Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - The most promising particle physics anomalies

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

Daniel talks to Harry Cliff, author of the new book "Space Oddities", about the most intriguing unexplained particle physics experiments and what they might mean. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey Daniel, when they operate a big, complicated machine, like the large Hadron Collider? Like, what's the worst that can happen? Ooh, other than pressing the wrong button and destroying a $10 billion science experiment? Can it get worse than that?

I guess you could make a black hole that destroys the world. And now, is that the absolute worst? Actually, no, the absolute worst is if the whole thing runs perfectly and nothing interesting happens. What's wrong with that? Well, then we'll have spent like $10 billion and learn nothing. And that's worse than destroying the whole,

planet. Yes, learning nothing is worse. destroying the planet would be a great outcome. We'd learn so much. Yeah, we learned not to get physicists $10 billion. You can make that decision from inside the black hole. No, it'd already have been too late. We would learn our lesson for a brief second before we all die. Hi, I'm Jorge I'm a cartoonist and the author of Oliver's Great Dink Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, a professor at UC Irvine, and I'm desperate to discover something before I retire. Before you retire or before you destroy the world? One and the same.

Wait, I thought if we destroy the world, you would learn a lot, but then you would be retired. Exactly. I want to go out with a bang, learn something, and retire all in the same day. you know you can do that on your own you don't have to involve the rest of us I'm not so selfish I want to include everybody it would be preferable if you don't destroy the world in your little personal curiosity

quest some people just don't know what they want until they get it isn't that what Steve Jobs said well I definitely know I don't want to die in a black hole we until Apple releases a super slick black hole that nobody can resist oh I see is that the new I die 2.0 yes better than the eye hole I don't know what that

for. Yeah, I want neither of those, please. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeartRadio. In which we try to widen the gap between the moment we understand the universe and the moment we all perish. We want everybody out there to understand the nature of this crazy, beautiful, bizarre reality and we want to enjoy that understanding as long as possible before our eventual demise.

We hope that this podcast helps you bridge that gap. And until we do gain that final understanding of nature, we can fill you in on everything we do and do not understand along the way. That's right, because it is a mysterious and confounding universe full of interesting phenomena that we are still discovering and learning about every day. Every day scientists are making new discoveries about how things work, how they don't work, and what is and isn't there. And remember that research is exploration. When you think back to the story of scientific discovery, it seems like a very linear path. discovered A, then B, then C, then D. So E and F were obvious, right?

Well, back in the day, they weren't so obvious. There were lots of hints in various directions, and the path forward was not clear. Here we are on the forefront of human understanding or ignorance, and we don't know which direction science will take us. We don't know which hint will turn out to unravel our entire understanding of the universe and which will turn out to just have been a loose cable. And which one will hopefully not destroy the world? I mean, that's always a good thing, right?

I mean, that's a secondary consideration, but yes. I think, Daniel, each episode you sound more and more like a superhero villain. I'm working on my mad scientist cackle. I haven't had to protect you. Are they going to make the Large Hadrian Collider now be activated by like a snap of your fingers? You have to put on like a glove and then you have to snap your fingers to activate it? Yes. Is that the plan?

Yeah, we hired a whole team from Marvel to help us design the interface. Oh, there you go. Does that mean you wear capes as well? It's a reverse the usual. Often Marvel is hiring scientists to be advisors on their films, but we're actually hiring the Marvel folks to tell us how to make our installations look super slick. Have to make it more exciting for people. Well, it would be nice if this podcast made some of that Marvel money.

You know what I'm saying? Yes, that's exactly the plan. This is step one. Right now we're just making DC money, which is not a lot. But particle physics isn't all about the Benjamins. It's about the discoveries. It's about those moments when you force the universe to reveal the way it actually. works and the most delicious moments are the ones when we understand the universe is quite

different from how we expected it. Yeah, as you said, science is all about exploration and following ideas and maybe promising directions and sometimes you discover that things don't quite work the way you thought. Sometimes those discoveries are clear and dramatic like when we found the Higgs boson and everybody can see the very persuasive peak in our data. Sometimes though, the discoveries begin with little hints, little things in our data that don't quite make sense. Little clues that maybe some big discovery

is just over the horizon. Yeah, although sometimes it seems like the horizon is getting farther and farther away. I mean, when was the Higgs boson discovered? It was a while now, right? Over 10 years? Yeah, 2012. Wow, time flies.

That was a huge discovery. The whole world got very excited about that. But since then, there haven't been any new big discoveries from the big collider there, right? Yeah, that's right, because research is exploration. We didn't know if there were tons

and tons of new particles waiting for us around the corner or if it was mostly just dust and rubble to be discovered and the new particles are around more and more corners if they even exist that's the joy and disappointment of exploration so how's all that dusted rubble looking dusty and rubly it gets hard to choke it down after a while i'll be honest yeah it's hard to swallow dust and rubble i mean you always prefer to make exciting discoveries when they landed the rovers on Mars, I'm sure they were hoping to find little squishy creatures under some of those rocks, but you know, they've also just found dust and rubble. It doesn't mean we're not going to keep looking. But as you mentioned, science is about exploration. And so right now, even though you've

only found dust and rubble for the last 12 years, there are maybe interesting things that you've discovered or noticed about the universe that maybe give you some excitement about continuing to explore. That's right, because before we make a big discovery, we often have hints that point us in that direction. Before we've discovered how neutrinos can change from one kind into another, we saw weird things in our measurements of neutrinos in the sky. So particle physicists are always on the lookout for the next anomaly, the next discrepancy, the next thing we don't understand, because it might be a hint for the next big discovery. So through the end of the program, we'll be talking the question. What are the most promising particle physics anomalies? Now these

are anomalies, right? Not anemones? An nominees? These are not our enemies either. Yeah. And we're not going to do this anonymously. That's right. Or according to memory. Okay, you push the grammar there too far. I'm not sure what the connection there is. Anomalies, the memories, amomones, Maimonides, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. I think we've finished this pun threat here. The thing about anomalies is that they're indirect. They're just something we don't understand about our data. So explanations could be, wow, something super exciting we're about to discover or it could be oops. Turns out we didn't calibrate things correctly. So what's the picture here? You're sorting through data. You're finding mostly dust and rubble. But sometimes in the dust and rubble, you're like

maybe there's a little bit of rubble here. It looks a little bit different than it should look like. Yeah, exactly. It's a promising sign that maybe there's something exciting there, but you need more data. It's sort of like fuzzy pictures of UFOs. Like, ooh, that would be exciting if it really is a UFO, but the picture's too fuzzy to really know. What you've got to do is get more data, crisper photos, more sensor information, something like that. Oh, boy. Did you just compare particle physics to UFO spotting? Yes, absolutely. Enthusiastically. Is there an area 52? Is there an area 52 for the big large Hadron Collider Conspiracy? I may or may not have signed an NDA prohibiting me from answering that question.

Prohibiting you from having a podcast where you talk about it for hours and hours? Maybe or maybe not. I think the answer. It's probably no. It sounds like no. No comment. The other thing about anomalies is that sometimes they go away. You know, all of our data is statistical. We can never tell from one collision to the next whether there was a new particle or a Higgs boson or just something boring like protons glancing off of each other.

And so all of our data is statistical, which means there are always little random wobbles. Sometimes those random wobbles can look like a new particle or a UFO. And then we gather more data and they just go away. Well, as usually we're wondering how many people out there had thought about particle physics anomalies and what they might mean or which ones are the most promising. Thanks very much to everybody who answers questions

for the audience participation segment of the podcast. We'd love to hear your voice on the pod. Write to me to questions at danielanhorpe.com to sign up. So think about it for a second. What do you think are the most promising particle physics anomalies? Not anemones. Here's what people had to say. I don't think it's possible to have,

have an unexplained result in a particle physics experiment, because the theoretical physicists set it all up and tell the experimental physicists where to find it. So I don't think it's going to be a particle. I'm just wondering if maybe that bit where general relativity doesn't quite fit quantum theory, what if say Isaac Newton was right all along and it is all about gravity

and you've just left gravity out of the formula and the calculations because you don't think it's big enough but what if that proves that Albert Einstein was wrong when he said that Newton was not wrong but limited he rewrote Newton what if Newton gets his revenge and Einstein's wrong

that might make the 9 o'clock news. The only thing that comes to mind is the very high energy cosmic rays that strike the upper atmosphere and result in a shower of particles, some of which reach the ground. And that baseball energy particle is coming from a blazar. I'm not aware of any specific unexplained particle experiment results, but I guess in general terms, The issue for particle physicists to work through there would be, is this unexpected result,

something that can be explained by things that physicists are generally already aware of, or is it something new that they've discovered? Well, I don't know that many experiments, but maybe the penguin diagram, and it has a cool name too. I don't know much about particles experiment results and what might be a real discovery, but if you could find a way to entangle my son's socks in the laundry so that when I find one, I always know where the other one is, that would be really helpful. Thanks, bye. I'm only aware of one unexplained particle result,

and it was something to do with muons, either missing muons or many muons, and either way, I'm hopeful that it spurs a discovery of something smaller or some behavior that we're not expecting, because that always opens up new questions and new avenues for learning. I'm guessing something like dark matter particle or a graviton, something of that nature. Other than that, no idea. Well, I guess that before answering that, I would need to learn what are the unexplained particle experiment results that have been generated. Please walk me through that.

All right. Mostly clear, I've known what you're talking about. That surprised me a little bit because particle physics anomaly. are often in the news, and they're often, like, way overhyped. I get emails from listeners asking me about some news story that says that we're on the brink of a complete revolution in particle physics because of some weird blips somebody saw on their computer screen. I guess it depends where you're getting your news, Daniel.

Is this from the UFO newsletter there? No, you see this stuff covered in pretty mainstream press sometimes. The scientists are excited about their little anomaly, and they tell the PR people, and then by the time it gets to science. dot org, they've transformed it into clickbait. What? It didn't sound like any of our listeners here that recorded their answer, knew of any physics anomalies. So maybe the question should have been, do you know of any particle physics anomalies? We have covered a few on the podcast because there are a few out there,

a few areas where we might be on the verge of discovering something new or it could just go away when we gather more data. All right. Well, let's jump into the subject. Daniel, what do you describe as an anomaly? How do you know if something is anomaly? us. Something is an anomaly if it's a deviation from what we expect. And what we expect usually is disappointment. So we have a theory of particles, the standard model that has a bunch of particles in it and a bunch of forces in it. And we can use that to predict what we would see in experiments. So for example, if we smash protons together, the standard model tells us how often they'll bounce off at this angle, how often they'll bounce off at that angle, how often

they'll make a Z boson or a W boson or a top cork. And we do a bunch of measurements and then compare them to the predictions from our theory. And when things are bang on, that's not anomalous. And when there's any difference there, when what we see in our experiments, collisions or cosmic rays or other kinds of experiments, is different from what the theory predicted, that tells us that maybe there's something new going on. There's something happening in the universe that's not captured by our theory. Well, I guess it's an sort of an interesting dance between theory and experiment. Like, for example, if something is a theory and you expect it to be, why did you expect it to be if you didn't prove it already before? Or is this about extending the

theory to new phenomenon or to new situations? Yeah, exactly. It's about extending the theory. Like the theory may have worked well for all previous experiments, but now we're in new territory. That's what we mean by exploration. When you turn a collider on it, new energies, for example, you're creating conditions you haven't seen before. So maybe your theory is going to break down. Maybe there's a new particle that's going to be revealed that you need to then incorporate into your theory. though maybe there's a new force that's so weak you haven't seen it before but at very high energies it reveals itself that's why we do these experiments hoping to force the universe to tell us how things work i guess that's why in science you just call everything a theory right because you always leave yourself

open to the possibility that your theory is wrong the more you explore the universe or the more different situations you go out there and test yeah exactly the point of the standard model is not to say this is definitive this is how the universe works It's a working project. It describes everything we know so far. It's like our current hypothesis, but we're always hoping to update it. Right, right. And that's why you called it the standard model, unequivocally, the way things are.

That's why you called it that, right? That's what I called it that. Yeah, it was named in a paper that came out a few years before I was born, but I'll totally take the blame for it being called the standard model. Well, you're continuing to use it, that you're complicit. I think I heard you say it also. Are you complicit? Have I said it?

You just called it the standard model, although derisively, of course. I said that's why you call it the standard model. Boom, you said it again. Anyway, it's a standard model, but it's also changed over time, right? We added neutrino masses to the standard model. So there's actually a big argument about what exactly is the standard model, which means it's not exactly standard, but the point is that we have a theory, we're developing it, we're testing it by doing these experiments, either by pushing to,

new energies or by looking out in space or creating conditions we've never explored before. We're hoping that one of those has an anomaly, a discrepancy from our prediction that shows us that there's something new in the universe that we need to describe with our theory. And this generally falls into sort of the different ways that you discover something, not just in science, but in particular in particle physics, you can either look for things directly or indirectly, right? Yeah, the direct way is the most convincing and the most exciting. Like if you can actually create this new particle, so it exists in the universe, in your experiment,

then you can sort of see it. I mean, we never actually see these things very directly, but we can see evidence of it. It was there. It left traces of the particles that decayed into. That's how we discovered the Higgs boson. That's how we discovered the top cork. We have a bunch of episodes about the discovery of each of these particles that tells you the story about how it was seen, how it became convinced that it was there.

Meaning, like, you think that it's there in a particular spot. You go, look for it there in that spot. and then you find it. Yeah. Or we're not sure exactly. We say it's somewhere in this territory and then we look around and we find it within that range. Like the Higgs boson, we didn't know in advance how heavy it would be, how much mass it had. There was a huge range of ideas. So we had to go out and scan that whole range.

But we found it in that range and we were able to measure it. And that's what we call it direct measurement, even though some parts of those measurements, of course, are indirect. So then what is indirect discovery? So the distinction between a direct discovery and indirect. It's a little bit fuzzy because, you know, everything is in the end, indirect. But some measurements are more indirect than others. Like, for example, if you don't have enough energy to actually create the particle to exist in your experiment, but you can still interact with the fields that are out there that could make that particle,

then that's more indirect because you're never actually creating the particle, but the fields themselves can still influence your experiment. Like if your protons interact with those fields and it changes how they behave, then you don't see those fields directly, but you see the influence of the fields on the particles that you are studying. I thought indirect meant like you're not looking for it, but you see some anomaly, which is sort of the topic of our discussion here.

Yeah, that's exactly right. But we use these indirect measurements as a way to like catch some new thing, something we're not looking for. Like very, very precise measurements of the particles we do know can sometimes reveal anomalies, which are clues that there's something out there influencing those particles. So that's why we sometimes make very, very precise measurements of the particles we already know.

know about. So we can look for little deviations that would tell us there's something there we weren't looking for directly. So for example, like we've discovered the Higgs boson and we sort of know where to find it and what it looks like and how it comes out. But maybe if you generate a whole bunch of Higgs bosons at one after the other, maybe in doing that you can discover something weird that happens that you didn't think about before that happens related to the Higgs boson. And that's exactly what we're doing right now. We discovered the Higgs boson 10 years ago. then we've made huge numbers of them piles and piles of Higgs bosons. We've been studying them looking for anomalies,

looking to see if the Higgs boson behaves in any weird new ways. Because if it does, we'll need some other element of our theory to explain that. There'll be a hint that there's something else beyond the Higgs boson for us to discover. Like instead of digging a hole in the field looking for something, you're maybe looking closer at the rock until you discover something that maybe you didn't expect. Yeah, exactly. Or if you're looking for like weird new animals in the forest, just like you suspect maybe Bigfoot is out there.

You don't know how to look for Bigfoot directly, then you can look for other signs. You know, you like look to see if there's any weird scratches on all the trees or if any neighborhood pets are missing. You like make measurements of the things that you can to look for weirdness. Any deviation from the ways trees and pets normally behave

we give you a clue that there's something out there in the forest to discover. Like you would study maybe cats and pay attention to cats. And you think, well, if there's no Bigfoot, then cats should behave this way. And if you find that cats, avoid a certain area of the forest for example or get really skittish if you put on a gorilla suit or something

then you know maybe there's some evidence here or an anomaly that tells you maybe there's a big foot. Exactly and the tricky thing there is that there could be multiple explanations your cats could be scared of you in a gorilla costume because there's a big foot in the forest or just because you look scary in a gorilla costume

so the thing about indirect measurements is that they can give you a hint for lots of new things but also they're frustrated indirectly indirect. Yeah, if only you could just ask the cats, right? All right, well, let's get into what are some famous anomalies that have led to discoveries in science,

and then let's get to the most exciting and promising ones in physics today. We'll dig into that, but first, let's take a quick break. The U.S. Open is here, and on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain, I'm breaking down the players from rising stars to legends chasing his, history. The predictions will we see a first time winner and the pressure? Billy Jean King says pressure is a privilege, you know. Plus, the stories and events off the court and of course the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very fancy, wonderfully experiential sporting event. I mean, listen, the whole aim is to be

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And we've talked about what an anomaly is. Daniel, what are some examples of anomalies and physics that have led to very interesting discoveries? Well, one of the most famous, of course, is the measurement of how galaxies rotate. People thought they understood how galaxy spun and how much mass there was in a galaxy, and they went out there to check to say, hey, are stars rotating at the speeds we expect around the center of galaxies? And it turns out they weren't.

They were rotating much, much faster than people expected. And that was an anomaly. It was a discrepancy from what people predicted and expected. And to explain that, of course, is the whole idea of dark matter. Still to be resolved and understood in detail at the particle level,

but maybe one of the biggest anomalies we've ever seen in physics. And wasn't that done by a grad student or something? like some lowly gratin can assign the task of like, yeah, I just check the galaxy rotation and then that gratitude was like, wait a minute. There's some hints early on in the century from

France Swiki and then Vera Rubin really did the most detailed analysis of galactic rotation curves. So she gets most of the credit, although she was overlooked for the Nobel Prize, of course. What? Not a great track record on the Nobel Prize for assigning credit to women. And

that turned to be a huge discovery, right? I mean, we found that there's five times more dark matter and there's regular matter in the universe. I mean, it's like five times everything that we know about that exists. Yeah, exactly. And this is why we go out and make really precise measurements of things we think we already understand because they can reveal things hiding under the surface, things waiting to be discovered. What's another famous anomaly? Well, people tried to understand how many neutrinos are coming to Earth. So they built a big detector underground to measure the rate of neutrinos. And they compared that to their prediction for how many neutrinos

are being made by the sun and how many should arrive on earth and they discovered they were seeing way fewer neutrinos than they expected and for decades people didn't understand this then it turns out that's because neutrinos can change their type as they fly between the sun in here if electron neutrinos can turn into muon neutrinos and town neutrinos which those detectors were not spotting that was a huge discovery which started from an anomaly and did that person get credit those guys won the Nobel Prize yes old white dudes always get credit Emphasis on the word guys, yeah. Funny how that word.

All right, well, let's pivot now to maybe some of the most current exciting anomalies. What are some of the things that scientists have found and make them go, huh? There's a bunch of stuff going on that we don't understand. There are weird particles we see in cosmic rays from space. There are bizarre things going on with muons and their magnetic moments. There's all sorts of confusion about how the universe is expanding. There's always like five or ten of these things going on. Sometimes they fade away as we get more data.

but some of these have persisted for a few years. Well, to take a deeper dive into this topic of anomalies and audities out there in space, Daniel, you talk to another particle physicist. That's right. I had a lot of fun talking with Harry Cliff. He's a particle physicist who works on a different experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. It's called LHCB, B for studying bottom corks, though he prefers to call them beauty quarks. And he just came out with a new book called Space Audities, which is a really accessible and fun tour through some of these anomalies in particle physics. Isn't that the title of like a David Bowie song or something? Not an expert, but I hope he's publishing house cleared the rights.

Yeah. Otherwise, you're going to have an anomalous lawsuit there. All right, well, here is Daniels' conversation with particle physicists, Harry Cliff. Okay, so then it's my great pleasure to welcome to the podcast, Dr. Harry Cliff. He's a colleague of mine and also the author of the new book Space Oddities, an excellent and fun exploration of a bunch of really weird stuff we see in particle physics right now. Harry, thanks very much for joining us today. Well, thanks for having on the podcast.

Yeah, well, I really enjoyed reading your book. I love thinking about all the weird stuff that we're seeing and all the funky stuff on the horizons of the frontiers of physics and the things that might lead to the next big breakthrough. Tell me what exactly inspired you to write this book right now. The idea really came out of my own research. So I work like you on the Large Hadron Collider, this big particle accelerator outside Geneva.

So I work on an experiment called LHCB, which is one of the four main detectors based around the ring. And the B and LHCB stands for Beauty, which is the name of one of the quarks, so these six fundamental particles, two of which make up nuclear material in ordinary atoms. And the B quark is the heaviest negatively charged quark.

It's the fifth heaviest overall. So it's quite an exotic thing. Let me just interrupt you to orient our listeners because on the podcast, we often refer to this as the bottom quark, but you're calling it the beauty quark. Is that just because you don't like saying the word bottom in your research? I think, so the history of this is that when the B and the T quarks were proposed, there were some people that tried to call them beauty and truth.

And I think this was sort of to mirror charm and strange, which are the two second generation quarks. But physicists, I think broadly decided that was a bit too poetic, so they plumped for the more prosaic top and bottom. So most physicists call them top and bottom. But there's this weird thing in what we call flavor physics that we prefer to be known as beauty physicist and bottom physicists. So for us, it's beauty. But yeah, most other physicists call it the bottom quark, but they are the same thing.

Right, because I did my PhD on the top quark, and we had no issues calling ourselves top quark physicists or top physicists. But I can see how bottom physicists doesn't. Slightly less positive, yeah. Anyway, so you were working on the beauty quarks, and you saw some weird stuff. Tell us. Yeah, so these quarks are really interesting to study because they're very heavy. they can decay to a very wide range of different standard model particles. So when they're created, they live for a really tiny fraction of a second,

about one and a half trillions of a second. That's long enough for them to fly a little distance in your detector because they're going at the speed of light, and then they decay. And there are certain very rare decay modes of these quarks. So basically that means that, let's say you had a million of these beauty quarks created in your experiment. Only around one of them would decay in one of these very rare ways. And these rare decays are very interesting because basically,

in our current theory of particle physics, the way these decays happen involves lots of complicated interactions of heavy particles, which makes them very suppressed. But if there is, say, a new force of nature that exists, which may be very weak, it can actually contribute to this decay process, and it can alter the measured properties of these decay. So it might change, for example, how often the decays happen. It might change the angles, the particles that come out of these beauty cork decays emerge at. So the basic game we play is you make very, very precise measurements of these beauty quark decays. You compare them to hopefully a precise theoretical prediction using the standard model of particle physics. And if you see a difference,

that can be an indirect clue that something new, something beyond our current understanding is altering these decays. And that kind of gives you an inkling to the existence of, say, a new force or some new heavy particle that we haven't seen before. So that's the sort of general, the game we play LHB, broadly speaking. And for the last 10 years, starting in about 2014, we've been seeing these anomalies in these very rare decays. So basically, measurements that weren't lining up with the prediction of the standard model. And in some cases, these were how often these decays was happening was different from what was predicted. Sometimes it was the angles. And what was intriguing about this is over time, more and more of these anomalies emerged. And they seemed to paint a

coherent picture. So it looked like these were all coming from some new fundamental interactions. So the most common explanations involved, broadly speaking, some kind of new force. And that got theorists very, very excited. And there was a lot of theoretical work pursuing this, and then a lot of experimental work. So I kind of came into this area, I suppose, about a year after this picture started to emerge in 2015 and spent several years of my career making other measurements that might give us some more clues as to what was going on. So that was really how I got interested in the whole subject of anomalies. And the way that anomalies can sometimes lead us to a big breakthrough in our understanding of the

universe and that's what the book Space Odyssey is about. It's essentially about, you know, how have anomalies shaped physics and cosmology through history and focusing on five particularly big anomalies that have been doing the rounds in physics and cosmology in the last decade or so. And when you're working on an anomaly of that, when you see something you don't understand, tell us about what that's like. I mean, you're on the forefront of knowledge. You're like potentially standing, you know, one step away from some big revolution in our understanding. When you were working on that, you had that sense of like, this could be historic. You know, that we could be writing books about these discoveries in 20 years. We could be telling

people about them. You know, the way I think like we pour over Einstein's notebooks now and sort of stand over his shoulder. I wonder for the people making discoveries if they sort of like feel like the ghosts of the future paying attention to the sandwich they had that day in the Smithsonian, you know, like was there that moment of excitement for you when you're working on this and you didn't yet know how it came out? Because across the ring, we were all very excited. We were like waiting with bated breath to see if this was real. Yeah, I mean, there were several moments that were really exciting. There was one in Mark 2021 when some of my colleagues who are working on one of these anomalies updated their measurement

with using all the data that we'd recorded at LHCB up to that point. And I wasn't directly involved in the analysis, but I was a sort of inside observer, I suppose, watching this whole process. And there was this really exciting moment where they, what you call, unblinded their data. So this is common practice in physics nowadays, which is that you perform your analysis blind in the sense that you can't look at the result until you've completely fixed your analysis procedure, you've done all your systematic studies.

Basically, all that remains in the paper is essentially to put in the answer at the end. And the idea of doing this is you prevent yourself from biasing yourself or massaging the results one way or another, subconsciously or consciously. As a result of this, you have this moment where the result gets unscrambled and you see for the first time,

you know, what is actually happening here. And when that result was revealed, in March 21, this anomaly had grown beyond this slightly arbitrary threshold, known as three sigma, which is essentially where the experimental measurement is more than three standard deviations or three uncertainties away from your theory prediction. And that is, for some reason, conventionally in physics, regarded as evidence. So at this point, there's a sort of one in a few hundred chance that this would be a sort of random statistical fluke. It starts to look more convincing, more compelling as a real sign of new physics. So that was a really exciting moment.

And you had this sense, particularly that period in early 21, you had this result from LHCB, and then about a month later, another anomaly was confirmed by an experiment at Fermilab, who were looking at the magnetism of a particle called a muon. And that again, sort of perhaps was interpreted as being evidence of some new force. So you had these kind of compiling results that were sort of suggesting that we were on the brink of something really exciting. And Personally, I mean, my moment came a little bit later and, you know, all these measurements are sort of small contributions to an overall picture. There isn't like one moment where you go. You know, we've discovered something. And while I was working on a set of measurements with a student, they were less sensitive than the big one that came out in March. But nonetheless, it was sort of, we had this moment where we were on. This was during sort of COVID times. We weren't together. We were on Zoom. We unblinded our measurements. And again, our measurements lined up with the anomalies that everyone else had been seeing. So there was a real sense then of like, wow, you know, maybe there's something really going on here. So yeah, it was. was a very exciting time. And you did feel like you were in amongst a process that could turn into something really big. Yeah, and this is sort of like the joy and the frustration of some

of these precision measurements, right? You're looking for something weird, something different, something that's not predicted by your theory. And you're sensitive to a whole broad range of stuff. But because you're sensitive to a whole broad range of stuff, it could be anything, right? It could be new particles. It could be new forces. It could also be like, wow, your cable wasn't plugged in correctly. And so that's, you know, as you say in your book, the unglamorous work of measuring some quantity or another to increasing number of decimal places can seem like a nerdy obsession. But this is also the kind of work that can really lead to exciting discoveries. Yeah, it can. But you always have to be really careful. And I think more often than not,

when you get an anomaly like this, I mean, there's usually sort of boring explanations for an anomaly. It's usually that it's a statistical wobble, you know, just basically bad luck in the data. And we saw that at the LHC about 10 years ago when there was this famous bump that was seen about both Atlas and CMS. People interpreted as evidence for some new particle outside the standard model and it was this crazy period. I think it was announced just before Christmas 2015 and by Christmas there were already something like 200 papers that had been published by theorists trying to explain what this little bump in a graph was and lo and behold, you know, six months later when more data was added, this bump just had melted away and it was just basically

neither experimented done anything wrong. It was just a statistical wobble and these things come and go. So that's one explanation. Sometimes it's, as you say, it's a cable that's not plugged in properly. So some kind of experimental mistake that you just didn't realize was there.

And sometimes actually it's also the theoretical prediction may not be totally solid. And this is maybe a sort of idea that's hard to get your head around because you kind of think, well, if you have a theory surely, you can just work out what the consequences of it are,

but that's not necessarily the case. Sometimes it's particularly in particle physics when you're dealing with the theory of quarks and gluons, particularly, which are very important at the Large Hadron Collider, those kinds of effects are very hard to calculate. So you might have a prediction for what you expect to see, but that prediction comes with its own set of uncertainties and assumptions that could bias it. So you kind of have to eliminate all three of those possibilities before you can say, well, this is really the sign of something genuinely new. All right. So finding oddities in

our data is a good way to make discoveries and also maybe just to find our own mistakes. And in the book, you highlight a few of them. Let's dig into the first one, which has to do with one of my favorite and craziest experiments, a balloon experiment looking for stuff from space. Tell us about the Anita experiment and what it saw. So Anita is a really cool experiment. Essentially what it is, it's this giant radio antenna. So it looks a bit like a huge tannoy system with all these white gleaming horns that stick off it. And it's launched into the Antarctic Stratosphere on a huge NASA balloon. So this is this incredible thing which is made of gossamer thin polyethylene filled with helium. And when it gets up to its full altitude up in the stratosphere, it's the size of a football

stadium. So this vast kind of, you know, translucent orb underneath which hangs on a little cable this radio antenna. And what Anita is looking for is radio signals coming out from the Antarctic ice sheet. And essentially the reason they're doing this is they're using Antarctica effectively as a giant detector. They're looking for, particularly Anita's looking for high-energy neutrinos. So these are neutrinos that are produced by really violent extreme objects out there in the distant parts of the cosmos. They come in, they hit the Antarctic ice, and when they hit the ice, they convert into electrically charged particles. That creates a wave of radio signal that comes up out of the ice. And then by detecting these radio blasts, you can then essentially infer

how energetic this neutrino was and sometimes also what direction it has. So essentially it's a way of looking for these really, really high-engine neutrinos using Antarctica as a giant detector. I love the ingenuity of these experiments. So like, we need a mile cube of ice. You can't build that, but let's just go like find it out there and take advantage of it. To me, this is like part of the real, you know, experimental cleverness of this field. People sometimes, I think, imagine that the theorists are the only ones being creative. But, you know, it takes real creativity and ingenuity to come up with these ways to force the universe to reveal something to you. to you. I love these experiments. And I'm also terrified and in awe of people who build their

detector and then send it up on a balloon, hoping that it works and it comes back and they get data from it. Like, oh my gosh, how terrifying. Yeah, I mean, I spoke to the scientists who work on Anita and, you know, the environment they're working out there in Antarctica is also really strange. They're at this place called McMurdo, which is a U.S. research base on the edge of the Antarctic continent, just on the edge of the ice sheet. And they're working in these pretty difficult conditions. You're out there at the balloon station. in very low temperatures working in this hangar and then there's this moment where you take

your instrument out onto the ice and it's attached to the balloon and you're kind of watching with baited breath is it all going to go off? Is it going to switch on in these very low temperatures? Like there's always a danger that your computer just doesn't boot up. And then this thing is launched into the air

and then they describe watching their sort of radio antenna getting smaller and small and disappearing and they're sort of vanishing into the distance and communicating with it while it was still within line of sight to check it's all working. So you're out there in this environment for a whole month. So you're really dedicating. It's not a job where you just go to the office and come home.

You're really, like, immersed in this place for a long period of time. And you're away from your friends and family. So it's also, I think, the lengths that people go to to find out about the universe is really impressive. Yeah. Every tiny little piece of knowledge you read about on your phone for, like, four seconds, it's like somebody dedicating their life to figuring out, like, why spiders, you know, live in these little nests in the rainforests or how high-energy neutrinos make it through the ice. So in this case, Anita is looking, you're saying,

for super high energy neutrinos hitting the ice and then the radio waves bouncing back up into the atmosphere for us to record. And so what did they see that was weird? So they didn't see the neutrinos they were hoping to see, but what they did see were high

energy cosmic rays. So these are essentially electrically charged particles like protons or heavy nuclei that come in and hit the ice and they will also produce these sort of radio signals. But what was weird was that in amongst all the cosmic ray signals that they saw, they saw two that appeared to have come from below. In other words, these look like particles

that had come from underneath the Antarctic ice sheet and burst up into the atmosphere. And such a thing should not be possible because when you have very high energy particles, they would only be able to travel a very short distance through the earth before being absorbed by the rock or the solid interior of the earth. So essentially, they had these two events where you had these upward going very high energy particles. And there was no particle that we know about. that could produce such an effect. Why couldn't it be a neutrino? We're always hearing the neutrinos

can pass through a light year of lead without issue. Why can't they pass through the earth and then interact in the ice? Basically because neutrinos are very weakly interacting. And the reason for that is they only interact with ordinary matter through the weak force. Now, the reason the weak force is weak is because the particle that communicates the weak force,

which is the, well, the W and the Z bosons, they're very heavy. So they have a mass of between 80 and 90 GEV. So that's sort of about 100 times the mass of the proton. So they're very heavy particles. And as a result, essentially the heaviness of those particles is what makes the weak force weak, because it's impossible for a low energy neutrino to actually create a real, what we call a real W or Z boson.

Instead, it has to sort of basically send a little bit of energy through the W&Z fields, but it's off resonance and it's all a bit of a mess. And so as a result, that force is very short-range and very weak. But when you have a really high energy neutrino of the type that Anita is looking for, these are so energetic when they collide with stuff in the physical material of the earth they can create a real w and z boson they have enough energy to make a real particle so the weak force stops being weak and it becomes strong for a low energy neutrino the earth is like this transparent thing which they just go straight through for a high energy neutrino though it's a solid

object and they can't get through it so not even a neutrino could explain this kind of weird signal that Anita had been seeing so we saw these weird signals that look like they're coming through the earth. What could these things be? You get an anomaly like this and then theorists go to town and they come up with all kinds of explanations. There were various ideas that went around. One was that this was an exotic type of neutrino, something called a sterile neutrino. So sterile neutrinos appear in quite a lot of extensions of the standard model. They're essentially even more antisocial neutrinos. So the neutrinos that don't even interact through the weak force. So they're essentially totally decoupled from ordinary matter. The only way they can interact is gravitationally.

But in some theories, these sterile neutrinos can mix with the ordinary neutrinos. So essentially what happens is you imagine one of these sterile neutrinos it goes through the earth with lots of energy, but because it's a sterile, it can just go straight through the earth, that's fine. And then just by chance, when it gets close to the surface, it oscillates and converts into a normal neutrino. And then suddenly it sees the ice and it crashes into it, creates this radio burst. So it sort of gets through the earth kind of disguised in this invisible form and then turns into something visible just by luck when it gets to the surface. So that was one possibility. Another possibility is that it was some sort of super symmetric particle traveling through the earth.

Other ideas that there was dark matter that was accumulating inside the earth and annihilating and producing various exotic particles. One of the most crazy ideas, well, crazy sounding, was this. There was actually evidence of a universe made of antimatter where time goes backwards, which comes from a theory. There was an attempt to sort of solve various cosmological problems, essentially, to do with the Big Bang where at the Big Bang there's two universes produced, one made of

matter which goes forward in time and one made of antimatter that goes backward in time. So, I mean, all kinds of explanations for these things. There's also the mundane explanation. So one group of theorists suggested that actually maybe what you're seeing here is not new physics, but effectively ice formations

that are interfering with your measurement. So the way you tell the direction the particles come in is essentially you get this radio burst that's like a kind of wiggly line on an oscilloscope, it looks a bit like that. And from the phase of that signal, so whether it kind of goes up, then down,

or it goes down, then up, you can tell whether it came directly from the ice or whether it was reflected. So the particles that come from above, their radio signals are reflected back up. The ones from below, they have this unreflected profile. But people suggested, well, maybe there are these subsurface features in the ice, so like subglacial lakes or layers of compacted snow

that could create multiple reflections that would make something look like it came from below. when actually it had some kind of complicated bouncing around in the ice before it came back up again. So they proposed, well, what we actually need to do is a survey of Antarctica and look for new sub-ice features that could explain this signal. Now, the experiment said, well, actually, where we saw these two events, there's no evidence for interesting features underneath the ice, so we don't think that's an explanation. So we don't know whether it's exciting new physics or whether it is just something to do with ice. And so help us understand why it's so hard to tell these various explanations apart. I mean, they sound like totally different stories about what's happening.

Is it just because we have such limited information? We don't have like the ice completely instrumented. We don't have like a picture of this interaction. I think people are probably used to imagining their minds, particle experiments leading to these spectacular traces where you have all these particles that you can sort of see what happened. Or do we have just less information about this? Why can't we look at this and say, oh, here's what it is and here's what it isn't?

Well, I mean, essentially all that Anita sees is this radio signal. It's essentially hearing this. radio chirrup with a particular profile and you have to then work out what you've seen based on that and there are various bits of information you know the shape of the profile whether it's inverted or not inverted that tells you whether it's reflected or not reflected but you don't have any other information so you don't have a track you don't have you know images of particle interaction so you're really just going off a relatively small amount of information and there's many ways that you can produce that signal that you know in terms of all the new physics

explanations. Ultimately, what they boil down to is at some point in charge particle gets produced that interacts with the ice. So actually, whether it's a sterile neutrino, whether it's dark matter, whether it's an antimatter universe, they would all basically look the same. You wouldn't be able to turn the part. You would then need other experiments to go out and look for. Well, okay, if it's the sterile neutrino, we would expect to see this in other places. So let's go and look for it there. So this would only be one clue. It's like you've seen, you know, one footprint in the mud in the jungle when you're hunting for an animal. You don't necessarily know what animal it came from just from this one depression in the soil.

You've got to get more evidence. So it would be a clue but not convincing or not. It wouldn't tell you ultimately what caused it necessarily. Personally, I find it kind of frustrating that we're doing particle physics in an era where a single observation can't make a discovery. You say it's like seeing a footprint or a tuft of hair or something you haven't identified the actual animal. And I think back on the days, you know, like when the positron was discovered or, you know, cosmic rays or, you know, the neutral current or whatever, where they saw something weird in their data, and it was obvious that it was something new,

that there was no other explanation other than a new particle. Why can't we do that anymore? Are we just past the days of single event discovery because our experiments are so complex and our data are so indirect? Or do you think that's still something we could do? I mean, if you go back to the positron discovery, that's a great story because, you know,

you have Carl Anderson with his cloud chamber, and he sees this one track going through his cloud chamber, which is bending the wrong ways. So it looks like a positively charged electron. And on the basis of this one photograph that he's taken of one track, he discovers antimatter. I know. One day's experiment, one photograph, one Nobel Prize. It's a great ratio.

I suspect he probably did a few more days experimenting than just the one photo. But, yeah, I mean, relatively speaking. But I think the reason that was accepted quite quickly is because it was expected. Dirac had predicted the existence of the positron based on theory. So people were primed to see this thing. So I think that's partly why it was accepted, but also, you know, with this one image there was no other way of explaining this how do you get a positively charged track that looks like an electron well there's nothing that can do that and he had ways of knowing that

it wasn't an electron going the opposite direction for example and tricking you so when there are no other explanations i think you can make a discovery based on a single measurement so often though i think nowadays in particle physics we're looking for really subtle effects and you're often talking about if we go back to the lhc and the beauty quark anomalies you're measuring some quantity to end decimal places and trying to compare it with your theory. And that measurement is kind of fraught with all kinds of potential systematic effects that you have to take into account. It's so rare that you just have this kind of thing that appears and it's, oh my God, you know, that must be a new particle. I suppose, you know, the closest we came recently was the discovery of the Higgs boson,

but that still required two years of data taking and then you see a bump. But at that point when you saw the bump, again, because the Higgs was expected, people are pretty ready to say, Okay, even at the time, they didn't say this is a Higgs boson, but, you know, it's a Higgs-like particle and, you know, gradually build more evidence. But even in that case, there's no event you can look at and say, okay, this proves to me there's the Higgs. Each one, like, could be Higgs or could be background. They're all sitting on top of a huge background spectrum. And so in the end, it's all statistical and indirect, right?

There's no, like, hey, look, we found it. Let's buy our ticket to Sweden. Yeah. Which is frustrating. But, you know, it also gives us power to discover all sorts of other stuff. I suppose actually the counter example, thinking about it, is gravitational wave discovery in 2015. So that was one event, albeit they had to extract it from, you know, their data using these the template techniques and all the rest of it. But that was one signal and they were prepared

to say, we've discovered gravitational waves on the basis of one interaction. That wasn't sort of, you know, having to sample vast numbers of, you know, things. So this does still happen. All right. That's inspiring. Again, I guess that that's helped by the fact that, you again, you expected to see them. So you kind of knew what you should see and you. then you see the thing you expect and you go, yes, okay, that's what that is. That's gravitational waves. All right, well, that's really exciting. And I hope that what they have found in the ice in Antarctica is something new and weird and not just new layers of ice down there in Antarctica. I want to dig into some more of these anomalies, but first we have to take a quick

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AXS.com Get your tickets today AXS.com Okay, we're back and I'm talking to Dr. Harry Cliff about his fun new book, Space Audities, which tells us all about weird things that we are seeing in particle physics experiments that could be the hint of something new. Tell us about the muon G minus 2 experiment and what they are seeing. So yeah, muon G minus 2 is a very impressive experiment. So essentially what they're trying to measure is how magnetic an exotic particle called a muon is. So a muon is essentially

a heavy version of the electron. It's got a negative charge. It's about 200 times more massive than an electron. And they're quite unstable. They only live for a millionth of a second or so before they decay into neutrinos and an electron usually. Now, the reason that measuring the magnetism of the muon is interesting is that it's sensitive to the existence of new quantum fields in the vacuum that we haven't seen before. So to sort of introduce the other quantum field for people who aren't familiar, in particle physics, actually we don't think of particles

as being the fundamental ingredients of the universe. We actually think of particles as being manifestations of something more fundamental, which are these quantum fields that permeate all of space. So, for example, like an electron, we actually think of an electron as a little vibration in something called the electron field that fills the whole universe.

And that means that if you take a little bit of empty space, and you know you look at it really hard what you see is actually it's not empty even when you get rid of all the particles there are these fields that are still there and we know about 17 of them at the moment there's you know the quarks the leptons the Higgs boson and the force particles

glue on some photons and so on so these fields are always there and there are certain properties of particles that are particularly sensitive to what is sitting around them in the vacuum so essentially you think about a muon you have your muon it's sitting in the vacuum it actually interacts with

all these quantum fields that are sitting there all the time. And what you actually measure is not the magnetism of the muon on its on its own, but the magnetism of the muon plus all its interactions with these 17 quantum fields. And they can be really quite complicated, these sort of interactions back and forth between each other. I think that's really helpful the way you're putting it. We're measuring these properties of the particles, but really they're showing us the interactions of the fields.

Like even the mass of the muon is that way, right? The muon itself doesn't have a mass. It's the interaction of the muon and the Higgs field, the changes how the muon field oscillates and the sort of standing waves of its vibrations and we measure that as the mass of the muon but it tells us about the Higgs field and so you're saying measuring the magnetic moment

of the muon also tells us about the other fields that could be out there. So it's a great example of this like indirect probe of all the stuff we might not know about. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so the muons magnetism was sort of measured back in the 90s, but then in 2000 there was an experiment at Brookhaven near New York

where they measured the muon's magnetism and it came out at 3-Sigma away from the predictions of the standard model. So you had this tantalizing anomaly that seemed to be evidence that there was something else in the vacuum, something beyond the standard model that was altering its magnetism. So this could be the clue to something really new and exciting. The problem was that the experiment shut down, wasn't taking any more data.

So how do you kind of resolve this mystery? Is it really new physics or is it, you know, something else or statistical effect, what have you? So some of the people who worked on that original Brookhaven experiment decided they were going to build a new and improved version of this muon G-minus-2 experiment and this involved essentially rebuilding

the entire thing from scratch at Fermilab near Chicago but I mean in terms of the lengths they go to the only bit of the old experiment they recycled was this superconducting magnetic ring so essentially the way the experiment works is you fire muons into this magnetic ring they go around the ring

and as they go through this magnetic field their magnetic moment processes that kind of wobbles about in the magnetic field when the new ones decay you can essentially measure the speed of the wobble depending on how much energy the particles that are produced come out at you get this kind of wiggle plot essentially but this big ring it's like you know 30 meters across very expensive they couldn't afford to get new one from scratch so they had this whole thing shipped from long island down the atlantic coastline around Florida through hurricane

alley up the Mississippi River and then over then close loads of freeways to get this huge thing to vermilab so it's insane kind of like lents that people go to again. So this whole process took, you know, a decade. They bring the new ring to Fermilab. They install it. They rebuild the entire experiment from scratch, taking real, incredible care to measure every effect down to the sort of nth decimal place, characterize their magnetic field beautifully. And then in 2021, they announced their first measurement of the mule magnetism. And again, there's this dramatic moment where they unblind their results. And the big question is, is this thing going to land on top of the old measurement and confirm the anomaly, or is it going

land on top of the theoretical prediction. And what happens is it lands bang on top of the Brookhaven results. So this confirms the anomaly. It grows to over 4 sigma and it's potentially really, really exciting. It looks like this is evidence for new physics. But so often with these anomaly stories, there's a sting in the tale, which is that this case, the very same day that the new experiment published their result, a group of theorists produced a new prediction of the magnetism of the new one. and this prediction came out much closer to the experimental measurement. So essentially you had these two predictions, one that was performed by this big consortium of over 100 theorists working together,

and then this new technique using something technically called lattice QCD using big supercomputers. And so you have these two rival ways of predicting theoretically the same thing that were giving different answers. And in one case, there's a whacking great anomaly in new physics. In the other case, there's not much to see, essentially. This is another example of what you were talking about earlier, how it can be actually hard to know what our theory predicts.

Just because we have a theory doesn't mean we know exactly how it predicts and experiments result will turn out, right? So here we have two different groups using the same theory but getting different predictions, right? Because the calculations themselves are so hard to do. Yeah, that's right. And in this case, it all comes down to, again, quarks and gluons, which are real pain in the ass, basically, quarks and gluons.

Because the theory that describes them is very, very, very difficult to make calculations with, the theory of what called quantum chromodynamics. So we said that the nuance magnetism is affected by everything that's in the vacuum, where there are quarks and gluon fields in the vacuum. They affect the magnetism, and it's been very difficult historically to calculate this term. So the way it was done earlier, previously,

was essentially to use experimental data where you have colliders that fire electrons and anti-electrons, electrons and positrons at each other, and then they produce particles made of quarks and gluons. And you can take this collider data, And you can essentially say, well, an electron annihilating to make quarks and gluons is basically the same as a muon interacting with clarks and gluons. You just kind of flip the process on its side effectively.

So you can take this data and then you can use a recipe to translate it into a prediction for the effect of quarks and gluons on the muon. And that was how it was done. And this gave you this four sigma anomaly. That's very clever. That's like saying we don't know how to do this calculation, but we can make the universe do this calculation and then extract that information and insert it into our calculation, sort of like using the universe as a computer.

That's pretty awesome. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just take it from nature. That was sort of an accepted, you know, very thoroughly tested method. But this new approach was using this technique called lattice QCD, which I'm not going to pretend to understand, but it's basically a way of calculating these sorts of effects from first principles using the equations of the strong interaction, where you break space and time up into this lattice of points, and you solve the equations on these lattice points, and you get your

prediction and they sort of made a breakthrough in this method and how to sort of apply it to the case of the muon and came up with a new calculation of this extra term in the calculation and this shifted the result basically towards the experimental measurement and so the big debate now is which of these two methods is right you know is it the experimentally driven one or is it the theoretically driven one to put it in broad terms and that is still unresolved we don't know yet which is right the big sort of drama in this story now is basically theorists having to sort of duke it out and figure out what's the right way of doing this and hopefully eventually get to a point

where both of these methods converge on the same answer and we can kind of agree how magnetic muons really ought to be. This is very frustrating for an experimentalist because I feel like we've done our job. We force the universe to reveal the answer here and we just need to know what it's supposed to be, right? And the theories can't get their house in order and figure out what we were supposed to have measured in this experiment.

It's like, you know, get it together, folks. But in this scenario, is there something we expect? You were saying, this is a great way to probe other fields. What other kind of fields might be out there that could be giving this effect? Is this the kind of thing that's predicted by various theories? With any anomaly, there are quite a lot of potential explanations on the market. So some involve supersymmetry, which is something that we've been looking for at the LHC for the last decade and have so far found no evidence for.

but, you know, so supersymmetry, super symmetric particles interacting essentially with the muon in the vacuum could produce an effect like this. Another possible, a popular set of explanations involves what are known as dark forces, which sounds rather sinister, but these are essentially the idea that dark matter may not just be one particle. Like, you know, it's often assumed it's like it's a wimp or it's an axon, but perhaps dark matter as a sector is quite rich. and there are more than, just as in the atomic sector, there are multiple particles interacting with forces. Maybe the dark sector involves multiple particles with its own set of forces. So there is one idea is this is actually evidence

of some kind of dark force field that allows dark matter particles to interact with each other that's subtly, again, altering the way that the muon behaves. So the honest answer is we don't know which of these is right yet. But again, this would be a clue. So if this anomaly was confirmed and the theorists agree on some calculation that gives this anomaly some high significance,

you would then know for pretty well certain there is something new out there to find. And you can make various arguments to say, well, the new one has this certain mass, so we kind of know the energy scale that the new physics ought to show up at. So it kind of gives experiments like the LHC a target, we might expect, you know,

say find a new particle in the GEV range, for example, and then you go and search for particular signatures. So it wouldn't be the discovery of, a particular new particle but it would tell you there is a new particle there to be found and that would drive an experimental ever to actually figure out what this thing is do you think it's important that we have a theoretical idea for what we're looking for before we discover it uh you said something in your book which struck me you said quote finding ourselves an unknown territory without a theoretical map to guide us has bewildered and disheartened many personally i feel like

personally i don't feel disheartened by not having a theoretical map i feel excited i'm like Ooh, let's go out and explore this territory because my personal scientific fantasy is to find something unexpected, something that makes people go, what? That's impossible. You know, because those are the moments that unravel everything we thought we understand about the universe. You know, the photoelectric effect, the black body spectrum, this kind of stuff. Why do you feel like people are bewildered or disheartened by not having theoretical guidance, not having like tips for where to go look and what we might see? I mean personally I agree with you so I think actually this moment is really exciting the idea that we're exploring the universe as we find it empirically observationally that's a great place to be and I would love like you to see something new and unexpected that no one had predicted because that's where you make the biggest progress but I think it's fair to say that if you went back 15 years before the large Hadron Collider there was this great sense of anticipation in terms of what we were going to find and there were these very clearly defined targets for what people were going to look for and great optimism that some of them would talk show up so the higgs was one of them and that did obligingly show up for us but there was a good reason to think it would because of all the success of the standard model for decades beforehand but then things like supersymmetry or extra dimensions of space there was a lot of work going into and lots of predictions and lots of experimental searches and none of them turned up so i think that did leave people who had invested a lot of time and effort into exploring those ideas feeling pretty dispirited

but it sort of depends which angle you're coming at it from i think and it is a sort of change that i think looking at the history of particle physics, particularly, there has been a change in the last 10 years. I think it's probably the biggest impact in a way of the LHC is a sort of a shift from this theoretically led era back into one that is experimentally driven. If you went back to the middle of the 20th century, that was a period where particle physics was really experimentally driven.

You had all these particles appearing in cloud chambers and bubble chambers and collider experiments that no one really knew what was going on or understood. And that forced a theoretical effort to sort of make sense of this crazy zoo of particles. and out of that comes the quark model and then later the standard model. But since the standard model was established in the 70s, I think it's fair to say, broadly speaking,

most of the story of particle physics has been a series of confirmations of predictions of the standard model. It's the great triumph of what Weinberg and Glashow and others did, which they predicted the existence of the WNZ bosons. They were found in the 80s. The Higgs boson was found in 2012.

The other quarks that were sort of predicted were discovered. So it was really a series of like, yep, tick, tick, tick. and now in 2012 we tick the larks box and now we're like okay there isn't a guide anymore we filled in all the boxes but we know there's more out there but we don't necessarily know where to go next there's been an adjustment that people have gone through

in shifting from that era where you sort of knew what you were looking for and you expected to find it to one where you don't really know anymore what you're looking for and you're just going out and exploring and trying to design experiments and searches that are broad enough that they can capture even the things that you didn't necessarily predict ahead of time Yeah, I feel like there's sort of a pendulum that swings between, you know, philosophy and botany. And in the philosophical areas, it's like, you know, we know how this all works and we can predict it and we know what you should do and how to look for it. And then we swing into the botany area where we're like, well, we have no idea what's going on.

We're just taking data and describing all the weird stuff that we're seeing out there in the universe. And I feel like mostly we've been in the philosophy era. And it's exciting to me to swing into the botany area where, you know, as you say, experimentalists are on the forefront and we can go out and discuss. weird new stuff that nobody understands. To me, that's really exciting. Talk about botany. I mean, just as historical aside, the same reaction came in the 30s when things like the muon and the hadrons were being discovered

where people like Fermi said, all these new particles appearing, people were quite dismayed by it because they were like, it didn't fit into this neat theoretical picture. And I think it was Fermi who said, you know, if I could remember the name of all these particles, I would have been a botanist. So it's not the first time. He says that dismissively, but to me that's very exciting.

So tell me how excited are people on the ground. I mean, you've done a great job of laying out these anomalies in your book and also giving us the caveats, not overselling it. But, you know, the people working on this stuff who are really seeing the details, are they excited? Are they betting that this is new physics or are they skeptical and jaded from all the anomalies that have come and gone? I think it depends on who you speak to.

I mean, I think broadly speaking, I think it's fair to say that experimentalists tend to be more cautious. I don't know if jaded is the right word. but certainly more cautious. And theorists are a bit more enthusiastic. And, you know, a new anomaly turns up and they're like, amazing, great. And they kind of write loads of papers about what could explain this thing. And there's nothing wrong with that.

I think that's sort of two different approaches to the same thing. And I think, you know, as experimentalists, you do have to be more cautious because you're claiming to, you know, measure what nature is actually doing. And you don't want to be biasing your results based on some presupposition of what you're expecting to see. Whereas in theory, you know, you come up with an explanation. There's no harm done really. I mean, if it doesn't turn out to be true, that's. that's sort of fine but it depends on the anomaly it depends on who you talk to but like with muon g

minus two i think if you speak to lattice QCD theorists they will say well there's nothing to see here because it's you know the lattice says that there's no anomaly if you speak to other theorists who worked on the other method they'll tell you oh no this method's solid and there's new physics so i think it really depends where you're coming from i think the one anomaly in the book that i found the most compelling and where i think a lot of the The field also believes this is something is actually not a particle physics anomaly, but one in cosmology, which is an anomaly called the Hubble Tension, which is essentially there's disagreement over how fast the universe is expanding or ought to be expanding. So you have these two methods of measuring this, one which involves looking at stuff we can see in the sky, so galaxies measuring their distances and their speeds, and then you measure the expansion rate of the universe from that data. another way that involves

looking at the light from the Big Bang determining the properties of the early universe and then using the standard of cosmological model to run the clock forward and predict from that early data what the expansion rate should be now and these two numbers do not agree with each other by over 5 Sigma now

so this is a pretty gold-plated anomaly and at least it would be in particle physics terms but in that case there's been this long argument for a decade now about what is going on and lots of people trying to find stakes in how we measure distances, for example, in the local universe or drilling into the cosmic microwave background data that's used for this prediction. And after a decade of,

you know, scouring the data and multiple different ways of measuring the same things, no one's found a problem. Really, nothing that can explain the size of the anomaly that you're seeing. So I think more and more of the field is now coalescing around the belief that this is actually genuinely something profound that we don't understand. The difficulty there, I think, and this comes back to the point we were talking about earlier is there isn't any ready-made theoretical explanation

for what's causing this. There are sort of various things that can help relieve the tension a bit but none of them solve it. So it's not like there's one sort of new thing where you say, oh, it's dark energy like you had with the accelerating universe in the 90s.

It looks like to explain this thing, you need new physics, multiple different periods in the universe's history of different types. And I think that makes people uncomfortable because this principle of Occam's Razor, If you see something new, there should be some really simple explanation that just, oh, right, yeah, yeah, that's the answer.

Whereas in this case, it seems very difficult to do that. And I think it's meant that it's taken time for this anomaly to really kind of be accepted as a genuine effect because it is hard to explain. Well, tell me a little bit about how you thought about presenting anomalies to the public because your audience are people who can't really go through the details and question your arguments necessarily. And so there's a responsibility when you're presenting this stuff to the public. Like, you want to make it sound exciting.

You're selling a book after all, but you also want to be responsible and you don't want to overhype stuff. And you tell in your book a story of sort of a disastrous example of this, you know, the Bicep 2 result. You said, quote, I can't think of a more disastrous example of scientific hubris than the sorry story of Bicep 2, which I thought was, you know, harsh but fair. How did you strike a balance in your book? Yeah, and I think the way I tried to put this across is that anomalies potentially can be revolutionary. They can give you this amazing new insight to something you never understood

before, but they can also lead you astray. And so at the beginning of the book, I actually kind of have a whole chapter basically on how anomalies can trick you and how it can all go horribly wrong. I mean, so with the Bicep 2 example, that was this discovery in 2014 where a telescope at the South Pole found evidence for gravitational waves from inflation. So there's a period of exponential expansion that cosmologists believed happened in the very first instant at the Big Bang. And this was presented to the world before it was peer-reviewed, this big press conference and this announcement that, you know, essentially we'd heard the be of the Big Bang,

that we'd proven cosmic inflation, that we'd probe quantum gravity, you know, all this talk about Nobel Prizes, and then within about a month or two, the whole thing was undiscovered as it was realized that they'd taken a key bit of data from a PowerPoint presentation by the Planck spacecraft collaboration, which was used to basically take into account the effect of dust. contaminating their observations of the cosmic microwave background and they'd misinterpreted this slide effectively and when this was taken to account the whole signal is literally turned to dust so it disappeared

so I think that the problem with what Bicep 2 did was not necessarily that they made a mistake because mistakes happen that can happen but it's the way it was communicated I think that it was they called a press conference they made a big deal out of it and before it had been really thoroughly checked by external peer reviewers I think that was what went wrong there. So in the book, all of the anomalies I talk about, the reason their anomalies and not discoveries

is because none of them are confirmed. And I go through each of them and say, well, you know, here's the exciting explanation. Here's the boring explanation. And I think it hopefully gives readers a balanced view of what the story is with each of them. But the other way, I think that whether or not any of them actually turn into a new physics discovery,

I think there's huge excitement just in the process of drilling into these things and, you know, learning about the experiments that people do, the lengths they go to, to measure these quantities, the emotional roller coaster people go through, you know, when they think they're seeing something and then they realize they haven't. One of the stories I tell the book is my own research. So we talked about this at the beginning of the podcast where we thought collectively in our area of particle physics that we were seeing signs of something

genuinely exciting. And what happened as I was writing the book, in fact, was that we discovered in some of our measurements there was a hidden or a missed background that we had not properly understood. And this was a real moment of, you know, it's a horror, essentially, when you realize that you've put measurements out into the world that have an error in them. And when this was corrected, a set of the anomalies disappeared. And essentially, you know, once you corrected for this effect, it agreed with a standard model. So what it looked like, you're on the brink of discovering something really big, you realize, oh, actually, it's the opposite. You've made a pretty spectacular cocker. Sad trombone sound here, yeah. Yeah. So I think it's important to see that's how

science works you know when you're working at the edge of your understanding you're in real danger of making mistakes because you're in territory that you don't know where you're stepping you know your foothold is not secure and you may take as much care as you can but there is always a chance you put a foot wrong but gradually you know science is self-correcting so these mistakes are eventually sometimes quite quickly found out and even when the anomalies go away you learn something new so you may learn about how to make calculations with a standard model for example or you may learn about particular types of background processes that you didn't understand. And that allows you when you do another experiment or you make another prediction in the future, you're on much more

solid ground. So these anomalies are kind of a grindstone where you're sharpening your scientific tools. Even when they don't lead to a big breakthrough, they are kind of equipping you for the next steps. Yeah. Well, let's hope that they lead to new anomalies that actually do turn out to be new particles. That's a lot more fun. Yeah. Wonderful. Well, thanks very much for coming to talk to us about all the exciting hints on the edge of the particle physics frontier that might be the revolution in our understanding about the universe. And I encourage everyone to check out Harry's new books, space oddities everywhere books are sold. Harry, thanks very much for joining us today on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Great talking to you. All right, an interesting

conversation. What's your takeaway from all of those oddities out there? I think they're all exciting, but I'm not 100% convinced that any of them really mean a new discovery, a new deep understanding of the universe. Wait, what? You're skeptical of a scientist saying, hey, let's go explore the unknown. No, I think it's great to explore the unknown. One thing I really like about Harry's book is that he tells you why they're

potentially exciting, but he also gives you a realistic sense for why they might have prosaic explanations. It might just be that the ice in Antarctica is not as simple as we thought, or that the calculations of the standard model are harder to do than we expect it, so we're not sure exactly what to compare it to. So stay

tuned is the final answer. So these oddities are maybe not so odd. We might mean that we learn something deep about the universe or we might just learn about the ice in Antarctica. Either way, we're going to learn something. Yeah, and hopefully not destroy the planet, right? Right? Hopefully.

Hopefully, question mark, dot, dot, dot. Great. And this is the part where you cackled, Danny. Great. Hey, NSF, can we cut off his funding now, please? Thank you. All right, well, another interesting reminder. There are still lots to discover out there,

or at least a lot of data and a lot of science to sift through to look for things that we maybe didn't expect because the history of science is that it's always surprising us. It's always surprising and it's always fantastic. Stay tuned. And that's why you shouldn't destroy. No comment. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that.

Thanks for joining us. See you next time. more science and curiosity come find us on social media where we answer questions and post videos we're on twitter discord insta and now tic talk thanks for listening and remember that daniel and hori explain the universe is a production of iHeart radio for more podcasts from iHeart radio visit the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness.

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