Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What are quantum glasses?

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

Daniel and Jorge talk about finding order among the messiness of the Universe, and the strange frustration of quantum spin glasses.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System
Starting point is 00:00:33 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. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's 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 or gone.
Starting point is 00:01:01 Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen.
Starting point is 00:01:31 I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do we really need another podcast with a condescending finance brof trying to tell us how to spend our own money? No, thank you. Instead, check out Brown Ambition. Each week, I, your host, Mandy Money, gives you real talk, real advice with a heavy dose of I feel uses, like on Fridays when I take your questions for the BAQA.
Starting point is 00:02:03 Whether you're trying to invest for your future, navigate a toxic workplace, I got you. Listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Daniel, where are you recording the podcast from these days? Today I'm in my office at the university. Aw, kind of disappointed. Wanting you to be like at the control center of the LECC or right next to where the particles collide. Kind of like a sportscaster.
Starting point is 00:02:37 Nothing so glamorous. But I may paint a picture for us. What does your office look like? Is it like in a dark dungeon or is it at the top of the penhouse at the corner office? You know, something in between. I've got a nice window here with a view outside of the Southern California landscape, but it's not like the biggest office on the floor. We've got some real big shots around here.
Starting point is 00:02:59 You're more of a medium shot? Small shot? I'm a just right shot. You're a podcast shot. Now, is everything in your office super organized or are there like huge stacks of papers everywhere? Well, I'm not the kind of person who's at risk for dying because his desk collapses under a huge tower of papers,
Starting point is 00:03:17 but it's not exactly like a well-organized museum or anything. It looks lived in, you know. Hmm. I think Liveden is code for messy? I don't know. What do you call something that's like halfway between being neat and messy? Well, I'm a physicist, so I would call it a phase transition. It's like a melting point. You're kind of like a slush. Like a slushy. I'm hoping that if they crank up the AC, maybe my office will organize itself into a crystal. And you'll freeze to death also. Preserve for future generations. But at least I'll look neat doing it. And you'll be pretty cool, too.
Starting point is 00:03:52 Hi, I'm a cartoonist, and the co-author of Frequently Asked Questions about the universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a professor at UC Irvine and a particle physicist who works at the large Hadron Collider. And I like to think of myself as just messy enough. Mm, messy enough for what? For not be neat? Messy enough to have that lucky stroke of insight, you know, when that pile of notes you took three years ago at a seminar just sort of falls into your view and provides that crucial piece of information to unlock the puzzle you're working on. If you're too neat and organized and everything's tucked away, then you never have that sort of serendipity. I see.
Starting point is 00:04:40 And I assume that because you're a scientist, you've have this tested, right? This is scientifically proven? Like, you've done the control studies where you're really neat and more messy. Yeah, I have a bunch of other Daniels in the basement, and I make them be really neat and messy, and I keep track of their careers also. And I guess you're the most successful one because you're not at the basement, right? So that proves your theory, I guess. I'm the only one with the podcast, which maybe means I'm a failure as a scientist. I'm not sure.
Starting point is 00:05:07 The other ones are actually doing physics. Is that what you're saying? They're still doing research, exactly. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeartRadio. which we try to find order in this messy universe, this chaotic swirl of particles going to and fro, weaving themselves together into this incredible, beautiful reality that we want to make sense of. While galaxies smash into each other and particles annihilate each other, we step back and try to organize all the things that are happening out there in the universe
Starting point is 00:05:39 into a crystalline set of ideas that we can transmit along these audio waves into your brains. That's right because it is a pretty messy universe full of amazing and exciting things happening out there, particles crashing into each other's black holes sucking up things. And yet somehow we have as humans figured out that there is a little bit of an order to all of this, even if we aren't very ordered ourselves. And of course, we don't know if that order exists in the universe or if it's just something we have imposed on it. Does the universe actually make sense? Are we just telling ourselves these stories?
Starting point is 00:06:13 A fun question in the philosophy of physics. But so far, it works for us. It lets us build airplanes and transistors and all kinds of new materials that ruin and save our lives. Are you saying the universe is just messy enough? I'm saying it melts my brain sometimes. Meltz in your mouth, all that knowledge. I wonder what would you like if the universe melted in your hand instead of your mouth. Well, first of all, can you hold the universe in your hand?
Starting point is 00:06:36 Only if it has a thin candy coating, right? But you are the universe also. Wouldn't your hand be inside the M&M too? We are all M&Ms. That's the philosophy on this show. But are you the chocolate or are you the candy? And which color is your M&MNM? Knowledge is the chocolate and this show is the candy coating that helps it go down smooth.
Starting point is 00:06:57 Keeps it from melting in your mouth or in your hands. Exactly. As you crunch on through it. Or in your ears, that would be pretty messy. You don't want to melt a chocolate in your ears. Are you suggesting people do or do not put M&Ms in their ears? I've sort of lost track here. I know children do and we have kids listening.
Starting point is 00:07:13 Are you saying you know the results of that experiment that if you put M&Ms in your ears, they do not melt? I can guess what happens. But dang it science is not about guessing. It's about going out there and doing experiments and discovering what actually happens when you make new arrangements that nobody's ever thought of before. Sometimes it's adding weird metals to other metals. Sometimes it's putting M&Ms in ears. That's right because we know the universe is made out of particles and bits of energy out there. But as it turns out, there are lots of different ways you can put together those.
Starting point is 00:07:43 bits of matter and energy, and which gives you all kinds of different results. And there are people still figuring this out. You know, I'm a particle physicist, so my natural inclination for understanding how the world works is to take it apart, is to reduce it to its smallest, most fundamental elements. But there are other people who work in a completely different direction. Their basic question is, how do we make some new kind of goo? And can we make goo that can do things that goo never did before? They combine those fundamental pieces of the universe in new ways to try to make them dance and jiggle and do things that no other kinds of goo have done before. Yeah, because there are many different ways that matter can arrange itself.
Starting point is 00:08:22 They're called states of matter, right? There's liquid and gas and solids and plasma, right? Those are the states of matter that we know of. Those are the famous classical states of matter. But as we explore the universe and push on these things, we discover that matter can do all sorts of weird kinds of things. We talked on the podcast recently about quark gluon plasma, or you called it quasma. A great name, by the way. Yes. I'm still waiting for my Nobel Prize. Well, just keep eating Banasma as you wait. Yeah, yeah. That might slip with the Nobel Prize Committee. But it's amazing to me all the things that emerge in our universe. You know, one deep answer to the question, what is the universe made out of, is to reveal its fundamental bits.
Starting point is 00:09:04 But I think it's equally important to understand what those bits do when they work together. because you can't explain the entire universe from the fundamental pieces. Even if you had a complete and unique string theory that described the fundamental theory of everything, you couldn't use it to predict hurricanes or traffic on the 405 because these are properties that emerge at a different scale. When you zoom out from the universe from the tiny little bits, you notice these incredible properties, places where we find these interesting and simple mathematical stories that we can tell about the universe, whether or not they are fundamental. Yeah, so there are these four basic states of matter that most people are familiar with, solid, gas, liquid, plasma.
Starting point is 00:09:44 And I guess they're popular and people know them because we see them in our everyday lives, right? They're sort of how matter usually sticks together. But as you were saying, there are many other ways that matter can stick together if you go down into the weirder realm of quantum physics. Yeah, if you stick things together in weird ways and zap them with lasers, you can find stuff that does things that no other kind of stuff can do. You've probably heard of Bose-Einstein condensates, for example. Weird collections of particles that act all together as a single quantum state, a macroscopic blob of stuff with quantum properties. That's another example of how you can squeeze and tweak matter into weird configurations
Starting point is 00:10:24 to do new kinds of stuff. And new kinds of stuff is what we'll be talking about here today. So today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question. What are quantum glasses? Now, Daniel, I'm guessing these are not just things you wear to see quantum things better. When we go to a quantum physics conference, everybody puts these things on. It's like going to a 3D movie, right? It's for curing quantum myopia?
Starting point is 00:10:53 Is that what it's for? Or are they for drinking quantum wine or juice? Quantum juice. So you can say, I'm not sure if I drank that glass of wine or if somebody else did. Schrodinger drank my glass of wine. How many glasses of quantum? have you drunk today? One and zero at the same time. There's a probability distribution that I'm drunk.
Starting point is 00:11:13 Quantum glasses. So these are two words I'm familiar with, but I've never seen them together in the same phrase. These are a really interesting kind of material. Sometimes they're also called spin glasses, as we'll learn about later, because they involve quantum spin. So it's a really fun topic and something a bunch of listeners have been emailing me about because they saw articles about spin glasses and quantum glasses, and they wanted to understand, hey, what are these things anyway? Interesting. And can you make a spin bottle out of glass?
Starting point is 00:11:43 Is that the same thing? I think you're thinking of the game, spin the bottle. Well, as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had heard of this phrase, quantum glasses, or had any idea of what they are. So thank you very much to those of you who are willing to answer these questions. It's really helpful to give us a sense for what people are thinking and what they already know. If you'd like to participate for future episodes, please don't be shy. Write to me to questions at danielandhorpe.com and I'll set you up.
Starting point is 00:12:11 So think about it for a second. What do you think quantum glasses are? And what could you see with them? Here's what people had to say. Quantum glasses, I guess, are not spectacles to view through, but they should be a kind of material. In material science, glasses are a class of material that are characterized by being very disorganized. so quantum glasses should be a quantum soup that is disorganized. I have no idea.
Starting point is 00:12:41 I don't think they're the tiny little reading glasses that some people perched on the end of their nose, nor are they the tiny little shot glasses one might use for a very strong drink. Even those are not quite quantum level, and one should use distance glasses, if any, rather than reading glasses and not drink alcohol while driving a Volkswagen Quantum. So I'm going to take a wild guess that there's something that refocuses beams of quantum particles, much like how eyeglasses and other such lenses refocus beams of light. I have absolutely no idea what quantum glasses could be. So this is going to be a completely uneducated guess in every way.
Starting point is 00:13:22 My mind originally went to glasses like glasses you wear, but then I also thought of glasses as like a container for a liquid. So my guess is that it is some type of container through which we can better observe quantum events, events on a quantum scale. I think quantum glasses is a system physicists use to negotiate quantum theory, either that or it's the glasses I used to use when I was a heavy drinker. Take a guess. Quantum glasses helps you. see Schrodinger's cat exactly what that cat is doing and it's no whereabouts. If I was to deduce, I reckon it's some way of being able to utilize something to review or to assess the way that the quantum world is behaving, similar to how spectacles
Starting point is 00:14:19 are laid to see the world. I wonder if it's got something to do with our ability to see or interact with the quantum world. All right. A lot of interesting ideas. I love the tiny little reading glasses. They're like little quantum particles you put in your eyeballs. Is that what they're saying? No, I'm imagining like little tiny glasses perched at the very, very tip of my nose. And they're there and they're not there at the same time. But I'm most impressed with this one guest that says glasses are disorganized.
Starting point is 00:14:51 So maybe quantum glasses are a disorganized quantum soup. That is so close to correct. I'm amazed. Yeah, yeah. I feel like maybe they cheated or something. I wonder if they read an article about this. I don't know. The rules are you're not allowed to Google. So, you know, maybe they just intuited it. Maybe this person just is a physics genius. Wow. Maybe you should be hiring them. Or maybe you already hired them. I don't know. Did you ask your grad students sometimes? I do sometimes, but these are all random internet people. Although, you know, some of our listeners are
Starting point is 00:15:22 physics grad students and some of them aren't. So there's a pretty wide spectrum of backgrounds. Yes. In the end, we're all random. internet people, Daniel. But anyways, lots of great ideas. And so let's dig into it. What is a quantum glass? Daniel, break it down for us. So basically our listener gave us the answer. A quantum glass is a material where the quantum states are disordered in a way that's similar to a window glass is a disordered solid rather than like an ordered crystal. That means that things on the inside are not like arranged so everything points in the same direction. It's sort of scrambled a little bit. Interesting. Because I guess bits of matter, atoms and quantum particles, they have a specific direction. Aren't they just like little blobs?
Starting point is 00:16:07 They do have specific directions because they have quantum spins, right? Electrons are not just tiny particles with charge and mass. They also have other quantum properties, including this weird thing, quantum spin, that we don't fundamentally know what it is. We don't think that these electrons are actually spinning because we think of them as point particles. And even if you account, count for the width of their wave function. If they were literally spinning, then their surfaces would have to go faster than the speed of light to explain all of this energy. It's some other weird property. We have a whole podcast episode about what is quantum spin. But for today, all we need to know is that it can have a direction. Electrons can be like spin up or spin down.
Starting point is 00:16:48 And this is true for other particles, protons and neutrons and even for atoms can have an overall spin. So that gives them a directionality. They're not just points. Right. They have a property that somehow points in a certain specific direction in space. And you said it's just sort of like normal glass too? Like maybe let's start with that. What is a normal glass? Yeah. So a normal glass is something that feels solid like you go to your window pane and you touch it, it feels solid, right?
Starting point is 00:17:16 But most solids out there are not like glass. Most solids are ordered. They're organized like a crystal. You know, they're sort of like built out of a bunch of tiny bricks that are all stacked together very nicely and neat. into like a big cubic lattice. You could think of them as like a bunch of atoms where the atoms all line up in three directions. You know, if you like sort of looked down it, you could line up all the atoms sort of like in front of you and then along the surface and this kind of thing.
Starting point is 00:17:43 So most stuff that's out there is fairly well organized, but a glass is not. A glass is just sort of like a pile of stuff that's stuck together, but it's not well organized. What do you mean? You mean like my wooden desk is, is neatly organized, but it looks pretty messy. Your wood desk is even more complicated because it has all sorts of structure in the wood
Starting point is 00:18:03 itself. But you know, if you take it like a block of ice, it's a single kind of stuff. It's cold and the atoms inside of it are arranged in a lattice. There's like the distance between two atoms is pretty much a single number. And that's true for most things like metals, et cetera. But they're both solid, right? Like a piece of glass is solid, just like a piece of ice is solid too. That's right.
Starting point is 00:18:23 A piece of glass is solid because its volume doesn't change and it's shape doesn't change. They both just sit there, right? But if you zoomed in with a microscope, an amorphous solid like glass would look very different from a crystal solid. A crystal solid you would zoom in and it would look like it's built out of these little pieces that are all arranged very nicely, like somebody stacked a bunch of Legos together. Whereas an amorphous solid would look like, you know, the inside of your Lego bin before you built something would be like a disorganized pile of stuff that's still somehow stuck together. And you know, glass is an example of it. And then we call these things glasses. But there are.
Starting point is 00:18:57 other examples like a lot of plastics are like this gels are like this you know sand is like this if you zoom in close enough it's not like stacked up in little bricks it's just sort of like a big jumble but you're right it is solid it manages to stick together well enough still have the properties of a solid right although i've heard glass is actually a liquid like a really slow liquid right isn't it that is something that is said often but i don't think it's actually true i think the people have been misled by old windows for example that are thicker on the the bottom than on the top, but that's mostly because of the glass making process at the time. Glass itself, I don't think, actually flows on a timescale the humans can measure.
Starting point is 00:19:37 But in a long time scale, it sort of does, right? Technically, it's true that these things can flow on very, very long timescales, but most of the things where you see it's like thicker on the bottom than on the top is not because the glass is flowed. It's a little bit unclear exactly what the timescale is for a glass to flow into a puddle, for example. It might be a very, very long time scale. Well, I guess maybe a question I have is what's the difference between something that is a glass and something that is not a glass? Like what makes some materials arrange themselves
Starting point is 00:20:07 into crystal structure lattices and what makes them just stick together amorphously? The answer is that is complicated. For some materials, it depends on how they are cooled. So if you cool things really, really fast, they don't have a chance for the crystal to organize itself. Other materials just don't fall into a crystal because of the way their interactions work. They can't build a regular lattice. So it depends a lot on the exact material and also on how you get it to its state. So some things can be crystals or can be glasses and it just depends on like how quickly they're cooled down. Doesn't a lot of it also depend on like the structure of the molecules in the material?
Starting point is 00:20:45 For example, I know like maybe I think water falls into crystals because the two Hs and the O kind of form. kind of a weird shape and there are only so many different ways you can kind of make those shapes stick together. Yeah, that's what I mean by the interactions of the materials. Imagine, for example, you have a weird shape tile. A question you can ask is like, can I tile this across the floor in a regular pattern? And that's basically what you're trying to do when you build a crystal is like fill up a space with a regular pattern with a weird shape that you have. So as you say, for example, water has kind of a weird shape, but it's capable of building crystal. But actually, it can build lots of different kinds of crystals based on the temperature and pressure of its formation.
Starting point is 00:21:24 There's like ice four and ice six and ice nine. These are all different crystal arrangements of the same basic thing based on the temperature and the pressure and the conditions in which it was formed. So it's a really complicated question. Yeah. And I think it also depends on like what makes the molecules stick together, right? Like an HTO. It could be the forces between the O's, for example.
Starting point is 00:21:45 I'm just giving out a random example. Or it could be, you know, the forces between the H's, the, the, you know, the forces between the H's. and things like that, right? Exactly. And some parts of it are stickier than others, right? Depending on the energy levels of their electrons. So it's something that's not always easy to predict. Sometimes the best way to figure it out is just to try it.
Starting point is 00:22:02 It's just to go out and see what happens. So we have people whose entire careers are just like mapping out the phase diagram of various kinds of materials, understanding what it does under certain configurations. I think maybe the takeaway is that stuff sticks together in general. And there are many different ways for it to stick together. And sometimes they stick together in regular patterns, like in a grid. And sometimes they just kind of bundle up like randomly, right? And that's what a glass is.
Starting point is 00:22:28 Mm-hmm. And glasses is an example of this category. You also have like plastics and polymers and foams and gels. These all follow the same kind of structure as glasses. They're amorphous rather than crystalline. Right. And those are in the macro scale, they're amorphous materials kind of like the atom level, right? We're not yet at the quantum level.
Starting point is 00:22:47 Yeah, these are things at the atom level, exactly. So then you're saying a quantum glass is a material in which stuff is stuck together, but it's amorphous in its quantum states. Yeah, and I predict you're going to be pretty unhappy with this distinction about what's a quantum state or not, because in the end, all of these interactions are quantum. Like when two water molecules touch each other and form part of a crystal, that is a quantum interaction between quantum particles. But when we talk about quantum glasses, we mean that we're adding a new dimension to it. they were considering another quantum property. In this case, quantum spin, because we're not interested in how the objects order themselves in space.
Starting point is 00:23:26 We're interested in the distribution of these spins. Are the spins ordered or are the spins disordered? Well, I guess maybe a distinction is that, like, for example, for water and ice, I mean, you're talking about atoms being in a kind of a lattice, right? And atoms themselves don't have spin or, you know, isn't it like the electrons in the atoms and the quarks in the atoms that have spin, not the atom itself? The atoms themselves do have an overall spin. It comes from adding up the spin of all the bits, the nuclear spin, the electron spin.
Starting point is 00:23:54 And that's what's important for forming magnets, for example, is the spin of the whole atom. It adds up. So we do think about the spin of the atom itself, not just the electrons inside of it. All right. Well, let's get more into it and explain what exactly is a quantum glass and whether or not we've actually seen them and can touch them and maybe use them to read quantum books. Let's get into that. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th,
Starting point is 00:24:25 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. old metal, glad. 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.
Starting point is 00:24:59 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. Wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit.
Starting point is 00:25:33 Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. 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?
Starting point is 00:26:01 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. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy.
Starting point is 00:26:32 Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told.
Starting point is 00:27:03 I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. podcasts. 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. When you 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
Starting point is 00:27:44 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 quantum glasses.
Starting point is 00:28:28 Are these like x-ray glasses that let me see through things? That let you see immediately to the next big discovery in physics. I wish. Isn't I just called working, Daniel? That's right. What if I could just put on quantum glasses and look at my calendar, be like, that's the day you're going to make a big discovery. Oh, what would you do? Would you work harder or less? I mean, you were going to make a big discovery next week. Well, I know that napping is a crucial part of making big discovery, so I'd make sure to get that out of the way first.
Starting point is 00:28:59 Right, right. But would you not more or less if you knew your feature? Well, future, Daniel would have already have seen his future using quantum glasses. So that would be accounted for sort of like Harry Potter time travel. Right. I guess you're saying you don't have any free will. That's right. I'm completely determined by my calendar. I just do whatever it says. That's right. Your naps are determined by your future self. It's not your fault. If I put make huge discovery into the calendar, then I have no choice. I have to make a huge discovery that day. Right. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. But I'm saying like how would it affect your presence choices. I would type that in my calendar a lot of times.
Starting point is 00:29:33 But anyways, we're talking about quantum glasses and what they are. And we're talking about how a glass is a material in which all of the bits in it are kind of disordered amorphous, not in any kind of grid or structure. And the same can be said for quantum materials. That's right. And traditionally when we talk about glasses, we talk about disorder in the location of the atoms. So if you zoomed in with a microscope, you would see like a big pile of stuff rather than a nice crisp organized lattice. But now we're talking about something else. We're talking about quantum properties of these objects. So you can have something which is a nice organized lattice in space, like a grid of atoms that are perfectly organized,
Starting point is 00:30:11 but it can be a quantum glass if their quantum properties are disorganized. If their spin, for example, so their magnetic moment is not organized in a very nice way. Whoa. So it's almost like something you layer on top of other materials, this idea. It's like, you know, we have this traditional distinction
Starting point is 00:30:30 between glasses and crystals, but that is sort of irrelevant here, right? What counts is whether or not the quantum states are aligned in a pattern or not. Exactly. Whether it's a quantum glass depends on its quantum states, not the spatial locations. And here mostly we're talking about things which are physical crystals. You know, their atoms are nicely arranged in a grid, but the quantum states of those atoms in the grid are sort of scrambled. And, you know, traditionally, if you have stuff in a grid, the magnetic fields can be nicely aligned.
Starting point is 00:31:01 So the ferromagnet, for example, is something where all the atoms, have their spins in the same direction, which is what controls their little magnetic moments. And it all adds up to be a big magnet. So if you have a fridge magnet, for example, like a nice piece of iron that's been magnetized, it has all of its spins in the same direction. They all add up together to make like a permanent magnet. That's a pharaoh magnet. That's not a quantum glass because the spins are all nicely organized.
Starting point is 00:31:26 I see. Right. That's what a magnet is, right? A magnet is usually metal, crystal, where all of the atoms in it have the same. spin direction, which kind of like, I guess, synchronizes them and makes them add up to a giant kind of spin or magnetic pole. Right. And one reason that's possible is because the spins like to align with each other. In a ferromagnetic material, that's the relaxed state. That's the lowest energy states when the spins are pointing in the same direction. It likes to be that way. There are
Starting point is 00:31:56 other kinds of material like anti-ferromagnets where they prefer the spins to be the opposite directions, where you want your neighbor to have the opposite spin as you, and because of the way these molecules interact and their funny shapes and all of their forces between them, that happens to be the lowest energy state. That's the opposite, an anti-ferromagnet, where you can have a crystal, but it's like spin up, down, up, down, up, down. Both of these are examples of well-organized magnetic lattices. Interesting. And does that apply only to metals, like magnet metals? Like, can I take a block of ice and align all of the magnetic spins in the, you know, atoms of water in a block of ice to make it magnetic? You can't do that with a block of ice. No, a block of ice is not
Starting point is 00:32:40 paramagnetic and it's also not paramagnetic. Paramagnetic are materials that are sort of weakly magnetic and if you put them in a magnetic field, they will eventually align. But then when you take the magnetic field away, they might lose it. But ice is neither of those. Why not? Why can I just, you know, somehow arrange my water molecules so that all the spins are aligned. It depends on how the bits of the atom are organized. So it depends sort of like on the overall spin of the atom. We were talking earlier about having like spins on the electrons and spins on the nuclei. If those sort of all add up to an overall small amount of spin, then there's not really much
Starting point is 00:33:17 to play with there. But if they come together in a way that makes like a large magnetic dipole for the individual atom, then you have spins that can get aligned. And so that's what's different between some materials, which are like ferromagnetic, because they can be aligned in other materials that are not. You're saying like in something like a water atom or molecule, all of the electrons and all the quarks in it are not easily or readily aligned. They like to kind of be in random positions, but sort of castles the spin out. Yeah. And some of these materials, for example, electrons want to be opposite spins so that they cancel out. And other materials, they're set.
Starting point is 00:33:53 up in a way that electrons can all be in the same spin, so you have an overall spin to the atom. And so that's the difference between a material that can form a magnet and one that cannot? That's one of the differences. This whole thing is very complicated and it's difficult to make like broad generalizations, but that's sort of like the cartoon picture, why some things can be magnetic and some things cannot. All right. So maybe tell me more about these antifero magnetic materials. So the anti-ferromagnetic materials are the ones where they like to be opposite, where every neighbor prefers to be the opposite of the other. And it just depends on their interactions,
Starting point is 00:34:26 whether that's the lowest energy state. So they like to be against each other or whether they like to be aligned with each other. They like to be aligned with each other. It's a pharaoh magnet. They like to be opposite with each other. It's an anti-farromagnet. Imagine like a big sheet of these atoms.
Starting point is 00:34:39 If you want them to be all aligned, there's an easy way to do that. You spin them all up or spin them all down, right? If you want them to be all anti-aligned, there's still a pretty easy way to do that on a square lattice. You know, every other one is up and every other one is down. So up, down, up, down. And you can imagine covering an entire plane or even a 3D grid where every
Starting point is 00:35:00 atom's neighbor has the opposite spin as it does, right? So if you're up, then you see down everywhere around you in the lattice. And if you're down, you see up everywhere around you in the lattice. So there's a way there to make an overall relaxation where everybody's in their lowest state and everybody's happy. I guess I got a little confused because I think basically, like, All materials is kind of a quantum glass, right? Like ice is sort of a quantum glass because its quantum spins are in all kinds of directions, right?
Starting point is 00:35:28 Like my hand is a quantum glass in that sense of the definition of it. I suppose so ice in the example has sort of negligible quantum spins compared to the kind of things we're talking about here. So it's not really in the category of things that we're discussing. We're talking about materials that do have quantum spins. Do they like to be aligned or do they like to be anti-aligned? And can you make the material in such a way that? the whole thing is happy overall. The whole thing is relaxed
Starting point is 00:35:52 into its lowest energy state, either in ferro magnets by lining up all the spins or anti-farer magnets by flipping all of the spins. Right. But I think you're talking now about like let's post a little challenge
Starting point is 00:36:04 for ourselves. Let's see we can find a material that you can arrange in a crystal in a lattice in like a grid, but somehow also make all the spins differently or randomly directed. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:36:16 So a spin glass is a kind of material where the spins can't all relax, where you can't find a configuration where everybody's happy. We talked a minute ago about antifero magnets where things like to be the opposite spin of their neighbor, and that works in a square lattice, right? Where you have like a neighbor to both sides and above you and behind you and in front of you. What if, for example, you have like a triangular lattice instead of a square lattice.
Starting point is 00:36:42 And so you have like two neighbors, imagine just points on a triangle. You label one point up and the next one down, what's the third point going to be? wants to be down because it has one up neighbor and it wants to be up because it has one down neighbor so it doesn't know where to go right it can't satisfy both of its neighbors at the same time wait you're saying i guess that these anti-ferromagnetic i guess atoms or molecules they're sort of like contrarians like if their neighbor is up they want to go down right and if they have two neighbors that are up then they want to go down i guess two questions first of all why are they so contrarient hey some people just can be grumpy and you shouldn't ask too many questions you know
Starting point is 00:37:19 It depends on the complicated interactions between the atoms. Atoms are not simple objects. They have a spatial extent and they're sloshing around. They have all their internal forces. You're closer to some bits of it than to other bits of it. And the spins of these objects interact. Right. And some of them like to be spin up and some of them like to be spin down.
Starting point is 00:37:36 I guess the short answer is that it's really complicated. And sometimes it even depends on distance. Like if you're close up, then they like to have the same spin. And as you get further away, they like to have the opposite spin. And then as you get even further away, they like to be the same spin again. It's really complicated and depends on a lot of the details about exactly the internal arrangements of each atom or molecule.
Starting point is 00:37:58 I see. But is it, I guess, kind of like a magnet, right? Like, if I have two magnets and they're both, you know, have the same North Pole pointed in the same direction, like bring them together, like one of them will want to flip over so that it's opposite the other one. Is that kind of like the good analogy or maybe even the same thing? That's the same thing for the anti-Farrow magnets, right? Except here we're talking about spins, but it's very similar.
Starting point is 00:38:18 You know, the minimum energy state there is for one north pole to be aligned with the other magnets south pole. And if you try to push in the other direction, it's going to take some energy to keep it there. And if you let go, it will relax into the configuration where they have the opposite directions, where the north pole of one magnet is aligned with the south pole of other magnets. Okay. So now I think what you're saying is, you know, we have these materials, these atoms that are contrarian. They like to be opposite the spin of its neighbors. So now what happens? And if I put two upspins next to it. It's going to want to be downspin. But what happens if I put an upspin and a downspin next to it? It gets a little confused, right? Or frustrated. Yeah, exactly. And that's
Starting point is 00:38:56 what physicists call it. They call it a frustration when you can't arrange the spins in a way. So the whole thing has minimum energy. Right. In a square lattice, imagine four points on a square. It could have like the top left be up and the bottom right be up and the other two points be down. And everybody's happy because all the downs have only up neighbors and all the ups have only down neighbors. But in a triangular lattice, you can't do that. The third point has one up neighbor and one down neighbor, and it can't decide which way to go. So there's two possible states there that have the same energy, and neither of them are like the minimum energy. Right.
Starting point is 00:39:29 It's like having a conversation between three people and one of them is their contrarian. What happens to one of the other people agrees with them, but the other one does not? What does the contrarian do? Exactly. Who to disagree with. And so this is what a spin glass is because the spins end up sort of like, disorganized. It's not like a pharaoh magnet where they're all pointing the same way or an anti-farrow magnet in a square crystal where they're all pointing opposite directions. It's kind of a disaster. It's sort of like tense. It's
Starting point is 00:39:57 frustrated. It can't quite relax. And so where the spins end up is a little bit random. Oh, interesting. So you're saying that part of the definition of what a quantum glass is, is that kind of frustration built into it. Like if I build a lattice with contrarian atoms and everyone's contrary to their neighbor, then it's and everyone's happy, then that's not a quantum glass. Right. Exactly. That's just a normal antifero magnet crystal. But if you can somehow frustrate the atoms, then you have a quantum glass because I guess everyone's frustrated and what constantly flipping back and forth. Is that kind of what happens? Yeah, everyone's frustrated. It can't find the minimum and it has new weird properties. So when we talk about a phase transition, there has to be like a change in how the material operates in one of
Starting point is 00:40:42 properties, right? We don't say that cold water and hot water are different phases, even though they are chemically different because there's no like large change in its macroscopic behavior. So for years or even decades, there was an argument about whether spin glasses really are their own phase of matter. And the people who say that it is its own phase of matter, they argue that it's unique because it has weird relaxation times. Like if you take a pharomagnet or an antifero magnet and you apply a really strong magnetic field and you sort of mess up the spins, it will relax pretty quickly when you take away the magnetic field. But a spin glass, if you do that, it'll react really differently. It'll take like forever to relax and it'll never come back to its
Starting point is 00:41:22 original position. So people argue that that's enough of a different microcoscopic property to be its own kind of thing. What do you mean it takes a while? Like the items keep switching back and forth or what? There's like turmoil inside of the material. Yeah, they have like decision paralysis. You know, It's like if you go to the cookie aisle and there's like a thousand cookies and your shopping list just says cookie, you're like, uh-oh, do I get Oreos? Do I get chips a hoy? Uh-oh, look at those fudge ones. Oh, no, I can't decide what I want. And they all seem equally good. You could spend hours there wandering around, switching, you know, taking stuff in and out of your basket, not sure what to actually buy. And so spin glasses are sort of like this. If you perturb them, you give them magnetic energy, put them in a magnetic field, and then you take it away. They take a long time sort of sloshing about. back and forth, spins flipping and then flipping other spins, they can't find a comfortable situation to relax in. But I guess isn't spin a quantum property, meaning like each atom has a spin that's both up and down?
Starting point is 00:42:22 Like if they went a particular direction, wouldn't that sort of collapse the wave function of that quantum state? Oh yeah, really interesting question. It's true that spin is a quantum property, which means both that it can either be up or down, but not like in between, right? When you measure these things, you either get up or down. but it means that until you measure it, it's not necessarily determined. So what that means is that the whole thing has like a few different quantum states that are all possible.
Starting point is 00:42:47 What we're talking about is what happens when you measure it, right? So you probe this thing, you ask like, what's the spin over here? What's a spin over here? And you're right, that will collapse the wave function so that everybody's going to make a decision. But you come back another minute later and it's made a different decision. You come back another minute later and it's made another decision. So you never really see it settle and relax into a fixed state. Right.
Starting point is 00:43:07 So when you're talking about like this turmoil with all the contrarians not being able to decide which way they're being contrarying about, it's more of like a quantum turmoil, right? Like it's not actually flipping back and forth and it's not like you're at the cookie aisle trying to decide. It's like you're sort of in this state where you're decided and not decided. No, I think it really is decided or not decided. I mean, you can take pictures of these things essentially
Starting point is 00:43:30 using like scanning, tunneling microscopy or other ways to probe the magnetic field. So you can collapse these wave functions. and you can see them evolve over time. So you can see that these things really are flipping. It's not like once you've collapsed the wave function, then it's happy and it's going to stay there. You can collapse the way of function, and you can come back and collapse it again,
Starting point is 00:43:48 and then again and again, you can see that they are flipping their spins. So that's the interesting property about spin glasses is that they have these really long relaxation times. They're basically never in equilibrium. You know, another way to think about it is like, say you sit down at a really long banquet table and there's silverware to your left
Starting point is 00:44:06 into your right. Do you take the one to your left or do you take the one to your right? You know, if everybody takes to the left, everybody's happy. If everybody takes to their right, everybody's happy. If people are arguing, you know, no, that one's mine. That one's mine. Then, you know, you can't really settle into a comfortable state. So spin glasses are situations where like, people can't agree about what the rules are. And so everybody's just taking whatever silverware. Well, then you say, eventually it settles down. And so what does it settle down into? Salad Forks or main core sport. That's the interesting thing about spin glasses is that it's very hard to predict. You know, when we try to understand the macroscopic properties of these things, we do so by
Starting point is 00:44:45 starting from the microscopic. We say, okay, crystal's made of these little bits and then we expand our understanding from that basis, stacking them together to make the macroscopic properties. That's really hard to do with spin glasses because they're so crazy and unpredictable. They're basically never in equilibrium. So a lot of the mathematical tricks that we use, used to understand crystals don't really work for spin glasses, which led to, like, invention of whole new categories of mathematics. Interesting. All right, well, let's get into those new categories of math and what these materials are good
Starting point is 00:45:19 for and what we can learn from them. 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.
Starting point is 00:46:00 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.
Starting point is 00:46:32 My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly. and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone.
Starting point is 00:46:53 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
Starting point is 00:47:09 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. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.
Starting point is 00:47:45 A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. on America's Crime Lab we'll learn about victims and survivors and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable.
Starting point is 00:48:15 Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 a 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
Starting point is 00:48:41 now. When you 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.
Starting point is 00:49:08 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 quantum glasses, which is one of our listeners said,
Starting point is 00:49:35 is where you take shots of quantum whiskey or tequila. One electron at a time, man. It's quantized. I'll take forever to get drunk, Tannu. That's the point, man, moderation in all things. I see, one atom at a time. All right, so it sounds like there are materials you can put together in a crystal that are unhappy, basically at their core,
Starting point is 00:50:00 because all of the atoms can't find a good arrangement of their quantum spin. Everyone is sort of in this state where they don't know whether to go up or down in their spin. And so you create a material with a lot of frustration in it. Exactly. And a lot of these spin glasses are not just like one kind of material in a lattice where they're all contrarians and it's arranged in a way where they can't be happy. A lot of the times it's a few examples of something that is magnetic inside a larger crystal. So you'll have like a non-magnetic material like gold or silver, copper, and you sprinkle into it a few percent of magnetic atoms, iron or something else. And because of their interactions depend on the distance, whether they have the same spin or the opposite spin depends on how far apart they are.
Starting point is 00:50:43 You can end up with these disordered spins. You're saying that's how you make a quantum glass. You embed magnetic atoms into a regular metal. Exactly. And then you cool it down and you see like how are they frozen in. Interesting. You bake in the frustration of the magnetic atoms. You freeze it in. Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, I guess a good question for me is what are these materials good for or why are we interested in them? So these things don't have like an immediate practical application.
Starting point is 00:51:12 It's not like with spin glasses you can make quantum computers or you can build a better transistor or you can take tiny shots of hot cocoa or something like that. There's no immediate application. But it's an interesting and tricky problem. And so people have been thinking about it and, you know, sweating over it and trying to figure out like, can we describe these things mathematically? Is there some way to figure this out? To me, this is one of the deep questions of physics itself, you know, because again, since we don't have the fundamental theory of everything, all of the theories that we develop are what we call effective theories. They're like mathematical stories that we tell that describe the things that we see, but they're not like written into the fundamental firmament of the universe. Aliens, for example, might not come up with these same effective theories. They're just sort of useful descriptions.
Starting point is 00:52:01 But it's incredible, we can find them. But sometimes they're harder to find than others. You know, for solids and for liquids, we have found mathematical descriptions that are useful. For spin glasses, it's been much, much harder because their interactions are more complicated and less regular. But it's inspired people to come up with all sorts of new mathematical tricks, one of which people think is the reason why we discover the Higgs boson. I guess maybe step us through that a little bit more. What does that mean? Like we have an effective theory to describe like a regular magnet.
Starting point is 00:52:31 Is that what you're saying? We have like a mathematical way to study and model how regular magnet works. But you're saying we don't have one yet for these crazy frustrated materials. We've been working on. We've been making progress. I mean, by we, I mean, all the other physicists, we're not goofing off making podcasts. We, you know, is the general group of humans thinking about these kinds of things. I've been working on this for a long time.
Starting point is 00:52:52 And I think it's always interesting when it requires a new kind of math. And so there's an Italian physicist Parisi who won the Nobel Prize for this in 2021 because he came up with a new sort of mathematical strategy for dealing with this complication. You know, one of the real problems is that these things can arrange themselves in lots of different ways. And when you poke them, you know, you give them a little bit more magnetic energy. So you scramble all the spins and you watch them relax. You wonder like, why does it land in this configuration and not that way? one. Can we predict this kind of thing? Can we come up with some sort of mathematical way to grapple with this and predict what's going to happen? It can't be completely random.
Starting point is 00:53:32 And I guess what do you mean by a new kind of math, like a new kind of like adding quantum to old math or what does that mean? The way mathematics makes progress is that sometimes they need to develop like a new kind of tool. You know, like they find differential equations and here's strategies for solving that kind of problem. Or here's algebra. You know, like the people who figured out how to write equations down and solve them to get. understanding we're able to solve certain problems that other people couldn't. And for example, Descartes made a lot of advances in geometry because he was able to figure out how to use algebra to tackle geometry. Like if you could write down the equation of a circle, then you could
Starting point is 00:54:07 solve systems of equations and understand geometric patterns. So here, they've done something similar. They've invented sort of like new mathematical tools. And these mathematical tools are really thinking about the symmetry of the problem. Like you have this huge complex tree of options. that a spin glass can do. It can flip this way. It can flip that way. It can flip the other way. So what Perisi did was come up with a way
Starting point is 00:54:28 to think about this in sort of the larger context. Like don't just think about the one spin glass you have. Think about all the other spin glasses that you don't have, like replicas of that system and try to organize them into like branches. So like, oh, these guys are all similar in this way. Those guys are all similar in this other way. Think about like the choices that were made to get to this spin glass from the higher energy spin glass.
Starting point is 00:54:52 And he found these ways to like organize these and use symmetries to like break down the problem into smaller pieces to organize this complexity. And that helped to make sort of like approximate statements about which kinds of spin glass final states were more likely than others. Like if you started here, you were likely to get to neighboring final states where you weren't going to make a big jump to something all the way in the other side of the sort of symmetry organized set of states. And you're talking about math that sort of analyzes. one of these grids, right? Like you're looking at a grid of these atoms, these frustrated atoms together, and you're trying to figure out, like,
Starting point is 00:55:29 you know, are they all going to go up or down? Or is they, are they going to alternate? Or are they going to, you know, how often are you going to run into an upspin atom? And you're wondering, if I poke this thing, how likely is it to change to another configuration? Or how likely is it after I've poked it to come back to this configuration? Or how many spins are going to be flipped after I poke it?
Starting point is 00:55:51 Is it going to be every single thing is flipped? or just a fraction of who are flipped. So those are the kind of questions people are interested in, just like, what are the behaviors of these things? So Porese's math gave us sort of like a map for all those different configurations. He said, like, okay, this configuration of the spin glass, you can like put it here on the map.
Starting point is 00:56:08 And he was able to sort of organize and create this idea of a distance between one spin configuration and another. This distance is sort of a mathematical way to calculate like how many spins are similar or not. And he was able to organize it in such a way that he showed that if you poke this thing, it was more likely to end up in a nearby configuration than a distant one, where the distance here is something that he defined
Starting point is 00:56:31 is his strategy for organizing these different configurations. So this is a pretty interesting kind of material. I guess, kind of to go back a little bit to my earlier question is, you know, like, let's say I make a piece of quantum glass and it has these interesting mathematical properties. What could I do with it? Can I, like, make actual glasses out of this glass? What would happen if I see through it? Only if you can see through solid gold or silver or copper.
Starting point is 00:56:55 You know, there's not anything that I'm aware that you can, like, do with it in your life other than impress your physicist friends, which, you know, has its own inherent value. I mean, it is sort of a quantum object, isn't it? At the end of the day, this glass is a quantum object. Could you do quantum things with it or computations with it, possibly? I'm not aware of any applications for quantum computing, but I think the most interesting thing is just the math that it makes us think about. it made these guys think about symmetries and patterns in new ways and come up with new mathematical tools and whenever we develop new mathematical tools we always find out that they are useful in other places so people have been thinking about these kinds of symmetries and crystals for decades and decades in the field we called condensed matter the study of you know dense objects like crystals and because of that mathematical foundation laying in condensed matter there's a lot of work on symmetries a lot of which informed peter higgs
Starting point is 00:57:50 When he was thinking about why particles get mass, he came up with this idea of another field in the universe that imparts the mass. But this field had to be really weird and different from any other field he had seen before. It would have to settle and relax into a non-minimum energy state. As we've talked about in the program a lot of times, the Higgs field has some weird energy bound into it. It can't relax to its lowest energy state. It relaxed to this weird intermediate state. And so thinking about the symmetry of that problem helped him think about the symmetry. and the broken symmetries of the Higgs field
Starting point is 00:58:22 and really inspired that whole direction of mathematics and particle physics. And that kind of worked out, right, for Peter Higgs and the rest of humanity. But Peter Higgs didn't know about these quantum glasses, right? You're just saying that they sort of use the same kind of math, and that's why it could be important. That's right.
Starting point is 00:58:42 Quantum glasses weren't well understood when he was talking about this kind of stuff, and he was thinking about it. But the mathematics that underlie condensed matter and understanding these symmetries led to both a deeper understanding of quantum glasses and of symmetry breaking and the Higgs field. Well, it's interesting that there is a connection, right? I mean, there's a connection between such a fundamental particle in the universe and maybe all particles and what happens at these kind of macroscopic levels, right? Maybe the idea that the universe is, there's a lot about symmetry in the universe. There is a lot of a symmetry in the universe and also about these emergent phenomena.
Starting point is 00:59:16 We've talked several times in the podcast about things we call quasi-particles. These are weird materials that have states in them that look sort of like particles, that act sort of like particles. You know, like phonons are waves that pass through a lattice in a crystal, and they're sort of similar to photons. But instead of moving through the fundamental electromagnetic field of the universe, they're moving through a crystal lattice. So we see these same kind of properties emerging in condensed matter that we often see also in the quantum. fields of the universe. And so there's a lot of connections between the mathematics of solid objects and the mathematics of space time itself. Does that inspire you to make your office more symmetric? Or do you work in a constant state of frustration as well? No, I'm always asking my
Starting point is 01:00:03 department chair. I'm like, can I get a bunch of gold bricks? I'd like to build a really strict nice lattice to study their symmetry. But so far, I haven't gotten a single delivery of a single gold brick. And you just need to let him your quantum glasses so he can see the future as well. Or maybe he's just going to send me microscopic quantum gold bricks that are either here nor there. He's like, here's one atom of gold. Good luck. In this economy, I'd be very happy for even one atom. All right. Well, this is an interesting new kind of material and with interesting properties that we're learning more about. And it sounds like it's just another example of the weird things we can find in this messy universe, you know, like maybe 20, 30 years ago.
Starting point is 01:00:41 We would never have imagined that we can make a material that is magnetically frustrated. Yeah, and despite all the mess that we find around us, we can still seek order and find patterns and mathematical tricks to analyze it, which turn out to not just help us understand the stuff around us, but also reveal the mathematical patterns that seem to be inherent in the universe itself. Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. Go have a shot of some quantum drink. Have an electron on me. See you next time. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.
Starting point is 01:01:56 Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged. Terrorism. 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.
Starting point is 01:02:23 Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's 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. Oh, hold up. Isn't that against school? policy, that seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends
Starting point is 01:02:47 by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, season two, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting
Starting point is 01:03:02 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. One Tribe, save my life. twice. Welcome to season two of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.

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