How did exotic particles change the Universe?

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Hey, it Jorhan Daniel here, and we want to tell you about our new book. It's called Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe because you have questions about the universe, and so we decided to write a book all about them. We talk about your questions, we give some answers, we make a bunch of silly jokes as usual, and we tackle all kinds of questions, including what happens if I fall into a black hole? Or is there another version of you out there that's right? Like usual, we tackle the deepest, darkest, biggest, craziest questions about this incredible cosmos. If you want to support the podcast, please get the book and get a copy not just for yourself, but you know, for your nieces and nephews, cousins, friends, parents, dogs, hamsters, and for the aliens. So get your copy of Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe is available for pre order now, coming out November two. You can find more details at the book's website, Universe f a Q dot com. Thanks for your support, and if you have a hamster that can read, please let us know. We'd love to have them on the podcast. Hey Daniel, do you ever wish the universe was a bad simpler you mean, like easier to understand. Yeah, you know, it seems so complex, filled with crazy particles and weird phenomena that's hard to understand. I don't know. I guess I'm glad that the universe is weird and mysterious. Well, I see, because then otherwise you'd be out of a job. Yeah, and we'd be out of a podcast. But also because the universe without mystery, I don't know, it sounds boring. You make it sound like understanding the universe would be born. Yeah, you know, sort of like you're watching that horror movie and it shows you the monster a little too early, and you're like, hey, physicists, watch out. The truth is right behind you. Physicists don't want to jump scare Hi'm more handing cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor you see, Irvine, And I'm not scared by anything the universe might offer us. Really not even I don't know anything your kids might say to you one day. I'm barely terrified of whether this world will be livable for my kids. But when we do uncover secrets of the Universe. I feel like I'm prepared for the craziest, most bonkers is ideas out there. What if it tells you that the universe is a horror movie, alien simulation or alien Netflix. Wow, if my life is scaring people, I don't know what to say to that. It's pretty terrifying. Oh, I see, it's a it's more of a tragedy than a horror It's a disaster movie. Is a disaster movie? Well, if it's an American version, it's going to have a happy ending. So let's hope for that. We're like the shark Nado of the Alien Netflix. Maybe let's just hope they got enough budget to make realistic special effects and Welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio, in which we talked about everything that is special and everything that is mundane, and everything that is boring and amazing about the universe. We take it all in stride. We want to understand all of it. We think the deepest thoughts about the universe, and we ask why is it this way, Why is it not some other way? Why doesn't it make sense to us? We try to digest all of the deepest questions in the universe, from black holes to tiny particles to everything in between, and explain all of it to you, because it is a pretty exciting universe out there, full of interesting plots in conflict and drama and sometimes a surprise twist ending. That's right. In this journey to uncover the nature of the universe, we have had lots of surprising moments where we found things we didn't think we needed or things we certainly didn't expect and later wondered, like do we really need those bits where you scare it that is startled physicists. There are lots of moments like that. But you know what they say, like a particle discovered in Act one has to kill somebody in Act three with the renting in the hall in the particle physics lab. Yeah, and it makes you ask a deeper question like is there a reason for everything? If you discover something about the universe, doesn't mean it had to be that way or could it had just been accidental? Are you uncovering some grand plan or just some like random collection of numbers that quantum mechanically fell into place? Yeah? Like is there a sort of a structure or sort of some sort of a goal to the universe, or is it all just kind of random? Right, because that's one theory of the origin of the universe, that we're just kind of like a random occurrence or a random fluctuation and in existence. Yeah, a lot of people ask why questions about physics, right. Physics is mostly focused on how how does this work? How does this fit together? How does this talk to the other thing? But in the end, the reason we're interesting these questions is because of the why questions. Why is it this way and not some other way? And I hope that when we do have the full picture of how everything works, we can look at it in see and say, hmm, well it couldn't be any other way, so it had to be this way. But you're right, it might just be that there are lots of universes and they're all just different and there's no rhyme or reason why anyone is any certain way. Is randomly generated by the Netflix agrilla? Is that random? I thought it was supposed to be intelligent. Seems kind of randoms. There are a lot of random shows and Netflix someuntimes it seems random at least but physicists are asking pretty interesting questions out there about the universe, the cosmos, what's out there, what's at the edge of the universe. But one of the more interesting questions that physicists asked is kind of about us, like what are we made out of? That's right, because we want to bring this question home in the end. This question is about our lives and our experiences and understanding our world, and that of course includes us and the things we eat and the things around us. And when you look around yourself in the universe, you wonder, like, what is the pattern here? Am I similar to that rock? Do I have something in common with that squirrel or that bit of lava? With that piece of ice cream over there? We all made out of the same bits, and we've made a lot of progress in that direction. Yeah, me and the rock have a lot in common. You both eat a lot of ice cream, right, Yeah, we both eat a lot and also um, But I think we're made out of the same things, carbon and nitrogen. I think that's right and pure determination, that's right and awesomeness. Of course. I hear he gets up at five am and has a workout? Is that also your schedule? I got to sleep at five am after I work out my brain cells. Yeah, it's a big question what are we made of? And as a scientists physicists have made a lot of progress answering that question. Like we we sort of have it down up to a pretty good level of you know, kind of the fundamental elements of the universe. We know that most of the things around us are made of a few basic building blocks that you're familiar with, you know, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, all that kind of stuff, the elements of the periodic table. And it's sort of incredible, right that you can describe so many different complicated things in terms of a few basic building blocks. It's like we talked about sometimes it's like the lego principle of the universe that with a small number of things arranged in complex ways, you can make incredible complexity. But of course we've dug even deeper than that. Right inside the atom, we know there is the nucleus which has protons and neutrons inside of it, which are made out of quarks. And those corks are just two particular flavors. There's the up cork and the down cork. Combine them in one way you get protons, combine them another way, you get neutrons sprinkling some electrons, and you get everything any human has ever eaten or slept on or thrown at their little sister. Yeah, it's sort of like finding out that legos are actually made out of Lincoln logs, super tiny little Lincoln logs, super tiny Lincoln blogs. But yeah, it seems like everything not just us and in this planet, but like everything you kind of see out there in the universal stars, the asteroids, all those billions and trillions of planets out that they're all made out of just three particles, the up and down quirks and the electron. That's right, And not just only those three particles, but those three particles in basically the same ratios, Right, Like the number of electrons and up corks and down corks that are in ice cream are the same as the number that are in lava. So like a kilogram of ice cream and a kilogram of lava have basically the same number of each kind of particles. It's just how you put them together that makes one different from the other. Yeah, we're all pretty hot. Yeah, have you ever had lava flavored ice cream? By the way, I have loved as ice cream, lava ice cream, but I have not had lava ice cream. All right, we are breaking new ground here today, and it's sort of amazing, right that you can get so much complexity out of that just these three particles. It blows my mind every time I think about it. Yeah, it's pretty amazing that we're all just made out of three particles. But the weird thing about the universe is that those are not the only particles in the universe. There are other There's a whole bunch of other particles out there that can possibly exist, and also a lot of them are are kind of flying around and raining down upon us. Yeah, it's sort of like in the Pantra the universe, there are a bunch of others ices, but your cook only ever uses three of them, right, and only uses those three to cook every single meal, And then you discover, wow, what about some basil or maybe a little bit of a reggano, you know, or some time? There are other things out there in the universe, not just the up cork, the down cork and the electron. Which spices? Do you think humans are made out of saltiness? I think a little cayenne pepper in there for sure, spice there. So we have not just the up cork and the down cork, but we have four other corks that we have discovered, and the electron has five more partners, other particles we call lepton. So in total, there are twelve of these matter particles out there, only three of which we need to make me and you and kittens and lava and all sorts of crazy things like kitten flavored ice cream. So that's a very big mystery in the universe that physicists are still pondering about, like why are those other particles there? Why does the universe need them? And I guess what would the universe be like if we didn't have them? You know, what role do they play? Like, imagine a universe without them, how would it work? They're really important or they just sort of extraneous. This is actually a question that came from one of our listeners asking me about it on Twitter. So to be on the podcast, we'll be asking the question what if the exotic particles didn't exist? And thanks a lot to Paolo Avocado for asking us about this on Twitter. It was a really cool question and inspired this episode. So, Daniel, why are they called exotic particles. That sounds like, um, I don't know, it sounds almost non PC. Well, I think we call them exotic. I don't know, I call him exotic. I don't know if that's like the official title. You know, the High Council on Physics naming hasn't met us since you started disparaging us on the podcast. Yeah, we're blackballed now. We'll never get a particle called Daniel and Jorge explained the universe. You know, that's for sure. We're not top of the list anymore. But we call him exotic because they don't appear in normal, everyday matter, because you need exotic unusual situations in order to create them, and they don't laugh for very long. I guess you'd call them exotic because you like you rarely see them, or like they rarely happen. Yeah, both. I mean, they do occur outside of our laboratory, but again rarely under special circumstances. And so there's sort of like, you know, that strange bird that you don't see very often in the park. You know, it's like compared to pigeons, that really weird strange bird is you might call it exotic if you don't see it very often landing on a tree nearby. So the big question is what would happen if that exotic bird didn't exist, Like, would the ecosystem be the same, would your experience of going to the park be the same, or would you even notice if they didn't exist? What if they were only pigeons? Right, we should ask Roseberry mousk of that question. It's pigeons all the way down. But we were wondering, as usual, how many people out there had thought about this question or thought they had an answer. So Daniel went out there into the wilds of the internet to ask what if the exotic particles didn't exist? And I love the symmetry here because this question came from the Internet and I'm sending it back out into the Internet to get people's responses. And so if you would like to participate in future questions for future episodes, please don't be shy. Right to me two questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. It's fun, it's easy, you'll be semi famous. It sounds like that's a typical strategy for physicist Daniel, Like someone asks you a question, you just ask the question back. Why do you say that's a typical strategy. I don't know, why do you think Anyways, here's what people had to say, So I'm gonna say, yes, we would notice if the particles that don't make a normal manner disappeared, like neutrinos, and now, because we can observe them, albeit not often, uh so all of a sudden we wouldn't be able to observe them anymore. But I assume there would be some other effects that we haven't considered, or maybe someone's considered that would have profound changes to our existence. That is a very good question, and yes, I think we would notice. I know that these particles don't interact with us or anything around us, and I know that neutronos are usually something that comes from supernovas or outer space. But I think we would notice because maybe there would be a difference in the supernovas, or maybe there is something that these particles interact with that we are yet to discover. I think we would notice, but I don't know how. I think we will notice. I don't know how much it will affect us. I don't know how much, but I'm sure we can notice it. Well. I think all matter is supposed to be interconnected and affecting each other. So even if we can't see it or since it, something's got to happen to normal matter if that non normal matter disappeared. I imagine if the moon suddenly disappeared, we would certainly notice it, not just by what we saw, but by the change in the motion of the Earth. Um. I don't know enough about neutrinos and tows, you know, if they have mass or anything like that, but they have to have something that we're interacting with that we would no longer be interacting with all of a sudden, and that's got to be weird. I think we definitely would notice if particles like neutrinos that don't make up normal matter disappeared all of a sudden, because I know there's experiments around the world that detect those particles. I don't know what the consequences of that happening would be, though I'm assuming that the particles that don't make up normal matter have an effect on normal matter. I'm not in timely sure what I know that neutrinos passed straight through stuff without affecting it, so I would hesitate to say that we wouldn't notice it at all. It seems to me like that's unlikely, because there's quite a lot of them. If particles that don't make up normal manner disappeared, we would not us because the energy of the universe would decrease. All right, people had opinions here. Nobody said I have no idea. Yeah, exactly, this is their universe we're talking about. Man, you know, they're really getting into it. It's important to them. It's almost like they didn't they haven't read the book We Have No Idea, A Guide to the Unknown Universe or our new book. Frequently asked questions about the universe, which is out right now. Yeah, check out your copy of Universe f a Q dot com. But no, it seems like a lot of people sort of had opinions about this, right, So people said we wouldn't notice, and people said we wouldn't notice. Yeah, nobody was on the fence, and a lot of people felt like, you know, these do make up an important part of our universe, even if you don't necessarily see them or detect them every single day. All right, Well, let's dig into it, Daniel. What are the exotic particles like specifically? Can you name them? I can't name them, though, I'm not responsible for having chosen their names, of course. And you know, the first sort of exotic particle is the new trino. We talked about the particles that make up matter in their two corks and one lepton. This electron is a particle we call a lepton, but the electron actually has a partner which is pretty weird and doesn't exist as part of matter, and that's the neutrino. It's this very strange particle. And it's not strange because it's rare. It's actually very very common. It's just not part of the atom. The Sun makes lots and lots of neutrinos when it produces nuclear fusion, and it's like a hundred billion of them raining down on every square centimeter of the Earth every second. So the universe is filled with neutrinos, but they're mostly invisible to us and they don't play a role in the atom. Yeah, I guess it's kind of weird to think about that. You know, the Sun, like the hydrogen in it and the fuel that's making it burn, is made out of the same things that we know that you and I are, you know, up and down quarts and electrons, and it's burning, but in doing so it creates other particles like the neutrino and then shoots a whole bunch of them out into space. Absolutely, and that's because involved infusion is the weak force, and the neutrino is a pro dout of the weak force. Like every time you have a W boson created by the weak force, it decays into, for example, an electron and a neutrino. So every time you get like a neutron that de cas into a proton. The way that happens is one cork changes into another one by giving off a W which then turns into an electron and a neutrino. So you go from neutron into proton, electron and a neutrino. Yeah, it's almost like the universe just kind of makes these particles out of nothingness, right, Like there's some sort of collision or reaction in the center of the Sun, and there's like pure energy for a brief second, and then that energy, you know, kind of solidifies or becomes particles that can exist and including stuff like the neutrino. Yeah, you can think of it that way. You know that we are like converting one kind of matter into another kind of matter. It's not like we're rearranging the pieces inside these particles to make something else out of the same bits, like a jigsaw puzzle or chemistry experiment. We really are converting one kind of matter into another. But another way to think about it is in terms of fields. If you'd like to think of about particles as like little energy bubbles inside a field, then you can just think about these fields is like connected to each other, and the energy can slash from one kind of field, you know, like a field that has a w boson in it, to another kind of field, like one that has neutrinos. And the way the forces work is that they are the things that connect those fields together that allow energy to slash from one kind of field into another. Yeah, but then a trina is not the only exotic particle. There's a whole bunch of other ones, that's right. So we talk about those three particles that make up the atom and then the neutrinos together, we have four particles we've talked about so far. And the amazing thing is that those four particles each have a copy out there. So those four particles we call them the first generation of particles. They're like the core group of particles, and then each of them has a copy in the second generation of particles. So for example, the up cork has a copy which is called the charm cork, and the down cork has a copy which is called the strange cork, and the electron is a copy which is called them you you on. And by copy I mean that there's another the particle out there that has almost exactly the same properties, the same electric charges, the same interaction, the same spins, etcetera. Except it's different because it has more mass. It's definitely a different particle, right Like all the ones in the first generation, the up and down course, the electron, the neutrino, they're all very different, right, Like they all have different electrical charges, and the maternal has zero electrical charge. They're like very different in terms of their properties. But there are sort of copies of them that are just heavier like that, but heavier precisely. And it's a big mystery, like why do these particles exist? If you're gonna have more particles, why just have like reruns of the particles you already had. Why not have like brand new, weird kinds of particles. But for whatever reason, there's this mirror image. This is like symmetry. This is the kind of thing we've see in particle physics all the time. You know, like every particle, you know, the electron, has lots of different kinds of symmetries. You know, there's also the symmetry that says every particle has an anti particle. That's like another reflection of this first generation of particles. We don't think about them usually, it's like the whole other set of particles. We think about the electron and its antiparticle like grouped together into one idea. And so here we have like a different way to reflect this first generation. We say this first generation has a copy, which we call the second generation. And the incredible thing is that there are two copies actually, so this is the second generation of particles, and then another four particles, the top and the bottom, and the towel particle, which is a copy of the electron of the muan, and then another neutrino. So in total there are twelve of these particles and eight of them are just copies of the first four. Yeah, that is super weird. And you know that there you call them different particles, not just because they're heavier. But because they said act a little bit different as well, I mean, like the fact that they're heavier makes them act different. They certainly do act differently. And because they are heavier, and more specifically, because there is a lighter version of them, they don't laugh for very long because they can decay, Like the top cork lasts for like ten to the minus twenty three seconds and very quickly decays into a bottom cork and a couple of other things, and then the bottom core class for a very short amount of time before it decays into other things like muans or charm corks or other stuff. And so things don't like to stick around in very massive particles. They tend to fall down the ladder to the lowest mass particles and those get stuck like an up cork and a down cork. They can't decay into anything else because there's nothing below them on the ladder. I guess what I mean is like there's no continuum of mass with particles, you know what I mean, Like, there's not like an electron and then a slot, and then you can have a slightly heavier electron and a slightly slightly heavier electron all the way up to like you know, super heavy that there's like discrete kind of slots for the mass of an electron, regular electron, a little bit heavier electron, and x L electro. That's right. It's not like ordering shoes on Amazon where they have every single size. You know, there's like the very very small ones, the heavy ones, and then the supermassive ones. And the incredible thing is that there's no like pattern to these masses. It's not like the second generation or all twice as heavi or three times as heavy as the first generation. They all have different ratios for the first generation, and the third generation has even weirder ratio. Its like the top cork is ridiculously heavy. It's like much heavier than everything else put together, and then times fifty. So we don't understand the pattern of those masses at all. As you say, it's not regular, it's not like something in every location, is not something that every possible mass, and there's nothing to explain why we have some masses and others. All right, So then we have eight or nine. I guess I need to count the neutrino exotic particles, which are you know, rare particles that don't make up the usual matter. And so the big question is why do we need them? And what would happen to the universe if we didn't have them. So we'll get to those questions, but first let's take a quick break. Alright, we're talking about exotic particle and who needs them? Why do we care? Daniel? They don't make me up, Like, I'm not made out of any exotic particles. None of the things around me, said, are made out of exotic particles. It seems like there's sort of extraneous at least to the human experience. But it seems like most of the experience of the universe they're a little bit extraneous. So I guess the big question is do we actually need them like that the universe need to make them or create them or invent them. Well, I need them. I mean they're not experenious to my experience. They're pretty big job of my everyday life. You know, without them, I wouldn't be a particle of physicist studying them. So, you know, for some tiny sliver or humanity, they are actually a central part of the human existence, you mean, an essential part of your job. Like if they didn't exist, you we just have a different job. Yeah, I guess, so I would have a different job. What job Daniel have in that university be inventing terrible ice cream flavors in a factory somewhere, like lava flavor and kitten flavor, yeah, or lego flavor. And you're right, you know, we don't necessarily see them in our everyday lives, but I think that probably we do need them. I think that these particles are clues. I mean, I think that they exist because there's something deeper going on, you know. I think that they come about because fundamentally, they're like a different way to organize little bits that are inside all of these particles, you know, sort of like the way the periodic table has structure, Right, it has metal here and this kind of stuff there, and various atoms act in certain ways and their patterns there, and those patterns come from the structure of the atom. How many electrons you have in orbitals or whatever. So now we look at this table of the fundamental particles and we see that there are patterns, and I'm pretty sure, though I have no proof, that those patterns come from something smaller that makes up all of these particles. Some you know, way to rearrange little er bits that give you all of these things. And so in that sense, we do need them because they're like an expression of what's going on underneath. And we certainly need them because their clues that will help us figure out what's going on underneath. I see you're saying like maybe the universe doesn't really need them, but are sort of useful or great for us that they're there because they might help us sort of understand that, you know, the secrets of how the rest of the universe, like the stuff we are made out of, how and why it's built. Yeah, So for example, if corks and electrons are not like the smallest things, we're pretty sure they're not. If they're made out of smaller things inside them tying your little particles, then I suspect these other things muans and the top corks and bottom corks are just natural byproducts of other ways those things can come together, And so I think that they're vital clues towards pointing us to those secrets. Right, and I vote that we name those smaller particles Lincoln Lugginos or something. But I guess maybe you know, and asking like why do we need them. Do we have anything that's made out of these particles? Is there anything out the any universe that kind of uses these for like building anything, or you know, at least momentarily in some extreme cases. So these particles are not stable, so they can't hang out. You can't like take a bunch of top quarks and build it together into some structure that's just made out of top quarks. You can't do the same thing with muons or with hows. These particles, if they are in the universe, they last very briefly and then they turn into lighter stuff, So you can't like build anything out of them. But that doesn't mean that they don't play a role. Just because you can't stick around for a long time doesn't mean that you can't influence what happens. You know. It's sort of like a guest appearance on a TV show. You don't have to be in all the seasons, but you can still like totally steal a scene when you come in and change the way things happen. You're saying they sort of have a presence about them. Yeah, they certainly do. They have some charisma, and there's actually lots of ways in which these particles really strongly influenced not just the structure of the universe and the way it's organized, but our everyday lives. I think we're going to get into that later, but I guess maybe a question I have is about the neutrinos. I mean, the neutrinos are pretty stable, they hang out for a while. It doesn't seem like they're used for anything because they're so Yeah, that's true. Neutrinos are stable. They can last for a long time. They do actually slide into each other. Like if you produce an electron neutrino and you shoot it through the universe, it might end up as a muon neutrino or a town neutrino. These particles sort of mix into each other, which is sort of cool, and we have a whole fun podcast episode about neutrino mixing. It's this crazy quantum mechanical effect though you can learn about if you check out that episode. But you're right that even though neutrinos are mostly stable, if you make a neutrino, you're gonna have a neutrino. You can't build anything out of them, and the reason is that they don't really interact. They're not like sticky, right. The neutrinos have only one way to interact with each other or with other stuff, and that's through the weak interaction, which is super duper weak. Like you can shoot a neutrino through a block of lead that's a light year thick and you only have a fifty percent chance of interacting with anything in there. So mostly the universe is just totally transparent to a neutrino, which makes it hard to like, you know, make something like atoms or elements or anything more complex out of neutrin knows. So that's why complexity doesn't arise out of just like pure boxes of neutrinos. But then would you say they're needed for anything in the universe, Well, their math definitely contributes to things, you know. The fact that their neutrinos are out there changes the overall mass energy density of the universe, so it contributes, you know, to like the curvature of the universe, Like if you deleted all the neutrinos in the universe, it would change a little bit the gravitational shape of space. I also remember talking in another episode about how you know some of these heavier exotic particles they disappear very quickly. But that's only because right now things are pretty calm in the universe. But back at the beginning of the universe, when things were like super hot and crazy like, these particles were more normal kind of, they were less exotic. Yeah, precisely. And that's what we're doing at particle accelerators is we are trying to recreate those conditions. These things require a certain temperature. It's sort of like having a puff of steam. You know, out there on a cold night. It's not going to stay stem very long, but you inject the puff of steam into a sauna, then yeah, you can hang out and stay a puff of steam. And so back in the early universe, when everything was hot and dense and very compressed, if you had one of these particles, it could hang around a lot longer because it was surrounded by a lot of energy, so the energy didn't have to spread out into lower mass particles. You could just hang out like that, like the average energy denstat The temperature of the universe was higher, so we could make these heavier particles and have them stick around. But these days the universe is very very cold and dilute. So if you get that much energy concentrated into one spot, Entropy likes to spread it out and very quickly decays into the lower mass stable particles. But I guess maybe back then, when the universe was hot and crazy, could you have made an atom out of like a top particle, you know, like a heavier version of what we would normally call hydrogen. Now, yeah, people are thinking about that kind of stuff, you know. Can you make things like toponium, which would be like a bound state of a top cork and an anti top cork, or charmonium or stuff like this. Can you have those things? We have actually seen charmonium like to charm corks, They get together and make a stable particle. It doesn't last for that long, but it hangs out for a little while, and so people experiment with that kind of stuff. Those calculations are very very difficult to do because they involved the strong force, and you're talking about a lot of particles in a really small place, and so the calculations gets sort of out of control. It's not something we can very actively simulate. But yes, we do think that there were other different weird states of matter in the very early universe that might have involved some of these heavier particles. Yes, like maybe the early universe was a universe dominated by these exotic things made out of these exotic particles, though it wouldn't be as like separated, you know, you wouldn't have like these things floating around and separated and is distinct the way we think about Adams now. It's more like a big plasma, like a big gamush where things are like interacting constantly with lots of other things. So things were more exotic and also swishier. Yeah, exactly, it was like a crazy party packed full of weird people. Nowadays were less exotic and I guess um less squishy. Definitely not lower mass though, yeah, not only used to go up well. And also I like this analogy you were telling me that it's it's sort of like wondering what iron or or at least what some of these like super heavy elements that you see like plutonium or you know, even those crazy einsteinium like what are those four? You can ask and you might say, well, they're not really good for anything, but there's sort of you know, evidence or a result of the universe having these kinds of rules about how to put things together, which is useful for us to know exactly if you're going to have like protons and neutrons and electrons, then they're going to come together and make weird stuff. And that stuff includes of course hydrogen and helium, basic stuff, but also more complex stuff. And that's great because when you see that complex stuff, you can look at the power, you can look at the clues, and you can figure out what's going on underneath. Now, in that case, you know they formed stable things like iron is pretty stable, it will last for a very very long time. In the case of the fundamental particles, like none of those other ones we think are stable, so they don't last for a very very long time, but we do hope they are clues of about what they might be made out of a smaller scale where those tiny little particles that make all of matter might be. It's so that's why I think there's sort of like a natural byproduct of the deeper pattern of the universe. So you just can't get rid of them. Like if you're gonna have protons and neutrons and electrons, you can't just remove iron from the universe. It's going to happen. I guess you could almost say Daniel that these exotic particles exist for you kind of like for you to understand the universe. Yeah, well, you know, they're just sort of like the consequences of the universe. And I think about this a lot, like what in the universe is fundamental, like what is written into the basic laws of the universe, and what just sort of like arises from how those fundamental elements interact, you know, like me and you, humanity and biology. None of that is fundamental, is to say in the source code of the university have to have it. It comes out of, you know, the interactions of particles in a very complex way, something it's very difficult to foresee. And the same thing is true of iron and platinum and all these complex elements. You take basic particles and you let them run free and they do these crazy things. And we think about the particles we know now, the electron, the upcork, the downcourt. Could think about those as if they're fundamental particles, but likely they are also just like emergent phenomena that arises out of something much much smaller that's interacting in a weird way in creating those things. So I think we haven't even seen the deep truth of the universe. All we've ever seen are the things that sort of happened to come together. I guess, in general, asking the question like do we need these exotic particles, it is really kind of a philosophical question, you know, And like maybe the better way to approach this question is, like what would the universe be like if we didn't have these exotic particles? Like what would be the consequences if they somehow didn't exist? I think it's asking like a hypothetical question, like how different would that universe be if you could some like edit these out of the simulation, right, And so let's talk about that, Like what are some of the things that would change about our universe if we didn't have these exotic particles. Well, one thing that would happen is we would all feel less radiation. When particles from space hit our atmosphere, like really high energy protons or electrons or whatever, they create tiny little meteor showers. Like what happens when a rock hits the atmosphere. It doesn't just hit the ground with the same energy as when it hit the atmosphere. It loses a lot of energy on re entry, right, or like a spacecraft also heats up when it enters the atmosphere. The same is true on a tiny scale. When a particle hits the atmosphere, it bangs into all the other particles in the atmosphere and gives up some of its energy, and it creates weird matter because it's created like extra energy density. So like a proton like smashes into an atom and the top of the atmosphere, it might create momentarily like a pion or a kon or some other weird combination that requires one of these exotic particles and then decay and produce muans, And those muans then come down and hit the earth, and that's radiation. That's radiation that hits your brain or hits your finger, or hits the ground. But it's definitely radiation created from exotic particles. Yeah, and it's not harmless radiation, right, Like it can actually kind of mutate your DNA. Like if those muans or those little bits of stuff that are falling down, you know, hit a DNA molecule, it's going to create a mutation. And so that could be trouble, yeah, or it could be necessary. Right, We don't know how much radiation is Like the exactly best amount of radiation to cause mutations in your DNA, because evolution needs some mutations. If every creature is just a copy of its parent, then you're not like exploring the possible ways creatures can be. You need variation and mutation to get randomness for natural selection to work, and so we sort of rely on some of those mistakes caused by cosmic rays. Well, I guess you know, when you're out in the sun, people worry about UV rays, which are photons, but you're saying that there's other particles raining down on me that could you know, harm me or burn my skin. Yeah, like muans. So muans don't last very long. They last just a few microseconds, but when they are created in the upper atmosphere, they're going really really fast, like some fraction of the speed of light, and so actually their clocks are slowed down. Even though they only last a few microseconds in their reference frame from our point of view, they actually last a long time, long enough to hit the ground, and the same is not true for example, for electrons. Electrons can't penetrate all the way down to the ground, so it's only because these muans are heavier they can make it all the way through the atmosphere down to the ground to cause a mutation in your d n A. If we didn't have muans, then what would happen when a proton hit the upper atmosphere is it would just create a shower of electrons, and those electrons wouldn't make it down to the surface, and they wouldn't cause mutations in that primordial soup that were necessary for you to evolve. So I think what you're saying is that without exotic particles, the sun block industry would go out of business, first of all, and second of all, we might not even be here, like humans may not have evolved at all, or life on Earth. Yeah. Actually, if you want to protect yourself against muans, you need like several meters of lead or rock or something. No sun blog is going to do it. How about at several of that. You gotta live underground, folks. That's why we do these experiments, these dark matter searches. We do them deep deep underground, so that we can protect ourselves from the reign of new ones coming from the atmosphere. All right, Well, that's one way in which the universe would be different. Let's get into other ways in which the universe would be different without exotic particles. But first, let's take another quick break. All right, we are painting the picture of a less exotic universe. I guess a more bland universe, Daniel, Is that the opposite of exotic, a more boring universe, a less surprising universe, more typical, or I guess less diverse universe? Right, yeah, exactly, all right, And so we talked about how the universe would not have cosmic race you're raining down on Earth and maybe even kickstarting evolution for us that lead to humans evolving. What are some of the other ways in which the universe would change change without exotic particles. Well, exotic particles actually play a really big role in the reason the universe even exists at all, in the way that it does. You know, one of the deep mysteries of the universe is why it's made out of matter and not antimatter. Like we know that every particle out there has an antimatter equivalent. Electrons have positrons, and protons have anti protons, and quirks have antiquarks, and there seems to be this deep symmetry, right, this is cool reflection, And you wonder, like well, why is the universe made out of matter and not antimatter? Because in the Big Bang, we think that like the same amount of matter and antimatter was made out of that primordial goo. So why didn't it just like find each other, smash up, and then annihilate and give us a universe filled with photons and energy with no matter left over whatsoever. So if the two were perfectly symmetric, then that would have happened and we would have no stuff left in the universe. But you look around you and obviously there's lots of stuff in the universe. There's like tons and tons uns and stuff in the universe. There's billions of stars and galaxies and all sorts of crazy stuff made out of matter and not antimatter. And for that to happen you need some kind of process, some weird physics interaction that prefers to create matter or that turns antimatter into matter. Yeah, that is weird that the most of the universe, or almost all of the universe is matter and not antimatter. And so you're saying that maybe exotic particles are the reason that is so, Yeah, we know of only a few ways that the universe prefers matter to antimatter that it likes to produce more matter than antimatter. Mostly it's totally symmetric, like in almost every way it's symmetric. It's sort of amazing, like it's cern we have made anti hydrogen. For example, we took an anti proton and we put an anti electron around it, and the two things formed anti hydrogen, and it acts just like hydrogen. You know, it's like emits light and it has energy levels to matter antimatter. Almost totally symmetric. But there are a couple of ways in which the universe prefers matter to antimatter, and those involve these exotic particles. So, for example, if you have a weird interaction that involves a bottom cork or a strange cork, that's more likely to give you matter than antimatter. And so we think that maybe in the early universe, this is what happened, that those exotic particles like steered the balance a tiny little bit towards matter, so that most of the stuff annihilated and turned into light. But what was left over is the matter that ended up being me. And you, wow, that's some heavy matters here. I think what you're saying is that, you know, when you smash particles together or there's a you know, explosion or something, there's kind of a fifty fifty chance of making matter or antimatter usually out of these kind of collisions or reactions. But you're saying that if it involves one of these exotic particles, then maybe it's not. Yeah, this is like fifty point one percent chance of making matter rather than antimatter, and that's enough. You know, it adds up, and we haven't actually identified all the ways that it happens. We found a few ways that the universe prefers matter to antimatter, and those are solid and they're real, but they can't explain the imbalance, Like the amount is actually bigger than we can understand, and so we suspect that these exotic particles are doing even more than we think to tip the balance towards matter than antimatter. We haven't figured it out yet. It's still an open mystery. So like, if you have a bottom cork in that reaction, then it will create a little bit more matter than antimatter. But what if you have like an anti bottom cord, wouldn't that create more antimatter? Yeah, Actually, these things are bound states of matter and antimatter. So you have things like it's called a b maison, which is like a B cork and an anti D cork, and those things oscillate back and forth between matter and antimatter, but they are more likely to stick around and stay as matter than antimatter. All right, So that's another kind of reason the universe seems to have these exotic particles, or at least you know, one big thing that would change if we didn't have these exotic particles, maybe we wouldn't be here, right, Like, maybe everything would just annihilated itself and there wouldn't be any room for us. Yeah, if they were just up quarks, down quirks and electrons made in the Big Bang, that they might have all annihilated and there wouldn't be anything left for us to be built out of. All right. Well, what are some of the other ways in which the universe would change without exotic particles. Well, we think that the really heavy particles play a really big role in the Higgs boson in a giving mass to the other particles. You know that the Higgs boson is the way that other particles have mass, and that it does that because it has this field that fills the universe called the Higgs field. And the key to the Higgs field is that even when it's most relaxed, even when it's like lowest energy, it's not a zero energy. So everywhere in space has this weird thing and it called the Higgs field, which has some energy stored in it. And when particles fly through the Higgs field, they interact with it in different ways and that's what gives them mass. So a particle that interacts with Higgs field a lot gets a lot of mass, and particles that don't interact with the Higgs field really at all get a very small amount of mass. And so that's key that the Higgs field has this energy stored in it. It's vital or making all the particles we know and love have the masses that they do. Right, Like, if the Higgs field didn't have this kind of basic energy to it, like everything which just fly through the universe, like it didn't have mass like a photon kinda yeah, exactly, if the Higgs field had cooled and relaxed down to zero energy inside of it, or much much smaller energy than most of the particles would have almost no mass. That W and the Z would have no mass, the electron might not have any mass, and the whole nature of the universe, the whole like way things come together, all those emergent phenomena we talked about earlier, the complexity that arises when you collide these particles and make them into soup. Then it would be totally different and the universe would look very, very different. And the Higgs field only has the value that it does because of the heavy particles that are there. Whoa wait, wait a minute. You're saying that the Higgs field has some energy, and without it, we wouldn't have any mass, or nothing would stick together because everything would be flying around like light. Basically, you're saying that it has this energy because of the exotic particles, or it has this energy, or it keeps this energy because of the heavy particles. It keeps the energy because the heavy particles, like the Higgs field in the early universe had a lot of energy in it like everything else. And then the universe started to cool and everything got more spread out and calmer, and everything started to relax down to smaller and smaller energies. But the Higgs field at some point got stuck. It's sort of like water that was flowing downhill, but instead of making it all the way to the ocean, it got stuck in some sort of mountain lake, right, really high energy, like it's holding some energy. It's holding some energy exactly. If it didn't have that energy, we wouldn't have the mass that we do. And the only reason it got stuck in that lake is because you know, there's like another other side of the lake, the thing that's like blocking it from flowing downhill. And then blocking comes from the heavier particles. Like if you didn't have the top cork, then the Higgs field would not have gotten stuck in that mountain lake. It would have flowed all the way down to the ocean. I guess that's a kind of a hard picture to understand. You're saying not because the top cord exists, but because it sort of can exist almost in a way, right, Like the top cork is something that could happen, and so because it can happen, the Higgs field doesn't just dump all of its energy. Yeah, because the top corp can exist because its field is out there, and because it's field interact with the Higgs boson so much, right, because the top cork is super massive, then it creates this weird shelf that the Higgs field gets stuck on. I guess what you mean, Like, if you didn't have the top cork field, then the Higgs field with relax down to zero energy. What does it mean to not relax or relax? Well, the Higgs field has energy stored in it, right, because it's sort of stuck. Like think about a ball that's trying to get down to the lowest energy state. It's like rolling down a hill, but it gets trapped along the way. You know, it can't relax down to the lowest height. And so the Higgs field is sort of like that. It got stuck while he was relaxing. Well though the rest of the universe was cooling down, the Higgs field got stuck at a certain energy level, and it's the top cork that's keeping it from getting all the way down to zero energy. Even though you don't see a lot of top corks out there in the university. They're sort of fleeting and they don't exist for very long. Just the fact that they can exist somehow prevents the Higgs field from collapsing. Yeah, it changes the potential energy for the Higgs field to create this weird little local minimum that the Higgs field gets trapped in, and we don't really understand that shape of that minimum. We know that it's due to the top cork. We also don't know how stable it is, like it could collapse. We have a whole fun podcast episode about whether the Higgs boson will destroy the universe if that local minimum falls apart. So right now the top cork is protecting it and making it strong, but we don't know how long that's going to go on for. Well, thank goodness it's there, because I know that without the Higgs field, or with the Higgs field collapse, like the whole universe would kind of like turnover right invert itself. Yeah, the universe would be totally different if the Higgs field ever collapsed. We still would have a universe, but the effective laws of physics would change dramatically because all of a sudden, like electrons and up corks and down corks would have much much less mass, if any at all, and that would change the way everything worked. Yeah, my son learned about this recently and it's been keeping him up. It's kind of a scary picture. Hopefully won't happened, and thank goodness, it's not happening because of the one of these Eiggs particles. Exactly. Just tell your son that the top cork is out there saving the universe the unsunk hero. All right, we have one more way in which the universe would be different without exotic particles, and it has to do with the weak force. That's right. We talked about new trinos, and neutrinos don't play a role in the atom, but they do play an important role in the weak force, like when you have beta decay, Like when a neutron decays, it can't just decay into a proton and an electron. It also has to make a new trino, right, because something has to carry away that extra hypercharge. And so every time you have a process that involves the weak force, which turns out to be pretty important in basic fusion and all sorts of stuff in the universe, then you have to have a new trino. For example, you were taking the universe and redesigning it and stripping stuff out. If you took away the new trino, you'd have to get rid of the w boson. If you get rid of the w boson, then the whole weak force doesn't work because the weak force is this complicated dance of the W and the Z and the photon. So now you've got to get rid of all of that. So neutrino sort of like at the foundation of the house, and once you start pulling it out, then things start to collapse. And specifically you get rid of the weak force, you get rid of electromagnetism, and you also got to get rid of the Higgs boson. I guess what do you mean, Like if I take out the neutrino, you have to take out the W boson and everything falls apart, Like what would happen, Like there wouldn't be like the same reactions wouldn't be able to happen, or like the reactions would happen, but they would be different or they like do you need them to have some sort of like exhaust or byproduct that kind of makes the reactions work? Yeah, Well, the way I think about them, you know, there are just like different elements of the same Rubik's cube. You know, the weak force is the W particles and the Z particles, but also the particles that interact with them, and so that's the neutrino. Like, the neutrino is the thing that interacts via the weak force, and so you know what does the W particle do? For example, Well, it turns electrons into neutrinos. Right, if you have an electron and admits a W, that W carries the ectric charge, and so it carries away the charge of the electron and leaves you with a new trino. And so you just can't do that anymore if you don't have new trinos. Like, if an electron admits a W, then what does it turn into. It's not nowhere to go without a new trino, And so that means that you basically can't have W bosons in the universe. And the whole symmetry this beautiful picture of the electroweak force, this combination of electromagnetism and the weak force as one nice machine that all fits together perfectly and respects certain symmetries. It all just falls apart, and you can't just like pick and choose. It's like a game of Jenga. You know, you pull out the wrong piece and the whole thing falls apart. But I guess that's kind of a weak excuse. Part of the pun for motivating the existence of a particle, Like, you know, why can I just be extra careful when I take out the Jenga piece and still have the thing hold you know what I mean? Like unless it's like the one piece holding everything up, you know, you can usually you know, patch it up or have it balanced something else. Like couldn't you have the weak force without the trino? Like couldn't it do the same things, just not output a neutrino. The way particles does this think about the weak force is that you have these states where you have the electron and the neutrino together, and what the weak force does is sort of like rotates those states. We have an episode recently about gauge symmetry that showed you that every force that's out there is really just there to respect and protect some sort of weird internal symmetry of the universe. And in the case of the weak force, that's the symmetry between electrons and neutrinos, which is why the w boson, for example, turns electrons into neutrinos. So to have this symmetry at all between electrons and neutrinos, you need the neutrinos. So the weak force exists sort of to protect this symmetry between electrons and neutrinos. Without the neutrinos, you don't need the weak force. And so I mean would it exist without it, It wouldn't be active, wouldn't be part of the universe, even if it potentially could be if you didn't have neutrinos. I see, it's like it's such an integral part of the weak force that you wouldn't have an excuse to have the weak force without it exactly who ordered that? Well, you could still maybe order it, it would just be an exotic part of the many all right. Well, then the weak force is pretty important because without the weak force, and you would have no Higgs effect, right, and so again things wouldn't have mass. Yeah, because the Higgs field again is also just around to solve this puzzle of the weak force, of why the weak force is connected to electromagnetism but also so different. You see Higgs boson, which breaks that symmetry. It's called electroweak symmetry breaking for anybody who wants to read further on it. So that's why we have the Higgs boson. So without the neutrinos, we don't have the weak force. Without the weak force, we don't have the Higgs boson, and then we don't have me and you and kitten flavored ice cream. Sounds like the main reason we have these particles are just to save you a lot of anxiety, Daniel. I feel like it would really spress you out if we took away these particles. I don't know. I imagine what would Daniel be like in the universe where there were a lot more exotic particles where we found like twelve thousand of them. That seems like much more of a headache. Well, that's another big mystery, right, Like why do we only have eight exotic particles and not more? Like technically we could have more. We certainly could have more, and we don't know if we don't have more. These are just the ones that we have seen. It could be that if we build bigger colliders and smash more energy together that we could create even heavier particles. There might be more out there that are just not yet discovered. All right, Well, I guess the overall picture is that, you know, we don't need these exotic particles to make you me ice cream. Things that are you know, effect us in a daily life sort of or at least at first glance. But if you actually took them away, they might have some pretty cosmic consequences, like none of us would be here none none of us would have evolved, or none of us would be here, none of us would have mass. The whole universe might just collapse without them. That's right. Nothing in the universe seems to be optional. Nothing in the universe seems to be extraneous. If you pull apart one piece of this Jenda puzzle, the whole thing collapses. Well, I think lava ice cream is optional. I don't think that's a requirement in any diet. Let's see what happens if we delete lava ice cream from the universe. I'll do it right now. Uh, nothing happened, alright, Well, just another great reminder of how exotic and flavorful and mysterious and the kind of scary the universe can be. Hopefully the collapse of the Higgs field won't scare us like a horror movie jump scare. And also kind of beautiful, you know, the way all these particles and fields fit together to make this incredible universe. It's gorgeous. It's sort of like figuring it out and unraveling this mystery is really beautiful. It really feels like we're revealing some deep mechanism, which is kind of gorgeous when you see all of its working parts. Are you saying these exotic particles are like the bling of the universe. They just make everything sparkle a little more. That's right. You might not need them, but they make you look special. All right. Well, we hope that expanded your idea of what the universe can do and why it is the way it is. Thanks for joining us, See you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorghe explained. The uni Verse is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah,