Speaker 1: Everything that we know about in the universe, all the stars, galaxies,
Speaker 1: gas and dust out there. You me, hamsters, hamsters, flamingos.
Speaker 1: Tell me that it's just three things. Yeah, that's crazy.
Speaker 1: You have all this complexity, not because the world itself
Speaker 1: is complex, but the world is made out of a
Speaker 1: small number of simple things, and it's the arrangement of
Speaker 1: that stuff that gives a complexity. It's just three things
Speaker 1: arranged in a bazillion different ways. Hi, I'm Jorge and
Speaker 1: I'm Daniel, and this is Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.
Speaker 1: Our podcast about the universe and everything in it, in
Speaker 1: which we try to take the whole universe, break it
Speaker 1: into tiny pieces and insert them one at a time
Speaker 1: into your brain, bit by bit. Today on the program,
Speaker 1: we're gonna ask question what is the universe made out of? Right?
Speaker 1: Sort of like, can you take the universe and break
Speaker 1: that into tiny bits? And how far can you go?
Speaker 1: And why do we even think that's possible? And why
Speaker 1: is it like that? And what are those tiny little bits?
Speaker 1: And why do they have such silly names. It's something
Speaker 1: I like to think about, is how long have people
Speaker 1: been asking this question? Clearly the Greeks thought about it,
Speaker 1: they wrote about it. You know, they had crazy ideas
Speaker 1: that were totally off base, but they thought about it.
Speaker 1: To them, it was an important question. Yeah. And even
Speaker 1: before that, I was reading you know, it's ancient cultures,
Speaker 1: even before the Greeks had this question and they had
Speaker 1: ideas about what the things were made out of. Well,
Speaker 1: I wonder, you know, like the folks, for example, who
Speaker 1: did those cave paintings in France thirty five thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: They were capable of symbolic thinking, probably logic, definitely music.
Speaker 1: Did they have these deep questions about this world they
Speaker 1: found themselves in that made little sense to them? Yeah? Well,
Speaker 1: I think it's crazy just to think about why even
Speaker 1: ask the question, like what makes us think that the
Speaker 1: universe is made out of stuff? You know? Like what
Speaker 1: does it mean to even ask that question? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: think it comes from a desire to organize. Like you
Speaker 1: see stuff around you, right, I mean you see logs
Speaker 1: and water and air and people, and you notice all
Speaker 1: this stuff, and then you might wonder like, well this
Speaker 1: stuff is kind of like that other stuff, and is
Speaker 1: there some way I can organize it? Right? So I
Speaker 1: think the first principle there is like looking for patterns,
Speaker 1: looking for forum for reasons why you can understand why
Speaker 1: this stuff is here. Yeah, and can I like take
Speaker 1: some of this and mix it with some of that
Speaker 1: and get something new or something different. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: sort of a natural idea. But as usually, we went
Speaker 1: out into the street and we asked you. We asked you,
Speaker 1: what do you think the universe is made out of?
Speaker 1: The deepest level of matters so far? Here's what you
Speaker 1: had to say. What is everything made out of at
Speaker 1: the smallest scale? Uh? On the smallest scale, I think
Speaker 1: electrons are the smallest that I know of. I haven't
Speaker 1: taking physics is like junior year from well, I guess
Speaker 1: from my classes it would be like the atoms. Atoms?
Speaker 1: Is it atoms? Um? It's made out of quarks and stuff? Right,
Speaker 1: the quarks freak. I feel like I should know this.
Speaker 1: I'm a chem major. Al Right, I think we got
Speaker 1: our answer. I think we're done with this podcast. It's
Speaker 1: Adams basically atoms and maybe something else. Yeah, everybody seems
Speaker 1: to know about the atom. I think basically everyone's physics
Speaker 1: education stops at high school. Basically most people unless you
Speaker 1: go on to study physics it's like high school physics.
Speaker 1: What do you remember is atoms? But that's not even physics, man,
Speaker 1: that's chemistry. Atoms are chemistry, how they interact and stuff.
Speaker 1: But it's fascinating that one of the deepest questions in physics, right,
Speaker 1: what is the universe made out of? Is mostly answered
Speaker 1: so far by chemistry. Like most of the progress we've
Speaker 1: made is chemistry. What chemistry used to be kind of physics, right,
Speaker 1: I mean it used to all just be natural sciences, right,
Speaker 1: Like these distinctions are kind of recent. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it all used to be philosophy, right, all of it
Speaker 1: grew out of posophy, That's what it all just used
Speaker 1: to be thinking, you know, like love of thinking? What's
Speaker 1: your job, Dad, I'm a thinker. I'm a lover of
Speaker 1: think all day. So, but I think it's it's interesting
Speaker 1: that you know, a huge part of the answer this
Speaker 1: question what is the world made out of? Is answered
Speaker 1: by what people said Adams. You know that you can
Speaker 1: even take the stuff around you and break it into
Speaker 1: a fairly small number of bits then explain all of it.
Speaker 1: And this idea can I like you said, it goes
Speaker 1: back to the Greeks, like the Greeks positive, They wondered, like,
Speaker 1: is everything made out of tiny little bits? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: think that gives the Greeks way too much credibly. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think there was a Greek democratus who had a
Speaker 1: lot of ideas, one of which was this one, which
Speaker 1: happened to be correct. Um. I think he had a
Speaker 1: lot of other crazy ideas which were not correct. And
Speaker 1: it's not like this idea was you know, took the
Speaker 1: Greeks by storm and had a lot of consensus. You know,
Speaker 1: sort of like if a thousand monkeys are typing on typewriters,
Speaker 1: one of them will predict a correct theory of physics
Speaker 1: and you can look back later and say, Wow, this
Speaker 1: monkey was a genius. But that doesn't make all monkeys geniuses.
Speaker 1: I'm saying. They kind of spread a lot of intellectual
Speaker 1: ideas of the board there, you know, and yeah, one
Speaker 1: of them stuck and turned out to be sort of true.
Speaker 1: But doesn't mean they necessarily need to get credit for it.
Speaker 1: But they sort of try to categorize these little bits, right,
Speaker 1: Like they had ideas that there were five or four
Speaker 1: kinds of stuff that the rest of the stuff was
Speaker 1: made of, right, like earth, air, water, fire, and I
Speaker 1: think that those are really two separate ideas that now
Speaker 1: we've kind of combined. I mean, one idea was there's
Speaker 1: a few basic kinds of stuff and everything is made
Speaker 1: out of those, Right, That's a really fascinating idea. The
Speaker 1: other idea that everything is made out of small pieces,
Speaker 1: you know, the atoms bits of stuff. That's a totally
Speaker 1: different idea, Like stuff can be made out of a
Speaker 1: small number of other stuff like earth, fire, wind, But
Speaker 1: those things don't necessarily need to be in little bits. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they could be, you know, earth and fire and water
Speaker 1: could be um elemental on their own. They could be
Speaker 1: it can't be divided into little pieces that could be
Speaker 1: like perfectly smooth no matter how much you zoom in,
Speaker 1: they could always just be themselves. Right. There's this other
Speaker 1: idea that if you zoom in on stuff, it turns
Speaker 1: out it's made out of little building blocks. That's a
Speaker 1: different idea. And now we have kind of both of them, right,
Speaker 1: we have both of them. Were like, oh, it turns
Speaker 1: out stuff it's made out of little building blocks, and
Speaker 1: there's a few kinds of them. Right, But I guess
Speaker 1: the question is what is that building? Blog are thinking
Speaker 1: is a species is evolved on that, right, Like maybe
Speaker 1: we used to think we were made out of little
Speaker 1: bits of dust and then we got smaller into atoms,
Speaker 1: and we've been getting smaller and smaller, right, Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: And um, I think it's incredible, as I was saying earlier,
Speaker 1: and I can't stop talking about this because I think
Speaker 1: it's underrated as a sort of human intellectual achievement that
Speaker 1: you can boil down everything you've ever eaten or sat
Speaker 1: on or tripped over or any human is ever interacted
Speaker 1: with in terms of just the atoms, right, the hundred
Speaker 1: basic building blocks. I mean, you go from like almost
Speaker 1: infinite complexity down to just a hundred things. It's blows
Speaker 1: my mind that that's even possible, Like why does the
Speaker 1: universe work that way? Right? Right? And if you need
Speaker 1: a reminder of your high school physics, so atoms are
Speaker 1: the ones in the periodic table of elements like carbon, iron, oxygen,
Speaker 1: those are atoms. Yeah, And not that long ago people
Speaker 1: thought that that's the that's the universe. Everything you see
Speaker 1: is made out of these hundred little things, right Yeah.
Speaker 1: And as impressive as that was, right, um, I think
Speaker 1: some people were wondering, why are there these patterns, right, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you have these hundred basic things and maybe that's it,
Speaker 1: but maybe there are things inside those, like maybe those
Speaker 1: things are made out of even smaller things. And the
Speaker 1: clues we had there is that if you look at
Speaker 1: the periodic table of the elements, it's not just a
Speaker 1: hundred different things that are totally separate from each other.
Speaker 1: There are patterns like things near each other in the
Speaker 1: periodic table act in similar ways, which suggests that they're
Speaker 1: made out of some smaller bits and that small changes
Speaker 1: and how you assemble them make different atoms. Right, It's
Speaker 1: like they had all these different elements and then they
Speaker 1: started to characterize their property. They started to measure how
Speaker 1: they reacted to different things and how much they weighed,
Speaker 1: and it turned out, to their surprise that you can
Speaker 1: put them like on a table, you can order them
Speaker 1: in a certain way. Yeah, and I love when a
Speaker 1: huge advance in science comes from something that's basic. It's
Speaker 1: like how you write it on a piece of paper.
Speaker 1: The first person to make the periodic tables, like, let's
Speaker 1: organize our knowledge in this way. Oh my gosh, that
Speaker 1: makes this obvious that there's a gap here and that
Speaker 1: there's a pattern here. Right, Sometimes notation or just the
Speaker 1: way you write things can lead to huge advances, right,
Speaker 1: And I think that's just an extension of what we
Speaker 1: were talking about earlier. Right. You know, why do people
Speaker 1: even ever wonder how the universe was made? It's because
Speaker 1: they looked at stuff and they wanted to understand it,
Speaker 1: and they look for patterns and they organized it, and
Speaker 1: then they wondered, you know, these things are similar. It's
Speaker 1: the same logic that you just described applied to the
Speaker 1: periodic table. You know, these things are gases and they're active,
Speaker 1: and these things are really inactive, and these guys are
Speaker 1: metallic and all that stuff. Why are there those patterns?
Speaker 1: Why are they sing similarly each other and different from others?
Speaker 1: Because patterns tell you that there are rules, right, Like
Speaker 1: there's some kind of underlying order, we certainly hope, so
Speaker 1: otherwise physics would be impossible. Um, and yeah, patterns are
Speaker 1: the clues, right, said, like why is this like this?
Speaker 1: It could have been different, So why is it in
Speaker 1: this way? Why are these things all similar and they're
Speaker 1: all different from those things are the opposite of those things? Right?
Speaker 1: And then you use those patterns as as clues, as
Speaker 1: as hints to say, you know, what could be inside here,
Speaker 1: what's making these things act in this way? Like that's
Speaker 1: the goal of signs, right, yeah, exactly, And it could
Speaker 1: just be there is no answer. It is just the
Speaker 1: way it is, right, That's that's possible. You know, at
Speaker 1: some point we could run up against the wall. We said, like,
Speaker 1: the universe is this way and there is no explanation,
Speaker 1: and some people like that. I think that's a cop out,
Speaker 1: like we could have stopped the periodic. They must be like, Okay,
Speaker 1: that's it. The universe is made out of these hundred
Speaker 1: things and that's all we know. Yeah, and nobody asks
Speaker 1: any more questions. Yeah, exactly. That doesn't seem to be
Speaker 1: very scientific. You know, I don't know if you know
Speaker 1: about the anthropic principle, but that's the kind of argument
Speaker 1: behind the anthropic principle. You know that the universe is
Speaker 1: the way it is and some things are just randomly set,
Speaker 1: and um, there's no point in asking any more questions,
Speaker 1: so go away, please slam. I see, But I feel
Speaker 1: like what's the point of science. It's to look for explanations,
Speaker 1: So never give up, right, just keep looking and and
Speaker 1: eventually you're going to find the reason and we did that,
Speaker 1: and turns out everything in the periodic table is made
Speaker 1: out of smaller bits and and not just that, but
Speaker 1: the complexity goes down right. You you can explain all
Speaker 1: the crazy stuff in your environment, the huge numbers of
Speaker 1: things in terms of just a hundred building blocks. You
Speaker 1: can explain those hundred building blocks in terms of a
Speaker 1: smaller number of smaller particles, not a larger number. But
Speaker 1: that that wasn't necessarily the case, right, Like what helped
Speaker 1: scientists at the time think that there was such a
Speaker 1: thing as atoms, like that there was a minimal bit
Speaker 1: of the stuff we call carbon. Yeah, that's a great question,
Speaker 1: and again the answer is chemistry. People were noticing, oh,
Speaker 1: if you mix these things together, you need equal proportions
Speaker 1: of this or this happens in ratios of three to two.
Speaker 1: And a guy named Dalton who came up with this idea,
Speaker 1: he's like, hmm. Turns out that there are these exact ratios,
Speaker 1: and so it made sense then that things were made
Speaker 1: out of these tiny pieces that they were then reorganizing
Speaker 1: and fitting together. That was the first indirect piece of evidence,
Speaker 1: because like, if carbon was let's say, infinitely divisible, you
Speaker 1: wouldn't have these kind of exact ratios in chemical reactions, right, exactly, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could mix it with something else and you just
Speaker 1: get a blend. Like you need the idea of a
Speaker 1: unit of this stuff in order to explain these ratios
Speaker 1: in chemical reactions. Yeah, exactly. I hadn't thought about that. Yes,
Speaker 1: So that was the first clue, and then people discovered
Speaker 1: the first particles um. It was actually with J. J. Thompson.
Speaker 1: He discovered the electron um. He was looking at cathode
Speaker 1: ray tubes, which at the time was just this weird thing.
Speaker 1: Cathode ray tubes are what used to be in television's.
Speaker 1: They shoot these electrons from one side or the other
Speaker 1: and they would make these glowing like raise inside them.
Speaker 1: At the time, it's just like this weird effect people
Speaker 1: who show inside shows and you know, magic shows and stuff.
Speaker 1: Nobody understood it. But he started looking into it and
Speaker 1: he discovered, oh, these razors actually made out of tiny
Speaker 1: little particles um. He called them. He didn't call them
Speaker 1: particles though, he called them corpus scules. And I'm really
Speaker 1: glad that that name did not stick because it's an
Speaker 1: ugly and hard to say. We should just go back
Speaker 1: to that. I mean, why, why why wouldn't you want
Speaker 1: to be of course, course corpuscule physics, because you can't
Speaker 1: even say it. And that's exactly why. You see. It's
Speaker 1: a mouthful, isn't that. One of my favorite things about
Speaker 1: that discovery though, is that he discovered this one particle
Speaker 1: and then immediately he thought maybe everything in the world
Speaker 1: is built out of my corpus scules. He like generalized
Speaker 1: to infinity. He's like, oh, I found one particle. This
Speaker 1: is the particle that answers all the questions. Right, of course,
Speaker 1: not everything is built out of electrons. I guess why
Speaker 1: wouldn't he make that deep right? Like why would some
Speaker 1: things be made out of little things? And why would
Speaker 1: some other things not be made out of little things? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Well he I guess he couldn't imagine that there might
Speaker 1: be other kinds of particles out there also, and he
Speaker 1: was hoping that his discovery was at the root of
Speaker 1: all knowledge, right, which I guess is part of the
Speaker 1: scientific fantasy for everybody. So we can forgive it. And
Speaker 1: you know, he is the first guy to discover a particle,
Speaker 1: so you know, credit to him. So he he thought, well,
Speaker 1: what if everything's made out of little things. And then
Speaker 1: we had the periodic table, and then we've ordered it
Speaker 1: and we got the table, and then people started noticing patterns,
Speaker 1: and that's when people thought, maybe these things are made
Speaker 1: out of something else. Yeah, that started to be a
Speaker 1: pretty compelling idea because you have all these elements of
Speaker 1: periodic table. They're organized in that way. They nicely slot
Speaker 1: into the periodic table that way and um. And then
Speaker 1: people started busting the atoms open to see what's inside.
Speaker 1: And he was Rutherford who first did that. He's like,
Speaker 1: let's shoot a beam of radiation at some some matter
Speaker 1: and see what comes out. And so he was the
Speaker 1: first one to really break the atom open and to
Speaker 1: see that there was that the atomant wasn't just like
Speaker 1: a continuous blob that had a hard center, this nucleus
Speaker 1: um of something inside of it. Oh, this is the
Speaker 1: what is it? The gold X ray experiment gold foil
Speaker 1: gold foil shot radiation at a really thin sheet of
Speaker 1: gold foil, and he figured it would just go right
Speaker 1: through and he was going to measure, like, you know,
Speaker 1: how much you got bent whatever. But occasionally when he
Speaker 1: shot at the gold foil um, some radiation would bounce
Speaker 1: right back, directly back, and he said famously that it's
Speaker 1: like shooting a bullet at a piece of tissue paper
Speaker 1: and having it reflect back in your face. Right, made
Speaker 1: no sense if you thought of the tissue was just
Speaker 1: like smooth and continuous. It made a lot more sense
Speaker 1: if you thought of it is like a chain link fence, right,
Speaker 1: a bunch of really condensed little points with big gaps
Speaker 1: in between, and occasionally you hit one of those points.
Speaker 1: And that's when we realized that matter is not continuous
Speaker 1: like a jelly, but actually like little thoughts that are
Speaker 1: kind of arranged together, right, these little thoughts, and the
Speaker 1: atom itself has this tiny little hardcore the nucleus. Adams
Speaker 1: are hardcore. I totally set you up without even realizing.
Speaker 1: I'm glad we don't live in a soft core world,
Speaker 1: you know. Now we're now we're vying into um, not
Speaker 1: say for chemistry. Not on that note. Let's take a
Speaker 1: quick break. So that's kind of amazing that they came
Speaker 1: up with this idea of the atomic nucleus and protons
Speaker 1: and electrons without actually like seeing this stuff, right, just
Speaker 1: from seeing the effects of it inexperiments. Yeah, but that
Speaker 1: was the last time you could really see things. I
Speaker 1: mean when you're talking about like visualizing, these things are
Speaker 1: so tiny, so small that they're really impossible to see
Speaker 1: directly in any sort of way. And the only kind
Speaker 1: of seeing you can do is indirect. Right. You have
Speaker 1: like an idea of what it looks like, You do
Speaker 1: an experiment, You think about the result of the experiment
Speaker 1: based if if your idea is correct, and you see
Speaker 1: the results. So even today, when we're smashing protons together
Speaker 1: at the large hit On collider, we have these huge
Speaker 1: detectors that take pictures of the collisions, but we can't
Speaker 1: see the particles directly. You know, they're they're too small
Speaker 1: and things happen too fast, and so direct imaging is
Speaker 1: is all but impossible at this scale. But these days
Speaker 1: we can see atoms, right, Yeah, but depends what you
Speaker 1: mean by seeing, right, you need to see an atom.
Speaker 1: You need to bounce electrons off of it in order
Speaker 1: to see its shape. And so that's is that really seeing?
Speaker 1: I mean, you're again you're using you're bouncing particles off
Speaker 1: of it, you're making measurements, and you're translating that into
Speaker 1: an image later. I don't know if you know if
Speaker 1: that really counts as seeing, but that's a whole different
Speaker 1: philosophical discussion. They're smaller than the wavelength of light, so
Speaker 1: you it's hard to say you're seeing it. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it's it's reasonable to say you're seeing it, but
Speaker 1: it requires you expand slightly your whole definition of what
Speaker 1: it means to see something. Okay, so well let's break
Speaker 1: it down for the listener then, So everything around you,
Speaker 1: the universe that you can see in touch and smells,
Speaker 1: made out of atoms, and atoms are made out of
Speaker 1: an atomic nuclei with electrons flying around it. And then
Speaker 1: the nucleus is made out of more things, right, right, exactly,
Speaker 1: So the atoms are made out of protons and neutrons
Speaker 1: and electrons. Protons and neutrons in the nucleus. The electrons,
Speaker 1: we think so far, are just made of themselves. There's
Speaker 1: nothing inside the electron. The electrons are just tiny dots
Speaker 1: um as far as we know that we could be wrong.
Speaker 1: We're probably all wrong, But as far as we know,
Speaker 1: electrons are not made out of anything else inside the nucleus. However,
Speaker 1: the proton and the neutron, these we already know are
Speaker 1: made out of tinier stuff. And so the proton and
Speaker 1: the neutron are both made out of corks. And there's
Speaker 1: two kinds of corks that you need to make the
Speaker 1: proton and the neutron is the up cork and the
Speaker 1: down cork. Take two upcorks and down and you get
Speaker 1: a proton, or two down corks and up and you
Speaker 1: get a neutron. How do we know electrons are not
Speaker 1: made out of smaller things maybe like electron quarks or something, Yeah,
Speaker 1: little electronitos or something. Well, we don't know. All we
Speaker 1: can say is that we've tried to look inside them
Speaker 1: and we haven't seen anything yet. I mean, like, how
Speaker 1: would you even how would you even look inside of
Speaker 1: an electron? The same way we looked inside the atom
Speaker 1: and saw that it had a nucleus, right, we saw
Speaker 1: that it was made out of smaller pieces. You shoot
Speaker 1: particles at it and you try to resolve some structure.
Speaker 1: You say, oh, if I shoot at this part of
Speaker 1: the electron, it bounces straight back. If I shoot at
Speaker 1: this part, it goes right through. And so then you
Speaker 1: can tell of the electron has some structure to it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But in order to see that structure, you have to
Speaker 1: poke it with a fine enough needle, which means a
Speaker 1: high enough energy particle. And so far, so far. Tune
Speaker 1: in next week for the final story of the electron. Right, Um,
Speaker 1: so far we haven't been able to break the electron
Speaker 1: into pieces or to use a needle that's fine enough
Speaker 1: to understand that there's more stuff here in the electron
Speaker 1: than there. So far we it only looks like a
Speaker 1: point to us. You imagine you have you're looking at
Speaker 1: the Earth from space right using Google Earth. You know,
Speaker 1: can you tell that the town is made out of
Speaker 1: tiny houses? Will you keep zooming in and zooming in
Speaker 1: and as long as you have more resolution, you can see, oh,
Speaker 1: the town is made of houses, and houses made of rooms,
Speaker 1: and rooms are made of furniture. But that's only if
Speaker 1: you actually have that resolution. So for the electron, we've
Speaker 1: zoomed in as far as we can and we can't
Speaker 1: see anything smaller. But we haven't zoomed in all the way.
Speaker 1: Build bigger colliders and zoom in further and maybe we'll
Speaker 1: find something like you zoom in and it still acts
Speaker 1: like like just one thing exactly. There's no weirdness about
Speaker 1: the way it acts at different scales like there's no
Speaker 1: texture there, that's right. There's no texture to the electron
Speaker 1: so far, right exactly. But that's that's purely limited by
Speaker 1: how powerful our microscopes are, how powerful our particle accelerators are,
Speaker 1: which are modern day microscopes. But for the proteon and
Speaker 1: the neutron, there is texture there, like there's actually a
Speaker 1: little bits inside of it that you can see, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: and we we can break them up, and we can
Speaker 1: interact with those little bits, and we can measure them
Speaker 1: and study them. So those are up corks and down corks,
Speaker 1: and we know that if you rear, if you arrange
Speaker 1: up corks and down corks in one way, you get
Speaker 1: a proton. You arrange another way, you get a neutron.
Speaker 1: And so that means that everything in the periodic table
Speaker 1: can be made out of up corks, down corks, and electrons. Right,
Speaker 1: So mixtures of those three things make every atom, which
Speaker 1: makes anything that anybody's ever eaten. It's to me, it's
Speaker 1: incredible that all this complexity of stuff around us can
Speaker 1: be described in just three particles. So what do we
Speaker 1: even still talk about protons? I mean, a proton is
Speaker 1: just you're saying, it's just the word for arrangement A
Speaker 1: of these two quarks and a neutron is just arrangement
Speaker 1: number B of the quarks, you know. Yeah, Well, sometimes
Speaker 1: arrangements can be interesting. For example, Jorge is a particular
Speaker 1: arrangement of protons and neutrons in Pasadena. Right, I think
Speaker 1: you'd like to be referred to as Jorge and not
Speaker 1: individually talk to your protons, right, yeah, don't talk to
Speaker 1: my protons. Talk to me like I'm a person. Eyes
Speaker 1: up here, e's up here, Daniel. Um. Yeah, Well, it
Speaker 1: turns out that the corks are not just like hanging
Speaker 1: out near each other and we call it a proton.
Speaker 1: They are tightly bound together. They are held really firm together.
Speaker 1: They move like a single thing. Unless you have a
Speaker 1: huge amount of energy to look inside, to zoom in
Speaker 1: to see that texture, to break it up, you're just
Speaker 1: going to see a proton as a proton, even if
Speaker 1: it's made out of three corks. It's like three tiny
Speaker 1: lego pieces jam together so hard that you need an
Speaker 1: expert to pride them apart. Well, this is a perfect
Speaker 1: point to take a break. But yeah, that's a really
Speaker 1: cool point you're making just just now, which is that
Speaker 1: everything that we know about in the universe. It's just
Speaker 1: three things arranged in a bazillion different ways. That's all
Speaker 1: we are. We're just electrons, up courts and down course. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's all about the arrangements. And you know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of information in the arrangements. You know, if I
Speaker 1: rearranged all of your particles into it just a puddle
Speaker 1: on the floor, you would not be the same person.
Speaker 1: So who you are is your arrangements, you know, it's
Speaker 1: not just the elements that make you. You know, I
Speaker 1: like to joke with my friends that if you ask
Speaker 1: the particle physicists to write a cookbook, it will only
Speaker 1: have three ingredients in every single recipe, right up quirks,
Speaker 1: down quirks, and electrons, and every recipe would just say mix. No,
Speaker 1: that's exactly the point, And all the hard work is
Speaker 1: in the arrangements, right Who you are is not just upquorks,
Speaker 1: down quirks, and electrons. It's your particular arrangement of those
Speaker 1: and assembling those and into the particular thing that makes
Speaker 1: you you. Right. And so that's the answer, is that
Speaker 1: the things that we see around us in the universe
Speaker 1: are not defined by the particles that make them up,
Speaker 1: but by the arrangements of those particles. And so if
Speaker 1: the whole goal of particle physics or asking this question
Speaker 1: is to get some deep inside into the universe, then
Speaker 1: that's it. You know, that the universe. Um, that the
Speaker 1: complexity in the universe comes from arrangements. That's fascinating to me. Well,
Speaker 1: I feel like this point is is kind of maybe
Speaker 1: hard to grasp, So I was just thinking that, um,
Speaker 1: maybe the way to really grasp it is that imagine
Speaker 1: if it wasn't just three particles. Let let's say everything
Speaker 1: in the u of Earth was made out of just
Speaker 1: one particle, like particle Bob, and everything you me television, Like,
Speaker 1: imagine if it was just one particle and everything you
Speaker 1: see around you was just different arrangements of Bob, you know.
Speaker 1: And that might still be the case. Right, We could
Speaker 1: discover that the electron, the upcork, and the downcourt and
Speaker 1: all the other particles, which by the way, we haven't
Speaker 1: even talked about yet, are made out of one kind
Speaker 1: of tiniest little particle. That could be the answer. Yea, yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's not that different from three, right, Like three
Speaker 1: is still fascinating, Like it's not just Bob. It's like Bob,
Speaker 1: Sue and Mary everything. You know, it's just Bos, Sue
Speaker 1: and Mary doing different things, and then you get this incredible,
Speaker 1: amazing complexity, right. Yeah, And as you say, it could
Speaker 1: have been different. It could have been that everything is
Speaker 1: made out of its own thing and either that it
Speaker 1: was made out of particles or not. You know, you
Speaker 1: could have a world where every kind of thing, every
Speaker 1: kind of person is made out of a different kind
Speaker 1: of particles. You know, you have like three particles and
Speaker 1: air particles and cat particles, and that's why cats are
Speaker 1: so weird exactly. That's a huge clue about the universe.
Speaker 1: You know that the universe at its core is kind
Speaker 1: of simple, and to me, that gives me a lot
Speaker 1: of motivation. It tells me we can understand it. It
Speaker 1: can be boiled down into a simple explanation. It would
Speaker 1: be disappointing, if, you know, if you said, oh, I
Speaker 1: want to understand the whole universe, and the explanation for
Speaker 1: the universe was like a five million page long document.
Speaker 1: I had to describe all these complicated things. It's just
Speaker 1: Bob su very mix. Yeah, and it's all sort of
Speaker 1: emergent phenomena, right, it's the consequences of this small set
Speaker 1: of rules. It's like the game Go right. I love
Speaker 1: that game because there's a very small number of pieces,
Speaker 1: just black and white. It's a very small number of
Speaker 1: rules for how you play, but the number of games
Speaker 1: you can play is incredible. It's much more complicated than
Speaker 1: Chess and UH and all of the gameplay. All the
Speaker 1: complexity arises from how you arrange the pieces on the board,
Speaker 1: not from having like a million different kinds of pieces
Speaker 1: and special rules and cards you can draw. I think
Speaker 1: you should talk to all physicists, like the American Physical
Speaker 1: Society or the World Physics Congress and just convinced them
Speaker 1: to rename the electron the up cork and the down cork, Bob,
Speaker 1: Sue and Mary Like. I feel like that would happen
Speaker 1: to tremendous impact on like people's understanding. The point you
Speaker 1: make is interesting because it seems like it hasn't seeped
Speaker 1: into everyday knowledge. Like the people we talked to on
Speaker 1: the street, everybody knew about atoms. All know about atoms,
Speaker 1: but almost nobody could even name the kind of particles
Speaker 1: of his inside the atom, or anything deeper than that.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying, yes, you're saying it's a marketing failure.
Speaker 1: It's a branding problem Bob and Mary, and I bet
Speaker 1: in three years you would ask people on the street
Speaker 1: what is the universe made off? And people be like, Bob,
Speaker 1: su would Mary exactly? And then you would get a
Speaker 1: one cent royalty every time that happened. But that's really
Speaker 1: your that's your secret plan here. Everything is branding. So
Speaker 1: that's where we are as a human species. Right. First
Speaker 1: we didn't know what thing for made up. Then we
Speaker 1: made up stuff like earth, fire and wind, and then
Speaker 1: we figure out Adams electrons, protons, and that's what we're
Speaker 1: down to. And you're saying there could be more. We
Speaker 1: could still break things down, possibly even further. That's right.
Speaker 1: And as far as we know, the up cork, the
Speaker 1: down cork, and the electron are not made of anything
Speaker 1: smaller as far as we know. But that's only because
Speaker 1: we have a limited capacity to look. You know, our
Speaker 1: little zoom in knob is maxed out and we haven't
Speaker 1: seen anything yet, but we have lots of hints that
Speaker 1: they probably they are made out of something smaller. And
Speaker 1: those hints are just like the hints we had. We
Speaker 1: were looking at the periodic table a hundred years ago,
Speaker 1: or when people are just looking at stuff around them
Speaker 1: a thousand years ago. Oh, you mean like there's a
Speaker 1: pattern between Bob Shu and Mary. You're saying like there's
Speaker 1: suspiciously something going on there. Yeah, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: unexplained patterns and phenomena that we don't understand. And one
Speaker 1: of our greatest strategies for figuring out what's inside up cork,
Speaker 1: down cork and electron is expanding the table. Is saying like,
Speaker 1: let's make a new periodic table this time of the
Speaker 1: fundamental particles, because there are other kinds of particles out there.
Speaker 1: It's not just the upcork the down cork in the electron.
Speaker 1: When we smash particles together, sometimes we make other kinds
Speaker 1: of quarks and other kinds of electrons. You mean, like
Speaker 1: sometimes a Peter will pop out or a Fred will
Speaker 1: pop out, Yeah, or a fat Albert or something like that, exactly,
Speaker 1: because some of these particles are big and heavy. Oh,
Speaker 1: I see, But do you only need box when married
Speaker 1: to make stuff? But there are other particles out there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So one question is what is the stuff around us
Speaker 1: made out of? That's definitely, you know, a corkdown cork electron.
Speaker 1: Another question is what kinds of stuff can there be? Right,
Speaker 1: because remember we're fourteen billion years into the universe, when
Speaker 1: the universe is kind of cold and dispersed and everything
Speaker 1: is spread out a lot earlier, you know, when things
Speaker 1: were hot and dense, it could have been that other
Speaker 1: kinds of stuff was dominant, that there was enough energy
Speaker 1: to make heavier particles and they were flying around all
Speaker 1: the time. And so we don't just want an answer
Speaker 1: for today, you know, we want to answer for a
Speaker 1: general answer when it tells us deep things about the
Speaker 1: universe itself, not just what is it like now, you
Speaker 1: mean back then when things were more hardcore. Exactly what
Speaker 1: you're saying is that right now, everything's made out of
Speaker 1: Bob should marry. But maybe at some point in the
Speaker 1: universe things were made out of other kinds of particles. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe the particles up corkdown cork and electron and Bob
Speaker 1: should mary weren't as common, and more common were other
Speaker 1: particles um that we can create now in particle colliders
Speaker 1: and study to get a clue to like what the
Speaker 1: possibilities are. And so that's the strategies like let's try
Speaker 1: to make all the different kind of particles that are possible,
Speaker 1: and that gives us a better handle on the patterns.
Speaker 1: You know, you can see more of the pattern. You're
Speaker 1: like putting together the weave, and you get more and
Speaker 1: more stitches and you get an idea for how it's
Speaker 1: fitting together, and that gives you more clues to figure
Speaker 1: out like what could be underlying all of that, meaning
Speaker 1: like maybe we'll find out that Bob, su and Mary
Speaker 1: are made out of even small things like Tito ari
Speaker 1: and and then yeah, if if you have to ask me,
Speaker 1: I'm almost positive these particles know of are made of
Speaker 1: smaller ones. That this is not the final answer. That's
Speaker 1: your bed, that's your that's what you think absolutely. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just at the limit of current resolution. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know J. J. Thompson saying everything is made out
Speaker 1: of what I know, everything is made out of the electron.
Speaker 1: It's it's ridiculous. It's so much hubris to say we
Speaker 1: found the answer and we're probably done. There's so many
Speaker 1: unexplained patterns, and you know, we can get into that
Speaker 1: in a whole other podcast episode about all these hints
Speaker 1: and the new particles that might be out there, but
Speaker 1: it just doesn't make sense to me. If this is
Speaker 1: the final story, Well, I guess we'll find out what
Speaker 1: physicists can do it, you know, if we'll find out
Speaker 1: what what kind of stuff they're made out of. Oh, physicists,
Speaker 1: we can do it. You're made out of the right stuff,
Speaker 1: that's right. Yeah, yeah, And so that's why we're trying
Speaker 1: to tear these particles apart to see even deeper. And
Speaker 1: you know, what would it mean if the universe is
Speaker 1: made out of one kind of thing, Well, that would
Speaker 1: tell you something really fundamental, that would say, like, look,
Speaker 1: this is the basic element of reality, and everything else
Speaker 1: that's around you that's an emergent phenomenon. That's just like
Speaker 1: a way they're organized, or a rain stuff. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like hurricanes and blenders. They're not basic elements of
Speaker 1: the universe. They're just happened to be arrangements of basic elements.
Speaker 1: And we want to know what's at the core, you know,
Speaker 1: what defines the nature of reality itself. And so that's
Speaker 1: the sort of the long term journey we're on, and
Speaker 1: you know, we're pretty far along it, but we have
Speaker 1: no idea what fraction of the way we have yet
Speaker 1: to go. You know, are there five more layers of particles?
Speaker 1: Are there a thousand more layers of particles? Is there
Speaker 1: just one more layer of particle? We don't know. It
Speaker 1: would be amazing to one day look at your neighbor,
Speaker 1: you know, or people across the world and just say
Speaker 1: to them like, hey, you and I were made of
Speaker 1: the same thing. We're made out of this thing. That's right,
Speaker 1: all right, Well, thank you very much, guys. I hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed this podcast. Yeah, thanks everyone for listening, and
Speaker 1: thanks to all the up corks, down corks and electrons
Speaker 1: inside you. And if you're called bobs who are merry,
Speaker 1: We're sorry and we don't owe you any money, and
Speaker 1: or you're welcome. Do you have a question you wish
Speaker 1: we would cover, send it to us. We'd love to
Speaker 1: hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter,
Speaker 1: and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge One Word, or email
Speaker 1: us to feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com.