Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What if our particles were different?

Episode Date: August 24, 2021

Daniel and Jorge consider how the Universe would be different if our particles had different properties Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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No, what do I have to worry about? You know, you're offering secrets of the universe for free to anyone on the internet. What's wrong with that? That's kind of my job. I mean, how do you know what they're going to do with that information? Oh, I see. You're worried someone out there is sitting in their underground layer, stroking a white cat in their lap, and looking for physics advice about how to build a doomsday device? A little bit, yeah. Well, so far, nobody has asked me how to build a nuclear warhead.

Wait, didn't we answer that in a podcast already? Oh, yeah. Oops, we did totally give away those secrets. Maybe we should have the government filtering your emails, Daniel. Maybe the NSA, if they're not already listening. If you're hearing this, it means they let this one through. Hi, I'm Jorge Maito-Kartunist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I don't have any actual useful practical knowledge.

But you do have a white cat that you're stroking right now? I don't anymore. I don't anymore. No, I have a beautiful pandemic puppy that we adopted. But he's not part of my doomsday plan to take over the world. Right, right. You never see any villains, super villains having a dog, right? It's always like a cat or some kind of lizard, some kind of dangerous animal. That's because dogs are inherently good and sympathetic. I can't imagine an evil person having a pet dog. Right, right. I guess they would make the supervillain turn good, probably.

Exactly. Exactly. Whereas cats, on the other hand, they will happy to snuggle up to an evil dude. Lower standards, cats. But welcome to our universe. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I-Hard Radio. In which we explain the universe to us, to you, two cats, and two dogs. We talk about everything that's out there, including all the pets in the universe and all the crazy things that we see, the things we hear,

the things that we can just barely detect with the most powerful scientific instruments ever devised. We try to weave it all together to you and do a tapestry of understanding so that you can grasp what we do and what we don't know yet about the universe. Because it is a pretty big carpet of a universe filled with small details and large, amazing facts for us to discover. And Daniel, do you think we have pet listeners? I think we probably do. Yeah. I'm sure there are folks out there who listen with their pets. And so their pets are sort of like, you know, secondhand listeners. Yeah, they're absorbing physics.

Oh, my gosh. What if we give Rice to like the first dog genius? Some dog is out there taking notes, right? And like, ooh, yeah. Turn that on. I've got to learn exactly how that works. Like the tail wags every time we say a banana joke or something. Maybe.

Or when the dogs take over, maybe at least they'll give us credit, you know, for teaching them some secrets of the universe that were critical to their coup. And when they're just going to try. turn to its owner and be like, hey, I think I figured out how to match quantum mechanics and relativity. Also, I need more snacks. Yeah, well, if the only expense to solving the deepest questions in the universe were more dog treats, then I think we could get the National Science Foundation to cover that.

I know who needs an LHC particle collider. You spend all those billions of dollars in dog treats. That's right. We need like a chihuahua thick tank. Yeah, you know what they say? Like with the monkeys and the typewriter? Let's just get a bunch of dogs, play them all of our podcast and see what happens. Yeah, you know, I've been to the dog park in her neighborhood.

It's something like a collider. You see dogs running in circles like crazy and sometimes bouncing into each other. But I never see like new weird kinds of dogs created in high energy dog collisions. You just got to crack up the energy, Daniel, obviously. If there's one thing I learned in this podcast is more energy, more magic. That's right. I guess we just need to double the treats and see what happens. Do you have a special name for your dog, like quark or neutrino or, you know, a strong dog or something?

No, no, our dog is a rescue from Encinada and he came with a name. His name is Pepito and is a wonderful member of the family now. Pepito. That does sound like a particle to be named that you discover one day. You can name it the Pepito. The Pepiton, yeah, exactly. But it is a wonderful universe that we like to talk about, the one that we have, I guess. I mean, the universe that we know and that we love, that we live in, that we seem to be studying and learning more about.

But we sometimes wonder if it's the only universe out there. That's right. There's a lot of things in our universe. that we don't understand. That seems sort of arbitrary. Like, why does the electron have the mass that it does? And why is the speed of light the number that it is? This is just like list of numbers that describe and define our universe.

And if those numbers were different, the way everything worked would be totally different. So we wonder sometimes, is this the only set of numbers there can be? Are there other universes with different numbers where the control rule of that universe has different settings on their knobs? Right, right. Would Pepito have more energy at the dot park? Impossible. He's already going maximum dog speed. He's reached the limit of the universe. But it is sort of like the universe has like a serial number, right?

I was trying to think of a good example of to illustrate this, but it's sort of like the universe has a serial number. And you look at the serial number and you think like, oh, where did that number come from? There must be other universes with maybe a different serial number. Yeah. And it's not just that we have arbitrary numbers. When physicists look at these numbers, they think sometimes the numbers look weird, like unusual. Like if you randomly pick these numbers, these would be rare. And that makes people think like, wow, maybe there's a lot of universes so many that you even have weird and rare numbers.

That's kind of a weak argument because even if there are lots and lots of universes, we have no real reason to understand why some numbers are preferred or some numbers are not or what would be rare. But physicists, they like numbers like 1 or 0 or pi. They don't like numbers like 1 divided by 137. So when they see a number like that, they go, hmm, that's weird. I wonder why. It's like looking at your serial number and seeing it that it's like 3, 3, 3, 3, 3.33. You're like, that's weird.

We must have gotten like a weird crazy coincidence number in our serial number. Yeah, but maybe not. And maybe all the numbers are out there. And only the people with 3333 are the ones going, oh, that's weird. I wonder what that means. am I special? Or maybe there's a reason. Maybe it's the only number that works.

Maybe there's some underlying idea that restricts what these numbers can be that says the electron mass has to be this and the speed of life has to be that. And the strength of gravity has to be this. We just haven't figured it out yet. Right. It could be that they only made one universe and they happen to put the serial number 3333333. Right? Like, who knows, right?

Yeah, but these are really fun questions because they make you like totally blow up your mind and think about the whole concept. context, not just of the human experience, but of the universe. Like, if the whole universe with its billions and trillions of stars is just one of many universes, it's just like blowing your mind at the next level. Right. That's this idea of the multiverse, which we've talked about here in our podcast, and we've talked about how there are different flavors of the multiverse, but I think the basic idea is that maybe there are other universes out there. And one possible version of the multiverse is that it's like a version of our universe, but with different,

properties or like different values for different physical things, right? Yeah, precisely. That's one idea of a multiverse and it's really not too far-fetched. You might be thinking a whole lot of second. The laws of physics are the laws of physics. And, you know, across the metaverse, there should be one set of rules that tells everything how it works, right? Well, there might still be.

But what we're talking about here are not like the deepest, truest laws of physics, but sort of the ones we observe in our experiments. These are what we call effective theories because they don't describe like the universe at its smallest and deepest level. They just describe what we have been able to see so far. The way, for example, like describing the motion of a ball as a parabola isn't a fundamental property of the universe. It's just something that kind of works. The same is true of our laws, even like the standard model of particle physics, this quantum field theory that's like a crowning intellectual achievement of humanity. We think it's mostly an effective theory.

and it's controlled by deeper parameters we don't understand. So it's possible that in the multiverse, even if there is like a single coherent theory across the multiverses, it can appear different in different universes because of how those universes break out. For example, if the Higgs field ends up at a different value, then all the particles have different masses. And we just don't really understand that deeper theory yet, so we don't really understand how many universes there can be

and how it can translate into different theories. But in the end, it is possible that there are other universes out there with different laws of physics because their parameters are different values. Right. I guess you can have multiple universes, some with different laws and some with different values. But I think the one that we're going to tackle today is this possibility of a multiverse, multiple universes with the same laws, but maybe different values for like, you know, some of the fundamental physical properties, right? Yeah. And this comes to us from a future scientist who's inspired to ask us questions because he read a really fun book. Yeah, we have some great questions from Thomas from Ontario, who is nine years old and best part, he's a fan of our book.

We have no idea, a guide to the unknown universe. That's right. His mom wrote to us saying that he really enjoyed reading the book, that it stimulated his deep thoughts about the nature of the universe and that he had some questions for us that he wanted to answer. Yeah, so kudos to Thomas for reading the book. I have yet to read our book, Daniel. No, I'm just kidding. I had to read it many times in writing it. But kudos to Thomas for reading the book and for being a fan of physics.

It's never too early to start. So here is Thomas asking his questions. Hi, my name is Thomas. I'm from Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, and I'm nine. And I have some questions for you, Daniel. Can you do an episode about what would happen if the photon had as much mass as a top quirk? And another question, what if the neutrino, felt a strong force and my last question, what if the neutrino felt electromagnetism?

Whoa. That kid is like a question machine. I know. Let's just hope he doesn't have a white cat. Not yet, at least. He's going to listen to this episode and he's going to realize, oh, that's the next step in becoming a supervillain. Mom! Quake, go ahead, get him a dog, put the pito in a crate and ship him over.

He could still become a superhero, not a supervillain. Wow, we could intervene and save the planet by turning him to use his powers for good. Yes, at least in this multiverse, in this timeline. Thomas, there is still good in you. I feel the bright side of the force. No, I'm sure Thomas is an awesome kid, and he just wants to know more about the universe. I imagine he read our book,

and he saw all of these particles that we talk about and how things could be different, and he probably wondered, like, what if they were not what they are right now? Like, how would the universe be different? Like, would it be totally different? Would it even be possible? Would we all collapse into a black hole or something?

kind of a big question. Yeah, there's a lot going on there. You know, it's fascinating how the properties that we rely on, the things that make up our existence come down to these numbers. And if they were different, the universe would feel so different. That's really fun to think about how the things that are important to us are not really fundamental to the universe itself, even if we rely on them, right? And then the deeper question, you know, of could those numbers be different? Should they be different? Do we know why they are the way they are? Should they be different? That's a meta question like if we could design a universe what would it be like now you're trying to think like a supervillain daniel yeah well you know there's a lot of debate inside particle physics about

whether the equation of the universe should be beautiful should we be seeking out a theory that has an aesthetic appeal so that when we read it we go oh my gosh that's incredible i love it or does it matter you know maybe we just need something that works even if people like geez that's kind of a cluge but i guess that's just the way the universe is a bit ugly but it works And if it's not beautiful, can we give it a makeover? Can we like, you know, do a little plastic surgery maybe? Oh, I see. You want to give some notes to the creator?

Some notes. I don't know. Love what you did here, but... Yeah, there you go. Now you're thinking like a super villain. Or an executive producer. It's reamoled the universe according to what we think it should be. I see.

So super villains are just like executive producers on the universe project. All right. Well, thank you, Thomas, for your questions. we'll start with your first one here. What if the photon had the mass of a top quark? Now, that's a pretty cool question. First of all, like, what if the photon had mass in the first place, right? Like, that's already a big one.

And then what if it had the mass of the top quark, which is kind of one of the heaviest particles, right? Yeah, the top quark is the heaviest fundamental particle we have ever found. It's the cousin of the upcork, which has almost no mass, but it weighs as much as 175 protons. So this tiny little particle has more mass than like a gold atom. So it's really incredible and sort of like at the extreme, which is I think why Thomas is asking like, what if the lightest particle, the one with no mass had as much mass as the most massive particle? Nice. All right.

So Daniel reminds us here, the photon is massless, right? It doesn't have any mass. It doesn't weigh anything. That's right. The photon has no mass, which gives it incredible powers. It means that it can travel at the speed of light and then it has to travel at the speed of light. You can't ever catch up to a photon. Everybody who's measuring the speed of a photon is going to measure it to be the speed of light.

And that's because a photon is nothing because it has no mass other than motion. So you can't catch up to it because if you did, there would be nothing there. There's no like frame of reference of the photon because there's nothing there but it's motion. So it's sort of a really awesome special case. And it's also really cool because it's in contrast to other very, very similar particles that do have mass, like the W and the Z bosons, these to play the same role as the photon, except for the weak force, but they do have mass. So we actually have an example in our universe of like a massive version of the photon. And I guess I'm just going back to what you said,

a photon, because it has no mass, it has to go at the speed of light, right? Like that's one of the rules of the universe. Anything without mass has to go at the speed of light. Yeah, and not just photons. Glouons, for example, are any particle that has no mass has to always go. at the speed of light and nothing else can. Right. And is there sort of an explanation as to why it has to go at the speed of light? Because it has no mass, it has to go at the speed of light, or because it has to go at the speed of light,

it can't have any mass. It has to go at the speed of light because it doesn't have mass. Yeah, because anything with mass will travel at the maximum speed and because you can never catch up to it. And so it'll always travel at some speed. You can't ever gain on it, right? You'll always be measuring travel at the same speed because there's nothing there.

just motion. And that's because it has no mass. So I would say because it has no mass, therefore it travels at the speed of light. Right. And the photon and remind me, it's like the force transmitting particle for the electromagnetic force, right? That's right. The way like electrons push against each other is that they pass photons back and forth. You can think of photons as like ripples in the electromagnetic field. And when an electron pushes against another electron is doing so using its field. But you can also think of those fields effectively as like a bunch of photons added up. So yeah, you can think of photons as like a way to transmit the electromagnetic force. Right. And so the photon is, doesn't have any mass, which I guess means it doesn't interact

with the Higgs field or it does, but it has no effect. That's how things have mass in the first place, right? They interact with the Higgs field. Yeah, the photon does not interact with the Higgs field. And it's sort of really interesting and super awesome because the photon actually is part of this group of particles. the W particles and the Z and the photon, they make a quadruplet. They're like all linked together because the electromagnetic force is really connected to the weak force. It's in one force called the electro-weak force. And this quadruplet of particles, they all do interact with the Higgs field.

And if the Higgs wasn't around, they would all be massless. They would all be zero mass. But the Higgs makes three of them heavy. It turns the Z and the 2 Ws into heavy particles. But then it's sort of used up. It can only make three of them heavy. And so the photon escapes and remains massless and the other ones get really, really massive.

And that is why the weak force is weak. Whoa, wait, wait, wait. So the photon is part of it like a family? Like there are other versions of the photon? Yeah, the Z is very, very similar to the photon. It's exactly like the photon, except that it's part of the weak force and it has more mass.

Oh, I see. It's like the electromagnetic force and the weak force are related, but all of the forces, all of the force particles in the weak force have mass. That's what makes it weak. That's why we call them weak. Yeah.

So the photon is just like our name for the one out of the four particles that stayed massless. Whoa. And I guess then the weak force is sort of light almost like these other particles are also light, but they're like massive light. Yeah, exactly. They are like heavy light. And the reason that the weak force is weak is that these particles are so massive. So they like, they don't go very far before they decay. A photon can travel across the whole universe.

It's totally stable. But these particles, because they're massive, they break down into other stuff. And that limits the weak force's strength. So like back in the early days of the universe before the Higgs field broke this symmetry, all these particles were basically equivalent. And the weak force was as powerful as electromagnetism. But then the universe cooled and the Higgs field condensed and it made these particles heavier and it left the photon massless.

And so now the photon is like its original version. It can go through the whole universe and its infinite extent. electromagneticism is a very powerful force and the weak force is like a thin shadow of what it used to be. I'm also a thin shadow of what I used to be. I'm more massive and slower than I was when I was younger. All right, well let's get

into the consequences now of Thomas's question of what happens that the photon had more mass, specifically the mass of the top quark. And I imagine it's not a light consequence. Big things will happen. It's going to be heavy duty. It's not going to be weak. It's going to be massive. All right,

we'll get into that. But first, let's take a break. December 29th, 1979, 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 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 don't water gone. Now hold up, isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hello, it's Honey German, and my podcast,

Grasias Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years.

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Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we are considering multiverses, different universes in which the loss of physics work the same, but maybe the values of things, of particles and certain properties are different. And this came to us from Thomas, from Ontario, who's nine years old, and he's curious about, first of all, what happens if the photon had the mass of the top court? It would be a pretty weird universe if that happened. Weirder, you mean? Weirder, yeah.

Although, I guess beings that arose in that universe would think, this is totally natural. How could it be any other way? Yeah. Also, what would that Thomas in that universe be curious about? What if the photon were massless? What would happen? Yeah. That would be as strange to them as the country.

brought us to us. Yeah, exactly. All right, so now let's give the photon mass, Daniel. What would happen if we give mass to the photon? So if you give mass to the photon, for example, you have like a more complicated Higgs boson that has the capacity to make more particles massive. And that's not too much of a stretch, like super symmetric versions of the Higgs boson could do this. And we talked about it in a recent podcast episode, like how many kinds of Higgs bosons are there. So if you have more Higgs bosons, you could give the photon mass. If that happened, then electromagnetism, would be much weaker than it is today.

Like the relative power between electromagnetism and the weak force is a huge number, it's like more than a factor of a hundred. And so if the photon had mass, then electromagnetism would get weakened, just like the weak force has. Right, but would it be weaker or just like shorter range? Do you know what I mean? Like, would it be, I still have the same strength,

but just, I mean, not work as well up close or far away when things are far away? Or would it actually like decrease in, strength. Both the range is shortened by the mass because the particles decay, but also the strength of the particles effectively depends on the mass of them. It goes like one over the mass of the particles. And so for example, neutrinos don't interact with most of the earth because the weak force is weak. Not because neutrinos don't get like close enough to the nucleus. Even if they fly right through the nucleus of an atom, they have a very small chance of interacting because it's like

you roll a die every time it happens. And the die for the weak force is just much bigger. And so you very rarely hit the right number. Is it because like once things have massed are harder to make, like it's harder to make photons that they were massive? Yeah, you need more localized energy. It's just less quantum probability to sort of fluctuate that out of the vacuum to create a heavy particle. Heavy particles are just rare. Like less likely. Yeah, it's less likely to happen, which means it's a weaker force. Right. Yeah, I guess there are masses. They wouldn't be as free. Like they would cost you more just to shine a light. Yeah, exactly. All right. And then they have shorter range because I guess they're going slower than the photon. And so therefore they give them more of a chance for them to like decay, right, or change.

Yeah, exactly. Because remember that heavy things decay into lower mass things, just like boulders roll down hills and our universe energy likes to spread out and equalize. So really heavy particles decay into lighter particles. And so the photon, you know, is massless. So it can't decay into other stuff. But if it was heavier, then it could decay into lower mass particles. It would prefer to. And so if you turn it on a flashlight, you couldn't send your photons all the way to Alpha Centauri. They would like peter out before they got there. It'd be like, yeah, it'd be like shooting. Now you're like shooting stuff more.

Like your flashlight would weigh more and you would feel more of a recoil when you turned it on. Yeah, I'm not sure if the momentum would be different. You know, a flashlight does impart momentum. Like if you hit somebody with a flashlight, you're giving them a very, very gentle push. It's sort of like shooting. them with a very gentle gun. And also, when you turn on a flashlight, there's a very gentle recoil, right? Like if you fire a big gun, you feel the pushback on your shoulder. The same thing

is true with a flashlight. You just can't feel it because the momentum is so, so tiny. But it is true. All right. So then what would happen if the electromagnetic force was weaker? What kinds of consequences would it have in our universe? Well, electromagnetism is what organizes matter into atoms, right? The electron is captured by a proton to make hydrogen and it's captured by electromagnetism. And that happened when the universe was cooling, right? Imagine particles are flying around. You have protons and you have electrons and they're all flying around. They have a lot of energy because the universe is young and it's hot and everything is zooming around. So we have a plasma. Now the universe then expands and everything cools down and sort of slows down.

And eventually things cool down so much that the proton, the electron, their electromagnetic force attracts each other. They're not like too fast to get captured. So they fall into these atoms. Now, that depends on the strength of the electromagnetic force. So if electromagnetism is now weaker because photons are more massive, that just doesn't happen at the same time. The universe forms atoms much, much later in its history because it has to wait until everything is so slow and so cold

so even this weakened electromagnetism could capture the electron and form atoms. So the whole history of the universe would be different. Like, would we still be in a place? plasma right now or would we have settled already? I don't think any of the elements we know now would be around. Like the version of hydrogen in that universe would be really different. It would have totally different energy levels. And, you know, the very nature of the universe we experience depends on chemistry, which

depends very, very sensitively on how electron orbitals are structured around nuclei. You know, whether something is metallic or not, whether something is active or not, whether, you know, something conducts the electricity or not, depends. entirely on those electron orbitals and now we're totally changing those. So I think we should expect to have completely different chemistry, which means basically everything would be different.

I don't even know if we would have stars in the same way. I don't know that we would have planets. I don't know that we would have the same sort of set of materials. Wow. Yeah, it would be a totally different universe. Because I guess, you know, an electron in an atom is throwing photons back and forth with the nucleus, right?

That's how it stays in orbit. So if the photon had mass, it'd be like a totally different relationship there, right? Yeah, and we don't know if chemical bonds could be formed. Like the way that two oxygen come together to make O2 is that they are like sharing electrons between two nuclei. And that depends on the strength of electromagnetism. It might be that in Thomas's universe with really, really massive photons and a weakened

electromagnetism, you can get a different kind of bond. It might also be that you just can't get bonds, right? That all you have are individual atoms and no molecules. which completely changes the way all of chemistry works. Yeah, I kind of need those molecules just to get up in the morning. Yeah, and you were telling me it also has sort of more fundamental consequences, right? Like it actually affects kind of like the overall electrical charge of the universe. Yeah, it's really interesting that the photon was left massless because that means that

its symmetry wasn't broken. We talked on the podcast a lot about how all conservation laws, things that are like preserved in the universe, like if you don't, do an interaction and nothing changes, that's a conservation law. We talked about how those conservation laws all come from symmetries. So, for example, the fact that momentum is conserved, you know, that if you collide two particles together, the same amount of momentum exists after, as it did before, comes from a symmetry of the universe.

That symmetry is translational symmetry, that it doesn't matter if you did that collision over here or 10 miles to the right. The universe doesn't have a preferred location in space. Well, there's a symmetry of the photon. It's called electromagnetic gauge symmetry. And the consequence of that is that electric charge is conserved. And that gauge symmetry can only exist if the photon is massless. So if the photon becomes massive, then electromagnetic symmetry is broken,

which means electric charge is no longer conserved, which means you can do things like create charges out of nothing. You can destroy electric charges, which is not something that happens in our universe currently. Right. And that could be weird because maybe suddenly most of the universe has a plus charge on it or has a negative charge, right? There's nothing kind of controlling that anymore. Yeah, exactly.

You could go up and down. It could change with time. It could all get super positively charged. You know, you could have photons turn into two electrons. Currently, a photon can turn into like an electron and it's antiparticle. And there's a symmetry there because of conservation of charge. You have to create a plus and a minus at the same time. But if that's no longer true, then photons could turn into like two electrons or two positrons or all sorts of crazy stuff.

And when you change these fundamental rules, the very, very foundations of everything, then it's pretty hard to predict what things are going to look like at the larger scales. I guess you could say there are pluses and minuses or there could be a lot of pluses or a lot of minuses. The pluses and minuses are going to be out of control. Yeah. That's pretty deep. And then also it has some consequences for superconductivity, right? Yeah, I think something that people don't really realize is that particle physicists didn't invent the idea of a Higgs field. like it didn't actually come from particle physics.

We borrowed it from another field. We borrowed it from the guys who study superconductivity because what happens in a material when things are superconductive is that the electrons do this very special thing. You know, electrons don't like to be like on top of each other. They're fermions. They don't like to be in the same quantum state. So to get superconductivity, what happens is you get electrons forming these little pairs, two electrons together. Because when they come together, they turn it. to bosons and they can do all sorts of crazy stuff they can't otherwise do. And that's how

superconductivity works. Well, these bosons do weird things to the photons that are in that material. And what they do to the photon in that material is exactly the same thing that the Higgs field does to most particles. So what that means is that inside a superconductor, photons are massive. Like photons have mass inside superconductors because these electrons create the same conditions necessary to give a photon mass. Right, they sort of like act like they slow down photons, right? They like absorb and re-emit them. And in a way, it sort of acts like the molasses in that material.

Not in a way, in exactly the same way. And so when we discovered the Higgs boson, it was also sort of like a triumph for condensed matter physics because we realized this is like a general idea. It doesn't just happen for fundamental particles in the Higgs field. It also happens with like emergent phenomena for like photons interacting with these Cooper pairs inside, superconductivity. So there are cases in our universe where photons do have mass. Inside a

superconductor, photons have mass. So then what would happen if you actually give them mass? Would that whole superconductivity still work? Yeah, that's a great question. It would totally upset that apple cart as well. Probably you can still make superconductivity work. You'd have to start from a completely different place. I mean, everybody else would have to start all over. Biologists, chemists, everybody would have to start from scratch if we change this basic parameter. And also light would be slower too, right? Like maybe the universe would feel smaller as well. Yeah. And we might not even see as much of the universe. If photons don't last forever, if they're not stable, if they decay, then we can't rely on them to travel for billions and billions of years

across the universe and bring us secrets from the most distant objects because they would turn into other particles on the way. So the night sky would be much, much darker because we wouldn't be getting these messages from far away. So I kind of like our universe. I don't know, what do you think? Yeah, let's keep the photon in a diet. Let's not give the photon any mass. I think the lesson is things would be very different, Thomas. But yeah, so the universe would be very different if the photon had mass, right?

It would have much weaker electromagnetic force and things just wouldn't be the same. We might not even be in a coherent universe. We might be still in a plasma universe. And the crazy thing is that it's not that far from our universe. Like, it could have happened here. If the Higgs field was more complicated, if there are super symmetric Higgs out there, it's possible this could have happened. And so it's not a big jump from

here to there. Like the universe looks totally different, but it doesn't take that much of a change in the underlying laws of physics to get from here or there. So it's sort of like, you know, our neighboring universe in the multiverse. Well, hopefully the NSA edited out that last statement in case that encourages

anyone to try to change our universe. All right, well, let's get to Thomas' second question because he had three. And this one is pretty interesting as well. Kudos to Thomas for thinking it up. Yes. What if the neutrino felt the strong force? Yeah. Whoa. Wow. I guess it's woe because, first of all, the neutrino is kind of an exotic particle, I guess.

It's not your typical particle. It doesn't make up anything about what we are. And also the strong force is kind of a special force, right? So, yeah, so you're taking like the most elusive particle that hardly interacts with anything and interacts the most weakly when it does. And then you're throwing it in to the mix with the most powerful, the strong, It's the weirdest force we know about in the universe. So you're like promoting the introvert that hardly ever interacts with the party. You put them up on stage and you're making them the center of the action.

I feel like you're describing a recurring dream that you have, Tenu. And then I wake up screaming. And then you burst into a ball of light. Massless photons, I hope. Yeah, so remember that the neutrino is this weird little particle. And you're right. It's weird because it doesn't exist. in our form of matter. Like you don't need the neutrino to make up the atom. You just need

electrons and quarks. But there are lots of neutrinos out there in the universe. The sun makes a huge number of them. They're a natural product of fusion. So there's like billions of neutrinos passing through your fingernail every second. They're just not sort of like part of our tactile universe. They're like this parallel universe almost that's right on top of us. So I think this question sort of gets to like, what if we could interact with more of the universe? What if we were, like, forced to? What if it became part of the structure of the stuff that we are made out of? Right, because neutrinos are, you know, they're elusive and they're not that famous,

but there's a lot of them. Like, through all my fingertips right now are billions of neutrinos passing through, right? Yeah, because the sun is a huge neutrino factory. Yeah, so they're one of the particles that can be made, and so they are made in big reactions, like in the sun. But right now they don't feel any force except the weak force, right? That's right. They have no electric charge, and we'll get into that later.

That's his third question. So they don't feel electromagnetism. They have a very, very, very small mass. So they do feel gravity, but it's almost negligible. But most importantly, for this discussion, they don't feel the strong nuclear force. This is the force that holds the nucleus together. You know, that's mediated by gluons. It's what makes corks come together into a proton or into a neutron and even enough residual strong

force left over to pull those positively charged protons together into a nucleus. So the strong force is really what dictates the whole structure of the nucleus, which is what controls everything. So usually only quartz feel the strong force, right? Yeah, we have this weird division. Like there are six quarks, up down, charm strange, top bottom. And then there are six particles we call leptons. There's electron muon tau and the three neutrinos.

For reasons we don't understand, only the corks feel the strong force. And none of the other ones, the electron, the muon, the tau, and the neutrinos, none of them feel the strong force. they just totally ignore it. All right. So then what would happen if one of the neutrinos or that neutrino

felt the strong force? How would it break things? Yeah. So in order for that to happen, you'd have to give these neutrinos the equivalent of electric charge for the strong force. And we call that color.

So that's sort of what it means to have a color charge. It means that you do feel the strong force. And so if neutrinos feel the strong force, then they no longer just like pass through material. Like we say the neutrinos pass through the earth without hardly noticing,

That would no longer be true if they felt the strong force. They would smash into the nucleus and they would interact. It would be just like if you sent a proton into the nucleus. Like when that happens, it sometimes breaks the nucleus up. Right. So they would feel the strong force. So they would have a color charge. And so if you shoot them through a material, they would probably mostly not do anything, right?

They would just fly through. But if they happen to fly close to the nucleus, then they would interact with the quarks inside of the nucleus. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, that's true. But materials are pretty dense. And so, for example, if you shoot a proton into a block of copper, you're very likely going to interact with something unless it's a very, very thin sheet. And we measure these things.

It's like, you know, the interaction length of an object as it flies into material. If you fly into anything with a reasonable nuclear density, you're going to interact. And so if you shoot neutrinos with a strong force into a rock, for example, then they're not going to come out the other side. It's because there are so many nuclei and quartz in that rock. But I guess what I'm saying is that the strong force, this in like long range, right? Like it usually only kicks up if you're really close to the quartz.

That's right, because the strong force is super duper strong and it's super duper strange. It's strange because unlike the other forces, it actually gets stronger as the objects get further apart. Like we know that gravity gets weaker as things get further apart. You feel gravity from the sun. You feel gravity from the Earth because they're relatively close. You don't feel gravity from Andromeda, the whole galaxy, because it's super far away, even though it's really massive.

The strong force is the opposite. As things get further apart, the strength of the force gets larger. What that means is that things with a strong charge, this color can't be really, really far apart because the forces would be so strong that things would snap together. So basically everything in the universe is balanced, has no effective color chart. Because if it did, then like a huge amount of energy would be devoted to fixing that, to sort of smoothing it out. And so the strong force also has sort of a short extent because it,

it's all sort of neutralized already. All right. So then what would happen to our universe if neutrinos had, you know, color and they could feel the strong force? Would we just be obliterated right now by all the neutrinos coming from the sun? You know, like would they just totally destroy us? Or, you know, would even that meaning neutrinos be formed in the sun? Yeah, it's a great question. Neutrinos are mostly formed in the internal part of the sun, right? Like where the fusion is actually happening. And so if neutrinos felt the strong force and they hit

Earth, yeah, that would be a big deal and it would like sterilize all life on Earth and kill everybody. Not a happy ending. Yeah, not a happy ending. But it also means that the sun wouldn't make as many neutrinos because the neutrinos wouldn't be able to escape the sun because instead of like being created and then flying off through a sun which is to them transparent, the sun would be suddenly opaque. It would be a huge barrier.

So they would just be like reabsorbed or they would trigger more nuclear fusion or they would form-balanced crazy states. And so probably the sun just wouldn't produce as many neutrinos. It would still have all that energy and it would get hotter and it might radiate more photons because it gets hotter, but it wouldn't produce as many neutrinos. But it would still produce some. And when those neutrinos hit the Earth, it would be bad news. Right.

Well, wouldn't our atmosphere protect us, maybe? Our atmosphere does protect us from cosmic rays. Like, there are particles that feel the strong force effectively that hit the atmosphere like protons. sometimes they're really high energy, but you know, you can't really evade them. What happens when they hit the atmosphere is they create this big shower of particles, cosmic rays. And those cosmic rays get down to Earth and they cause like, you know, changes in our DNA.

It's actually important part of our evolution that sometimes errors in DNA are created from cosmic radiation. And so what you're talking about is increasing the amount of cosmic radiation. It doesn't mean we'll all instantly get cancer, but it does mean that there will be a lot more DNA errors, and that means that, you know, the next generation would be pretty weird. Or have superpowers. Or have superpowers. This could be a great origin story for everyone.

Bitten by a radioactive neutrino. Yeah. You get all the powers of the neutrino. All right. Well, it sounds like maybe the consequences are not as dramatic as in our first question, but because, you know, neutrinos are more dangerous, but they're also maybe we wouldn't see as many of them, right, because they're harder to make. And they would also do other weird stuff.

like the reason we have protons and neutrons and other particles made of quarks is because those quarks like to group together and make interesting things. And there's lots of different ways to put quarks together. You can make pions and caons. These are all just different combinations of the same Lego particles. Now in that universe and Thomas's universe where the neutrino feels a strong force, it's another Lego piece you can use to make these weird particles. So now you can have like, I don't two quarks and a neutrino making some new kind of particle or just like, you know, a bound state of a bunch of neutrinos could build something. You could have all sorts of new forms of matter made out of either combinations of quarks

and neutrinos or just neutrinos. Whoa. You could have like more atoms than what we have in the periodic table. You could have like a whole separate table or more multiple tables. Yeah, it'd be a whole other dimension to the periodic table, you know, where you have the hydrogen with more or fewer neutrinos inside the nucleus. Wow, that's pretty cool. It's like getting more pieces for your Lego set of the universe.

So things would maybe be very different, right? There would be more types of matter. Yeah, exactly. It would be much more diverse, the kinds of things you could build out of the strong force. All right, well, hopefully that answers Thomas' second question. And so let's get to his last question, and this one is pretty killer.

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... a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. 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. 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. 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. 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. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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 is echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. 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. 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.

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 podcasts. All right, we're answering questions from Thomas, who's nine years old from Ontario. Who's read our book, we have no idea, a guide to the unknown universe. And he has questions about what if the universe was different. What if we were actually in a different universe in our multiverse where things had different values or things had different properties? And so his last question is, what if the neutrino felt the electromagnetic

force. Yeah, and I love this series of questions because it connects to this like series of inclusion. Like the strong force only touches quarks. That's interesting. It's weird. We don't understand why. Then there's electromagnetism. It touches corks. Like corks have charges. They can create photons, photons, all this kind of stuff. But also electrons, muons, and taos feel electromagnetism. So of the 12 particles, only six of them feel the strong force. Electromagnetism is more inclusive. It would be like nine of those 12 particles feel electromagnetism. But then the last three particles, these neutrinos, right, they don't feel either the strong force or electromagnetism.

So it's really fun to think about like what the universe would be like if that were different. These neutrinos are special and crazy because they don't feel either of the more powerful forces. Yeah, I mean, these are definitely not random questions. I feel like Thomas really sort of looked at the table of fundamental particles and he saw the gaps and like what wasn't connected. And he's like, what if we connect these two things? Yeah. And I think the other side of these questions,

is not just what if, but why, right? Because the implication is maybe this doesn't make sense. Maybe it doesn't work. And that's why the neutrino doesn't feel the strong force or doesn't feel electromagnetism. Because if it did, the universe would be incoherent or something. You know, I think that's sort of the way we are all thinking about is sort of in the field trying to ask these what if questions.

All right, well, his what if question is, what if the neutrino felt the electromagnetic force? So right now we know that the neutrino doesn't feel the electromagnetic force, which is why it like flies through us and doesn't kill us and doesn't do anything to us, even though there are a ton of them flying through us. So I guess if they felt the electromagnetic force, we would feel them too, right?

We might even be toast. We would definitely be toast. Exactly. It's very similar to what would happen if neutrinos felt a strong force, right? Right now, neutrinos mostly ignore the universe, but the universe is built out of the strong force and electromagnetism.

So now if neutrinos feel electromagnetism, that means that when they pass through matter, they interact with everything that has an electric charge. right? That's what it means to feel electromagnetism. It means to have a charge and to interact with things that do have charge. That's really what electric charge is when we say like the electron has electric charge. What we mean is that when you put it in an electric field, it gets accelerated. Something that has zero charge, we mean it ignores electromagnetism. For a neutrino to feel electromagnetism, it would have to have to have electric charge to it. That have to be like a positive neutrino and a negative neutrino. And then as it flies through matter, it would interact with. electrons and the nuclei and do exactly the same stuff that other charge particles do. It would cause crazy havoc. Right. Yeah, I guess you would have to make

two kinds of neutrinos, right? If you give them charge, you'd have to give them, you have to make up the plus and the minus type. Yeah, because every particle that has a plus also has a minus. There's the anti-particle. One of the really interesting things about the neutrino is that we don't know if it is its own antiparticle

or if there's a separate anti-nutrino. Like, we can't tell the difference between neutrinos and anti-nutrinos because they don't have electric charge. Most particle antiparticle pairs, like one of them is positive, one of it is negative. So you put them in a magnet, they separate.

Neutrinos have no charge. And so we can't tell, are they their own antiparticles? Is there just one kind or are there two kinds? And we just sort of can't tell the difference. It's one of the deepest questions about neutrinos. But if they had electric charge, they would definitely have to be two kinds.

And in fact, I think their name comes from the fact that they don't have any charge, right? Neutral, neutrino comes from the word, neutral, right? So if you're given charge, you would have to change its name. Yeah, exactly. Now Trino means little one in Italian, right? Little neutral one in Italian. Sort of like little cute particle with no charge. You would have to call the positive one like the pepito and maybe the negative one, the nepito maybe. Nenito. Yeah, exactly. That would be the most important consequence in the universe. The names. Again, you're focused on the names, of course. No, but I guess what I mean

is that they wouldn't be called neutrinos, right? No, absolutely. Their most fundamental property would be different. Yeah, neutrinos were hard to discover. We didn't even know about them until fairly recently. And the reason is that they are neutral. They hardly ever interact. We only know the neutrino exists because we saw momentum sort of disappear.

And we thought, wait a second. Momentum can't disappear. And so somebody said, well, maybe it didn't disappear. Maybe some weird and almost invisible particle is carrying it off. And that's how the name came about. Somebody said, oh, that would be fun. What if there was a little neutral particle? carrying it off. So we would have discovered the neutrino much, much sooner if it did have

electric charge. It would have been much more obvious. Right. All right. So then if it's not neutral, if it does feel the electromagnetic force, it would interact with us. And so we would be toast, right? Because we're getting showered by them right now a ton, like 10 billion per square centimeter. And so each one of those would basically, you know, push us or interact with us or knock an electron off or, you know, maybe change our DNA. We'd be toast, right? It'd be a ton of energy showering us right now. Yeah, we basically all be in a particle accelerator all the time. And that's not recommended. You know, like to have all those particles ripping through your body, ionizing things, basically causing cancer, damaging your cells. It's like being shot by

billions of tiny, tiny bullets all the time. So yeah, we wouldn't survive very long. But again, just like in the case with the neutrinos feeling the strong force, fewer of them would come to earth than now, because the sun would also absorb a lot of them internally. And so it would radiate more photons, the sun would be brighter. It would heat up and we'd all get like hotter from the temperature of the sun, but we'd feel fewer neutrinos, but still a lot of them and those would cause damage. Right. This is interesting. You said that the sun would be brighter. Like it would make the same amount of neutrinos? Wouldn't the neutrinos be harder to make? And if you make them, then how does it make the sun brighter? Yeah, that's a great question.

I haven't thought about whether fusion is more or less likely to make more neutrinos. But assuming that the same number of neutrinos are made, they don't escape the sun. Right. Now the sun, the sun again is opaque to them. It's a barrier. It's not transparent. You know, neutrinos are super cool because when you make them inside a star, that star is like glass to the neutrinos. They just fly right out of it. It's super interesting. For example, when we observe supernova in the sky, we see neutrinos from the supernova before we see photons from the supernova. And you might think, hold on a second, photons travel the speed of light, right? Shouldn't they always get here first? Yes, but neutrinos come from the heart of the supernova. So they're the first thing that's

created. And the photons come when the shockwave reaches the outside of the supernova. So the neutrinos actually get here first because they started first and they travel at almost the speed of light. It's like the trailer for the main feature. Yeah, exactly. We're like, watch out. You're about to be zapped. Well, if they had charged, they would zap us. The trailer would be just as good as the movie. Yeah. So if they had charged, they wouldn't be able to escape in those first moments. It would be reabsorbed like all the other particles, just contributing to the overall temperature of the sun. That would cause the sun to glow brighter if it's hotter. So it would heat up the sun.

And the sun would also be shorter lived, right? It wouldn't last for so many billions of years. Wow. All right. So we'd be toast and maybe not live as long. But would we even be here? Like if you gave charge to the neutrino, would the universe form the same way? Or will we also have like interesting new kinds of matter?

It would be totally different. Well, the stable forms of matter would be really different. And you would probably have like neutrinos in bound states around protons. right, you could form atoms with neutrinos, not just with electrons. And maybe you could have atoms that have like some neutrinos and some electrons. And again, the orbitals would be really weird and chemistry would be much harder. Like you think organic chemistry is hard now while with neutrinos in there, it'd be even more complicated. So I wouldn't even deign to predict what it would look like.

But I'm sure that the very structure of matter would be very different if neutrinos had electric charge and could participate in the forming of atoms. Wow. All right. Well, I think maybe the main lesson from all of these questions from Thomas is that, like, the universe could be very different. And it wouldn't take that much for things to be totally different and maybe even feels like a totally different universe. That's right. So, Thomas, if you wander into the control panel of the universe, please take care before you play with some of those knobs. I know, I know you're nine and you want to touch things and push on buttons.

But, you know, think about it for a second. And also, if you're a dog listening to this, also, you know, restrain yourself. Don't turn into a super dog villain. All right, well, thank you, Thomas, for these awesome questions about what would happen if things were a little bit different in our universe. It sounds like things would be a lot different, Daniel. Things would be a lot different. And it just goes to show you that the universe that we exist in now

really rests on like a very finely balanced set of stuff. And if you change any of that, then the downstream effects are very dramatic and very hard to predict. All right. Well, let's be grateful that we have the universe that we have with the properties that it has because otherwise we wouldn't be here to ask these awesome questions. That's right. And thank you very much to Thomas's mom for encouraging his curiosity. And thank you to all the parents out there who fan the flames of curiosity and wonder in your children. Those are future scientists who I hope are going to solve the big problems of the day.

Just don't get him a cat. Just make sure it's a nice, friendly dog. All right. Well, thanks for joining us. 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. 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 her gone. Oh, 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. 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. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.