Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - The long race for the top quark

Episode Date: June 16, 2020

Daniel and Jorge talk about the twenty-year race to find the top quark, that came down to the wire. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denials easier complex problem solving takes effort listen to the psychology 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's 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, Jorge, what's the first particle discovery that you remember?

Well, I've never discovered a particle yet. You don't have to have discovered it yourself, though, to remember it. I mean, these are cultural moments. Don't you remember where you were and what you were wearing when the Higgs boson was discovered? Hopefully, I was wearing clothes. And I like how you equate physics with culture. I'm sure that there is culture within physics. But, no, I was probably wearing pajamas, I'm guessing.

Where were you? I was there at CERN helping to discover the Higgs boson. Oh, yeah? You were pressing the button. They were trying to keep me from pressing the button too many times. times. Yeah. Well, what's the first particle discovery you remember? Well, I remember way back in 1995 when the top core was discovered. Did you push the button then? No, I'm not that old. I was just in college, but I remember one of my physics professors coming into class that morning and

announcing it like this was a really big deal. Oh, nice. And do you remember what you were wearing? You know, it was college, so I was probably also in my pajamas. I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of Ph.D. Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. And I don't usually do physics in my pajamas. What are you doing your pajamas then? I make podcasts. You're supposed to say sleeping or cooking breakfast. Staying up late, having deep throats. Staying up late, having deep thoughts about the universe. And that's why we're here to plant little ideas for you to stay up late thinking about about the universe in our podcast.

Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeard radio. That's right, our podcast in which we take you on a tour of all the incredible discoveries that science has made and all the questions that science has not yet answered. Yeah, we like to talk about all the things we know and all the things we don't know or haven't discovered. There is a lot we haven't discovered out there, right? I feel like sometimes science gives the impression or people give science the impression that it's discovered everything already, that there's nothing left to find in the universe. That's right. And in contrast to that, we think that there's a huge amount of exploration left to do that most of the deep secrets about the universe remain out there for us to be found.

But science is not a process where you just sort of sit at home and have ideas float into your head. It's a slow chipping away. It's a moments of discovery and long stretches without any insight. And we also like to tell you about how that happens. How do scientists actually figure stuff out? Yeah, long stretches of sitting around in your pyjamas drinking coffee is how I imagine physics gets done. Well, you know, it's research, which means it's exploration. And when you go out to find something new, you never know if you're going to stumble on a vein of rich gold or if you're just going to be digging through rubble for decades.

Yes. That's sort of the excitement of it, right? It's unexpected. Yeah, I always imagine McGellen and Lewis and Clark, you know, sitting around in their pajamas, drinking coffee as well. So it's something they all haven't in common. I'm sure they had coffee on those ships. Come on.

I'm sure nobody made it through one of those tours without drinking. You say discovery needs caffeine. I'm saying caffeine is now more widespread and the rate of discoveries is increasing. So therefore, dot, dot, dot. Therefore, we should all drink more coffee. We should fund coffee research, is what I'm saying. But yeah, we like to talk about not just the science that's out there for people to know about, but also how the science was discovered

because sometimes it is sort of this low process and a little bit like chipping away at a rock but sometimes these discoveries are pretty interesting and full of drama and intrigue. That's right because these are real people's lives and their careers. The figures you hear about in history they were real people. They had struggles. They went to the bathroom. They slept in. They had arguments. They made mistakes.

And I think it's fascinating to get in the minds of those people and understand what it was like to be them before we understood the universe before they had these insights, before they revealed new deep truths about the universe, because that helps us to understand how to go forward and what it's going to be like to reveal the next deep truth about the universe. So today on the podcast, we have a really pretty interesting discovery to talk about. You're telling me full of leaks and lies and false discoveries and wasted millions. I feel like almost it should be an episode of horrible histories. That's right. Or science telenovelas. There is a lot of drama.

telenovelas and it's fun because we've been doing this series about how particles were discovered and we started way back in the late 1800s with the discovery of the electron but you know that's sort of like shrouded in history who really was J.J. Thompson

what was it like to be a particle physicist back in the dawn of science but now we're coming up to the present moment we're back into the most recent few decades and so these are real people these people are still alive I was around when this was happening and so it's fun to bring people up to the present

and to talk about recent dramatic discoveries. Yeah, I mean, this particle we're going to talk about today was around when Friends was on the air in Seinfeld. That's right. Which to me sounds like yesterday, but I'm sure for younger readers, it's like, what? That's ancient history. I've read about that in textbooks.

Yeah. So today on the program, we'll be talking about how is the top quark discovered? Now, Daniel, this is the third. top quark, like the best quark, did we save the best for last year? Or is this just sort of like the one that they always put on top? Well, you know, this cork has had multiple names and you'll be not impressed to discover that particle physicists have not agreed on how to name this particle. Really? You went through several versions and this is what you landed on, the top.

They were competing schools of thought. The top cork is the partner of the bottom cork. These corks come in pairs. And for a while, people thought that the pair should be called top and bottom. And there was another group that thought we should call them truth and beauty quarks. Oh, my goodness. They're like, no, this one's more confusing. No, we like this one. It's more confusing. I know.

Then we keep doing this. We keep adapting words from English that means something totally different and then applying them to particle physics. And just like giving it a new meaning, like that wouldn't be confusing. You know, it's like, let's call this one the banana cork and that one the peach quark. Like, you know. There's some physicists somewhere right now taking notes. It's like, oh, that's a good one. And then it's in peaches.

somebody's working on like the latex script for a miniature banana, so you can work that into your equation. I thought you were going to say that people argued about which one should be the top and which one should be the bottom. No, we already know that because of their charges. These quarks have really weird electric charges, one-third and minus two-thirds. And so the ones on the top, a row, the up, the charm, and the top,

these three quarks all have the same electric charge. And the other ones, the down, the strange, and the bottom all have the same charge, minus two-thirds. And so we know where they sit. And so top and bottom are just part of that pair. And top isn't top because it's like the best quark. It's just the name that we gave. What's the name of that British show, Top, Top Engine?

Or am I thinking of top model? What am I thinking of? Is there a reality show for particles? America's Next Top Particle. The universe is next top particle. Man, I wish I could get auditions from brand new particles. I mean, we have to try to smash particles together at CERN just to get hints of what new particles might be out there. And we could just like sit back and have the particles parade themselves in front of us.

Wow. That would be, then I could really just sip coffee and wear pajamas and just make big discoveries. You would think after all the fanfare about the Higgs boson, you know, the particles would be lining up. They would all want to star in this giant media blitz. Yeah, the particles should really talk to their agents about cashing in on that. How to monetize yourself as a particle. Yeah, well, but anyways, this particle is pretty important. It's pretty interesting, the top cork.

And it also has a pretty interesting and illustrious and kind of funny history. And so as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had heard of the top core and more importantly, how it was discovered. So I asked people to volunteer to answer random questions on the internet. And I didn't tell them what I'd be asking in advance. And the rules were no Googling. So here are the answers from a bunch of brave listeners willing to answer my question. So take a moment before listening to these.

If someone asked you, if you knew what the top. Top quark is and how it was discovered, what would you say? Here's what people had to say. I really don't know how the top quirk was discovered. If I had to guess, like with most things, it had to do with smashing particles together. But I really don't know. Absolutely no idea. Please tell me.

How was the top quark discovered? I don't know. Absolutely no idea. It probably was the last cork to be discovered, hence the name top. But I don't know how it was discovered or when. I would assume 80s, maybe, but I don't know how. I have no idea. I would guess through some experiment at the LHC or certain, but yeah, not sure.

I have no idea how that was discovered, but I'm sure that it was discovered by a scientist way smarter than me at the LHC. I think probably in a particle accelerator. I'm going to guess inside a particle accelerator. Interesting question. I hope that this will be actually something that I will learn in one of your next episodes. I'm going to say the top quark was discovered from Quark's Got Talent competition show.

I have no idea, but being such a specific small particle, I could suppose it was discovered using a particle accelerator. But I think the top quark was discovered in the early 90s after Gilman had written the the Jaguar and the Quark book but I don't know how the top quark was specifically discovered maybe there's another amusing anecdote that you're going to reveal

so I would guess either it was discovered in an accelerator or it was found in atmosphere as other particles but I'm not really sure all right not a lot of name recognition here on the top cork no it's definitely

definitely not in the top of people's mind but somebody else had same idea that maybe was discovered on a reality show. Quarks got talent. I like that, Joe. But yeah, not a lot of people know what the top quark is. And so maybe, Daniel, that's how we should start. Tell us a little bit about the top quark. Why is it interesting? Well, the top cork is especially fascinating because it's different from the other quarks. So remember, you know, matter is made out of electrons which orbit the nucleus and then the protons and neutrons inside the atom. And those protons and neutrons are made up of quarks, up quarks and down quarks specifically.

So the up quarks and down corks are the ones that make up me and you and lava and ice cream, all the stars in the universe and all of that stuff. But there are heavier quarks out there. If you collide particles together at really high energy, you can make these other corks, which are heavier, they have more mass to them. They don't last very long. They like to decay back down to the lighter stable corks. But you can make the charm and the strange corks.

So we had a whole episode about strange matter that has strange corks in it. And if you pump even more energy into it, you can make the bottom cork and then the top cork. And the top cork is weird because it's so much heavier than all of the other ones. Like the light corks, the up, the down, the strange, all these way about as much as a proton or less. But the top cork is like 175 times heavier than a single proton. Really? Wow. Wow. And a proton is filled with other quarks. So it's like many times heavier than a regular cork.

Yes, many, many times heavier. And that's what was so surprising about it. That's why it took so long to find because it was shockingly massive. Even to this day, we do not understand why the top cork is so darn heavy. We think it's probably a clue, a window into something else that's happening in physics, some special role it might play in mass or in generating matter. but we really don't understand it. Well, you would think that the heavier it is, the easier it is to find. That's usually kind of the rule. But I guess maybe my question is, you know. Wait, because you're imagining that we're like chasing these things on the savannah or something. And if it's heavy, it's like slow.

It's like finding the elephant in the room, I guess. Maybe that's a bad analogy because elephants in the room are kind of hard to see. Have you ever caught an elephant? It's not that easy. Yeah, I don't have a lot of personal experience, I guess. No, it's actually the opposite is because if it's really massive, then it takes a lot of energy just to make it. So it's harder to make these particles because you have to concentrate more energy into a really small space. So it takes more technology and frankly more money just to build a bigger accelerator to make these things.

Oh, I see, because you guys don't, I guess you don't discover these in the sense that you find them. It's not like you're mixing chemicals in the lab and it's like, oh, there it is. It's like you have to make them to discover them. That's right. You have to make them. You have to create the environment. in which they can exist, because if you just look around you, everything in the universe is sort of too cold to make any corks except for the upcorks and the down corks. Those are the

stable ones. They can't go lower into any lighter corks because there's nothing below them on the ladder. So to make anything above it on the ladder, you have to create special conditions. So yeah, we're making these things. And, you know, that's what happened sort of in the 1950s that we first created the tools, the accelerators, that we could use to create these conditions to make heavier corks. And we talked about in the podcast, when we talked about how the charm cork was discovered

that in the 15th, we found all this crazy new slew of particles. And when we slowly understood that these were just different combinations of a few light corks, the up, the down, and the strange, all put together in different ways like Lego pieces. Right, yeah.

And I like how you talk about creating the conditions because it's literally like you need to create pure energy. Like you have to put enough energy in one place that all these particles can come out of that kind of ball of pure energy.

Yeah, and it's an amazing way to do exploration. It's not like we go out and find these particles. We just create the energy. And there's some quantum mechanical sort of almost magic that happens there. Because if you create the energy, the nature turns that energy back into mass because energy just like that is unstable. Nature likes to convert it into particles.

And it can convert it into any of the particles on its menu, which means you don't need to know what's on nature's menu in order to find something new, you just have to create enough energy and then nature will roll a die and say, okay, this time that energy is turning into bottom quarks, this time that energy is turning into charm quarks. And as long as you're above sort of the energy cost of making that particle, then it can be discovered. You do it often enough, you will see it, which is why we can go out and explore the fundamental

nature of the universe just by staying in our pajamas and running our particle accelerators here at home. Just sit back and roll to die over and over 20,000 times. a second. Yeah, much more than that. We run this 40 million times a second because we want to see rare things. Heavy things are rare. And so the more times you're all to die, the more likely you are to see something weird and new. It's a lot of pajamas. I guess my question is, you know, you found this, you found this particle. You decided to call it a top cork. But, you know, how did you know it was a cork? Like what makes a cork a cork? And what, how did you know that this

one was like the other corks that you found? Yeah. Well, we sort of looked for it because there was a hole in our ideas. We had found five corks so far, the up, the down, the charm, the strange, and then the bottom. And that was in 1977 that Leon Latterman found the bottom cork. And there was sort of like a hole

there. Four of the corks you could pair off together, up and down, charm and strange. And then like... I guess pair it up in what way? Like they're the same, but with a different charge? And then that's how you pair two of them together? Yeah. The up and the down are in the first generation. They're the lightest ones. So you sort of

sort them by mass. The charm and the strange are heavier, but they have the same charges as they up and the down. They're like the second generation we call them. And then alone in this third generation of corks was the bottom core. And we were like, well, where is its partner? Shouldn't it have a partner? We're always looking for patterns in particle physics. We're always looking for trends to help us understand what's coming next. And then on the other hand, we had six kinds of leptons, right? The electrons, the particles that whizz around the atom, there are also six kinds of those particles. So we thought, well, if there are six leptons, which form nicely into three pairs, and then there are five corks, that's weird, and they form two and a half pairs, it's just very

suggestive. It's like, if you write this periodic table of particles on paper, there's a hole there. And you go, well, is there a particle that feels in that hole? Let's go look for it. So we sort of knew what to look for before we found. We thought it probably did exist, and we went looking for it. I feel like maybe you said yourself up. You're like, we'll call this fifth one the bottom cork, and who knows if there's a sixth one, but wink, wink, it's probably the top called the top core. Well, yeah, and a lot of discoveries in particle physics work this way, that we see a pattern in our data, and then we think, you know, this would make a lot more sense if there was

one more particle. That's the way it happened with the Higgs boson, right? The theorists, they saw this pattern in the data, and they thought the universe would make more sense if you had one more piece because it would all click together. And that's really powerful. that tells you that, like, wow, you've understood something deep in the universe. If you can, like, call the next discovery, if you can say, I see a trend, and it means this is going to be the next thing we can find.

All right, let's get into how it was discovered, and let's see if the drama involved here can top the history of the other particles. But first, let's take a quick break. Imagine that you're on an airplane, and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. Because the pilot is having an emergency, and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control.

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We're talking about the discovery of the top quark. And Daniel, you were telling me that this could very well be an episode of horrible histories and physics because it's full of drama and intrigue and, a lot of a twist and turns in this story. So maybe step us through and set it up first of how you would look for a particle. So the way to find new particles is really just to spend money. Like you need to create the conditions where the particle can exist. The more energy you put into this tiny little collision,

the more likely you are to find a big, heavy, fat particle. And the way to do that is just to spend more money to build a bigger accelerator. So there's nothing limiting us from building an accelerator. is like the size of the solar system to discover crazy new massive particles other than money. Like it would cost a gazillion dollars. Right. And back in the day, before we discover the top cork, before we knew it was so crazy heavy, nobody ever imagined it would be so massive.

Nobody ever thought it would take so much time and money and such a big accelerator to discover. So they were sort of thinking smaller. Right. Because the other corks, they were all sort of in the same range. Yeah, they were all in the same range. Like the heaviest one we'd ever found was the bottom cork, which was five GEV, about five times the mass of the proton. So the theorists got to work and they said, well, we're very sure the top cork exists.

And we're also very sure that its mass must be around 10 or 15 GEV. They had like very convincing arguments. They were so sure that it was right around that range, you know. And theorists, they can come. Because they were just connecting the dots, kind of like the lightest corks started about one GEV. And then the next bigger one is about 1.6. And the next one is 5. And so they kind of extrapolated like, oh, it's probably about 10.

Yeah, but, you know, they made their arguments sound very confident. Like, when you go to a funding agency and you're like, look, I want $100 million to build this collider, you want that funding agency to think we're going to find it. Like, we're right about where this is because if you build it and your accelerator's not big enough, then you just find nothing, right? You've explored a little bit of territory and found nothing. That's very disappointing. So you want to make your accelerator big enough that you're sure you're going to find this thing,

but not too big because then you're wasting money, right? So it's a balancing act. So they were very confident. We were going to find this thing if it was like 10 or 15GV. And so take us back, what year was the first, I guess, project that tried to find this top cork? So the bottom cork was found in 77. And so in the late 70s and early 80s, people thought, well, this must be right around the corner. Because the charm cork was in 73.

So we were like finding a new particle every few years. People were like getting into a rhythm of it, right? And so they thought, you know, in the early 80s, like sequels. That's right. It's like Avenger's sequels. Every three years, bam. That's right. And so in the early 80s, they looked for it in Hamburg at this accelerator called Daisy.

And they looked for it up to about 25 GEV. And it was very surprising that they didn't see it. I mean, they were surprised that they didn't see it. They were like, what? We thought it was going to be maybe up to 15. And we looked all the way up to 25 and it's not there. That's crazy. So that was the early 80s.

And, of course, the theory community. that had very confidently said, well, it must be around 10 or 15. They said, oh, wait, hold on a second. We have a new calculation. Now we're very sure it's around 30GV. And we're like, what's the latest number?

What's the biggest number that you haven't found anything, 25? Well, then I think it's 30. Exactly. And that's the game at theoretical physics. They're always predicting things to be just around the corner, and they're very confident in their predictions every time, you know. And you dig in, like, well, why this factor?

of two and not a factor of three. They're like, you know, two is a more natural number. It's a more natural number for us to get funding. Yeah. All the other numbers don't work out. And so then the Japanese built a collider and they were going to be able to see it up to around 30 G.E.V. And so, you know, they spent a lot of money on this thing. It was called Tristan and it ran for about 10 years and it didn't find anything. We're talking about like hundreds of millions of dollars, right? Yes. And a lot of time and a lot of people's work. And they were very certain. And, like, they thought they were buying a discovery. You know, the Japanese government thought, we are going to discover the top core.

It's going to secure our place in the history of particle physics. But they came up empty and they didn't find it. Wow. And so then, of course, you know, the theory community is like, oh, you know what? It turns out it's going to be around 40 GV. Did I say 30? I mean 40. Exactly.

And so this game continued for a little while. At Stanford, they looked for it. They could see it up to about 45 GEV. And the reason these accelerators had different capabilities was just because they had had different amounts of power. They had more money to build them longer, to push the particles faster to make more energy in these collisions. And so Slack was able to, Slack, that's the accelerator at Stanford,

was able to push it up to about 45 GEV. I like how the name, the acronym just says Slack. It's like a, are they slackers? Did they voluntarily pick that? I don't know. Everybody I know who went to Stanford is a bit of a slacker. In a good way, right? In the best possible way.

But I guess my question is, what does it mean to not find something? It's like you run the machine and you get all these bazillion collisions and you get all this stuff coming out and then you don't see what you thought you were going to see or you don't find anything. Yeah, you don't see what you thought you were going to see. Like if the top work exists, then we already understand how it should be made and how it should decay. So we know how to look for it. Now, there are other things that could also look like that. Remember, we don't actually create the particle and then get to look at it. It lasts for like 10 to the minus 23 seconds, and it turns into other particles, which turned

to other particles, and then they make these splashes in our detector. But we're pretty good these days to figuring out like, okay, given this splash in the detector, it looks probably like it was a top quark. But you can never know for sure. You can't say this event was a Higgs boson. This one was a top quark. What you can do is you can count. You can say, well, there are other ways to make the same kind of splash.

the same patterns, but we know how often that happens, we expect to see maybe 10 of those. And so if instead we see 50, that tells us, oh, we see more of these specific kinds of splashes in the detector than we expected without the top quark. And so we think that the top quark is there. And you can see it in lots of different ways, like the top quark should decay in this way and in that way and in this third way. If you see them all together, you sort of build confidence in the story. I think it's amazing to me how dependent this is.

on the theory, you know? It's like, it's not like you're looking through rubble and saying, finding a pearl or something. It's like, you know, you're really relying on the theories to tell you exactly what to look for and where to look and, you know, they're also kind of, you know, theorizing and they're not sure. And so you could be totally looking in the wrong place or looking for the wrong thing. It's amazing that it ever works.

Yes. And there are certainly some discoveries you could never make if you didn't know what to look for. Like, you know, could we have found the Higgs boson if nobody had thought of it? Like randomly? It's a pretty subtle signal. Yeah, it's a pretty small effect. And so you can imagine another universe where you delete Higgs and everybody else who had similar ideas from history and then would experimentalists discover it. And there are times that experimentalists have found particles before they were conceived of, before anybody had the idea of them.

And, you know, that's my personal scientific fantasy is to find a new unanticipated particle, particle that makes a theory. is go, what? That can't be true. What are you talking about? If that exists, then we got to erase all these other things we thought we understood. And that's, you know, that's the goal is to crack open the deep mysteries of nature and find something surprising. All right. So it sounds like up until the 70s and 80s, people had looked up to 60 GEV and found nothing. But so then this is where the plot thickens. Yeah. So now the CERN gets into the game. The Europeans sort of step it up. that's right. And so the Americans had it up to about 45GV. And everybody felt like, okay, this thing is around the corner. Like, it's ridiculous that we haven't found it yet. We're at like four times the mass we thought it should be. We were certain it should be. And so the next collider is definitely going to discover it. And so CERN turned on the collider in the early 80s called the SPS, the super proton synotron. And this was run by a guy with a really big personality, Carlo Rubia. And he ended up winning the Nobel Prize. using this collider and this detector for discovering the W boson and the Z boson.

And he's a famously huge personality. And he has two Nobel Prizes. Well, he got one for the discovery of those of the W and the Z. So he was sort of riding high. He was like, hey, I am basically god of particle physics. And they saw some interesting things in their data around 1984. And they started putting stuff together. And Carlo Rubio sort of got out ahead of his skis.

And before people really looked at this data very carefully, he went and called up a reporter for the New York Times and claimed discovery and said, hey, we found this thing. Yeah, he said, it looks really good. Yeah, he said it looks really good. And then they wrote a paper and they claimed discovery of the top cork at around 60 GEV. And, you know, of course, that was not correct. The top cork was not there. And I talked to some folks who were around at the time and part of that experiment. and one guy in particular who worked for Rubia

and his job was to go through the data and verify that everything looked good. And on his first day, he could tell him very soon that things were very sloppy. Oh, I see. He looked back at the data and it didn't look the way it was described and the record of what had been done

didn't seem to match up with the results they were getting. And so there was just sort of like a lot of sloppy work there. I think there was a bit of a rush, like an anticipation. People were, you know, I'm sure it's there. So if we claim discovery, even if the data is not quite, right, we're sure that the data will eventually back us up. I wonder how that phone call went.

Did he call the public line at the New York Times? It's like, hi, my name is Carla Rubia. I think I discovered a particle. This is, you know, he was a celebrity, and he's still a big figure. And his son is a big figure in particle physics today. So this is like, if Stephen Hawking calls the New York Times, you know, then they pick up. They want to hear what he has to say. And so he was making a big claim.

And it's kind of embarrassing because they have to walk it back, right? that this is, they did not discover the top cork despite their claims. Boy, all right. So CERN kind of crashed and burn here. And that's when more people get into the game. That's right. And that's when the Americans picked up the race. And we had a collider outside of Chicago at Fermilab.

It's called the Tevatron. And it was the most powerful collider in the history of human science at the time. And so it picked up the race. The CERN didn't see the top quark and they left the limited about 69GV. We knew that if it existed, it had to be heavier than about 69 GEV. And I guess people believed each other. Like if you were at the Tevatron and Cern says we can't find it up to 69, you sort of assume

that they were right. Do you go back or do you go back and check? You definitely go back and check. Absolutely. Because if they missed it, yeah. I mean, that's the point of having these independent experiments is to check each other. And also, you know, there's a lot of antagonism and rivalry between these experiments. Like they want to find it and they want to scoop the other one.

I mean, scientists are all about scooping other experiments. That's one thing I think the public doesn't understand about science. It's not a monolithic enterprise where we all sit down together and decide what we're going to announce, right? You know, that's why it's impossible to have like scientific conspiracies for very long because the data reveals the truth and some scientists out there, if you're BSing with your results, if you're covering up something, some scientists out there is going to get some data that shows you're wrong and they are going to show you're wrong and you're going to

be embarrassed. Yeah. Yeah. I think the same way too. scientists would wish nothing more than to prove each other wrong. And so if you have something like climate change where 98% of scientists agree, you know, you know that those 98 scientists are trying to disprove each other. So the fact that they agree must mean a lot.

Yeah. And, you know, there's also international politics here because the torch is passing back and forth between Europe and America, started looking for it in Germany. It went to Japan momentarily, went back to America with Slack. then CERN thought they were going to win it and then the Americans come in with their new accelerator and they seem like they're poised to find this thing so there's also a lot of national pride here.

All right, so the Americans have the football. They're running. Will this be a bruce will this movie where America wins at the end? Let's find out after the break. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency, and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane.

Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, until this. Do this. I can do it my eyes close. I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devon.

And on our new show, no such thing. We get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing.

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And my podcast Grasas Come Again is back This season we're going even deeper Into the world of music and entertainment With raw and honest conversations With some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition.

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or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Daniel, we are in the middle of this drama that's unfolding about the discovery of the top quark and the Germans failed, the Japanese failed, the people in California,

I guess California. California is kind of like a different country. The nation state of California. Yeah. We failed. CERN didn't, couldn't find it up to 69 giga electron volts. But now there's a new collider called the Tevatron outside of Chicago that thinks they get the football and they make a run for it. But the drama is not over. That's right.

And so the Tevotron, very powerful collider. It had the potential to discover the top quark up to about 200 GEV. So there was like a lot of territory there. that the Tevatron could discover. But it was not just a happy party. It wasn't just like the Tevotron is just one group. They set it up like a competition. They set it up.

They had two separate groups with their own detector competing to find this thing. Wow. And that's new too, right? That's like none of the other teams have done that. It's like putting your kids to fight against each other. It's a bit like a reality show. Some of the other accelerators like Tristan had multiple experiments, but some of them only had one.

But it's a bit controversial, but I think it's good because it motivates people. You know, it keeps them honest. And also, if you're going to make this big discovery that people have been looking for for now 20 years, you really want to have independent information. And so we're here by now in the very late 80s in the early 90s. And we had two experimental collaborations. One was called CDF and the other one was called D-Zero. There was some friendliness between them, but also there was a lot of animosity. Really?

You know, CDF. They're all working in the same place. eating at the same cafeteria. Yes, they're all eating at the same cafeteria, but they have their own detectors. So Fermilab is a big ring. It's like four miles around where the protons swing around

and smash into each other, and the protons collided at four different places around the ring. And CDF had one of those places. They had their own collisions, and DZero had a different place when they built their detector around that other collision point.

So they would go off to their own detectors and work during the day, and then you have lunch together and, you know, try not to growl at each other too much over their sandwiches. Trying to poison the other's cafeteria food. Yeah.

And, you know, there's something of a cultural difference here because CDF was earlier. Like, they got funding first. They got built first. They started collecting data before D-Zero was even finished. And they had sort of the fancier universities, you know, Harvard, MIT, Yale, all these Stanford, all these big famous universities. They were in CDF. And D-Zero sort of came along later.

It was scrappier. It was cheaper. It was late in the game. And so you had this sort of different culture and different personalities. And CDF was very hierarchical and DZero was a bit more wide open in terms of the culture of the experience. I feel like you're setting it up here. Who is the clear underdog? Yes, exactly.

Like there's the Ivy League, you know, snotty dude or who has all the money and the attention. And then there's this crappy physicists. This is definitely Bob's College of Knowledge versus the Ivy League for sure. Oh, man. All right. well, if this was a Hollywood movie, I would know who to root for, but who knows? This is science. Yeah, exactly. Well, maybe we'll make a Hollywood movie about this story. So they turned the accelerator on. It starts to run. And by late in 1993, CDF had some interesting hints.

They're like they had some events that looked like maybe top quark, but it's hard to say, right? There are ways that you can mimic what the top cork looks like. You can't take a picture of the event and say, with one event, I found it. Here's the one. You need enough statistics. You need to say, you know, the background looks like 10, but there's an uncertainty of 1. And I found 20, and that's very unlikely to have come from this background. Is that the number that you typically need? Just like 20 times you have to find it, and that's it?

What you need is you need to calculate the chance for the background to fluctuate to look like the signal. Like the background is other ways to make the same signature in your detector that looks like a top quark. And, you know, there's fluctuation. Quantum mechanics is random. You do the same experiment 100 times. You get a different set of splashes in your detector. So what you calculate is the probability for there to be no top cork and for your data to look like top corks. Right.

It's like if you roll a die, you know, you're going to get a four a certain number of times. But if you roll the die, keep rolling the die and you get four a lot more than one sixth at the time, then, you know, it's like a, there's something funny about that die. Exactly. And before you're certain. that the die is biased, you want to roll it a lot of times. You don't just roll it and get four ones. We're like, oh, the die is biased, right? Because that could happen randomly.

Exactly. And so CDF saw a few events, which looked interesting and looked weird. But, you know, everybody was primed to discover this thing. And so they tried to also be really skeptical and unbiased on the statistics. We decided we were not going to declare we'd actually discover this thing until the chances that were a fluctuation were less than one in millions. Wow. Because they learned from Carla Rubia, what happened?

of you claim discovery too early. Yes, exactly. It's embarrassing. And particle physics, I think because of that experience with Ruby and the top quark at Surin is now very, very conservative. They're terrified of claiming discovery and then having to walk it back. And so they only claim discovery when they get to this five sigma threshold, which is when the odds are millions against it being a fluctuation.

Okay, yeah. All right, so CDF, the Snoddy Ivy League, favorite to win, find something, but it's not enough. That's right. In 93, they had some hints. And then in 1994, they had, you know, a nice little collection of events that seemed unlikely to be just background. It seemed. It smelled like top quark.

And there were a lot of rumors swirling around the community. And there was an agreement at the lab. You have these two different groups, CDF and DZero. And the agreement was, if you're going to go public, if you're going to claim your discovery, you have to tell the director of the lab. lab first and give the other experiment two weeks to sort of scramble together to say something at the same time. They wanted to present sort of a unified message. What? Really? Mm-hmm. Yeah. But wasn't it a competition? Like, what's the incentive then? Or do you get to claim to be the ones who discovered it? Well, it is a competition, but also, you know, Fermilab didn't want

like racing press conferences. You know, if these two groups really are going to discover it about the same time, then they wanted a unified statement. If one was really far ahead, then two weeks is not going to give anybody enough time to, like, really catch up. But they felt like it was a sort of a gentleman's agreement. Like, we'll let you know if we're about to call the New York Times. Oh, I see. And then what would happen? Like press release would go out and would say CDF found it and it's confirmed by DO.

D0. Yeah. D0, yeah. That's the idea. But, you know, in 94, DZO really didn't have very much. Like they had one interesting event they had found. But, you know, they had really just turned. turned on. They didn't even have access to the earlier data because their detector didn't even

exist for those first runs. So it was really just CDF on its own. And in about 1994, CDF told the Fermilap director, they said, look, we have 12 events that look like top quarks. The chance of fluctuation is about one in 400, which is not enough for discovery. It's like it smells like top cork. It seems like top cork. A lot of arguments inside CDF about what exactly to claim. But finally, the conservative group inside there said, we are not claiming discovery. on a 1,400 chance. But they put this paper out because they wanted to sort of like stake their name on. Really? They put it, what did the paper say?

That we found something, but we don't know. Yeah, it looks really good. Yeah, it looks really good. But you can't use the word discovery unless you have reached this statistical threshold for significance. Right. And at the time, DZero was like, well, we don't have enough. Like, we have some interesting stuff, but our data looks more like background than CDF's data. Their fluctuation probability was one in 40.

So they didn't, their data was not nearly as convincing. But the information from CDF maybe told them where to look? Yes. Or were they both looking at near the same, you know, kind of energy level? No, that was a very important clue because remember, CERN left the game around 69 GEB. And so then people thought, well, the top must be like 100. It couldn't possibly be much more than 100, right? So people were focusing their search around 100, 120.

It makes a difference because as it gets heavier, it changes how it decays, the other kind of particles it can turn into. So this gave DZero a clue. And then in the summer of 1994, DZO got very, very lucky. Really? So wait, so they were both looking, so CDF was looking in the higher energies

and DZO was not. But now they got a hint that CDF was looking at the higher energy. So now they were both looking at the higher energy. And then they got more data. And then they got more data because the accelerator group discovered that one of the magnets had been put in wrong. So like,

what exactly it was turned 90 degrees from where it was supposed to be and so the 90 degrees not like 0.01 degrees somebody really messed it up somebody really messed it up you know they had one of these IKEA drawings for how to assemble a particle accelerator and it's hard to get that stuff right you know I feel like Tevatron is the sound like a IKEA name yeah and and so what they did was they discovered this and they fixed it they rotated the magnet and then all of a sudden, the accelerator was working much better. It's very important that these magnets are arranged correctly because they focus the beams.

And the more you can get those beams down to really small locations so the two beams of protons overlap, the more collisions you're going to get. They hadn't noticed this before. Well, they had noticed that it wasn't working as well as they hoped. But, you know, this is not like downloaded from the internet and run it on your laptop. This is something nobody had ever built before.

This is cutting edge technology. So, you know, you never know how these things are going to operate. But it often takes a few years for the engineers to figure out like how to make this thing really hum. You know, you've got to kick it here and twist this knob and flip that button three times and then it's really going to sing. And so that's what happened in the summer of 94. I feel like the next part of the story is you're going to tell me that this magnet that was discovered that was wrong was discovered by this upstart intern called Daniel Weitson who was working there at the time. No, I was in college at the time. I didn't even know about particle physics at the time.

I was still thinking I was going to do plasma physics. So I was not involved at all. Somebody found it. Somebody found it. And the reason it's important in the story is that all of a sudden, the data started coming in much more rapidly. So it didn't make much of a difference anymore that CDF had been there early, that they had access to data that DZER didn't have because now there was like an avalanche of data.

And so this first few percent of the data now are relevant. So DZR basically caught up to where CDF was in terms of how much data that had access to because the floodgates are wound. And they both share the same collider. So it's like everyone's getting more data. Everyone's getting more data. Exactly. They have different collisions.

Actual collisions are different. Statistically independent, but they share the collider. They're drinking from the same river. All right. So now there's lots of data. And so who makes the first claim? So in January of 1995, DZero showed some results at the Aspen Winter Conference, a very important conference in particle physics.

But they didn't look great. there was more convincing evidence of the top cork than they had before, but they hadn't yet like re-optimized their analysis. They were still doing their calculations the old way. And so their results were like, you know, one in 150 chance of fluctuation. So people thought like, huh, that's weird. You know, DZeros has all this new data, but they haven't yet like really optimized how to look at it. So CDF was like in top speed. They were like, they were racing. They were sure they were going to find this thing. And they had a bunch of really smart people and they worked really hard.

And they had a great result. And this is in February now of 1995. They had a result which is basically totally inconsistent with just background. It looked like Top cork. Top cork was the only way to explain it. The chances of it being a fluctuation were now like one in a million. Wow. So they did it.

They did it. But they had to tell the director. They couldn't just go to the New York Times and claim discovery. They had to call Rumelab director and say, we're going public in two weeks. They had to follow the rules. They had to follow the rules.

So then Fermilab director calls DZero and says, by the way, CDF has found the top quark. You guys got two weeks. I wonder if that's the phrase he used. He's like, oh yeah, did you guys renovate the bathrooms? Uh-huh, yeah. Oh, by the way, your brother, your sister, just found the top cork.

Yeah, well, DZero had been working furiously, of course, because they had this new pile of data and they were working to improve the way they were analyzing it. And so I'm very curious to know what it was like to be on that experiment in those two weeks. Did anybody sleep at all?

Do they stay up all night? Because the option was, discover the top quark alongside CDF or be left in the dust, right? Wow. So nobody's like on vacation. Nobody's like, you know, taking a break to watch a movie or whatever.

This is like these two weeks. All hands on deck. Yeah, these two weeks define your scientific legacy, right? Wow. But they did it. And they came out with a, a really strong result. Really, in those two weeks?

Well, they were like almost there anyways, right? Yeah. Well, there's a lot of discussion here. There's a lot of grumbling from old folks who are on CDF that they shouldn't have had to tell D0 and that only because they gave D0 the clue that it was there, that DZero scrambled something together. Sure. When you're on the giving side, they complain.

But if they were on the receiving side, I bet they would be grateful. And then, you know, you talk to people who were on DZero at the time. And they're like, no, we were totally on track. We had this thing. you know, we were going to be ready anyway. We were about to pick up the call, the phone to call the director also. I also had that idea. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. There's a lot of this. And so then in the end, it was March 2nd, 1995. They had a press conference together, a joint discovery press conference. They submitted papers the same second, like they synchronized their computers and submitted their papers in 1995 and discovered and claimed discovery of the top court. So did each of their papers said that they found it together or just? Both papers that we found it at the same time.

Yeah. Each independently wrote their own papers saying, we discovered the top quarks. So now there are two papers published on the same day, so they have equal precedence that have independent evidence for the top quark, each with a background fluctuation probability around a million or more. I'm picturing it like a Hollywood movie, right? I'm picturing the press release and I'm picturing the fancy folks at CDF looking bitter and like they're upstage. And then I'm picturing the D-Zero physicist, you know, scruffy, they're wearing sandals, they haven't shaved, and they're feeling pretty happy and high-fiving each other. Yeah, I think there's a lot of that. I think there is a lot of that. And, you know, I wasn't around at the time. And the professor who came into my class that March morning in 1995 were very proudly showing this paper. He was on D-Zero. I went to Rice and it was on the D-Zero experiment.

What was he wearing? He was a Finnish guy. He actually wore the same thing. every day. We used to joke. Did he have like a closet full of those shirts? Was it just the same shirt every day? We didn't know. It was a quantum mechanical question. He knew how to dress. You know, it was a nice button-down shirt, buttoned all the way to the very top. Yeah, he knew exactly how to dress. That's why he never changed it. I don't know. He was really, he was a really nice guy. He's the guy who got me into particle physics. Oh, wow. And here we are. And here we are. So they found the top quark. That was it. March 2nd, 1990.

What was I doing in 1995, Daniel? You were probably drawing cartoons up at Stanford. No, I was a Georgia Tech. Oh. Yeah, I was a junior, sophomore? I was probably in my pajamas. Probably. Well, it's a crazy long saga because they started looking for this thing in the late

70s, expecting to find it at any moment. And then for basically the next 20 years, they thought it was going to be around the corner, around the corner, around the corner. And then finally they did actually find it. So it was a real moment of, triumph for particle physics, but also a moment of head scratching because this thing is 175 times heavier than the proton. It weighs as much as the nucleus of a gold atom. And that's really weird.

You know, anytime you see something in particle physics that doesn't fit into a pattern, you ask why. Because often those questions lead to ideas that lead to like pulling back a layer of reality and seeing what's underneath. And it's been, you know, what, 25, almost 30 years since we found the top cork, and we still don't know why it's so heavy. We're still studying it at the Large Hadron Collider, trying to figure out what it means that the top quark is so massive. Right, because it's weird, right? Because it weighs more than, you know, it's a basic particle of nature, but it weighs more than all of these complex built atoms. That's right. And remember when we talk about particles and their masses, we're not talking about like different sizes of particles. It's

not like the top cork has more stuff to it. These are points in space. Each point just gets assigned a certain amount of mass based on how much it's slowed down by the Higgs field. So you might say, well, doesn't that just mean that this thing interacts with the Higgs field more and that's why it has more mass? Yeah, sure, but you just transform the question into why does this one interact with the Higgs field more? Why does the up quark interact very little with the Higgs field and the top quark a lot? What sets that knob? And that's a question we have no clue about the answer.

I feel like it's also more expensive than gold, you know? Has anyone figured out like how much money was spent? to find this quark and then divided that. No, that's good. That's a good point. Yeah, you know, a ring made out of top quarks would be very expensive. Also kind of explosive and not good for your finger. No, and last to about 10 to the minus 23 seconds, so not a good investment.

All right. Well, I think this is, I was glued to my seat, Daniel. And I'm a little exhausting now, all this drama. Well, you know, the funny thing is that that was the last discovery of that century. And then we didn't discover a new particle until the Higgs boson in 2012. And the Higgs boson has kind of also this kind of drama about it, right? There's a famous documentary movie called, what's it called? Particle fever.

Particle fever. Yeah. Yeah. Which shows you these two groups trying to find the Higgs boson and a lot of this drama as well. It's a pretty good movie. Yes. And, you know, Carlo Rubia plays a big role in the discovery of the Higgs boson. Does he really?

And yes. And in sabotaging the Americans. attempts to discover it. Oh, geez. We'll tell that story in another episode. A sequel. We'll do it in three years. But we never know when the next discovery will come.

It would be another 20 years before we find a new particle or tomorrow when I open my laptop, well, I get an email from my students saying, look at this weird bump in the data. You never know. Bring me some coffee. I need my discovery pajamas. Where are my discovery pajamas? Oh, they're in the blush. Oh, no.

Dang it. The Europeans are going to beat us. They don't wear pajamas All right Well I think this again points to You know how much there is to discover You know we never know We never know what's out there

Beyond what we can see With our telescopes or with our colliders You know It's like we're blind to a huge part of the universe There's a huge unknown out there That's right We just keep chipping away at this rock Hoping to discover fascinating fossils underneath

Hoping that there's something for us to learn But you never know That's why research really is like exploration We're not reading textbooks. We're trying to write them. And we don't know what's coming next. And the only way to figure it out is to just go out there and tap, tap, tap, tap, and see what we learn. Just make sure you have your magnets on the right way.

And you'll be good. Follow those IKEA diagrams very carefully. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next night. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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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's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation,

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