Listener Questions 67

00:00:07
Speaker 1: Hey, or hey, when was the last time your family moved.

00:00:11
Speaker 2: We moved to our house maybe eleven years ago.

00:00:13
Speaker 1: Wow, that's been a while. You know, the longer you live somewhere, the harder it is to move.

00:00:19
Speaker 2: What do you think that is, like inertia or potential energy? Are we trapped in a potential energy?

00:00:24
Speaker 1: Well sort of. I think you're trapped by your stuff. You gradually accumulate stuff in every corner, makes it impossible to ever.

00:00:32
Speaker 2: Leave because of the gravity or the nostalgia.

00:00:37
Speaker 1: The overwhelming task of packing it all up into boxes.

00:00:41
Speaker 2: Sounds like you need Mariconda to do some consulting for you.

00:00:43
Speaker 1: It's all right. I try to leave the house as little as possible anyway.

00:01:02
Speaker 2: Hi am jorgemmy cartoonist and the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe.

00:01:05
Speaker 1: Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I've moved a lot of times in my life, and never was it fun.

00:01:14
Speaker 2: Well, there's a certain aspect of getting rid of your old stuff that's kind of cathartic. Din'd you feel lighter after you move or did you just bring everything with you?

00:01:23
Speaker 3: No?

00:01:23
Speaker 1: I always start out so optimistic and thinking, Oh, this time it's going to be great. And then about halfway through I realized I'm only five percent of the way through. And then at the end of just throwing random stuff away.

00:01:35
Speaker 2: Of throwing out your stuff, of packing. Oh, but you know you can hire people to do that, right, or ask your friends and buy them a peer.

00:01:44
Speaker 1: I usually use moving as an opportunity to cleanse myself of all the stuff I should have thrown away earlier.

00:01:50
Speaker 2: When was the last time you moved?

00:01:51
Speaker 1: Between two thousand and seven and twenty twelve, the family moved across the Atlantic, I think eleven times.

00:01:59
Speaker 2: I think that's just call it going on vacation.

00:02:02
Speaker 1: It now when you're living there for nine months and setting up schools and bank accounts. Soul man, But.

00:02:09
Speaker 2: You've been in the same place now for twelve years.

00:02:11
Speaker 1: Yes, since the kids got older. We've stayed in California and haven't moved back to the Collider as often.

00:02:16
Speaker 2: Wow, so it's your house now, just the giant pile of stuff.

00:02:21
Speaker 1: I can't even close the door, it's so jam full of crap.

00:02:25
Speaker 2: Well, fortunately it makes for a good soundproofing, I guess for podcasts recording.

00:02:30
Speaker 1: That's why I've been doing it.

00:02:32
Speaker 2: Yes, one positive thing, but anyways, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.

00:02:38
Speaker 1: In which we help you soar through the ever increasing piles of knowledge that humanity has accumulated along the way. We learned this, we learned that, we learned the other thing, and our goal is to organize it to marry condo your mind and make it crisp and clean and understandable because we think, we hope, we assume the universe is understandable, that we can make sense of it with our little minds, and that we can explain all of it to you.

00:03:02
Speaker 2: That's right. We try to relocate your brain out there to the giant, vast cosmos that exists out there for us to try to understand, and we try to move you with the amazing things that scientists have discovered about why we're here and how things work.

00:03:16
Speaker 1: And one thing we'd love our listeners to do is to participate in this goal directly by asking their own questions about the universe. Don't just sit back and let the answers from scientists rain down upon your brain. Go out there and ask your own questions. About the universe. What doesn't make sense to you, how do you think it works, Why isn't your idea the right one about the universe? And so On this podcast we talk to you about the universe, but we also want to hear from you. Send us your questions to questions at Danielanjorge dot com.

00:03:48
Speaker 2: That's right, because it's not just scientists that have questions, it's everybody. We all look at the night sky, the day sky, all of the skuis and we wonder about what's out there and how to make sense of it all.

00:03:59
Speaker 1: It's a part of being human, trying to make sense of the universe, wanting to understand it, and it's something that everybody can do. You don't have to be a professional scientist to look up at the night sky and wonder what it all means. Or if you've been listening to the podcast and there's some ideas that don't quite fit into your mind together they don't click the way that you want them to, then write to me questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Everybody gets an answer, and sometimes I got a question that we answer right here on the podcast.

00:04:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, and sometimes we'd like to answer your questions, And so today on the program, we'll be tackling listener questions number sixty seven over five dozen.

00:04:43
Speaker 1: These are questions for listeners that tickled me, or I thought we would have fun talking about, or I needed a little extra time to do some research before answering.

00:04:52
Speaker 2: So we have three awesome questions here today. They are about habitable moons, about the Higgs field, and about Daniel's favorite subject, particle colliders and moving it. Right? Are we going to move the particle collider?

00:05:06
Speaker 1: We're not going to move the particle collider, but we might spend tens of billions of dollars on a new one.

00:05:12
Speaker 2: Oh boy, isn't it easier just to move it.

00:05:16
Speaker 1: You don't gain anything from moving it. You need a bigger, fancier one or a different flavor of one, and those are expensive.

00:05:24
Speaker 2: Oh boy. Well we'll dig into that, but first we'll tackle a question from Lydia, who is eleven years old.

00:05:31
Speaker 3: Hi, Daniel Jorge. My name is Lydia and I'm eleven years old. I have a question for you. Do you think it will ever be possible to move planets or moons into more habitable zones? And if you could, which planet or moon in our Solar system? Would you move?

00:05:47
Speaker 2: All right? Pretty interesting question about lots of things here, about habitable zones and solar systems and about I guess planet orbits. That's a lot going on in the mind of an eleven year old.

00:06:00
Speaker 1: I love that Lydia is thinking about the future. She's trying to make the Solar System a better place for humanity, and she's wondering about all the details of it. So good job, Lydia, thanks for your forward thinking.

00:06:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, future president, hopefully seems like we could use some some forward thinking in our leadership. But the question is interesting. It sounds like she's asking whether there are planets out there that we can't live in, like or moons, whether we can somehow not terraform it or change it, but actually just move it to a cozier spot.

00:06:36
Speaker 1: Yeah. For example, some of the planets that are closer to the Sun than Earth, Venus and Mercury, are very very hot, and planets that are further from Earth, like Mars, are very very cold. Neither of those seem very cozy to live on. And so I think Lydia's ideas like, could we bring Mars closer? Could we push Venus further out. Or I love that she even mentions moons. You know, Jupiter and Saturn have some huge moons. Snag one of those and bring them closer and make it a place that humanity could survive.

00:07:06
Speaker 2: M you need a lot of friends and a lot of beer to get your friends to move a whole moon.

00:07:14
Speaker 1: Depends how much stuff it's accumulated in the years. Right, if you've been keeping it clean and crisp, maybe it's a little easier to pack everything up.

00:07:22
Speaker 2: I think it just depends on how many friends you have.

00:07:25
Speaker 1: Can you call a moving company and be like, hey, do you have a box big enough to fit like Europa?

00:07:31
Speaker 2: I'm sure you haul has something Forday, you haul the moon, you haul a planet. I mean they just rent you the va to the stuff. Then you have to do it.

00:07:43
Speaker 1: Hey, if they have a device capable of moving the Moon, I'll drive it. That sounds like fun. I can parallel park that thing.

00:07:50
Speaker 2: But you need a special license though, only if you get pulled over by the Solar syste the police. But anyways, it's a pretty interesting question, and so let's dig into it. Daniel. Is it possible to move a planet to a different orbit.

00:08:03
Speaker 1: So it definitely is possible, like the physics doesn't say no, But in the case of some planets or moons, it's not necessarily a good idea, Like even if you could do it, it wouldn't really give you a place humans could live. And in other cases, like Mars, it's possible and it might solve some of the problems, but it would cost an enormous amount of energy.

00:08:25
Speaker 2: Hmm, Well, you mentioned Mars, so maybe let's start with that. What's wrong with Mars now, isn't it sort of already in the habitable zone.

00:08:34
Speaker 1: So Mars is a lot smaller than Earth and a little further out, so it gets a lot less sun than Earth does, which makes it very very cold. It also has a very dilute atmosphere, so it has trouble hanging on to any of the heat that it does get from the Sun. So bringing Mars close to Earth would definitely help that. You also need to increase the atmosphere, so you couldn't totally avoid doing terraforming. You need to make an oxygen rich atmosphere unless you want to live in bubbles your whole life. But bringing it closer to Earth would be handy. Would also make it easier to colonize Mars, like the round trip time would be shorter, connections between the two civilizations could be crisper, so there'd be a lot of advantages to having Mars closer in.

00:09:14
Speaker 2: Oh, I see. It's sort of like that saying, right, like if Muhammad can't go to the mountain, then you bring the mountain to you.

00:09:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. It's sort of like where you're going to buy your vacation house. Is it just going to be half an hour away or is it a nine hour plane flight. It's a lot easier if it's just the short drive.

00:09:33
Speaker 2: But is he the biggest problem for Mars, it's I know it's cold, but it's not like crazy cold.

00:09:39
Speaker 1: I mean, Mars is definitely like less comfortable than Antarctica, So it's not cold the way like the surface of Pluto is. But it's definitely very cold, too cold for humans. But that's all connected to the atmosphere, right. It has a very dilute atmosphere, so it doesn't hold in that temperature. That thin atmosphere also means that it doesn't protect you from cosmic rays with the Earth's atmosphere does. It also doesn't have a magnetic field to do a lot of shielding. So yeah, there's big problems with Mars that you couldn't solve even by moving it.

00:10:09
Speaker 2: So then would it even help to move it, Like if it got warmer, would it maybe just blow off all the atmosphere or is this an actual working proposal.

00:10:17
Speaker 1: No, that's definitely an issue. Now you bring it warmer, you're going to melt some of the frozen CO two for example that's at the poles, and that's going to increase the atmosphere, but you might also blow it off. Right, as you said, there's increasing radiation because Mars is smaller, so it doesn't have the same gravity as Earth, so it's harder for it to hang onto its atmosphere. That's a bigger issue for the moons for example, like Europa or Enceladus or Io, all these big moons of the gas giants, a lot of them have frozen surfaces and some of them even have like liquid oceans underneath them. But if you brought them into the habitable zone, you would melt those surfaces and boil off those oceans and leave yourself with just a rocky core. So moving these things to the habitable zone wouldn't necessarily.

00:11:00
Speaker 2: Well, let's say that we try with Mars and we wanted to make it as warm as Earth. How much would you have to move it in.

00:11:08
Speaker 1: Well, given the current atmosphere, you'd have to have Mars be closer to the Sun than Earth because Mars can't hang on to the heat. But if you just wanted to move Mars like near the Earth's orbit so that it was in the same zone it was easier to go back and forth, which might make terraforming and building an atmosphere easier as well. Then you'd need to do what's called a Homan transfer, which is a way to like change orbits. This is what space ships do. For example, if they're orbiting high and they want to go low. Orf they're orbiting low and they want to go high. It's a classic way to change your orbit by firing your rocket thrusters.

00:11:42
Speaker 2: How does it work? Do you have to like accelerate or just move away from the Sun or towards the Sun? How does that work?

00:11:50
Speaker 1: So there's a zillion different ways you could do it, but the Homan transfer is the one that requires the least energy, and it definitely requires some force, some acceleration. Imagine you're in a circular orbits, you have a particular velocity and a particular radius, and that's all aligned and nice. And now you want to be in a different circular orbit, maybe larger, maybe smaller. What you need to do is change to an elliptical orbit. So you fire your thrusters, so you move out of your circular orbit into an elliptical orbit. Elliptical orbit, because an ellipse doesn't have a fixed radius, right, A circle is a fixed radius. You're always the same distance from the Sun or whatever. An ellipse you get closer sometimes and further other times. So you go on this elliptical orbit temporarily, and then when you get to the radius you want, you fire your rockets again to put yourself back into a circular orbit at that new radius. So it's two firings of your rocket, two accelerations, two delta v's as they call them in the space business.

00:12:44
Speaker 2: Oh, I see, So you wouldn't have to fire your rockets or push the planet the hallway. You just give it like a one initial push, and then later when you're further where you want to be, you give it another push.

00:12:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.

00:12:56
Speaker 2: And in the case where you want to get closer to the Sun. You're talking about out slowing down the planet, right.

00:13:03
Speaker 1: You want to slow it down. You also have to change its direction, right, because an elliptical orbit operates differently from a circular orbit, So you want to change your whole vector, not just the magnitude.

00:13:12
Speaker 2: But yeah, okay, so we'd have to slow down Mars. And then once it gets closer to Earth, or maybe even beyond Earth or it's orbit, then you want to slow it down some more.

00:13:23
Speaker 1: Well, things in the inner Solar System orbit at a higher velocity than things in the outer Solar System, and that's just basic circular motion. So for example, Earth is moving at thirty kilometers per second relative to the Sun and Mars is moving at twenty four kilometers per second relative to the Sun. And that doesn't depend on mass, It just depends on radius. At every radius is a certain velocity you need in order to move in a circular orbit. In the end, you'd have to speed Mars up in order to get it to move at the Earth's.

00:13:53
Speaker 2: Orbit, all right, So then once you're in the closer orbit to the Sun, then you'll eat in a stable orbit.

00:13:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, And so it did the calculation for like, how much of a kick would you need to give Mars in order to accomplish this? And so initially, to move Mars into an elliptical orbit, you have to change its velocity by like two and a half kilometers per second, which is not a small amount. I mean, Mars is currently going like twenty four kilometers per second, so it's like more than ten percent of the speed of Mars. And then you're in the elliptical orbit. And then to kick it back into a circular orbit, you have to give it a delta v of almost three kilometers per second. And so those are the two kicks that you have to give Mars in order to change its orbit to have the same radius as the Earth's orbit.

00:14:42
Speaker 2: Oh interesting, So it sort of sounds like it's going to be hard, right because you have to slow it down by ten percent of a whole giant planet.

00:14:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And it's fascinating because these numbers don't depend on mass, Like it's the same for a proton as it is for a planet when you're talking in terms of delta v. But then when you think about it in terms of energy, right, the energy is like one half mv squared. Then the mass really does affect it. It takes a lot more energy to change the orbit of a planet relative to a proton, and these planets just have so much mass. Even Mars, which is kind of small, has like an unfathomable amount of stuff, and so to move Mars from one orbit to the other would take like ten to the thirty one jewels.

00:15:26
Speaker 2: Well, that's a lot of jewels. What would that mean, Like, could you use rockets to you know, slow yourself down? How would you even slow down a planet?

00:15:33
Speaker 1: This is a huge amount of energy, like orders of magnitude, much more than humanity produces and uses every year, So you'd need something crazy. You basically have to build like a rocket and attach it to the planet and drive the planet like a spaceship. So the simplest way to do this is to like dig stuff out of the planet and launch it into space. If you could pick up a rock and throw it into space so it doesn't like come back to the planet reaches escape velocity, then effectively that's giving the whole planet a little push, right because by conservation momentum, the rock goes one way, the planet goes the other way. Now that's a really tiny little push because it's just a little rock. But if you keep doing it, and you do a lot of it, and you push those rocks really really fast, then effectively you are pushing the planet. So if you build something which like dig stuff out of Mars and throws it into space, that's essentially a rocket attached to Mars. And that's how you could do it.

00:16:29
Speaker 2: Couldn't you just use rockets.

00:16:31
Speaker 1: Like build rockets and just point them to the ground.

00:16:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, basically build them upside that.

00:16:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, you can do that. But then where you're going to get all the fuel? Right, The thing is you need an enormous amount of energy, and so you might as well take the propulsion from the planet itself. This an incredible amount. Like, in order to do this on Mars and achieve this kind of transfer, you just dig out a trillion kilograms of material and eject it into space at ninety nine percent of the speed of life light every single day for almost five thousand years.

00:17:04
Speaker 2: WHOA, that sounds crazy. So this is using your like scooping up dirt and throw it in into space scheme.

00:17:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we haven't even talked about, like how do you accomplish getting dirt to ninety nine percent the speed of light.

00:17:16
Speaker 2: Well, could you you just use like atomic bombs or something you know, I'm thinking of like a rocket that uses nuclear fission.

00:17:23
Speaker 1: Maybe you might want to use fission or fusion as a way to accelerate this stuff. But you can need some propellant, right, you need to change the momentum of the planet, which means you need to eject something from it. The other thing you could do is like solar power, right, try to use that somehow. But either way, it's just an overwhelming amount of energy, something that humanity you can even conceive of producing. Not to mention like wrestling into this crazy scheme.

00:17:49
Speaker 2: Because you need ten to the thirty one jewels, But like, how much does this an an atomic bomb give off? I'm just trying to get a sense of, like is it thirty thousandfar bombs or thirty basillion?

00:17:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, atomic are pretty impressive, but they give off order of magnitude like ten to the twelve, ten to the thirteen jewels, and we need ten to the thirty one. So we're talking like, you know, ten to the nineteen nuclear bombs.

00:18:13
Speaker 2: Well, so that's one followed by nineteen zero number of nuclear bombs.

00:18:18
Speaker 1: Exactly so pretty impractical. Another way to do this maybe is to try to take advantage of other things in the Solar System that have energy in them, you know, things like asteroids and comets. These things have a vast amount of gravitational energy as they come towards the inner Solar System, they're moving with very high velocity, and we often are using the gravity of other things in the Solar System to navigate, like when we send spacecraft out there where you slingshot them around Jupiter or this kind of stuff. So if you could somehow direct comets from the Ord Cloud or the Kuiper Belt to rain down and pass near Mars, each one of them would give Mars a little bit of a tug. If you did a gravitational slingshot using comets, it would change the trajectory of the comet and the planet. So if you did that enough times, you could change the trajectory of the planet enough to accomplish the same maneuver. But it would still take a lot of comets.

00:19:14
Speaker 2: WHA, Yeah, it sounds like you're just making it more complicated because you still have to spend all that energy to move the comets to get out there. To the commets and then move them.

00:19:22
Speaker 1: Well, I don't think it would take that much energy to move the comets because you're using the energy of the Sun. You just take the comment, give it a little nudge so it falls out of orbit. You know, they're moving pretty slow that far out, and so it doesn't take a big nudge to get them to fall towards the Inner Solar System, and then they gather a lot of energy as they're coming in. Then you take advantage of it when they're zipping by. But you know that's dangerous for other reasons, like you make a miscalculation and boom, a comet hits the Earth and it's all over.

00:19:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, then we'll really need to move to another planet exactly.

00:19:57
Speaker 1: So, Lydia a great question. I don't think it's really practical anytime in the near future, but I hope somebody figures it out.

00:20:04
Speaker 4: Hmm.

00:20:04
Speaker 2: It sounds like maybe it's easier just to terra form Mars, so that becomes warmer.

00:20:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, we have a whole episode about how you might do that. It's very challenging and quite impractical. Maybe less impractical than moving the planet, it's still very very difficult.

00:20:21
Speaker 2: I see. All right, Well, maybe the solution is just to hire Marie Conda to come clean up our planet and then nobody will want to move.

00:20:31
Speaker 1: That's right, Lydia, and I hope you clean up your room.

00:20:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Lydia's parents, you're welcome. All right, Well, thank you Lydia for that awesome question. Now let's get to our other questions of the day. We have a question about the Higgs field and about particle colliders, so let's get to those. But first let's take a quick break. All right, we're answering listener questions here today, and our next question comes from Mark was a question about the Higgs field.

00:21:12
Speaker 5: Hey, daniel Le Jorge, I'm back with a serious question. Just as I sort of feel confident that I'm building a mental map, at least at the most primitive level, of how this quantum stuff works. This Higgs Boston is I don't understand how does a field lend mass to other fields?

00:21:32
Speaker 1: What is it? In part?

00:21:34
Speaker 5: If mass is like what potential energy you're gathered?

00:21:39
Speaker 1: What?

00:21:40
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's the question. Where is the mass coming from? Then it just seems like we're at another level of incomprehensibility here.

00:21:50
Speaker 1: What how is it transferring mass?

00:21:52
Speaker 2: All right? A pretty massive question here about basically, how does the Higgs field work, How does it give mass other particles?

00:22:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, a really good question, a really deep question, and one that we've been sort of probing in several different episodes on the podcast, trying to give people an intuition for how this works.

00:22:11
Speaker 2: Well, I guess maybe let's go get back to basics. So the Higgs field is something that was proven to exist about ten years ago, and in the media you always hear that it's the field and the particle that gives other particles their maths.

00:22:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, And maybe we should start with the concept of a field because this is a little bit mysterious for people. I mean, particles are something we can sort of imagine. We think of them as tiny specs of stuff explaining the microscopic world. You see their traces in cloud chambers or particle detectors. But fields are a little bit more in direct We don't ever see fields directly, and we say that particles move through fields and particles are excitations of fields. And field is just like a number that you put everywhere in space, like the Higgs field, for example. It's just a number. It has a value here, has a value there, it has a value somewhere else. But those values aren't just random and arbitrary. There's mathematics that describe how those values relate to each other and how those values change in time. The same way. It's like if you have a sheet, one that you might put on your bed and you wave it in the air. Right, waves move through that sheet, and the same way waves can move through the Higgs field or any other kind of field.

00:23:26
Speaker 2: Right. Right. But I guess maybe a question is like our fields physical things or just sort of like mathematical conveniences that physicists use in their equations, meaning like if you have a field but no particles in it, is that field there?

00:23:42
Speaker 1: Nobody knows the answer to that question, man, I mean, I think the mainstream view is that fields are the fundamental building blocks of the universe as we know so far. We don't know what they're made out of, and we think of particles as emerging from fields. There are these special ripples in the fields. They move in this special way. There's something that comes out of the fields, But nobody really knows that the fields are there, or if they're just something we think about. To answer your second question, in our current conception. If you believe fields are there, then they're still there with no particles in them. Right, They exist everywhere in space and they can never go down all the way to zero because they're quantum, so they're always fuzzing and frothing a tiny little bit. But whether fields are really there, like when we're not looking at them, is not a science question. It's a philosophy question. It's when you can't test because it requires answering the question what happens when you don't look, And to do science you have to look. Hmm.

00:24:36
Speaker 2: But I guess you know we talked about and I know you said that fields have like an energy to them. So if they have an energy to them, doesn't that mean that they sort of exist when you're not looking.

00:24:48
Speaker 1: Well, we describe them as existing and having energy, That doesn't mean that they are there, that they are real. You know, there's no way to interact with a field directly and to like measure it. You know, you can see this effect on other stuff, but you can't actually measure them directly, even if you do ascribe energy to it. But the energy in the field is a crucial concept for getting an intuition for like how this all works because what's happening in the field when it's oscillating is sometimes it's oscillating in a way that moves like way you wiggle your sheet and a ripple moves through it. But sometimes it can also oscillate in place, and what's happening there is that the field is wiggling sort of the same way that like a ball trapped in a well, if there isn't any friction, can go up and down forever. It's switching between like kinetic energy it's moving fast to the bottom of the well, and potential energy. It's not moving, but it still has energy of location. When it's at the top of the well. Put a ball in a little well, it can oscillate around that forever. Fields can do that too. They can sort of oscillate in place like a little standing wave, and that's where their mass comes from.

00:25:52
Speaker 2: Like the whole field, or just like in a little spot.

00:25:56
Speaker 1: At any point these fields can do that. So, for example, the electron field can be mostly empty and then in one spot it can be doing this special oscillation. And that's what an electron is. It's this special oscillation of the electron field. It's got some energy, and it's oscillating in this stable way. And some fields can do this, like the electron field can do this. They can just oscillate in place, and that's what we call an electron, and that's an electron at rest. And fields that can do this are fields that have mass. Like the photon field, it can only oscillate in the way the ripples move. It can never oscillate in place. Right, The electromagnetic field can't make you a photon that's just sitting there because photons don't have mass, and so in order to do this thing, to oscillate in place, they have to have mass.

00:26:42
Speaker 2: Oh well, that's sort of another philosophical question, right, Like can an electron stay still? Like isn't it a quantum particle?

00:26:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good point. An electron can never be located to exactly one location. What you have is like a little packet. And we talked about like how long is a particle, how wide is a particle on a recent podcast. It depends on how much uncertainty there is. And so you always have like a little neighborhood of the field that's sort of oscillating coherently, and that depends on the uncertainty in those measurements, so it's never like a dot, it's none. Think of it like a single point in the field as doing the oscillation. Think of it like a little localized packet. And the important thing to understand is that none of these fields operate independently. Right, You have a field that has some energy it's oscillating, but there are also other fields, and the fields can transfer energy back and forth. That's how, for example, the photon field and the electron field, energy can slide between them, Photons can turn into electrons and positrons, or photons can push on electrons, for example. In the same way, the Higgs field interacts with all of these fields and changes how they wiggle, and then changing how they wiggle it gives them mass. It gives some of these fields the capacity to do this wiggle in place thing, which is what gives those particles mass.

00:27:53
Speaker 2: I think you're getting to Mark's question now, which is that like, how exactly does that happen? It seems like you sort of said it this both ways, like you need mass for it to stay in place, or it can only stay in place if you give it mass.

00:28:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, So go back to thinking about the ball in the well. The ball in the well moves in a certain way because it has mass. Right now, if the ball didn't have mass, it would operate very differently, like it wouldn't feel the same gravitational potential energy, it wouldn't oscillate in the well that way. So imagine you took a ball without mass and you added some special magic force that changed the way the ball moved. So now it moves exactly the same way it would if it did have mass. Okay, so every time the ball is moving, you give it a little special push to change its direction so that it moves exactly the same way it did as if it had mass. That's what the Higgs field is doing. It's taking particles that naturally don't have mass. The electron wouldn't have any mass without Higgs field and changing the way it moves in exactly the same way that you would expect if the electron field had its own mass by itself. That's why we say it gives the electron mass because it changes the way the electron field wiggles and precisely the way it would if the electron had its own mass. So the mass comes from the Higgs field, and the interaction between the Higgs field and the electron field is not inherent in the electron field itself.

00:29:17
Speaker 2: Meaning I guess I got a little confused with your ball analogy because now I'm thinking, like the ball has mass or what. But it seemed interesting to think about that. An electron is just a standing wiggle in the electron field, and you're saying that because of the way that the electron field and the Higgs field interact, then that wiggle can stay in place. Is that kind of what you're saying.

00:29:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. So for the electron field to wiggle in place, it needs to be able to trade kinetic energy for potential energy and back to kinetic energy and then back to back to potential energy. That's what the wiggle is, right, And in order to do that, it needs to be able to have potential energy, and that's what the Higgs field gives it. Interactions between the electron field and the Higgs field create a potential well for the electron which lets it oscillate.

00:30:07
Speaker 2: In place, like it gives it a place for the energy to go to.

00:30:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, it can go from kinetic to potential and then back, whereas a photon field is like just kinetic energy. It's always flying through space that doesn't slosh back into potential energy and then kinetic energy and potential energy and kinetic energy.

00:30:24
Speaker 2: Well, let me recap. Maybe what you're saying is that in order for the electron field to wiggle in place and therefore have an electron instead of need something to suck some energy out of it kind of in place. Otherwise we'll just go somewhere, we'll take off.

00:30:39
Speaker 1: You could still have an electron, it would be massless. Right, in order to have an electron at rest, it has to have mass, and so you need something to change how the electron is oscillating. It's not exactly taking the energy out of the electron field. It's just creating potential energy for the electron. You know. Imagine, for example, a kid on a swing right, in order for the kid to swing back and forth, to be the swing there pushing them back as they move. Without the swing, the kid just flies off. So the Higgs field is sort of like the swing that keeps the kid oscillating back and forth rather than just flying off.

00:31:12
Speaker 2: It pushes the electron wiggle to stay in place.

00:31:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And in another universe where you didn't have a Higgs field, and you had an electron field that actually had mass on its own, it would wiggle in exactly the same way.

00:31:24
Speaker 2: Are there things that have mass on their own?

00:31:27
Speaker 1: There are none in our universe. We don't think particles like that can exist because they would break some of the other laws of particle physics, some of the symmetries that we think are held. That's why you need something like the Higgs field to give these particles mass.

00:31:40
Speaker 2: Ah interesting, And I guess, just to be clear, you need the Higgs field to give things resting mass, right.

00:31:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, resting mass is the only kind of mass we think about. There's this concept called relativistic mass, which is really just a confusing way to think about energy. You shouldn't think about things gaining mass as they go faster. Mass to be an invarying quantity, the same as you would measure at rest.

00:32:05
Speaker 2: But I guess this idea that you know a lot of our mass that we have in our bodies comes from the energy doesn't necessarily come from particles. It comes from the trapped energy between the particles. That's a different kind of mass, right, Or does that mass also comes from the Higgs field.

00:32:19
Speaker 1: Oh no, great point. You're right, this is not the only way to get mass, right, Mass in general comes from internal stored energy. What we've been describing is like how the electron gets internal stored energy, is that oscillates in place. That comes from the Higgs field. Quarks do the same thing. Quarks get energy from the Higgs field. But you put three quarks together into a proton that has much more mass than the mass of the individual quarks, and that's because those quarks now have a little bounce state. The proton is like a little box keeping them oscillating in place, and that energy comes from the strong force creating that box, not from the Higgs field. And that's most of the mass of the proton comes from the energy of the bonds between the quarks, this little bowl that the quark live in that we call the proton. So most of the mass in your bodies comes actually from these bounds created by the strong force that give the proton internal stored energy. And that's really where mass comes from, any kind of internal stored energy, not energy of motion, energy at rest, internal stored energy.

00:33:19
Speaker 2: So then the Higgs field is responsible for some of our mass. But not all of it.

00:33:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, really a tiny, tiny fraction, because quarks have almost no mass. Almost all of your mass comes from the mass of protons and neutrons, which is overwhelmingly from the strong force.

00:33:35
Speaker 2: So when they say, like the Higgs field and the Higgs boson gives particles their mass, it's maybe not as grand deal as of a statement as it may sound to a lot of people.

00:33:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. I mean, without the Higgs field, all the fundamental particles would have no mass, and then nothing would be possible, like electrons would fly out of orbits at the speed of light, all this kind of stuff. But you're right, most of the mass in the universe doesn't come directly from the Higgs field.

00:34:00
Speaker 2: Where does it come from, Daniel?

00:34:02
Speaker 1: Most of the mass in protons comes from the strong force, right. It gives internal stored energy to the proton, and that's what gives us mass. A deeper question is like, well, all right, you're talking about mass, but why is inertial mass a thing? Anyway? Why is internal stored energy change how much force it takes to get some acceleration? And that's a really deep.

00:34:23
Speaker 2: Question, that's what I mean. Yeah, that's still a big unknown.

00:34:25
Speaker 1: Right, still a big unknown. You know, why do we even have a inertia?

00:34:28
Speaker 5: Man?

00:34:29
Speaker 2: Yeah? Like why are heavier? Or at the same time, why are more energetic things harder to move?

00:34:35
Speaker 1: Like?

00:34:36
Speaker 2: We don't know that, right, nobody knows that.

00:34:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, we describe that using general relativity, but we don't have an answer for like why in the same way that, like general relativity describes that space does get curbed in the presence of mass, but doesn't really tell us like why does that happen? What is the mechanism for it underlying it? To understand that, we'd need to have some deeper level theory that explains like what space is, but we have no idea yet, right.

00:35:01
Speaker 2: Right, Or maybe we could just move to a universe in which people have figured it out.

00:35:06
Speaker 6: Let's just take a big rocket, put U haul, we get a U haul, we'll put pack all the physicists into it and then and then just ship into a more knowledgeable universe.

00:35:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, or just more knowledgeable solar system even, you know, to go to another universe, let's just go visit the Aliens and go to their physics school and learn how this all works.

00:35:27
Speaker 2: Unless they're also on the move, in which case you might get there and then nobody's there.

00:35:33
Speaker 1: We missed the party, man.

00:35:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, you missed the main course, which might have might be you if there are aliens involved. All right, well, I think that answers a question for Mark, which is just sort of like, how does the Higgs field work? And it sounds like it's mainly about the interaction between the Higgs field and the electron field allowing it to wiggle in place, which is what looks like mass.

00:35:58
Speaker 1: That's right, And if you want a deep intuition into what fields are and how.

00:36:03
Speaker 2: This all works, then it's not possible.

00:36:05
Speaker 1: So then I really recommend Matt Stressler's book Waves In an Impossible See, which starts from almost nothing, uses almost no math, and gives you a really deep intuition for fields.

00:36:16
Speaker 2: All right, well, thank you Mark for that question. Now let's get to our last question of the day, and it's about Daniel's future career. It seems about the particle collider at CERN, so let's dig into that. But first let's take another quick break where we're talking about listener questions here today, and our last question comes from Bill comes from Union City, California.

00:36:53
Speaker 4: Hi, Daniel and Jorge. This is a. Bill Quirk, a retired astrophysicists living in Union City, California. I'm curious what's going to happen now at CERN and the other large particle colliders now that you haven't found the supersymmetric particles. What are people going to be looking at? What possible discoveries can this lead to? Daniel, I don't understand how you can understand so many different things you and explain them so well. Thanks for everything, enjoy the show very much.

00:37:30
Speaker 1: Bye.

00:37:31
Speaker 2: All right, great question from Bill. So CERN is the big facility outside of Geneva where the large hadron collider is, and I think Bill is asking what's going to happen to it? You know, there was a lot of fanfare about ten fifteen years ago about the Higgs boson, but not a lot of news since then. What are the plans for it?

00:37:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, the plans are to keep running it because though we haven't found anything after the Higgs boson, there are still lots of possibilities for discoveries. Bill mentions super symmetric particles. These are particles that a lot of physicists hoped to discover shortly after finding the Higgs, but we haven't seen any of them, which has been a bit of a disappointment.

00:38:13
Speaker 2: Like have you ruled them out totally like we've given up or is there still a possibility or do most physicists things they don't exist?

00:38:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, a little bit of all of that. Sort of we can't ever rule out something exists because it could exist but just be really really rare, like if it only happens once every twenty years in our collider and we only run the collider for one year, we can't rule it out. It could also be really really heavy, like maybe our collider doesn't have enough energy to make it. So all we can do is we can rule out low mass stuff that we could make that isn't rare, And so it's sort of a statistical statement. The longer we run the collider, the more we can rule out rare stuff, and the higher the energy the collider, the more we can rule out heavy stuff. So we're always just ruling out like a fraction of that space that I said. A lot of physicists claimed that nature really wanted very common, very low mass supersymmetric particles, and those people were wrong. A lot of the fields has moved on from supersymmetry they're sort of given up on it, But there's also a lot of diehards that really believe in it.

00:39:16
Speaker 2: And they believe that maybe they're there, but they're just heavier or rarer than we thought before.

00:39:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, and maybe we're just looking for them wrong, and so they don't appear the way that we expected, and we need to look for them in new interesting ways. Maybe they're hidden in certain ways and we can reveal them if we're clever enough. So there's definitely a lot of people looking for supersymmetry. And realize also that the LEDC has been running for fifteen years or so. It's going to run for another fifteen but the rate at which the collisions happens increases very quickly. But most of the collisions we're ever going to see are in the future. That's because we get better and better operating the machine, so we can have more collisions per second as time goes on. So we've seen like one percent of the data where ever ever going to see from the machine. Most of the data is still in the future, and so it could be that that future data reveals something like supersymmetry or something else interesting.

00:40:09
Speaker 3: MMM.

00:40:09
Speaker 2: So to answer Bill's question, that's sort of part of the plan. The plan is for the Large Hydron Collider to just keep u smashing particles for another fifteen years.

00:40:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, for about another fifteen years. And we're not just looking for supersymmetry. We're also looking for all sorts of other stuff. We're looking for things we didn't necessarily anticipate, because you know, you land on Mars, you don't just look for cats and dogs and people. You look for any kind of life. So we're trying to broadly imagine, like what new particles might be out there that we didn't imagine or that are really weird and crazy. And one of my favorite example is actually Bill's last name. There's a theory of a particle called a quirk, not a quirk, but a quirk with an eye just like Bill. WHOA.

00:40:52
Speaker 2: That's an interesting coincidence.

00:40:54
Speaker 1: It is really a fun coincidence.

00:40:56
Speaker 2: I mean it sounds like, if you just want to find a quirk, just good call Bill.

00:41:00
Speaker 1: Exactly. It's a really quirky theory and it predicts particles that look very different from anything we've ever seen before. They were sort of move in a really weird way in our detector, and so far the way we've analyzed the data, we wouldn't be able to see these quirks, and so my group and a bunch of other people are starting to go back and analyze data to see if we can find evidence for these quirks. So that's just one example, but there could be stuff in the data we've taken already that we haven't found yet because we haven't figured out how to look for it yet. Some of the stuff is trickier to look for than your standard electrons and muons and this kind of stuff. So as we develop new techniques, we might be able to discover things in existing data, not just wait for more data.

00:41:39
Speaker 2: I see. Well, since you mentioned that, maybe give people a quick three minute explanation of what is a quirk, because I don't think we've talked about it before, have we?

00:41:47
Speaker 1: No, we have not. Yeah, a quirk is like a quark, but it has a different kind of force. It's like a new version of the strong force, and quirks are much heavier than quarks. And you produce two quarks at the particle collider. What happens is that the strong force doesn't like them being far apart, so it creates a bunch of new quarks out of that energy. For quirks, that's not possible because quirks are too massive, So the universe can't turn that energy into new quirks because there isn't enough energy to make quarks because their mass is higher. And so what that means is that you have these two particles that now fly apart from each other and they still have that great energy between them, which means they wiggle in really weird ways. Rather than just flying through a magnetic field like a charge particle, they oscillate inside the detector, which is really a challenge for our current data analysis pipeline to discover.

00:42:39
Speaker 2: So then that's sort of the answer for bills that you're a large hundred collider is going to keep running and you're looking for I guess rarer or harder to find particles.

00:42:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, and people are also developing techniques to look for things that are completely unexpected, like running machine learning based anomaly detection algorithms to see if there's anything just like really weird in the data. So we're going to keep mine in this data hoping to make discoveries.

00:43:02
Speaker 2: And you're also trying to make antimatter right and stuff like that.

00:43:06
Speaker 1: Well, in a particle collider, you can make basically anything that the universe is capable of. You smash those protons together and eventually you make everything on nature's menu. And we often make antimatter. We're hoping we might even make like dark matter and be able to detect it in our collider, all sorts of stuff. There are other experiments that'scern not the collider, that do things like make anti hydrogen and study its behavior.

00:43:28
Speaker 2: Oh, I see now, are there plans to make more colliders, bigger colliders, or to expand the current collider?

00:43:35
Speaker 1: Yes, all of those. We just finished put it together like a ten year plan for particle physics, and there's some interesting proposals. Some people think that when the large Hadren collider is done running, we should build a bigger circular collider, and so this would involve like a larger tunnel under Geneva. And because it's bigger, you could have more energy in it. You're limited by like the strength of the magnets that you need to curve the particles around in that if you can't make your magnets stronger, you can just make the circle bigger and then you can get your particles moving faster with the same magnets, So that's one possibility.

00:44:09
Speaker 2: So you can make particles go at point nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine the speed of light instead of point nine nine nine nine nine nine.

00:44:15
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, currently the collider explores up to about thirteen and a half terra electron volts trillion electron volts, and this new one would go up to fifty or one hundred terra electron volts. And that doesn't sound like that big a jump, but that's like multiplying by four or eight the sort of entire energy range we've ever explored. You know, it's like landing on eight new Earth like planets simultaneously. It's an enormous range that we could use to discover something.

00:44:42
Speaker 2: So how many dines does that give us in terms of the how fast we can explain particles at a percentage at the speed of light?

00:44:49
Speaker 1: Oh, I don't even know.

00:44:50
Speaker 2: A lot of nines, half a nine, three nines.

00:44:54
Speaker 1: We don't even think about it in terms of velocity because it's a crazy asymptopic quantity. We just think in terms of energy. That's right.

00:45:00
Speaker 2: You don't want to think that each nine cause about ten billion bills.

00:45:03
Speaker 1: I don't like to think about that. No, but these colliders would be very expensive because you've got to drill the tunnel, you've got to build the magnets. The whole thing is expensive. It's tens of billions. And a competitor on the international scene is China. China is proposing to maybe build one of these colliders over there. They think they have the money, and they are ramping up very quickly in terms of particle physics in their universities, and I think they would like to be the leader in particle physics in the world. So there's two big competing proposals there, one from CERN, one from China, and then there's a dark horse, which is saying, hey, maybe we shouldn't be colliding protons or electrons, let's try colliding something else.

00:45:39
Speaker 2: What what else can you collide?

00:45:42
Speaker 1: Well, there's a really fun proposal for a muon collider. Muons are just like heavy versions of electrons.

00:45:48
Speaker 2: They're not hadrons.

00:45:48
Speaker 1: They're not hadrons to know, they're fundamental particles, and they're really hard to use because they don't last very long. Like electrons are stable they last forever, but muons last a few microseconds and so it's hard to get them in a collider and keep them going and all this kind of stuff. You might wonder like, well, why bother. Well, the answer is to have more mass than electrons do, and so colliding muons gives you more Higgs bosons than colliding electrons because higgs boson interacts with particles that have mass, right, it interacts more with particles that have more mass. So when you smash two muons together, you have a much higher chance of making a Higgs boson than when you smash two electrons together. So the muon collider is what they call a Higgs factory. It would produce oodles and oodles of Higgs bosons and allow us to study it in great detail.

00:46:35
Speaker 2: To answer I guess what question?

00:46:36
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, well, good point. I mean, the Higgs boson was discovered and it acts the way we expect, but it might be that it's not quite the Higgs boson we expected. It could have some weird new properties. And one way to make discoveries is to like measure all the properties of the Higgs boson, its mass, its spin, it's precise interactions with all the other particles, really really accurately, and see if it lines up with our predictions, and if it doesn't, that's a hint that there's something new going on, some new particles or feels out there that are messing up our calculations.

00:47:05
Speaker 2: All right, now, Daniel, since technically you are employed by CERN, do we need to give a sponsored content warning here?

00:47:14
Speaker 1: I am actually not technically employed by CERN. I'm employed with the University of California, though I do my research at CERN, and I'm certainly very heavily biased here that I think this stuff is a lot of fun. It's tens of billions of dollars, so whether or not governments want to spend that money is a very political question. Personally, I think we should spend lots more money on science, not just particle physics, but astrophysics and condensed matter physics and maybe even chemistry. So I'm all in favor.

00:47:40
Speaker 2: Of it, right right, but not philosophy.

00:47:44
Speaker 1: Definitely more money for philosophy. I don't know if you call that science or not. That's a philosophy question.

00:47:48
Speaker 2: All right, Well, great questions here today. Thanks for our question askers for sending in their questions.

00:47:54
Speaker 1: Thanks to everybody who thinks about the universe, wonders about it and tunes into the podcast, hoping to gain some ununderstanding. We really love hearing your thoughts and answering your questions.

00:48:04
Speaker 2: Do you hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.

00:48:13
Speaker 1: For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Disport, Insta, and now TikTok. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.