Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What are magnetic monopoles?

Episode Date: December 12, 2019

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Sammy Hagar. Tate McCray. The offspring. Tim McGraw. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today. AXS.com. Hey, Daniel, I have a question for you. Is it about aliens? Maybe. It might be about aliens. But what do you think would happen? What would happen if you made an amazing discovery in your work? Maybe you found aliens, maybe you found a new particle that changes our understanding of physics.

This sounds great so far. But then, what if nobody believed you? Oh, man, what if I found a deep secret of the universe but nobody else was convinced? Ooh, that's a terrible, terrible choice to make. Would you still want to do it? Or do you think it would just drive you crazy? Like seeing Bigfoot in the forest by yourself? You know, would you want to see, do you want to see Bigfoot and know that he exists or she exist?

or would you rather not be that crazy person? I think I'm too haunted by the secrets of the universe. I'd need to know that answer, even if it means all of my friends and relative think I'm crazy. Hi, I'm Horam, a cartoonist, and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I may have discovered something that you won't believe. Ooh, clickbait, click bait. Well, if you click here, welcome to our podcast. Daniel

and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeard Radio. In which we talk about all the amazing and crazy things about the universe. Things we've discovered, things we have not yet discovered, things physicists have found, and things physicists are still looking for. Yeah, things that even you might find out there. Maybe there are people listening to this who will make an incredible discovery for science and for physics. And if they hear about the potential for that discovery on our podcast, then all we ask when you're accepting your Nobel Prize is that you give us a shout out. That's right. Just mention our Twitter handle and we'll call it even.

Spill it out, though. Spell it out, though. People have trouble spelling your name sometimes. Yeah. Yeah, so sometimes it's a tricky thing in science, I think, because you could be the person who discover something amazing, but then if nobody can replicate it or maybe it just happen once, then nobody might believe you. Sometimes you're trying to create an effect like cold fusion that should be replicable. You know, somebody else should be able to make the same conditions in their lab and create the same situation. But sometimes you're looking for something.

Sometimes you just want to go out and find one example to prove it exists. And what if there's only one? You know, what if you're looking in the night sky and the aliens come and they go, hi, and then disappear forever doesn't mean it didn't happen well i won't confirm whether that's happened to me or not daniel but i would maybe um use the example like you know sometimes i'm out in camping or in the beach or something in the night at night and we're looking at the night sky with other people or with my kids and you know you'll see a shooting star and you'll be like look a shooting star and by the time everyone looks obviously it's gone and um and you sort of look like uh crazy person

Why does your family not believe your stories, Jorge? Are you making up stuff all the time? Oh my god, a unicorn. Nobody was looking. Maybe because my profession is to make up stories. Of course. That might be a... Maybe that's the real problem with this example.

Yeah, I hear voices in my head, Daniel. I mean, I think you're real, but maybe you're just in my head. But you know, but you're right. And sometimes in science, what you're looking for is just one example because the question you're asking is, does this exist? Just like, we want. want to know, is there life on other planets? Even just one example would be the answer to that question.

We don't need to know if there's life everywhere in the universe. We just want to know is there life anywhere else? And seeing it one time would totally answer that question. And so sometimes all you need is one piece of evidence, a proof of existence of this kind of thing. Yeah, I guess some things in science just need a proof of that proof of existence, like a unicorn or Bigfoot.

Yeah, we're sounding like a pseudoscience podcast. Yeah. Welcome to Daniel and Jorge talk weird conspiracy theories. Unicorn particles are real, man. And they collide with Bigfoot particles to produce something in the atmosphere which the CIA is hiding in Area 51. That's right. On the ground in a tunnel. That's right. I'm going to be called by the Republicans for the impeachment testimony based on my conspiracy theories. No, but it's true. And this happens not just in cryptozoology, right? People looking for weird animals. But it also happens in particle physics. Yeah. And in fact, it's happened in an area that I think, I thought, was pretty much settled in physics. But it seems that there are still open questions and open unicorns to be found there. That's right. Come join particle physics. There are still unicorns for you to discover. That's our selling point. Come for the unicorns. Stay for the big feet. What are you saying about my feet? Nobody out there knows how big my feet are.

That's why you always wear sandals. It all makes sense. Because they grow every day by like an inch, right? I tear apart any shoes I'm wearing. No, we have questions in particle physics where if you just saw one example of something, it would be not literally earth-shattering, but maybe literally mind-blowing for particle physicists. So today we'll be talking about an effect in magnetism, right, in electromagnetics, that would sort of up and our understanding of it, but that hasn't been found, or maybe it has been found, but maybe nobody believes the person who found it. That's right. The whole particle physics community is waiting to see if any,

Anybody will find this. We have one example of it from 40 years ago that nobody really believes except for the guy who found it. Right. So to the end of the program, we'll be talking about. What is a magnetic monopole? And where are they? If they do exist, why are they so hard to find? You're hiding next to Waldo and Bigfoot, apparently.

Do you think all those hard to find things just are hanging out somewhere? the middle of the forest and we just found them all together one day hanging out well i gotta say i think magnetism in general is just a big mystery it feels like the force to me you know it's like an invisible force but it's surprising to think that there are still things that might up and our understanding of it yeah it feels a little bit like 18th century science right in 18th century magnetism was like a big mystery what is this weird thing you can push and pull things and then people feel like you know we sort of figured it out. We have a good theory of electromagnetism. You know, we understand electricity. By now, we must understand everything about magnetism, right? Wrong. You are

attracted to these kinds of questions, Daniel. I am. I am pulled by these kinds of questions. Things that, you know, anybody could discover. But the thing that's fascinating to me is that this is a huge question in physics. It's like been open for more than a century. It's something people are actively working on that we do have a potential discovery. But I was wondering, is this something people like in general are aware of? Is this just something in the minds of physicists or is everybody else out there also desperate to hear about the latest search for the magnetic monopole? So as usual, I was curious if people understood, you know, what a magnetic monopole is.

And so I walked around the campus of UC Irvine and I asked folks if they knew what a magnetic monopole was. And so here's what people had to say. No. Magnets required two poles, a positive. than a negative, so I'm assuming this is maybe a combination of them, or just one, just negative or positive. Does it exist a magnetic molecule?

Do you think it's possible? It seems like it would be a contradiction, but I'm sure it could be theoretically possible, I guess. It sounds familiar, but I'm not too sure what it is. Okay. I actually have it. No idea? I have not. No.

No? No. No? No. No, I didn't think that you could have a magnetic molecule. Why not? Well, I'm only familiar with thinking of magnetic dipoles. Right. So can a monopole exist?

Well, I mean, since you're asking me the question, I think it kind of presumes that it can exist. So I'm assuming the answer to this is yes. That's based on my history of talking to you. Now, if you were a random guy approaching me at a coffee shop, or Asadu leaving the Indian forest, tell me that he had just witnessed a magnetic monopoles in his meditations,

I might be more dubious. I have not. All right. Not a lot of familiarity out there. And again, if you had interviewed me on the street, I'd probably would have said, no. It sounds like a magnet who has mono. I'm not sure what...

Yeah, it's sort of a technical name, but I think people will be surprised to discover that it's something they really can understand. It's something that makes perfect sense. because we have monopoles in other things. We have monopoles in electricity. And so it would make perfect sense to have monopoles in magnetism.

But you're right. Almost nobody had really any understanding of what this thing is. But a magnetic monopole would be a big deal, you're saying, in physics. Yep. Electric monopoles, we see them all the time. They're just electrons.

But a magnetic monopole, something which is a north or a south without being both, that we've never seen and that would really change our understanding of physics. All right. Well, let's dig into it, Daniel. What is a magnetic monopole? Or I guess what is a monopole in general? So a monopole comes in any kind of part of physics where you have things that are charged. And so I think it's easiest to start with electricity because people can think about electricity and charges.

And so you have the atom, for example. The atom is neutral because it has the electron and it has the proton. And so it's balanced, right? But there is a plus and a minus inside there. So the atom itself is neutral. We call a dipole. because it has both a plus and a minus, but you can separate them. You can cut it in half. You can get rid of the electron. You can just be left with the plus, or you can just have the electron.

So that would be a monopole for electricity, just the plus or just the minus. Is it then, it's a property of things, and it's like the charge that you have. Like if you're an electron, you have a negative charge, so that's your monopole. That's your single pole.

Yeah, you're a single pole. And then you bring the plus and minus together. That's a dipole. They balance each other out. in a hydrogen atom, I guess, if you're an electron and a proton, you have a plus and a minus. And so you have like one end of you is plus and one end of you is minus. Precisely. It's a dipole.

Precisely. It's a dipole. Overall, you're balanced, but one side is positive. One side is negative. Right. But that which side is which is moving around because the electron is moving around. Yeah, precisely. Okay.

And so that makes perfect sense. In electricity and magnetism, you can have a dipole like a hydrogen atom and you can have monopoles because what happens when you separate those bits of the. dipole. You get two monopoles, right? That's what makes perfect sense. You combine two monopoles. You break apart a dipole, you get two monopoles. You can separate a proton and an electron. No big deal. Okay, so that's in electricity. Like if you're, you have charge, if you're an electron or like a battery. But what does it mean then for magnetism? Because that's where the tricky stuff comes in. Yeah, magnetism turns out to be weirdly different, right? We're all familiar with a magnet. A magnet has a

north and a south. And so for magnetism, that's sort of like the plus and minus from electricity. So in magnetism, we call them north and south, mostly because they align with, you know, the Earth's north and south. But we could have called them anything else. We could have called them Bob and Alice or dogs and cats or, you know, chocolate, peanut butter or whatever. But they're not the same as plus and minus, you're saying? Why did we call them north and south? Why didn't we just call them plus and minus? They're not the same as plus and minus. Magnetism is separate from electricity. I mean, they have deep connections, of course, but it is a different force from this point of view, and they have a different charge. So this is like the

magnetic charge. So north is one kind of magnetic charge, and south is the opposite kind of magnetic charge. And the earth is a dipole. The earth has a north pole and a south pole, right? Overall, it's neutral, but there's one part of it which is more northy and one part of it, which is more south. The same is true for any magnet that you hold. It has a north and a south. And it's not related to where the charge, like, it's not related to where the charges are. or how much of it is there, right? Like the north pole on Earth is not due to the fact that the north part of the Earth has more electric negative charge, for example.

No, it has to do with how the electrons inside the Earth are moving. You see, all the magnetic fields that we have are dipoles. They have a north and the south. And that's because all of them come from moving charges, actually. See, here's the connection between electricity and magnetism. We have no way to create a pure north or a pure south. that's what the magnetic monopole would be. You don't need a magnet to create a charge,

like an electron, but you need a charge to create a magnet because we don't have a pure magnetic pole. You can't create just a north. Like what happens if you take a north and a south magnet? You split it in half, well, you get a north and a south in between, right? The little magnets then become dipoles.

Oh, I see. Oh, that's weird. Okay, so the north and south of a magnet is due to the movement of the charges inside. Like if I just take one electron, that has a negative charge. It's a monopole. But if I spin that electron in a circle, like in a coil of wire, then I create a magnetic...

Dipole. ...field, dipole, which has a north and a south. Precisely. Above the loop is north and below the loop is south. Precisely. But I can't just create a north. That's right. And say you did two of those electrons together, right?

right, and they're spinning together so they make a double north and double south. Now you want to say, okay, I just want the north, so I'm going to separate the two electrons. Well, each electron is its own dipoles, so it has a north and a south. You can't separate the north from the south. Like what happens you take a really long magnet, which is north on one end and south and the other, and cut it in half? Well, at the point where you cut it, that part becomes a south for the one magnet and north for the other. You get two dipoles. It splits off, but then if you put them back together, then you make...

one big magnet again. That's right. And this is very different from what happens when you separate electric charges. You can separate again the proton and the electron and just have a plus charge by itself or a minus charge by itself. But you can't do that with magnets. You can't separate the north and the south

into a pure north or a pure south. Because we've, well, we've never seen one, right? All we have are dipoles. We have no monopoles. We've never seen a magnetic monopole. I think we talked about this before, but the magnetic field of a magnet, like your average kitchen magnet, that field, that magnet

is due to like the spinning of the charges, the motion of the charges inside of the magnet, right? That's right. All the charges that are either moving or spinning. Quantum spin sometimes generates little magnets for each electron, little dipole magnets for each electron, which then all add up to give you a magnetic field for the fridge magnet. All right.

And so the idea is that you can't just make a north magnet. You always, whenever you create a magnet, It has two sides to it. If you create a magnet from a moving or spinning charge, it has a north and a south, and you can't ever separate them. And the question is, does there exist some material out there we've never discovered, some objects, some particle, some something, which is a pure north or a pure south? We've never seen one.

We've only seen magnetic dipoles. Does a magnetic monobole exist? Yeah, as far as we know, you can't create a north and south. But maybe there's a unicorn out there whose horn isn't one to pull. I would say the other way, I would say physics has nothing against magnetic monopoles. They would actually make much more sense if they did exist. The weird thing is, we've never seen one, except for that one guy in 1982. Well, a lot happened in 1982.

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All right, Dino, so that's what a monopole, magnetic monopole is. It's a magnet that has only a north or only a south. And you're telling me that it seems like it's kind of possible, but we've never seen one in nature. Like whenever you try to split a magnet or cut one in half, it just generates two mini magnets. You can't just, we haven't seen one where it's just north or just south. That's right. And I love encouraging experiments at home, but really, folks, if you just go out there and take your bar magnets and chop them in half, you're going to get two little bar magnets.

You're wasting your time and just shrinking your magnets. We've done that for it. What if I cut them really fast? But if I cut really fast before the loss of physics have a chance to rearrange. You think the laws of physics are like the laws of cartoons where they like take a moment to realize before Wiley Coyote plummetes to his death? I mean, that's, yeah, that's how it works in bucks money. That's right, yeah.

But our podcast is about the real universe and not the cartoon fiction universe in your mind. So, yeah, you can't do that. Well, I think we've established I'm nuts, so I'll keep on living in the cartooning universe. Yeah, and this is one of those fascinating moments where we see sort of a gap. You know, like you arrange all of human knowledge and you notice, hmm, something's missing. Something else would fit there. It's like when we were first building the periodic table and we noticed, oh, nobody's ever seen, you know, technetium element number, whatever that is. Why not?

Can we make it? Can it exist? You know, anytime there's a gap there in a pattern, you're wondering what would feel that hole. Right. There's like an empty chair and you're like, who's supposed to sit in that chair? Yeah. And we also, we like symmetry. We like balance.

And, you know, we said electricity and magnetism are kind of two different forces, but they're really deeply intertwined. You know, moving charges create magnetic fields. And so there's this symmetry between electricity and magnetism. And so if we can have positive and negative electric charges by themselves, why can't we have pure north and pure south? Well, I guess maybe one thing I might be need of some explaining on that I'm confused about is like what exactly is a magnetic pole at all. Like I know what a charge is. It's like your plus, which means you're attracted to minus charges and you repel other plus charges. Wait, you know what a charge is?

I don't understand what a charge is. I mean, to me, that's still like a deep question. Like, what makes the electron negative charged? We don't know. Well, I guess I mean not so deeply philosophical, but just like, I know what it means. Like, I know that if you have a plus, you're attracted to minus and you repel other pluses.

But what is, is it the same for north and south of a magnet? Like, it just means you repel other north, but you're attracted to other south? Precisely. And you know what north and south mean for magnets. If you try to push two north together, they repel each other. And a north and a south will attract each other. It works that same way.

I guess it's just, it's based on the magic of magnetic fields being generated by moving electrons. Yeah, that's what magnetic fields are. Magnetic fields are this force that a positive magnetic charge, which we call a north, feels on a negative magnetic charge, which we call a south. And they really are different, right? Positive and negative refer only to electricity. North and the south refer to magnetism. but they're connected because charges can make magnetic fields

and if there are monopoles out there then a moving monopole could create an electric current the way a moving charge creates a magnetic field so what would even a monopole magnet look and feel like like it'd be a be a little block or a little cylinder that only has north in it which means that if I put it up against another north

it'll repel it And it would have a magnetic field which radiates out from it from a point, just the way an electric field radiates out from an electron. We've never seen that before. We've only ever seen this north-south couple, you know, that has a dipole field. There's a totally different shape because it has both the north and the south. We've never seen an object that is not balanced in magnetism. We've only seen things that are overall neutral.

They have a north and a south. But you're saying that we think that maybe it could exist. Like the loss of physics don't tell us, nope, you can't have that. they tell us actually you can. Yeah, it was like a hundred years ago, Maxwell wrote down the laws of electricity and magnetism. He unified all the different magnetic effects and all the different electronic effects

that we had observed and all the different laws, you know, Gauss's law and Amper's law and all these different effects. He unified them all together into one concept, electromagnetism. So he's these four beautiful equations. And those equations are perfectly symmetric in electric and magnetic fields.

Like they look exactly the same. If you take every electric field out and replace it with a magnetic field and do the same thing for magnetic fields, the equations are the same. So they treat electricity and magnetism in exactly the same way with one exception, that it allows for an electric charge, like an electron, and it also allows for a magnetic charge. We've just never seen one. So the equations allow for it. They suggested, they say, if you had a magnetic field, here's how it would look, and that would make magnetism perfectly symmetric with electricity. Wait, so you're saying that the equations tell us that you should be able to see something like a particle or an object that only has a northness to it. Yeah, we know exactly how it would work, and it would make electricity and magnetism more similar if it existed.

But you're saying it's like a charge, like an electric charge, but aren't electro and magnetism the same thing? Yeah, they are related. They're two parts of the same coin. And so you would expect them to be similar. You expect this electricity, magnetism should be symmetric under the swapping of electric and magnetic fields. They should treat it the same way, but they don't. This is the one way in which electricity and magnetism are not the same thing.

Electricity has pure charges, plus and minus, but magnetism, maybe it does, but we've never seen one. So we'd love to see one because that would make them symmetric. It would make it, like, prettier in our minds. I guess I'm confused. doesn't an electron, which has a plus charge, a negative charge to it, doesn't it have a magnetic field around it? It does, but it has a north and a south. It has a magnetic dipole.

But you're saying the equations say that you should be able to see a particle that only has one pole. Yeah, the way we've found particles that have only plus or only minus, right, electrons and protons. We shouldn't be able to find a particle which has only a north or only a south according to the physics, right? physics says, you know, there's room for it. We have an opening here in the equations. We'd know exactly what to do with it to just go out and find it, prove that it exists. It doesn't look like it exists. Well, we've just never seen one before.

You know, if you talk to particle theorists, they say, oh yeah, probably those exist. We just never seen one. There's a famous quote by one of the greatest physicists of our generation, Joe Polchinsky. He says, magnetic monopoles are, quote, one of the safest bets than one can make about physics not yet seen. Like if you had to guess what was out there that we hadn't seen before, magnetic monopoles are a good guess. Is there like a running tally or like a betting, on those betting websites? Is there an odds on that right now? Yeah, there's like seven people contributing.

No, there are some famous physicists that make bets with each other about black holes and stuff like that. But I'm not aware of any about magnetic monopoles. And I'm not famous enough for anybody to bet me. But I would totally bet that monopoles exist. Right. So if I bet a dollar against it, it's a pretty good investment because everyone seems convinced that they exist. Yeah, but it's hard to prove that something doesn't exist, right? You have to look for it forever and never see it.

So you're never going to get that dollar. Oh, that's the problem. All right. And I think you were telling me that if it does exist, it's a big deal, right? Like it has implications about what we know about quantum physics. Yeah, not only would it symmetized electricity and magnetism, but it would... Symetries. Symetries.

I like that word. But also would answer another deep question about physics, which is why is electric charge quantized? Like, why can you have, you know, one or a third or whatever, but you can't have like 0.7621? You know, why is it not a continuous number? Like you can't have a 0.7 electron. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And a lot of these things are quantized, you know.

Energy is quantized and all this stuff. But we don't know why electric charge is quantized. But there's a really simple explanation. If monopoles exist, then the angular momentum of that monopole would be quantized because angular momentum is quantized, and that angular momentum is directly related to the charges. And so if you have one monopole existing in the universe, it requires that electric charge is quantized. I feel like you just pulled a fast one on me, and I'm debating whether to let it go or not.

It just sounds like you're saying if a monopole exists, it means electric charge. charge is quantized because magnetic fields are or charge are quantized. But isn't that just pushing it back to why magnetic charges are quantized? No, it comes from angular momentum. Angular momentum has to be quantized. We know it's quantized. That is definitely true. Angular momentum is quantized. Like, we see that in the orbits of electrons in atoms, right? That's why they have orbitals because their angular momentum is quantized. And the angular momentum of a monopole, would be related to its charge and to the electric charge

of a thing it's interacting with and not related to really anything else. And so because the angular momentum is quantized and the angular momentum comes from these two charges, then the product of the two charges has to be quantized. So that's how you trace it back. And it's like you were saying,

the problem is that it's hard to prove that something doesn't exist, right? Yeah. But wait, if we know that electric charge is quantized, Doesn't that prove that there exist monopoles in the universe? Well, sort of. I'm just reversing the argument that you gave me. Yeah, well, that's not a terrible argument, but somebody might say, well, we don't know that it's quantized.

We've just never seen it act in any other way. So maybe it's not actually quantized, right? We have no reason, we have no explanation for why electric charge is quantized. But you might say, well, you know, if there is no other explanation, then maybe it's because a monopole exists somewhere. But then maybe somebody else could come up with another explanation. But this one, if a monopole exists, it would require electric charts to be quantized. So it's a nice explanation.

Yeah. And it gets into kind of a philosophical realm here because like you were saying, it's hard to prove a negative. Like it's hard to say unicorns don't exist. Just because you haven't found one, it doesn't mean they don't exist. Exactly.

And you just have to find one to prove that they do exist. Exactly. But sometimes you find one and still nobody believes you. All right. So the physics tells us that monopoles exist, but we haven't found one. Or maybe we have. Apparently, somebody thinks they

found one in 1982. So let's get into that. But first, let's take a quick break. 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.

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Magnets with only one pole, one north or south. Physics says that they should exist, but nobody has ever seen one. And if we do see one, it would be a big deal. It would certainly be a big deal. It's talking Nobel Prize material. I'm going to go try cutting some magnets right now. I guess the question is, are people looking for these monopoles? Or is it something that people are just hoping to stumble on?

How would we even look for a magnetic monopole? I would love to stumble on a magnetic monopole. wow, that would be a great day, you know. Have you looked around? Have you, did you check under your seat there? I'm checking my pockets right now. Hold on. You get them on a pole and you get them on a pole.

Everyone gets a monopole. Exactly. No, there's, people are looking for monopoles actively. People have been looking for them for decades. Daniel, I think in general you want to avoid sitting on a monopole. I'd have to do the calculations. I'm not sure what that would be like if you sit on a monopole. All right.

So how do we, how do people? look for a monopoles. And there's two, yeah, there's two ways to look for them. One is to look for ones that exist already in nature, try to find it, and the other is to try to make them. Make or study them. Yeah. Find them or make them.

And so the way you would find them is, is pretty simple. You just use the rules of electricity and magnetism. So if you have a monopole, then it passes through a loop of wire, then it will generate an electric current. Just the same way if you have a charge particle that's moving, it will generate a magnetic field. A charge monopole, a single

monopole will generate a magnetic field. Here's the beauty of the symmetry. All you need to do is build a big loop of wire and wait for a spike. And that's it. And I guess you're looking for a spike that doesn't have a counter spike. Exactly. Exactly.

You're looking for a spike that doesn't have a counter spike because you pass a big magnet through a north and a south. you'll get a current one way and then a current the other way. That's exactly how alternating current generators work. But if you just pass a north through it, you'll just get a spike and it won't be balanced. Oh, right. Like if I pass a little stick magnet through a little loop of wire, you know, the north goes in first,

which generates current in one direction. And then as it goes through, the south goes through then after that, which should generate a spike in the other direction. Yeah, because you're passing through a net zero magnetic charge, you're going to end up with net zero current. Right. Or a current that goes up and then down. Yeah. So integrated over time, it's zero.

But if you only have one north going through, it should generate a spike, which you should build up over time. Yeah. So you're looking for many multiples at the same time. No, even just one. Even just one would give you a spike. You just need one. I mean, two would be great. A hundred would be even better.

I mean, that's 100 Nobel Prizes. Can you publish a paper with just N1? I guess that's the question of the day. Yeah, and so somebody saw one. Somebody built a big loop of wire and, you know, saw a little blip here and a little blip there and the kind of noise you would expect was on a big bloop of wire. How big are we talking about? Like millimeters or miles?

That's a good question. I'm not sure. I think it's, you know, tens of meters in size. Because the bigger it is, the more likely you are to catch a monopole, right? It's like you're going fishing. Do you use a big net or a little net? And you would be able to detect, like, a set? single particle with that? That's the challenge, right? Build a big loop of wire that's sensitive to

a spike like that. And so the bigger it is, the harder it is to tamp down the noise, but then the more likely you are to catch something. So there's a bit of a balance there. Okay, so you can build a magnetic monopole catcher or detector. And I guess people have built these? Was this an active field for a while? Or is something people are looking at? Yeah, I think it was sort of hotter a few decades ago, but about 40 years ago, a guy named Blas Cabrera Navarro, he built one of these things and he ran it. And on Valentine's Day, 1982, he saw a beautiful spike, exactly the kind of spike you would get from a monopole, like a big spike in current, much bigger than any noise he's ever seen, and no counter spike. Oh, just one. Just one. Meaning like one particle

went through or like one clump of particles? What did he think he saw? It's consistent with a single monopole. Like one, like seeing one electron. Like seeing one electron. Yeah. It's a hard thing to spot. Oh, wow. And you know, you go out fishing in a huge lake

and if the first time you dip in your net you get a big fish you think, oh wow, looks like this lake has lots of fish in it, right? But then everybody else comes with their fish and nobody finds a fish. And they're like, you're lying. What's wrong with you? Okay. And he only found one spike and never again.

Never again. So he once saw that weird spike, which may or may not have been a magnetic monopole, but he was not able to replicate it. And nobody else who's done something similar has ever seen one. He's left a machine on since 1982. And since even in 30 years, 40 years, almost, they still haven't found another one. Yeah. And so either it was some crazy glitch, right? But then a glitch that was not reproduced because he's not seen that signal again. Or it was a real monopole and monopoles are just super rare, right? For nobody else to have seen one and for him to never seen another one,

they would have to be really, really rare. And so maybe they do exist. They're just really rare and he happened to see one. And he just happened to see it on Valentine's Day, which is suspicious. Yeah, his wife was trying to get him out of the lab. And she said, all right, if you find one, then you're done, right? Okay, here you go. Or maybe the wife did it.

to get him out of the lab or spouse or I don't know his romantic interest was but yeah it's a little bit funny that it was on a holiday it is a little bit funny yeah but you know

and we're talking about n equals one so coincidences can just be pure coincidence or they could be meaningful maybe this was a gift from the universe for Blascabrera it must be a tricky position because it's like

if you get something like that once and never again you know, it's very likely that it might be like an error or something. But then again, you don't want to be the person who found the thing, but then didn't make a big deal about it, right? Yeah, exactly. You don't want to be the person who went out and actually caught that crazy fish and then just sort of threw it back because you didn't believe in yourself.

So you're making a huge bet here. You're saying, I found it. And just in case it was the real thing, you can be the one that people say it was the first one. Or people might think you're nuts. People might think you're nuts. But this is a tricky field, like you say, because not seeing them doesn't mean they don't exist. They could just be super duper rare, and you need to wait for a long time.

All you can do is make statistical statements. The longer you don't see one, the more you can say that they are rare. And so currently, we know that if monopoles do exist, there's fewer than one per 10 to the 29 atoms. Because if they were more frequent than that, we would have seen them. you're talking, just finding them in nature, like just holding out your glove and hoping to catch one, right? That's right. That's just finding them already existing in nature. The other idea is to make them in the lab. Making monopoles. Making monopoles. That's right. We know the recipe. How does that work? Which cartoon machine do you need here to make one? It's not a cartoon machine. It's a

real machine. It's the large Hajon Collider. It's my favorite machine. It's produced by Agmi products, but, you know, we'll let that slide. How do you hope to make one? Just smash stuff and hope it something comes out? That's the magic of particle colliders is that you can use them to explore sort of the space of what's possible. If monopoles can exist in nature,

then we should be able to make them in the collider. Now, it might be that they're just very rare, that they're hard to make. You smash protons together and it takes a quadrillion collisions to get one monopole. We don't know. So we've been looking for them. We've been smashing protons together for decades.

looking for monopoles, never having seen anything that even looks close to a monopole. So that means that the evidence that it doesn't exist is building up. Yeah, but those searches are different. Those searches make different assumptions. They assume, for example, that if monopoles exist, they can be made in colliders, which requires a few assumptions about how they interact with the particle we have in our colliders. Remember, the basic limitation is in colliders, we can only make particles that interact with the stuff we're putting in.

So, for example, we try to make dark matter in colliders, hoping that protons have some interaction with dark matter. If they don't interact with dark matter, we can't make it in the colliders. Same way, if monopoles don't interact with protons and quarks, then we can't make them in the collider. So there are some loopholes there. All right. Well, then that means that we need to stay tuned.

Maybe somebody will build a new kind of collider, right? Or maybe at some point, a monopole might pop out of this. collision experiment. Yeah, sometimes I feel like we're in the middle of a centuries long story. You ever read about these, you know, these questions in physics which you get posed and then solved like a hundred years later or 150 years later and you wonder like, what would it like to be like 70 years in? And it feels like this question's been around forever and still nobody's made any progress in your decades from the discovery. That's sort of where we are here. What keeps people going? Well, you never know how far away you are from the discovery. And so

It could be that next year somebody finds a cluster of monopoles, or maybe it's in 100 years, or maybe somebody will figure out a new way to manufacture them, yeah. I think that they exist. I think that monopoles are out there, but I don't know. You know, it's a question about the universe. We just don't know the answer to, but someday humans might know. Well, if you think they exist, and I'll take that bed with you, Daniel. Okay.

All right. That's a dollar. Where are they? Where do you think they are if you think that they exist? Are they, you know, hidden? Are they, is it a dark matter? Is it just something that, like some of these particles that don't live a long time that we just haven't reached with our particle colliders?

Where do you think they are? I don't know. And we think that if monopoles can exist in the universe, they should have been made during the Big Bang, just like everything else, you know, protons and electrons and all those other kind of particles were made just after the Big Bang. So why not monopoles? And if monopoles were created,

you know, do they annihilate each other? Like when a north and a south meet, do they annihilate each other into a photon? It might be possible. It might be the case that, you know, matter and antimatter were asymmetric, which is why we ended up with matter. Monopole Norths and Souths were all symmetric and they all annihilated each other away.

So we just don't know. All right. I'll formulate my dark matter, anti-matter monopole unicorn theory for next week's episode. And I'll be taking bets. Sounds good. take a bet on that one. Maybe you should call it a unipole, and then magic unipole, and then maybe you'll get more people

interesting. Yeah, the bigfoot pole, the big pole, magic unibigpole. The unifoot. New cryptosology entry. Crypto-particle physics. All right. Well, I think this is just another example of how there's just all these unanswered questions out there in the universe that might at any point in time up in our understanding of what we think

is going on. That's right. If you are an aspiring physicist, young woman out there, remember that science can be done by anyone and there are great discoveries remaining. Yep, everybody, check under your seats right now. Go. And remember, our Twitter handle is at Daniel and Jorge. That's right. Thanks for going along with us on this ride about the crazy bonkers, amazing universe. that we all live in. Yeah, we hope you were attractively symmetized. And thank you for joining us.

See you next time. Thanks for tuning in. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback.

at Daniel and Jorge.com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

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