Are there particles that don't have anti-particles?

00:00:08
Speaker 1: Or Hey, I have a cartoon physics question for you. Go for it. I have a PhD in cartoon physics. You know, all right, I'm just glad to hear that there is some physics and cartoons. But my question is, if you were a superhero in a cartoon, who would be your corresponding villain? Like the anti Jorge? You know, working to spoil all my plans exactly? Paint us a picture of who this character would be. There. Probably wouldn't be an anti Jorge, you know, no, why not? Because I think you know, my plans are usually pretty simple, you know, draw cartoons and take naps. Who we want to foil that? I guess maybe the anti Jorge would just want to join you for a nap and a snack. I guess that means you are the anti Jorge. M I am my worst enemy him or handmay cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at you see Irvine, and I can read a comic without criticizing the physics of it. You cannot, or you can't. I can, Yeah, I can totally suspend my physics disbelief when I see the Green Goblin floating above the streets of New York City, What I mean he could be on a drone. Yeah, those now like personal drones. Yeah. I don't see any spinning blades on the Green Goblins platform, though there's some weird anti gravity device. They're green on green, that's why you can't see them. What about Marvel movies? Can you watch those and and suspend your physics disbelief? That's a little harder, especially when the plot revolves explicitly around bending the laws of physics and ways that make no sense, or when they go into the quantum universe. That's alright, it's when they try to time travel and tie their plot into nonsense, sical knots that it drives me bonkers. Makes you want to be a villain in the Marble universe, Well, you know, all the villains in the Marble Universe seem to have a PhD. They do. Hey, and you could be Doctor Stranger maybe. But welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of Our Heart Radio in which we critique the physics of the real universe. Does everything out there makes sense? Is it possible to take the entire physical universe, with all of its black holes and supernovas and strange bendings and ripples of space, and squeeze it all down into a human brain. Is it possible to build a mental, mathematical model of the universe that actually describes what's going on out there? Can we ever wrap our minds around this crazy, bonkers physical reality. We're not sure, but we can have a lot of fun trying. Yeah, because it is a pretty amazing universe. It's really big and really old, and there's a lot to explore in it, a lot of interesting stories and lots of interesting characters to give us fascinating insight into how everything works. And we exploded so many different levels. We think about the physics of hurricanes, we think about solar systems, we think about galaxies. We also think about tiny little particles. And I am constantly amazed that, frankly, any of this works, since we don't understand the universe at the tiniest level of vibrating strings or little space pixels. It's incredible to me that we can understand the way things emerge, that there's this sort of simplicity that arises. It's not always chaotic and that lets us tell nice little mathematical stories about what's going on around us. Yeah, because that is one of the goals of human existence, I think, is to understand our context and to understand how and why we're here and how we can make it better. Yeah, and to make better and faster iPhones. We need to understand how the world works so that we can bend it to our will. But there's another deeper pleasure there in just knowing and just understanding and just unraveling the mysteries of the universe and having some mastery of it to meet. There's a deep, deep satisfaction in feeling like we have grasped something true about the universe. Then it made it sound like we're here to critique the universe or we physics critics. Is that what this podcast is about? A little bit we are, you know, we are trying to say, hey, this doesn't make any sense. And because it seems like the arc of the scientific universe it bends towards understanding when something doesn't make sense or when something is ugly. That's sort of a clue. It's a clue that says, maybe there's a simpler explanation, maybe there's a beauty here that we haven't yet unwrapped. It's sort of like points us in the right direction, right right, or when they use the same old tired plot, or it is a physical law and so therefore it's not not as novel. Yeah, and sometimes we're here just a critique how phys this name things, right, which isn't exactly a critique of the universe as much as a critique of scientists, right right. Hey, we need some kind of like grading system. You know how some people have the stars, and so some people use thumbs up or thumbs down. Well what you would use bananas exactly? Would but would five bananas be the worst or the best? Like, wow, that's bananas? Is that a positive review or a negative review? I think it's just kind of like a self explanatory you know, like this thing is five bananas, it's one banana. You know, how bonkers is it? That's the rating system? Yeah? I like that, Yes, as representing the bonker's nous of the universe. Well, I'm pro banana in that context. At least, I want the universe to be many bananas, so that when we finally understand the true nature of reality, our little minds are blown well, what's the most bananas you would give something like the theory of the universe. I don't think we should limit ourselves. I think there should be the possibility of infinite bananas. The rating system goes from zero to infinity. Yes, there's always something that's more bananas than anything we've ever seen before. Maybe should be five bananas maximum, but then each banana can have bananas inside of it, or be made up of other bananas. It's a continuous banana spectrum or likes all the way down, but it is. We like to talk about this universe and everything in it, not just kind of the big amazing things like black holes and galaxies and quasars and incredible stars, but also the little tiny particles that make up everything, including you and I, exactly because we have this hunch that one key to understanding the true nature of reality is to pull it apart, used to figure out what the smallest bits are and how they relate to each other. What are the rules that these smallest bits have to follow. Those should be the deepest rules of the universe. And if you could somehow write down the list of the basic elements of the universe and how they interact, you would be looking at like the source code of the universe and you could finally give a definitive answer to how bananas is the universe. Yeah, you'd be like Neo, you know, when he's finally sees the matrix, sees what everything is made out of. Behind the scenes, that's the goal. But we know that we aren't there yet, that the things that we are looking at are now the basic constituents of the universe, because there are things about them that don't make sense yet. That suggests that there must be some deeper layers, some smaller bits that follow even more fundamental rules. When we look at the particles and we have understood there are things about them that sort of jump out at us. Yeah, I mean you'd like to sort of talk about the sort of the story arc of humanity and our understanding of what things are made of, and how it's sort of like each time we get closer and smaller and we sort of get down to the smaller and smaller bits of Lego like you talk about how the universe is sort of put together like a Lego set. Yeah, that's right. It's incredible to me that all of the complexity that we see in the universe. You know, the bananas, the black holes, the boogie boards, all of that stuff. None of that is fundamental to the universe. And the way that that complexity arises is not in like the nature of the boogie board or the banana, but how it's little bits are put together, as you were saying, like lego pieces. You can use the same little bits to make boogie boards or bananas or ban in the bread. It's all made out of the same fundamental ingredients. And so the key is understanding how those things come together. What are the rules that let you arrange things into different configurations? Why are some things allowed and other things not allowed? Those are the deepest rules of the universe, the ones that we want to uncover, right right? And why do they hurt so much when you step on them? It's another big question. I think there's a whole branch of philosophy devoted just to that question, to lego or to letting go, to the existential pain of legos, of having to pick them up all the time? Is there a universe in which legos feel good on your feet? Right? Is there a universe in which they picked themselves up by themselves? That that one I would give more bananas to. Is there a universe in which legos step on us and then the legos scream? Yeah. But we made a lot of progress in the last few thousand years. We know, we went from thinking that the universe was made out of four elements win, fire, air, and another one and uh dad, to like the periodic table of elements, and now to like the fundamental particles. So we're golud and smaller and more precise. I think it's fire, air, water, and bananas. Those are the fundamental elements of the universe. Yes, I agree from my reading of Greek philosophy, forget the standard model. Let's switch to a hore hip banana model exactly. But yeah, we have peeled back lots of layers of reality, and we have a really nice description of how particles interact. But you know, we look at this description and we ask questions about it, questions that just sort of jump out at you when you look at the patterns of the particles. Yeah, and one of those interesting patterns is this idea of antiparticles. It seems that every particle out there that we know about has an antiparticle. Yeah, when you look at a picture of the particles of the standard model. They show you like up corks and down corks, electrons and neutrinos. But what they don't show you is that every particle that's there has a partner particle, and like shadow twin electrons exist, but so do anti electrons. Quarks exist, but so do anti corks. Every single kind of matter particle out there, the things that make up stuff that me and you and all the things in the cosmos, they can exist, but also their antiparticles can exist. Yeah, and these fundamental particles are not the only kind of particles there are in the universe. Physicists have found sort of other kinds of particles that don't necessarily make up matter but kind of exist both mathematically and possibly in the real world exactly. This is one of those kinds of patterns. What we say, it's interesting that all the particles we've seen so far have antiparticles, and it's possible mathematically for there to be particles without antiparticles where they are their own antiparticles. And so because it's possible mathematically, physicist wonder is it real physically? Yeah, These kinds of special particles have a name. They're called my Urana particles named after the physicist tore Magurana, and they'd be important to those to how everything works, including neutrinas and maybe even making quantum computers. That's right. And they might also be clues to a real true crime mystery in physics, which is what happened to a Torre Marana himself. Wait what, there's a murder mystery in this in this podcast too. They just suddenly turned into one of those murder shows. That's right. We are now a true crime podcast for real. Tore My Irana, a genius Italian physicist, came up with this idea for the Marana particle in the thirties, and one year after he came up with this proposal, he mysteriously disappeared. Whoa man, I can't wait for ratings to go up. Now that we're a crime podcast, are we going to interview like everyone he knew and the neighbors and stuff. We're gonna take field trips to Venezuela and Argentina to track down potential sightings and no or not? I mean if we have the budget. Yeah, this is real stuff. He bought a boat ticket from Palermo to Naples and sent a really cryptic telegram and then he was never seen again. But there are pictures of people who look a little bit like him which surfaced later in Venezuela and in Argentina, so that all these theories. Was he killed by a rival physicist, did he actually escape to Venezuela because he knew he was going to be killed, or did he just get on the wrong boat and got confused. Oh man, Daniel, I am totally serious. Let's do a crime Ast episode about this man. It's a crossover podcast. But anyways, this theory is that there are at least things called Mariorana particles, and they're kind of interesting because they're sort of not like real particles maybe, and also they are their own anti particles, or at least they don't have antiparticles exactly. They are fascinating new idea and how the universe can exist, and so maybe part of the future of understanding the nature of the universe and also potentially a path to building more robust quantum computers. So on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question are there particles that don't have antiparticles? I feel like that's a double negative question, Daniel. They don't have anti parts. Does that mean they're pro particles or they're they're anti antiparticles? Aren't they're not antiparticles that don't not have their own antiparticles? No, never say never. No, it's an interesting question, you know, are their matter particles that sort of are their own antiparticles that can like annihilate with themselves. Maybe that's what happened to Tori ma Uranna. He realized he was his own anti ma Uranna and then that the knowledge immediately annihilated him. Wow, you may have just cracked this mystery podcast over. You just spoiled our trip to Venezuela. Man, Now we don't have to go, well, we don't. This won't air for a while, right, we can, all right, But he sort of invented this idea of the Mayorana particles, and it's sort of an interesting concept that maybe a lot of people don't know about. So it's usually we're wondering how many out there had heard of this and what they think it might be. So thank you very much to everybody on the internet who continues to participate and give answers to these random questions. They're very helpful in guiding our podcast. If you like to participate and hear your own voice on the podcast. Please don't be shy. Everybody is welcome just right to questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. So think about it for a second. What do you think is a Mayorona particle? Here's what people have to say. I've read about them on wikipea, but I think they're a weird combination of quirks. So Magorana particles I think are probably some kind of ultraspin for me, where it's has like three half spin or five half spin, and it's has just a very large excessive charge to it that brings about very specific and unique properties that is kind of only synthetically made and has never been discovered naturally, so disappeared guests. But by the looks of the name, I think it's a collection of particles which are very common or a very larger number around us. Major Anna particles are a big part of history. They're the remnants of the Fall of Berlin, produced in May when Major Anna Nicolina of the Red Army hoisted a Russian flag over the Rice Stagg. The Majorana particles, I have no idea, sounds like something somebody might put in a pipe and smoke or something. I've known no clue, but I'm guessing they're bigger and more major than the minor on a particles. Sorry best guess. Yeah, not a whole lot of people really knew anything about my orana particles. It did feel a little bit technical, and so I thought, well, let's try something new. Instead of asking random people to answer a particle physical question, I thought, how well will a particle physicist answer a question without any preparation? So you asked your post doc who is from Scotland? That's right, So here's Mike, my Scottish post doc, trying to answer this question without any chance to prepare. My name is Mike, I, UM post doc with Daniel at u C. I and I research particle physics and machine learning, aspecifically top quarks my irana particle. So you have different extensions to the standard model can give you different kinds of UM interactions, so you have to RAQ and my irana neutrinos and I forget exactly what one is what, but they obeyed different statistics and I should know which one's which, and I don't. So I hope that makes you feel better, and folks out there who didn't know what MYRNA particle is. Even professional particle physicists people with PhDs don't always have these things at their fingertips. So are you going to fire him then, Daniel? Are we are we announcing that here on the podcast? No, I'm giving him karma points for participating Karma points. Oh, that sounds like you're going to collect later on. I might have to make a withdrawal at some point. You he owes you a favor. Well, good luck to him in the future with that favor. But it is an interesting question, this idea of mayoruna particles, Daniels, So maybe step us through it first. What are they and what do we know about them? So my aerna particles would be like a different kind of matter particle from all the ones that we are familiar with. And to understand where this comes from, you sort of have to go back to the early days of quantum mechanics and understand how our current theory of matter arose and why your anti matter comes from. And he goes back to Paul DrAk He was trying to do something very difficult, which is to bring together the new field of quantum mechanics, which was describing how electrons and photons operated with the new field of special relativity, which was trying to describe how things operated at very very high speeds. Quantum mechanics at that point had only really been able to solve problems of sort of slow moving quantum objects, and Diract was wondering, what happens when things get going really fast? You have electrons at very high speed or photons moving at the speed of light? Can we describe things which are both quantum and relativistic? So you found a bunch of particles that sort of follow this mathematical framework or equations that direct made up, right, Yeah, So Diract made up a mathematical framework. It's called the Dirac equation, and it's basically like the super fast version of the shrouding Er equation. But when he was putting that equation together, he noticed something. He was trying to just describe electrons and matter particles, but what he noticed was that his equation had a symmetry to it that he could also at the same time describe another kind of particle, a particle with like a positive charge. So he called this an antiparticle. He sort of discovered the antiparticle on the page. Right, It's sort of like you invented the multiplying things by itself and you find out that not only does one kinds one equals one, but also like minus one minus one is also equals one exactly. So he found that the math that described the universe and the particles that we saw also describe things that we hadn't yet seen. And then he made this incredible sort of philosophical leap. He was like, well, if the math describes it, it must also be real. So he proposed that these things might be real, that they might actually be out there, and then pretty soon afterwards in experiments people found them. They saw evidence of antiparticles, and you know, I think you can't really overstate the sort of philosophical brevera. They're like, if the math describes it, it is real. Is really a huge step to take. Yeah, Because he was trying to come up with the equations that described something that he had seen, and then he found these questions also worked for like the inverse of the particles, and so he said, hey, maybe those exist too, Maybe those exist too, right, And he was right. This guy direct was sort of famous for not being short on sort of intellectual self confidence. As he was giving his Nobel Prize acceptance speech for basically predicting the existence of the positron the anti electron, he made more predictions for more antiparticles, which were then borne out a few years later. Like what in his in his acceptance speech he embedded some bananas inside the bananas. Yeah, and he was right about all of it. Wow, what do you do? When he accepted the Nobel Prize for those he predicted the anti Nobel Prize, he invented a whole new kind of a prize. But he wasn't the only one out there playing with the mathematics of quantum mechanics and special relativity. And the formulation that he came up with, it does seem like it describes the matter that we see in our universe. But there was another physicist at Torre Marana. He came up with another equation, another equation which also unified quantum mechanics and special relativity. But the symmetry of his equation was different. It didn't require the existence of these anti particles. It didn't have this like other shadows side to the universe that it suggested in my Irana's equation. Every particle sort of was its own antiparticle. Well wait, wait, wait, what do you mean, like he did did he know about diras work or was he working independently? You knew about diracs work, it was famous, but he was just like, well, let's see what else we can do. Also, you know, the communication between folks back then in the thirties wasn't nearly as tight as it is today. People don't just like post their papers on the Internet and the next day you read about it. So I'm sure it's the kind of thing he had been thinking about and playing with for several years, even if he was aware of Dirac's work, and so you can probably treat it as an independent line of study. Though I'm sure he was aware of what Dirac was doing. But he came up with this other equation, and this equation, unlike diracx equation, didn't sort of like look different in the mirror directs equation. If you flip the signs, you get equations to describe a different kind of matter antimatter. My Irona's equation has a symmetry in it so that if you flip the signs, everything just looks the same. But what was he trying to do, I guess is the question was was he trying to describe regular particles like electrons and protons and things like that in quirks or was he just playing around with the equations. That's sort of a good question for all of theoretical physics. What are you guys trying to do? Are you trying to describe the universe? Are you just playing around with the equations? Are you doing cartoon physics or real physics? Sometimes just playing around with the equations is discovering the nature of the universe, right, Like what is possible mathematically might be what is real physically. That's sort of the amazing thing about diracts discovery, right that just because antimatter particles were possible mathematically, he predicted they existed physically. And so my Irono was sort of exploring, like, what other ways can we follow the rule equantum mechanics and follow the rules of special relativity and be mathematically coherent. Maybe that kind of matter also exists out there in the universe. Was he thinking it was a different kind of matter or did he think, like, hey, maybe this will eventually describe the regular matter. His kind of equation can't describe electrons for example, because myrona particles that they exist have to have zero charge so that they are their own antiparticle. That you can't be a plus one charged particle and be a myrona particle because then your antiparticle would be minus wine charge. So his equation can only describe uncharged particles. So that rules out most matter particles, right, because most matter particles have some sort of charge. If it's not electromagnetic, it's you know, the strong force or the weak force. Right, that's right. But there are some particles that don't have electric charge and might be their own antiparticle, and those are neutrinos. Neutrinos are still very mysterious, and we still don't know today if neutrinos are direct particles as described by directs equation or if they are myrona particles as described by myron as equation. M sounds like another mystery podcast. Who killed the neutrino? Why is it so neutral? All right, well, let's get into more about this interesting new kind of particle and what other particles might fit into that category. But first let's take a quick break. All right, we're talking about particles that maybe don't have antiparticles. I guess they're pro particles, Daniel, they're not antiparticles, so they must be pro particle. Yeah. And you know, there are some particles in nature we know of that are their own anti particles. For example, the photon. The photon doesn't have an anti photon to it, and the higgs doesn't have an anti higgs. That doesn't make it a myrona particle because myerna particles describe fermions matter particles like quarks and electrons or maybe neutrinos, whereas photons are bosons. They're a different kind of particle and aren't described by myronics equations. But in that sense, we do have examples of particles that don't have antiparticles. Interesting, I guess what's the difference between fermions and bosons? Like, how do you where do you draw the line? Yeah, well we draw the line in how they spin. Remember we talked about how particles have this weird property called quantum spin, which is sort of related to real spin, but it's not really the same because you can't think of them as like actually spinning. You think of it's sort of like a label that particles have, though it's deeply connected to angular momentum, so it's more than just a label. Anyway, you go check out our whole episode about quantum spin. It's at least one hour of material right there. But fermions have half spin, which means they can be spin up or spin down, and bosons have integer spin. So the eggs boson just doesn't spin at all. It's spin zero. The photon is spin one, which means that it can spin up or can spin down. And you can do another weird thing, have like a circular polarization, and so it just depends on what kind of spin states these particles can have. Bosons are integers and fermons are half integers. Wait are you saying the only difference between being a matter particle and not being matter is the half spin the half spin. I think usually what we call matters like stuff that feels substantial, right, that sort of like makes stuff up in the in the universe. And usually that's the stuff that feels gravity and force, right, like dark matter. We say it's matter because it feels gravity. Yeah, that's true, but remember gravity actually couples to everything with energy, so gravity is influenced by photons and by Higgs bosons. You know, some people think that the Higgs field is the thing that's driving the accelerated expansion of the universe because it's a large potential value. So actually, even though matter is the thing makes up stuff, all the energy inside your body is some of it's contained in bosons, like gluons inside your protons contribute to your mass. So I think the confusion is that we call these things matter particles, but really what you are made out of is both a combination of fermions and bosons, all of which contributes to your gravitational effect on the universe. I see you're saying, we're we're all just energy. At the end, the word matter doesn't really matter. I guess um. It's just really from a physics point of view, the word matter just means that it has a half spin half quantum spin. As usual, we've taken a word that has a common sense meaning and used it in a slightly different way to be very confusing. Yeah, and it seems, uh, in an arbitrary way, a little bit arbitrary. But yeah, we call matter fields everything that's a fermion, and radiation fields everything that's a boson. And there are other differences. Right, Bosons can all be in the same state, and fermions can't be in the same state, so they really are different kinds of fields. Okay, so the rex equations supplied both matter and non matter particles, but you say my urannas equations only applied to matter particles or non matter particles. Dirac and my irona both just described fermions. So these equations only described fermions, but directs equation describe fermions that have anti fermions, whereas my irons equations described fermions that are their own anti fermion, which is not a particle we've seen before. Like in all the list of particles we have in the universe, we have all different kinds of fermions, but we haven't ever seen one that is its own. Antiparticles, but we know that antiparticles exist, So I guess what makes us think that my uronas equations are a good way to describe the universe. You're right, antiparticles exist, and that's exactly what makes us think that maybe my irna was on the right track. The mantra is sort of like, the universe does everything that's allowed when particle physics. If something isn't prohibited. It just happens like those are the rules. Particles will do everything that's not like explicitly prohibited. They're sort of like children in that way. You know, if you don't say that you can't put chocolate chip cookies up your nose, eventually your kids will try it. That's a whole different mystery right there. That's right now, this is switched into being a parenting podcast. Oh man, those are also super popular. Let's just make like the one podcast that unified, the grand unifying podcast of everything exactly. But the philosophy here is, Look, if the mathematics says it's okay, quantum mechanics says it has no problem with it, relativity says it has no problem with it, then maybe the universe is doing it. Right, if there's no reason not to do it. Then what we've seen in the past is that the universe does it just like with antiparticles. We had never seen one before, but the mathematics said it's possible, and then turns out, yeah, the universe has a lot of antiparticles in it also. So the idea is just like, if it's allowed, then probably the universe is doing it. I see and so you're saying that there are particles that don't have an antiparticle like their their own antiparticle, and so does that mean that they can't be described within the wract equations or they still can, but there also could be described by mayoranas equations. So there are bosons like photons that are their own antiparticle. They are not my aerona particles because their bosons Myrona only describes fermions. So what we're looking for is whether there are fermions that are their own antiparticle. And so we know that electrons are not myorona particles. They're definitely direct because we've seen their antiparticles. We know that quarks are direct particles because we've seen anti quarks. One question is what about neutrinos. Are neutrinos direct particles? Are there anti neutrinos or are they actually myrona particles Like a neutrino is its own antiparticle. Oh, I see, like maybe a new trina shouldn't be grouped in with the other particles. Maybe it's like its own whole other category of mathematical particles. Yeah, because neutrinos are very very weird. Not only do they have no electric charge, which means that they could theoretically be their own anti particle. They're also just different in so many other ways. Right. For example, neutrinos have very very very tiny little masses. Particles, as we talked about, get their masses from the Higgs boson, but that doesn't explain like why particles have certain masses, and there's a huge range of these masses, like top corks are billions of electron bolts, and leptons are millions of electron bolts, and then really far down on the other edge of the scale are neutrinos, which have masses of like single electron bolts or even less, so they're like one million the mass of everything else. And that makes people wonder, like do they really talk to the Higgs? That's the way the other particles do. It seems sort of like a different kind of thing. But they do have some mass, even if it's super little. That means it does interrite with the Higgs. Well, there are other ways to get mass. Remember, the Higgs is one way to get particles mass. It's a meta chanism that can give mass to particles, but it's not the only way that particles can get mass, and we suspect that there are other things out there in the universe that are not getting mass from the Higgs. For example, dark matter. Dark matter we're pretty sure is out there. We think it might be a particle, and if so, it's almost certainly not getting mass from the Higgs. In order to be a particle and get your mass from the Higgs, you have to satisfy a couple of requirements. One is you have to be a direct particle, you have to have an antiparticle, and the other is that you have to feel the weak force, because the Higgs boson is all tied up with the weak force. So dark matter might have an antiparticle, So there might be anti dark matter. We don't know, but it doesn't feel the weak force and so it doesn't get its mass from the Higgs. The ntrino definitely feels the weak force, it's definitely part of that. So that's possible, but we don't know if it has an antiparticle, and that's necessary in order to get your mass from the Higgs boson, because remember the way the Higgs boson gives a particle it's mass is that you have like this particle sort of swimming through space and it can sort of emit a Higgs boson, But in order for that to happen, you have to be able to have a Higgs boson talk to a particle and an antiparticle at the same time. It means, for example, like a Higgs boson needs to be able to decay into that particle and it's antiparticle. There's just no way for a Higgs particle to talk to particles that don't have their own antiparticles. Well, I feel like it's a really big change from how people usually talk about things because you know, when they describe the Higgs boson, even like here on the podcast, we usually say it's the particle that gives other particles mass, but really we should be saying it's the particle that gives some particles mass. Like maybe other particles don't get their mass from the Higgs, like maybe the Higgs um. That is not the last word on giving things mass. Yeah, we're pretty sure it's not the only way to give mass. Two particles. We haven't ever seen other particles get mass in other ways. So it's like we know for sure it's not the only way for particles to get mass, but we've never seen anything else do it, and so it's sort of like the possibility is there theoretically, but you know, until we've seen another example, the Higgs is sort of the only one on the playing field I see. So I guess the question or the story is that when you're you're saying that maybe some particles like neutrinos or maybe even dark matter could be the whole different kind of particle, like maybe a urana particle that doesn't interact with the Higgs, it gets mass in a totally different way exactly. And and for neutrinos, really the only clue we have is that their masses are weird. Right. The way the particles get masses from the Higgs field is that they interact with the Higgs field, and different particles get different masses because they interact with the Higgs field that different strengths. The top cork interacts a lot with the Higgs field, so it gets a big mass. The electron interacts less with the Higgs field, so it gets less mass. So it's possible the neutrinos just like very barely hardly interact with the Higgs field and so get any tiny masses. But that would be really weird, like why are those numbers so so tiny a million times smaller than the other particles. Maybe instead it's a more natural, simpler explanation if they're getting their mass another way, if they have Myerona masses instead of direct masses from Higgs field. WHOA, and you're saying they could also explain maybe dark matter, like maybe dark matter is good to also be a mi Orona particle. That would also explain why we can't see it. Dark matter could be a Myrona particle. Exactly, we know that dark matter, if it has mass and it's a particle, it has to get its mass in some other way from the Higgs field, because we don't think that it feels the weak force. So exactly, it's possible that dark matter also gets its mass through a Myrona mechanism. We cracked the mystery releasa how to ask about it? Maybe dark matter killed my ironic because it didn't want it to like spill its secrets. Cosmic conspiracy. All right, Well, let's get into whether or not we've actually seen my Orana particles and what we can claim we've seen about them. First, let's take another quick break, all right, we're talking about murder mystery. Welcome back to what happened to a torm Rana? Only particles in the building. It was a dark and stormy night. It probably was a dark and stormy night. Yeah. He might have gone to Argentina. He might have gone to Venezuela. He might have also sadly killed himself. There are also some theories that he gave up physics and his entire life and just became a beggar wandering the streets of Naples forever? Does that happen often with physicists? I think there's sometimes this dream of a simpler life, you know, you're not struggling with funding agencies and intellectual rivals. I don't know, not something that I've been tempted by. Interesting. All right, well, um, so we talked about how there might be this whole new class of particles called magorona particles. There's totally different than the other particles we know about the quarks and the electrons, because they're described by totally different mathematical equations. But the only reason we think they might exist is because there is a mathematical equation that might describe them, which is kind of a loop and thinking there, but we haven't actually seen any, have we We have not seen any Myrona particles in the universe. But there's sort of two ways that we could see them. We could see like fundamental Myrona particles, like things we think are fundamental elements of the universe, like electrons and quarks, whatever, and in neutrino would be in that category. If a neutrino was a Myrona particle instead of a direct particle, that would be mind blowing, That would be a huge discovery. Another way is to see like quasi particles that follow the same mathematics of the myron equation, but there aren't really particles in the exact same sense of the word, right, Like they're not fundamental to the universe. They're just they just kind of like come up kind of like um sometimes atoms get together and they form a little ball, and you can treat that as a particle. Sort of goes to a deeper question, which is like what is a particle anyway? You know? And quasi particles we have a whole fun podcast episode about what they are. They're like persistent quantized discrete you know, excitations of solids instead of like persistent, quantized, discrete excitations of fundamental fields of the universe. So instead of like you know, an excitation in the electron field, you have an excitation in some like weird semiconductor or in some crystal or in some fluid. But mathematically they follow the same rules, and so we call them quasi particle. Right. It's sort of like an ocean wave, like a wave in the in the ocean or a lake. It's actually a wave in water. It's not a wave in the sort of fundamental field of the of the universe, but it's still described by a wave equation. Yeah, exactly, it's the same mathematics. And so you know, you could say, hey, quasi particles are particles too, and that's this reasonable point, you know, philosophically, Really, what's the difference. It's just the underlying thing that is oscillating, Like an ocean wave is still a wave. Ocean waves are definitely still waves, especially when they slam down upon you. Even if they're not waves in the fundamental fabric of space time still powerful. Be funny if people could serve a strap concepts, it'd be cool to be a gravity wave surfer. That sounds like a cool superhero, right, yeah, I think that has already been invented actually by Marvel. He's called the Silver Surfer. What is he sing on anyway, I don't know, maybe gravitational waves. But it's still possible that we could discover fundamental myron of particles. Like the jury is still out on whether the neutrino is its own antiparticle or not. And if it is its own antiparticle, it can do something really interesting. You can annihilate itself. So like when a neutrino hits another neutrino, they could just like poof, turn into a little blob of energy, the same thing that happens when an electron it's a positron, they annihilate and turn into like a photon. So if neutrinos are my or on a particles, they can annihilate into each other. Well, but I guess the question is with the netrino, if it is a ma Urona particle, does that mean that it's it's like it's writing some other type of quantum field, like a Maurana quantum field, or would it still be right in the same kind of field as the other particles, or maybe not even a field at all. Yeah, great question. It's still would be a quantum field, and it still would be an oscillation in that quantum field. But yeah, it would be sort of a different field that follows a slightly different equation. But these rules for what happens to fields are all following quantum mechanics and relativity. Right. But you're saying, like, maybe there are many fields in the universe, some of them follow one set of equations and others follow another different set of equations. Absolutely, And we know that's true already because we see like Fermion fields and Boson fields and fields with mass and fields without mass. Right, you can unify these all into like one grand equation perhaps, but there are different equations that describe the emotions of different fields. And again here we're talking about are like how oscillations move through the fundamental fields of the universe, And we're developing mathematics wave equations, for example, to describe that that are also consistent with the underlying quantum mechanics and rules of special relativity. And so we're saying, hey, if the fields can do this kind of wiggle and some other fields can do that other kind of wiggle, oh interesting, alright, So then um, but you're saying that we've seen we've sort of seen myrna particles, but maybe at like the water wave level, but not at the like the fundamental level. They are really cool experiments trying to see fundamental myrona particles neutrinos, And if you're interested in that, you should check out our episode on neutrino masses and neutrino lists double beta decay, which is crazy set of experiments that are basically trying to smash neutrinos into each other to see if they annihilate. But there are other ways to look for myrona particles, and those are myron a quasi particles, as you say, like the wave level version, and here people are trying to create myrona fermions not as neutrinos, but as like emergent properties of semiconductors. But they wouldn't be fundamental, right like they wouldn't They would just be sort of like a thermodynamics law or something something that describes links at a much sort of higher level than fundamental particles. Yeah, not individual fundamental particles, but if you can get fundamental particles to act together so that together they do something which follows the rules of the Myron equation. Then you can say, oh, look, we've seen an emergent Myron AFFIRMI on the same way, like, yeah, if you're talking about waves, they're following the wave equation. What are the individual particles of the way of doing Who knows? They're not following the wave equation. But together all those particles acting in concert are following the wave equation. So now you get a bunch of electrons together, put them under very strange conditions nano wires and very strong magnetic fields, and get them to do a funny dance, a dance which is described by the mayrona equation. Then you can say I've seen a Mayer on a quasi particle. Woa. But I guess that would just validate that the equation works. But it wouldn't. Would it tell you something fundamental about the universe. Oh, that's a really good question and a huge argument between different fields of physics. You know, people say like, well, if you discover myronof fermions in solid state physics as quasi particles, does that tell you that they're allowed in the universe? I don't really know. It tells you that the physics of the equation is valid the same way like seeing waves tells you. Yeah, the wave equation works, and that helps you have confidence that you can use the wave equation to talk about fluctuations of quantum fields. Also, it doesn't mean that there are quantum fields following that same equation necessarily, So there's a deep argument there about what it really tells you about the universe. Yeah, just because you see an ocean wave doesn't mean wouldn't necessarily mean that fundamental particles act like waves, right, that's right. But you know there's a lesson there, Like it says that the mathematics is correct, that the mathematics really does describe something the physical universe does, and so that suggests that there might also be parts of the universe that behave the same way, that this might be sort of a universal phenomena in the wave equation. We see it everywhere, right, and so there is some reason to think that if you found a mathematically valid description of what the universe does, that maybe it also does at other places. Oh, I see, we're sort of at the point where we have worked out the my Urano equations or my Urona did and people like it, but we haven't actually seen them even in a sort of ocean wave level. I thought that we had because we talked about sort of seeing holes in materials that act like my Orona particles. So there's been a controversy because there's a group in eighteen that claimed to have seen my Irna fermions in matter. They created these nano wires that were like a hundred nanometers wide and one micrometer long. They put them at a very very cold temperatures and very strong magnetic fields actually made them into a topological superconductor that we talked about on the podcast recently, And they claimed in that these were Myrona fermions, that they had arranged the electrons in this fancy way, that they followed the rules of myron Its equation. Then people couldn't reproduce their results. Then people dug into the details of their paper and found some mistakes, so they actually had to retract this paper and this claim that they remiron A fermions. Wow, it seems like there's a lot of ever going into confirming this theory, Like is this theory that interesting or beautiful or like we've only ever found two theories that describe maybe things at the fundamental level, it's not easy to bring quantum mechanics and relativity together. They're sort of famously difficult to get to play together in the same field. It's not something we've achieved in general, like general relativity and quantum mechanics just do not cooperate. This special case of quantum mechanics and special relativity is easier task, but still difficult. So the fact that there are two solutions to it is really intriguing makes people really want to dig into it. There are also possible applications. If you could develop myron a fermions in sort of solid state physics, and these like excitation of electrons their applications to quantum computing. They can make quantum computing much much more powerful and much more robust to errors. Oh why is that because they're they're bigger. Has to do with building a very different kind of quantum computer than the one we're used to thinking about. Normal quantum computers are like individual ions in a certain quantum state. Maybe it's been up, maybe it's been down, And the power of the quantum computer comes from not knowing exactly. And it's key that for those cubits, those quantum bits that they stay isolated that they don't get like bothered by the environment, because then they decohere and they lose all of their quantum fuzziness. They're like forced to choose already spin up, already has been down. That's the typical quantum computer that we've been talking about. But there's a new idea for a quantum computer called a topological quantum computer, where the information isn't stored in the state of an individual particle, but rather in the relationships between particles. Like I have these two particles over here and they're sort of entangled with each other, and myrono fermions can do that because myrona fermions don't come from an individual particle. They come from like the connection of two electrons into this sort of emergent state of a myrona particle. And if you put them under these very special conditions, then it's much easier for those particles to retain that quantum information because the information is instored in like the details of where the electron is, but how these two electrons are sort of connected to each other, so they're sort of protected by some of the symmetries of the myrona behavior from decohering. Yeah, and that's good for like error protection, right, Like if you have a quantum computer that uses these things, because the cupids are tied together, they they're less likely to get kind of a destroyed exactly. And that's the problem with comin and computing is that it's very hard to keep your quantum bits isolated from the environment. But a topological quantum computer sort of doesn't care as much if it gets bothered by the environment because the interesting parts, the parts that you care about, aren't in the details of where the particles are, but how those particles are related to each other. So connected to this idea of topology, you know, there's this famous example, like a topologist says that, like a coffee cup is the same thing as a donut, because fundamentally they're the same shape. They both have like one hole in them. There's this property of having one hole which doesn't change as you like slowly deform a coffee cup into a donut or back. I mean, obviously there are different things. You wouldn't want to dunk your coffee cup in your coffee cup, but topologically those are similar. You don't want to know your own a lot tap and The idea is that a topological quantum computer the information and it is invariant to the kind of transformations that the universe typically applies to quantum computers, which is that it pokes them, it bumps them, it it's hard to keep them separate. So the information there is sort of invariant to the kinds of things that the universe typically does. Two objects, and so it's easier to keep the information preserved and to not have a deco here. And that's the kind of thing you can do with myron affermions if you can build them, but nobody's successfully done it so far. Yeah, speaking of cart and physics actually made a video about to his I don't know if you know that, like seven years ago, about this idea of using my uranna particles and quantum not to like do error protection and quantum computers. Oh very cool. Well, I know that this big group of cal Tech that are experts in this, John Preskill and Jason Alca, they work on this kind of stuff. It's mind boggling and amazing. Yeah, yeah, I know. I work with them to make the videos. So if you're interested, you can on YouTube. You can search for quantum knots and maybe also PhD comics and you'll see the video that might help you. Yeah, awesome, because a lot of this stuff is very tricky to visualize, and so I'm sure you're awesome. Cartoons would be helpful to listeners, So go check that out if you want a better visual for what's going on. But I guess the main point is that, you know, we have these equations in my Uranna, equations that also maybe potentially describe particles, and they might describe from the mental particles like the neutrino or dark matter, and they might describe things that we can use pretty usefully for quantum computers exactly. And it's a sort of fun question to explore, Like the math says that this can exist, so does it exist? And some physicists are totally convinced. Professor Sarma from University of Maryland. As his quote in one article I read, he says, I guarantee you the myrona will be seen because the theory is pristine. This is an engineering problem, this is not a physics problem. That's a direct quote. So wait, are you saying, Daniel, that physicists are really just here to confirm the math for mathematicians. Are you saying mathematicians are really at the top here. You know, mathematicians explore universes that might not exist. Also, they don't have to follow the rules of quantum mechanics and special relativity. But mathematics that follows the rules of the universe. You know, that's likely to be physics. Yeah, I feel like you're saying that the physics are religious. The middleman between mathematicians and engineers exactly, as long as we get our cut, we're happy to be the middleman put on top. Well, maybe that explains what happened to myrona right, Maybe the mathematicians and the engineers got together to cut out the middleman. Oh man, don't dun't done the plot? Thinkins It was his closest collaborator, the engineer. You got to watch out for those engineers. Yeah, they'll stab you in the back. But it's interesting to think that, you know, how we um this process of discovering how the universe works. You know, it's a sort of a combination of poking around but also kind of thinking about these equations and seeing what's possible from a mathematical sense, because sometimes that means that it is true Yeah, we can do exploration in different ways. We can go out and see what the universe is actually doing, and you can follow the breadcrumbs of the mathematics to think what else the universe might be doing. And sometimes that's right. Often that's right, you know. The Higgs Boson is another great example. The mathematics says this is the simplest way for particles to get mass, and then we went out and found it. So there really are two different arms of exploration that are working hand in hand. Well, we hope you enjoyed that and then made you think a little bit about what we know and don't know about the universe. It seems like maybe we don't know how all of the quantum field in the univers could work. And thanks for joining us. See you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio or more podcast For my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.