Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Can you see an electron or other tiny particles?

Episode Date: July 30, 2019

If you were Ant-Man and shrunk to the quantum realm. What would that actually look like? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone.

Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy,

which is more effortful to use. unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier, ignoring is easier, denial is easier, complex problem solving, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Jorge, I want to play a new game I invented. It's a free association particle physics game. Uh-oh. Am I qualified?

Do we need a physics degree? No, no, you might actually be the most qualified person ever. Really? That's the first time I hear those words ever. But I'm game. How does it work? All right, it goes like this. I say a particle, and then you describe your mental image.

You've been doing this for a while, translating science into visual art. And so I'm curious, what goes on in the mind of a comic when I say the name of a particle? But all right, I'm game. Hit me. Okay. All right. proton. Proton. I see the color blue, like a little, little sphere that has a soft blue glow. All right. Well, then let's go to the other side. What about electron?

Electron, I see something kind of jumpy, kind of electric. Like, it has little, like, electricity bolts coming out of it. All right. What about the squiggly on? Okay, I see Brian Green somehow and being kind of squiggly and shaky. All right. Well, let me try. you and Daniel, if I say the word quark, what do you see? You're like grant money. If you say the word quark, I think of a bowl filled with glue and these little particles swimming around inside of it. Like edible? Yeah, that's my lunch, basically, a bowl of glue. No, because, you know, the corks are inside the proton. They're held together by this seeding mass of gluons, this frothing foam of gluons. And so I can't think of corks except being surrounded.

by gluons. Hi, I'm Jorge, I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I have no idea how to draw a particle. And speaking of having no idea, we are the co-authors of the book, we have no idea, a guide to the unknown universe, and the host of this podcast you're listening to, Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe,

a production of iHeartRadio. That's right, our podcast in which we zoom around the universe and find interesting weird stuff to think about, to imagine, and try to bring clear images into your mind of very strange, weird stuff that's happening out there. Yeah, we talk about not just seeing weird stuff, but we wonder how can we see all this weird stuff that's out there? in the universe.

That's right, because part of understanding the universe is building in your mind sort of a mental model, like what's going on in the center of the sun? How does this really work? And where is the dark matter? Every time you want to understand something, in some sense, you're building sort of a mental model that you want to look at. And so where do those mental models come from? And how do we form these images in our heads and how do we know they're true, right?

Like how do we know that what we imagine is happening is actually happening? That's right. And this is especially relevant for things that are not just super duper huge that are out there in the universe, but things that are super duper tiny, like electrons, like protons. What do they actually look like? And when I do particle physics, I think about these things visually. I think geometrically in my mind, think about the relationship of these particles. But what do they actually look like? They look like little balls, don't they? They don't look like little balls. We know that little balls are just sort of the mental model we have in our head. It's part of the sort of analogy we make. We say we like to think of this in terms of something that we know, something we're familiar with. And so it's very easy to do.

But then, of course, sometimes these things don't act like balls. They act like waves, right? And so then you have to wonder, like, what do they really look like? Can you see them? That's right. And so on the podcast today, we'll be asking a very deep question. We'll be asking the question, What does an electron look like?

Or can you see an electron or other small particles? That's right. If you were Ant-Man and you got minuscule down to the quantum realm, what would that actually look like? You know, frankly, I was pretty impressed with the creative visuals in that movie for the quantum realm. I thought it was like crazy and psychotic in this way that sort of evoked the weirdness of quantum mechanics without trying to be too specific. What did you think of that?

He didn't scoff at their depiction of an electron or... electron clouds and stuff like that I will be honest I was prepared to scoff I had a scoff all loaded up and ready to deliver it was at the tip of your the tip of your tongue

tip of my scoffer but I was impressed and so I withheld my scoffing I thought you know what somebody really thought about somebody must have like talked to a physicist and tried to imagine

and I think there's a lot of real science there in imaging scientific ideas you know take what a scientist is describing as a mathematical description of the universe and try to translate it into human thought. And, you know,

there is really a lot of art there. And it's an important part of science. I mean, if you think about it, we're all made out of particles and electrons and quarks and protons. But what do these things actually look like? I mean, we know what they look like when you stack them together. But if you were to actually blow them up, or if you were to shrink down like Ant Man down to that level, what would you see? What would your brain register? Right? That's the question. Yeah, exactly. And when we do particle physics, we're seeking to understand the universe at its lowest level. We're going to take it apart.

What is it made out of? You know, is it all the way down to strings? And when we talk about building the universe out of these little vibrating strings, everybody gets an image in their head, right, immediately. I think of this little loop that sort of like fuzzy little loop that's shaking around. And so it's very natural, I think, for humans to think of ideas and mathematical models and physical explanations in terms of mental images. and so today we wanted to explore

what can we say about what these things look like how do you see an individual particle because in the end at particle physics experiments we're talking about electrons and muons as if we have seen them so we want to pull back the curtain and show you what we can see

and what we actually are just imagining well my question when I see that and movie is you know he shrinks down to the size of an atom or an electron right that's kind of what happens in a movie right but how does so what is he made out of

at that level. Smaller atoms and molecules. Do you know what I mean? Because he still looks like Ant-Man. So what are his clothes made out of? He's made out of PIM particles, right? No, that's a great question. Like, he starts out made out of electrons and other particles, right?

And he shrinks down, and he's the size of an electron, but you're right. Then have his electrons got shrunk down to smaller electrons? Like, does that make sense? Or maybe he just gotten compressed, so he has the same number of particles, but they're, you know, just a shorter distance because when he's small doesn't he supposed to have the same strength and the same like mass and weight as his larger version of himself oh i see he's just condensed yeah he's like super dense man that's that's what it should have been called aunt man wait but then doesn't he also get big when he gets big if that would be true then he would be like

super light and fluffy man right i'm not sure that i'm not sure the physics is really holding together there sorry aunt man you just ruined the movie for me Thanks. I have the feeling you're able to suspend disbelief and enjoy these movies, even if the physics is totally baloney. Am I wrong? You mean, do I have a scoff ready when I watch movies? Or do you, have we been talking for long enough that you have a sort of a mental Daniel in your mind that says, Daniel would think this is crazy? That's a little bit, I have to say, and I'm not super happy about that. I'm so sorry. I feel like I have to watch every movie with you now. I wish I could go back in time, Daniel.

Well, the mental Daniel in your head says that's impossible. Well, that's actually one of my parenting goals is that my kids have a little mental version of me in their head that says, what would my dad say about this decision? And at that point, you know, I'm sort of done. I'm not needed anymore. Yeah, it sounds like a great conversation your kids will have with their therapist later on.

All right, so that's the question today is, what does the world look like at the sort of quantum particle level if we could see an electron, an individual electron, what will we see, and how could we see it, right? Yeah, exactly. And how are we seeing it? Because we are getting sort of pictures of that in science right now. And not only are we claiming to say, we saw an electron go this way and we saw muon go that way, we're claiming statements about the particles they came from, things like the Higgs boson that last for very brief moments in time.

And so not only are we claiming to have seen, you know, you know, electrons and muons, which are sort of everyday particles, but we're claiming to have seen weird exotic stuff. So we'll dig into exactly what we mean when we say we saw the Higgs boson. And I guess it's kind of a philosophical question, right? Like, can you actually see one of these particles without touching it or without interacting with it? Can you really, like, spy on a Higgs boson or spy on a cork? And would it still get a restraining order if you do?

No, I think that's one of the really interesting deep questions is, are these things just mental models? Are these just ideas we have in our head, calculational tools we use to predict future experiments, or are these things really there? And that's why we want to see them because it gives us the sense that things are really there, right?

And did you know I'm actually an expert in this area? You're an expert at being there? I think I'm pretty good at being there too, physically at least. No, I'm an expert in pontificating ignorantly about the philosophy of physics. You're a professional physical pontificator. No, I was actually given the title of Professor of Philosophy.

Oh, right, right. That's right. That you do have, as part of your job, that is one of your job titles. You're a professor in the philosophy department. Yeah, I just showed up at a bunch of philosophy seminars for a while. And then eventually somebody said, hey, who are you? What are you doing coming to all of our seminars? And then I told them, hey, I'm a particle physicist.

I'm interested in the philosophy, philosophical implications of the research. search. And they were like, cool. And then they gave me a joint appointment. Apparently, that's all it takes to become a philosopher. Did they even check your ID? Where they're just like, hey, you look, you look kind of like a physicist. I think I do. Come on in. I think I do look kind of like a physicist and maybe a tiny little bit like a philosopher as I get older and more scruffy. Physics philosopher. Well, maybe I just look more like a homeless person. I don't know.

Either one, you're qualified to be a philosophy professor. There's some quantum superposition between physicists, philosopher, and homeless person. And I'm going for that next. You could be all three, you know, something to aim for. Yeah, well, if this podcast doesn't work out, I might just be. That's right. If we end up insulting everyone else and get sued out of all our money.

But I was curious what people think about when we talk about seeing particle and how do we see them. And so I walked around campus at UC Irvine and I asked people, and I said, how can you see tiny particles? How do they do that at particle physics experiments? So those of you listen in, think about it for some. Second, if somebody asks you on the street, how can you see a particle? What would you answer? Here's what people had to say. I think we have to use, like, lens and stuff to use the light, like principle of light

and principle of the lens. So, like, we can use, like, we can magnify the small stuff to see bigger. Well, in chemistry, you can literally see it through spectroscopy or, like, atoms in space, or atoms, like, microscopes, electron microscopes. So it depends on the particle size. Well, electron microscopes, I guess, get to pretty small, but beyond that, I'm not sure it's, you know, they have devices that can sense tiny particulates in air or gases.

A microscope, I hope. I don't know. Magnifying glass? Either one. Microscope, very powerful device. I believe they use something called insulators, which are kind of like really dense. interactive slabs.

All right, it seems that everyone's pretty much said, how do you look at small things? The answer most people gave was a microscope. Yeah, and that's not a terrible answer because microscopes are good at seeing really small things, and everybody has that experience. And so I think people just imagine, like, well, if I have a little toy microscope at home

that I can use to look at bugs, and in a lab they have a powerful microscope, they can use to look at individual cells, surely you can just make microscopes more and more power. powerful and see smaller and smaller things. I think they're just sort of extrapolated. Bigger, right. Well, I thought it was funny that the answer to how do you look at small things

is using a device for looking at small things, obviously. I use my small things looking at divisinator. I mean, that's what the microscope means, right? Microscope, like looking at small things. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think that's pretty common. I mean, you could level a lot of the same criticism at physics.

You know, what is dark matter? it's something that's dark and we think it has matter and that's about all we know about it. So sometimes you just sort of like encapsulate our ignorance or the totality of our knowledge in a cool sounding name. Which is totally sketchy and or genius if you think about it. Slash cutting edge science, exactly. All right, well, let's dig into it.

Let's talk about what a microscope is, how it works, and what it can actually see. What is the limit of microscopy? The key thing to understand there is that a microscope is using light. right the way that you usually look at things is that you use light right photons hit your eye they make an image in the back of your retina your brain turns that into however you want to interpret it right so if you're just looking at something macroscopic you know your hand or a ball or whatever a homeless physics professor or something then the image just forms in the back of your eye right

so a microscope is just a fancy device to sort of gather the light from really small things and make that image on the back of your eye you basically want to cut out all the light that's coming from other things in the universe and just have the light that's coming from that small thing you're trying to look at be the one that hits your eye. Exactly. And you have to remember that the back of your eye has a resolution, right? It has these cones and rods that uses to form an image. If you have something really small and all of its photons hit like the same rod or the same cone, then any detail inside of it is just going to get lost. It's just going to look like a dot, right? Like a one pixel in your eye. But if instead you have these lenses which spread the light out, so this tiny little thing

now forms an image that covers the entire back of your eye, then you can tell the difference between one side of it, another, the green parts and the red parts, right? So it's about spreading the same light from this, from this tiny thing over a larger area on your eye so that you can resolve the differences. You can see different parts of it. I thought it was interesting the way you said it. You basically have to, you're looking at a thing, a light that you have to bump off of the thing you're trying to look at, right? Like you have to shower it with photons and then you, from the ones that bounce around, that's how you tell what's there.

Yes, exactly. Remember that things don't emit light unless they're like, you know, a light bulb or a sun or whatever. If you're looking at a sample of something, say you've gathered some, you know, cells from the inside of your mouth or you picked up some dirt from the ground

and you want to see it. It's not glowing. The only way you see it is when it reflects lights. You need a light source, like a light bulb, shoots photons at it, and then those photons bounce off and come to your eye.

And, you know, different things have different colors. And so they reflect different. kinds of lights and that's why things look green or blue or whatever. And so regular microscopes work with light and they work with lenses, right? Like little pieces of glass that are curved in just the right way to kind of gather all those photons and kind of focus in or spread them in the right way, right? Yes, exactly. And so it's all this reflected light and then they spread them out so that the thing you want to look at occupies sort of the back of your eye. And you're

looking at just that. And, you know, you can have a pretty weak one, like a magnifying glass does that. You can have a more powerful one. My wife has really powerful microscopes in her labs because she looks at individual cells and tries to look at individual viruses. And so you might imagine, I can just build a bigger one and a bigger one, and I can build one the sides of a football stadium and that'll let me see an electron, right? What's the current limit for optical microscopes or light-based microscopes? The limit is that light itself sort of has a size. It's not that photons are particles that you can measure with a ruler or anything. Remember, photons are sort of wiggles, right? We think of them as these waves and the waves have a wavelength. And the

wavelength is like how long it takes them to wiggle up and then wiggle back down. And different frequencies of light correspond to different wavelengths, right? So high frequencies mean short wavelengths. High frequency just means they wiggle more often, right? So they have shorter wavelengths. And longer wavelengths like radio waves have a low frequency. And the thing is that light has a frequency, right? Right. And that's sort of like the size of the light. And you can't really see anything that's smaller than the wavelength of light that you're using. Okay. I guess my question is why not? I think the best way to think about it is that you're using light as a probe. You're like shooting photons at something and you're seeing how it bounces off. Right.

But instead of light, which is hard to sort of visualize, imagine you're like poking at it with a stick, right? If you had like a really wide stick, then you wouldn't really be able to tell small. differences and stuff. Whereas if you had a really narrow stick, like with a real point to it, you could really tell the edge. Like a record player works. Record player works. It has a tiny little needle and it goes through the ridges on the record and tells you like what those little bumps are. Imagine if instead of having a tiny needle, you just use like your finger. And you couldn't tell like how many little bumps are there. You couldn't get that information out. So what you need is a small little probe to bounce off of to see the tiny little differences. So that you see,

so that the light is actually affected by the thing that you're trying to look at? You know what I mean? Yes, and that it's affected only by that. Because if you have, if your light is too large a wavelength, then things smaller than that are going to affect the light, but also the things next to it will, right? Like if the thing you're trying to look at is 10 nanometers and your light has 500 nanometers,

then the light's going to bounce off the 50 things, 50, 10 nanometer things next to each other, and it's going to give you sort of an average over those. If you want to see things that are really, really small, then you need a probe that's that size. So it doesn't bounce off it and it's 50 neighbors. Right. All right. So I get that you need a really short wavelength of light to look at really small things.

Exactly. I guess my question is, why is that a limitation? Like, couldn't we just make light smaller and smaller and smaller also? Just like super high frequency light? Yes, you can. With visible light in microscopy, the limit is about 250 nanometers. And the reason is that above that the light has such high frequency that it has some high frequency that it has such high energy that doesn't bounce off anymore.

Instead, it becomes x-rays and it becomes gamma rays, and they just go right through. And so there's no limit to the energy you can have of light, but eventually you're building like a laser and you're just zapping these things instead of, you know, probing them. Oh, I see. At some point, you shrink the wavelength down, but that also increases its energy. And so they start to ignore the thing you're trying to look at. Is that kind of what's going on?

Yeah, that's one part of it. The other part of it is the lenses, right? we need lenses to bend this light. The ability of lenses to work depends on the frequency of light. And the higher the frequency, the harder it is. And so, like, there aren't lenses that can bend x-rays or gamma rays very well. And that's the basic principle of the microscope is you're using this lens to expand, to bend the light to take a small image and make it large.

And you can't really do that anymore as the light gets very, very high frequency. At some point, the light starts to ignore your lenses, is what you're saying. Not just the thing you're trying to look at, but just your ability. to like focus them. Yes, exactly. Your ability to focus it and make the image degrades very quickly

as the photons get to very high energy. Plus, now you're shooting deadly radiation and whatever it is. You mean, it kills the things you're trying to look at too.

Yeah, I mean, x-rays, you know, are damaging, ionizing radiation. And they're great for seeing through things, right? But they're not great for reflecting off of stuff. But, I mean,

if we're trying to look at things that don't really die, right, like an electron or a proton or, you know, a small piece of rock, Does it really matter if you're shooting it with x-rays? Man, all particles matter. Well, you know, we can do without the neutrinos probably, right?

Well, the neutrinos lobby is going to be knocking on your door. No, you're right. And we can do that, right? We can probe individual particles by shooting x-rays at them and shooting gamma rays at them, certainly. But are you forming an image in that case, right? You're shooting individual particles at these particles, and they're bouncing off,

forming an image in the same way. It's not really microscopy anymore because you're not focusing that image, you know, distorting and focusing that image to make something that you can visually see. Yeah, you can use gamma rays and x-rays to probe stuff. Or could you make like special lenses, maybe not made out of glass that it gets ignored by x-rays? But, you know, can you make a special lens made out of something that x-rays don't ignore? They're working on that. And, you know, people are doing that, for example, to develop x-ray lasers. That's one of the challenges. But it's very difficult to get any sort of material that will bend x-rays or gamma rays. All right. So that's kind of the limitations of traditional microscopes that use light.

Yeah, exactly. It's down to about 250 nanometers. It's sort of the smallest thing you can see with a light-based microscope. But of course, one of the wonders of particle physics is that we think of everything that's a particle also as sort of a wave. And so we can talk about the wavelength of particles like electrons. And you can ask, oh, could we, instead of use light, instead of bouncing light off of stuff, could we bounce something else off of it, something with a smaller wavelength? So people had this idea decades ago,

and they said, what about electrons? Let's get into that idea of a waveoscope. Is that how you would call it, maybe? Electroscope? A particular scope? A squiggly scope? A squiggly scope. There you go. Somebody copyright that quick. Yeah, but first, let's take a quick break.

December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just, It's a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay.

Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam.

Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate.

Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it.

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All right, we're talking about microscopes and probing the smallest things in the universe. And so we talked about how the optical, regular microscopes that we're all used to from physics in high school have a limitation of about 250 nanometers. That's the smallest thing we can see with those, which to me sounds pretty small, but it may be for particles that's really big. Yeah, like you want to see an individual molecule, right? Or you want to look at, at some complicated thing and see like what, how do the bonds work, right? You want to zoom down and look at a single hydrogen atom, right? They're much smaller than 250 nanometers. And so, of course, I want to see things that are really small.

I'm a particle physicist. I want to be Ant Man and zoom down to the quantum realm and see how the universe works. And so I'm definitely interested in ultramicroscopy, right? And so instead of using light, something else that we can do is we can use and use electrons to see something. And so the idea behind using electrons is that, But just like when you use light, right, when you use light for a microscope, you shine a light bulb on something and then you're looking at the light that comes off of it to make your image. It's the same with electrons.

We shoot a beam of electrons at something and then we see how the electrons bounce off and then we use that to reconstruct an image. It's not a direct image. It's not like the electrons hit your eye and then make an image in your eye. They go into a computer and a computer says, okay, this electron bounced off at that angle, which means there's something here that looks like that. these electrons over there bounced of that angle and sort of sort of uses it to reconstruct what the electrons must have bounced off of. Okay, so the idea is that electrons are smaller than photons? Is that the idea?

Or you can get an electron to have a smaller wavelength than a photon? Yes, exactly. Electrons can have smaller wavelengths than photons because they have more mass, and so that ends up giving them a smaller wavelength. Oh, I see. And also they don't kill the thing you're trying to look at, right? That's kind of part of the idea. That's right.

And there's actually different kinds of electron microscopes. There's the ones where the electrons go bounce off of it, which is very similar to light-based microscopes. There's also other electron microscopes with electrons do go through the material, the transmission electron microscopes. But the basic idea is the same, is that the wavelength of the electron is small enough that you're sensitive to tiny features, right? It's the tip of that stick that you're using to sort of drag across the surface of something

to see, like, where are the bumps? And then you have to catch the electrons and kind of tell what's happening to them? Yes, you have to catch the electrons or you have no idea what happened to them, right? So you need like a little particle beam. You shoot electrons at something. And then you have to catch the electrons. And from the angle of the electrons, you can tell what happened. It's sort of like, you know, imagine that you're in the dark and you're, I don't know,

and there's a wall in front of you, you want to know what the shape of it is. So you throw tennis balls at it, right? And if the tennis balls are bouncing. Right. Glow in the dark tennis balls, obviously. Exactly. That glow with electrons. Yeah, I carry glow in the dark tennis balls with me at all times just in case I end up in this situation.

Just in case there's a power outage. Yeah, throw the tennis balls to the wall. And if they bounce up, you know that the wall has a certain angle to it. And if they bounce right, then you know the wall has a certain angle to it. And if it says, ouch, then it's actually your wife. Then you found your kids. And if you were really careful about it and you're throwing these tennis balls at different parts of the wall and measuring the angles they bounce out, then you can build a mental image of what the wall looks like without seeing it using light, right?

And that's exactly the idea. And the smaller the ball that you throw at the wall, the more you can resolve really small features on the wall. And that's why we want to use small wavelengths. But you have to be really good at throwing these tennis balls, right? And measuring where they're going. Yes, exactly. You have to be very accurate at shooting them. And you have to be very good at catching them.

And then you need a computer to put that all together and to make an image for your brain. And it's pretty cool because we've been able to look at single molecules, right, with these electron microscopes? Yeah, exactly. In 2009, they made an image of a single molecule. And when I first saw that, I thought, wow, like I've had an image in my head of what a molecule looks like, you know, it's got a bunch of particles zooming around, whatever. But here's like a picture. You know, it's like you think you know what Saturn looks like, and then we fly a probe by and you get actual pictures from Saturn, right? That's much more satisfying. And to see like a picture of an atom.

Then your imagination. Yes, exactly. To go from imagination to reality. That's a transformational moment in science. And so that's pretty exciting. What did it look like? Did it look like Paul Rudd? That would be a shocker.

It looks like Ant Man. Oh my God, he's been here. Yeah, and he wrote SOS, right? Help me, finally. Somebody can see me. I'm stuck down here. I'm stuck down here with Michelle Pfeiffer. Help me.

Go away, actually. I'm fine. No, it looks sort of like what you would imagine. You know, you can see the electrons orbiting the nucleus. But you can see that stuff is there. You know, it gives you the idea that it's real, that it's not just a mental calculation. It's pretty fascinating. And then a few years later, they were able to image a single hydrogen atom, right?

That's just a proton with an electron around it. It's pretty impressive. And these days, electron microscopes can get you down to half of a nanometer. Wow. So light-based microscopes are 250 nanometers, electron microscopes down to half a nanometer. So that's a big difference. To me that's kind of weird because it's kind of like you're saying, hey, I saw this glow-in-the-dark tennis ball that was sitting there. And then I asked you, how do you know it was there?

And you say, well, I throw a bunch of glow-in-the-dark tennis balls at it. And that's how I know there is a glow-in-the-dark tennis ball there. Do you know what I mean? Isn't that weird? It is kind of weird. And if you want to be really strict about it philosophically, then, yeah, you're not really seeing it. You're inferring its existence from, you know, probing it. and you're building a mental model, right?

But that's sort of the same with everything. Like, how do you know that there's a watermelon in front of you? You're like, oh, I see it. Well, do you see it or do you see the photon that bounced off of it and then your brain built a mental model? In the end, it's really the same. Oh, I see. You're saying the watermelon itself didn't hit your eyeball.

Hopefully not. Hopefully no, he's, you know, looking in the dark with a watermelon, throwing it around. you never see the thing you're trying to see you know what I mean like you never directly touch the thing that you're trying to see you just touch things that touched it yeah so you can either say

you never really see anything or you can say that's what seeing is interacting with the universe and building a mental model of what you think is out there and so from that perspective seeing with light and seeing with electrons it's really the same I mean there's maybe more layers

of indirection but they're both indirect at the same level well you know what my grandmother always used to say. I'm prepared for some Jorge Grandma wisdom. Hit me. She said, you know, that scene is believing. That seeing can be whatever you define it to be. Yeah, exactly. And I think that seeing plays a big role in making people believe something because it's such an overwhelming amount of data.

It really affects the way you think about things. It's such a dramatically important part of how we build this model of where we are in the universe. And so I think a lot of people don't believe something unless they can see it. For example, I was listening to the baloney documentary on Netflix about Bob Lazar and UFOs. And, like, he claims to have seen these things, but if I don't see them, I can't believe what he's saying. It has to be repeatable, right? Like, checkable. Yeah, well, especially for something really crazy, like, I found an alien spacecraft that uses anti-gravity propulsion.

You know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You know, I wouldn't believe those claims from Stephen Hawking if I couldn't see the ship myself. So I'm certainly not going to believe it from some random dude. Well, all right, so that's electron microscopes. We can shoot electrons at things, and by measuring how they get deflected or bounce back, then you can look at some pretty small things because electrons are smaller than light. Exactly. Right? That's the idea.

Or you can get electrons down smaller, do smaller sizes than light. Exactly. Okay. So now we get into the weirder stuff, right? Like, how can we see an electron itself, right? How can we see the tennis balls themselves? So how do we know what the tennis balls actually look like? But first, let's take another quick break.

December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay.

Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is Back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school. a week on the okay story time podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate.

Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. Then it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown ambition.

This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and

dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it and in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right. So now, Daniel, how do we see an electron? Because our best technology sort of is in microscope is to use electrons to look at things. How can we see something as small as an electron itself? Yeah, that's really tricky. And I think the most honest answer is that you can't really.

If you could somehow isolate one electron in a trap, you could bounce electrons off of it so you could tell that it was there. But, you know, you can't really use tennis balls to see tennis balls. I mean, you can tell that it's there, but you can't, like, see it to resolve features that are smaller than it. You want to know more than it was there. You want to see, you know, what is there? this side of it look like? What does that side of it look like? And so you can't do that with

electrons. Does it look like Paul Rudd also? Exactly. Is it getting wrinkles or is it getting Botox? You know, what are the features of it? So you can't use an electron to see an electron in any detail. Can you use something smaller? Can you like can we shoot quarks at it or quark smaller than electrons or you know little strings? Can we shoot little strings at it? All these particles are microscopic. They're basically point particles. What we can do is we can shoot other particles at them, but we can't really resolve any features. You know, you could shoot super high energy particles at them, and you can try to get a sense for like, where is the charge distribution, but you're not really going to get a satisfying image out of these things. And in the

end, all you can do is really detect that it's there. So I don't think you can see and you can resolve any features. All you can do is make a statement about its existence. Oh, I see. We can't touch it or we can't poke at it the same way that we poke at other things, because we don't have anything to poke it with. That's right. And if you poked it with another electron, with another particle, all you would do is say that it's there. You can't really see anything smaller than that particle. It could be that there's things inside the electron, right? Imagine that the electron is not fundamental. It's not a point particle, but it's made of smaller particles, okay? How would you tell? Squigglyons. Yeah, squigglyons. Exactly. How would you tell? Well, you would have to take super duper high energy particles and

shoot them at the electron and then try to see like a variation in the response. Like if I shoot them at the top of the electron or the middle of the electron or this part of the electron, do I get different responses? And this is, for example, how we discovered that the atom has a nucleus, right? We shot high energy particles at gold atoms. We saw, oh, if you go right in the center, boom, they bounce back. And if you miss the center, then they don't bounce back. So we could tell if there was something there in the center. So what you need for that is really, really high energy So they have really short wavelengths. And we've done that kind of stuff.

We've shot really high energy electrons at each other. And we've never seen anything inside the electron. So as far as we can tell, we haven't been able to resolve any features inside the electron. Not yet at least. It's like taking a little box and shaking it to try to figure out what's inside of it. But you can't open the box. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And so all we need is, you know, $100 billion to build a really big accelerator so we can shoot these things at each other with even more energy. more energy and maybe start to figure out where the stuff is inside the electron. Oh, man, Daniel. Is this what this has all been about? You're just trying to ask me for money? Just take out your checkbook and write a bunch of zeros. I mean, how hard is it?

Sure, it's easy. I'll do it. Here, hold on. I don't know if the check will go through, but I can definitely write your check for a bazillion dollars. You might have to wait to cash it, but here you go. That's right. I don't have the cash flow right now, but.

And in the end, that's what we're doing with particle colliders is that we're just shooting higher and higher energy particles at each other to try to see inside them. And that's how we found out what's inside the proton, right? We saw that if you shoot the protons at each other with a high enough energy, or actually, if you shoot high energy electrons at protons, then sometimes they bounce back with a lot of energy and sometimes they go through. And that's how we found that there were quarks inside the protons. We could see these little spots inside the protons where the electrons are more likely to bounce. off and interact. So that's how we discovered quarks. From the way that it behaves when you shoot at it, not from what you measure of the things that you shoot at it, but just how it's sort of like what happens if I shoot at it. And some weird things happen. And from that,

you can tell what was inside the box. Yeah, we shoot like super duper tiny high energy tennis balls at these protons. And sometimes they bounce back and sometimes they go through. And that tells us, you know, where the stuff is inside the proton. That sort of gives us an image. It's sort of like x-raying the proton. I guess you could say. So does that mean that we can exceed the limit of half a nanometer that you mentioned before as being the limit? That's the limit for electron microscopy for like seeing samples. But if you use particle colliders, then yeah, you can get smaller than that.

But, you know, it's not as clear that you're seeing. I mean, you're not like, you can't take an individual proton and scan it and send a bunch of electrons at it, right? This is a one-off experiment. One electron against one proton. Then you do it again. and you build up a sort of a statistical model for what's going on inside the proton. But you can't take one proton

and zoom a bunch of electrons at it and get an image of it the same way that you can, for example, a hydrogen atom or a molecule. Oh, I see. You can't look. Like if I had a special electron that I wanted to look at, that would be impossible. Yeah, you basically just get one look.

But you can sort of look at electrons in general to maybe see what's inside a whole bunch of them. But if I gave you a special electron and said, hey, this electron came from Mars, can you check it out? You would not be able to tell me anything about it. I could, you know, probe it once, basically. It's sort of like it's a destructive technique.

Here's this really special electron, Daniel. You tell me what it looks like. Sure, it looks like this. Where is it? It's gone. I'd be like, well, first sign this waiver, you know. Yeah, promise you won't sue me. Yeah, exactly.

But, you know, there are lots of things that we studied at the Large Hajon Collider that we can't see directly and yet we claim they exist. So maybe before we wrap up, we should dig into that a little bit. All of this has been kind of seeing things that we already know about. But you guys at the Collider are trying to look for things that you don't even know what they look like, if you could even look at them. That's right. And to make it even crazier, these particles that we think exist,

they don't last very long. So, for example, every time we make a Higgs boson, it lives a very brief, happy life for about 10 to the minus 23 seconds. So these things, it's not like we make a pile of Higgs bosons and then we have a bowl of them and we're like, okay, what are these things like? Each one lives for just the briefest, briefest moment. Not only do you not know what they look like, but they barely exist at all. Exactly.

And what happens is they exist briefly and then they turn into other particles, particles that we're familiar with, photons or electrons or muons or something. And then we have a big camera, essentially, that tracks the passage of those particles. Like these electrons or muons or whatever, as they fly out from the point of the collision, they leave these little traces in our detectors, in little scintillators or trackers or calorometers or all sorts of stuff that give us a clue about the direction that these particles came out of. So we don't see the Higgs boson itself. We just see the particles it turned into.

And even those, we don't see those particles themselves. We see sort of the trace they left in our detectors. You know that they were there, but you don't actually know what they look like. Like the Higgs boson could look like Paul Rudd, which is we'd never know. That's right. We could just see sort of their footprints. And so it's sort of like, I don't know, arriving at like a big fight scene and you see like footprints running off in every direction. And then you try to imagine like what happened.

You know, like, okay, somebody ran away this way. This bloodstains this direction. It was Paul Rudd fighting with Canteries. It was Jorge versus Paul. What happened? But we can use that to tell like, oh, this was an electron and had this energy and that was a muon, had this energy in this direction. And we can use that with a bunch of physics arguments to reconstruct what we think happened in the collision and whether or not a Higgs boson existed briefly. And so in the end, it's all sort of indirect and it's all statistical.

And we have no idea what a Higgs boson looks like, but we're pretty sure it was there. Just to maybe recap here and start to wrap up, it seems like we kind of have like a progression, right? Like, if you want to see things with your actual eyeballs, the limit of that is about 250 nanometers, right? Like, if you use lenses and optical microscopes and if you actually want to see the photons hit your eyeball, that's about the limit, right? Yeah, exactly. But if you want to be a little bit more indirect, you can use electron microscopes and you don't actually see the electrons, but you maybe see the image that comes from the electrons hitting some sort of sensor. And that one gets you down to about half a nanometer. And then if you want to spend a couple billion dollars

and be more sort of removed from the thing you're looking at, then you have to get into particle colliders. And those, maybe you don't have a limit. Is that true? There's no limit except for money, right? You could build a particle collider the size of the solar system and see things down to like 10 to the minus 20, 10 to the minus 25 meters. As far as we know, there's no limit until you get to like the plank length,

like what we think is the smallest spatial resolution of the universe, itself. But that would require like billions of dollars. A very special microscope. That's right. And so everybody, get at your checkbooks and support science. No, just kidding. Tell your Congress people or your members of government that all

this stuff is worth the money because we want to know what the universe looks like. We want to tear it apart at a smallest scale and build an image in our minds of what's going on. Just focus on all those tax dollars and make it into science. That's right. That's right. All right. So

thanks for tuning in everyone. That's the answer to the question. Can you see an electron and what's the smallest thing that we can see? And does it look like Paul Rudd? Now we know that we may never know possibly. All right. Well, thanks for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed that and hope you got some clarity into seeing things at the very smallest of levels. See you next time. and after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word,

or email us at Feedback at danielandhorpe.com. 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. Oh, come on.

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Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo. Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carpent, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys,

then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looked. for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast,

so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Thank you.