Is there a fifth force of the universe?

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Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, if I wanted to win a Nobel Prize super quickly, like right now, what would I have to do? Are you in some sort of hurry You're applying for a new job or something. I might be applying for some new cartooning jobs and I figured that might help. Or you looking apply for my job? Is that what's going on here? Anyway? If you wanted to win a Nobel Prize super quickly, you'd have to discover something new, like a new particle. You know. That sounds good, but actually we kind of see new particles all the time. They're just like different versions of the particles we already knew. So I'm not sure that would cut it. So what would I have to discover? Then? Maybe like a new force of nature? What if I discover the force like in Star Wars. Well, it depends on where you're applying for your job, if you want to discover the dark side or not. Hi am Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, though I've never discovered a particle, nor have I ever won the Nobel Prize yet yet. Daniel career over yet. That's right, You've got you still got a lot of podcasts to record here. That's right. Every podcast I do decreases my chances of discovering a new particle or finding or learning a Nobel Prize. And sorry, but remember we are discovering new friends through this podcast every time, and we're helping everybody else discover the amazing, crazy, wonderful truths about our universe. That's right, So welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of My Heart Radio in which we take the things that actual working scientists are doing and revealing and learning about our universe and explain them to you in a way that you can actually understand and maybe even makes you chuckle. Yeah. And we often try to talk about what's out in the news recently, you know, the latest discoveries, the latest headlines that are catching people's attentions out there about exciting new things that scientists and physicists and Becausemolo Juice have found. Yeah, And something I take as a real vote of confidence in our ability to explain things is when something appears in the news about science and a bunch of listeners right in and say, hun, can you explain this to us? And that's just what happened this weekend. I got a torrent of emails from listeners asking us to explain something exciting that they saw in the Science News. Do you think people had options here? Daniel? Like, I could ask all these different physicists, but I'll uh, I know Daniel, so I'll ask him instead. Well, Daniel actually writes back, So maybe that's why they saw or maybe they just blasted everybody. And you know, I just thought we were special and we don't charge your fee. That's the best part. That's right. We do download malware into people's laptops when the email us. But wait, I'm not supposed to say that online. Yeah, welcome to Daniel and Jorges bought net about the universe. Try we do it to Jennifer listener numbers. No, there was an exciting piece of news over the weekend, and dating back a couple of years, has been a trend here and some exciting results dribbling in about a potentially enormous discovery. Yeah. I saw that this weekend and I was very curious it was. It was in the front page of CNN, and my favorite part about that was that it showed two scientists and lap codes doing something next to really exciting machines. So I thought, wow, that's that must be science. It's got to be science because they're wearing lab coats. Exactly every time I'm about to get a really good idea, I rushed over to put on my labat to make sure it's extra science, just in case someone takes a picture of you. Nobody's ready ever going to take a picture of me in zience. But let's not keep our listeners in the dark anymore. Let's tell them what these article is about. Yeah. So over the weekend there was there was some big headlines about a new discovery that was done I think in Europe that might potentially kind of up in our understanding of the universe. That's right. The headline of the article has to do with finding a fifth force of nature. Yeah, which is maybe more exciting than finding that fifth Beatle. I here, Well, it depends. If the fifth Beatle gets to share of all that money, you could be a much bigger deal. They can they can buy a new force that money. Yeah. And you know, sometimes you'll see something online it's like, wow, that sounds like an amazing discovery, But you don't know is this just the science journalist drumming it up for clicks, or is this actually a real turning point in the history of science. And a lot of times you'll read that and then it'll sort of fade and you never hear about it again, and you wonder like, huh, was that actually a thing? Yeah, it's hard to tell the difference. And so today on the podcast will be asking the question is there a fifth force of nature? What's the right context here, Daniel that makes it epic? Is it force of nature? A new force of nature or a new force of the universe or reality? Or what are we talking about? Yeah, I think the common phrase is a force of nature. But you know that also like makes you think of like a hurricane, or clauses and legal documents that let you, you know, get out of things, acts of God, but or or just a really motivated person. They're like, Wow, it's a real force of nature. Somebody must have discovered her while wearing a lab coat. Yeah in Hungary. No, for me, it has to do with these sort of fundamental forces I guess of the universe. You know, to me, there's not really a difference between nature, reality and the universe. These things are sort of interchangeable unless we're talking about the Marvel Comics universe or the d See universe or the Star Wars universe or other fictional universes. But for the real universe, what we're trying to do is understand how it works and understand how many forces there are. And so that was a It's a big deal. And do you think it got a lot of play in the media that people can afforded it a lot and ask questions about it? Yeah? I think so. Our listeners certainly seem to have picked up on it, and there are a lot of interest Is this real? What does it mean? Can you help us break it down? Um? And so to sort of get a broader context or whether this had penetrated into, you know, the community in general, I did something a little bit different with our street interviews. Rather than walking around campus at you see Irvine, I just went to a random coffee shop in Orange County and I asked random folks if they had heard about this discovery and if even if they knew about the original four forces of nature. So these might be a little bit more caffeinated than the usual answers a little bit more caffeinated, a little bit less ramen noodle infused. Perhaps I academic less academic exactly, you know, a broader section of the Orange County public. So think about it for a second dose of you listening out there. If someone asked you at a coffee shop, what is the fifth force? Think about what you would answer. Here's what people had to say. No, never, I've never. I didn't even know what better? Okay, no, what is it? No? No, I'm not hunting through. I saw an article if I just saw the headache? No, no, well, I don't know what the four forces about it? No, don't you do that? The song earth wind and fire like wind, fire, earth like earthquakes and then also water. All right, I guess maybe they hadn't checked this front page of the CNN yet a lot of people, it seems, no, only one person had even heard of the article, and very few people could even really comment intelligently on the four forces of nature. I got a lot of sort of ancient Greek ideas, like earth in the Fire. I thought they were talking about the rock group Earth Wind and Fire. They really were a force of nature. What will be the fifth force? In that case, Earth when fire, Sun politics, rama noodles. Yeah, so I'm not sure that everybody else out there understands the ramifications of this potentially mind bending, earth shattering, universe upturning discovery. So maybe we should really start at the beginning. Yeah, I guess it wasn't like we interrupt this broadcast for an important physics announcement, have landed on the Moon and discovery the fifth Force. Yeah, it wasn't like a stop the press this kind of thing. Yeah, we didn't have President Trump commenting on this discovery yet looking up at the Sun to see if that's were the fourth the fifth force was no comment, but that was the headline. The headline was scientists discover a new force of nature, right like, um, like, if you didn't know there were forces, they just found a new one. Yeah, precisely, and so um that sounds like a big deal. But I thought, since people out there might not be terribly familiar with the forces that are out there and what means to be a force and what we think of from a physics point of view as a force, I thought maybe we should start by talking about what the four forces actually are. Yeah, the ones that we do know about, right, the fat four of fundamental forces. That's right, all these physics you'll be shocked to discover that there is not consensus agreement among physicists about how many forces we've discovered. Oh jeez, some say three, some say four, some say five. There's controversy about how many there are now, but they but now they've discovered another one. This controversy about that too. All right, well, let's get into it, Daniel. Let's talk about the forces we do know about. Um, so, what are the four or three fundamental forces in the universe? So off the bat, we think about the four fundamental forces as gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and electromagnetism. If you have to ask me, or you're costed me on the street and ask me what the four forces where, that's what I would say. You wouldn't say there are only three. Well, you know, from a particle physics point of view, we've done a pretty good job of showing that electromagnetism and the weak force are really one and the same. They're just two sides of the same coin. In fact, in particle physics we refer to them as the electroweak force, so that from that point of view, you have three forces gravity, the strong force, and the electroweak force. But traditionally the weak force is kind of its own thing, and it's kind of is because it has its own like particles that interacts with, right. It doesn't use the photon like the electromagnetism forced us. Right. But you know, if you want to talk traditionally, like historically, electromagnetism is a new thing. They used to be electricity and magnetism they were identified initially is totally separate phenomena and then later understood to be too sides of the same coin and merge into one that we now call electromagnetism. So you know, years and years ago you might have said five fundamental forces, that we emerged that down into four. Now we've merged that down into three. So I think three is actually the best description of you know, what we currently understand. But that's not a widely held opinion. Is this, like the Greeks thought that maybe there are only three forces, like like women, fire were actually the same. Yeah, except that we actually have more data than the Greeks. Did we conclude this pretty conclusively and mathematically. Yeah. Okay, so there are three or and or four. We'll say there are three point five forces about that the difference. This is not the kind of thing you want to compromise on. This non negotiation. I'll give you three point seven five plus you get the house on weekends. Maybe you should, and maybe you would have more headlines that way. No, And to remind people, electromagnetism is a force you're familiar with. It's responsible for electricity from magnetism um and also for chemical bonds. Is basically what holds your body together. It's what makes the wall seems solid, you know. It's it's responsible for most of the forces you actually feel. And the weak force is not one you come and commonly feel, but it is sort of related to the electromagnetic force. Yeah, it's very closely related to electromagnetism. The particles that contribute to the weak force are the W and the Z, and you can think of them sort of like heavy photons. Because they're heavy, it makes the force very weak and it makes a very short distance scale. And so this one really only comes into play for things like neutrinos and radioactive decay. And I was actually talking to a particle theorist this morning who said he didn't even consider the weak force a force because you can't really feel it, not even weakly. Not even weakly. Yeah, um, but I consider it a force. Is a it's one of the fundamental forces of nature, part of it because but it gets lumped in with electromagnetism because like the math and the the photon and the bosons, they are all sort of act the same way, or they all fit into the same mathematical box. Is that kind of why you think they're all the same. Yeah, it just makes much more sense mathematically if you put them all together in the same box, and you can show that you start from a certain set of particles and they get rotated sort of by the Higgs boson and turn into the particles we have. We should do a whole interesting podcast episode about electroweak symmetry breaking. But just briefly, you know, we have these forces, electromagnetism and the weak force, and they're responsible for some of these physical effects. But then of course there's also the strong force and gravity, right, and so the strong force is the one that holds the nucleus together, right, Like, without that one, all of our nuclear which is fall apart. That's right. Remember, the nuclei are protons and neutrons, and protons are positively charged and so they repel each other, and the neutrons are neutral, so they can't do anything to really help. So from an electromagnetic point of view, the nucleus shouldn't even hang together. We did a whole podcast episode about how the strong nuclear force holds the nucleus to other So without the strong force, we wouldn't have nucleari, we wouldn't have fusion, we wouldn't have stars. It's pretty important. And gravity, that's the that's the heavy one, right. Yeah, gravity is the weakest force actually by all of these things. But it's something you're familiar with because there are big sources of gravity nearby, and so gravity will pull together anything that has mass. You, your friend, your neighbor. You guys actually feel gravity pulling on each other. Um, you just can't really sense it because it's so small. Most of the gravity you feel is with respect to the Earth or if you're the oceans, with respect to the moon. Okay, so those are the four or three and a half forces um electromagnetism, weak force, strong first gravity, And that's what we've known for a long time, right, I mean at least maybe years is what we have known there to be in nature. Like, that's it. You can't two things can't pull or push on each other any other way. These are the four ways that they can do it. Yeah, and it's important to understand that these are descriptive. They're just a description of all the stuff we've seen happen. It's not like they come from some deep principle of nature where we've derived a rule that there have to be four forces or there can't be anymore. You know, you could see tomorrow some new physical effect that can't be explained by anything else, and that might be a discovery of a new force of nature. It's just that so far these forces have been able to describe everything we've seen. But again, there's no theoretical limit. There could be like forces and the other nineties are just super duper duper feeble. We can't even sense them. Oh, I see, up until Saturday, there was no indication in any of the up until you went into that Starbucks to ask people questions. Uh, there's no indication from any experiments that humans have ever done that there was anything else going on in the universe. Basically right like that, we hadn't seen anything. They couldn't be explained by these four fundamental forces precisely. And that's the way we like to do science. Right. You see something new and weird, first thing you do is say, can I explain it with things we know? Because if you can, and that's the most likely explanation, just a comes razor. And then you know, if you can't, then you consider, well, maybe there's something new. I have to add, something new to my theory, a new particle, a new force, and new something to explain this new phenomenon that nothing else I know can't explain. And you guys felt pretty confident that there were only these four, because you mean, you've done so many experiments over the last seventy years, you know, smashing particles over and over and over and over, that it didn't seem maybe likely that there were more forces, right, I would have guessed actually that there were. You know, if I had to guess, gun in my head, are there more forces? I would have guessed yes, And that doesn't happen. Hold hold the gun to your head, Danniel. Somebody in a lab code I'm sure Rappid from in the dramatic movie right now my life, you know where physics, And the reason is that there's a lot going on in the universe that we know that we don't understand. End um. You know, we wrote this book all about all the things we don't know about the universe, and one of them is that there's dark matter out there. And if there's dark matter, that means it's a new particle, and a new particle probably has a new kind of force, because we know that dark matter doesn't interact with normal matter in any way that we're aware of other than gravity. But we think that dark matter probably does interact with normal matter in some way in order to account for how much we see it in the early universe. So I would have guessed that there's a new force out there, like a dark photon particle that mediates some new dark force. But we don't have any actual evidence for it's just a suspicion. Oh, I see all the experiments you've done pointed to these four forces. But there are still things out there in the universe we don't understand. Yeah, And as always, there are patterns and the things we do understand that suggests something is missing. To say, you know, This would be a lot simpler if you found this new particle. So you know, until Saturday, we didn't have any evidence for that. All right, let's get into this new discovery and what the news article was all about and whether it did revolutionize our understanding of physics. But first, let's take a quick break. Al Right, So what was the actual article about that came out this weekend that said that they found a new force of the universe. What did they actually discover? Yeah, so the article was misleading in several ways. You won't meet surprised to learn, um. And the first thing is that this last weekend wasn't really the most important moment. There's been a series of papers from the same group in Hungary announcing discoveries for the last few years, so they've been teasing this. No, they've been trying to replicate their experiments. So maybe the most important result came out in two thousand and sixteen when they first saw evidence for what might be a new particle, and this paper from recently just sort of confirmed it in a different system. So let's talk about what happened in two thousand sixteen, because I think that's really the most important result. Okay, let's go back in time. So wh then, what was the actual experiment and in who who were these scientists and what did they actually discover. Yes, so it's a group in Hungary and their experiment is called the atom key Experiment a t O m k I. The short version of the story is that they see some things in their detector that they think are consistent with a new particle, meaning something that they had never seen before. Yeah, and something that, as we were talking about before, they cannot explain using the fundamental forces and particles that we know about. So that sounds exciting. It is, And they've been doing it since two thousand sixteen, like they've been talking about this for a while. Yeah, In fact, they've been doing this kind of physics for quite a while, and but this particular experiment is interesting. What they do is they take a proton and they shoot at a lithium nucleus and then it turns into burrillium because that's one more atomic number up. So the nucleus sort of absorbs the proton, but it's not just brilliant, it's like excited burrillium. It's like has extra energy, so it's like wiggling and dancing should we picture a dance that the billium is doing? Which of the Fortnite dances is it doing? You're the cartoon is you're the visual person. So I want to see a doodle of dancing Burrellium. When we're done, it's doing the Charleston. Let's go with that. And just like you know how electrons can get excited up from their ground state and then jump down a state. When you jump down the state, you give off energy. And so what they what we expect to happen is this burrillium jumps down back into the ground state and gives off energy in terms of a photon. Oh I see, So the proton not just transforms it into a new element, It transport forms it and gives it kind of extra surplus energy. Yea. Then it has to get rid of yeah, because the proton that comes in has a bunch of energy. It's not just at rest proton just sort of hanging out comes zooming in with a lot of energy. And then the brillium nucleus which is then formed, has this extra energy. It wants to get rid of it. And so what you expect is for it to shoot off a photon and then that photon would turn into a pair of particles, an electron and a positron, and you can measure the energy of that photon by finding the electron oppositron and sort of adding them back up. Why doesn't the photon just keep going as a photon, as a little bit of light. Why does it have to turn into an electron and a anti electron? Yeah, they can. Photons like this can fly across the universe and just go forever. But these guys have a special trick for measuring it. In the way they measure the energy the photon essentially is to induce it to turning into an electron and an anti electron, so they can it helps them measure the energy. How do you induce a photon to not be a photon? Well, every time a photon goes through matter, it interacts with the all the electromagnetic fields inside that matter, and that tends to make it pair produced. That we call it turning from a photon into a pair of particles. You're gonna like slam it against something, yeah, And the key thing is that when you do that, you measure the energy of it, and you can measure the mass of that particle and photons, of course, don't have any mass. So you expect that you get this electron and this positron. You add them back up to reconstruct what the photon was like, and you calculate what this mass was. You should get zero. But what they see is a bunch of events where it doesn't add up to zero. It adds up to a different number. It adds up to a blob all around the same number, around seventeen mega electron volts. So where did this mass come from? Wit um? So photon doesn't have mass, so you expected to split off into an electron and an anti electron. You're saying that that has to add up to zero. The mass of that pair has to add up to zero. Yeah, But sometimes they see something that they can't explain, which is the mass of that pair adds up to something which is not zero, which means that the particle that carried that energy didn't have zero mass, It had non zero mass. And so essentially what they think they've seen is like another version of the photon, a different particle that does have mass. Oh, they think that the photon they're seeing is not a photon precisely. They think they call it the X particle good branding. I was wondering if you'd like that or not exert for like mysterious. We don't know, you know, if it actually becomes something real, and I guess they'll give it a real name. I think that means that they're doing physics X at the end. So that's the basic thing is that when they plot this or the mass of this pair of electron and positrons, they see a bunch of year zero where you expect to see photons, but they also see a blob all clustered together around seventeen mega electron volts. And that's the kind of thing you would expect to see if there was a new particle. There's something which wasn't a photon, but brilliant was emitting this X particle when it went down to its ground state. Oh like sometimes or usually gives us a gives off a regular photon, but sometimes you get a lot measurements of something that doesn't look like a photon precisely. And that's exactly the kind of thing you would expect to see if there really was a new particle there. But it's not like there's something terribly different going on here. I think maybe That's the weird part for me is like, like I was following you, it sounded like things I've heard before, but some of that you're telling me that, like on irregular atom decaying, suddenly there there's this weird new kind of particle coming out. Yeah, that's precisely what they're suggesting. And remember that to be consistent with everything else we've ever seen, it would have to be pretty subtle. If this was happening a lot, or shooting out some really powerful rays, or happening really often, then we would have noticed. Are already we studied atomic nuclei great detail. We have a pretty good understanding of how this works. So for this to evade all other previous experiments, it have to be pretty subtle. Not something in particular to the beryllium or the lithium. It's just something that nobody had that had flown under people's it are. It's not like these um they were taking like super exotic matter and doing experiments with experiments with it and they found something new. It's like they were doing something pretty what sounds pretty regular run of the mill physics. Yeah, and what they did last weekend, this new result that just came out is that they reproduced the same results using helium. So instead of brillium, they excited helium into a new state and when they saw a decay, they found a few of these examples of this X particle that looked just like in the brillium decays, like helium and helium balloons have some sort of secret particles in them. Yeah, but you know, if it's real and it's actually there, it's just turning into electrons and positrons and you can't tell the difference. So if this thing is real, and then it could be happening around us all the time, but it wouldn't make much difference to your world. I mean, the world with four forces or five forces doesn't look very different to you. And what did they say in the paper? Are they just saying like, hey, we look better than everybody else and so we found it. Or are they saying, you know, nobody's looked in this range before, or are they saying this is an interaction like a reaction that nobody had studied closely before to see it. Well, nobody else has ever seen this before. Only this one group from Hungary has seen this before. Now, other people have done nuclear physics experiments other people have looked at burrillium, other people have looked at helium. Nobody's ever seen this before. Now, when they put out the paper in two thousand and sixteen, nobody really paid attention. They were like, huh, whatever, that's interesting, but it's sort of in conflict with other results because nobody had ever seen this thing before. But then a group of theorists here you see Irvine, actually, Jonathan Fang and Tim Tate, they read this paper and they thought, that's interesting. Can we find a way to explain this result in terms of a new particle that also doesn't break all the other results that we've seen. Can we find a reason why all those other experiments wouldn't have seen this particle yet they looked at it. And Jonathan's a friend of ours, right we you're a friend of Jonathan, and I've met Jonathan and he's been in our videos that we've made for YouTube before, which is why I was like, I saw the article and then I saw his name. I was like, what, I know this guy because it was his paper that got this group a lot of attention. They published their paper and nobody really paid attention. But then Jonathan showed that their result could be consistent with a new particle and also be consistent with all the other experiments. Essentially, Jonathan found a way to explain away all the other results because all the other experiments have slightly different configurations or use a different energy range or a different kind of particle a different kind of detector. So Jonathan found a theory that explained this new result and also was consistent with everything we've seen before, and that is what made it exciting. I feel like that's really gutsy, you know, like if you read a paper with a crazy idea that probably clearly sounds like they just made a mistake to be like Nope, I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna double down and find a theory that might explain weird circumstance. Yeah. I think it actually sort of went the opposite direction. They were like, well, here's a crazy result. It's ruled out by all these other experiments, right, let's do the calculation, let's estimate, let's see if these other experiments actually are in conflict with this one, or if we can find a way to wiggle this one out. I think it started as an exercise and then they realized ham there really is an opening there. There's a way that you can explain this new result that doesn't conflict with the other ones. And that's when they got excited. Do you mean it was kind of like Jonathan was sitting on a Sunday and he's like, I could do the cross word puzzle today, or I could just you know, pass some time working out some equations for this experiment. Um. I don't know. I think it was an exercise at the time. He was working with his post doc Flip Tonedo, who's also a friend of ours on the podcast and is now a professor e C Riverside, and they were just sort of working through this as an exercise and then discovered, hey, maybe this overlooked piece of evidence from Hungary is actually evidence for a new force of nature. That was an exciting moment for them. Interesting. If he hadn't done that, then people might have just ignored this experiment. Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think it was the attention of this frankly world class group of theorists and this reasonable argument for how it might be a big discovery that pointed the world's scientific attention to this group and Hungary. All right, well, we'll have to ask Jonathan over a beer or something, how he got in, how he found this article and what made him get interested in it. But yeah, let's talking about the result itself and whether it's significant and whether it is actually a new force of nature. But first let's take a quick break, all right, Daniel, So have they found a new fifth force or I guess four and a half fource of the universe. I would say it's way too early to tell. I mean, first of all, I don't think we can even really conclusively say that they have seen a new particle. And then there's the follow up question of if it is a new particle, is it a new force? Also, so you you have doubts about or you want to see more evidence about whether or not even found anything. And then there's actual deeper questions about whether it actually means there's a new force. That's right, this result only comes from one team, this team in Hungary. And before you really believe that a particle exists, do you want to see it replicated by an independent team? You want to see another group that has a different setup and maybe different potential biases, make the same measurements and see the same thing. I mean, if it's a real thing in nature, you should be able to see it in more than one place. It's like when we discovered cold fusion, that group in Utah. Other groups immediately went out to see if they could reproduce it, and nobody could, which is how we knew that it was bogus. And that doesn't mean necessarily malfeasance, you know, it doesn't mean that they're lying to us, But it's a There's a lot of ways to accidentally bias your result or introduce a mistake, and that's why we cross check things to science. So where are we at now? Have people tried to replicate it or has just nobody tried And so that's why it's an open question. Like it doesn't sound like a super difficult experiment, isn't like you don't need billions of dollars for it. You don't need billions of dollars. You need some sort of particle accelerator so you can get these protons up to the right energy, and then you need a detector that can transform this particle into your positiron electron pair and measure it precisely. And you also just need time and interest. And so there are a few groups out there that are interested in potentially reproducing this measurement using slightly different equipment, but nobody has done it yet, and until that happens, I don't think anybody in science is really going to take this result seriously. Well, it's kind of a weird incentive, right, because like, if I'm a physicist, what's my incentive to being the second guy who confirms the first guys or first girls or gals experiment? You know what I mean? Like, it's like it's a weird thing to jump into, you know, because you want to get all the glory, and if you disprove it, then you know, you would you probably wouldn't get munch of glory either. That's an interesting question, and I think that goes to like who would get the credit for this kind of discovery, you know? And should it go to the Hungarian folks? Should it go to Jonathan and those folks for recognizing the importance of this, should it go do a new team that verifies it? Should you split it three ways? I'm not sure. To me for having a podcast about it, I'm not sure. And you know, there's also a question of sort of priorities and credibility you know, everybody out there's a lot to do in science and a long list of experiments they'd love to get done, and given infinite funding, sure, I'd like to see this thing happen, But you know, is it the most important thing that these other groups can be doing with their time? And also, does anybody really believe this result? This Hungarian group has sort of a I mean there are whispers and hallways and physics departments about a checkered past from this group, claiming discoveries which didn't pan out. Oh man, gossip gossip. There is physics gossip. And you know there's people who have now retired and I think passed away who used the same facilities and made a lot of claims about new particles they thought they discovered, which then sort of went away and no longer part of this team, of course because they've passed on. But it sort of lingers. The questions linger about whether results from this facility can really be trusted. I'd like to see that TV show Gossip Girl for for physics. And you know, in the end, the results speak for themselves, either you believe them or you don't. And and importantly, nobody has found a flaw in their work. People have combed through the details and nobody has found a mistake. And also people have worked really hard to try to explain the results using just standard physics, using the four forces we know, and nobody has been able to. So it's either a very subtle mistake or it's real. You're kind of saying that it's suspect. But if it's a hoax, it's a really good hoax. I'm not saying it's a hoax, right. Hoax implies that these folks are tricking us. I think they're doing honest work. Oh, I see right. But if it's a mistake, it's a really well hidden mistake. If it is a mistake or not, no, And it's really easy to make subtle mistakes. You know, these detectors only see a fraction of the events, and so you have to make some assumptions about the ones you missed, and it's very easy to introduce biases. We have lots of examples in particle colliders, for example, where we see bumps in our data and we think, oh my gosh, maybe that's a new particle, and it turns out it came from a complicated series of of influences from this and that me other which produce a bump in your data. So it's easy to produce false bumps. And so what you really just need is a totally independent cross check. And you would need that for any group, right, even if this was a very well respected group from Harvard, you would definitely need independent confirmation before you believed it. All right, Well, let's get into the details a little bit. I think we have time and talk about to the idea that Jonathan proposed, or that this group proposed at the same time, was that like, maybe this is a new particle that we're seeing. Maybe this particle has a new force of nature attached to it. Yeah, and that's really sort of just interpretation. All we know is if this particle is real, it decays into an electron and positron pair, and that means that it has to have into your spin because the electrons and positrons are spin half and so they have to add up to either spin zero or spin one or whatever, but into your spin. And that's the kind of particle we call a boson. Bosons have intoed your spin. And so this looks like it's a boson, that's right. And so the most conservative thing you could say, is if this is real, it's a new boson. Is a photon a boson. A photon is a boson, the W, the z, bluon, all these particles are boson's. Every boson we know of is associated with the force. Photon carries electromagnetism, that W and Z carry the weak force, gluons carry the strong force. If gravity is a quantum force, it would have a graviton, which is a boson. So this is there's this association between bosons and forces. Okay, and you think so you you sort of know it's a boson because of the spin, but do you think it might be a new boson because it weighs differently than all the other bosons you know about? Precisely? But I think there's some disagreement in the physics community about whether every new boson has to be a force. For example, we discovered a new boson a few years ago, the Higgs boson. Is the Higgs boson represent a new fundamental force of nature. Some theorists say yes, Some theorists say no, because the Higgs boson also doesn't just fall out of requiring what we call a local gauge symmetry, which is a fancy jargon for having a certain kind of math. But how do you know it's not just a like a W boson that weighs differently, or like a boson W boson that eight too much for lunch. This is much much lighter, right. The W boson is about, let me do some math um four thousand times heavier than this new X particle. So it has to be a W boson on a strict diet. It's like intermittent fast W boson. It's a W boson that's skip lunch. Well, that's a good question. So you also call that in a different like like a W boson that ways less would still be a new boson. W boson that wass less would still be a new boson. Like we are looking right now for new versions of the W that have different masses. That would be a different particle, because the mass of the particle really shapes its identity. It's part of what we call a particle. And you know, like finding a heavier version of the electron, that would be a new particle. It's who they are, it's who they are um. And so there's not an agreement about whether every boson really represents a new force or not. Even if you find a heavier W Boson, that doesn't mean there's a new force. It just means you found a heavier W Boson. That's right. But of course it sounds cooler to discover a new force than a new particle, and so I think that's why some people described in the media is like, discovery of a new force of nature sounds sexier. It it focus grouped better than discovery of a new particle of nature. You would get more clicks if you say we found any force then you say and then if you say we find a new Boson, that get lunch. That's right, But it could be It could be that there is a new fundamental force out there and this boson carries that force, and that this is the first piece of evidence for the discovery of this new particle, which is the clue to the new force, which tells us something about, you know, the way the universe works. Although I think you would get a lot of clicks if you wrote the headline as you won't believe what this boson life now with its new diet. That's right, But you know there's also competing forces here because physicists are trying to discover new forces, we're also trying to get rid of forces. You know. One of our goals is to describe all the forces in terms of one mathematical structure, Like we combined electricity and magnetism into electromagnetism, and then with the weak force into the electro week. We'd love to find the grand unified force that encapsulates everything. So on one hand, we want to find more forces, and then on the other hand, we want to sort of shoehorn them together into one framework. It's like when you're trying to clean up your kid's room and you got everything sort in the closet, and then the kid comes up and says, look, I found this toy, and you're like, great, well. It's sort of like when you're trying to solve the jigsaw puzzle. First you want to get all the pieces and categorize them, and then you want to see if they fit together into one nice picture. But you can't do that if you don't have all the pieces. And so we desperately want to figure out are there other pieces out there that we're missing? Because we know this a lot about the universe. We haven't understood. When you get a headline like this, you're both kind of excited but also like you've grown a little bit, like, oh, that means that means we're behind. But hey, isn't it exciting that we're behind. We're always behind. It's not like this a schedule for discoveries of the universe. We're never gonna understand everything behind one of my jet packs yesterday, yesterday. You know, we are always going to be behind. So it's always exciting to hear about more physics to understand. All right, Well, it sounds like the answer here is stay tuned. Sounds like, um, they found something amazing, or maybe they found something but it's it's not that revolutionary, or maybe they maybe they didn't find anything. Maybe it's just something that there that people are overlooking. Yeah, stay tuned for independent confirmation. Until we get that, you really should just put a pin in it and think about it as a cool result that maybe we'll understand one day. Right, until then, we still only have three and a half fundamental forces three. That's my final offer. Let's get three point six and then weekend end this podcast Daniel done, especially after we account for Lawyer's fees on the forces. All right, Well, hopefully that answered people's curiosity and questions about this headline that came over the weekend. Yeah, so thanks for sending in your questions. If you see something in the Science News that you don't understand, please send it to us at Questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. We'll break it down for you. And remember Daniel answers Twitter and email, but he doesn't answer Instagram, Instill what instead? You know what the kids are using? But I think you do answer TikTok? Do you do TikTok? I don't know what that is, but I definitely do it. Loll the kids are doing it. I mean I'll put a lab coat on and make one of those ticker talkers. There you go. Well all right, well, we hope you enjoyed that and see you next time. Thanks for tuning in, and thanks for lending us your brain for fifty minutes. Before you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio a Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H