Listener Questions #19

00:00:04
Speaker 1: Hey everyone, Daniel here with a quick note that my new book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? Is coming out soon November fourth, and I'd love if you considered pre ordering it. The book imagines the arrival of aliens and what it would be like to try to make mental contact and download their understanding of the universe. Do we have Physics in common with the Aliens? If you like how the podcast asks deep physics questions and dabbles in philosophy, you'll enjoy the book, which also features cute cartoons of aliens from my friend Andy Warner. Find it anywhere or check out the book website www dot Alienspeakphysics dot com. Okay, on to today's episode.

00:00:49
Speaker 2: How do the pinworms know that it's night when they lurk in a place with so little light?

00:00:54
Speaker 1: If I upgraded my quirks to top quark class, what I automatically get we had a bigger mass.

00:01:02
Speaker 2: If you eat certain foods, your skin will change you. Why does that happen? Do we have any clue?

00:01:08
Speaker 1: Whatever questions keep you up at night, and Daniel and Kelly's answer will make it all right.

00:01:14
Speaker 2: Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

00:01:30
Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I've never had pinworms.

00:01:34
Speaker 2: Hi. I'm Kelly, I'm a biologist, and I'm not sure Daniel can be sure that he's never had pinworms.

00:01:43
Speaker 1: Welcome to the episode where we dig deep into Daniel's condition.

00:01:48
Speaker 2: All right, So, Daniel, my question for you today is what was the most surprising thing about parenting?

00:01:55
Speaker 1: Wow? Great question. I think one of the most surprising things about parenting for me was how the gross quickly becomes monotonous and every day you like wiping somebody else's feces off of your hands or face, it's just like, you know, it's just another Tuesday.

00:02:12
Speaker 2: Yep. Oh, I totally agree. The first time my daughter, like projectile pooped and it was on the wall and on me, I was like, oh my gosh, this is so gross. And then by like the fifth time, I was like, I got some more laundry to do today, and it was like it was like nothing whatever.

00:02:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, And when you have visitors and they see the inside of your actual day to day routine and they're like, whoa, it gives you a taste for like how far you've drifted from societal norms.

00:02:41
Speaker 2: But you pretty quickly get back to normal expectations. You know, when your kids get past the age where you have to wipe your butt, you very quickly return to I would prefer to not wipe people's butts if I could avoid it, Although I think taking care of each other is one of the best things that humans can do.

00:02:55
Speaker 1: I agree, But if my sixteen year old pooped on me, it would be a pretty big memory, and I can't remember all the time she did it when she was young.

00:03:04
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, things change, things change exactly.

00:03:07
Speaker 1: It would stand out now, that's right, that's right. How about you? What is one of your most surprising discoveries about parenting?

00:03:14
Speaker 2: So it also has to do with hygiene, and it's how far our species has come with hygiene, because there's so many things that kids don't do naturally that you would expect they would want to do naturally, like wash their hands, like wash their hands or take a shower.

00:03:27
Speaker 1: But doctors weren't washing their hands until like one hundred and fifty years ago.

00:03:30
Speaker 2: I know. No culture has played such a huge role in keeping us healthy, and it's amazing and it really hit home for me when I was a parent. But I think that one of the things that surprised me in particular is the number of times I've had to say the phrase get your hand out of your butt, and which leads us into question one, because kids sticking their hands in their butts is how they transmit pinworms and why this is probably the most common worm infection in the United States.

00:04:03
Speaker 1: All right, so get ready to get itchy everyone.

00:04:06
Speaker 2: That's right. So we have an amazing Discord community, and you can join us by going to Danielandkelly dot org and clicking on the link to our Discord channel. And Julian on Discord had this question that he wanted to share with us, and let.

00:04:19
Speaker 1: Me add another shout out to our Discord community. If you want to reach us, you can write us questions at questions at Daniel and Kelly dot org. But the Discord community is also a lot of fun. You can ask your questions there. There's lots of folks chatting and discussing, sharing recent articles, talking about science. If you can't get enough Daniel and Kelly and science, come join us on Discord and be part of the inner synctum.

00:04:41
Speaker 2: And I'd just like to shout out to our moderators, who are the best moderators on the whole entire internet.

00:04:46
Speaker 1: I'm sure, Oh, yes, absolutely, they win all the awards they do.

00:04:49
Speaker 3: Hey, Daniel and Kelly, this is Julian in Houston. As the parent of a small child. I've had pinworms on my mind a bit in the past couple of years, and I think I heard on a previous episode you mentioned the pinworms tend to come out at night to lay their eggs and cause itchymut. So my question is, how do pinworms know it's nighttime to come out and cause ITCHI mut Thanks so much and I look forward to hearing the answer.

00:05:14
Speaker 1: So Kelly, tell us what is a pinworm?

00:05:18
Speaker 2: A pinworm is a little worm. When it's an adult, it's about the size of a staple, so they're tiny. About forty million people in the United States probably have pinworm right now, and a billion people worldwide. I think I said a moment ago that pinworms are the most common worm infection that's in the US, where we don't have a lot of other kinds of worm infections. They're very common in children, and they're also kind of common in people in long term care facilities.

00:05:42
Speaker 1: All right, so let's estimate what fraction of our audience have pinworms right now as they're listening to this. We're talking forty million people. That's like fifteen percent of the US. Is it not evenly distributed because you're saying it's like children and old folks homes.

00:05:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, So if you have children and they are let's say preschool or elementary school age, there's a pretty good chance they have or have had pinworms, and there's a decent chance they gave it to you, although it does seem like adults become more resistant, and so even if your kids have it, you're not definitely going to get it. But doctors will often prescribe medication to an entire family if anyone in it gets the parasites, because it is pretty pretty easy to transmit.

00:06:25
Speaker 1: So maybe like one in ten of our listeners right now have pinworms. Maybe the pinworms are listening to this episode.

00:06:32
Speaker 2: So if I have to remember our demographics from the last time we did a survey, we have a lot of men over fifty or sixty and they are highly unlikely to have pinworms, And so I don't know about one in ten. It depends on how many of our current listeners have young kids. But there's a good chance that you have either had it at some point in your life or if you have kids, you have it now.

00:06:53
Speaker 1: All right, So tell us what do these guys look like.

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Speaker 2: So they're in kind of nematodes. So these are cylindrical worms. They have no segments, so don't think about an earth work. Think about just kind of like a hard outer case and a very tiny worm. They kind of come to an end, which is why they're called pinworms. As I mentioned before, they're like the size of a staple when they're adults. Oh, I see, and you might remember that a few months ago we talked about geo helmets, or we call them the dirt worms. These are nematods that you find in the dirt. This is another kind of nematode, so they're kind of related to the dirt worms we were talking about earlier.

00:07:25
Speaker 1: So you're using this phrase nematod, and it sounds like it describes a category of worm. What is a nematod.

00:07:31
Speaker 2: Nematoda is a whole phylum of worms that have this like hard outer cuticle. Some of them live in the soil, some of them are commensal with plants, and some of them are parasitic.

00:07:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, if I had to guess, if somebody just asked me what a nematoad was, it sounds to me like some sort of miniature Japanese frog. That's great, like it might be served in a weird sushi or something very high end sushi.

00:07:58
Speaker 2: I mean, that's completely wrong. That is very cute, very cute.

00:08:03
Speaker 1: So I'm imagining that the life style with these guys is not very cute. So tell us about it, and everyone finish that snack you're having before you.

00:08:11
Speaker 2: Listen to this, or go wash your hands. So the infection route is what's called fecal oral or poop to mouth. Good start.

00:08:23
Speaker 1: That's an actual phrase people use.

00:08:26
Speaker 2: I've heard it said in my community more than once. I don't know if it shows up in any textbooks, but.

00:08:31
Speaker 1: Poop mouth, all right, So tell us about it. Yeah.

00:08:35
Speaker 2: The idea here is that you accidentally eat the eggs. So you accidentally consume an egg, it hatches in your body and when it gets to the intestine, the males and the females will find each other and they'll mate, and then the males die.

00:08:48
Speaker 1: Inside you instant having a party inside you. Oh my gosh, that's right.

00:08:52
Speaker 2: You might not be dating. But the worms inside you might be so someone's find in love in that body of you are So.

00:09:00
Speaker 1: That's good news.

00:09:01
Speaker 2: I guess.

00:09:01
Speaker 1: I don't know, all right. So they start out as eggs, you end up in your mouth. We'll get into that in a minute, I imagine. Yep, they hatch, they mate inside you, and they have little babies. Oh no, eggs, I guess.

00:09:12
Speaker 2: Well, So the female starts producing eggs. The male, after reproducing dies and gets digested, and so you'll never see the male.

00:09:20
Speaker 1: Wow.

00:09:21
Speaker 2: The female her eggs. She starts making eggs. They start maturing a little bit inside of her. Then she moves down farther into your intestine, and when she is ready to lay those eggs at night, she will come out. She will crawl out of your anis.

00:09:37
Speaker 1: One's anis. Excuse me, one's anis?

00:09:40
Speaker 2: Crawl out of one's anis. And on the CDC website it cracks me up because it says anis and then in parentheses butthole just in case you are sure as so crawls out your butthole. And the female needs oxygen to stimulate the release of eggs, and apparently in some cases she has what's called a prolapsed uterus, which essentially just means that her uterus sort of comes out of her body and expels the eggs. And I guess in some cases they've observed the eggs going airborne. This expulsion happens so violently.

00:10:12
Speaker 1: This is much less cute than miniature Japanese frogs. I vote for miniature Japanese frogs. We should have that instead.

00:10:18
Speaker 2: Well, you know you don't.

00:10:19
Speaker 1: Get to juice, all right, But I have an actual sides question. Okay, how do the eggs survive in my digestive track, Like you're dropping them in stomach acid and they're surviving.

00:10:28
Speaker 2: So in this case, they're still inside of their mom. She doesn't expel them until she gets outside of the body.

00:10:33
Speaker 1: But the eggs I've consumed, right, The mom herself was born from an egg that I swallowed.

00:10:38
Speaker 2: Right, yes, And your digestive juices helped it escape from the egg that it was living in. Oh wow, And then it's tough cuticle protects it from your.

00:10:47
Speaker 1: Juices, all right. So she comes out the enis does her little oxygen.

00:10:51
Speaker 2: Dance, yes, and she will lay her eggs in the perianal region, and then often she will die and we'll talk about what happens. If she doesn't die as a symptom, that's bad. But most of the time she dies. And the eggs are sticky, and so they stick to your butt, and they also kind of make you itch because now there's like some sticky stuff in your butt, and that's not great. And kids are likely to stick their hands in their butts, which is what I learned as a mom, is that they're always sticking their hands in their butts. And so they stick their hands in their butts and then they get it underneath their fingernails or on their fingers. And then because they're scratched, because it's itch that's right, that's right.

00:11:31
Speaker 1: Don't make it sound so weird. They're itchy, so they're scratching.

00:11:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, they're itchy. So they're scratching. They're humans. And then these grubby little creatures we call children go around and touch things, you know. They put their fingers in their mouths, they put their fingers in your mouth, they put their fingers on the kitchen table, and in that way, these sticky eggs get to lots of different places, and when they get consumed, then you're back up at the start. Of the cycle that we talked about, where your stomach juices will open up the eggs and the process will start again.

00:11:58
Speaker 1: So this is the story I use to convince my kids to keep their fingers out of their mouth. So, you know, kids like to chew on their nails or whatever. And anytime I see my kids chewing on their nails, I just make this wiggly fingers hand gesture and it recalls for them the story I told them about pinworms, and they go, oh, They're immediately grossed out by what might be under their fingernails, and they stop. So this has been an effective parenting technique.

00:12:22
Speaker 2: Fantastic. Now you have your kids ever had pinworms that you know of?

00:12:27
Speaker 1: I don't think I should be discussing my kids medical history on the podcast. Let's keep it abstract.

00:12:34
Speaker 2: Okay, have you ever had pinworms?

00:12:37
Speaker 4: No?

00:12:38
Speaker 1: I have not personally ever had pinworms to my knowledge.

00:12:41
Speaker 2: Right, So that's the thing. Most who No, not to my knowledge. But I've had periods of itchiness where I wondered if maybe maybe I had it. Anytime there's a little itch, I think good worms.

00:12:55
Speaker 1: And now everyone listening to this podcast is suddenly feel and itchy.

00:12:59
Speaker 2: That's right right. I mean the females lay like ten thousand eggs.

00:13:02
Speaker 1: Oh my god, how tiny are these? Can you not see them?

00:13:04
Speaker 2: You can't see them. They're teeny tiny.

00:13:07
Speaker 1: You can't even see them when you lay ten thousand of them, Like, it doesn't look like a little blob or a smear or something.

00:13:12
Speaker 2: No, it's teeny tiny. I mean if you put it, you don't have to put it under a super high powered microscope to see it, but you do need a microscope to see it. You know, they're kind of clear, they're not very big. These eggs can survive for two to three weeks, like out on a counter or something.

00:13:25
Speaker 1: Wow.

00:13:26
Speaker 2: But the way that you find out if someone is infected is called the Scotch tape test.

00:13:33
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, no, where at the Scotch tape? Kelly, where around the black hole?

00:13:41
Speaker 2: The physicist that comes in with the black hole joke, Yes, around the black hole. Yeah. So, so the females come out at night to lay their eggs, which is going to get us to the listener's question in just a minute. But they lay their eggs at night in particular, and so in the morning right when they wake up, before they've you know, used the restroom or wiped or anything. You take a piece of tape and you sort of pat it around the perianal region and then you stick it on a glass slide and you put it under a microscope, so you can see those eggs. Sometimes you even catch the mom because she's just sort of died and she's still there, and so you'll see a worm and those you can see. So sometimes you do know that someone's infected because you find one of the mom worms and you're like, oh, shoot, well we've got worms.

00:14:26
Speaker 1: Yikes, yikes.

00:14:28
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:14:28
Speaker 1: So then the listener asked, how does the mom know that it's nighttime and she should come out and do her dance? Why doesn't she come out during the day?

00:14:35
Speaker 2: All right, great question. I didn't know the answer, and I asked the American Society of Parasitologists Facebook page, which has like fifteen thousand followers, and I was like, all right, team, how do we know that pinworms know that it's nighttime? Because I looked through a bunch of medical books about parasitic diseases and they all said pinworms come out at night. Some of them would say that the pinworms were detecting our drop in body temperature when we sleep. Oh, and then others would say they might be detecting a drop in body temperature, but they wouldn't say it definitively, And none of them included an inline reference that I could check for the study that showed that they're responding to body temperature, because they could also be responding to like, you know, you're not moving for a couple hours.

00:15:23
Speaker 1: So there's the question of how the worms know it's night to come out. But how do we know they only come out at night? And why do they only come out at night? Do they come out at night because that's the best time to lay the eggs while we're asleep, or do they need the darker environment or what?

00:15:38
Speaker 2: Yes, I think the answer at the end of the day is we don't know. Because the American Society of Parasitologists, when I asked them, the best answer I got was from my friend Brandon, who said they have little watches and that's how they know it's nighttime. I thank you, Brandon. But anyway, as far as I could tell, we haven't done studies to figure out one why it's nighttime, or two to confirm that they're actually queuing in on temperature. I think we suspect that that's the cue that they're using, but we haven't ruled out other possible cues. And as to why they do it at night, it could be possible that while people are sleeping is a time when you are less likely to have a bellel movement. And this parasite doesn't pass in feces, it passes on fingers. And the reason that we know that it happens at night is because if you do the Scotch tape test in the morning, you get a bunch of eggs. If you do it at other times of day, you don't get a bunch of eggs. And you would expect if they were laying randomly throughout the day, the Scotch tape test would give you eggs at just about any time of day.

00:16:38
Speaker 1: Fascinating. So Julian's question is really at the forefront of science.

00:16:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. I encourage any young people out there to search for this answer. I don't know what it would take to answer this question. I think pinworms are pretty host specific, and so like Ancherobius vermicularis, which is the species that humans have, I don't know you might be able to do it in some other mammalians species do the experiments, But I don't know. Maybe you'd have to heat people up and cool them down and see what their worms were doing, or ask them to stay still, or mess with some hormones that are associated with sleep that maybe the pinworms are queuing in on. But anyway, inquiring minds want to know, but we don't know the answer as far as I can tell.

00:17:17
Speaker 1: Well, if you've always been interested in black holes and this podcast has peaked your interest in biology, maybe this is the perfect crossover topic for you.

00:17:25
Speaker 2: Could be all right, Julian, thank you so much for this question and for joining us on discord. Did we scratch your itch? Please don't give us worms?

00:17:36
Speaker 3: Hey, y'all, yes, you absolutely scratched my itch. I think my favorite part was hearing about the violently explosive egg laying. Also how small the eggs actually are, as I always assume that you'd be able to see them in the poop or something like that. I'm also glad to hear Kelly give a we don't know answer, and I hope Daniel Guest to drop on it depends soon. Thank you so much for your answer, and my kid will one day figure out the answer, though hopefully not by catching pinworms.

00:18:24
Speaker 1: All right, we're back and we're answering questions from listeners because your curiosity literally powers science. If people didn't want to know the answer to these questions, we would not get to do it. So we want to hear what you wonder about the universe. Right to us two questions at Danielankelly dot org. Our next question comes from a lawyer in the UK. Rebecca wants to know about top quarks.

00:18:47
Speaker 5: If I weigh fifty five kilograms on the basis that my protons are upquarks and down cork, how much would I weigh if my protons were made of top quarks? And why is there a different if any All.

00:19:05
Speaker 1: Right, this is a really fun question about what it might be like to have top quarks in your life.

00:19:10
Speaker 2: I can imagine there being a new diet fad where people say, oh, I've created a thing that turns your bottom quarks to top quarks and that's how you're going to lose ten pounds. So you better not say this works.

00:19:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't recommend no, no, definitely, no particle physics inspired diets do not fall for that.

00:19:28
Speaker 2: Oh, there's got to be some quantum something, something diet out there that people have tried out.

00:19:33
Speaker 1: Well, you can have quark, right, Quark is some German yogurt like product, and that sounds kind of quantumy, but it's not any more quantum than anything else. I mean, literally, everything is quantum because we're all made of quantum particles. Right, So your diet is already quantum.

00:19:46
Speaker 2: That's right, all right? Well, so mass is a concept I understand biologically. Let's go ahead and understand it physically. Where does mass come from?

00:19:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Rebecca wants to know what would happen if you built your protons out of top quarks. We got to understand mass for that. So your mass mostly comes from the stuff you're made out of. Right, The mass of Kelly is very close to the mass of all of Kelly's parts added up. You are not much more than the sum of your parts. I mean, intellectually, of course you are. Personally you are. When it comes to a mass point of view, you're mostly your chunks added up.

00:20:23
Speaker 2: Thank you for pulling me out of the depression black hole. I was inevitably going to slide into.

00:20:28
Speaker 1: And that's where our intuitive sense of mass comes from. Right, Like stuff is made of smaller stuff, and the mass of the bigger stuff is the sum of the mass of the smaller stuff. Like you weigh a cat made out of legos, and then you take it apart and you weigh the legos, you get the same answer. Right, that's where our intuition comes from.

00:20:44
Speaker 2: Cats are way less fun when you take them apart, and also.

00:20:49
Speaker 1: When you make them out of legos, they're not as cozy. Yeah, And so you're made out of your atoms, and your atoms are made of protons and neutrons and electrons, and we can mostly ignore the electrons because an electron weighs almost one two thousands of a proton, so they're basically irrelevant when it comes to what you're made out of. So mostly you're made out of your protons and your neutrons.

00:21:10
Speaker 2: Sorry electrons, all right, So then where does the mass from a proton and a neutron come from?

00:21:16
Speaker 1: Right? And so Rebecca is referring to upquarks and down quarks because that's what makes up protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are just different combinations of the same two bits, which is awesome and amazing and also requires them to have these weird charges. Like to make a proton, you add two quarks that have a charge two thirds and another quark that has a charge negative one third, So plus two thirds plus two thirds gives you four thirds minus a third gives you three thirds. Or charger one that's a proton neutron is one quark with a charge two thirds and two quarks with a charge negative one third, so you get plus two minus one minus one zero. It's amazing how you can build these things out of the same building blocks, right, That's something sort of cool.

00:22:00
Speaker 2: We're talking the other day about whether or not the universe is like beautiful and sort of meets the expectation of our esthetic preferences, and I got to say, there's something about plus two thirds and negative one third charges that's not aesthetically pleasing to me. But I like that You no.

00:22:16
Speaker 1: What I thought you were going to go the other direction. Tweet. That's beautiful showing how you can build two very different things out of the same pieces. It's like when you see somebody build something incredible out of legos, You're like, Wow, that's awesome that you can do it out of the same bits. That's something simple and organomic about it. That appeals to my aesthetic.

00:22:34
Speaker 2: And I guess that's why this question about whether or not physics and math meet our definitions of beauty is so hard, because what's beautiful to some person is you know, maybe not beautiful to others, and we don't even have the same definition of beauty.

00:22:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true. And I can also get rid of the one thirds easily if I just redefine the electron mass to be negative three, then the upquarks and down quarks have charge plus two and minus one. And you know it's just because of Ben Franklin that the quarks have charge one third. There's no absolute scale there.

00:23:02
Speaker 2: Why is it Ben Franklin's fault that the charge is negative one third? We're getting way off track here, But what is Ben? Was Ben Franklin around when we were figuring this stuff out?

00:23:09
Speaker 1: Well, Ben Franklin, you know, the best president of the United States. He helped to find the direction of the currents, and so the direction that we later discovered was caused by electrons he called negative.

00:23:19
Speaker 2: Was Ben Franklin ever a president?

00:23:22
Speaker 1: No, he was not a president. That's an internet joke.

00:23:24
Speaker 2: Oh, I did that one right over my head. All right, Look, this isn't a history podcast, Daniel, Let's get back on track, all right.

00:23:32
Speaker 1: Anyways, so your protons and neutrons are made out of upquarks and down quarks. But this is where our intuition breaks down. You might imagine that the mass of the proton is just the mass of the quarks it's made out of, added up, the way the mass of the lego cat is the mass of the legos. But it's not true because mass is not just the stuff you're made out of. Mass is a measure of your internal stored energy, which is a much weirder and more astract concept. The universe is not required to be intuitive, right, or to make any sense to us at all. It's amazing we can't understand any of it. But like to give you a sense for what I'm talking about. If you have a box made of mirrors and you shine a photon in there and then slam the door. So now the photon is bouncing around inside of it, and I ask you, well, what was the mass of the box before? And after you'd say, well, you've just added a photon. Photons have no mass. You've put a zero mass thing in the box, so it has the same mass before and after, And you would be wrong because now that photon is trapped in the box, it's internal stored energy of the box. So the box gained some mass by e equals mc squared.

00:24:40
Speaker 2: Wait a minute, Wait a minute. The other day you were telling me that energy doesn't have I thought you were saying that energy doesn't have mass, and people get confused about equals mc squared. Doesn't imply that photons have mass.

00:24:50
Speaker 1: Photons do not have mass. Okay, photons do not have mass, But what is mass anyway? Mass is internal stored energy. Photons have no internal stored energy. But you can capture a photon same way that for example, if you absorb a photon you lay in the sun, you absorb photons, you gain mass because those photons energy gets converted into other kinds of energy in your body, and any internal stored energy, that's what mass is.

00:25:16
Speaker 2: So can we get a short answer for how do you define energy then? Or is that another philosophical side road? So if you've got if you've got a photon in a box and now you have more energy, what does that imply that energy is?

00:25:31
Speaker 3: Then?

00:25:32
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, we don't really know what energy is if you want to go like really deep and fundamental. It's not even something that's conserved in the universe, which makes it even harder to define. But we have categories. There's energy of motion, which is what a photon has. A photon is pure energy of motion. Is also internal stored energy, which is what mass is. So we have these examples, and we know that in many situations that some of these two things is conserved that you can convert one kind into another and back and forth they slosh back and forth. There's also potential energy, which is just energy of like configuration. You know, if you have a ball on a shelf in a gravitational field, then it has energy stored. Like you can make a gravitational battery just by lifting concrete blocks up to the top of a building, and like that has energy in it, and you can recover that energy by like dropping those rocks, and then it turns into kinetic energy and you can have that spin a wheel which then generates electricity, for example. So there's lots of different forms of energy, but mass is a measure of your internal stored energy, which is really weird because me and what we're talking about is the inertial mass of the object, right, Like, how hard is it to accelerate it? And if you shine a light into a box and then slam the door, you need to give it a bigger push to accelerate it to the same velocity.

00:26:49
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, So you've got that photon in a box and you switch one of the quarks to up and now you have two or no, you've got three quarks in there.

00:26:59
Speaker 1: So photons that you're talking about, photons and protons. Oh, I was talking about photons, which.

00:27:05
Speaker 2: Have no mass, but they have quarks.

00:27:07
Speaker 1: No, no, no, protons have quarks, photons, photons. I was using photons because they have no mass, which it makes it especially obvious that when they add mass to the box, it's not because they have stuff to them. It's because you now have internal stored energy. You've captured their energy.

00:27:27
Speaker 2: Okay, got it.

00:27:29
Speaker 1: So let's return to the proton, which is a good idea. Where does the mass of the proton come from? It does get some contribution from the mass of the quarks, like those little lego pieces, but those masses are really really tiny, like they're about one thousands or two thousands of the mass of the proton. Most of the mass of the proton comes from the energy of those quarks, the binding of them into a proton. There's a lot of energy stored in there. And we know there's a lot of energy in protons because there's a lot of energy in the nucleus. It's the strong nuclear force. This is what fission and fusion and deal with, and that's why they're so powerful. And so most of the mass of the proton doesn't come from the bits it's made out of. It comes from the binding energy. And the mass of the quarks themselves does come from the Higgs boson. But so most of your mass comes from the binding energy of quarks inside protons, not from the Higgs boson, which gives those quarks mass.

00:28:21
Speaker 2: So, to imagine what this experiment would look like, if you wanted to switch your quarks from down to up, you would need a bunch of energy to break that bond and switch it, and then you don't even really have protons anymore.

00:28:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, you wouldn't have protons anymore. So a proton is defined as this combination of up and down quarks, and you can have other combinations, like you can replace one of the up quarks with a charm, or you can replace the down with a strange and we've done all those. We've seen those particles. We call them other weird things, delta's and omegas. You can have three strange quarks. It's all sorts of different combinations. These particles can be neutral in triplets. It's meaning like their color charges are all balanced. And so we've made every possible combination we can make, but most of them are not stable. Like even the neutron is not stable. The neutron will decay to the proton. The proton is the stable one. It's the lowest energy state of all of these things. So you can make other particles out of quarks, but they wouldn't be stable, and they wouldn't be protons. But let's say you did. Let's say you took a proton and you made the top quark version of it, whatever you call it, and you make it like top top bottom, which is an analog of like up up down number one. It would already be a lot more massive because the quarks themselves are much more massive, Like a top quark has the mass of one hundred and seventy five protons, right, So the upcork has the mass of like a thousands of the proton, and the top cork has the mass of like almost two hundred protons, So it's a huge ratio. Nobody understands this. By the way, why is the top quark so much heavier than the upqork. Nobody knows. It's just this incredible heavy grand papa of a particle. Nobody knows why it's so much more massive, if.

00:30:03
Speaker 2: We could take a quick step back, So up and down quarks are different than top and bottom quarks. And what are top and bottom quarks again?

00:30:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, top and bottom quarks are the heavy versions of them. They're up and down quarks which we use to make the proton and neutron. And then, for some reason that's a mystery to us, there are other heavier versions of them. The charm and the strange are just like the up and the down, but they're heavier. The top and the bottom are just like the up and the down in terms of like electric charges and weak charges and behavior and stuff like this, but even heavier, and the top and the bottom are like the grandma and grandpa of these things. They're much much heavier than they up and the down okay, and that's why I think Rebecca was asking you about this, because they feel like different flavors of the same particle. In fact, we call this field flavor physics because if top quark and bottom quark feel like different flavors, and people who study this we call them heavy flavor physicists, which makes them sound much cooler and hip hoppier than they actually are.

00:30:57
Speaker 2: That does sound way cool? Yeah, yeah, they have big necklaces and stuff. Yeah, okay.

00:31:05
Speaker 1: So if you replace the upquorks with top quarks and the down quarks with bottom quarks you already just from the stuff you're made out of, just from the quarks, would increase the mass of this new version of the proton by a factor of hundreds, right, So, like a particle made out of a top top bottom would have a mass just from the quarks of like three hundred and fifty five protons. And that doesn't even account for the binding energy, which is most of the mass of the proton. So now this new particle you're building, what would be the binding energy this thing? How much binding energy is required to bring two top quarks and a bottom cork together. We don't know. We can't do that calculation because quantum physics in the strong force is too hard, Like we can barely calculate what the mass of the proton is. It's like not an easy thing to calculate because the strong force is so strong that every time you try to do a calculation, there's gluons, and those gluons make more gluons, and those gluons make more gluons, and those gluons stick to each other and interact with each other. It gets very complicated, and all the tricks we can use for other weaker forces don't work because the approximations break down. So we can't make that prediction. I don't know the answer to that. Nobody knows the answer to that. But I can tell you that that particle, if you made it, it wouldn't be a proton, and it wouldn't be stable. Right. Top quarks are not stable, bottom quarks are not stable. No combinations of these quarks are stable except for the proton, And so this top top bottom thing that Rebecca wants to build would definitely not be stable. So if you're designing some like super massive version of humanity and you made it out of these things, it would last for like ten to the negative twenty three seconds before decayed into something else. Probably you would end up with protons.

00:32:45
Speaker 2: You know, I gotta admit I misunderstood Rebecca's question initially. So what she says is the proton is made of up and down quirks, which are light. I thought she was asking if we instead of having up up down, what if it was all up up up, How would that change the mass? But now, oh, and I thought maybe top was another way of referring to up, because it's because up it's on top. But now now it is all clear.

00:33:06
Speaker 1: The top is just another example of particle physicists being brilliant at naming things. You know, top and bottom is like an analogy to up and down. Don't ask me why charm and strange are called charm and strange. It breaks the pattern.

00:33:18
Speaker 2: But I'm sure my confusion with the question reveals how clear you guys are with your naming.

00:33:24
Speaker 1: You know, there's a whole group of physicists who reject the names top and bottom, and they call them truth and beauty. And so there's a whole group of people who say, we don't do flavor physics, we do beauty physics.

00:33:35
Speaker 2: Oh wow, do you guys like get really heated? Do guys and gals get really heated at conferences about this kind of stuff?

00:33:43
Speaker 1: More snide and snarky than heated.

00:33:45
Speaker 2: But yeah, we're all just human beings after all, all.

00:33:50
Speaker 1: Right, Rebecca. So the answer your question is, if you tried to put Rebecca together with top quirks, you would be very very massive, at least hundreds of times more massive, probably much much more, and you would also decay very quickly down to protonic.

00:34:02
Speaker 2: Rebecca, sounds like a bad idea, Rebecca, I don't recommend it.

00:34:07
Speaker 1: No, let us know how it works. I'm curious. Maybe you'll discover something awesome.

00:34:10
Speaker 2: We don't want to lose a listener, all right, Rebecca, what do you think?

00:34:16
Speaker 5: Daniel N Kelly, thank you so much for giving me the extra time and your indulgence responding to your answer. Don't think I didn't notice the terminology drift from a barrister to lawyer, and I know that you have spared yourself having to explain to all of your viewers that in the UK, barristers don't actually make coffee. Anyway, back to the quirky cork question. Thank you very much Daniel for explaining the difference between the ups and the tops and the downs and the bottoms, which now actually makes good sense to me. However, it strikes me that there is research to be had because it doesn't explain why people gain weight over the winter months, specifically in the holiday season. And I wonder if there is a moment in time, possibly due to reduced photons in the atmosphere at that time of year, that in fact all of the fields do a switcheraroo and my protons are comprised of top bottom rather than up down, and that accounts for the weight gain. I think that there is money to be had in researching this. What do you think?

00:35:57
Speaker 2: All right? Sorry? Next question is from Robert noted that on an episode I made a mistake by joking about something that actually happens. Let's hear Robert's question who.

00:36:09
Speaker 4: In one of the podcasts for Passing Months, Kelly made a random side comment about how it'd be cool if he didn't carrots turn the orange, which, as it turns out, actually does. I don't really understand how though, so I'd love it if you can look into why and do some sort of segment about krotinemia beta caroteenes and all that.

00:36:26
Speaker 1: Thanks, all right, Kelly being called out by our audience. I wonder if this is a physics inspired listener that would be juicy.

00:36:35
Speaker 2: I don't know, but I would like all listeners to call me out. At least I assume you'd like us both be called out if you if you catch us making a mistake, please correct us. We want to get this stuff right. And you know, lots of times knowledge is moving quickly and we might not be all caught up. But in this case, this is something that I got wrong. We've known this for a long time. I think I knew it, but I've since forgotten.

00:36:58
Speaker 1: And so well, let's dig in and marinate in your wrongness. What exactly did you say? And exactly how.

00:37:06
Speaker 2: This is my favorite thing to do? Uh so, so I said, I think I made some joke about like, wouldn't it be funny if you turned orange when you ate carrots? And this is called caratinemia. And it's not called caratinemia because you ate carrots. It's called caratinemia because of the carotene that you find in a lot of different kinds of fruits and veggies.

00:37:31
Speaker 1: And are carrots called carrots because of beta carotene or is it just a totally random connection.

00:37:36
Speaker 2: I'm gonna bet that carrots had a name long before we knew what carotene was.

00:37:42
Speaker 1: Well, Google tells me that the word originates from a Greek word, which is derived from an Indo European word for horn or head. So it has to do with the shape of the top of the carrot.

00:37:53
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, and caratene is not spelled C A R R O T E ny, It's just got one R. So maybe it's just a coincidence. So anyway, around World War One and World War Two, actually caratinemia I'm going to slow down and stumble every time I have to say it was actually moderately common because there were some food shortages and lots of people kept eating large quantities of the same fruits or of veggies, and lots of different kinds of fruits and vegetables not just carrots have carotene in them.

00:38:25
Speaker 1: What's an example of something that's not a carrot but has a lot of bit of carotene in it?

00:38:29
Speaker 2: Apricots, mangoes, oranges, green beans, et cetera. Lots of different fruits and vegetables have it.

00:38:34
Speaker 1: So these are all sort of orangey stuff until you got the green beans.

00:38:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't have to be orange. And if you remember, we were talking about krotenoids when we were talking about flamingoes, and we were talking about how flamingoes extract the krotenoids from the food that they eat and they use that to make themselves pink, and they're not always eating pink foods. It has to do with how your body sort of converts and deals with these products. So in our body, when we consume carotenoids in our liver, we convert some of those carotenoids into vitamin A using a particular kind of enzyme that we have, and then we go ahead and we use that vitamin A to help us with things like vision and the functioning of our immune system. But if you have too much vitamin A, it can be toxic. So no matter how much beta caroteen we consume, our bodies only convert a small amount of it to vitamin a.

00:39:28
Speaker 1: Is that because we only need a certain amount of vitamin A, our body is not capable of converting more or why is it rejected?

00:39:33
Speaker 2: We only need a certain amount, and if you have too much, it becomes toxic, and so our body sort of protects us from that toxicity by only converting some amount of it well into vitamin A. Yeah, go us, go us. But our body still has it, and it binds to fat, and if you accumulate enough of it, sometimes you can actually see those accumulations in our hands and in the soles of our feet. So when you get caratinemia kerosinemia, see how fast I said it, I'm really good. So when you get keratinemia, you mostly can see like a yellowish tint in your souls and in your hands. You don't tend to get it in your eyes because your eyes don't have the right kind of stuff for the carotenoids to bind to. And this is one of the ways that you tell the difference between if somebody has jaundice, which is a liver problem, versus keratinemia. If their eyes aren't yellow, they probably don't have jaundice. But anyway, so it tends to build up. And you could also get licopenia, which is when you have too many tomatoes, which has a different kind of carotenoid called lycopene. I eat a lot of tomatoes, which, yeah, well are you yellow?

00:40:41
Speaker 1: Everyone's a little yellow, right, I.

00:40:42
Speaker 2: Get well, you're not noticeably yellow, and you don't have yellow hands, so you have probably haven't eaten too much. In general, this condition isn't dangerous, and you know we think that in general. Like you, if you become orange or yellowy, the solution is to just change your diet, stop eating that stuff. Eventually your body will extract the kerotene and you will go back to your normal tone. But I did find a paper that said, you know, this problem is almost never associated with poor health. Quote. However, a man who allegedly ate six to seven pounds of carrots weekly was found to have constipation, hyper keratinemia, increase liver enzymes, and possible vitamin A toxicity. So you can overdo it, guys. Your body tries to save us. But if you're eating six to seven pounds of carrots weekly, you might have some problems.

00:41:31
Speaker 1: Is this a carrot farmer or what's the story with this guy?

00:41:35
Speaker 2: That's all I could find. I don't know. Man, moderations, that's right, that's right, that's right.

00:41:41
Speaker 1: Throw in some tomatoes, dude, geez.

00:41:43
Speaker 2: That's right. Have a little leycopenia to go with your caratinymia.

00:41:48
Speaker 1: Wow, this is fascinating, and so can people google to get like pictures of people with kerotinemia that look crazy orange? Is it impressive or is it sort of underwhelming?

00:41:59
Speaker 2: It's kind of under not super impressive, And that's a fairly safe Google search as far as I can tell, I don't remember seeing anything.

00:42:07
Speaker 1: More than pinworms.

00:42:08
Speaker 2: I'm guessing yeah, yeah, I don't recommend actually looking up pinworms pictures of pinworms. But anyway, that's the answer that I have for Robert.

00:42:18
Speaker 1: And so is there anything else that if you eat it, you will turn that color? Can I turn purple by eating enough eggplant?

00:42:25
Speaker 2: I don't know about eggplant in particular, but any of those plants, be they fruit or vegetables that have a lot of carotenoids, you risk your body storing them in your in your body as something that will make you yellowy.

00:42:40
Speaker 1: So well, as a kid, I enjoyed having a blue tongue after eating blueberries. It's something really cool about that. But like, you are what you eat, and you get that color. That's super cool. So it's kind of cool to like turn orange after eating carros. It feels like cartoony biology, but real it does.

00:42:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I like that you can do this without yourself too much.

00:43:01
Speaker 5: Yeah.

00:43:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it is so sort of counterintuitive that if you eat too many green beans you could turn yellow or orange. But it is weird.

00:43:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, well it depends, right, because it's biology.

00:43:12
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. But unlike physics, I had a clear answer. And so let's see what Robert thinks of our clear answer. And Robert pick a team biology. Ooh no, I'm just kidding. You don't have to do that. Can't we all just get on you started it.

00:43:30
Speaker 1: I say, after tossing so many bos.

00:43:32
Speaker 2: All right, that's right.

00:43:34
Speaker 4: That is super interesting. I would not have expected it to be a lipid binding process. Wonder if that means if a person got liposuction procedure, if the adiposse would also come out more yellowish. Super cool regardless, So thank you for so much for ixporing my question. And as my degrees are social work, psychology, and sexuality, I'm gonna have to abstain from your biology and physics rivalry. I think all science is great, nothing more human than one to understand.

00:43:57
Speaker 1: All right, thank you Robert for writing it, and thanks to everybody who's saying and your questions. We really do love hearing from you. Write to us Questions at Daniel and Kelly dot org.

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