Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - How quarks were discovered?

Episode Date: April 16, 2020

One day in November 1974 that changed particle physics forever. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. 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 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. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha.

This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Daniel, tell me a good physics story. Oh, you came to the right place. Okay, but don't tell me just a story about amazing physics. want something with drama in it. Oh, because, like, the universe isn't dramatic enough for you? I mean, I want a story with, like, intrigue and sabotage and conflict and, you know,

people fighting and, you know, revolutions. Oh, I see. You want, like, Jason Bourne in a lab coat. Yeah, you know, don't you look like Matt Damon or Tom Cruise? You can make a movie called Thesis Impossible. All right, you asked for it. I have got a juicy story for you. Hi, I'm Horham, my cartoonist, and the creator of PhD comics.

Hi, I'm Daniel Whiteson. I'm a particle physicist, and I like to imagine that my dramatic life would be well adapted to a telenovel. With a lot of twists and turns and evil twins, twin particles. I guess there are twin particles in physics. There are twin particles. know which ones are good and which ones are bad. We could be the evil twins. That's right. And lots of dramatic revelations that your advisor has other grad students you didn't even know about. Well, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge explained the universe, a production of IHeard Radio.

In which we take you on a tour of all the drama in the universe, the black holes, the neutron stars, the tiny particles, the discovery of those particles, and try to make you understand what scientists are thinking about. what people on the very forefront of human understanding are puzzling over today. Yeah, because we like to talk about all the amazing things out there to discover and all the things that we have discovered. And sometimes we like to talk about how we discovered these things because, you know, sometimes the story is pretty dramatic or, you know, interesting or tells us a little bit about how science works. That's right, because you can look back at history and say,

oh, if I'd been around, I would have discovered the electron, or it's pretty simple actually to figure out what the photon is and it's a quantum mechanical object. But when you're standing there... I think you might be alone there, Daniel. I don't sit around thinking, you know I could have discovered the electron. Hey, Einstein won the Nobel Prize

for interpreting other people's experiments that were already published. It's like, you know, sit around for an afternoon, read some papers, boom, Nobel Prize. Nobel Prize, change the course of history. So if you know how to do it, if you know where to go, it's pretty straightforward. But when you're standing at the forefront of human ignorance

and you don't know what the solution is, it's much more complicated. So I think it's really worthwhile, rewinding our understanding and remembering, like, what were people thinking at the moment? What were the questions they were asking? What was confusing? What was simple? What were the ideas of the time? I think what you're saying, Daniel, is that there's a fine line between a thought experiment and just making stuff up.

That's right. That's right. And that's why I prefer to do real experiments in the Collider and actually ask nature questions. All right. Well, today on the program, we'll be continuing our series about how particles weren't discovered. or particles of things that matter and all the things in the universe are made out of, how did we actually discover these things and know that they existed and know what they look like and know how much they weigh and what they like to wear in the morning?

I don't even know how to respond to that. I'm imagining a photon getting dressed or something. But I think this is really fascinating because currently we have fantastic theoretical understanding of all the particles, how they fit together, what they are, and of course, lots of outstanding questions. But there's a wonderful history there. Each particle was like a hard-fought victory. Each one was like, how do we figure out that this particle is also there? And, you know, in the end, our theory has to describe experiments.

We've developed this theory in order to describe all the crazy experiments that we've seen that revealed the existence of those particles. So it's a lot of fun to sort of reimagine and understand how each one was discovered. Yeah, because, you know, I think looking at history now and looking at science now, it's kind of hard to believe sometimes that there was. was a time where we didn't know anything, and we didn't know any of these things. We didn't know that electrons existed or photons existed or protons existed or what they wore in the morning. And so it's kind of interesting to kind of put yourself in the mindset of the people

who didn't know anything, but they discovered what actually reality is like. Absolutely. And it gives you another fun exercise, which is to imagine somebody in a hundred years. How would they look back at what we know now? They will have hopefully a grasp of, you know, the shape, the size of the universe and why it's accelerating and maybe what the smallest particles are and they'll look back at us and then be like, oh my gosh, those guys knew nothing about the universe. How do they even go to work? You're making stuff off on podcasts. I like to think of human knowledge as one of these exponentially growing graphs. And at every point, it seems like, wow, we know a hundred times what we knew 50 years ago. And then in 50 years, we will again dwarf human knowledge. So I'm looking

forward to that. Yeah. I'm looking forward to being dwarfed. There are positive exponential graphs, not just negative ones. So we've done a podcast episode on electrons and positrons and photons and muons. And so today on the program, we'll be asking the question. How were quarks discovered? Is this a quirky story, Daniel? You know, this is one of the most dramatic stories in all of particle physics. There really are crazy things in these stories.

You know, there is sabotage. There are competing public. announcements, there are arguments about how to name particles, there are stories about leaked information, being slipped from one experiment to the other. What? Yeah, it's pretty crazy. No, there is real drama. I mean, I'm waiting for the six-episode mini-series on Netflix about this set of events.

Murder, explosions. No? We didn't get that far? That's right. Tiger Kings becomes Particle Kings. Oh, I see. Oh, I see, like the true crime. Ooh, that could be the new genre of Netflix, true physics.

But as usual, we were wondering how many people out there know the story of how quarks were invented. Because, you know, quarks and just a quick recap, there are the mini particles that everything else is kind of made out of. Most of everything else, protons and neutrons are made out of quarks. And so these are pretty fundamental particles, right, Daniel, they're not just like, you know, some novelty. That's right. They're not just some random thing you pick up in the store. on the way home, and then throw away unused, they are the things that make up me and you.

I am made out of atoms, and those atoms have neutrons and protons and protons at the center, and all those neutrons and protons are made of quarks. Yeah. And all the matter that you've ever tasted and touched and tripped over or thrown at each other is made of quarks and electrons. So they're pretty important.

Yeah. So as Daniel does, he went out into the streets and asked people if they knew how corks were discovered. Now, as usual, think about it for a second, and put yourself a hundred years ago and ask yourself if you know how quarks were discovered. Here's what people had to say. Some scientists in the Hedron Collider found it.

I don't. I actually don't know how they were discovered. Okay, cool. No, I haven't learned about that. Was it electron cloud chamber or something? No, that's not for quarks. That's for something else. It's for like positrons or something. Using a particle accelerator?

Nice. I don't know. All right. That's cool. I don't even know what they are, so... I think it's discovered by a collision of the items. I mean, I don't remember the name of the machine, but it's the collision of particles.

All right, not a lot of deep knowledge of history of physics out in the public. No, not so much. There's some pretty good answers here. I like the guy who knows how positrons were discovered in cloud chambers, and, you know, people giving credit to the Hadron Collider, which is, you know, not too far off. They certainly were discovered in collisions. Interesting.

So, you know, some knowledge here. It seems like some people thought quarks were discovered recently. Yeah, like the LHC, you know, this thing is 20 years old, tops and but quarks we've known about since the 60s and 70s. So it definitely was not the large Hadron Collider responsible for discovering quarks. And I'm just curious here, how did you get these questions? Did you go out into the street before the pandemic or during the pandemic?

Do you have now like a six-foot selfie stick with a microphone? I, shockingly, I actually work on these things kind of far in advance so that I'm prepared for a pandemic. I have a stockpile of questions I have asked people on the street. I see. You have a federal stockpile. The National Strategic Reserve of random questions. All right, good. So people were still feeling optimistic about science. All right, it seems like not a lot of people know the stories and you're saying that it's full of drama and interesting twist and turns. So tell us a story, Daniel. Set the scene. What was it like back then and what year are we talking about. So let me take you back to

1947. A dramatic in a world. A cold winter blew into Chicago. No. You have to sort of rewind back to before the clues were found for quarks. And back in 1947, we actually had a pretty clear picture we thought of how the universe looked.

We felt like... Like we knew things were made out of atoms and atoms were made out of some bits inside. Yeah. We knew there were atoms. We knew those atoms had protons and neutrons and electrons and electrons. We also knew they were photons. And we felt like, hey, that's a pretty good picture of the universe. And I think a lot of people in physics felt like that might be it. Like maybe, you know, we're coming up to the last end of the road and we're going to answer all the questions. And that's going to give us a sort of last sense for what the universe is made of. Like there can't be anything smaller than these particles. These are it. These are the basic building blocks of life, the universe and everything in it. That's right. But of course, there were a few loose threads, right? There were a few things which didn't quite fit.

into that picture and that's a lesson right every time there's a little loose thread one thing that doesn't quite fit into the hole you wanted to you should pull on that thread you should mix that metaphor until you figure out the secrets of the universe you should just ignore it repress it and some of those those threads were things like muons like remember we talked about how muons were discovered and when they were first found people were like what who ordered that we don't need those muons i see they're not part of the atoms for just particles it seemed to have been there, but they weren't part of regular matter. Exactly.

That was the kind of clue we're talking about. And there were other particles like pyons that were found in cosmic rays, and people were like, huh, what are these particles about? We don't need them to build matter. Interesting. But they can't exist. Why do they even exist? What's the idea? I see. And so you see them,

but they're not part of most of things. So I guess that's a weird thing, right? It's a pretty weird thing, but it also gives you a clue. It gives you a clue for, like, what kind of particles can be out there. And in the end, remember, what you're looking for is an answer to the deepest question, right, to understand, like, the nature of reality. So you want the full menu. And in those few little threads then turned into, I don't know, what's the metaphor here, a whole rug, I suppose,

or a whole pile of yarn. A giant haystack. Because originally we had these weird, unstable particles, muons, and pyons just from looking them come down from the sky and cosmic rays. But then people built particle accelerators. They weren't satisfied just. to sort of look at high-energy particles that we already found in nature, they wanted to create their own collisions to explore these things with more control. Oh, I see.

So people built particle accelerators. They wanted to smash things in front of them, not just wait up, wait until they come raining down. Yeah, you want to do it on your terms. You know, you want to have control. I want to say, I want to turn up the energy. I want to turn down the energy. I want to collide this kind of particle,

that kind of particle, right? I want to see what it feels like when I stick my hand into it. I mean, that's a basic curiosity, right? And so what they found when they built these accelerators was a whole lot of new particles. They found caons and strange particles and all sorts of stuff. We talked a little bit about strange matter on the program recently. And this is an era we call the particle zoo because basically every time they turned on the accelerator, they found some new particle.

Did you guys have a theme song, a jingle? Like, Particle Zoo. Particle Zoo. Ra! Welcome to our particle zoo. Yeah, so I guess you didn't have particle accelerators, but you thought, hey, let's see what else happens when things smashed together. Because I guess that's what you knew was happening in the atmosphere. Yeah, we had a sense that these things needed more energy, right?

These unstable particles were heavier, meaning that they contained more energy, and then they decayed down to lighter particles. So to try to create new heavy particles, you want to create localized energy density. You want to smash two particles together, so you got a little like, blob of energy right there, maybe enough to create something new. And so that's what these first particle accelerators did was create these high energy density situations where you could create these new particles. And we found zillions and zillions of these things.

Because at this point, you sort of knew about E equals MC square and then you knew that, you know, things can matter can come from pure energy. That's right. You can create new matter. It's, I mean, it's alchemy, right? People have been trying to do this for thousands of years and we actually were able to do it by smashing particles together at high energy. you can create new kinds of matter.

And that's exciting, right? Like, wow, look, every time you turn it on, you create a new particle, and then you get to name it after your puppy or whatever. But it's also confusing. Did anyone name it after their puppy? I don't have a record of that, no. Back in that day, they were mostly naming them after Greek letters.

So you got lots of, you know, sigmas and Thetas and Upsilons and this kind of stuff. But it was also confusing. Maybe they named their puppies after Greek letters. Probably after that. Lots of puppies named Upsilon and Theta, yeah. But, you know, once you're, once you sort of your dream is satisfied, you've created all these new particles, then you're looking at it and you're looking for patterns. You're like, okay, why are there these particles and not other particles?

What do this mean about the nature of the universe? Like, how are they related? Yeah, because we don't want an answer that says, oh, there's 942 different kind of fundamental particles, right? We suspect that the answer is a small number of particles. We want to explain the whole universe using a small set of pieces, right, like the Legos. We want to build everything out of a small number of basic blocks, not 974. And we often talk about how we had the periodic table of element and how that was kind of something that told us that when you have a lot of these things out there in the universe, there's probably some kind of pattern or some kind of underlying building block to them. Yeah.

Every time you see unexplained phenomena, weird patterns, trends you don't understand, it's probably an emergent phenomenon from the arrangement of smaller bits, just like in the periodic table. you see all these patterns and that tells you that there's something else going on and you're absolutely right every feature of the periodic table comes from how the electrons sit in their orbitals around the nucleus and so people suspected they're like well maybe all these new crazy particles we found are reflective of something smaller something tinier and all these patterns that mastered these particles and the way they interact come from how those little bits are fit together that was sort of the nugget of the idea i see and so they found the pattern, right? In all of these particles, in the particle zoo, they're like, wait a minute,

the lions are sort of like smaller versions of the elephants and the zirias or sort of have four legs, just like the lines kind of thing. Yeah, so we had a decade of discovering new particles. And then in 1961, a theorist came up with an idea. He said, well, I notice that if I categorize the particles in two ways, one by their electric charge and the other way by their strangeness. And remember, some of these particles are strange in the sense that they last a lot longer than you would expect. And you can listen to a whole podcast episode about strangeness. And so people postulated this new property of particle strangeness. And they give particle strangeness zero, like the proton and the neutron, or strangeness one, or strangeness two.

And then they just made a table. Meaning like, it's strange because given how massive it is, how much it weighs, it shouldn't be around this long. Yeah, like caons last a lot longer than you would expect. And the reason is that they have strangeness. And the universe likes to preserve strangeness, so it tries to find a way for the chaos to decay to keep the strangeness in the products. And that takes longer. It's a weaker interaction.

But protons are pretty stable, and they're supposed to be stable, so they have zero strangeness. Now we know that strangeness actually reflects the strange quarks inside of it. But at the time, they didn't know. They were just like, this is a property of these particles. And a lot of particle physics is just like writing down properties we observe and wondering where they come from and wondering if we can see patterns and then explain those patterns in terms

of something deeper. So at the time they knew the charge of these particles, they could measure that. And they'd sort of invented this idea of strangeness just by observing how the particles decayed and labeling them, strangeness one, strangeness zero. And then they noticed this pattern. They called it the eight-fold

way because they noticed that if you arrange the particles according to strangeness versus charge, that they formed these octagons. Right. And they formed these triangles and all these really interesting geometric patterns. All right. So they found a bunch of particles and they found a pattern maybe a clue to what all these particles mean. Yeah. And they found these geometric patterns. And that suggested to them that like, you know, maybe there's something going on here. Maybe there's a reason for all these patterns.

And the theorists that came up with this eightfold way found a hole in those patterns. Like there was one triangle that was missing a corner. And they said, okay, well, maybe there's a particle there. You would have to have this strangeness and this charge to be in that corner and he predicted its existence and then they found it. Like, oh, you were right. This new particle does exist. So that was the first clue that maybe

this pattern really reflected something real. It wasn't just imaginary. Like, they weren't just imagining things. You could actually find particles using these patterns. Yeah, just like with the periodic table, we started putting it together and we noticed some holes. We're like, where's this element number

or whatever that we don't see in nature? It turns out, you know, it does exist. You can create it. It's just very unstable. In the same way, they were able to fill out these triangles and these octagons of the eightfold way. All right. Well, let's get into what this pattern actually meant or means and how it helped them make sense of the particle zoo. But first, let's take a quick break.

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 emerge. emerged, and it was here to stay.

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Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, so they found a bunch of particles and they saw that there was some kind of pattern to the, meaning that there was something going on here. Yeah, every time you see a pattern, that's your first clue because it lets you sort of play games with what's going on underneath. You want to find some way to explain a very complicated set of things you've observed, 92 different particles with all weird masses and behaviors in terms of a smaller set of objects. And so finding that pattern gave them a clue as to how to put that together. And so they came up with the idea that maybe there are even smaller particles

that kind of put together to make these bigger particles. Yes, exactly. And that's sort of the idea that particle physicists are always looking to, right? Like everything is made of smaller bits. That's like the oldest idea in particle physics. And so they thought, well, we have all these particles. Can we explain them in terms of smaller bits, right? You're like, we're particle physics.

We only have particles. That's right. That's our hammer. When you have a particle, everything looks like a particle to you. That's our hammer, so everything's a nail, exactly. And this idea actually came up independently by two different theorists. And they came up with the same idea that there could be these three little particles that if you put them together in different combinations, explain all the particles that we see.

But not all of them, right? Like some of them, like the muon, isn't the muon kind of like an electron and can't be split? Yeah, they don't explain all those particles. Like the muon is not made of quarks, but all those particles discovered in the particle zoo, the pyons, the caons, the sigma particles, all those kind of particles, they could explain all these new ones in terms of these little basic particles. And so Murray Galman came up with this idea, and he called them quarks based on a word that he saw in a James Joyce novel. And at the same time, another theorist named Zweig came up with exactly the same idea of mathematics. and published it, but he called them aces. And you mean mathematically, like the math predicted there would be three of these?

Well, at the time, all these particles were only made out of these three quarks. Now we know that there were up quarks, down quarks, and strange quarks, right? Up and down is what you need to make the proton and the neutron. You add in strange to make all these other strange particles, like the Kion and the omega and the sigma particles. And so at the time, they only needed three. And the particles they were creating only used those three Lego pieces. Oh, I see.

But now we know there are more. Now we know there are more. Yeah, the story goes on and on. So to mathematically, to explain the ones they had, they thought there were three of them. That's right. And they discovered that if you postulate the existence of these three particles, that you could put them together in pairs and triplets to explain all the particles that they were seen. So it's like peeling back a layer of reality and saying, oh, all of these things are just different ways to combine these basic building blocks. And not only could they explain all the particles that we had seen, they could.

It show which particles we hadn't yet seen. Like, oh, nobody's tried this combination that would give you this particle and predicting it and then we find it. And that's exactly what happened with this omega-minus particle that we mentioned earlier. That's what they found. They found particles that were predicted by these aces and corks. Yeah, exactly. And so that's pretty convincing. And, you know, if you ask me, I would have believed it.

Like, at that point, I would have been sold on this cork idea. I would have been like, well, this explains it. It describes all the particles we see. It simplifies things. it holds together. But you hadn't seen them, I guess. There were just sort of like an idea that seems to predict things, but you hadn't, like, directly seen them.

Yeah. And so most physicists were like, all right, that's a cute idea. But is it an idea or is it real, right? Is that what's actually happening inside these particles? Or is it just a nice thing you can calculate in your mind? And there's sort of a deep philosophical question there about whether any of our theories are more than just ideas we calculate in our mind and whether we actually see anything directly.

But physicists were skeptical, I guess. They're like, um, aces. I'm not sure I would call that an ace. Yeah, and I don't know the history of why Quarks took off instead of Aces. Actually, like, Aces better than Quarks. Quarks is kind of a weird word. You do? the number one particle. I don't know. It sits in a nice spot somewhere in my brain. I see. But maybe

Gilman was barely thinking like, hey, these are weird, odd, and new. Let's find a word that's kind of weird, odd in you. Yeah, perhaps. Perhaps. And I guess the field liked his idea better because Quarks is now what we call them. Really? It was totally just a name popularity content. Yeah, I don't, I've done some reading to try to figure out like why Quarks took off. It might not just be a name popularity. I think Galmon had a larger personality and was more famous and influential. And so you know, it's a bit of a political thing. Doesn't it depend on who published first? Yeah, but, you know, it was just about the same time.

But sometimes like the second counts, right? The minute counts. I think that's ridiculous. But we'll hear a story later on in this program about two discoveries announced on the same day. All right, so they were theoretical and some people didn't believe them. But then what happened? How did we say, hey, look, quarks are real? So then we got some actual evidence because they did some experiments.

And experimentalists said, well, if these things are real, we should be able to see them. meaning we should be able to like take a proton and shoot particles at it and see this internal structure. I mean, if protons are not just like tiny perfect dots or perfectly smooth, if they're actually made of three like hard nuggets bound together, we should be able to see them if we shoot electrons at them with high enough energy. And what made them think that the proton was deconstructible or breakable but not the electron? Oh, boy, that's a good question. We don't know if the electron is deconstructible,

We are doing experiments to try to figure that. We had a podcast episode about whether the electron has stuff inside it. I guess the short answer is we don't know, and we're trying to see if the electron has stuff inside of it. We've never seen any evidence. They're just like, hey, let's match these two things together and see what happens. Yeah, but the theory went that the proton was built out of quarks, and so that's what they were tested.

The suggestion was you could maybe see these things inside protons. Nobody suspected that electrons were made out of quarks. And we know today that the electron doesn't feel a strong force, and so it can't be made out of quarks. We don't know why and what the difference is, not the whole other podcast episode. But anyway, they used electrons because they're cheap and fast and small to shoot at protons to try to see what was inside. Because I guess protons are heavier? Protons are much heavier than electrons.

And the idea was that maybe they had this structure. And so you shoot electrons at a proton, it will bounce off. But if you shoot it at high enough energy, then it can get to break it. Yeah, to break it. It can get between those bonds. A proton we now know is made out of corks that are held together by really strong bonds. But if you shoot at it with electrons that have energy more than the energy of those bonds, then those bonds are sort of irrelevant.

And you can bounce off the individual corks. And so they did that. They shot the proton with the revolver in the library, and they found that the proton split into three. Yeah. They found not necessarily that it's split into three, because remember these corks can't be alone. And so if you break up a proton, it just, the quarks inside of it, just form a new proton and new other particles.

But what they found was that there were three sort of hard centers in the proton, three places where if you hit it just right, it would bounce back at a great angle rather than passing through. Oh, they were looking at the bounce rate. Yeah, they were looking at the bounce rate and the bounce angles, essentially. And so if the proton is a totally solid sphere, then you'll always sort of get the same angles. Whereas if the proton is mostly transparent with three hard nuggets in it, then often your electron will go right through it and sometimes it'll bounce off.

But how did they know there was three of them? Like, could they actually aim electrons with that sort of atomic position? You can't aim, it's all statistical. You can't aim at an individual cork, but you can count how many hard centers there are by how often you get a hard bounce back. And, you know, this is very similar

to the way the nucleus of the atom was discovered. Back in the day or in the turn of the century, before we even knew that the atom had an electron with a nucleus in it, Rutherford discovered the nucleus in this exact same way. He shot particles at nuclei and found that mostly they went through, but occasionally they bounced right back.

And that's how he discovered the nucleus. Physicists were still not convinced. They saw these hard centers, Nugate centers, and physicists were still like, I don't know if those are quotes. Yeah, it amazed at me. I don't understand what physicists were thinking at the time. Like, you had this beautiful idea of these times,

particles that explained this big mystery that had been going on for 20 years about the particle zoo. And then you had this evidence that these particles really were made of smaller particles. And still physicists were like, I don't know. And I think part of it is that they couldn't see the quarks on their own, right? They couldn't like create independent stand-along corks and study them, like with all the other particles. They're only looking at x-rays and not at, you know, holding the bones in their hands. Yeah. And, you know, corks, you can't see them by themselves.

They can never be on their own. They're always tightly bound into these, in combinations of other corks, into other particles. So maybe that's what motivated this skepticism. But, you know, I would have been on that train long before this. He would have been wearing the cork hat. Yeah, yeah. All right. So it sounds like it was still sort of an idea, maybe a little unproven.

People were unconvinced. But then something amazing happened. And so let's get into that. 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 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 2, 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 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.

I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call. Said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff Podcast, season two, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a nonprofit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month.

So join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines. of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat Army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. Don't want to have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission.

I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Daniel, tell me about the November revolution. It sounds like the October revolution, but this happened a month later, or this is a totally different thing?

I know. It sounds like something that should have happened at the Alamo or something, but this is a revolution in physics. Or with SARS and, you know, Anna Karina. Yeah, and as far as I'm aware, nobody died on this revolution, but this is sort of the day that physics changed its mind. We went from like quarks are an idea to quarks are a real thing. And there's an actual date.

It's an actual date. Yeah. And that's because that's the date of the dueling press conferences that are the end of this story. What? Yeah. And the idea was if quarks are real, maybe there are more of them. Like we only needed three up, down, and strange to explain all the particles that we've

seen before. But how do we know there aren't more corks, like a fourth quark? or now we know there are six quarks. And there are actually some theorists that said, you know, it's weird to have three because the up and down are sort of a pair that go together. What about the strange quark? Like, where is its partner?

And you can associate the down quark and the strange quark that have the same electric charge. Where's the partner of the upcork, right? Where's a version of the upcork that has its electric charge? You mean the Catholics weren't like, three? Sounds good to me. Sounds like a trinity to me. Yeah, there are reasons three seems nice.

But also, if you have corks that pair off, it's weird to have an odd number. And so they predicted this fourth cork. They said, well, we predict there's another cork out there, and they called it Charm. And this cork would be a heavy version of the upcork. So the way the up and the down are a pair, this cork, the charm and the Strange would be a pair. So this pair, the Charm and Strange, are like the heavy version of the up and down. There was a fourth beetle missing. They're like.

Yeah, there was a fourth beetle. And this solved some complicated theoretical problems. Like people were trying to do some calculations and the calculations didn't work unless you had this other quark also in the calculations. It was sort of the first clue that maybe the universe made more sense if you had another one. Yes, map. And so then people went off to look for it.

So then November 10th, 1974, people were like, didn't know what was coming. No, so then people went off to look for it and there was a guy at MIT named Sam Ting. get an idea for how to look for it. It was a very nice experiment, very clean. He was shooting protons at a target, and he was hoping to create essentially this quark and its anti-cork. He was hoping if you smash protons into this target, then occasionally you create a charm cork and an anti-charm cork into this new particle. And then he could see that new particle. And it was a very nice experiment, except it had one weakness, which is that it was sort of slow. Like, he wasn't making a lot of these every day. It was going to take him like,

a year, year and a half to get enough of these things where you could claim discovery. Because in particle physics, you have to do things a lot. And then from the statistics, then you say, hey, look, that bump in the data looks is probably a particle. Exactly. And so he ran his experiment and he was cranking it up and his bump was building up and up and up and up. Now, meanwhile, on the other side of the country at Stanford, there's a guy named Bert Richter. And Bert Richter had access to a much more powerful machine. This is a collider that would smash electrons and positrons against each other.

And this thing was capable of discovering a new particle in like an hour. But the problem was he'd have to tune it to exactly the right energy. Like if you knew exactly the energy you needed to create this new particle and you tuned the beams, boom, you could produce like a hundred of them in an hour and be done. But you had to know how to tune the beams. If you didn't know where to look, you could be, you know, you could be searching for. Like Stanford had a huge microscope, but they just didn't know where to look. Yeah, they had a huge microscope, but they were searching a beach, right?

And they had to like put it here, put it here, put it here. If they knew where to look for this new particle, they could prove it existed right away. Or something maybe had a giant sifter, which was slow, but, you know, would cover a wider range. Exactly. And so they were racing. And Bert Richter and his team did these scans. They started at low energies and they scanned up and they didn't see anything. And then they scanned down and they scanned back up and they didn't see anything.

They didn't see anything. And meanwhile, Sam Ting is accumulating this data. And he knows exactly where Bert Richter needs to look. But he doesn't want to tell him because if Bert Richter finds out this one piece of information, then he can scoop him in just a day. So these two guys across the United States, they knew what each of them were doing and what they could do. They knew what the other one could do. There's a lot of controversy about exactly what they knew about each other's experiments and the connections between them. And there's also lots of crazy stories here

like, I have heard stories that Sam Ting was so desperate to get time to run his experiment that he actually sabotaged other experiments that were using the same because he had to share time with them. And there are stories that the other experiments

kept having these weird electronics problems. And every time they would come in after a night, their electronics were fried. So finally they installed a video camera and they're like, what's going on? And the story goes that Sam Ting would come in every evening and piss on their experiment.

Come on. There's video evidence. You've seen this. This is the story. Their story is there's video evidence. I have never seen this video. This is pre-internet. I do not know if the story is true.

Wouldn't you smell it? Wouldn't they be able to tell that somebody was doing this? It's an interesting story. And it actually reveals something, I think, about the time, because at the time, the field of particle physics was dominated by white American dudes, mostly. And Sam Ting is a Chinese guy. He's at MIT, but he's sort of an outsider.

And so there's, you know, maybe shades of racism in this story. It's not clear whether this story is true, but it's a story that exists and is out there. And it sort of is the flavor of the time because Sam Ting finally accumulated enough data. He's planning to announce his result. He's, you know, calls a press conference for the next day. And this is like November 10th, right? And meanwhile, at Slack on November 10th, they figure out exactly where to look. And they figure it out or they figured out from Sam?

We don't know. Like, there are stories that maybe there was a leak. Sam certainly didn't tell them, but somehow they knew exactly where to look. No. They turned to collider. They turned the collider there. They ran the experiment. They got the plot.

They wrote the paper the same day. What? This is all one day. Next day, they also call a press conference. Really? At the same time. So now, on November 11th, same time. Wow.

So you have two press conferences, two parts of the country, making announcements of the same. discovery at the same moment. But Sam was in Eastern time, so he winks. I don't know. I don't know if it's down to the minute. Sounds a bit suspicious, you know. Like, they've been looking for years, and then suddenly the day before this guy's about to go public,

they find the right parameters. I know. And so they didn't talk to each other, and so they gave the particles different names. Like Sam called it the J particle, and the guys at Slack called it the Psi particle, this Greek letter. And so we had the same particle, discovery announced by two different groups on the same day.

And you told me they called the official name for this particle is the J-Sai particle. Yeah, we never resolved this dispute. Like, people still argue about it. There are people in the J-camp, people in the Sye camp, but the official name is J-slash-Sye, which is like such a cop-out. And to this day, there are people bitter that it's not called the SIE-S-J particle. Probably, and people who think it should just be the J-particle, and people who think it should just be the SIE particle. They should just call it. off and call it something totally different.

But they did give them the Nobel Prize for this, the 1976 Nobel Prize, and they shared it. Oh, all right. So that's a good happy ending for everybody. They were all happy, probably, no. I think there's still a lot of grumpiness in the field over this. But the end of the story is that this is what really

led people to believe that quarks are real, because we predicted a new one and then found it. And that told us that corks are not just like an idea for how to explain all the particles we seen so far, they really are sort of a more basic fundamental building block of the universe. And they saw it on its own or they saw it kind of in the same way of hitting something inside or something else? You can't see the charm cork by itself, but they were able to create a particle which is made of just charm corks. So it's a charm cork and an anti-charm cork put together. That's

the jap side part. Oh, I see. See, this should just end the controversy and not call it a name just called the charm I didn't think charm core a particle somebody else wanted to call it orthocharmonium like a for real?

Yeah seriously that was the sort of technical proposal charmonium forget it forget it let's not leave this up to physicists exactly

exactly that's what happens when you leave it up to the physicist but I guess what you're saying is the point is that corks are real and that's how they were discovered yeah it was a sort of slow accumulation of evidence

people were not convinced for a while, but then seeing them inside the proton, discovering that there was a new one, finding it actually out there in reality, like it's real. That's really what convinced people. And since then, we've thought of quarks is real and we've gone on to find some more. That's right. There are now six quarks. That's right. Just after the charm quark was discovered, just a few years later, they discovered the bottom cork. That was the fifth one. And, you know, we don't like odd numbers of quarks. And so then people thought, well, there must be another one that goes along with the bottom corks. And so they called it the top quark. And there was actually competing names for those two also. There was a whole camp of people who wanted to call them the truth and beauty quarks instead of top and bottom. Wow. Even more confusing.

But the top quark took a long time to discover. We'll do a whole podcast episode about that. There were also dueling press conferences for that discovery. Well, I guess, you know, this all sort of points to how science is made. You know, first it starts off with, just looking at what's out there and then people reading these papers and thinking about what it could be

and then it involves then more people than taking those ideas and proving them right. Yeah, I think that's a wonderful process and I love how you can sort of see that happen many times in science. You go from like all the stuff around us to the periodic table and then from the periodic table

down to proton, neutrons and electrons. And then, you know, you get an idea that there are other particles out there and then you boil that list down to basic quarks and the hope is or the idea is that maybe we can do that again and now we have this new list of particles all these quarks and all these leptons we don't understand what the patterns are there we don't understand you know why we have all of them we're sort of at the the new particle zoo it's like the quark and lepton zoo we don't understand it and we're looking for that new idea the one that will maybe explain how these particles are made

out of even smaller ones. Right. The subsuit. The mini-aices. The end form. Maybe aces will come back, right? I guess, but we should probably come deuses now. Deuses.

They're smaller. I think that has another meaning. Maybe we should avoid. I don't think I want to drop a deuce on particle physics. But you could, Daniel. If you're the discoverer, you get to name it. Tell me about your deepest scientific goals. Well, I want to drop a deuce on the field.

I want to call it the poop particle. Then I could finally align my research with my wife's research. There you go. All right. Family whites and unity. That's what size it's all about. Yeah. But, you know, we're far from that.

We don't have any ideas for what could be underlying the quarks. We don't know your question earlier. Our electrons also have made out of smaller things. We know they're not made out of quarks. We don't know why. We don't know what the connections are. The one thing we do know is that there are not more quarks out there. Really?

I know that there are six and that's it. That's it. That's the end of the story. We don't know why six. You're for sure for real. For sure for real. Because more would violate the loss of physics or what? Because we have ways to tell how many quarks there are.

And that's from how they talk to the Higgs boson. Interesting. Because the Higgs boson talks to all the particles that have mass. So if there were more quarks... And there are no more ways to talk to the Higgs boson? Well, if there were more quirks, we would be making the Higgs boson more often. colliders. So by the rate at which we make Higgs bosons, how often we make one, we can tell how many quarks there are out there. It's a really powerful, subtle argument. Well, you know, I wouldn't

put it past nature to still have an ace off its sleeve. Maybe nature will drop a deuce on the field. I mean, it'll poop all over your theories, as usual. All right. Well, that was a pretty interesting history, and it's sort of exciting to put your head in the minds of these scientists We're at the forefront, staring at the big unknown and trying to make sense of all the weird things that we find in nature. That's right. And what seems obvious to us now was confusing and bewildering at the time. And there were lots of other explanations and competing ideas that we now no longer recall. And so while history seems like a linear story, there are lots of twists and turns and false starts, even in science.

Lots of quarks and quarks. Lots of aces and duses. All right. Well, thank you for joining us. See you next time. Thanks for tuning in. If 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 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 I-Heart-Riddy. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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 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 her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do we really need another podcast with a condescending bro, trying to tell us how to spend our own money. No thank you. Instead, check out Brown Ambition. Each week, I, your host, Mandy Money, gives you real talk, real advice with a heavy dose of I feel uses, like on Fridays when I take your questions for the BAQA. Whether you're

trying to invest for your future, navigate a toxic workplace, I got you. Listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Thank you.