Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What is everything made of?

Episode Date: October 11, 2018

What's the smallest piece of matter? Is there one?  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 her 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 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow.

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Everything that we know about in the future. universe, all the stars, galaxies, gas and dust out there, you, me, hamsters, hamsters, flamingos, tell me that's just three things. Yeah. That's crazy. You have all this complexity, not because the world itself is complex, but the world is made out of a small number of simple things, and it's the arrangement of that stuff that gives the complexity. It's just three things arranged in a bazillion different ways. Hi, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel.

And this is Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, our podcast about the universe and everything in it. In which we try to take the whole universe, break it into tiny pieces, and insert them one at a time into your brain. Bit by bit. Today on the program, we're going to ask the question, what is the universe made out of?

Right. Sort of like, can you take it? take the universe and break that into tiny bits and how far can you go and why do we even think that's possible and why is it like that and what are those tiny little bits and why do they have such silly names and something i like to think about is how long have people been asking this question yeah clearly the greeks thought about it they wrote about it you know they had crazy ideas that were totally off base but yeah they thought about it to them it was an important question yeah and even before that i was reading you know it's ancient cultures even before the greece had this

question and they had ideas about what the things were made out of well i wonder you know like the folks for example who did those cave paintings in france 35 000 years ago they were capable of symbolic thinking probably logic definitely music did they have these deep questions about this world they found themselves in that made little sense to them yeah well i think it's crazy just to think about why even ask the question like what makes us think that the universe is made out of stuff you know like what does it mean to even ask that question yeah i think it comes from a desire to organize. Like, you see stuff around you, right?

I mean, you see logs and water and air and people, and you notice all this stuff. And then you might wonder, like, well, this stuff is kind of like that other stuff? And is there some way I can organize it, right? Yeah. I think the first principle there is, like, looking for patterns, looking for reasons the way you can understand why this stuff is here. Yeah. And can I, like, take some of this and mix it with some of that and get something new or

something different? Yeah, it's sort of a natural idea But as usual, we went out into the street And we asked you We asked you, what do you think the universe is made out of? The deepest level of matter so far Here's what you had to say What is everything made out of at the smallest scale?

The smallest scale? I think electrons are the smallest that I know of I haven't taken physics since like junior year Well, I guess from my classes it would be, like, the atoms. Adams? Is it Adams? It's made out of quarks and stuff, right?

The quarks. Oh, freak. I feel like I should know this. I'm a chem major. All right. I think we got our answer. I think we're done with this podcast. It's Adams, basically.

Adams and maybe something else. Everybody seems to know about the atom. I think basically everyone's physics education stops at high school, basically, most people. Unless you go on to study physics, it's like high school physics. What you remember. is atoms. But that's not even physics, man. That's chemistry.

Adams are chemistry, how they interact and stuff. But it's fascinating that one of the deepest questions in physics, right, what is the universe made out of, is mostly answered so far by chemistry. Like, most of the progress we've made is chemistry. Well, chemistry used to be kind of physics, right? I mean, it used to all just be natural sciences, right? Like these distinctions are kind of recent.

Yeah. I mean, it all used to be philosophy, right? All of it grew out of philosophy. That's right. It all just used to be thinking. you know like love of thinking what's your job dad oh i'm a thinker i'm a lover of thinking i just sit around and think all day yeah so but i think it's it's interesting that um you know a huge part of the answer of this question what is the world made out of is answered by what people said atoms you know

that you can even take the stuff around you and break it into a fairly small number of bits that explain all of it right and this idea can i like you said it goes back to the greeks like the Greeks posited, they wondered, like, is everything made out of tiny little bits? Yeah, I think that gives the Greeks way too much credit. I mean, I think there was a Greek Democritus who had a lot of ideas, one of which was this one, which happened to be correct. I think he had a lot of other crazy ideas, which were not correct. And it's not like this idea was, you know, took the Greeks by storm and had a lot of consensus. You know, sort of like if a thousand monkeys are typing on typewriters, one of them will predict a correct theory of physics.

You could look back later and say, wow, this monkey was a genius. But that doesn't make all monkeys geniuses. I'd say they kind of sprayed a lot of intellectual ideas at the board there, you know, and yeah, one of them stuck and turned out to be sort of true, but it doesn't mean they necessarily need to get credit for it. But they sort of try to categorize these little bits, right? Like they had ideas that there were five or four kinds of stuff that the rest of the stuff was made of, right?

Like earth, air, water, fire. I think that those were really two separate ideas that now we've kind of combined. I mean, one idea was there's a few basic kinds of stuff and everything is made out of those, right? That's a really fascinating idea. The other idea that everything is made out of

small pieces, you know, atoms, bits of stuff, that's a totally different idea. Like stuff can be made out of a small number of other stuff like earth, fire, wind, but those things don't necessarily need to be in little bits. Yeah, they could be, you know, earth and fire and water could be

elemental, you know, on their own. They could be it can't be divided into little pieces that could be like perfectly smooth no matter how much you zoom in they could always just be themselves right there's this other idea that if you zoom in on stuff it turns out it's made out of little building blocks that's a different idea oh and now we have kind of both of them right we have both of them we're like oh it turns out stuff is made out of little building blocks and there's a few kinds of them right but I guess the question is what is that building block our thinking is a species as involved in that right like maybe we used to think we were made out of little bits of dust and then we got smaller into atoms

and we've been getting smaller and smaller right yeah absolutely and um i think it's incredible as i was saying earlier and i can't stop talking about this because i think it's underrated as a sort of human intellectual achievement that you can boil down everything you've ever eaten or sat on or tripped over or any human is ever interacted with in terms of just the atoms right the hundred basic building blocks i mean you go from like almost infinite complexity down to just a hundred things. It blows my mind that that's even possible. Like, why does the universe work that way, right?

Right. And if you need a reminder of your high school physics, so atoms are the ones in the periodic table of elements, like carbon, iron, oxygen, those are atoms. Yeah. And not that long ago, people thought that, like, that's the universe. Everything you see is made out of these hundred little things. Right, yeah. And as impressive as that was, right?

I think some people were wondering, why are there these patterns, right? Like, yeah, you have these 100 basic things, and maybe that's it, but maybe there are things inside those. Like, maybe those things are made out of even smaller things. And the clues we had there is that if you look at the periodic table of the elements, it's not just 100 different things that are totally separate from each other. There are patterns. Like, things near each other in the periodic table act in similar ways, which suggest that they're made out of some smaller bits and that small. changes and how you assemble them make different atoms. Right.

It's like they had all these different elements and then they started to characterize their properties. They started to measure how they reacted to different things and how much they weighed. And it turned out to their surprise that you can put them like on a table. You can order them in a certain way. Yeah. And I love when a huge advance in science comes from something as basic as like how you write it on a piece of paper.

The first person to make the periodic tables. Like let's organize our knowledge in this way. oh my gosh, that makes this obvious that there's a gap here and that there's a pattern here, right? Sometimes notation or just the way you write things can lead to huge advances. And I think that's just an extension of what we were talking about earlier, right? You know, why did people even ever wonder how the Wii universe was made? It's because they looked at stuff and they wanted to understand it and they looked for patterns and they organized it. And then they wondered, you know, these things are similar.

It's the same logic that you just described applied to the periodic table. You know, these things are gases and they're active and these things are really inactive and these guys are metallic and all that stuff. Why are there those patterns? Why are these things similar to each other and different from others? Because patterns tell you that there are rules, right?

Like there's some kind of underlying order. We certainly hope so. Otherwise, physics would be impossible. And yeah, patterns are the clues, right? You say, like, why is this like this? It could have been different. So why is it in this way? Why are these things all similar

and they're all different from those things or the opposite of those things. And then you use those patterns as clues, as hints to say, you know, what could be inside here? What's making these things act in this way? Like, that's the goal of science, right? Yeah, exactly. And it could just be, there is no answer. It is just the way it is, right?

That's possible. At some point, we could run up against the wall. We said, like, the universe is this way and there is no explanation. And some people like that. I think that's a cop out. Like, we could have stopped at the periodic table and be like, okay, that's. it. The universe is made out of these hundred things and that's all

we know. Yeah, and nobody asks any more questions, shh. Yeah, exactly. That doesn't seem to be very scientific, you know. I don't know if you know about the anthropic principle but that's the kind of argument behind the anthropic principle. You know that the universe is the way it is and some things are just

randomly set and there's no point in asking any more questions. So go away, please. Slam. Oh, I see. But I feel like, what's the point of science? It's to look for explanation. So, never give up, right? Just keep looking and eventually you're going to find the reason. And we did that and

it turns out everything in the periodic table is made out of smaller bits. And not just that, but the complexity goes down, right? You can explain all the crazy stuff in your environment, the huge numbers of things in terms of just a hundred building blocks. You can explain those hundred building blocks in terms of a smaller

number of smaller particles, not a larger number. But that wasn't necessarily the case, right? Like, what helped scientists at the time think that there were such a thing as atoms, like that there was a minimal bit of the stuff we call carbon. Yeah, that's a great question. And again, the answer is

chemistry. People were noticing, oh, if you mix these things together, you need equal proportions of this. So this happens in ratios of three to two. And so is a guy named Dalton who came up with this idea. He's like, hmm, it turns out that there are these exact ratios. And so it made sense then

that things were made out of these tiny pieces that they were then reorganizing and fitting together. So that was the first indirect piece of evidence. Because like if carbon was, let's say, infinitely divisible, you wouldn't have these kind of exact ratios in chemical reactions, right? Exactly, right. Yeah, you could mix it with something else, and you just get a blend. Like, you need the idea of a unit of this stuff

in order to explain these ratios in chemical reactions. Yeah, exactly. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, so that was the first clue. And then people discovered the first particles. It was actually with JJ Thompson. he discovered the electron. He was looking at cathode ray tubes,

which at the time was just this weird thing. Cathode ray tubes are what used to be in televisions. They shoot these electrons from one side of the other, and they would make these glowing rays inside them. At a time, it was just like this weird effect. People would show inside shows and, you know, magic shows and stuff. Nobody understood it. But he started looking into it, and he discovered,

oh, these rays are actually made out of tiny little particles. He called them, he didn't call them particles, though. He called them corpuscules. And I'm really glad that that name did not stick because it's ugly and hard to say. We should just go back to that. I mean, why wouldn't you want to be a corpuscular physicist? Because you can't even say it.

And that's exactly why. You see, it's a mouthful, isn't it? One of my favorite things about that discovery, though, is that he discovered this one particle. And then immediately he thought, maybe everything in the world is built out of my corpuscules. He, like, generalized to infinity. He's like, oh, I found one particle.

this is the particle that answers all the questions, right? Of course, not everything is built out of electrons. I guess why wouldn't he make that leap, right? Like, why would some things be made out of little things and why would some other things not be made out of little things? Yeah, well, I guess he couldn't imagine that there might be other kinds of particles out there also. Wow.

And he was hoping that his discovery was at the root of all knowledge, right? Which I guess is part of the scientific fantasy for everybody, so we can forgive it. And, you know, he is the first guy to discover a particle, so, you know, credit to him. So he thought, well, what if everything's made out of little things? And then we had the periodic table and then we ordered it and we got the table. And then people started noticing patterns.

And that's when people thought maybe these things are made out of something else. Yeah, that started to be a pretty compelling idea because you have all these elements of periodic table. They're organized in that way. They nicely slot into the periodic table that way. And then people started busting the atoms open to see what's inside. And it was Rutherford who first did that. He's like, let's shoot a beam. of radiation at some matter and see what comes out.

And so he was the first one to really break the atom open and to see that the atom, it wasn't just like a continuous blob that had a hard center, this nucleus of something inside of it. Oh, this is it the gold x-ray experiment? Gold foil. So he shot radiation at a really thin sheet of gold foil. And he figured it would just go right through and he was going to measure like how much it got bent or whatever.

But occasionally when he shot it at the gold foil, oil, some radiation would bounce right back, directly back. And he said famously that it's like shooting a bullet at a piece of tissue paper and having it reflect back in your face. It made no sense if you thought of the tissue was just like smooth and continuous. It made a lot more sense if you thought of it as like a chain link fence, right? A bunch of really condensed little points with big gaps in between. And occasionally you hit one of those points. That's when we realize that matter is not continuous like a jelly, but actually like little dots that are kind of

arranged together, right? These little dots and the atom itself, it has this tiny little hard core, the nucleus. Adams are hardcore. I can't believe. I totally set you up for that joke without even realizing it. I'm glad we don't live in a soft core world, you know.

Now we're veering into not safe for chemistry. Not safe for chemistry. On that note, 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 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. 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 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 okay

Storytime Podcasts on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hola, it's HoneyGerman. And my podcast, Grasasas 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.

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on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So that's kind of amazing that they came out with this idea of the atomic nucleus and protons and electrons without actually like seeing this stuff, right? Just from seeing the effects of it in the case. experiments. Yeah, but that was the last time you could really see things. I mean, when you're talking about like visualizing, these things are so tiny, so small that they're really impossible to see directly in any sort of way. And the only kind of seeing you can do is indirect, right? You have like an idea of what it looks like. You do an experiment. You think about the result

of the experiment based if your idea is correct, and you see the results. So even today, when we're smashing protons together at the Large H-Gron Collider, we have these huge detectors that take pictures of the collisions, so we can't see the particles directly. They're too small and things happen too fast. And so direct imaging is all but impossible at this scale. But these days we can see atoms, right?

Yeah, but depends what you mean by seeing, right? To see an atom, you need to bounce electrons off of it in order to see its shape. And so is that really seeing? I mean, you're, again, you're bouncing particles off of it, you're making measurements, and you're translating that into an

image later. I don't know if you know if that really counts as seeing, but that's a whole different philosophical discussion. They're smaller than the wavelength of light. So it's hard to say you're seeing it. Yeah. I think it's reasonable to say you're seeing it, but it requires you expand slightly your whole definition of what it means to see something. Okay. So let's break it down for the listener then. So everything around you, the universe that you can see and touch and smell is made out of atoms. And atoms are made out of an atomic nuclei with electrons flying around it. And then the nucleus is made out of more things, right?

Right, exactly. So the atoms are made out of protons and neutrons and electrons, protons and neutrons in the nucleus. The electrons, we think so far are just made of themselves. There's nothing inside the electron. The electrons are just tiny dots as far as we know. We could be wrong. We probably are wrong. But as far as we know, electrons are not made out of anything else. Inside the nucleus, however, the proton and the proton and the proton are made out of tinier stuff. And so the proton and the neutron are both made out of corks. And this two, kinds of quarks that you need to make the proton and the neutron is the upcork and the down quark. Take two upcorks and a down and you get a proton or two down quarks and up and you got a neutron. How do we know electrons are not made out of smaller things? Maybe like electron quarks or something. Yeah, a little electronitos or something. Well, we don't know. All we can say is that we've tried to look inside them and we haven't seen anything yet. I mean, like how would you even look inside of an electron? The same way we looked inside the atom and saw that it had a nucleus, right? We saw that it was made out of smaller pieces.

You shoot particles at it and you try to resolve some structure. You say, oh, if I shoot at this part of the electron, it bounces straight back. If I shoot at this part, it goes right through. And so then you can tell if the electron has some structure to it. You like poke it. Yeah. But in order to see that structure, you have to poke it with a fine enough needle, which means a high enough energy particle.

And so far... So far. So far. Tune in next week for... the final story of the electron, right? So far, we haven't been able to break the electron into pieces or to use a needle that's fine enough to understand that there's more stuff here in the electron than there. So far, it only looks like a point to us.

Imagine you're looking at the Earth from space, right, using Google Earth. You know, can you tell the town is made out of tiny houses? Well, you keep zooming in and zooming in, and as long as you have more resolution, you can see, oh, the town is made of houses and houses made of rooms and rooms are made of furniture. But that's only if you actually have that resolution. So for the electron, we've zoomed in as far as we can,

and we can't see anything smaller. But we haven't zoomed in all the way, right? We can build bigger colliders and zoom in further, and maybe we'll find something. Like you zoom in, and it still acts like just one thing. Exactly. There's no weirdness about the way it acts at different scales. Like, there's no texture there.

That's right. There's no texture to the electron so far. Right. Exactly. But that's purely limited by how powerful our microscopes are. how powerful our particle accelerators are, which are modern-day microscopes. But for the proton and the neutron,

there is texture there. There's actually little bits inside of it that you can see. Yeah, exactly. And we can break them up, and we can interact with those little bits, and we can measure them and study them. And so those are up quarks and down quarks. And we know that if you arrange upcorks and down quarks

in one way, you get a proton, you arrange another way, you get a neutron. And so that means that everything in the periodic table can be made out of upcorks, down quarks, and electrons, right? So a mixtures of those three things make every atom, which makes anything that anybody's ever eaten. To me, it's incredible that all this complexity of stuff around us

can be described in just three particles. So why do we even still talk about protons? I mean, a proton is just, you're saying it's just a word for arrangement A of these two quarks. And a neutron is just arrangement number B of the quarks, you know? Yeah, well, sometimes arrangements can be interesting. For example, Jorge is a particular arrangement of protons and neutrons in Pasadena, right? I think you'd like to be referred to as Jorge and not individually talk to your protons, right?

Yeah. Don't talk to my protons. Talk to me like I'm a person. Eyes up here. Eyes up here, Daniel. Yeah, well, it turns out that the quarks are not just like hanging out near each other and we call it a proton. They are tightly bound together. They are held really firmly together. They move like a single thing. So unless you have a huge amount of energy to look inside, to zoom in, to see that texture, to break it up, you're just going to see a proton as a proton, even if it's made out of three quarks. It's like three tiny Lego pieces jammed together so hard that you need an expert to pry them apart.

Well, this is a perfect point to take a break. 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. 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.

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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. But yeah, that's a really cool point you were making just,

just now, which is that everything that we know about in the universe is just three things arranged in a bazillion different ways. That's all we are. We're just electrons, up quarks, and down quarks. Yeah, it's all about the arrangements. And, you know, there's a lot of information in the arrangements. You know, if I rearranged all of your particles into just a puddle on the floor, you would not be the same person. So who you are is your arrangements. You know, it's not just the elements that make you, you know. I like to joke with my friends that, If you asked a particle physicist to write a cookbook, it will only have three ingredients in every single recipe,

upcorks, downcorks, and electrons. And every recipe would just say mix. No, that's exactly the point. All the hard work is in the arrangements, right? Who you are is not just upcorks, down, quarks, and electrons. It's your particular arrangement of those and assembling those and into the particular thing that makes you, you, right? Wow.

And so that's the answer is that the things that we see around us in the universe are not defined by the particles that make them up, but by the arrangements of those particles. And so if the whole goal of particle physics or asking this question is to get some deep inside to the universe, then that's it, you know, that the complexity in the universe comes from arrangements. That's fascinating to me.

Well, I feel like this point is kind of maybe hard to grasp. So I was just thinking that maybe the way to really grasp it is that imagine if it wasn't just three particles, let's say everything in the universe was made out of just one particle, like particle Bob. And everything, you, me, televisions, like imagine if it was just one particle and everything you see around you was just different arrangements of Bob, you know? And that might still be the case, right?

We could discover that the electron, the upcork and the down quark, and all the other particles, which, by the way, we haven't even talked about yet, are made out of one kind of tiniest little particle. That could be the answer, yeah. Yeah, but it's not that different from three, right? Like, three is still fascinating. like it's not just Bob it's like Bob Sue and Mary

everything you know is just Bob Sue and Mary doing different things and then you get this incredible amazing complexity right yeah and as you say it could have been different it could have been that

everything is made out of its own thing and either that it was made out of particles or not you know you could have a world where every kind of thing every kind of person is made out of a different kind of particles you know you have like tree particles

and air particles and cat particles and that's why cats are so weird yeah exactly That's a huge clue about the universe, you know, that the universe at its core is kind of simple. And to me, that gives me a lot of motivation. It tells me we can understand it. It can be boiled down into a simple explanation.

It'd be disappointing if, you know, if you said, oh, I want to understand the whole universe. And the explanation for the universe was like a five million page long document that had to describe all these complicated things. It's just bobsu-berry mix. Yeah. And it's all sort of emergent phenomena, right? It's the consequences of these small set of rules. It's like the game Go, right? I love that game because there's a very small number of pieces,

just black and white, and there's a very small number of rules for how you play. But the number of games you can play is incredible. It's much more complicated than chess. Right. And all the gameplay, all the complexity arises from how you arrange the pieces on the board. Not from having like a million different kinds of pieces and special rules and cards you can draw.

I think you should talk to all physical. like the American Physical Society or the World Physics Congress and just convince them to rename the electron, the up quark, and the down quark, Bob, Sue, and Mary. Like, I feel like that would have a tremendous impact on, like, people's understanding. The point you make is interesting because it seems like it hasn't seeped into everyday knowledge. Like, the people we talked to in the street, everybody knew about atoms. They all knew about atoms.

But almost nobody could even name the kind of particles that was inside the atom or anything deeper than that. That's what I'm saying, yes. You're saying it's a marketing failure. It's a branding problem. Bob Sue and Mary, and I bet in three years you would ask people on the street, what is the universe made off? And people would be like, Bob Sue and Mary. Exactly.

And then you would get a one cent royalty every time that happened. That's your secret plan here. 2018, everything is branding. So that's where we are as a human species, right? First, we didn't know what thing we're made up. Then we made up stuff like Earth, Fire, and Wind. And then we figure out atoms, electrons, protons, and that's what we're down to. And you're saying there could be more.

We could still break things down possibly even further. That's right. And as far as we know, the up quark, the down quark, and the electron are not made of anything smaller, as far as we know. But that's only because we have limited capacity to look. You know, our little zoom-in knob is maxed out and we haven't seen anything yet. But we have lots of hints that probably they are made out of something smaller. And those hints are just like the hints we had. We were looking at the periodic table 100 years ago.

or when people were just looking at stuff around them a thousand years ago. Oh, you mean like there's a pattern between Bob Sue and Mary, you're saying? Like there's suspiciously something going on there. Yeah, there's a lot of unexplained patterns and phenomena that we don't understand. And one of our greatest strategies for figuring out what's inside up, quark, down cork, and electron is expanding the table as saying, like, let's make a new periodic table, this time of the fundamental particles. Because there are other kinds of particles out there. It's not just the upcork, the downcork, and the electron. When we smash particles together,

sometimes we make other kinds of quarks and other kinds of electrons. You mean like sometimes a Peter will pop out or a Fred will pop out? Yeah, or a fat Albert or something like that. Exactly, because some of these particles are big and heavy. Oh, I see.

But you only need Bob's Food Mary to make stuff, but there are other particles out there. Yeah, so one question is, what is the stuff around us made out of? That's definitely a quirk-down quirk electron. Another question is, what kinds of stuff can there be, right? Because remember, we're 14 billion years into the universe

when the universe is kind of cold and dispersed and everything is spread out a lot earlier. You know, when things were hot and dense, it could have been that other kinds of stuff was dominant, that there was enough energy to make heavier particles and they were flying around all the time. And so we don't just want an answer for today. You know, we want an answer for a general answer,

one that tells us deep things about the universe itself, not just what is it like now. You mean back then when things were more, hardcore. Exactly. What you're saying is that right now, everything's made out of Bob Sue and Mary, but maybe at some point in the universe,

things were made out of other kinds of particles. Yeah, maybe the particles, up quirk, down, quirk, an electron, or Bob Sue and Mary weren't as common, and more common were other particles that we can create now in particle colliders and study to get a clues to, like, what the possibilities are.

Wow. And so that's the strategy. It's like, let's try to make all the different kind of particles that are possible, and that gives us a better handle on the patterns. You just see more of the pattern. You're like putting together the weave,

and you get more and more stitches, and you get an idea for how it's fitting together. And that gives you more clues to figure out, like, what could be underlying all of that. Meaning, like, maybe we'll find out that Bopsu and Mary are made out of even smaller things, like Tito, Ari, and Zven. Sven.

Yeah, if you had to ask me, I'm almost positive. that these particles we know of are made of smaller ones, that this is not the final answer. That's your bet. That's what you think. Absolutely. I mean, it's just at the limit of current resolution. It's like, you know, J.J. Thompson's saying, everything's

made out of what I know. Everything's made out of the electron. It's ridiculous. It's so much hubris to say, we found the answer and we're probably done. There's so many unexplained patterns, and we can get into that in a whole other podcast episode about all these hints and the new particles that might be out there. But it just doesn't make sense

to me if this is the final story. Well, I guess we'll find out what physicists can do it, you know? We'll find out what kind of stuff they're made out of. Oh, physicists, we can do it. You're made out of the right stuff. That's right, yeah. Yeah, and so that's why we're trying to tear these particles apart to see even deeper. And, you know, what would it mean if the universe is made out of one kind of thing?

Well, that would tell you something really fundamental. That would say, like, look, this is the basic element of reality. Wow. And everything else that's around you, that's an emergent phenomenon. on that. It's just like a way to organize or arrange stuff, you know. It's like hurricanes and blenders. They're not basic elements of the universe. They just happen to be arrangements of basic elements. And we want to know what's at the core, you know, what defines the nature of reality itself. And so that's the sort of the long-term journey we're on. And, you know,

we're pretty far along it, but we have no idea what fraction of the way we have yet to go, you know. Are there five more layers of particles? Are there 1,000 more layers of particles? Is there just one more layer of particle? We don't know. amazing to one day look at your neighbor, you know, or people across the world and just say to them like, hey, you and I were made of the same thing. We're made out of this one thing. That's right. All right. Well, thank you very much, guys. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Yeah, thanks everyone for listening. And thanks to all the up quarks, down quarks, and electrons inside you. And if you're called bobs who are married, we're sorry. And we don't owe you any money. And or you're welcome.

Do you have a question you wish we would cover? Send it to us. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, one word, or email us to feedback at danielandhorpe.com. 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 podcast.

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. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe. Find out how it ends.

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