Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What do Quarks taste like?

Episode Date: June 20, 2019

Quarks have flavor and color but what do they taste and look like?  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When your car is making a strange noise, no matter what it is, you can't just pretend it's not happening. That's an interesting sound. It's like your mental health. If you're struggling and feeling overwhelmed, it's important to do something about it. It can be as simple as talking to someone or just taking a deep calming breath to ground yourself because once you start to address the problem, you can go so much further.

The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have resources available for you at loveyourmindtay.org. Hey, Jorge, would you say that you have good taste in movies? I don't know if I have good taste in movies, but I feel like I like what I like. But does that mean that you think those movies like taste good? I mean, what does it mean to have good taste in movies? You mean like if I ate a movie?

Yeah, exactly. Like are certain movies like delicious or like, you know, hard to swallow? I think some plot lines are definitely hard to swallow. Yeah, but it's kind of an interesting question that you're asking me. You're still asking me like, how can a movie taste or how can somebody have good taste in music? Yeah, exactly. Like, why do we use the word taste to describe how we choose art? or clothing or, you know, living room furniture.

It's not like you're going to eat that stuff. Well, it's probably just kind of a poetic analogy, you know. Right, it's a little bit of poetry, right? We're saying, here's something we can't really describe, and we're going to relate it to something we can describe. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of Ph.D. Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I smash stuff together at the large Hedron Collider to try to figure out what the world is made out of. And you are a listener with really good taste because you are listening to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.

The most delicious podcast in the whole universe. But seriously, our goal on this podcast really is to take the universe and slice. it into bite-sized pieces so you can chew them one at a time and really digest each one. Bite-size installments of knowledge for your ears taste buds. Yeah, exactly. We want you to really be able to incorporate these ideas into your brain, right? This is something you don't just swallow it like a pill. We want you to really, you know, take some time, chew it, enjoy it. Understand like the top notes and the back notes and the, I don't even know what I'm talking about here when it comes to names of their various tastes.

Take your phone or whatever you're using to listen to this and kind of swirl it around a little bit, you know? Let this podcast aerate a little bit. Hey, I think this podcast has legs. For tasting? That's what they say about wine. You swirl it around and you look to see if it has legs. Oh, I don't drink that much wine. Well, I'm also complimenting your legs, Jorge.

I did shave them this morning. What? I didn't want to hear that. Nobody wanted to hear that. Nobody wants to admit, well, maybe some people out there do want a mental image of Jorge shaving his legs. But I think the point is that there are words that physicists use sometimes describe physical phenomenon that is kind of weird to use, right? It's kind of like they're used for other things in the English language. Yeah, and we've talked about that a few times on this podcast recently.

We did a whole podcast about spin in which you rightly insisted that we should have called it like spin because it's not spin. It's like spin. but there's an important point there that we're sort of extrapolating. We're saying, here's something weird and unknown, but it's sort of similar and interesting ways to this thing we do know. And so let's give it that name

so we can associate these two ideas in our head. Yeah, I am a grumpy person when it comes to nomenclature, to naming things. I'll take that mantle. I've heard you do this yourself about your own work. What do you mean? Sometimes you introduce your comic, and if somebody, if you don't get that flash of recognition,

you say, oh, PhD comics, it's like Dilbert, but for academia. Yeah, yeah, I think analogies are a useful thing in the English language, and that's why I use the word like, you know. But we lean on these heavily in physics. I mean, when we talk about things being particles. Metaphors or analogies? Metaphors, yeah.

And I would admit that we often use metaphors when we should be using analogies. But that's basically all we do. You know, in physics, we try to describe the unknown, and what can you do when you just the unknown except related to the known, right? So you're like, what is a particle like? It's kind of like a little spinning ball. Oh, it's kind of like a wave. You know, how does this thing work? It's kind of like this other thing. And that's the job of physics is to say, here's all these weird, disparate phenomena. Can we describe them using similar ideas? So there's, you know, there's a good intention there. It's not like physics is trying to deceive people by saying this has spin and this is a particle

and this has this flavor. We're doing our best to try to connect these things to ideas that are already in your head to make them easier to understand. And so today on the podcast, we'll be talking about what do quarks taste like? That's right. What do quarks taste like and what do they look like? Because in particle physics, we describe corks as having flavor, and we also describe them as having color.

And so you might be wondering like, what? How does a tiny little particle have like a color or a flavor? Like, can you taste one particle? at a time. What does that really mean? Are these guys being literal? Are they being metaphorical? Are they being analogical? What's the word there? Yeah, poetic, you know, wrong, perhaps. There you go. And we will be open to the possibility that physics has taken too many

liberties in bending the English language to describe what we've learned. Yeah, so, and there are a lot of examples like this in physics, right? Especially particle physics, because you're dealing with some pretty weird and unknown things. Yeah, we basically always have to do that when we're describing these tiny little weird things we call particles. We're always relying on things that we understand. Even the whole idea of a field, you know, like we've talked about quantum fields and electromagnetic fields. You know, you're relying on your understanding of how these things work. You know, a field in general.

Like I imagine like a field of wheat or a field of grass, you know, like thinking about how things change over a plane. So everything we do basically is some sort of. sort of poetic or non-poetic extension of the English language. Today, we're in particular talking about quarks, right? Because quarks have both color, flavor, and spin. But they actually don't have neither color, flavor, nor spin. No, they have like flavor, like color, and like spin. Here you go.

Yeah, there you go. Podcast done. Podcast over. No, we're going to dig into exactly what that means. But I was curious what people thought. So I went around the campus at UC Irvine, and I asked people first, I asked them, hey, have you heard of a quark? And most people, you'll hear their responses. But if they hadn't, I asked them, well, would you believe me if I told you that these tiny

particles had flavor or color? Wait, if they had heard of them, you would ask them if they knew that they had flavors. That's right. If they had heard of them, I asked them if they knew about quirk flavor and color. And if they hadn't, I said, would you believe me if I told you that they had flavors and colors? This is like a multi-part question here. All right. Yeah. Otherwise, it was just too short a conversation.

Have you heard of quarks? No. All right, well, there you go. Those of you listening, maybe take a second to think about it. If somebody approached you on the street and ask you what a corks taste like or what's their flavor or color, what would you answer? Here's what people had to say. Have you heard of corks? Do you know what corks are? I've heard of them.

They're supposed to have colors and flavors. Do you know what cork colors and flavors mean? No. Pork is a delightful, like, yogurt-y kind of a thing. So that's the first thing that I thought of. Well, the question is, do you know what cork flavors are? Wow. You're not talking strawberry, blueberry for the yogurt.

I have heard of cork flavors, yes? I have heard of corks. Another thing, don't know what they are. Did you know that corks come in different colors and flavors? No. I wish I could say yes, but I don't. I've heard of them, but no. Quarky people.

Did you know that quarks, the fundamental particles, come in different flavors and colors? I had also heard that. But I can't tell you. I did not. All right, great. Yeah, they're one of the parts of protons and neutrons. Right.

Did you know that they come in different colors and flavors? Mm-hmm. They do? Can you explain that? Do they really taste and look different? No, it's just a way that it's describing there's up and down, and I don't really understand too much how that works. I would have a hard time believing that because, as far as I know,

we don't really see the quantum mechanical side of the world. So I don't know how that would work exactly. All right, a pretty delicious set of answers there. That's right, yeah. I was amazed to learn that there actually is a European yogurt product called quark that does come in various flavors. Is that true? That is true.

I verified that via Google. Well, technically that yogurt probably does have a lot of quarks in it. That's true. We should relabel everything in the grocery store as mostly corks. Quarks and electrons. Is that going to be a particle physics food company? Quarks and electrons. Yum, yum, yum.

That's right. You can have a patent for pretty much anything, and you would dominate the entire global economy. That's true. And that's something I think most people haven't really gotten their minds around,

the fact that everything they eat is just made out of the same particles, and it's made out of the same particles in basically the same numbers. You know, you have a spoonful of yogurt and you have a spoonful of, I don't know, what's something healthy, ice cream or lentils or whatever,

then it has the same particles in it. They're just arranged differently. So the thingness that you're eating, the yumminess or the grossness, comes entirely from how those particles are put together, not what they're actually made out of, which endlessly fascinates me. A bit of a digression, sorry. But on to the topic of quarks being tasty. Maybe we should first remind people what a quark is and where it sits in the sort of hierarchy of particles and then dig into their flavors and colors. All right, yeah. So let's bring it down for people or remind them.

What is a quark, Daniel? It's a delicious European yogurt, apparently. All right. And what flavors does it come in? And what color is it? It comes in strawberry and blueberry. No, a quark is, as far as we know, a fundamental particle. Right.

So if you look at the stuff around you, then, you know, stuff is made out of atoms, elements of the periodic table. You dig into those atoms, of course, there's a nucleus surrounded by electrons. And inside the nucleus are protons and neutrons, right? Protons being positively charged and neutrons being neutral. but inside the protons and neutrons are these particles we call quarks and there's either two up quarks in a down

or two down quarks and it up and that gives you protons and neutrons so even at the smallest level everything is made out of these little pieces that are arranged differently. The same basic building blocks can give you protons or neutrons you just sort of different numbers of this stuff and arrange differently. Right because I think

most of us learn about the atom in high school right and we learned that there's a little nucleus with protons and neutrons and then little electrons flying around them. But the thing you're saying is that those things inside the nucleus are not actually things. They're just kind of configurations of smaller things. Yeah, well, there are things in the same level that you're a thing, right? You're a thing and your configurations of smaller things.

And those smaller things are configuration of smaller things and on and on until we don't know when. In the end, everything is made out of these particles. And there really are the fundamental building blocks of like all the matter you've seen, all the matter you've tasted, all the things you see in the night sky. You know, those stars out there, they're made mostly out of quarks. The planet under your feet is made mostly out of quarks. Your hand that you're looking at right now is made mostly out of corks. The brain you're using to hear this podcast is made mostly out of quarks.

But two corks in particular, up corks and down quarks. And they are, as far as you know, fundamental in the sense that you, as far as you know, you can't split them any further or they're not made out of even smaller things themselves. That's right, as far as we know. But that's mostly because we don't have enough power to break them further. And, you know, there's an interesting bit of history here that for a long time people thought protons and neutrons were fundamental particles. They were the smallest things we had found yet. And then people came up with an idea that there might be particles inside the protons and neutrons.

And, you know, they call them quarks. But inside the field, there was a debate for a long time about whether quarks were real. Like, you know, are they really there or is it just something we use in our calculations that helps us figure out how the math works? And there was sort of a lively debate for a while until we actually saw corks by breaking open the proton and interacting with them directly. Right, but you don't actually see the quarks, right?

Like you don't detect the quarks. You detect what they turn into or what they break into. That's right. Quarks by themselves don't hang out very long. They have such powerful forces, the strong nuclear force that they gather other stuff around them very, very quickly. So you almost never see

in fact you never see a free cork a naked cork just by itself. It very quickly just grabs energy out of the vacuum and dresses itself up. But they're very shy. Who wants a bunch of physicists to see them naked? I mean, I think a lot of people can relate. Oh, I won't answer that question. I'm not qualified to speak to that question.

So you've never seen a quark by itself. You mostly see the bits of it. But from your theory, you can piece together that at some point in that shower of stuff, a cork existed. Yeah, exactly. And also on the other side, remember, we're colliding protons. So when we start out, we collide protons. But protons are basically just bags of quarks, and we speed them up so much that what's actually interacting are the corks inside the proton. Because the energy of the cork, the energy the corks have when they're moving in the beams is much, much bigger than the energy that's holding the proton together.

So you can basically just disregard that. So on one hand, you can think of the large Hadron Collider as a proton collider, but really we think of it as a cork collider because it's colliding these bags of corks against each other. So while we've never like individually seen a cork by itself, we have a lot of pretty direct evidence that they do exist. So you're telling me you even name your own machines wrong. Like your machine should have been called the large quark collier. We need you, man. I keep telling you. We need you on these committees for the name me because somebody's going to say straight.

You know my services are available for a feed, Daniel. I'll put you in the budget next time. Nameer. That's my nameer scientist. Well, you just named yourself the namer. I'm glad good. If you're going to be, I mean, it's direct. I like it.

It's simple. But if you're going to go for like, I'm in charge of naming stuff for physics, you've got to be a little more creative than that, right? His grand naminess. It's simple and direct. That's what I keep telling you guys. You need to be.

Not poetic. The ye-nameer of particles. No poetic flourishes allowed here, huh? Well, so let's get into. What a cork tastes like or what a cork looks like. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.

Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in.

plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious oh wait a minute sam maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend has has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone.

Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet.

So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls, I sit down with Dr. Othia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right, in terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, your spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel. It's how our hair is styled.

We talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss Session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

All right, so we're digging into quarks today, and in particular, this idea that a cork has flavor. That's right. It wears bling and wraps. No, it gets even funnier than that because there are other corks out there, right? And those corks are heavier. So they're just like the upcork and the down cork, but they have more mass. And so we often refer to those other corks as heavy flavor. And I remember in grad school telling my friends who were like biologists or, you know, political science grad students.

When I was working on, I said I'm working on heavy flavor. And to them, it totally sounded like a rap group. Heavy flavor. Yeah, I'm going to drop some heavy flavor on you today, man. There is a well-known YouTuber who raps and sings about physics. You've heard of him, met him? I've met him. But have you heard of him? Yeah, isn't it a woman?

No, no. It's a guy who does a lot of acapella songs about physics. Oh, yes. I have heard of him. Acapella Science. He's fantastic. There's another, there's a famous rap about the LHC that was done by a young graduate student. She's also pretty good.

So it turns out there's a whole community of physics rappers out there. Yeah, that's exactly what the world needs. But back to the topic of quarks, the idea of flavors is that there's more than just the up quark and the down quark. Those exist. Those make the proton and the neutron. But sometimes you can also make these other quarks. They're called charm and strange, top and bottom. And the thing that's interesting about those other quarks is that they're very similar to the up quark and the down quark.

They're like copies of those corks. They're just heavier. So is that kind of what happened that at first you only had two quarks up and down? And then you discovered more corks. So you had to come up with other names. Yes, exactly. The first thing, up and the down, and then they found the strange cork. And after that, they found the charm quark, and then the bottom, and then the top cork.

Because I wonder if physicists thought that there were only two, so they went with up and down. And then they're like, wait, there's another one. What do we call this one? Side, left, right, front, back. No, it actually did happen that way. There were these particles that were kind of weird, so they called them strange. particles very creatively. And then when they discovered that the reason they were strange was that they

included a new kind of cork, they called that the strange cork. And then there was one that was just particularly charming. And you're like, let's call this one the charm quark. So we were saying that every particle, every cork has like two cousins or two versions of it. The down quark aligns with the strange cork. So then when they thought, well, there must be a fourth cork to balance it out, they needed to make it somehow like above the strange quark the way like the way up is above the the down so they were like well what's you know sort of in that category but you know higher so they went for charm oh i see and you know this is where the poetry is they were like grasping for some sort of relationship to try to describe these weird particles using you know english and so they did their best and they came up with charm they thought charm is to strange the way up is to down i can see that in like an SAT question, you know, up is to down as strange is to obviously charm.

Obviously charm. That's exactly what we did. Yes, somebody was doing the SAT, and that's how we named particles. And then when they found another one and it aligned again with the down quark, they called it the bottom, which is not a great moment of creativity, right? But once they called at the bottom, then they had to call the other one the top. And if you find another one, it'll be the lower and the under. Exactly. No, interestingly, we've actually proven that there are only three different flavors of corks. So when we say flavor of corks, that's what we mean. We mean either this first group up and down or the second group, charm and strange, or the third group, top and bottom.

So there are three flavors of cork. And they're not strawberry, blueberry, and vanilla. There, you know, that first group, the second group, and the third group. Okay, so the idea is that first you only had to up and down and you discovered more, And so suddenly you needed a name that tells you, that separates all of these different versions of the quarks. Yeah, and probably somebody was like, what can we do? How can we name it? Maybe they, like, went out for ice cream.

They were looking at all the different flavors. And they were thinking, oh, these things are all similar, but each is a little different. You know, and so I think they were grasping for something poetic there. They were trying to describe how these particles have relationships, but they're each a little tweaked version of the other one. And so, you know, flavor, it's not a perfect description, but it's not terrible. there. Well, it's weird because it's not really a quality. It's not really a measurable

quality, right? Or quantity. It's just like a category. It's basically another word for category or another word for types. Type. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's trying to describe basically the type of type or

the relationships between these three types. Right? Saying, we have these three types of things. What's the relationship between them? And you know, to make it even more complicated. There's actually sort of like dueling ways to talk about this. Some people say, oh, there's three flavors of corks. Other people say there's three families of corks or three generations of corks because they think that, you know, the cousin analogy works better than like the ice cream flavor analogy. So there is debate even within the physics community about how good you guys

named things. I think the fact that nobody can agree on how to call them pretty much settles the fact that we didn't do a great job naming them. But I guess what I'm saying, is it's not a property that's like on a spectrum, you know, like a real flavor sweet. You can have something really, really sweet or less sweet and everything in between. But a flavor for quarks is not really, it's really more like strawberry or blueberry. It's quantized, right? You're right. You can't be halfway in between one type or the other. You can't be half up down and half top bottom, right?

That's not possible. You're either one or the other. Well, I guess, but then the question is, do they have flavor? Like, is there something about corks and their different flavors that is maybe analogous to real flavor? I don't think so. I think it's a bit of a stretch. I mean, corks do have flavor in the sense that they taste like stuff. Like, the last thing you ate was made of corks, and I hope it tasted good.

But corks themselves, you know, they have no inherent flavor in that sense. And this quality that we call flavor has, you know, only the most tenuous relationship with the quality that you and I think of as flavor. Okay. So it's not like it's something about the way they react to other things or it's not something related to how other particles feel them. It's just sort of a name they use for, like, when you go to the ice cream store and there are different types of things to choose from.

Yeah, exactly. And again, I think it's trying to show that they're part of a larger category, but they are different elements in that category. That they're also all under the same freezer. Yes, exactly. Basically, right? I think they're all sort of here altogether and you can order one of them. Yeah, that about sums it up.

Quarks are all different varieties of frozen treats. All right, so that's flavors. And so let's get into what color quarks are because apparently quarks also have color in addition to spin, which they have neither of. But first, let's take a quick break. LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged. and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop.

Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor. is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the 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. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him?

Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls, I sit down with Dr. Othia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our

identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled.

We talk about the important role hairstyles play in our community. the pressure to always look put together and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Quarks also have colors. You guys give colors to quarks. And so this one you're telling me is a little bit more than just poetic. Yeah, I think this one really does convey something about how the property works, the relationships it has. It really makes more sense if you think about it in terms of color.

And this relates to how the corks interact with each other. Remember that these corks are bound together inside a proton or inside a neutron. And you might ask like what holds them together. And you're probably familiar with thinking about electromagnetism. Like electrons are negative and protons are positive. And so they, you know, feel these forces. That's what hold the atoms together. Well, what holds the proton and neutron together is a totally different force.

It's the strong nuclear force. Right. And so, and the strong nuclear force is one of the forefront of the mental forces, right? There's other big forces that make particles push and pull on each other. That's right. We have gravity. We have electromagnetism. We have the strong nuclear force and we have the weak nuclear force.

And actually, we've already combined the weak nuclear force. And actually, we've already combined the weak nuclear force. with electromagnetism, so you can think of it as three sometimes. But strong is its own, yeah. Strong is it... All this time I've been same four. You're like decades behind the time, man. You should like talk to a particle physics until you'll fill you in.

I think I read that in a book that we wrote, Daniel. I think I added a footnote with that caveat somewhere in that book. Yes, it's called the Electro Week because it turns out that the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism are really just two sides of the same coin. And that's fascinating. It actually is connected to the Higgs boson, which is also really interesting. But we'll talk about that on another podcast. But the strong nuclear force stands apart because, first of all, it's really strong,

but it also has this really weird property. Unlike electromagnetism, which can be like positive or negative, so there's two different charges there, the strong nuclear force has three different charges. Right. And I just want to add a footnote here that I actually agree with the naming criteria you have here. And you call it the strong nuclear force. because it's strong. Like, that's a, that's simplicity I can stand behind.

All right. I'll let people know that this one has your seal of approval. The namer has approved it. Not official yet. You're still the unofficial namer, right? Let's not jump the gun. But, yeah, I'm working on it. I'm getting the paperwork through.

Yes, so the strong nuclear force has these three different kinds of charges. And you might be thinking three, that's weird. Like, this positive and negative, what else could there be? Not zero, right? but there's three different non-zero charges. And so instead of having just sort of one axis with positive and negative, you have to have sort of a weirder image in your mind because there's three different directions you can go from zero instead of two.

And by charges you mean like, you know, if it's the electromagnetic force, you know, if I'm minus and you're minus, we're going to repel each other, right? So it's kind of like what determines. That would never happen, man. That would never happen. Which part that you were both negative? that we repel each other. Exactly. I'm pretty sure we're pretty negative sometimes.

Well, as long as one of us is positive, it'll all work out. But yes, exactly. Two negatives repel each other and two positives repel each other. Right. So it's kind of like a label, you know, like it determines what this force is going to do to the two of us. Yes, exactly. It's just like a label. And in electromagnetism, there's two possible labels, positive or negative.

And as you said, the same labels repel and oppositely. labels attract. But in the strong nuclear force, there are three different labels. And the math is kind of weird. Like if you have particles that have all three labels and you bring them together, they cancel out. Just like if you have an electromagnetism, you have a positive and negative and you bring them together, they cancel out to zero. In the strong nuclear force, you need one of each of these three different charges to bring them together to get zero. So quarks, when it comes to the strong. nuclear force, then you can be one of three things. And these three things are called color. That's right. We call them color. We call them red, green, and blue. And the idea is that not having a color is called white, right? Or colorless. And the idea is that if you add red, green, and blue together, you get white. And so it's trying to describe the mathematics of that, right? This weird business where you need one of each of the three things together to cancel it to get back to zero. The other thing that's like that in our world is color.

But wait, let's take a step back and let me understand this a little bit. So if I'm, for example, if I'm one kind of strong charge, like if I'm red and you're blue, what does that mean between the two of us? Are we going to repel each other or attract each other? We're definitely going to attract each other. Okay. What if I'm like blue and you're green? Then we'll attract each other. Like what are the rules there between the three? Right. And I see where you're going, that you want to make this comparison with electrons and protons

and protons and protons, and understand this like in terms of attraction and repulsion. That makes sense, but the strong force is just a different kind of beast. It's so powerful that any time two quarks get near each other, any two colored objects, the energy between them generates more quarks and gluons and other colored stuff until they can combine to get something color neutral. And it's different from electromagnetism in another important way. See, the particle that carries the electromagnetic force, the photon, it's neutral, right? It doesn't carry a charge itself.

So the electron, it can emit a photon and still be negatively charged. It doesn't change the charge of the electron to emit that photon because the photon is neutral. But the particle that carries a strong force, the gluon, it's not neutral. It carries two different colors. So what does that mean? It means that if a red cork emits a gluon, it changes the color of the quark. So it's like if an electron emits a photon and then becomes an anti-electron or something else with a different charge. Anyway, so for the color force, it's not as simple as saying two red corks can attract or repel.

What happens is that they interact like crazy, changing colors and shooting gluons everywhere until it's the right combination, like red plus green plus blue, to become color neutral or white. That's the only way the strong force is happy, the only way you can chill out. But you're saying something weird happens when there's a, you know, when there's three of us. And I think this is a safe for work podcast here. so let's not get into what happens, analogies for three. We're not advocating any of these arrangements in your personal life, right? That's right.

What are you doing there, Jorge? You're using an analogy to get people to understand it, right? You're like making... No, I'm trying to avoid an analogy. Because this is a children listen to this podcast. You're trying to avoid a very obvious and useful analogy. So let's say there's three kids who want to play together, and they're all different charges.

is you saying something weird habits? Like, all the kids will want to attract each other because they're all different. And together, together they have no charge. Just like if a proton and an electron attract each other and they form a bound state, then from the outside they have no charge. Like that's hydrogen.

Hydrogen has no net electric charge. If you bring together a red quark, a blue cork, and a green cork, then together they have no charge, no color charge. And that's what a proton and a neutron are. They're colorless, but they have colored things inside. them but those things cancel out so a plus an reminder you saying cancels out so like if I get a proton and electron together they they add up to zero basically they become nobody wants to be attracted

or repelled by them exactly they're like a married couple they're invisible in the dating scene and in the same way if for color if you bring together one of each of the charges except now there's three red green and blue then you get something which has no colored charge right it's colorless. It doesn't, it's neutral from the point of view of the strong nuclear force. Okay, but what if I just get a red and a blue together? What happens then? Then it still has a charge. Which charge? Red and blue? Yeah, it's a combination of red and blue. And it'll be a gluon. Those things will emit a glue on. And gluons carry two different colors. The math gets pretty hairy. But they will

attract a green cork. And if they can successfully attract a green quark, then it'll be neutral. So they like being in threes, quarks. Yes, because the strong nuclear force is so powerful that nature tries to make everything have no net color because thing because it's so powerful that anything that has color automatically just like create particles out of the vacuum to balance that color out because there's so much energy in the strong nuclear force and that's why we can't see quarks on their own because they have a cork color and it's so much energy in that color in that colored field that it pulls um new corks out of the vacuum to balance it out So that's what happens.

If I get a red and a blue together, like a green will magically appear? Not magically, scientifically. Poetically, a green will just appear? Poetically. Yeah, the energy of their interaction will get converted into the mass of another quark. And then it'll be complete. And then it'll be complete. Yeah, and then it'll stop generating new particles out of the vacuum because it'll be colorless.

But there's another way, there's another way you can be colorless. Like if you're a red cork, then if you meet up with an anti-red cork, like, you know, corks have anti-particles, right? Corks and anti-corks? Well, anti-corks have anti-color. So red and anti-red together make white. And then what happens to them? They disappear or what? No, they can form bound states.

And we have particles that have just two corks in them. They're called like pyons. Pyons are examples of like an upcork and an anti-up cork bound together. That only works if that cork is like green and the other. the one is anti-green or blue and anti-blue or red and anti-red. I thought anti-matter when you touch it would matter if they annihilate and explode. It can, yeah, but it can also form bound states. This book we wrote is totally wrong, Daniel.

Turns out there's a whole field behind that, right? It's just scratched the surface. In the same way that, you know, like positive negative charges can annihilate, but they can also form bound states like hydrogen, right? Just the same way like two things that feel gravity, like the Earth and the Moon feel gravity towards each other, but they don't necessarily automatically crash because there's so much energy in the Moon's orbit

that it's stable, right? So even though there are forces between them that want to pull the Earth and the Moon together, the Moon is in a stable orbit. In the same way, electrons can be in a stable orbit around a proton, even though there's a force pulling them together. And upcorks and anti-upcorks can form stable particles together. Well, I think the point is that you're trying to make

is that because when you have things, three cores of the different flavors and you bring them together, they sort of cancel each other out. That's sort of like... Different colors, yes. You're saying that's sort of like when you get color, like a real, like a red light and a blue light and a green light, you're going to see that

as a white light. Exactly. Exactly. It should work the same. I mean, I'm not an expert on color. I defer to you as the artist. But that's the idea that the math of cork color, the way they add up, is very similar to the math of these real color, the colors of light.

And so that's why they named it color, not because these corks actually look like anything. Red corks are not redder than green corks, but that the math of how color works when you put them together is very similar to the math or how we think about how light adds up, the color of light. Okay, so that does seem more appropriately poetic, maybe, is the word for it. But, I mean, it is still, I would say, a little suspicious to name a phenomenon

in physics, using an analogy from another phenomenon in physics, which is how light of different frequencies mix together and get processed by our eyeballs. Do you know what I mean? I know what you mean. Yeah, absolutely. But I think this one, there is some poetry there I really do appreciate because when I was learning about this for the first time as a graduate student, the analogy of color really did help me understand it. I thought, oh, it really is like color. That's pretty cool. And so it helped me understand it. And then I went further and I thought, well, maybe there is a deeper connection because sometimes when things are similar and the mathematical structure mimics each other, then there really is a deeper connection, like with spin. We talked about how intrinsic spin is really another

kind of orbital angular momentum. There really is a connection there. But in this case, I don't think there is. I don't think there's really anything, any connection between quark color and photon frequency that makes any sense. It's just a helpful guide for building the construct in your mind. Because I think the combination of red, green, and blue to make white is really just a human perception thing, right? Like if you actually take a photon that's red and a photon that's green and a photon that's blue, they're not going to suddenly become another photon that's white color. Because there is no white frequency. That's right. Yeah, it's a product of

how your eye sees color, right? All right. So then that means quarks do sort of have a color. They don't really have a flavor, but they do sort of have something. that is sort of like color. Yeah, exactly. And it's so weird and so odd that it really is helpful to draw on something familiar to say this new property of particles we've never seen before

is weird and bizarre and strange, but we have something familiar that you can use to base your understanding on. And I think that's pretty helpful. So those are quarks and flavors. Now, here's a question, though. Can you have a red raspberry, like, Technically, you could have like a red quark can be different flavors.

Yes, that's true. You can have red top quarks or red upcorks or red charm quarks, for sure. You can have red raspberry or red blueberry. I mean, now we're totally mixing it up. A red strawberry. I don't know. A red blueberry cork. Well, they have blue raspberry, right?

That's a thing. I never understood that. Oh, right. I mean, there are red blackberries and black raspberries and red black berries and I don't know. I mean, we should get on the biologist because they can name those berries pretty confusingly also. Well, I think the overall conclusion is that scientists maybe shouldn't be in charge of naming things. Not without adult supervision at least, right? Well, I hope that clears that question for the people who wrote in with that asking for that explanation.

Yeah, I think people were reading about quarks and seeing this thing with flavors and colors and wondering, what does that really mean? And I think on the whole, it's confusing if you don't understand the technical aspect of it because it makes people think. think of the familiar flavor and color that they have in their mind already. But once you dig into a little bit, you start to appreciate if you think of it as just sort of a placeholder or a guide for how to think about this, you can appreciate what the physicists were trying to do. But on the whole, I think these physics words borrowed from other concepts are more confusing than they are helpful for the beginning student or the person just reading about a topic. So that's the lesson. If physics confuses you, take a class. And maybe,

people confuse you as much. All right, everyone. And if you have a question about particles or the universe or something else really weird and strange and you'd like us to explain it to you and show you how maybe physicists are not totally insane and crazy,

write us and ask us to explain your question to feedback at danielanhorpe.com. We promise we'll answer with charm and strangeness. Some days our conversation goes up and sometimes it goes down. All right, thanks for tuning in. See you next time. 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 Danielandhorpe.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. Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. December 29th,

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