Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Were all the forces once one?

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

Daniel and Jorge explore whether the fundamental forces can be linked together, and whether they all acted as one in the early Universe.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, Jorge, I have a question for you about forces. For me? You're asking the cartoonist about forces? Yeah, but it's not a physics question. It's a Star Wars question. Oh, and then, yeah. I have a master's-degree in Star Wars. It's like a JD, but it's more like a Jedi.

Nice. So there's like a dark side and a light side to the force, right? Uh-huh. So are these really two separate forces? like unified by a physicist into a single force? Kind of, they're like two sides of the same force. That's how they call it. That's why it's called the dark side

and the light side of the force, Daniel. So they're sort of like doing physics in the Star Wars universe. I think it's more of a fantasy, although you just made me think, like, could there be physicists in the Star Wars universe? I mean, somebody had to design those spaceships. Maybe it was just engineers. Maybe the Jedi are engineers.

Force engineers. That would explain everything. You can be a Jedi-E. Hi, I'm Horamie Kartunis, and the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I'm still forcing myself to try to understand physics. Yet to forge yourself? I think you're doing it out of pure joy and curiosity. I am, but sometimes you've got to force those ideas into your head. It's like reformatting your brain disk.

Because it don't fit or because they're too complex? What's going on? Because they're not always intuitive. You know, the way that we see the universe and experience it isn't always the way it makes most sense to describe it mathematically. So sometimes it takes a little bit of a brain reformat to make it all work in your mind. But if you have to force it, doesn't it mean you're doing it the wrong way? Shouldn't it all flow, dude?

I'm not sure intuition and like sitting around the night fire staring up at the stars is enough to figure out how the universe works. You need some sort of method because sometimes the answers are really counterintuitive. Well, it worked for a long time, didn't it? Using our intuition, staring up at the nice guy. It worked for thousands of years until maybe recently. Depending on your definition of worked, I mean, it also led us to big misunderstandings in how the universe worked, thinking that the earth was at the center of everything, for example.

not really understanding all of the effects around us. Well, it's led us somewhere, and we're hoping that it's correct, isn't that right? It's led us today here to this podcast, the culmination of all human wondering. That's where we are, the climax of science. We are the end result of all human curiosity, knowledge, and inquiry. Right here, right now, this is what's come down to. Now, Daniel, say something profound. We are a flea on the shoulders of giants.

I think somebody said that already. Dang it. I'm a flea standing on the shoulder of the person who said that already. We're just fleas on the universe of podcast, I think. Exactly. I hope nobody scratches this off. That's right. Sucking up the blood of advertising money.

But anyway, speaking of this podcast, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of I-Hard Radio. In which we guide you on the journey of humanity, from being totally bewildered and confused about the universe we find ourselves in, to slowly piecing together a picture that makes sense. Combining ideas and merging concepts into a unified understanding of how

the whole universe works. What are these laws that underlie everything? How do they come together to make the universe that we love and experience? That's right. It is a lovely universe full of questions and mysteries. And we are the fleas that are making you scratch that edge of curiosity about how it all works. What's going on? And what are the forces or force behind the motion of of the stars. Wow, we're the fleas, huh? That's not very glamorous. Flea's good, isn't it?

He's the basis for red hot chili peppers. So you're going to be a cool flea. I don't know what you're talking about. Isn't the flea also a superhero or are we thinking about the tick? I think you're thinking of the tick, yes. Wrong. Although, maybe there should be a superhero called the flea. Is the flea the name of a musician in Red Hot Chili Peppers?

No, he's got control of the flea force, both the dark side and the light side. of the flee force. What are you talking about? I'm totally lost. I think we lost our way here a little bit. So let's scratch our way back and say that the podcast is it's about all questions out there, even the ones that have to do with superheroes and not superheroes. And as curious humans in the universe, we look around and we see all sorts of stuff happening. We see lightning, we see magnets, we see rain, we see stars. We want to understand each and everything. What is the story behind it? What is the mechanism? What is the microscopic explanation for what what's really happening.

But we don't want a bunch of individual stories. Here's the law for lightning and here's the law for magnets and here's the law for rain. We want one understanding. We want to unify everything down into a single law that explains the whole universe because we think the universe does follow a law. That's right. It's been one of the most amazing discoveries of humankind and of science to see that behind the chaos of motion around us there are apparently fundamental laws which govern everything.

And those laws can sort of be boiled down to a simple set of equations that describe only a few forces in the universe. And we can make progress in understanding these things by doing more experiments, but we can also make progress just by looking at the mathematical structure of these forces and say, hmm, what's the relationship between them? Why do so many of them have the same sort of force equation that's like 1 over R squared? Why is this one different from that one? We can look for patterns between them in the same way that we've used. them to explain the things we see in the universe. Sort of like a mathematical exploration of how the universe works.

Yeah. And I guess that's sort of been the history of science in general, right, Daniel, in the sense that, you know, the world is pretty complex when we see it around us. But little by little, science has sort of found the commonalities, found the patterns, found the underlying laws that seem to govern different phenomena. And it all sort of turns out to be due to a simpler and ever-simplifying set of equations and concepts. Yeah, that's been the trend and it's sort of incredible. I mean, philosophically, you have no guarantee. Number one, that the universe does make sense. Number two, that we could

figure it out, you know, that it's within like the realm of human intelligence to solve this puzzle. And number three, that there even is a single unifying law that describes the universe. You might have had a scenario where like different things are run by different laws that just don't overlap or draw dotted lines between them. But so far, the trend seems to be towards unification. toward simplification towards a single underlying law, one we haven't yet been able to uncover. Right. I guess it could have been that, you know, the universe worked in such a complicated way that it would have been the equivalent of like us being fleas or having the brain of a flea and trying to understand what we know now of the universe, right? Like it could have been the universe

was too complicated for our brains to even try to understand or figure out how it works. It could still be, right? Because we certainly have not figured out the whole universe. We don't know if that's just because we haven't had enough time or smart enough human hasn't come along or if the universe is just beyond our kin. It might be that like the kind of mathematics we use to think about the universe is not appropriate and that we're not capable of the sort of higher level math that describes reality. When you're saying we could still be fleas? We could still be in our general analogy. Exactly. It might be, for example, that it requires higher intelligence or more brain power or a different kind of mathematics.

explanation, you know, one that doesn't favor simplification in terms of little mathematical stories, but more like tabulation. It might be that our AIs are more capable of sort of grocking the way the universe works than we are. And then you have fun philosophical questions like, well, if you build an AI that understands the universe, do you also understand it? Right. Or it could be that maybe Fleece can understand the universe, but we don't. Is that possible, like for them to have maybe some quirk in the brain that makes them capable of understanding the universe? universe, but not us? It's certainly possible. I think it's very unlikely with fleas because their brains are so simple. But ticks, but you're saying ticks can do it. There are other things on Earth that are

definitely intelligent in different ways from humans. I mean, crows can count. Octopi have really interesting intelligences. You know, we think that their neural computation is mostly happening in their legs. So like their consciousness is a little bit more distributed. That might lead them to a different way of thinking mathematically and maybe an easier way to understand the universe. We just don't know what the deepest nature of the universe is and what kind of brain is best to explore it. So just ask an octopus maybe to explain physics to you. You might get eight answers, though.

Yeah. Might get wrapped up in all the tentacles of the answer. But yeah, it's been a journey for humans to boil everything down into a single sort of set of equations. Now, how far can we go? That is maybe the question we're asking today. So today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question. did all the forces used to be one one what daniel one force one flea one band one rock band one octopus

i'm going with the flea theory of the universe one flea explains everything he used to be one flea huh but then what was the flea on what is the shoulder of the universe no it's boiling it all down to one force is the question. So like all the forces used to be one, meaning first of all that the forces can change. Like a force can change? Yeah, we think the forces operate differently at different sort of temperatures

and the universe is definitely cooling. So as the universe cools and expands, it goes through different phases. And so the forces look different as we move through those different phases of the universe. So we have some forces that we think govern the universe and how things move in it.

And so the question here, is, was there a time in the universe when they were basically the same thing or when they were sort of acting the same way? Exactly. And can we recreate that scenario in our particle colliders? Well, as usually, you're wondering how many people had heard of this question, this idea, and do they think that all the forces could have been won before? Thanks very much to everyone who plays in this audience participation segment.

We love hearing your voices. And if you're out there and would like to hear your voice on the podcast, don't be shy. write to me to Questions at Danielanhorpe.com. So think about it for a second. Do you think all the forces used to be one? Here's what people had to say. I think we have a pretty good idea that strong, weak, and electromagnism

all used to be one force back in the first gazillionth of a second of existence. Gravity, we don't know. It may not even be a force like the others. That's still an open question. My simple answer would be yes. Whether you believe in creation or you believe in some other form, evolution, everyone believes that there was one moment, one singularity, one moment, one thing that set everything in motion.

So yes, all of the forces used to be one. I wonder of the four forces that there are, electromagnetism, weight force and strong force all seem to be very similar, but there's something different about gravity, I think. So I think that the first three potentially used to be one, but gravity, there's something different about that. Of course, the force, the one that unifies, keep together all the universe and the only master jedies are able to control. That's for sure the original force for all the other forces. well no in seriousness

I suspect that that is what physicists have been trying to do for a long time to unify the forces and although the idea of all the forces coming from one

sounds very evolutionary and very tempting I think a lot of smart people have not been able to figure it out how to solve that so I'm not sure at this point. I feel like all the forces would have necessarily had to have been one at the origination point. But what happened after that or how long they stayed one before becoming separate and distinct? I have no idea. All right. A wide range of answers from religion to Star Wars,

which is a religion to some people. To faith in physics to figure it all out. Or faith on the Jedi. The physics Jedi. Dr. Yoda and his theories of the universe. All right. Well, a wide range of answers. Some people think that maybe yes or maybe not one or maybe we'll never know. All reasonable answers.

All right. Well, let's dig into it, Daniel. What are the forces? So first, just to put it in context, remember that physics doesn't just deal with forces. We also deal with stuff. like we see stuff out there in the universe particles whatever but those particles are being acted on by forces and so when we want to when we want to simplify the universe really the end goal would be to explain like what is the most basic stuff in the universe can be explained in terms of like one kind of stuff

and can be explained all the motion the interactions of those things in terms of one force so this is sort of like half of the larger physics goal to unify everything down to like one kind of particle and one kind of force And so far, we boil it down to a handful of forces, right? That's right. So we have three or four or five forces depending on how you count. Those forces are like electricity. What do you count within tentacles? Well, then you're counting in base eight, so you're still going to get the same number.

It just kind of seems like you're guessing. You're sounding very undefinitive. You're like three or four or five or maybe six or seven perhaps, kind of, maybe eight. It depends on how this is presented to people. And I've learned that a lot of people have had this presented in elementary school or in high school in sort of very different ways. And so if you ask people like how many forces are there, sometimes you hear three, sometimes you hear five. And so I just wanted to be inclusive. We'll clarify it.

So if you think most broadly, we have sort of five forces. There's one, electricity, two, magnetism, three, the weak nuclear force, four, the strong nuclear force. And then the fifth sort of question marky one is gravity. So in the sort of broadest sense, you have five. I see. I like that designation, question marky. We'll just call maybe the biggest, most significant concept in the universe that bends space and time. I'll just call it question marky.

Well, we have a lot of question marks about gravity. You know, like, is it even a force? How does it all work? Can it be described quantum mechanically dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, yada, yada, yada, yada. So particle physicists tend to sort of put that one aside. and be like, you know what, let's worry about gravity another day and just think about the other four. The things that we know are actually forces.

Because, you know, gravity, we don't even think it is a force. It doesn't cause acceleration. It just bends space time. So the other four are things we definitely think are forces. And those are the ones we're working hard to unify into one idea. Okay. Now, this is traditionally there are four other forces besides gravity, right? Yeah, exactly.

So you just listed them. So should we go one by one? Yeah. What's electricity? or what's the electric force? Yeah, so this is just the force between particles that have charge, right? Two electrons will push away from each other or an electron or proton pull on each other because they have electric charge.

You could also say that's sort of like what electric charge is. Electric charge is a label we put on particles that seem to feel this electric force. So some things have no charge like the neutron or the neutrino. Some particles do have charge like the electron, the positron, the proton, And these definitely feel a force. Like you can make an electric field and use it to accelerate particles through that field. We definitely see that happening in the universe. And an electric field would have to be generated by other particles with charge in them.

Yeah, exactly. So one particle creates an electric field and that operates on other particles and pushes and pulls on them. And by pushing it pulling, you mean like if you just leave them there, they'll start moving. Yeah, exactly. Like F equals MA. Exactly. They accelerate. F equals MA.

forces require acceleration. And the M in there is an inertial mass of that object. And so basically any time we see acceleration, we're like, okay, there's a force there, what's causing it? And historically, we've seen electricity in lots of places. Static electricity, lightning, right? Now, of course, we generate electricity. And all of those really very disparate phenomena,

those different early human experiences, can now be explained using a single theory of electricity and electric forces. Now, like, what's an example of everything? day life where we see the electric force, like when our hair stands up, if you rub a balloon and you put in your hair, that's the electric force acting on your hairs, right? That's definitely the electric force acting on your hair, exactly. You have like ionized particles on the balloon and on your hair, and they're attracting each other. Okay, what's another example

of the electric force? Batteries, right? Batteries create an electric potential to create current flow, or if you stick your fingers in the socket, not recommended, you'll definitely become acquainted with the electric force. But you'll get a zap, but it's not necessarily going to push or pull you. There's a lot of energy there that's pushing and pulling on those electrons to create the current, right? And so that energy will get deposited into your skin in a very unpleasant way. But yeah, it won't push or pull on you.

It'll push a whole bunch of electrons onto you. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Or through you. Mm-hmm. Now, what about like the atom, like the electrons hanging out near the nucleus, which has positive protons, is that the electric force keeping the electron orbiting around the atom? Yeah, that's exactly it. There's a force between the electron and the proton. That's

what's attracted them together. In the early universe, electrons were moving really, really fast. And then when they slowed down, the proton had enough electric force to pull on that electron and to bind it into an atom. So that's definitely because of the force between them. The same with it, like, the Earth is bound into the Sun's orbit by the force of gravity. Gravity turned off, the Earth would just fly off into space. If you turned off electricity, electrons would fly off into space and leave their protons behind. Right, or at least in a question marky kind of way. I guess.

Now, how is the electric force different than the magnetic force or force of magnetism? Because I always kind of feel there's the same thing, maybe. Well, they're definitely very closely connected. And we'll get into that when we talk about the unification of the forces, because that was the first big success of that whole program of trying to explain multiple forces in terms of one idea. But historically, like a long time ago, in terms of like basic human. experience. Magnetism and electricity seem different. You know, there are magnets out there in the

world and you don't get a spark when you touch them. You don't have to have charge to have magnetism. So like kitchen magnets, right, or like maglev trains. These are all examples of magnetism out there in the world. But how are they, aren't they sort of maybe the same as the electric force? Like I always thought maybe like a magnet repels or is attracted to my fridge somehow because the negative electrons in my magnet are somehow attracted to the positive spots in the fridge? Or are you just talking about what we thought before? Now, of course, we definitely know that electricity and magnetism

are very closely related. So closely related, some people are taught that they're the same thing and you clearly have an understanding of them as two sides of the same coin. But yet, historically, they were different. And it wasn't until James Maxwell noticed that the mathematics of electricity and the mathematics of magnetism,

like if you wrote down the equations of the two, they were very, very similar. And there's this, like, beautiful symmetry between them and that they were interconnected. That things with electric charges can make magnetic fields. Magnetic fields can generate electric fields. The two things definitely seem linked. So in your fridge magnet, where does that magnetism come from? Well, it's nothing in the universe we know of that, like, just generates magnetic fields the way that an electron generates electric fields.

All the magnetic fields in the universe come from the motion of electric charges. So, for example, atoms have spin, and electrons have spin, and these things have charge. And so that generates a magnetic field because moving charges generates a magnetic field. So all the little atoms in that fridge magnet are all lined up with their quantum spin, generating little tiny magnets with north and south poles. So it comes from the charges in the end. There's a very deep connection between electricity and magnetism, yes. And would you say maybe the difference is that electricity or the electricity, or the electricity, electric force is a force between charges that are plus or minus. But the magnetism force is maybe

the force between like moving electrons. Like if you have a moving electron over here, moving in a circle, it's going to somehow influence other electrons around it to also move in a circle. But yet they have to be moving to do that. Yeah. And I think you've put your finger on one of the biggest differences between electricity and magnetism. Mathematically, they're structured very similarly, but there are sources of electric charge in the universe, electrons, for example. There's no similar source of magnetic charge in the universe. If they did exist, they'd be called magnetic monopoles, be like a particle with a magnetic north or a magnetic south, but we've never seen those things. We've only ever seen electrically charged things like electrons generating

little dipoles, like a magnet with a north and a south. So I think basically what you're saying is that all magnetism in the universe is actually generated by things with electric charge. And that's totally correct as far as we know. So like before we thought it was something else. But really, it's just maybe another part or another aspect of the electric force. Yeah. Or the two sides of the same coin, right? Electricity and magnetism are really one thing.

You can say it's all electric, whatever you can call it electromagnetism to reflect that there's two sides of it. But yeah, mathematically it makes much more sense to think about it as one thing because electric fields cause magnetic fields. magnetic fields cause electric fields and even light is like an oscillation between electro and magnetic fields back and forth. So it makes much more sense if you click them together. It's like magnets. Yeah. It's like treating the front of an elephant and a back of the elephant is totally separate things. Like obviously they're connected, right? It makes much more sense to just

think about the elephant and not just the two separate pieces. Unless it's like a weird Siamese elephant. Does that happen for other species? I don't know. I think so. Maybe. Aren't there like two-headed snakes? I'm going to Google two-headed elephant when we're done here. Okay. But why wait?

So we've talked about some of the basic forces around this electricity, magnetism. And now let's dig into the nuclear forces that govern how things move at the particle level inside of the atom. And then we'll see if maybe they're all just the same force underneath it all. So we're going to explore that. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1971, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage,

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

Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order. criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit.

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

and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast

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I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. all the forces that we know about. And so we talked about the electric force and the magnetism force, which turned out to be the same force, kind of. Right? You sort of see it now as the same force.

We definitely see it as one concept. We originally discovered them sort of separately and then realized that it made much more sense if you click them together into one idea. Well, you keep saying it's a concept or an idea. Is it a force or not? Yeah, it's a force for sure. Electromagnetism is a force.

Absolutely. It causes things to accelerate. And you can think about it either in terms of the electromagnetic field or if you like the particle picture, you can think about it as exchanging virtual photons back and forth to carry that momentum. Okay, so that's one force, electromagnetism. Okay, so then how did they realize that the electric force and the magnetic force were the same thing or part of the same force? This is really an example of like the triumph of theoretical physics because it wasn't an experiment. It wasn't like somebody went out and did a bunch of experiments and then had an aha moment when they proved.

that electricity and magnetism were the same thing. It was just a guy sitting in his study, like writing out equations and noticing patterns. So this is the Scotsman Maxwell figured out a way to write down a bunch of different laws, like Amperer's law and Gauss's law and Kulam's law and all the stuff describing different parts of electricity and magnetism. He figured out a way to write it all in very similar way. And he noticed like, oh my gosh, we're talking about this thing called the electric field and talking about that thing called the magnetic field.

but the math is so similar that basically the same equations for both things. And that's what led him to the discovery that there really are two parts of something larger. But they weren't exactly the same, right? They didn't describe like the

like the magnet, the equations for magnetism didn't describe how electric charges move. So what do you mean they were similar? Like you could get one from the other or you could have them all in the same equations and they would be okay with each other. What do you mean?

Well, the, the law for like how you generate a magnetic field and the law for how you generate an electric field, you write them down mathematically, they look the same. You just like replace electric field with magnetic field and now you have the other law. It's like finding replace E for B. But they work the same, but that doesn't mean they're the same. If you can write them down using the same mathematics, that's a strong hint that maybe they are closely related. And it's not just that they have the same mathematics, but they're very closely linked. Like the magnetic field appears in the laws for the electric field because like changing magnetic fields will cause an electric field and

changing electric fields cause a magnetic field. So not only is the mathematics for each one similar, but they appear in each other's equations. But then this appearing in each other's equations, didn't they have to figure that out experimentally? Yeah. And that's something we knew that like, for example, you could generate a magnetic field by changing electric fields, right? And that's something we already knew. But Maxwell actually noticed that there was like a flaw in this symmetry. He's like, you know, the equations we have are really beautiful and symmetric and they match each other perfectly, except there's a missing piece. There's like a hole here. Like if the equations were a little bit different, they would be even more beautiful and symmetric. So he said

like, maybe we just missed something. And so he corrected one of the existing laws, it was Amperer's circuit law and added a term, the term that tells you get electric currents from changing magnetic fields. And he sort of like predicted that this thing was real. And then they went out there and did the experiment and found it. So like the symmetry of the mathematics by itself led him to discover something physical. It kind of seems like he was looking at physical things that other maybe experimentalist found

and then he kind of pieced it all together from his couch. Yeah, exactly. He was sitting in his study and had this like moment of insight. It must have been really incredible. And so really what this shows you is that they are part of this larger concept that it just makes much more sense to treat them together rather than trying to pull them apart.

It's like taking the earth and drawing a dotted line through half of it. Like, yeah, you could do that. You could talk about the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere, but it really makes much more sense to talk about the whole Earth. So what we thought were two forces were actually one force. Yeah, we're just one force. And this is really important work because it not only did it help us unify it and like reduce our list of forces down by one, but it also was like the groundwork for relativity, you know, understanding that light was a wave in electromagnetic fields and the questions about the velocity of that wave is what led to like attempts to measure the velocity of light in different directions

and the whole puzzle of how light moves at the same speed for all observers and basically led to relativity. So if it hadn't been for Maxwell, we wouldn't have had Einstein's breakthroughs. Are you saying Einstein what's the flea who stood on the shoulder of Maxwell? I think he was a giant standing on the shoulders of another giant. Let's just hold him. He's a giant flea. He's a giant flea standing on the shoulders of another giant flea. Exactly.

And there's one more really important lesson in this unification that we're going to see. happen again and again and we hope to see again in the future. And that's the unification of the strength of the forces. Like magnetism in general feels weaker than electricity. Like electricity just seems like a more powerful force. And if you look at like the force equation for like how an object is affected by electric fields and magnetic fields, they're a little bit different. The Lawrence force law that maybe people out there know if they're electrical engineers or whatever, it tells you that the force on electron depends on the strength of the electric field. And the force from magnetism also depends on the velocity.

Like as things move faster, the force from magnetism has a stronger effect. So what does that tell you about the forces? So what that tells you is that as you approach the speed of light, these two forces get the same strength. Like at very, very low speeds, if your velocity is close to zero, magnetism has almost no effect. But electricity is still very strong. But as you approach the speed of light,

magnetism grows in strength to be the equal of electricity. That's why light is so perfectly balanced between electricity and magnetism. The energy flows back and forth because the magnetic fields and electric fields are the same strength at the speed of light. And that's the clue about the history of the universe because as we look back in time in the universe, things get hotter and denser, higher velocity, electricity and magnetism basically become the same thing. So at the speed of light, i.e. earlier in time, these things really were much more unified. Wait, wait, I thought they were already unified. You're just saying like back in the beginning of the universe, they were more balanced with each other. But now that things are cooler, like one of them is obviously stronger than the other.

Yeah, exactly. You can still unify them today into the same mathematical framework, but they were more in balance back in the early universe. Everything was better before. Back in the good old days when electrons moved at the speed of light. Back in the big bang. Didn't have all these kids with their TikToks. But if you think about in terms of history, there's like a moment in the universe when basically everything is moving at the speed of light very, very early on.

And back then, electricity and magnetism had the same strength. But as the universe cools, magnetism gets weaker because it depends on velocity and electricity doesn't. And that's when the two split. That's the pattern we hope to see in the other forces that as we rewind the universe backwards, we go deeper into our history, higher speeds, hotter temperatures, denser material. maybe things have the same equal strength. Well, they have the same strength,

but that doesn't mean they're more or less unified. Like you just said, like, as things cool, they split. But did they really split? It's more like they preserved its strength as the universe cool. But that doesn't mean that they're like, it suddenly became different. It just sort of looked different to us. Yeah, it looks different, exactly.

It's like the symmetry is broken a little bit. They're not so indistinguishable. Or they're more distinguishable. Yeah, they're more distinguishable. I guess it's the same thing. Exactly. And if the force is, like, the symmetry is broken. do have the same strength back in the early universe.

That's a clue that maybe... So does that mean they were the same back in the beginning of the universe? They were still different or two sides of the same coin. You're just saying that they were equal in magnitude. Yeah, they were equal in magnitude. And so the differences between them were less apparent. And so it's like even more arbitrary to draw a dotted line between them in the early universe. Now it makes a little more sense because like they are two different sides of the same coin.

And those sides are quite different, right? I mean, they still click together into one idea, but the sides are quite different. But back in the early universe, it sort of made no sense. It's sort of like the Earth, right? Again, with the hemispheres. If the Earth wasn't spinning, you could split it in any way. It wouldn't make any difference. Now that the Earth is spinning around exactly one axis and no other axis,

there is a north and a south hemisphere, right? There is a way that makes sense to split it up. In the same way, electricity and magnetism used to be much more balanced. And so drawing a dotted line between them really made no sense. Now that the symmetry is broken between them, it makes sense to draw a line between them, even though we still know they're connected. I'm not so sure about that analogy. It feels a little forced.

But I think maybe the overall point is that we used to think that we had these two forces, electric and magnetic forces, but we figured out they're the same. And then it's not the last time it happened, right? Like there was a third force that we thought was a separate force, but then we figured out it's also part of the same thing. Yeah, that's exactly right. The story continues. And again, Scotsman with impressive beards play a big role.

Is that the formula? Is that why you have a beard? Do you have plans to move to Scotland? I'm really not a fan of Haggis, though. The whole plan is not going to work out for me. You're not a fan of Haggis, but you're a fan of the Higgs. I'll take a bowl of Higgs. You're a fan, but not a Huggis.

I'll take Higgs for dinner, but not Huggis. You know they're made of the same thing, aren't they? Isn't Huggis technically made or has it to the Higgs boson in it? The Higgs gives Huggis its mass. That's true. Oh, there you go. And then the Huggis gives your stomach its mass. And indigestion.

It's all interconnected. It's all part of the same metaclorean force. Yeah. And then you make dark matter the next day. There you go. It's all connected, man. All right.

So then what's this third force that we ended up unifying with the other two? So the next force on the list is the weak nuclear force. The weak nuclear force is the one we think about in terms of like radioactive decay.

When a proton turns into a neutron, for example, and shoots off an anti-electron or when uranium cracks open, all of these things. This is due to the weak. nuclear force. What do you mean?

How is it a force? Like what's it pushing or pulling? So some particles out there have electric charge and they're pushed and pulled by electric fields made by other particles with electric charges. But not everything out there does have an electric charge like neutrinos don't have electric charge. But every particle out there has weak charges. This is like another label you can put on a particle.

There's actually two different kinds of weak charges. It's not a one number. It's two numbers you need to describe the weak force. particle has this pair of weak charges that create these weak fields, and these weak fields push and pull on other particles. Meaning, like, if I'm a neutrino and I'm flying through space, I don't have an electric charge, so I don't feel the electric or magnetic forces, but if I come near maybe another neutrino or another kind of particle that does feel the weak force, what's going to happen?

Is it going to pull me in? Is it going to impart some velocity on me, repel me, or attract me, or is it something different like how is it involved in decay of particles so the weak force can both push and pull and it's much more complicated than electricity because it has two charges so you have to know like a combination of those two charges we did a whole podcast episode about whether the weak force pushes or pulls the answer is it depends but it can do both and so the weak field is much more complicated than the electromagnetic field in that way which is very simple so we can do both push and pull and the fascinating thing is that no particle escapes this field not

Not every particle feels the strong force we'll talk about later or electromagnetic force, but every particle feels the weak force as far as we know. Dark matter, if it's a particle, does escape the weak force, but every particle we've discovered feels the weak force. Now, your other question was about radioactive decay, like how is the weak force exactly involved in radioactive decay? And the answer there involves like the particles that we think about in terms of the weak force, like for electromagnetism, we think about in terms of these fields, or sometimes we

think about those fields as virtual photons, like, electrons are exchanging momentum using virtual photons. We have a whole episode about how that happens that came out recently. In terms of the weak field, we have three different particles. There's two W particles that actually have electric charge of their own and the Z. And so particles can decay into other particles by giving off a W or giving off a Z. When that happens, we say that the weak force is responsible. So, for example, if an upcork gives off a W boson becomes a down quark,

and that's what needs to happen for a neutron to decay into a proton, then we say the weak force has decayed that neutron into a proton. I feel like you're saying a lot of words. I wonder if some of our listeners are getting lost. I guess you're saying like maybe the weak force isn't a force in the same way that we are used to it for electric and magnetic forces. But you see it mathematically when things decay or they transform at the quantum particle level. From one thing to another, maybe you see these other particles popping into existence.

Well, it definitely is a force. It can push and pull. But was it pulling and pushing? It can do it for any particle. For example, a neutrino passing through a wall can get bounced off by an electron or by something in the nucleus using the weak force. In fact, only using the weak force

because the neutrino doesn't feel the electromagnetic force. Right, we got that. But when you say it's involved in decay, what is it pulling or pushing? So forces don't just push and pull, right? These are interactions between particles that can also transform those particles. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

So that's a different concept. So you're saying the force isn't just about pushing and pulling. It's also about transforming. Forces are fields that fill the universe, or if you like virtual particles, and they also allow particles to transform from one kind into another. For example, you can have an electron and a positron annihilate themselves, turn into a photon, and that photon can turn into like a muon and an anti-meon, right? That's using the photon.

So it's using the electromagnetic field. It means the energy of those two particles gets dumped into the electromagnetic field and then back out as other particles again. That's an example of like converting one kind of particle into another using the electromagnetic field. Oh, I see. You're saying the weak force can push and pull things, but it can also kind of act like a little like a placeholder for energy between particles as they transform between things. I guess a force turns out to just be like a feature of a field. Fields can apply forces to particles, but it's not all that they do.

You know, like your bank will change money, but it also like land. it out and does all sorts of other stuff. So fields are more complicated than just pushing and pulling on particles. The forces are features of those fields, but those fields can do lots of other stuff to like transform particles and let them interact. So you're saying like the weak force is really like, let's just think about it as a field. They can also push and pull. Yes.

Okay. All right. And then later we found out that the weak force is actually part of the electromagnetic force. Exactly. And this is the story of Peter Higgs in a way that's like kind of amazingly. oddly parallel to what happened with Maxwell. Now, Peter Higgs actually doesn't have a beard. I lied.

Maxwell has an impressive beard, but Peter Higgs is clean-shaded. Well, it depends whether he's shaved or not. Yeah. And I guess actually technically everybody has a beard. Even if you just shaved, you have a tiny little beard, right? I think you mean maybe half the population gets beard. Yeah, exactly. I think you're missing.

I think you're missing. Yes, I think you're missing a lot of people here. So he was looking at electromagnetism and the weak force, and he was trying to do the same thing that Maxwell did. He's like, can I put these together into a larger mathematical framework? Can I click all these complicated fields for the weak force and electromagnetism together to make a bigger idea? All right.

And apparently he was able to do that. And now we've reduced a number of forces even more. And so can we keep doing that? Can we unify all of the things we see as forces in the universe as one, including maybe gravity, question marky? And so let's dig into this big question of unification. But first, let's take another quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

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

Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious well wait a minute sam maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot.

He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them.

I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor? or not. To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I had this like overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're

battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast season two takes a deep look to One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission.

Don't want to have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg. a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition.

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

I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go. away just because you're avoiding it and in fact it may get even worse for more judgment free money advice listen to brown ambition on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast all right we're talking about unifying all the forces in the universe and it seems like

physicists are doing pretty good like we started with four apparent forces and now we're down to two apparent forces because you unified the electric magnetic forces into one and then you modified those two in with the weak force to get the electroweak force right yeah that's right higgs connected electromagnetism and the weak force by putting them together into a larger idea and in the same way that like when maxwell tried to do that with electricity and magnetism he noticed a missing piece and then went out and found that it was actually real out there in the universe. For Higgs, what he noticed was there was a missing particle. Like these two forces didn't actually click together perfectly because, you know, like the W and the Z, these particles

that come from these forces, they're very, very heavy. And the photon has no mass. So he's a little bit of trouble fitting them together, which is why he had to add a piece that Higgs boson. And then later we discovered it. So it's another example of like mathematics leading us to a clear picture of the physical universe, which is super fascinating. And it's also a continuation of that same story we were telling earlier, but how things come together or are more balanced at higher energies. Because the weak force, why is it so weak after all? It's weak because the particles that transmitted, this field that carries it is very massive. These particles, the W and the Z are super duper heavy. They weigh like 80 or 90 times the mass of a proton, which is what makes the force

weak. Right, which is kind of counterintuitive, right? Like why if the particles of it are so massive or why it's the force weak. You can think about it like it takes a lot more energy to get this field into play. You have to create the wiggles in this field takes more energy because the field itself has more mass. Like it's bigger so it's lazier. Yeah, it's bigger and so it's lazier. Exactly. But what happens if you dump a lot of energy into this field? Like what happens if everything is moving at nearly the speed of light? Then it doesn't really matter anymore that the W and the Z have mass because you have so much energy, it's like irrelevant. You know, it's, It's like if you're a billionaire, then paying your traffic tickets doesn't really matter.

Whereas if you're a normal person, paying your traffic tickets can be really expensive. But billionaires will just park anywhere because 90 bucks means nothing to them. So back in the early universe, when there's lots of energy floating around, you couldn't tell the difference between the strength of the electromagnetic force and the strength of the weak force that had the same strength back then. I think what you're saying is like to activate the weak force, you need a lot of energy. And so that's why it's weak. It's like it takes so much energy and you hardly ever see it, right? Like two particles are like, no, is this too much work to interact through the weak force? Forget about it.

But you're saying like maybe at the beginning of the universe, things were so hot and so crazy that like the weak force got activated all the time, which means that it was actually nuts a week. Exactly. And so that helps us bring these things together. Like as you run time back together, magnetism joins with electricity to have the same strength. Keep running time backwards. then the weak force joins with electromagnetism. Now those three all have the same strength.

So this picture of like the forces merging together as you rewind time. Or if you think about it forwards, like as the universe cools, it sort of like crystallizes and breaks the symmetries and these things crack out in different ways. But again, it's conceptual because they don't really break apart, right? Like they're still the same. They're still the same math equations. They just start behaving differently. Yes, exactly.

They're not like getting a divorce. or anything. I mean, it's not like they're transforming into something else. It's just like the weak force gets lazier, basically. Yeah, but they're sort of analogous to phase transitions. Like water is water is water, but sometimes it acts like a solid and sometimes it acts like a liquid and sometimes like a gas. So in different temperatures, you use different rules to describe them.

And so as the temperature of the universe cranks up, you use different laws to describe the physics that's happening because there are different phases there. But ultimately, you can use the same equations for the weak, the electric, and magnetic force. It's all you're saying like now there's three sides of the same coin. Yeah, exactly. And so now we'd like to continue that program and also add the strong force. Like wouldn't it be awesome if we showed that all these things are just different

sides of the same four-sided coin or something? That's a pretty susque coin there. So let me, let's recap for listeners. What is the strong force? Yeah. So the strong force is the force between quarks, for example. And the strong force like the other forces. acts between things that have its kind of charge.

Every kind of force has its own charge. Electric forces are things that happen between things with electric charge. Weak forces are things that happen between particles that have the special weak charges. And there's also a strong force with its own strong charge. And some particles, quarks, have this strong charge. We call it color. And other particles like electrons and muons and neutrinos don't. So they don't feel the strong force.

And the strong force is crucial to our universe. It's what binds quarks together to make protons. and to make neutrons and the building blocks of the nucleus of the atom. And that's where it's pushing and pulling. It's basically pulling the corks together. Or like if you try to separate the corks, that's the force that keeps them stuck. Yeah, exactly. It's what binds corks together.

And we think back in the very early universe, there was so much energy that corks were flying around free. We call that the cork glue on plasma. But these days, when things are pretty distant and cold, everything is stuck together. The corks don't have enough energy to escape those bonds. the strong force is very, very powerful. Ideally, or to keep simplifying things,

you want to show that the strong force is actually also part of the lecture weak force. Exactly. That would be great. Nobody's figured out how to do that yet. Like the game that Maxwell and Higgs played and were successful at trying to put these things together into a larger mathematical structure hasn't worked so far. Like people have tried it and they've jammed them together, but it's not really pretty.

And the extra bits that it predicts, we haven't seen those. yet in the same way that we like saw the higgs boson or saw the displacement current well what do mean it's not pretty what happens you get ugly equations you get ugly equations yeah what we're looking for is the kind of symmetry we saw with electromagnetism like oh look these equations if you write them in this way they're symmetric it's the same you can replace electric field and magnetic fields the equations are the same or with the weak force he put them in this larger structure of group theory we show you can rotate one equation to another equation and so the strong force has its own symmetry within it, but we can't really click that symmetry together with the other

symmetries to make it into like some larger machine where the gears all rotate nicely and meshed together. Well, when you mixed electric and magnetic forces, you figured out that there's really just electric charge. When you mix the weak force in, did you also have to get rid of weak charge? Or that's still around? No, that's still around. And, you know, we could live in a universe with magnetic charge. That's not a product of the unification. The unification allows for there to be magnetic charge. It just so happens that we've never seen one in our universe. It's a mystery of why there are no magnetic monopoles. You don't have to give up a charge when you unify. And so now the electric weak force, it's like this one equation, one force, but is it the same

quantum field? Different fields, but they're all somehow connected through the equations. There are different fields. The same way you can talk about an electric field and magnetic field, you can still talk about the field of the W and the Z. But there's a symmetry between them. They're definitely part of one larger thing. And as you rewind the universe, their strength balances together. And one mystery about the strong force is that as you rewind time and make things hotter and denser, the strong force doesn't get to be the same strength as electricity, magnetism, and the weak force. It's still different.

Those two lines sort of don't cross as you go back to the early universe, which is a mystery is sort of like a problem for unifying them. Now, I'm wondering if like the lack of unification here with the strong force, does it mean that the strong force is totally independent of the other forces. Part of the reason you can mix the other two into one equation was that they're all sort of, I guess, depend on each other, right? They're all intertwined. They were all intertwined. And we definitely showed that they're all part of the same sort of larger structure. What we'd like to do is do the same thing with the strong force, but we don't know. Like maybe it really is just its own thing and it comes from somewhere

else. And the universe has a couple of things to it. The whole assumption that you can describe everything in terms of one force. Well, that is an assumption, right? It would be sort of pretty, but it might be that there are two forces in the universe, the strong force and the electro-week force. And they sort of like pushing upon each other. And the question marky stuff. But there is one really other tantalizing clue, which is if you add a bunch more particles, particles we call super symmetric particles, ones that are partners of our current particles, that changes the way all these forces behave. And it makes it so that if you do rewind time and heat up the universe, that the strong force and the electroweak force do end up at the same strength.

So that's sort of like a clue that makes people feel like, oh, wait, maybe there's two problems here that solve each other, you know, like maybe supersymmetry is real. These particles do exist and they help unify the forces early on in the history of the universe. So far, we haven't seen any of those supersymmetric particles, which has been kind of a disappointment, but it would have been awesome because it would have helped us unify the strong force with the other forces. Wait, so these supersymmetric particles that you just mentioned, and they were never real?

You just sort of like invented them and you tried to make them work, but you never saw them in a collider or anything? We don't know if they're real. They're just an idea. And if they exist, they answer all sorts of other questions about the nature of the universe,

et cetera, that particle physicists are interested in. But they also change the way the strong force behaves at high energy in a way to make it to have the same strength as the electro-week force. That's just like an added bonus. So we don't know if they exist, but if they do,

then they help unify the forces. But we haven't seen them yet, right? They've been searching for like decades. Yep, we haven't seen any of them. Maybe they're just too heavy or maybe they don't exist. We don't know. I guess maybe the larger question is like, why is it important for them to be the same magnitude?

Like, why can you just have a one big one and a little one? Or why do they all have to be, you know, the same strength? They don't have to be the same strength. But that's part of the simplification. Like how many numbers do you need to describe the universe? Well, it's sort of cool if you need fewer numbers. You only need one number to describe the electrow weak force, like the very strength of the parts of the electrical weak force can all be explained with how the universe cooled and cracked. But you only need one number to define its strength.

Wait, what do you mean the only one number? Like at the beginning of the universe, the forces were indistinguishable? Well, they were part of a larger thing, but you'll need one number to describe its strength because they were in balance, right? Like magnetism and electricity had the same strength at the speed of light. You don't need separate numbers for them. And the same thing with the weak force. But you could still have two numbers. Like that's something, I guess you know what I mean?

Like did something happen in these conditions that make them lose a degree of freedom? Yeah, that's exactly the right way to think about it. That like you had this unification and then it cracked and they broke into two and then you have another degree of freedom. You sort of gain a degree of freedom as the universe cools and the symmetry is broken between them. Whereas before maybe they were act together. It's maybe one more of what you mean. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

At the beginning of the universe, these forces were all sort of in sync. Exactly. And we don't think it's coincidence that the strength of these forces was the same number back then. There were parts of the same thing. They have the same strength. That doesn't seem like a coincidence, right? You don't need two numbers to describe one phenomena, especially if the numbers are equal. Now, in terms of making the ultimate progress, which is like finding out that even gravity is part of these forces,

I think scientists are maybe envisioning a time in the universe. maybe very close to the big bag when maybe even gravity was part of these forces. Yeah, maybe. We don't know and it's very speculative because we haven't even unified the strong force with ElectraWeak, but the idea is that maybe back when the universe was so hot and so dense that even gravity, which is crazy weak, was as powerful as these other forces that maybe it was all just one. And that's the, you know, very speculative theory of quantum gravity or theory of everything

combines the strong force, Electro-Weak, and gravity together. But that's like double question-marky. I see. So, wait, you're saying like maybe a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there was only the force. Is that kind of what you're saying as a physicist?

That's a beautiful idea. We don't know if it's true. We've seen the first two chapters like electricity and magnetism joined together to make elective magnetism. The weak force joins to make Electro-Weak. We don't know if the next season strong force will unify and if in the sequels you know gravity comes in to link up together

and again this is like episode one was the new hope they joined electric and magnetic forces then the empire strikes back was the weak force joining and then maybe we're still waiting for the return of the Jedi engineers yeah exactly unify the rest together return of quantum gravity exactly and it might be that back in the early universe there was only one force And then it cracked as the universe cooled and passed through the different phases. Or maybe it didn't. Maybe there were multiple forces to begin with. We don't know.

Well, that would mean that even today, they're all still all the same force. They're just, you know, acting in different levels kind of. Yeah, exactly. They all respond differently to the universe cooling. But it would be beautiful. We could figure out a way to describe them all in terms of one force. Absolutely. So what's needed right now?

More experiments or more theory or both? Either. We're desperate. Like either we need new ideas, like new mathematical ways. looking at what we've already seen, the patterns that we've described, or we need new experiments to show us more of the pattern so we can get better ideas. We don't know which way is the path forward right now. And the history of physics is sort of leapfrogged each other. Experimentalists discover a bunch of new particles and nobody understands. Theories fit them together into a new

idea and then predict new stuff. Experimentalists discover some more stuff. It's sort of gone back and forth. Right now we don't know which direction is the best to make progress. Wow. It does sound a little desperate, but I wish you the best of luck. physicists, or as they say, may the force be with you. May the force be one. May the funds keep flowing. All right.

Well, another interesting conversation about how, you know, little by little we make progress in making sense of the universe, simplifying the equations, making them all work within the same framework. And it seems like we've made a lot of progress, but it sounds like maybe we've hit sort of a brick wall

for now. And maybe you just need to force yourself through it. We need some clever fleas to sit on our shoulders. That's why you just need bigger fleas. That's what it is. I'll put that in my next grand proposal. There you go. Make it a clever acronym. Force, leptons, engineering, astronomy. Done. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next night. For 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 TikTok. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio.

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