today's podcast, we're going to be talking about symmetry and balance and imbalance in the universe.

• 6:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I'm super interested in this topic because I only had a chance to sort of like realize that it existed back when we were writing Soonish because we wrote a little note of Bene on George Church, who is trying to make organisms where every one of their molecules is the opposite-handedness as it is now. And the ultimate goal, as I understood it, was that if you had a human of opposite-handedness, no pathogens or parasites could recognize our receptors and they would never be able to infect us. And so you would be free from all infection, but...

• 7:24Daniel Whiteson?

  You also wouldn't have a microbiome, so you couldn't digest any food, right?

• 7:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  So your microbiome would also have to be made opposite-handed and then all of your foods would have to be made opposite-handed. And that just seems like way too much work for the trade-off. And also, like, if a global supply chain problem popped up, because you'd never feed anyone because they need the opposite-handedness bread, it was complicated. But I remember when I was doing the research, thinking, why is there such a trend in handedness for molecules? Like, what caused that? And then I got too busy, and so I never dug in. And today, we get to find out about that.

• 7:56Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. It's always super fascinating when there's an asymmetry in the universe, when the universe seems to have made one choice. Because then you've got to ask, like, why not the other choice? What does it mean? Is it random? Is there a reason? Could it have been the other way? Are there other universes out there where another choice was made? And does that explain my whole childhood, basically?

• 8:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow. Whoa, it got deep.

• 8:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And so this stretches from the mathematics of handedness to the handedness of life, to the handedness of particles, and even the handedness of the whole universe, and the origin of the universe itself. So I went out there and I asked folks what they knew about this topic, if they thought the Big Bang could have been left-handed. If you'd like to play for future episodes of the podcast, please don't be shy. Write to us to [email protected]. So think about it for a moment. Do you think the Big Bang could have been left-handed? Here's what people had to say.

• 8:54Speaker 08

  Okay, this has to do with chirality, but I don't think chirality is at the fundamental particle level that would be manifested there, you know, because you've got flavor, spin, charge, flavor, color, but you definitely don't have chirality built into the core properties. Now, it does come up in chemistry. I know that all chemistry on Earth is a certain chirality. I can't remember if it's left or right, but it's one type. And if we get a meteor that comes that has a different type that shows some type of organic biological life, then we would know that it's that it's alien and not something, you know, that that came from Earth.

• 9:29Speaker 09

  Let's see, in molecules, you can have handedness based on the arrangement of the atoms in the same way your hands are left-handed and right-handed based on the arrangement of fingers. But in a soup of particles like protons, surely there's no way their arrangement can be left-handed or right-handed.

• 9:46Speaker 10

  Considering the Big Bang was everywhere all at once, and we ended up in a universe with both right and left-handed fundamental force particles, then maybe it was both.

• 9:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I feel like the intuition here from the answers tends to be that folks think the Big Bang was probably not left-handed and produced an equal amount approximately of left and right-handed molecules. That totally matches my intuition as well, but is not actually the answer, right?

• 10:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it reveals something about our prejudice, what we think is natural, what makes sense. And I think it's super fascinating in science, what answers people will accept without further explanation because it aligns with their intuition. And they're like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. And what answers require more explanation. And for a lot of people hearing, oh, it was symmetric, it was a balance between left and right handed. And they're like, yeah, cool, of course it was. That doesn't require any more explanation. But if you tell them, no, it was left handed, or no, it was right handed, then they ask why. And I think all the possible outcomes need a why. You know, why should it be symmetric? But we have this innate preference for symmetry, for balance in the universe, which I think says something about us, but I'm not sure exactly what it says.

• 10:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think I would like to have you on the next panel that judges my grants. I like the way you think about this stuff. It all needs answers.

• 11:05Daniel Whiteson?

  It all needs answers. Exactly. Every question is worth asking.

• 11:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  But yeah, it does make me wonder what questions we should be asking that would like have amazing impacts on how we view the world, but we just don't think to ask them because our gut says they make sense.

• 11:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. To me, this tendency suggests that there probably are questions we should be digging into more deeply, or just accepting the answers because they seem right to us without really understanding what's going on. And maybe in a hundred years, or maybe when the aliens come, they're going to be like, why didn't you think about that more deeply? And we would be like, I don't know, it just made sense.

• 11:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sought right. Sought right, man. Yeah. All right. Well, I think for anyone who hasn't thought of this concept yet, or anyone who was lucky enough to not have to go through chemistry, is maybe a little confused about what we mean by this handedness thing. So let's start at the beginning. What does it mean for something to have a handedness?

• 11:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, left or right handedness really is a mathematical thing. It's a geometric thing. And super fascinating. So let's start in two dimensional space. Imagine that you take two arrows, right? So you know, they have a tip and a tail, and then stick their tails together and have their tips be 90 degrees apart. So now you have like two arrows that are pointing perpendicular to each other, right? Now, in two dimensional space, just like on a sheet, any pair of arrows you make are always going to be essentially equivalent. And by equivalent, I mean that you could line them up on top of each other, like move them and spin them and put them on top of each other. They're always going to line up perfectly. There's no way to make a pair of arrows that follow those rules,

• 12:41Daniel Whiteson?

  where they're perpendicular to each other, where you can't then line them up. So that's two dimensional space, right? There's no handedness. But if you label one of the arrows X and the other one Y, so they're no longer two totally symmetrical, identical vectors, but they have these labels on them. Now, there are two ways to arrange these two arrows. Like, if the X arrow is straight up in front of you, then the Y arrow can be to its left or to its right. And because you have these labels, there's now no way to spin the left version of it to make it look like the right version. To do that, to have one lay on top of each other, so the X is aligned and the Y is aligned, you'd have to flip it over, essentially reflect it,

• 13:24Daniel Whiteson?

  make a mirror image, go from left to right. It's analogous to notions of clockwise and counterclockwise on the surface of a clock, also two dimensional. Now, expand our universe. Add a third dimension above and below the plane, and add another arrow. Take your two arrows that are perpendicular to each other. You could think of them as like the X axis and the Y axis, or you could think of them as like your thumb and your pointy finger, right? That are perpendicular to each other. And now, add a third arrow that comes out from where the first two were joined. Now, you have to make a choice. Do you go up above the plane or down below the plane? And you might think, oh, it doesn't matter. If I stick it above the plane, I can just rotate it to make it below the plane, right? But it actually does matter.

• 14:07Daniel Whiteson?

  If you choose the arrow that goes up above the plane, and then you rotate the whole thing so the arrow goes below the plane, you'll find that the other two don't line up to the first two. There's no way to take that set where the arrow is above the plane and rotate it to match the arrow that was below the plane. You can see this very easily with your hands. Your hands one is left-handed, one is right-handed. That's why we call them that. If you take your thumb and your pointy finger and you make them 90 degrees apart, and you have your middle finger stick perpendicular to your palm, so it's perpendicular to the other two, then you have like an X, Y, Z axis, but there's no way to orient them, so they line up on top of each other. There's one is left-handed and one is right-handed.

• 14:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so I get that. But I, when I think of handedness, I feel like I'm thinking of my hands in the X and the Y direction and not the Z direction.

• 14:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 14:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  It still doesn't work in those two dimensions, is the point that, Kelly, your hands are actually three-dimensional. You're an idiot. Stop thinking about this like they're two-dimensional.

• 15:03Daniel Whiteson?

  No, you're not an idiot. Your hands are three-dimensional. You're exactly right. And the reason, you're like, make your hands flat. You're thinking, I make my hands flat. I lay them on top of each other. They're still not the same, right? Even in sort of flat-hand, two-dimensional world. The thing is that you're right, they're not two-dimensional. And if they were, you could make them lie on top of each other and be exactly the same. The reason that they can't is because they have a top and a bottom, right? They have a thickness. If you try to put your hands together, then you meet your palms together, then they're inverted in that third dimension. So you still are working in a three-dimensional world. If you squeezed your hands in a hydraulic press so they were infinitely flat, then you could make them identical and lay them on top of each other.

• 15:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't think it's worth it for this purpose.

• 15:46Daniel Whiteson?

  That's why we have thought experiments. You don't have to actually do it. You could just think of it that way. So that's what handedness is, and that's where it comes from. It comes from our hands, right? One hand is left-handed, one hand is right-handed. Amazingly, these words actually make sense. And the technical definition lines up with your knowledge.

• 16:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Another example of how humans sort of take the way that we see and experience the world and overlay it on our science.

• 16:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly, right? And what would aliens call this kind of stuff?

• 16:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Tentacleness.

• 16:15Daniel Whiteson?

  It's fascinating because this is a basic property of geometry, right? And it's totally arbitrary. There's nothing special about left-handed or right-handed, right? It's just, how do you orient these three vectors? And it would be really weird if the universe, for some reason, preferred one or the other. Mathematically, they're totally equivalent. They're completely symmetrical. There's no reason for one to be more fundamental or more basic. There's just two choices to make here. And not everything in the universe has a handedness, right? We're talking about this combination of three vectors, or your three fingers have a handedness. But take a sphere, for example. A sphere has no handedness. There's no choices to make there. A way you can tell something is handedness is put it in front of a mirror.

• 16:59Daniel Whiteson?

  A mirror flips the handedness. Like if you put your left hand in front of a mirror, it looks like a right hand. If you put your right hand in front of a mirror, it looks like a left hand. Put a sphere in front of a mirror, what do you get? A sphere, right? There's no handedness to a sphere. So some things have handedness and some things don't have handedness. So that's the sort of mathematics of handedness. And you might imagine in a perfect universe, everything would be symmetric. There's no reason to choose one or the other. But as we already talked about in this episode, nobody is really symmetric. Like, I use my right hand, right? I am right-handed. It's a part of me that breaks this symmetry. That for some reason prefers to use my right hand to knead dough and to write doodles and to point at things and all sorts of stuff.

• 17:43Daniel Whiteson?

  And some people are left-handed. So the symmetry is broken sort of at two levels, right? One level is every individual person prefers one or the other. And the population has way more righties than lefties. So this symmetry is already broken even from the place we've defined it.

• 18:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Fun fact, this happens in the animal kingdom too. I remember a talk, oh my gosh, this was two decades ago. But they were looking at blind cavefish. And they put them in an environment with Legos in the middle and it was a circular tank. And the fish to explore the environment, they like get, you know, the vibrations or the water currents, they feel them on one side of their body to figure out where things are. And so they'd swim around and you could tell that they had figured out like what their environment was like because they eventually slowed down and like stopped swimming. But as soon as you moved the Legos in a different configuration, they'd start swimming around again a lot. They could tell the environment had changed and they wanted to understand how it had changed. And they specifically would swim with one side of their body facing the Legos because

• 18:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  they had a body side that they preferred to collect information on. And so like even fish exhibit something like a preference for one side over the other. Anyway, I always remembered that it was like amazing that blind cavefish were responding to changes in their environment. Animals are incredible.

• 18:58Daniel Whiteson?

  We've noticed that our dog seems to have a preference. Like when we ride in the car, he will stick his head fully out the window, but only on the right side. On the left side, he will stick his nose out the window, but he won't like all the way climb up on the armrest and get his whole shoulders out the window. So he seems to prefer the wind on the right side of the car. And that makes me wonder like, is he more comfortable with his right paw? And looking out that window requires more strength from that leg or something? Or is he fundamentally a righty? I mean, have we done a lot of experience on animals to determine, you know, if they're right or left handed? Like do chimpanzees use their right or left hand more, do you know?

• 19:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't know. I think we need to get Katie Golden on the show from Creature Feature, and she'll let us know. But I do not know the answer to that. So the left side is the side that the other cars are coming from. I wonder if it just feels safer to stick your head out farther on the opposite side than like towards incoming traffic?

• 19:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, we'll have to do some experiments with folks in England to see if their dogs prefer the opposite side.

• 19:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  There you go. That's a good experiment.

• 19:59Daniel Whiteson?

  We're doing the natural experiment right here on Earth, folks. So you see that pop up in your daily life and in your own experience and in your family, but it turns out to also be important in the biochemistry of life and later on, more fundamentally in physics itself.

• 20:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  And yes, we said chemistry, but stick with us. This is exciting.

• 20:27Speaker 11

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• 20:55Speaker 01

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• 21:56Speaker 05

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by rising star Sienna Spiro.

• 22:15Speaker 12

  I love the 60s. I feel really jealous that I wasn't alive for it. I'd be interested, like, knowing what that was like and seeing the way culture and art has progressed today. How do you find it?

• 22:25Speaker 05

  Wait a minute, I'm...

• 22:26Speaker 12

  I'm sorry, I have so many questions, sorry.

• 22:28Speaker 05

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• 22:29Speaker 12

  I am nervous.

• 22:30Speaker 05

  You are?

• 22:31Speaker 12

  I am. I feel, like, insecure about my experience. I know I shouldn't, but, you know, I'm 20. I haven't really lived my life yet. And then sitting in front of somebody that has lived an enormous life is intimidating. And sometimes I feel like talking about myself is just not as interesting. So that's why I feel a bit nervous. I'll try and ignore it, though.

• 22:50Speaker 05

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

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• 23:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so we're back. We've talked about handedness. And I remember from organic chemistry and biochem that organic molecules are left-handed and right-handed. And actually, when we were researching soonish, Zach discovered that spearmint and caraway, which are very different tastes, are molecules with opposite handedness.

• 23:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Whoa.

• 23:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so like those opposite handedness results in completely different ways that it interacts with our body. So anyway, molecules have handedness and are chiral. And why?

• 24:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so we don't fundamentally know the answer. And you might be wondering, like, what does handedness mean for a molecule? Well, it just means that if you put it in front of a mirror, you don't get the same molecule. So a molecule is more like the three first fingers on your hand or the XYZ axis than it is like a sphere, right? They're not symmetric. They have a handedness to them. So you can't just like spin a left-handed version of amino acids into a right-handed version of methane. It's like fundamentally a different molecule. You can tell which one is left and which one is right. And as Kelly mentioned earlier, life is built out of only one of these things. Life has chosen one of these. We are all built out of left-handed amino acids.

• 24:55Daniel Whiteson?

  The things that make up all living creatures on Earth, including the microbes that infect us, are all made out of one of these things and not the other one, which is really peculiar.

• 25:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, wouldn't we have a lot more options for the kinds of amino acids and stuff we could make if we had both chiralities? But I guess we already could make more amino acids than are typically used by organisms. So maybe we don't need that many more amino acids.

• 25:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, because the different chiralities don't work together. Like, these things have to fit together really precisely. I think of these little molecules as little machines, you know, that do something biochemically. This one builds that, and this one builds the other thing, and this one rotates this thing. They're all like, you know, I imagine little Legos in my head because I'm not very good at chemistry. And they have to have their particular arrangement to do their job. You can't just replace it with the opposite chirality and expect it to do the same thing, especially if everybody else is the different chirality. It might work if you flipped all of it, right? You took all of life from left to right, and you can make a right-handed version. I think that's one of the questions Eric Church was hoping to answer, like... Is it really arbitrary? Could life work if everything was right-handed?

• 26:01Daniel Whiteson?

  It seems like it should, but it's fascinating that you can't mix them, right? Like, a left-handed person can't eat right-handed food, or couldn't have a baby with a right-handed person. You know, like, their biochemistries just don't interact. It's fascinating.

• 26:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, you said Eric Church, but I think you meant George Church.

• 26:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, sorry, yeah.

• 26:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's all right. So is this kind of like, if you have an iPhone, you can't use the apps made for Android? Could it just be that life sort of started in one direction? And then some piece of machinery for life came into existence that was really good, but only the right-handed molecules could be used with that piece of machinery? And that just kind of got the ball rolling? And the left-handed ones could never compete? Sorry, Android users. And that's why we have this preference for one? It was like some early machinery used one chirality and not the other?

• 26:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so we actually don't know the answer to that question. We don't know, like, does it have to be this way? Is there something about left-handed molecules that are better at forming life? Or something fundamentally about the biochemistry of life that prefers left-handedness? That would be weird, right? Because there isn't really a difference. It's just a reflection. Fundamentally, the universe shouldn't prefer one or the other, but it kind of seems to. And you're right, that once you choose one, you're stuck, right? It's sort of like, everybody sits down at a dinner party. Are you taking the silverware that's on your left or on your right? Once somebody takes one, everybody's got to make the same choice, or you get clashes, right? Or, as you say, once you're in the Apple ecosphere, then you've got to have all Apple devices where they don't work together. So we think that once you choose one, you're stuck with it?

• 27:36Daniel Whiteson?

  We don't know if it was just like a random choice? Like, that first living thing could have been left or right, and it was just randomly left? And now we're all stuck left? Or if there's a reason it has to be left, or more likely to be left, and just everything has followed from that?

• 27:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, but it feels to me like there's no reason why you couldn't have had a branch of life that started right, and then a branch of life that started left. Like, you know, the same trick could have been come upon for both chiralities, and then you sort of radiate out from there.

• 28:06Daniel Whiteson?

  And then there was an epic battle, right versus left.

• 28:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. I'm sure the right-handed would win.

• 28:14Daniel Whiteson?

  But this is not something we even knew until like 150 years ago. And it was Louis Pasteur who discovered this. He was studying this byproduct of wine fermentation, tartaric acid. And he noticed that there were two types of crystals that were made. They were mirror images of each other. So he was trying to synthesize this thing because you can synthesize these chemicals and you can make right or left. But then you discover out in the natural world, you only ever find left. So he discovered, oh, this is a difference if I make it myself in the lab versus if I like find it from nature. And he was able to pin this down using polarized light to figure out what the chemical structure of these things were. So this is something we've only known about for 150 years.

• 28:56Daniel Whiteson?

  And people have been trying to figure out like, what is the cause of it for much longer than that? There are some speculative answers. I read a paper that suggested that there could be something about how magnets formed in the earth that prefers left-handed chirality, like the magnetic field of the earth generates some preference for the left-handed versions versus the right-handed versions. But it's very speculative. And this is super cool. We just learned from an amazing mission that went out and sampled an asteroid, Bendu, brought stuff back to earth so we could study it. In that sample, there are equal mixtures of left and right-handed organic chemicals. So huge clue because life on earth prefers the left-handed ones.

• 29:38Daniel Whiteson?

  But the basic ingredients for left or right-handed life seem to be out there in the universe.

• 29:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  So when you do industrial processes like Pasteur was doing, you get both kinds. Do you get both kinds evenly? Because if so, it feels like the magnets answer doesn't work.

• 29:55Daniel Whiteson?

  You're right, but I think the idea is that there could be these magnetic surfaces essentially that are made that better bind to the left-handed bits and then essentially bring them together, gather them together so that they can make more complex molecules. So you might get more complex left-handed structures faster than you get complex right-handed structures, even if you have the same relative abundance of the precursors. That basically it creates a playground where the lefty bits come together to make the complex structures you need for life.

• 30:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, that feels testable.

• 30:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, this is totally testable. I read an article from Science in 2023 where they do experiments and they can produce this kind of effect. That doesn't mean that it's the reason why life is left-handed. It's just like, oh, there is, in some sense, something that prefers left-handed chemistry to right-handed chemistry, right? And we do see other hints of that in the universe, like there are other parts of the universe that seem to prefer left-handedness over right-handedness, like particle physics. Particle physics has a basic preference for left-handedness over right-handedness. And after we dig into it, we can come back and make the connection. People think that maybe high-speed particles from space could have influenced the left or right-handedness of life on Earth.

• 31:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  We talked about amino acids being left-handed. Amino acids come together to form proteins. Are there other things that are important to biology that also have a handedness?

• 31:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I think the left-handed nature of the amino acids means that the sugars they make are right-handed, because that's the kind of thing that a left-handed amino acid will make. So those bits are sort of complementary. So there are some parts of our life biochemistry that are right-handed, that the amino acids are all left-handed. So we call it left-handed, if that makes sense.

• 31:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Because the amino acids are the building blocks, you expect the things that the amino acids make, like proteins and sugars, to be the opposite-handedness because of how they all get put together?

• 31:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 31:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 31:55Daniel Whiteson?

  And you can actually exploit that, as you were talking about earlier with flavors. Some artificial sweeteners exploit this fact. Despite being a sugar and tasting sweet, they can go through your body without being metabolized because they have the wrong-handedness. So that's kind of cool.

• 32:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  That is kind of cool. I feel like there's a little voice in the back of my head saying, wasn't there a study about how maybe they're not so good for your body? But I'm not an expert on that. Anyway, it might be worth looking up.

• 32:20Daniel Whiteson?

  And we are not making any medical recommendations here, folks.

• 32:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amen. All right. So we've discussed that amino acids are building blocks of other things, and that the left-handed building blocks produce right-handed other things. So let's go down another level before amino acids, or maybe multiple levels before amino acids, down to particles. Like, if you knew that amino acids were left-handed, could you predict the handedness of particles because it alternates between levels?

• 32:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, it's a great question. We don't know the answer to that. And we knew 150 years ago that amino acids were left-handed, but physicists were confident that the universe fundamentally, at the particle level, had to be balanced, that it would be crazy if the universe itself was left-handed in some way. Like, why would it prefer one direction over the other? That was nonsense. And people did some tests early on, like, let's see if electromagnetism is symmetric. Like, is there any preference for photons to go in one direction or the other? And they're like, no. And they did tests on another force as well, the strong force. But people were very confident that the universe didn't prefer left or right-handed. And when we talk about particles, we have to be a little bit careful what we mean by left or right-handed particles, because the definition we gave earlier, you have like three directions.

• 33:30Daniel Whiteson?

  That makes sense for building molecules, right? You're putting these things together. You can imagine like balls and sticks, and you're making something which doesn't reflect in the mirror. But particles, we don't think about as having extent, right? They're just like dots. So what do we mean by left or right-handed when it comes to particles? Well, particles don't have an extent, but they do have two different arrows. You have particles can be moving in one direction, so that's the momentum of the particle, right? Imagine an electron is flying through space. You could put an arrow from where it was to where it's going. And that's one arrow. The other arrow of the particle is its spin. Electrons can be spin up or spin down. So you can think of that as another little arrow. And that arrow can either be aligned with its motion,

• 34:12Daniel Whiteson?

  in which case we call it a right-handed electron, or not aligned, so pointing away from the direction it's moving. So if your two arrows of your spin and your momentum point in the same direction, we call you a right-handed particle. And if they're not aligned, we call you a left-handed particle.

• 34:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Does it change the way we think about this when we think about electrons as waves instead of particles?

• 34:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that's a great question. And we should always keep in our minds that electrons are not tiny little balls or even dots, but they are guided by the wave function. Right? So what happens to a particle is determined by this wave, its outcome, which makes some of this stuff probabilistic, right? Like, an electron might not have a defined spin. It might be maybe this or maybe that. Right? But some processes have to produce left or right-handed electrons, which means you know in advance, like, this one doesn't have a probability to be left or right. It has to be left or it has to be right in order to balance with other bits. So, for example, if you have two electrons produced opposite each other, you know their momenta point opposite to each other, and you know their spin also have to be opposite to each other, which means they're either both right-handed or they're both left-handed.

• 35:19Daniel Whiteson?

  And you might not know that in advance. So in that case, for example, your electron's gonna be 50% left-handed and 50% right-handed. But they have to be the same, right? If they're produced the same. So, yeah, the wave nature gives you a probabilistic aspect to all these particles, for sure.

• 35:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Got it.

• 35:34Daniel Whiteson?

  And so this is what we call handedness for particles. Sometimes they call it helicity. And one important caveat here is that this isn't actually something that's exact, because the momentum of a particle depends on your velocity. Like, you can imagine flipping the direction of a particle by zooming past it in a spaceship. So now, instead of moving one direction, it looks like it's moving the other direction. That basically flips its momentum. So we actually only talk about the handedness of particles that have no mass or very, very, very low mass precisely because then you can't pass them in a spaceship. To be very technical, this handedness is actually an internal label. It's not a physical thing. So the direction of the two arrows is like an approximate way to think about the handedness of the particles.

• 36:19Daniel Whiteson?

  But fundamentally, it's some internal label we don't understand the way, like, charge is. So now I just think about these particles as having like a little label on them. Some of them have an L and some of them have an R. And we thought for a long time, like, the universe shouldn't predict either one. Like, if you have some particle physics process, it should make the same number of right and left-handed electrons. In the early universe, you should have gotten an equal mixture, right? In the same way, we talked earlier about preferring symmetry. And then it was in the 1960s that people realized, hey, you know, we think that the universe is balanced, we think that there is a symmetry here, and we've checked it for a couple of things, but nobody's actually gone and done the test to see if the weak nuclear force prefers left or right-handed particles equally or not.

• 37:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm just gonna point out that the biologist had figured out the importance of this 100 years earlier, apparently.

• 37:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm glad you guys caught up, though, so go ahead.

• 37:11Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. Physics is always 100 years behind biology. That's the way it works.

• 37:17Daniel Whiteson?

  So there was this exciting moment in the late 50s where people realized, oh, my gosh, nobody's tested this before, and it's not actually that hard to do. So then this amazing scientist, Chan Shien Wu, realized in the late 50s, actually, this wasn't difficult to test. This is something you could figure out. So she decided to skip her Christmas holiday. She sent her husband on along and said, I'm gonna stay in the lab and figure this out. You know, when you get, like, excited about something. And she put the experiment together, she got a bunch of cobalt atoms to spin only in one direction, and then she measured the angles that the electrons came out. And this was a great test of whether the universe preferred one direction or another, because the electrons were made purely by the weak force.

• 38:00Daniel Whiteson?

  And she discovered not only was it out of balance, but it was completely out of balance. It wasn't like, oh, the electrons were 51, 49, one direction. It was like 100, zero. Like, the electrons would only go in one direction. It turns out that the weak force only makes and interacts with left-handed particles. It, like, completely doesn't play with right-handed particles at all. So all the other forces don't care. Electromagnetism, the strong force, no preference. But the weak force only plays with left-handed particles. This was a really shocking discovery.

• 38:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  And after the break, we are going to 100% explain to you why that is.

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• 42:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we're back. Just kidding, we never have 100% explanations for anything. What is our current state of not understanding this phenomenon, Daniel?

• 42:12Daniel Whiteson?

  It's not something that we understand. It's something that we describe, something we see in the universe. We can incorporate it into the mathematics of our theory, like the standard model of particle physics. It describes how particles interact and how they're created and all this kind of stuff naturally has left and right-handed particles. And the mathematics of the weak force allow it to only interact with left-handed particles. But again, we don't know why that is. You know, the other forces treat the particles completely equally. And the Higgs force unifies these things. Like the Higgs force combines the left-handed and right-handed version of particles into one that we see and know and love and has mass.

• 42:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Where does it get the right-handed versions? If it's combining them, so it gets the right-handed versions from other forces and combines them. Okay.

• 42:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so you can make right-handed electrons, you just can't use the weak force to do it. You can use the electromagnetic force to make right-handed electrons, no problemo. But those will not interact with W bosons and Z bosons and stuff like that. It's really weird, and if we didn't have the weak force, we never would have discovered that our universe, for some reason, seems to be left-handed at a particle level.

• 43:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  If you were to like, rank the forces in terms of like, how common they are in the universe, I actually don't know the right way to rank these, like, how important is the weak force?

• 43:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazing question. Well, you know, the most powerful force is the strong force, and then electromagnetism, then the weak force, then gravity, if it's a force at all. But the weak force, in some way, is so much more complex and fascinating than any of the other forces. It's got extra particles, like it has the W and the Z particles, all these particles needed to do its stuff. And it's so much more complicated, and it's responsible for the Higgs boson. So it's pretty important and weird, and in that sense, it's valuable because it gives us insight into the nature of the universe. You know, it does its weird stuff. If everything was simple and clean, then we wouldn't learn as much about the universe. It's the ugly messes that teach us something about how the universe is actually working.

• 44:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  I feel like that's a lesson for my life somehow, but, uh, go ahead.

• 44:19Daniel Whiteson?

  This is such a shocking discovery that the theorist that suggested it won the Nobel Prize just like a couple of years later. Unfortunately, Chin Chen Wu, who did the experiment, she didn't get the Nobel Prize. Another example of the Nobel not treating lady scientists equally, unfortunately. There's an imbalance for you.

• 44:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that sucks. Is she still alive?

• 44:38Daniel Whiteson?

  She is no longer alive, but we're gonna have a whole episode about her next year, and we're gonna talk to her granddaughter, who I grew up with.

• 44:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, fantastic. All right. I'm looking forward to that. So the weak force produces left-handed electrons and then somehow we end up with left-handed amino acids. Let's talk about the intermediate scale there. How do we think scale up between left-handed electrons and left-handed amino acids?

• 45:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, we don't know. There's a lot of speculation because this smells like a weird coincidence. Like, how is it that the universe produces more left-handed particles than right-handed particles and life is made out of left-handed amino acids? Is that a coincidence or is there a reason? So there's a theory that particles from space, when they smash into the atmosphere, cosmic rays, they produce a shower of particles and the weak force is involved, which means that it makes more left-handed particles than right-handed particles. And then dot, dot, dot, a bunch of stuff that's not really plausible. Maybe that makes more left-handed amino acids. And, you know, there are papers I've read about this and I always come away from them going like, I don't think so.

• 45:47Daniel Whiteson?

  It's like a real effort to draw a line between these things because it's hard to imagine how a left-handed muon is going to somehow make more amino acids that are left-handed. Like, yes, the muons come in and they smash into stuff and they're still an important part of life today. You know, breaking amino acids and creating mutations and all sorts of stuff is important for evolution. But we don't have a microphysical explanation for why having more left-handed muons could create more left-handed amino acids or encourage them to form life or whatever, make them more resilient. I don't know. Because the weak force is very, very weak. You know, most of the time when a muon interacts with you, it interacts electromagnetically. So it would be a very subtle effect if it even did exist.

• 46:31Daniel Whiteson?

  So really still an open question. We don't understand whether there's any connection between the fundamental left-handed preference of the weak force and the left-handed nature of life on Earth.

• 46:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so there's an important question that one of our listeners can answer, one of our young listeners. Okay, so we know we have handedness in some cases. We don't know why we have it. We don't know the implications as you scale. Is there important symmetry in other areas that gets broken?

• 47:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, a great question. This inspires us to look for violations of symmetry elsewhere in the universe. Right? And we know already that the universe isn't always in balance. Like, for example, we know that there are two different kinds of matter in the universe, matter and antimatter. Antimatter is like the reflection of matter where everything has the opposite charge. So we have electrons. We can also make positrons, which are just like electrons, but they have the opposite charge. And you can make antiprotons and antineutrons. And there's nothing really anti about them, except that they're not our kind of matter. So, you know, you could, we think, maybe build life out of antielectrons and antiprotons to make anti-people or whatever. We don't really know that for sure, but the laws of physics so far suggest that that's possible.

• 47:46Daniel Whiteson?

  But the universe is made more of matter than antimatter.

• 47:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Have I watched too many sci-fi movies? I'm under the impression that if matter and antimatter interact, they explode or consume each other in some way. Like, could both of these things exist in the same universe? Or does one have to win?

• 48:02Daniel Whiteson?

  They can't exist near each other because they interact very strongly. And so, for example, if you have an electron and a positron near each other, they will attract each other and they will annihilate and give you photons. And it's a very efficient conversion of energy from mass to radiation. So, for example, if you have a gram of matter, like a raisin, and a gram of antimatter, like an anti-raisin, and you bring them together, you get about as much energy as a nuclear bomb, just out of two grams of matter and antimatter. So, yes, you can't have matter-based life and antimatter-based life on the same planet. But you could have, for example, matter galaxies and antimatter galaxies. Right? They don't have to touch each other. They're just floating in space saying hi.

• 48:44Daniel Whiteson?

  But we're pretty sure that all the galaxies in the universe are matter galaxies, not antimatter galaxies. And we can actually test this a little bit because galaxies shoot out particles. All the stars and the black holes are emitting radiation. And they shoot out electrons, for example. And if they were anti galaxies, they would shoot out anti electrons. And where those meet, you would see these great flashes of light where the electrons and the anti electrons were meeting. And we don't see any of that. We don't see like huge curtains of light between galaxies, which suggests that, at least as far as we can see, everything is made of matter. So that's an important asymmetry in the universe. Again, one we don't understand. We think probably in the Big Bang, there was an equal amount of matter and antimatter.

• 49:28Daniel Whiteson?

  But something preferred matter, because otherwise it would have all just gone away and turned into a universe filled with light and no matter. So there's a preference there for matter. It's just an example. We don't know that it's connected to right or left handed. We call one matter and the other antimatter. It's just an example of how the universe sometimes seems to make one choice and not the other for reasons we don't understand.

• 49:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Well, so first of all, I think it's important to note that I'm on team anti raisin.

• 49:55Daniel Whiteson?

  But you like the golden raisins instead?

• 49:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't like any raisins. No raisins. No raisins.

• 50:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 50:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, team anti raisin.

• 50:03Daniel Whiteson?

  But how do you feel about grapes? You like grapes, but no raisins?

• 50:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm pro grapes.

• 50:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Really? Interesting. Are you anti dried fruit in general?

• 50:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, dried mangoes, those are great.

• 50:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, man, we gotta convert you.

• 50:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is really, really important.

• 50:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Is it just because you think raisins ruin oatmeal cookies? Because you'd be right about that.

• 50:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's like 90% of why I have trust issues.

• 50:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  So the Big Bang had to have resulted in a preference for one or the other, right? Because otherwise it would have all just like blown up at that point when it was all compressed.

• 50:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, either more matter was made in those early moments than antimatter.

• 50:38Daniel Whiteson?

  And then when they annihilated, you get some matter left over. So either there's some early baked in preference for matter over antimatter. Or it was symmetric at the beginning and there's some process which then prefers matter to antimatter. And we have a few clues. We've discovered one or two little processes that prefer making matter to antimatter. And that was sort of fascinating and surprising and led to more Nobel prizes. These things are called CP violation, if anybody wants to dig deeper into them. But they're not enough to explain it. They're like tiny little effects. They can't explain the size to the effect that we see in the universe. So this basic question, this asymmetry in the universe, we still don't have an answer to. But just to be clear again, it's not directly connected to left handed versus right handed.

• 51:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Whether the universe is symmetric, it's just whether the universe is symmetric in a mirror. It's just another example of how the universe doesn't have to be balanced, right? It can pick one or the other, we think, and we just don't understand why it does or whether it did. But we can think about whether the universe in the Big Bang itself was symmetric from a left versus right handed point of view. Like when we talk about making those three vectors, is there something in the universe that really prefers those fundamentally at the level of the structure of the universe itself? Not just the particles or the amino acids or dogs or this kind of stuff. And we could think about this by looking at the relationships between galaxies. There's this really amazing study people did last year where they basically just looked

• 52:03Daniel Whiteson?

  at groups of four galaxies and decided whether they would call them left handed or right handed. So remember the example of your fingers, right? You have three fingers, so three tips. And there's also the point where they all meet. So you have sort of like four points there. So if you have four points, you can say, is this a left handed grouping or a right handed grouping? So they looked at all the galaxies that they could find, over a million examples in this one study. And they grouped them into clusters of four and then decided, is this a left handed grouping or a right handed grouping? And they figured like, hey, this is just galaxies strewn out in the universe. We're just assigning left or right handed to these clusters. It should be balanced, right?

• 52:46Daniel Whiteson?

  There should be no reason why you would get like more right handed or left handed clusters. But what they found is a huge bias towards left-handed clusters of galaxies. When you group these things together, I know it makes no sense, like, why would you prefer one or the other? But, you know, they had groups check their results. This is the kind of result you sort of hope for in science, but then you're terrified of, because then you're like, what? This has got to be wrong. This has been delayed my paper. Oh, my gosh.

• 53:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Did I pick the galaxies arbitrarily? I feel like that would have to be a hard, hard to pick them.

• 53:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, they tried every combination. And out of a million galaxies, you get a trillion trillion combinations. They make these pyramids, right? Like, four galaxies make this pyramid, and you can decide whether it's a left or right-handed pyramid. And the chances of this being a random fluctuation is one in 300 billion. So either it's a crazy fluctuation, or it suggests that there's something about the universe, something about the topology, the structure, the nature of space and time itself, that aligns these galaxies in a more lefty way than a right-handed way. It's really a fascinating clue, and it's just like adds to the story, like, life is

• 54:01Daniel Whiteson?

  left-handed, particles are left-handed, something about the structure of galaxies in the universe itself is left-handed.

• 54:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  No wonder Zach thinks he's so great.

• 54:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Turns out he's right. Science has proved him right.

• 54:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  There's got to be something we don't understand in between there.

• 54:16Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, reviewer number two over there. So this is just like a collection of clues that all point towards something that smells suggestive, but it could just be nothing. It could just be, here's a bunch of coincidences, you know, left versus right, whatever, the universe just picks randomly, and we live in a multiverse with all different kinds of universes, and some of them have right-handed life and right-handed particles and left-handed galaxy structures. Or maybe there's something deep in the mathematics, which really prefers left-handed structures and can only work this way. It's just, we haven't puzzled it out yet. We haven't found the connections between these different layers of leftiness, and we

• 54:59Daniel Whiteson?

  haven't understood what about the nature of the universe requires things to be left-handed. It's a fascinating puzzle, and the kind of thing I think in 100 years, I hope, we have much more clarity on.

• 55:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Are we currently at the just, like, scratching our head and pulling out our hair phase? Or are there, like, four competing hypotheses, and we're just waiting for the LHC to give us the answer? Like, where are we right now?

• 55:20Daniel Whiteson?

  I think we're in between those two different outcomes. We have some crazy ideas, like people think maybe the thing that came before that early moment of hot density, you know, inflation and the inflaton field and sort of pre-big bang theories and everything that's pre-big bang, very speculative. And that doesn't mean worthless, right? It just means like, hey, we don't really know, we're still in the building phase, we're trying stuff out. Some of those maybe were seeded by something that prefers left-handedness and people are trying to build left-handed ideas into that inflaton field with varying success. So we don't have solid predictions that we can use to test any of these ideas. We're just sort of like, maybe this is something and maybe this is something we should be

• 56:04Daniel Whiteson?

  building into our theories of the pre-big bang universe. We can try to look deeper into the history of time to try to understand it, like we hope that gravitational waves from the very, very early universe will help illuminate what was going on. You know, we can only see the early universe back to about 380,000 years after that first understood moment, because that's the first time the universe was transparent. But there's a lot of stuff going on before the universe was transparent, where it's hot and dense and opaque. And we hope that gravitational waves will give us a window into those moments and maybe there's some clue there in the polarity of those gravitational waves to see if they prefer left-handed physics to right-handed physics, or maybe not, right?

• 56:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Maybe they're perfectly in balance. So there's a possibility that we could learn something, but that's very subtle physics. And seeing gravitational waves from the very early universe is notoriously tricky. There was an experiment, Bicep 2, a few years ago, that thought it had seen them and had evidence for inflation, then it turned out to just be dust.

• 57:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 57:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 57:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that's frustrating. It's always pigeon poop or dust.

• 57:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. Science is hard, people. It's hard.

• 57:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  It is.

• 57:17Daniel Whiteson?

  But the mysteries are deep and they are fascinating. And all of these clues tell us like, maybe this is a thread we should pull on that's going to unravel our whole understanding of the universe. Or maybe it's just a coin toss in beginning the universe and it means nothing.

• 57:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  And people will spend entire careers trying to figure it out.

• 57:33Daniel Whiteson?

  And maybe one of you out there will be the one to pull back the veil and help us understand the nature of our own universe.

• 57:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Please do that.

• 57:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Soon, please, soon. I'd love to know the answer.

• 57:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, same.

• 57:53Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 57:59Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 58:05Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 58:11Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 58:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 58:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

• 58:32Speaker 02

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• 58:40Speaker 03

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• 58:51Speaker 03

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• 59:01Speaker 15

  This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Traveling with Doug is one of my favorite things, but when you're on tour like I am, bouncing between 35 cities, feeding your dog can get complicated. And that's why I started bringing Just Fresh from Just Food for Dogs. It's real fresh dog food made with human-grade ingredients that he's been obsessed with. But it's shelf-stable, so I don't need a freezer, or a cooler, or a whole travel operation just to feed my dog. Doug loves it and I feel good giving it to him. So go to justfoodfordogs.com and get 50% off your first order.

• 59:34Speaker 16

  Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound Terezepatide may be able to help. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity, or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems, to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains terezepatide and should not be used with other terezepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens, or reuse needles.

• 1:00:16Speaker 16

  Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia, if you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with asalfenolurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor.

• 1:00:56Speaker 16

  Call 1-800-545-5979, or visit zepbound.lily.com. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.