Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Is the W boson too massive?

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

Daniel and Jorge talk about the recent measurement of the W mass that shocked particle physicists. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, Daniel, I was wondering, how heavy are the fundamental particles? Oh, man, it's a really big range, from very light to pretty massive. But, like, how heavy and how massive? Like, how can I get a handle on these numbers? Well, one way to do it is, to think about electrons like cats.

I mean like electric cats? No, no, no. Think about it in relative terms. If an electron was like the mass of a cat instead of its super tiny mass, then how heavy would a muon be? Well, a muon is 200 times heavier, so a muon would be like a walrus. All right, yeah, that's pretty heavy stuff. And your light as quarks, the ones that make up the protons and neutrons inside your body,

the up and down quarks, if the electron has the mass of a cat, then the quarks would be be about as heavy as a typical dog. I see. And does the light quark also chase the electron? They do, actually. But it's a pretty stable circle. They've been running in circles for billions of years. Like a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

But what about the top quark? I hear that one's pretty heavy. Yeah. So if the electron is a cat, then the top quark would be six blue whales. Wow. Yeah, that is bigger than a cat. It's 350,000 cats. Are the whales electric, too?

They're more positive. Hi, I'm Horham, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I weighed the top quark for my PhD thesis. Oh, did you? Really? That was your, like, the title of your thesis? I weigh one of the fundamental particles, and this is what I found.

Click to find out more. Yeah, sort of. We are very curious about exactly how much mass each of these particles has. And back when I was a PhD student, the newly discovered particle was the top quark. And it was crazy heavy. And everybody wanted to know exactly how heavy was it. So my thesis and postdoc work were like fancy statistical techniques to extract as much information as possible to get the mass of the top cork.

Wow. It was a heavy burden. Did your thesis also weigh a lot? Like, was it a thousand pages? It was a pretty massive topic, yeah. Was it printed in the size of a top quark? I thought at some point that I was going to collapse into a black hole during the writing of this thesis.

From all the snacks you were eating while you were writing it? As my thesis got longer and longer, I thought, what is the short style radius of a PhD thesis anyway? But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, explained the universe, a production of IHeartRadio. In which we put the whole universe on a scale to understand exactly what it's made of and how its little bits work. We examine all of the tiny little moving parts to understand how they work,

how much stuff they have, how they interact with each other, and how that all comes together in an incredible chaotic dance to make the world that we know. Yeah, because it is a pretty massively cool universe full of giant, incredible things that defy our brains in terms of their size and scale. And also the tiniest, smallest things that you can even imagine. Some of these things are tinier than tiny.

That's right. And that feeling you get when you look out into the universe that there are these really different scales that like you are so much smaller than the Earth. The Earth is so much smaller than the Sun, which is tiny compared to the galaxy. That same kind of thing happens also for particle physics. There are particles that are a million times heavier than other particles.

And so we have this broad spectrum of masses. One of the great mysteries of particle physics is understanding exactly why that is. Yeah, the smallest of scales in our universe, there's a whole zoo of particles that not only exist, but that can exist and do exist sometimes in the universe, and they all weigh a different amount. And particle physicists really care about exactly how much they weigh,

because sometimes our theories predict how much they should weigh. And so if they don't weigh exactly the amount we expect, then we know something is wrong. Something is new in the universe that we didn't understand. And sometimes that's a clue that reveals, a whole new chain of discoveries. Isn't that a little awkward, though, Daniel? Like, what would you do if there were a whole bunch of physicists

really interested in how much you wait or how massive you are? I would be flattered. I'm like, wow, I'm so important to the universe. There were grants being written about me, particle accelerators being devised just to accelerate Daniel and anti-Daniel together. There'd be a physics paparazzi outside your house all the time, trying to shoot particles at you.

Wouldn't that be kind of annoying at some point? Over here, Daniel, over here. They'd be like, don't have any more chocolate. We just spent $10 billion measuring how heavy you are. You're just going to change the answer. You can't just do that. Oh, man, yeah, don't go on a diet. You would throw out all of that literature.

No, the truth is, I would hate to be the subject. If I'm so much scrutiny, I'm such an introvert. That would be a nightmare. But maybe you're making the point that we don't ask these particles if they want to be studied, right? Nobody got their consent to be part of our experiments. Yeah, what if they want to keep their mass private? Well, the interesting thing about particles is that they don't have mass as an individual property. Like, I weigh a different amount than you do and then every other person out there does.

But particles all basically have the same mass if they're the same type. In fact, it's sort of the way we categorize particles. Like the difference between an electron and a muon is a muon is a heavier version of the electron. But all the muons out there have exactly the same mass because they're all part of the same quantum field. They're all just ripples in the same field. Yeah, well, even taking a step back, it's sort of amazing that you can break down everything in the universe into like a short list of little tiny particles, you know, sort of like the universe is made out of only five or six or nine Lego pieces. And it's interesting that all these Lego pieces are just a little bit different from each other. They not only have different like charges and quantum numbers, but they, they weigh differently.

Yeah, and particle physics is all about finding those patterns saying what do these particles have in common and what's different about? these particles. And the reason we do that is that we're hoping to reveal some deeper layer of reality. We think that probably these five or six or 12 Lego pieces aren't the fundamental nature of reality. They aren't the most basic parts of our existence, that they're more like the atoms we see that are made of smaller pieces. And that by arranging the fundamental particles and studying the patterns, we can get some clues as to what might be going on underneath. Yeah. And as you said, physicists are really interested in knowing what the exact masses of these particles are because I guess you want to get the model right, right? Like if the model is off

by even a little bit, you're wrong about the universe. Yeah, and because the masses tell us a lot about how these particles are connected to each other. Remember that when particles fly through the universe, they're never just a tiny dot flying through empty space. They're flying through lots of quantum fields and interacting with those fields. And how they interact with those fields changes how they move. And that's part of how they get their mass. So by measuring the mass of these particles. We can tell something about how they're touching all these other fields. So it's a very, very sensitive probe of the particles and how they talk to the other particles. Yeah. And so we've known about these particles for a bit of a long time now and we've measured through mass.

I mean, if you did it for your thesis, that must have been, what, like 100 years ago? 200. Don't try to flatter me. Last year, maybe. But they've been measured before, right? Like, that's one of the first things you did when you discovered these particles, when physicists discovered them. It was measure how much they weigh. That's right, but it's a long project. First, you discover the particle and you just know that it exists. Then you start to study its properties. One of the first things you do, as you said, is to measure its mass. The first measurements are usually very imprecise because you only have a handful of examples. You just discover this thing of barely enough data to show that it exists. But as you accumulate more data and your techniques

get fancy and fancier, then your measurements get more and more precise. And then you can start asking really interesting questions about, like, is the mass what we expected it to be? Does it make sense to us? Yeah. Does it make sense in terms of the theory that you have from the math, right? And does it all hang together? Like, there needs to be some self-consistency. Right, right. And it seems like every time you do an experiment, you're refining that measurement. Like, you're adding more numbers down the decimal places of how much, how well you know this, the mass of them. Yeah. And there's really two different ways that you can do that. One is just do more experiments. You get more data. And that can reduce what we call the statistical uncertainty, like the chance that you

accidentally measure the wrong number due to a quantum fluctuation. But then later, once you have enough data, the real work is in understanding the data that you have to remove sources of bias because that becomes the dominant source of the uncertainty. So it can take years or even decades before the final answers come out about these measurements. The most precise results are sometimes arrived at 10 years after the last bit of data was taken. Well, we've been doing this for a while weighing the particles. And I think in general, we sort of feel that we, or we felt that we had a pretty good handle on what these particles weighed. But recently, there's been some big news about or maybe big error about them.

That's right. Last week, we released a paper to the world about a new measurement of the mass of one of the heaviest particles, a W boson. This is the particle that communicates the weak force. And the CDF collaboration, a group working at Fermilab where actually I was a postdoc, so I did my research on that experiment, released a paper measuring the mass of this thing with unprecedented precision. Like the uncertainty they claim on their measurement is much smaller than anybody has ever achieved. So it should be a very, very precise measurement of the mass.

But the answer they got, the measurement they made of the mass, the number was a big surprise to everybody. And it made big news. You were telling me that it was all over the science pages of all the major newspapers. That's right. It actually was the cover of science, which is basically the biggest journal. And it was all over the news. And a bunch of listeners wrote in and said, hey, what's going on with this measurement? And also, hey, Daniel, I saw your name on this paper.

What's up? What? What's up indeed? So you're one of the authors of this paper? I am, in fact, one of the authors of this paper. Out of how many? 389 authors. What was your position in there? Were you near the top or the bottom, or is it alphabetical?

It's alphabetical, so I'm always near the end of the list. Who goes after you, Mr. Xylophone? We have collaborators from all over the world, so we have every letter from the Hungarians whose names start with two A's to Chinese collaborators whose name starts with ZH. So I'm not close to the end of the list. Well, in my field, at least when I was working on research, being near the end means you were more.

senior. So that's a good thing, right? It can be a good thing. In our field, though, we have this sort of ridiculous policy or anybody who has contributed in any way to building the detector or running the experiment is an author on every paper that uses that data, even if it comes out years later. I've worked on this experiment in almost 10 years, but they still put my name on every paper, which is kind of ridiculous. Wow. So did you get to like type one word out of the whole paper or something? It's kind of embarrassing, but I didn't know about this paper until just a few days before the news broke. Oh, really?

Say, hey, we're including you in this paper. You might win a Nobel Prize. Good luck. FYI. It's sort of silly and it just speaks to how like modern science is done in these really big collaborations and the publishing system hasn't really caught up to that. You know, 389 authors sounds like a lot. But in my current collaboration on Atlas at the Large Hadron Collider, we have 5,000 authors on

every paper and we publish more than 120 papers every year. That means twice a week. There's a paper going out with my name on it. I don't even know the titles of most of the papers that my name is on. And some of them I couldn't even explain the title to you. So being an author on these papers doesn't really mean that much. Then how do you know it's good signs? Like what if they discovered one of them was not correct? Wouldn't that look bad on you? I think that's an excellent question. And I think in a perfect world, everybody who's an author in every paper should be responsible for the scientific content of that paper. I think that we know that that's not how things are working right now. And we need to revise somehow the way these authorship policies work. And I've actually

proposed inside my collaboration that we do change that, that we don't have everybody being author on every paper. But there was a lot of resistance to that proposal. I guess there's some politics. But on the plus side, you probably get residuals and royalties, right, from these papers? You know that in science, you pay to publish, right? You don't get paid to publish. I see. Speaking of negative royalties. Exactly.

No, but if you go Google my name, I have something like more than a thousand papers with my name on it. Only a hundred of those are like my actual scientific output. Most of them are work done by my colleagues. And I'm sure it's all excellent. Wow. Yeah, that's pretty cool. And so this paper that your name is on was big news. And in fact, it was massive news.

And so today on the podcast. podcast, we'll be asking the question, is the W. Boson too massive? It's like a very judgmental title here, Daniel. Like, how can something be too massive? Well, it has a higher mass than is predicted by the theory and higher mass than other measurements. So their new result that came out is bigger than the previous measurement. So it means if they're right, the W boson is, in fact,

more massive than we thought it was, and more massive than our current theory can explain. Well, I'm curious to see what happened. Did the W boson gain weight or was somebody leaning on the scale or something? But it's a very small difference, kind of, right? Like, what was the old measurement and what's the new measurement? So the old measurement is quoted in weird units, which is why in the intro we talked about cats. But the units are mega electron volts. So that's millions of electron volts.

And for calibration, about a thousand of these MEVs are about what a proton weighs. So the previous measurement of a W boson was about 80,370 MEVs. So like 80.4 almost protons. And now what did they measure it to be? The new one they measured to be 80,434. So it's an increase of about 64 of these MEVs. I didn't quite spot the difference between the two numbers. But I'm sure to a physics, it's a huge difference.

It's a very small difference. You're right. You know, it's a difference of 64 MEV out of 80,000. So it's very, very precise. Issue is that the theory predicts it to be 80,357, with a very small uncertainty of about six. So the old measurement was 80,370, and the new measurement is 80,434.

Again, I'm not catching the difference. I feel like it's maybe like maybe we can put it in terms of percentage. It's like 0.1% different, maybe less. Yeah, so the difference between the old measurement and the new measurement is less than 0.1% relative to the W's mass. And I guess that sounds like a little, but to a physicist, that's massive, shall we say. It's huge, right? Because if it doesn't match the theory, then there's either something wrong with the experiment or something wrong with the theory. Yeah, the key thing is not how big is this difference of 64 MEVs,

relative to the W's mass. That's tiny. The key is to compare the difference to how well we know these numbers. The difference is 64 M.EVs in the measurement. The uncertainty is 10 MEPs. So like they are very certain in this new measurement relative to the other measurement.

So like the uncertainty is one sixth of this difference. All right. Well, it's a big result and made all the news. And a lot of people ask you to come on the podcast and explain it, right? That's right. Folks were wondering what this meant for physics. did it really break science, like all those SICOM journalism headlines said,

and so they wanted us to talk about it. Oh, man, I hope it didn't break science, because then we have to return it. Is science have a warranty on it? Oh, wait, we can return it. Well, as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had heard of this headline and knew what it meant, what the difference between the W. Bosons mass could mean. And so, since this was a late-breaking news event, And instead of asking our cadre of internet volunteers, I just walked around campus here at UC Irvine to see, had earned a grads heard the big news about the W.

Boson. Yeah. And so you went out there into the campus and you asked people if they had heard of this interesting measurement and does it worry them? Here's what people had to say. Have you heard of the W boson? Oh, only heard boson, but not W. Okay. Yeah.

What do you think it means if scientists discover that the W. Bozon is a little heavier than it's supposed to be? I don't care. Have you heard of the W. boson? No, I haven't. What do you think it might be? Probably a policy in place for like environmental aspects.

Okay. And what do you think it would mean if scientists discover that some particle is heavier than it's supposed to be? Ooh, not so good. That's not so good, to be honest. And I've heard of the boson, not a W boson. What do you think it means if scientists discover that the W boson is a little heavier than it's supposed to be? I'm not sure. Does it make you worried?

Yes. Have you heard of the W boson? No. What do you think it is? Boson shaped like a W. And what do you think it means if scientists discover that it's heavier than it's supposed to be? That it's fat. Have you heard of the W. boson?

No. Do you have any guess what it might be? No, my first year. No. What do you think it means if scientists discover that some particle is heavier than it's supposed to be? It's more like charged? I don't know. All right, great. Do you know what the W boson is? Have you heard of it?

No. What do you think it might mean if scientists discover that it's a little bit heavier than it's supposed to be? Maybe it might be a bad thing. Does it make you worried? Kind of, but not really, since I don't really know what it is. Okay, thank you. What do you think it means if the W. boson is a little heavier than it's supposed to be? It means the interaction length is a little shorter.

Does it make you worried? No. excited. New physics. All right, the question is, do you know what the W boson is? No, I do not. If you have to guess, what do you think it might be? Maybe a science law? I don't know. And what do you think it means if scientists discover that a particle is heavier than it's

supposed to be? It just didn't find it correctly last time. No, I don't. Have you had to guess, what do you think it might be? Something with either physics or chemistry. Okay. And if scientists measure a particle and discover that it's more massive than it's supposed to, to be, what do you think that means?

Maybe there's something else smaller than that particle. That's possible if it's bigger than we think it is. Okay, cool. Thank you. The W boson. I'm not familiar. You have a guess. A particle? A particle, cool. And if scientists measure a particle

and discover that it's heavier than it's supposed to be, what do you think that might mean? It's something unstable or that it's not functional in a normal manner. All right. Not a lot of people had maybe heard of this.

Nobody had any idea what I was talking about. Some people thought it was some sort of policy or some particle shaped like a W. I was kind of surprised I thought the W boson

was a little better known than that. Mate's only famous in certain circles, certain scales. Like if you're really small, then the W boson is big. Yeah, well, I thought the W boson

was going to get a W, but it looks like it got an L instead. Well, it's interesting because this time you went out into the campus, which is more of a maybe general audience than the one that you find online. Because online, you sort of get a lot of listeners of this podcast. Yeah, and I think that listeners of the podcast probably have an idea of what the W boson is, but maybe don't necessarily understand why it's important to measure its mass and what this new measurement means and if we can believe it. Well, I guess to start with, for those of us who don't know what a W boson is, Daniel, can you explain it to us? Yeah, as you described earlier, we know that the world around us is made of tiny little particles. The stuff that makes up you and me in the table in front of us is not smooth and continuous like it seems.

It's more like a mesh with these little points of matter connected by forces. And we've discovered that the little points of matter are made out of tiny little bits of stuff. And we call those matter particles, fermions like quarks and electrons. But there are also the forces that tie those things together. And those forces you can think about as communicated via a field, like an electric field from an electron. You can also think about them as communicated via particles. So we call these force particles, like ripples in those fields. And so, for example, when an electron pushes against another electron, you can think about that as like ripples in their electromagnetic fields or exchanging virtual particles.

In this case, it would be a photon. So every force that you know about has a particle associated with it. electromagnetic field has the photon, the strong force has the gluon, the weak nuclear force, the weakest of all the forces we know, actually has three of these particles, the W plus, the W minus, and the Z. So there's sort of like heavier versions of the photon for the electro-weak force. Right, and I think this is something that maybe confuses a lot of people, or at least it confuses me, you know, this idea that, you know,

when you take high school physics or, you know, even college physics, you sort of think of forces as just these invisible things. Like, you know, the Earth is pushing me down through some invisible force or, you know, a magnet repels another magnet through some invisible force. But you're saying that actually what's going on, it's like they're exchanging sort of invisible particles when something is pushing against something else. It's a bit of a subtle question. We did a podcast recently about what is a particle. And one way to think about how particles push against each other is that each particle creates a field. And that field pushes on other particles.

So when two electrons come near each other, each one has an electric field that pushes on the other particle. A totally equivalent mathematically and philosophically acceptable way to think about it is instead of fields to think about particles being exchanged. So an electron comes by another one and it shoots a photon at the other electron. You might think like photons, I mean, I don't see light. I don't see like bright flashes of light between electrons. Well, these aren't things that you see, right? You can't see a photon unless it hits your eye. These are photons that are shot back and forth between the electrons.

And sometimes there are a special category of particles we call virtual particles that don't follow all the same rules that normal real particles that you observe do. If you're interested in the subtleties there, we have a whole podcast episode about what are virtual particles. Right. It's interesting that like, you know, the force that one magnet pushes on another magnet is basically the same thing as the light that hits your eyeball from the sun, right? It's sort of hard to square the two, but they're the same thing. Because one feels tactile and the other one feels visual, but they're the same thing.

They are the same thing, depending on your definition of same thing. They're all part of a larger phenomenon, which is electromagnetism. They can be different aspects of it. It's like saying, are electric fields the same as magnetic fields? Well, not exactly, but they are two sides of the same coin. And so in that sense, they are the same. Every force that's applied via electromagnetism is communicated via electromagnetic fields. and all information that moves through electromagnetic fields

you can think of as photons. Like every ripple in those fields, every piece of information where the field was one way and now it's another way that you can think of as a photon. And so the photon is basically the thing that carries force or the electromagnetic force. And so the W boson is one of the things that carries the force for the weak force,

which is one of the fundamental forces. Exactly. The weak force is one of the fundamental forces. and it actually has three of these particles that carry its forces, which seems weird. Like, why does it need three? It's busier, you know, it needs more staff. It needs three sort of because we've already done some unification. Like we found the W plus, we found the W minus, we found the Z and we realized, oh, these are

actually all part of the same thing. Originally people found the Z and the W separately, and they're like, oh, these are different phenomena until scientists put them together into one idea called the weak force. And so those sort of fit together very nice as part of the same force. So we have those three particles, the W plus, the W minus, and the Z that we now call carriers of the weak force. The force particles or the weak force. Okay. So this one is a force particle.

Does that mean that we're not actually made out of W bosons? Or is it somehow sort of these things trapped inside of me? It's another great philosophical question, right? There are W bosons inside you right now because there are particles that are feeling the weak force, Some particle of potassium, for example, is decaying radioactively right now from the banana that you just ate. And that's happening via the weak force. So there's a W inside you right now. Are you made up of W's?

It's a little bit harder to say. Like you're made up of the matter that's inside you. But a lot of your mass actually comes from the energy and the bonds inside that matter. Like your matter comes from your protons, but the mass of the protons mostly comes from gluons inside you. So I would say that you are made up of those matter particles and all. also the force particles. Definitely need them to make up Jorge. Yes, and that's important for sure, especially bananas.

So then is the W boson helping keep me together? Is this something that sort of helps things, you know, stay as one piece? Or does it only happen when things decay or things break down? The W boson is part of the weak force. And it's really, really weak. And so it doesn't play a role in holding together quarks into protons and neutrons. And it doesn't play a role in terms of holding the atom together. like electrons surrounding the nucleus.

And so it doesn't really play a role in holding things together. It mostly plays a role when things break down. When a neutron decays into a proton, for example, that happens via the weak force. I see. All right. Well, but it's still important because, you know, it tells us a lot about how things break down, which is kind of an important process in the way the universe works. And it's also important because it's a cousin of the photon. The Ws and the Z are actually very closely related to the photon.

the photon. They're just sort of like heavy versions of the photon. And the way that we group those three particles together, the W plus, W minus, and the Z into the weak force, we can actually include the photon into that, making a quartet of force particles that all fit together really beautifully. And we call that unified force, the electro-week force, where we combine electromagnetism and the weak force into one idea. I see. So it's only famous because of its cousin. That feels a little nepotistic there. It's part of the entourage of famousness. Yeah, it's the guy who gets the water whenever the photon is thirsty. The photon doesn't roll without the W goes on.

All right, well, it's one of the fundamental particles, and it's important because it's in particle interactions, and it helps define our theory of the universe. And so recently, scientists measured it to be different than we thought it was. And so let's get into that measurement and what it could mean. 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.

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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 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 boy. boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age.

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I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, and in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Afea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right, in terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together,

and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. I would love for you to share your breakdown on pivoting. We feel sometimes like we're leaving a part of us behind when we enter a new space, but we're just building. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us, I was joined by Volusia Butterfield, media founder, political strategist, and tech powerhouse for a powerful conversation on storytelling, impact, and the intersections of culture and leadership. I am a free black woman who worked really hard to be able to say that. I'd love for you to break down. Why was so important for you to do see. You can't win

as something you didn't create. From the Obama White House to Google to the Grammys, Belisha's journey is a masterclass in shifting culture and using your voice to spark change. A very fake, capital-driven environment and society will have a lot of people tell half-truths. I'm telling you, I'm on

the energy committee. Like, if the energy is not right, we're not doing it, whatever that it is. Listen to Culture raises us on the I-Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking indiscreetly about the W boson's mask, Daniel. I guess there's a lot of interest in knowing how much this thing weighs.

You think the Ws out there are blushing? Do they have color? Do they have color charge for them to turn red? No, you're right. They are colorless. They are colorless. They are colorless. Maybe they don't care.

All right. So there was a big headline recently that the mass of the Dewey Bulls, boson is heavier, is more than what we thought or what the theory predicts. And so, Daniel, I guess maybe a more basic question is, why does a force particle need mass for? Isn't it just transmitting forces? It doesn't need mass. And a lot of the force particles don't have mass, right? The photon doesn't.

The eight gluons and none of them have mass. But this particle has mass. It doesn't need mass. And we think back in the very early universe, it didn't have mass. But then it got massive because of the Higgs boson. Interesting. So it doesn't need mass, but it somehow has mass, and it's all because of the Higgs boson. It's all because of the Higgs boson, exactly. Remember how the photon and these particles fit together beautifully into this nice quartet.

And there'd be this very nice symmetry. For those of you interested in the mathematical details, it's a gauge symmetry where you can like rotate these particles into each other, and it preserves all sorts of interesting properties. That only works if these particles are all massless. None of them have any mass. And we think in the very early universe, that was true. and the W and the Z had no mass and they flew around the universe just the way the photon does. And in fact, we think the weak force was much stronger because its particles weren't so massive

so they could fly further and interact more. But then the Higgs boson came along and it broke that symmetry. You may have heard the phrase electroweak symmetry breaking. That's what this refers to. It made the Ws and the Zs very heavy and it left the photon massless. Yeah, I guess it's kind of weird to think of a force particle as having mass because, first of all, that means it's slower right like it can't go at the speed of light and two does that mean that it like costs you to exert a force you know if you have to use mass

or where does that mass come from if you are pushing one thing from another with the weak force it definitely costs you to create w's and z is harder than it is to create photons that's why it took us longer to discover them at colliders the w's and the zs were only discovered in the 80s at cern we had enough energy in colliders to make them and then if you don't have enough energy to make them. You can make them as virtual versions where you like borrow the energy temporarily from the universe to make this heavy particle. But the heavier the particle is the less likely you are to be able to borrow that energy. So to like borrow enough energy to quantum fluctuate a W out of the vacuum is much less likely than it is for lower mass particles.

Is that where the name weak force comes from? Because it sort of like it's really hard to do so nobody ever uses it kind of. That is why the weak force is weak because its particles are massive, exactly. And it also means that it doesn't have a lot of range, right? Like if something has mass, it eventually decays. And so, like, you can't shoot a W boson from here to Mars because it's not going to get there. Yeah, the universe likes to spread out its energy. It doesn't like to have a lot of energy density in one particle.

And so if a particle can decay to less mass particles, it will. So the reason your electrons are stable is because there's nothing lighter than an electron that it can decay into, but a W can decay into things, and so it will very quickly. Like a W naturally lives for 10 to the minus 25 seconds. What? So you have 10 to the minus 25 seconds to measure its weight? We'll get into the details, but you can't actually weigh Ws directly and you can't see them directly.

Well, all right. Well, that sounds like a perfect transition here to talk about how you do measure the mass of a force particle if it's so hard. Well, the first thing to understand is that you don't measure its weight, right? measure its mass. The difference there is that weight is the force of gravity on an object or mass we think of as an inherent quantity, although you can get into whole philosophical questions about what is mass and where does it come from. But mass is something that you have even if you're not in a gravitational field, right? So you would weigh different on Saturn than you do on Jupiter

than you do on Earth, but your mass is the same. So that's the quantity we're interested in. You're trying to measure not how much it weighs on Earth, but like how hard it is to get it accelerated or how much energy it cost to make this mass, right? Yeah, how much inertia it has, how much it bends space. The other problem is that you can't really use gravity to measure these things. Like, if I asked you, how massive is that bag of onions, you would put it on a scale. You would use gravity. You would say, I know how much gravitational force there is on it so I can deduce what it's

massive. No, I would just mash it against another bag of onions. Isn't that what physicists do? You're a natural physicist now, exactly. Make some fricacy or something. Exactly. And so the reason we can't do that with particles is that they don't weigh very much. You know, these amounts we talked about earlier are tiny.

And so the gravitational force on a W boson, it exists, but it's basically impossible to measure, even though the W is one of the most massive particles. And so instead, we don't measure its weight. We measure its mass. All right. Well, then how do you measure its mass? Well, we would love to measure its mass by seeing, like, how it moves, so we can measure its inertia. Right.

But we can't do that either because, as we say, said before, the W doesn't last for very long. When we make it in our colliders, it lasts for 10 to the minus 25 seconds before it decays into other stuff. And so because we can't ever see the W directly, all we can do is look at that other stuff the W turned into and try to reconstruct what its mass was. Right, because I think other particles that do fly for a while, you can see like how much they bend in a magnetic field and things like that.

And that kind of tells you its momentum, which tells you its mass, right? Exactly. So you use E equals MC squared. And you say, well, the mass of the W boson is getting converted into the energy of these other particles it turns into. If you have some particle that's really heavy, but you can't see it directly because it doesn't last for very long, it turns into other particles that you can see, then you can measure the energy or the momentum of those particles. And from that energy, you can reconstruct how much mass the original heavy particle had because its mass is getting turned into the energy of those particles. Be like trying to see how much Daniel Whiteson weighs by weighing your kids. Sort of.

It's more like measuring the brightness of a nuclear bomb and using that to figure out how much fuel there was. Like what was there before things broke apart? Exactly. If I took all this energy that was released and asked how much mass is that equivalent to, then you're weighing the mass that was converted into energy. So that's what we're doing with the W. We're seeing the parts that fly out, the decay products of the W were measuring their energy or their momentum, depending on the particle. And we're using that to figure out how mass of the W must have been. Well, that sounds straightforward, but there are difficulties, right? It's tricky.

It is tricky. And one reason is that the W doesn't always decay to visible particles. Like the way that they measure its mass is when the W decays to a muon and a neutrino. And the muon, you can see. It flies through a detector. It bends in a magnetic field. You can measure that bending so you can deduce the momentum of the muon. The neutrino, however, flies right through your detector and you can't see it. It's invisible. So that makes the problem a little harder. Yeah, I guess you need all the pieces to get a good accurate measurement of what the thing looked like when was put together, right?

If you're missing a piece, then you're not going to be able to tell how much the thing weighed originally. It makes it harder. You can do a better measurement if you have all the pieces. But even if you have half the pieces, you can still make a measurement. Like, imagine you could only see half of a nuclear bomb's explosion. The fact that you know you're seeing half of it means you can extrapolate to the other half. As long as you know what you're missing, you can guess what might have been there. So they measure the mass of the W just by seeing one of these particles that flies out.

But then you sort of need to know what the missing particles parts are, right? And that's where your models come in. That's where a lot of our models come in. And that's where a lot of the really careful experimental work comes in to figuring out how to do this very, very precisely. Yeah, because there's a lot of uncertainty, right? And so you need a lot of data to make sure that what you're measuring is correct, right? Yeah, you want to see a lot of examples to make sure you're not seeing anything.

weird, any random fluctuations. And in the latest measurement, they had four million examples of W bosons decaying either to an electron or into a muon. But that's not really the problem. The challenge these days is not getting enough examples of Ws. They think they have enough. The challenge is making sure there aren't biases. Like when your muon flies through its magnetic field and you're using its curvature in that field to measure its momentum, are you sure you know exactly how strong your magnetic field is. Has one of your magnets that makes that magnetic field slipped by one millimeter in the 30 years since some grad student installed it? How would you know? And so it's that level of scrutiny, that level of detailed understanding required to make a precise measurement of the mass

of the W. Right? Because I guess if your instrument is off, all of your results are going to be off, right? Like if there's a blur in your microscope, you're going to think that what you're measuring has a blur on it. Exactly. And that's why this measurement has taken. so long. You know, they stopped collecting data in 2012, and this measurement came out now. It took them 10 years to understanding gory detail exactly what does that magnetic field look like. How does the detector respond? They did things like looking at cosmic rays, muons from space to see how they fly through the detector to understand exactly where every piece of it is down to the micron. Wow, that would sort of drive me crazy, right? If you have to worry about, you know, your experiment,

which is huge, but you have to worry about it down to like the particle level. Are all the particles in my instrument, okay? Or are they somehow being, you know, shaped or moved by some cosmic force? Yeah, and it reveals something cool about these experiments, which is that there are very different kinds of physics you can do. There's the folks who are like, let's look for an exciting signature of something new, that if we see it, we know it's there, and it's like a big press release. And there are other folks who are like,

I want to very carefully understand this one particle to gory detail, even if requires 10 years of super fine understanding of how the detector work. It's just sort of like a different way to do science. And so I imagine that people have been working on this for, you know, decades, and they've been refining this measurement of this one particle, and they've got some new results out a few days ago. That's right. They did, and their answer shocked the world. All right. Well, let's get into this massive shock, this massive discovery about the W boson

and what it could mean. 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. is 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.

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. According to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And 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'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, and in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down. with Dr. Afea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right?

That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a real. It's how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss Session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety.

Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I don't write songs. God write songs. I take dictation. I didn't even know you've been a pastor for over 10 years. I think culture is any space that you live in that develops you. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive

to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. This is like watching Michael Jackson talk about Thurley before it happened. Was there a particular moment where you realized just how instrumental music culture was to shaping all of our global ecosystem. I was eight years old, and the Motown 25 special came on. And all the great Motown artists, Marvin, Stevie Wonder, Temptations, Diana Raw. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into the soul of the music and the purpose that drives it. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, Daniel, so who got to tell the W boson that it weighs more than it should? Well, maybe the W boson is like you. It doesn't read science journals, so it doesn't even know. I thought you were going to say, it's like me who doesn't care how much our way. I hope we could all be so lucky. Maybe the W is listening to this podcast, and this is how it's finding out. Oh, no, that would be awkward. Sorry, you look great, though you boson.

So they did a big measurement. It's sort of, it's a new measurement, right? Or it's something they've been measuring for a long time, and only just now they publish. the results. Yeah, and you might be surprised to hear that this is not a measurement that's coming from CERN. It's not from our new fancy collider, the large Hedron Collider that discovered the Higgs boson. This is from the previous generation, the last champion, the Tevatron, just outside Chicago, which has the energy of about one-seventh, the large Hedron Collider, and turned off in 2012, but they've been biding their time and working carefully on this measurement for 10 years,

having just released it. Wait, what? They did the measurement back in 2012 and they've been just processing the data for 10 years? The last collisions were in 2012. And yes, they've been processing the data and analyzing it and thinking about how to bring down these uncertainties

and measuring the location to the detector and calibrating it and double checking it and double checking those double checkings and then hiring somebody else to independently cross-calibrate those double checkings. Oh, I see. Like if you find that there's a bias in your instrument, You don't fix the instrument.

You just fix the data to account for it. Well, they spent the last 10 years developing these tools to measure the W boson and to get the answer. They didn't know what the answer was until very recently. We do this thing in particle physics where we blind ourselves from the answer to avoid biasing ourselves. We don't want to change the way we're analyzing the data to get the answer that we want or the answer we expect. So they actually added a random number to all of their data so that nobody who was working on the analysis would know what answer to expect. And they only unblinded it. They only removed that random number in 2020,

just about a year and a half ago. Wow, that's wild. So they, like, corrupt the data, so a little bit, right? So that you don't, like, look for the, like, you don't manipulate your analysis to get the answer. You're, like, you're supposed to work in your analysis independent of what the data says. And we're not worried about, like, explicit manipulation

where people are, like, fudging the results. We're worried about, like, subtle biases. For example, if you get the answer you expect, you stop looking for mistakes. Whereas if you get the answer you don't expect, you keep looking for bugs. And so what happens is people just leave bugs in if they cancel each other out. Or they leave bugs in if they give them the answer they expect, which might not be the right answer. With this history and particle physics of experiments confirming previous experiments,

and then we discover later, oh, all of those experiments were actually off by a big factor. And then the result jumps. So we have to be very careful because we only have one shot at this, right? You can't run the collider for 10 years again. We have one data set. You have to do it right in an unbiased way. So we hide the answer from ourselves to avoid being biased by what we expect to see. That's wild.

It's wild that you would do the experiment and then just kind of sit on the data or work on it for 10 years. You know, I think as part of the public, you're sort of used to this idea of like, scientists in a lab and she's measuring something. And she goes, Eureka, the results are there. But here it's like they do the measurement. And then 10 years later, it's like, oh, hey, we found something. Yeah, well, most of the people left this experiment. This experiment used to have like 500 scientists on it in its heyday.

And then the Large Hadron Collider turned on and almost everybody moved over to the LHC to work at CERN. But a few folks stayed behind because this measurement would take a long time and a lot of really careful work and they thought it was worth it. So there's just like a few folks left and most of the lights are off and they're like wrapping up the last little bits of science you can do with this data. Right, right. And I guess it's tough because it's not like you can ask them to do it again, right? I'm like, oh, do you find this? That's interesting. it for me again and see if we find it again? You can't because the thing is like 10 years old.

It's been decommissioned for 10 years. It's in pieces literally. Like it doesn't exist anymore. They've like built a museum where it used to be. Wow. All right. Well, what did they find? What was this experiment that they did? So the experiment is the collision of protons and antiprotons. So the experiment uses the Tevotron Collider, which smashes protons and antiprotons together at two trillion electron volts and that's one seventh of the energy of the Large Hadron Collider and it's different from the LHC in that it's protons and antiprotons instead of protons and protons which is what the LHC collides. What? Really? You can make antiprotons? Yeah and it's hard which is why they didn't do it for the LHC but at the Tevatron we fabricated antiprotons by smashing particles and basically a big blob of

rock and filtering out the antiprotons that come out the other side. Not very easy to make them or to store them or to insert them and accelerate them, it was a huge piece of work. And kudos to the accelerator engineers at Fermilab who made that work. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I guess they're very ornery, right? Because they're very anti-everything. They're not protons.

Exactly. They're intons. And tons. Well, I guess what I mean is, is this experiment similar to the Large Hadron Collider? Like, is it about, you know, spinning protons around in a ring? And then you spin anti-protons, I guess, the other way in the same ring?

And then you bring them together. It's similar in idea to the LHC. You have a ring, you're accelerating particles around it, a few points around the ring. You smash those particles together to create collisions. So here you have protons going one way and antiprotons going the other way. And so you need two different rings because you don't want the protons and antiprotons just smash together except at the heart of your detector. But you can't actually use the same magnets because protons going one way get bent the same

as antiprotons going the other way. So that was a clever trick. And so you smash a bunch of these a lot. and then you look at kind of what comes out of it, right? And mostly what happens when you smash protons and antiprotons is a big flash and a lot of quarks flying out because quarks are created by the strong force, which is the most powerful force and so it's the most likely thing to happen. The weak force is very weak, and so its interactions are much rarer.

But sometimes what happens is you get a down quark from one particle and an anti-up quark from the other and they come together to make a w-minus. Or you might get an upcork from one side and an anti-down quark from one particle from one particle from the other, come together to make a W plus. That happens very rarely in billions of collisions, and you filter those out, and you get a few million examples after running from like 10 years. Wow. And so how long did they run this experiment?

This data set is about 10 years of running that ended in 2012. Wow. Wait, they ran it for 10 years, and then I guess that makes sense now. It took them 10 years just to go through all that data. Well, it takes 10 years just to get the data, just like do the collisions and find those Ws, And then another 10 years to analyze it, to go through it and to get the answer. So from start to finish, it's 20 years. It's 10 years of data taking and 10 years of data analysis.

And how long to build the thing? That must have been also like 10 years, right? Oh, yeah, that was 10 or 15 years. They started that even earlier. That's back when I was a baby. So this whole project is like as long as my lifetime. That's wild. Okay, so then you look at the debris from these collisions,

and somehow you piece together the measurement of the W boson mass. And I guess what did they find? So what they found was not what they expected. All the other experiments in the world have measured this. The LHC has measured it. Other experiments at Tevotron have measured it. Experiments from other colliders have measured it. And they all came up with an answer of 80,370.

That was the previous best measurement of the W boson mass. Okay. 8370. And people were pretty happy with that number because it agreed with what the theorists predicted. So theorists go into their offices and sit down with calculations and they say, The W boson sometimes interacts with the Higgs and with the top, and we know the mass of those particles. How heavy should the W be? And they do all their calculations and they come up with a number.

And their number was 8357. So the old measurement was 8370 and the expectation from the theorist was 80357. Those are pretty close. People were pretty happy. Yeah. And like you said, it came that 370 came from multiple colliders, right? Like, you know, they measured it in Geneva. They measured it in Japan.

370. And now this new measurement was 80434 with an uncertainty of just 10. So not only is it like 60 MEB above the theory, it's like above the other measurements with an uncertainty of just 10. So the result is shocking not just because it's so much heavier than the previous measurements, but because it seems so confident. They're like, oh yeah, it's heavier and we're very sure it's heavier. Well, as we've learned from U.S. politics, being confident doesn't mean that you're right. Though, doesn't it? Yeah, well, there's a difference between physics and politics, and this is one of them.

It's kind of an interesting scenario. So you're saying that the theory predicts 357. Most of the people who have measured this, measured this to be 370. And they were all independent, right, with different colliders. But now this new measurement is way higher. Wouldn't you just say like, hmm, there's something wrong here? You would, but this measurement is also the most precise. Of all the measurements we've made, this one claims to have.

have the best handle on all of these details that affect the mass of the W. So on one side of the room, you have a bunch of imprecise measurements saying one value. On the other side of the room, you have one very precise measurement claiming something else. And so it's a puzzle. Yeah, I mean, someone must be wrong, kind of, right? And it feels like this one's out there in the corner of the room by itself, whereas everybody else is on the other side. Somebody could be wrong or it could be random chance.

And you can ask the question like, well, what's the odds of a random fluctuation? You know, these are quantum particles we're talking about. Sometimes as muons end up a little faster and the W looks a little heavier, that can't happen. There's always statistic. But they calculated, what are the odds of the W boson having the mass the theory expects and then CDF measuring this? And those odds are one in 10 to the 12. So it's very unlikely to be like a random fluctuation.

Right. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that's what they got. But I guess as a skeptical, you know, engineer, you could, you know, if you're out there in the middle in the corner of the room by yourself, maybe like, surveillance. or something wrong with the equipment or something? What's the certainty that they didn't make a mistake? It's a bit hard to pull apart.

Like on one hand, I know these folks. They're the most careful scientist I've ever met. They're the kind of people where if you show them a result and there's one tiny little part of it that doesn't make perfect sense. Like, what's this wiggle over here? They will not let it go. And they will go down a rabbit hole for months to understand it. It can be very frustrating to work with these people

because they are so detail-oriented. And that's why it took them 10 years because they did so many insane cross-check just to make sure they didn't mess it all up. So they have a lot of credibility. On the other hand, their result disagrees with everybody else. And so you've got to wonder if there's something that they haven't understood. And one area to look at is like this claim of their precision. They're claiming this measurement of 434 with an uncertainty of about 10.

Some people have wondered whether that estimate is accurate, if in fact they really understand those uncertainties as well as they think they do. And it's not about them making a mistake in any one cross-check. It's about how to arrive at this small. uncertainty and then what that means. For example, they had many sources of uncertainty. How do they combine all of those two? I mean, if you have two uncertainties of five MEV, what's the chances of getting a 10 MEV fluctuation? The answer depends a lot on whether those two sources tend to fluctuate together

or tend to cancel each other out. Now we're talking about understanding how likely a 60 MEV fluctuation is with lots of sources of uncertainty that are all around 5MEV. To say that you know how likely that is means you think you understand the rare events really well and whether they fluctuate together or cancel out. So I think the result is probably right but the uncertainty might be underestimated or the calculation of how unlikely we are to get this big a deviation might be a bit overstated. So in that case the result might not really be in that much tension with the other results or with the theory results.

Right. Well, I mean, I'm not trying to, you know, throw it down on their work. I'm sure they're top-notch and they're amazing scientists. I guess maybe the, maybe the question that is on my mind is like, well, what could have been wrong with the other measurements that would have, you know, what could be the reason this one is so different? What could have been wrong with the other measurements? You want to cast doubt on their qualities as a scientist instead?

Well, I'm saying, I'm saying, I'm saying this new measurement is doing that. And what are they saying could be have been wrong with the other ones? Well, so they're not analyzing the other ones and criticizing them. They're just coming up with their measurement saying, here's what we got. And they did a lot of really important and impressive crosschecks like they used the same method to measure the mass of the Z boson. Those Z weighs about 91,000 of these MEVs. And just as a cross check, they're like, let's measure the mass of the Z.

And they got it spot on agreeing with everybody else. So there's a lot of reasons to believe this. But as you say, it disagrees with the other measurements and we don't understand that. The truth is we don't understand the description. between these experiments. There's two different important discrepancies. There's this new CDF result is different from what the theory expects. It's also different from the other measurements.

And those are two things that we don't understand. I see. Nobody's saying nobody's wrong. Anybody's wrong. They're just saying like, hey, I know you guys did this, but we did this and we work hard. And this is what we found. Let's all sit together and figure it out. So now we sit through it and try to think about it and try to understand where things

could have gone wrong or if this one's right, what it means about particle physics. Right. Yeah, I was going to say the science headlines were not so measured. They're like, oh, my gosh, did we break science? Everything we thought was right, has it turned out to be wrong, right? That's sort of how this has been kind of portrayed in the media, right? Like maybe we've been wrong all this time. Yeah, the most exciting way to read this is, wow, this new measurement is right, and it means that the theory is wrong.

That means that the prediction of the W mass to be lower than what CDF just measured means that those predictions are wrong, which means that all those fancy calculations about how. how W bosons and mid-virtual top quarks and Higgs bosons, those must be wrong, which means there's something wrong in our theory of particle physics, if this new measurement is correct. I see. And so I guess what specifically could have been wrong with our,

or could be wrong with our theory about the universe that this measurement exposes? The great thing about these kind of measurements is that they're a very general probe. Like these masses are sensitive to the existence of basically every particle out there. Remember the muon G minus two measurement we talked about, recently you did that really cool cartoon about. The reason that's so powerful is because it's sensitive to the existence of all these other fields out there that it can interact with. And the W mass is the same way.

When it's flying through space, it's sensitive to the existence of new particles we don't know about that might change its mass. So what this means is there might be other particles out there that make the W mass different from what our calculations assume. Our calculations use the existence of all the particles we know about. But if there are more particles out there, you would get a different W mass. I see. Yeah, it's sort of like the zoo analogy, right? Like, you know, we have this zoo diagram of all the particles, but if something's off, maybe it means that, you know, the panda is sprouting off a little rabbit on the side and that nobody had noticed before. Yeah, or if you're feeding the panda three square meals a day and is still gaining weight, maybe somebody's sneaking at some snacks and you weren't aware of it.

Maybe some physicists who are overly interested in its weight have been snacking or helping it out. Yeah, exactly. Or maybe the clever panda is sneaking out of its cage at night and helping itself to the vending machine. There you go. Mystery solved. But I guess it sort of points to this idea. And I think probably the reason that it got so many headlines is that, you know, everyone is interested in this idea of like, you know, we have this model of the universe. Maybe we've been wrong all along. And it's a little salacious, but it has happened in the past, right? It definitely has happened in the past. And, you know, there are two different ways to discover something new about particles in the universe. One is like, actually. see some new particle like the Higgs boson, be like, look, here's something new. We found it. Another way is to just do a bunch of consistency checks between the particles we do know and see if they all add up. Because if they don't, it means that there must be some particle out there playing on the field that you're not aware of. So it's a little bit more indirect, but it's also

a little bit more general. So it's a nice way to like cast a wide net to see. Is there something new out there? And we would love to discover something new because it would help us understand all the open mysteries of particle physics. Yeah. And I guess. it sort of takes a little bit of courage to do that, right? Like if you know that everyone is saying one thing, right, they have this measurement of the w boson that matches the theory. You know, it takes a lot for scientists to go like, hey, I'm measuring it to be different to just sort of stick your head out there and say, hey, maybe it's different than what everyone thought it was. And, you know, they've known about this results since November 2020. That's when they removed that random number

and actually saw the answer for the first time. And they kept it to themselves in a very small circle of folks while they worked for a year and a half to just double, triple check all of their double checks before they went out there in public with it. And I'm sure as you as one of the authors got to double check it, right? No, I wasn't even aware about this until two weeks ago. So they kept this to a very small circle. Otherwise, you know, it would have been on the podcast a year ago. You folks would have been the first to hear. Right, right. Yeah, Daniel, what's going on there? I thought you had connections. We should have been ahead of this story. No, I got the paper a few days before it was released everybody else under embargo.

Yeah. And I guess you also never know what's going to capture the imagination of the public, right? And the newspapers, right? Sometimes I feel like, you know, some these discoveries seem like they're amazing and revolutionary, but hardly anyone notices. Yeah, you can never tell what people are excited about. But particle physicists at least are excited. You know, the day after this was announced, there was a flood of new papers put out by

theorists explaining this new result. They have some model where the Higgs boson is made of other smaller particles. It's not fundamental. And that explains the W boson. Or they have a model with some new crazy particle they call a Swino particle, like a weird super symmetric version of the W boson. And now it would explain this. So now that we have this new result,

the theory community is going wild coming up with ways to explain it. Well, I guess that's sort of how science works. You know, it's a continual process where people are coming up with new ideas, new measurements, and you get to, you know, don't take the established facts as established sometimes. Exactly. And if you trust what you've done and you've double-checked everything, then you've got to come out there with your answer, even if it flies in the face of other measurements. Because, hey, maybe you're wrong or maybe they're wrong. History will sort it out. All right. Well, best of luck to the scientists working on this.

And I guess stay tuned to see who is not right, but who has the most to say about what's the mass of the W. That's right. We'll keep working on it. We'll make measurements of it at the large H-ron Collider and end at future colliders. and eventually we will know the truth. Yeah, we will know if Daniel was actually working on this or not. It might be a surprise, even to himself. Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.

Thanks for listening. And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the powerful stories

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