Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What is the Weak Force?

Episode Date: July 18, 2019

Find out about the Weak Force on today's podcast with Daniel and Jorge. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone.

Now, 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. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy,

which is more effortful to use. use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials is easier. Complex problem solving. Takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the Iheart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Jorge, you have strong opinions about naming things, don't you? I just don't like it when things are. named in a very confusing way or where the name actually confuses you instead of making things clear. All right. Well, then I have a bit of a personal question. How did you pick the names of your kids? Not through physics, for sure. That's definitely, did not... There's not one called strange, one called charm. They're both strange and charming, for sure. That's a linear superposition. There is physics there. They are definitely quantum and deline.

leap a lot for sure. Our son was named, my wife had a dream and that's how she came up with the name for our son. She just came up with the name in a dream and my daughter is named after a Jane Austen character. Wow. All right. So both inspired by mental realms outside of the physical world. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm a connoisseur of all jokes' physics, strong, electric, and even weak ones. And banana forces, of course. That's right. And of course, the mysterious banana field that fills the universe and is mostly concentrated around Jorge's head.

And together we are co-authors on books and other projects, but this is. our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe, a production of iHeard radio. In which we take you on a tour of all the weird, crazy, amazing stuff in the universe and try to explain it to you so you go away going, wow, that's kind of cool. I never understood that before. Yeah, all the strong and amazing things and even the weak but significant things in the universe that maybe everyone should know about. That's right.

It's a forceful exposition of all the fascinating things about the universe. Oh, man. Now you're just forcing it, I think. that's right well you know my my joke force is pretty weak but forces themselves are sort of a weird thing it's like forces are something that physicists even had a hard time grappling with over the centuries well it's something that's really intuitive i think you know as a little kid even as a baby you sort of get the idea of force right things pushing you things pulling you gravity pushing you down yeah but i think your intuition is misleading i think most people think of a force as something

as a push, right? Something that's touching you. Somebody comes up to you, pushes you over, you fall over, you move your role or whatever. So I think most people think of forces as touching. The really weird thing about forces is when they can act without touching, right? When they can, like when you see a magnet levitating,

it seems almost like magic, right? Because it's this, these two things are acting on each other without actually touching each other. Yeah, it's weird. And so today we'll be talking about one particular force out of all the forces out there in the universe, one that is maybe not the strongest one, but that led to some amazing discoveries, right?

That's right. It's not the most powerful force, but it did give us some amazing hints into the way the universe works. So it's weakly powered but plays a strong role in the sort of overarching drama that is physics. Yep, it's a force that's inside everyone, right? It's inside of me, inside of you, inside of everyone listening to this podcast. That's right. It's everywhere in the universe, and it plays an important role in how we live

and how we die and how we power ourselves. So to the end of the podcast, we'll be talking about the weak force, weak force. Are you just trying to add some drama to it because it needs some panache? Yeah, I mean, it was a little anticlimatic that you said the weak force. I thought you might go with weak nuclear force

because nuclear gives it some sort of like edge of mysteriousness, right? The weak quantum nano nuclear force. The weak black hole force. Let's just pry it on. Let's just give him multiple hyphenated names. The weak Trujillo, Guadalajara, Montez force. A yang force.

Yang force. Yeah, exactly. That would be a lot more fun. No, the weak force is really amazing. It's fascinating. Yeah, it's one of the four fundamental forces in nature, right? There's only four of them. Yeah, well, spoiler alert, turns out there's three.

You eliminated one. like Pluto, just got declassified. No, no, that's the goal of physics, right, is to not have four forces. We don't want to say, hey, here's how the universe works. There are four totally weird separate rules about things, how things can push and pull on each other. We think, we hope, we want to explain the universe in terms of one force. So the story of physics so far is look around you, see all the weird thing that's happening in the universe, and try to describe them all in terms of the smallest number of things,

the smallest number of forces. So, yeah, the goal is to sort of take things off the list and describe everything in terms of just one thing. So you're saying there used to be only four forces in the universe, but then physics killed one of them or married two of them, and now there are only three fundamental forces in the universe. Yeah, well, the drama is even more, because we suspect that in the first few moments after the Big Bang,

there was just one force. But then as the universe cooled, we think they broke up in the world. into all these different forces. And what we're trying to do now is sort of run that backwards and understand like, can we bring these things together? Can we understand these things in terms of one big picture? How do we marry these things back together?

You know, it's like a universal divorce early on. And we're trying to bring the couples back together and show them how they can work together again. You're trying to bring the band back together, basically. It's like the Beatles broke up and, you know, we enjoy their individual work. But come on, guys. Yeah. That's a great analogy. Wouldn't you like to just describe the Beatles instead of having to describe all four members of the Beatles, right? That's exactly what we're trying to do. We're trying to show you that, you know, the drums are not interesting on their own. They're just part of a larger harmony, right? They make much more sense when you understand them in terms of the guitar parts and the vocals, which come together to make this amazing, beautiful music, right? Yeah. The physics of the Beatles. That'll be the next.

Yeah, exactly. So today we're going to show you how Paul and John were actually the same person. Spoiler alert. They were the same person. That's right. And Ringo is an alien. Everybody knows Ringo's an alien, right? All right, so the weak nuclear force.

And so it's not the most popular force. You know, most people know electromagnetism and gravity, right? It is sort of the ringgo of forces, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, maybe it is. Maybe it's the Ringo of forces. It's sort of overlooked and, you know, dismissed. But in the end, fundamentally important to making things work.

That's right. Just like Ringo. He kept the beat going. He holds the harmony together. Without the beat together. He wouldn't have a good song. That's right. Who's ever heard a good pop song without a drum line?

Without Ringo. All right. So we were wondering, it is kind of the lesser known maybe of the forces. And so we were wondering how many people out there knew what the weak force was. Yeah. And this is one of the times when I really had no idea what to expect. Had everybody heard of the weak force and they were going to spout off some interesting physics about it or was they're going to get a bunch of blank stairs. So I was pretty curious. And so as usual, Daniel went out into the street and asked random strangers if they knew what the weak force was. And so before you listen to these answers, think a little bit yourself. If someone approached you on the street and wearing sandals and sporting a beard, if they asked you randomly, what?

the weak force was. You're giving away my disguise, man. I'm going to have to wear a completely different disguise when I go out on this tree. They'll be like, you can't be Daniel. I can't see your toes. So if you were asked this question, would you know the answer to it?

Here's what people had to say. Yeah, it kind of governs radioactive decay. Most particle stuff, I guess. I'm not heard of the weak nuclear force. No, that either. No. Have you heard of the strong nuclear force? No.

The medium nuclear force? No. The super weak nuclear force? Nothing at all. I made most of those, though. Big nuclear force, I'm not as well. I've heard of it, I'm not sure. No, I'm not heard of that.

No. The MRI measures the nuclear force, and then you can... No? I don't know. That's good. That's one of the four main types of forces in physics. Not just in physics, in the universe. Right, in the universe, sure.

It's a counterpart to a strong nuclear force. Why do we have it? What is it important, or what does it do? It has something to do with how atoms are held together. I don't know exactly. All right. not a lot of yeses. I got a lot of blank looks on this one.

That's for sure. Well, some people, most people said, no, they never heard of it, but somebody actually said that it's related to the radioactive, radioactivity, radioactive decay. Yeah, exactly. And somebody even understood it was like, connected to particle physics experiments. We do in Geneva.

So, a hundred bonus points to that guy. Was it your office mate, another physics professor? That was me with disguising my own voice, asking myself a question. Spoiler earlier. They're all you, always, every episode. I'm just amazing at impressions, right? No, you know what one of my career goals is?

Please. Speaking of which, is, do you ever read The Onion? They have this fantastic people in the street section where they ask people ridiculous questions. And every week, they have the same four pictures, and they just give them made-up names and jobs, you know, bone crusher or, like, you know, keyboard tester or something. My career goal is to get my face used in The Onion as one of those people on the street saying something dumb.

I've actually written to The Onion several times volunteering, but never heard back. Please use my picture. Exactly. Please make fun of meat every week. Do they write back or they just ignored it? No, no. Unlike other Internet celebrities, they did not respond to my cold call. Well, keep trying, Daniel.

There's always hope. All right. I will. So, yeah, somebody, most people didn't know what it was. And so, did that surprise you? I mean, it's not something that is usually covered in, you know, high school physics even. No, it didn't surprise me because it is a bit esoteric. And also, it's not something people experience.

You know, people experience gravity. They all know what it is. They have to understand it. They have an intuitive sense of it. People experience electricity, right? We've all been shocked by static electricity. People experience magnets, right? But people don't interact with the weak nuclear force very much.

You don't really see its consequences directly. You can't tell the difference between it and something else the way you can tell the difference between gravity and magnetism, right? Yeah, well, there's a couple of things about it. First of all, it's a force, and second, it's weak. That's right. It's really, really weak. Like, compared to electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force,

it just is not very effective. And one way to understand that is to think about how particles interact, right? Like, when you touch something or when you bounce against something, that's all done with particles. That's particles pushing against each other or interacting with each other. You mean like the particles in my finger are interacting with the particles in the table

and they're pushing against each other. That's right. And that's mostly using electromagnetism because it has to do with the bonds and the electrons, holding the atoms tightly together and making this like, you know, chain link fence of atoms

that your finger can't pass through. But there are other particles, right? And that's because all the particles in your finger and all the particles in the table feel electromagnetism. But there are particles that don't feel electromagnetism, like this mysterious particle called the neutrino. Right.

The neutrino doesn't feel electromagnetism and it doesn't feel a strong force and it has almost no mass or hardly feels any gravity. The only way it interacts is through the weak force. And so it's a good lens for figuring out like how weak is the weak force. Yeah, we had a whole podcast episode about neutrinos. And we sort of talked about how, you know, the forces are sort of like social media channels. You know, there's Twitter.

there's Facebook, there's Instagram that you can interact with people. But some people don't use some of the, don't use Instagram, or they only use Twitter, or they only, or they use all three. And neutrinos are like that. They only subscribe to this one very lightly used social media channel. And so they hardly interact. You're the friendster. It's the friendster of social media channels.

The original. And so that's why a neutrino can pass right through you. And a neutrino can pass right through the earth. Right. We do these experiments where we look at neutrinos. from the sun and we use the entire earth as an instrument to try to get the neutrinos to interact. But most of them fly right through the entire earth without interacting. And if you had to say like how thick a wall would I have to build to block neutrinos? Well, neutrinos can fly through

a light year of lead and have a 50% chance I'm getting through. So, I mean, it's hard to even fathom, like how big a wall you would have to build to effectively block neutrinos. And the reason is that the weak force is so weak that every time the neutrino nears something, it rolls a dye and the die has to come up just right for it to interact. Most of the time it just ignores it. Oh, wait. So, all right, so we're getting into what is the weak force and you're saying that it is super weak. And you're saying that it's weak, not because it's just the weak force, but it's just less likely to interact with you? That's exactly what weak means, right? That it has a smaller chance to interact. that you shoot these two things against each other

and they will less often have an interaction. But when they do interact, the force that you actually feel is also weak or not? Oh, I see what you mean. No, the magnitude of the force is not affected. It's how often it happens. Oh. It's how likely it is to happen.

When a neutrino interacts with the nucleus, for example, it bounces off and goes in the other direction. It's not like just slightly deflected. It's just that it doesn't happen very often. It passes right through most of the nuclei without doing anything. It just ignores them like they're not there. But in terms of magnitude, like when it does interact, it is as strong as the other forces? Yeah, that's a really good question. I never really thought about it that way. It's just a question of whether it interacts. The strength of the force really determines whether it's interacting. And so, for example, you know, the strong force is really, really strong. There's a lot of energy in that interaction. And so it's going to interact with everything else that feels it. Electromagnetism is a powerful force. And that means that it's going to interact almost all the time. And so you get to interact.

lots of particles contributing, but if you're like going to measure it per particle, I think it's just another way of saying the same thing. I think, you know, the strength of the force between them is another way of saying how likely are they to interact or not. The other fascinating thing about the weak force, another reason to think about why it's weak is that it doesn't interact over a very long range. Like electromagnetism, two electrons that are like a thousand miles away from each other, they can feel each other. They feel each other's electric fields, right? That electromagnetism extends infinitely far. The weak force, another way to think about why it's weak,

is that it only interacts with things very, very near it. Wow. Right? Like, you have to be really close to that neutrino to interact with it. Is that true? Like two electrons, even if there are millions of light years apart, they'll still feel each other? Absolutely.

You feel the electric field from electrons in Alpha Centauri or the Andromeda Galaxy or halfway across the universe. Absolutely. Is that why I feel like a, I'm being pulled apart. No, that's like maybe the only scientific connection between astronomy and astrology. Like, are you affected by the movements of the planets? Well, you know, electric fields, maybe, but it's really negligible.

And I also remember that it's time delayed. You know, if there are electrons in Alpha Centauri and somebody wiggles them, you don't see those wiggles until the information comes here, which travels at the speed of light, so it takes a long time. But you're saying the weak nuclear force doesn't have that long range. Like at some point, two particles that feel it don't affect each other with the weak force. That's right. The range of the force is really tiny. It's like the diameter of a proton, right?

So these particles have to be really close together. It's just another way of thinking about whether these two things will interact. I think about it's sort of like, you know, imagine you're throwing two baseballs at each other, right? They're less likely to interact than if you're throwing two basketballs at each other. or two with some really enormous ball, some like enormous yoga, bouncy yoga ball at each other, right? And so this is what we call cross-section in physics because the cross-section of those balls

tells you how likely they are to hit each other. Balls with a really small cross-section, like if you're throwing pebbles at each other, it's much harder for them to hit. And so the range of this force tells you basically the cross-section of their interaction. And so the weak force is a really small range, which makes them less likely to interact.

When they interact, you know, they still bounce off each other like anything else. It's just less likely to happen. So what happens when you get further away? Does it the force just drops off or, you know, like I've heard that at some point, the weak force doesn't travel far because the particles decay or they don't last far out enough. Yeah, that's a really fascinating way to think about it. Yeah, the weak force, it just is negligible beyond a certain distance. Like, you know, it's basically zero.

And another way to answer the question, why is the weak force weak? I mean, one way to say is, well, it just has a number associated with it, and that number is smaller than the number associated with electromagnetism or, you know, the strong force. Then, of course, you can ask why. But one way to explain that is to think about it in terms of the particles that transmit these forces, right? We think about, like, the photon, the photon is the thing that transmits electromagnetism. What do we mean by that? Well, we have this sort of picture that, like, two electrons come. may near each other, one of them can shoot off a photon to hit the other electron and push it away.

And that's like how electrons repel via a photon. And we use that same sort of picture for all the forces, actually. But the particles that are associated with the weak force, they are not massless like the photon is. The reason electromagnetism extends so far is because the photon is massless. It zooms away the speed of light and it doesn't decay, right? Photons can go forever. But the weak force has these really head. heavy particles. They're really, really heavy. And so they don't go very far before they

basically decay. It's like if I was trying to hit you with a bowling ball, my range would be limited. Yeah. Or if you like, you know, had taped a bunch of stuff together very loosely and then tried to throw it to me and it exploded in midair before it got to me. Like throwing a sandball or a snowball. At some point it might break up. A sandball. Exactly. It's like throwing a sandball. You know, you're not really getting hit by the full force of the sandball unless you're really really. close. And that's fascinating. It's like these particles, these particles that mediate the weak force bosons, why are they so heavy and the and the photon is massless? That's like one of the

deep questions in physics over the last few decades. And that's why the photon can go to infinity because it's massless and it just keeps going, right? Exactly. That's why electromagneticism is powerful and that's why its range is infinite. And the weak force is very weak because the things that carry it are very fat and slow you know it's like uh if you know if you wanted to send letters uPS drivers are super duper faster driving Lamborghinis right and uh instead you sent it via i don't know um u.s mail and and they're driving you know a big heavy slow bus or something um your letters just not going to get there as fast or might not even get there so the thing that carries the the messages the information of the weak force is big and heavy makes you weak

it's like and that's what makes the force, blame the messenger and the fascinating thing is that that's really only relevant sort of late in the universe that's relevant when there isn't a whole lot of energy

because the mass of these particles makes a difference when everything doesn't have a lot of energy but if everything was really hot and dense and zooming around then it wouldn't really matter what the mass of these particles was right if they have a little bit of mass or not

they had a lot of energy you wouldn't make any difference. And that's why we think back in the beginning of the universe, electromagnetism and the weak force had the same strength. Because everything was just closer together and interacting the same way. Yeah, and those particles, the ones that carry the weak force, just had enough energy to get further. The fact that they had mass didn't really matter

because they had so much energy, it was negligible. All right, so that's the weak force. Now we know it's a force and we know why it's weak. And so let's get into what's interesting about the weak force. Why is it weak? What's weird about it? Why do we have it? And how did it help us discover the Higgs Bulls out?

But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass.

The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat of. 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. Hola, it's Honey German. 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.

You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success.

You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vibras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching. I won't say whitewash

because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. Yeah. But the whole pretending and cold, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network

on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right. Hey, Daniel, do you think the weak force knows that it's called the weak force, you know? I think its agents have been working for quite a while to get a name change. Yeah, I think it needs a PR overhaul for sure. Would you like to be called Dr. Week or Daniel Week?

I don't think anyone. Master of the Weekforce. Expert in weakness. He still worked out for John Wick. That franchise. You should just change it to Wick Force. The Wick Force. The Wick Force.

Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, what would you have called the weak force? Well, I don't know anything about it, much about it. You should listen to this podcast to explain it to you. It's really good. Well, all I know is that it's weak and that it's a force. But, you know, what do we know about it that might give it some identity? Like, what's special about it?

What is special about it? It's pretty weird. It can do some things that other forces can't do. It sort of like messes with your mind. A lot of the things that we thought we knew about the universe that we just assumed were fundamentally true about the universe. The weak force just sort of breaks those rules and shrugs and moves all. And so it's a great window into like, what is the sort of the limitation? What can forces do in the universe?

It turns out they can do a lot of things that we thought were impossible. And that's what the weak force can do. Yeah, that's what the weak force can do. For example, the weak force can change quark flavors. We had a whole podcast episode about cork flavors. And for those of you thinking, what? What's a quark? And how does it have flavors?

We're not talking about European yogurt snacks. Although there are flavored snacks called cork. We're talking about fundamental particles. Yeah, and so the weak force can change the flavor of a quark. Yeah, exactly. Electromagnetism can't do that, right? You have a charm cork, it can't give off a photon and then become an upcork. That doesn't happen, right?

But if the charm interacts using the weak force, it can give off one of the particles that it transmits and it can become, for example, a down quark or a strange cork can become an up quark, right? Or a top cork can become a bottom cork or a down quark. And so it can actually change these flavors. And other forces are not allowed to do that. Well, and that's kind of a big deal because if I change all the flavors in the quartz inside of your atoms, you'd be in trouble, right? Well, I think I'd be even tasty. You'd be charming and strange, but or more charming and more strange.

Yeah. Well, you know, you think of it sort of like a ladder. There's the lowest energy ones, the lowest mass ones. Those are the up quark and the down quark. and if you have the heavier quarks then they tend to decay down the ladder. Things in the universe tend to be the lowest energy state, the lowest mass

particles. So if you have the heavier particles like the top, then it uses the weak force to sort of step down that ladder down to the up and the down. And I and you, and every banana you've ever eaten, are made up of just upcorks and down quarks and, of course, electrons. But it also changes

it can change those up quarks and down quarks back into each other. And that's actually what we call radioactive beta decay. That's you change, for example, a neutron into a proton is by changing, is by going back and forth between up quarks and down quarks, because that's the difference between neutrons and protons. It's just one up versus one down. Wow. So it's weird because it can really mess with the identity of matter, right?

Like if all my corks change identities, I would probably blow up, right? I wouldn't be able to stay together. Right? Like if all my protons turn into neutrons, you know, goodbye Jorge. Yeah, well, protons don't turn into neutrons, right? are stable, which is a whole other fascinating thing. Like, can protons live for the whole life of the universe, or do they eventually

decay? Currently, we think that protons live for like zillions of years. But neutrons don't. Neutrons will eventually turn into protons, and that's fascinating. And that's what the weak nuclear force does. And only the weak force can do that. Okay, that's weird. So maybe I would call it

the weird force. I don't know. Ooh. Or the flavor force. The waxy force, maybe. The flavor flavor. Weird seems a little The tasty force. And the particles that it uses are also weird. Like we said the electromagnetism has the photon, right?

And that's how it transmits information. And the weak force is more complicated. It has three particles that transmit its forces. It has this particle we call the Z boson. And then it has the W plus and the W minus. And we call them plus and minus because those particles themselves have electric charge. So it's like the particles of one force, feel the forces of another force.

So you can affect the weak force using a magnet is kind of what you're saying. Yeah, exactly. Or the particles that transmit the weak force can shoot off photons, right? They interact with each other using electromagnetism. Oh, weird. And that was a big clue. We'll talk about that later, that there's a deep, deep connection between the weak force and electromagnetism.

It'd be cool like if, for example, you can affect gravity using electromagnetism, right? like that would be crazy then you could yeah right exactly you could like make a magnet which turned off gravity or something that would be cool and you know we hope one day in the far future to have a unified understanding of all the forces take gravity turn into a quantum mechanical theory which we haven't done yet and have no clue how to do and then somehow unify it with the other forces and show that show that they're all just part of the same larger force in that case then maybe you could do what you just said is use one part of the force to balance another part of the force and affected. So, yeah, I think you just invented an anti-gravity machine right here.

All right. I should get one, what, one half of a Nobel Prize then? Or? Let's go with one 500 million, so we're equal. That's probably the chances that I will get one. I think that's probably accurate, yeah. All right, so, well, let's get into now. We know what it is. We know what it's kind of weird. Wait, but wait, there's more. There's more. There's even a, a, weird or thing about the week? I thought it was weak, but there's more. All right. It's weak, but it's got a long backstory, right? It's one of these superhero characters with like a really

deep, interesting connection. It was affected in its childhood and it's carrying all that baggage. Black Widow, not a lot of superpowers, but you're like, what is going on with her? Oh, you mean Blackwood or the superhero, not the actual spider? Yeah, exactly. She looks good in leather and she can really kick. Yeah, but she has all this mysterious Russian spot. backstory. Yeah, exactly. She's intimidating. Now the one of the weirdest things, but the weak force is that it breaks what we thought was a fundamental symmetry in the universe. And that is that we think that it shouldn't make a difference sort of how you draw your X, Y, and Z axes. Like if you have to draw, you draw an X axis and a Y axis, you put them in 90 degrees

with each other, right? Then you're going to draw Z axis, you want to put it in 90 degrees. But then there's a question, do you draw it like sort of up above the X, Y axis, or or down below, right? And the difference is what we call handedness. Is it a left-handed system or a right-handed system? It's really just arbitrary. And so because most of us are right-handed, we tend to draw those things the way you would have the first three fingers

on your right-hand hand point. So we call them right-handed coordinate systems. It's kind of related to mirrors, right? Like you think that physics should work the same on one side of the mirror or in the reflection of the mirror? Exactly. Because if you take a right-handed coordinate system and you look in the mirror, then it looks left-handed.

Right. And so for a long time, people thought, well, that's just a thing we made up. It's just like human. It's not fundamental or physical, right? And so they said, well, physics shouldn't matter. It should, physics shouldn't depend on whether things are right-handed or left-handed. So they made this assumption. They said, well, we assume that any experiment you do, if you watch the experiment in the mirror, you should also be able to do that mirror experiment, right? The laws of physics should work the same here as they do in the mirror. Right? So like, you do some experiment. you watch in the mirror you should be able to do that same experiment or our laws of physics should still govern what's happening in the mirror right but you're saying the weak force totally doesn't care yeah and this is one of the great stories of physics is that nobody checked for a long long time like they checked electromagnetism yep it's true they check the strong force yep it's true and they thought well this is just so fundamental and obvious like we don't need to check it you know it's like you know do you check that the sun doesn't like come out in the middle of the night? No, you just, they don't get up in the middle of the night and check if the sun is sneaking, sneaking around,

right? You just, you checked it at sunset, you check it at sunrise and you assume what else is happening, right? So people thought, well, the weak force is really hard to test. So we'll just assume that it also respects this symmetry called parity. And then in the 50s, some theorist realized nobody's actually ever checked this. So maybe somebody should. And this is great story about a physicist at Columbia. She was planning to go on vacation with her husband for Christmas. And she said, you know what? I can't go on vacation. I can't relax without knowing the answer to this deep question. Sounds like a physicist. Exactly. So her husband went on vacation by himself and she stayed back and she did these experiments where she

demonstrated, she asked the question, would the weak force look the same in the mirror? And she set up this really complicated but very clever experiment. And it's difficult to describe it with the audio. So I encourage everybody to check out, Jorge, your video on this experience. which you can find by Googling. Yeah. But the short version is... Well, we made that video together, Daniel. I don't know if you remember.

We made it with Derek Muller of Veritasian. See if you look up... Yeah, it's a great video. It's a great video. It's called do particles respect time symmetry? Right. Or do particles go backwards in time? In that video, you can see that the weak force doesn't work the same in the mirror.

In fact, in the mirror it works exactly the opposite. Yeah. So not only does it not like respect this basic symmetry, we assume, was a true thing about the universe, it violates it almost 100%. So it's weak, but it's like the rebel force. Yeah, which means that like our universe is, you know, has a handedness. It's not like it could have been this or could have been that. It is one way, right?

And anytime you see a kind of thing like that in physics where it's like an arbitrary choice between two things, you expect it to be balanced or even or symmetric, and then it's not, that's a clue that tells you something happened when the universe would be being cooked up that it went this way and not that way. Yeah. What is that? Yeah, it makes you realize that the universe maybe doesn't have laws or the laws you thought ruled the universe are not always true. Exactly.

It makes you wonder, is there a deeper understanding in which it had to be this way, right? Is it just arbitrary and random and we live in a multiverse and it's one of a bajillion and there's no reason for it. I don't like that idea. I think it's a clue that there's something deeper going on. There's another way to think about the way the universe works that requires it to be this thing that's weird to us. and those are the moments of insight. That's when your intuition is confronted by reality and you realize, ooh, here's a clue that reality is quite different

from my intuition. Those are learning moments, right? Yeah. No, definitely I have a lot more respect now for the week fours. I mean, it's so weird and breaks all these laws. I feel like you just upgraded it from Ringo to George Harrison. You know what I mean? Okay.

There you go. So now we should be called the well-respected interview force. Yeah, there you go. Well-respected, well-liked. interesting. You should speak with a stuffy British accent. Well, let's get into now whether we even need the week fours or why is it important. But first, let's take a quick break.

December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay.

Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is, Back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's Back to School Week on the 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. 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. 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.

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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. All right, let's get into why we need the week fours. Do we even need it? Well, there's two questions, I think, practically.

So practically, first of all, what would happen if we didn't have the weak force? We still be here. And the second, why is it important to physics? Yeah, so that's a fun hypothetical question. Like if you deleted a law of physics, what would happen, right? Well, obviously, everything would be different. Would it? You know, yeah, well, you wouldn't have radioactive decay, right?

For example, you wouldn't have beta decay. And the weak force is important to making things happen in the center of suns. And the structure of the atom is partially controlled by the weak force. And so everything would be different. So if we took it out, if we eliminated Ringo Star from the Beatles, what would happen to my atoms? Like, would I just dissolve? Would I explode?

Would I feel just a little heavier? Or what would happen? Well, it depends. Are you talking about starting from the beginning of the universe, never having the weak force, or having the current universe, and then just turning it off? Let's do the second one first. So flip a switch, the weak force just quits, goes away.

What happens? The first caveat is it's impossible. it doesn't make any sense for reasons we'll talk about it in a minute because it turns out the weak force is just entangled with everything else and you can't get rid of it right the way you can't just fire your drummer and the universe wouldn't make any sense if you did that but say you just turn that off somehow somehow you're able to get to the control panel of the universe and turn off the weak force what would happen i don't think you would feel it immediately um i think we would never interact with neutrinos again right neutrinos would just become invisible become decoupled no big loss

with them. But yeah, no big loss. We don't really feel neutrinos. It'd be harder to run nuclear reactors, right? And fission wouldn't work the same way. So we'd have to re-engineer all of that. But again, you know, not everybody's a big fan of nuclear power. The structure of the atom would be a little bit different, right? I mean, it certainly plays a role in how the nucleus is held together and how it gets broken up. So that's a good deep question. I'm not sure the answer of how it changed the structure of the atom. But mostly, I think you could just totally ignore neutrinos that were already mostly ignoring you. All right. So then what's the other answer that if we started off the universe without the weak force, would we end up in the same spot? Yeah, that's a great question. I think I have to deflect that question because I don't think the universe makes any sense without the weak force. And the reason is that it turns out the weak force is not its own thing. It's not like a completely separate thing. But right now, we don't understand any connection between gravity and electromagnetism. They seem like totally different phenomena with no relationship. turns out the weak force is not its own thing. It's actually part of electromagnetism, or said more correctly, the weak force and electromagnetism

are part of one larger force. I've heard that before, that the weak force and the electromagnetic force are actually just one. What does that mean? Like, they're actually the same particles, but they behave differently, or they're all, like, different flavors of the same particles? What does that mean? It means that they're all different parts of the same thing.

They're all, like, different sides of the same coin. And I think a more intuitive analogy to help you get there is to think about electricity and magnetism. Like 150 years ago, people thought, electricity, oh, that's that thing that zaps you. Magnetism, that's the thing that lets magnets fly or magnets work, right? And they thought they were totally separate. And it wasn't until Maxwell wrote down Maxwell's equations and he realized, hold on a second, the laws that govern electricity and the laws that govern magnetism are basically the same thing when you write them down mathematically. And, you know, magnets can create currents and currents can create magnets.

So it turns out that there's just one force, electromagnetism, and we had artificially separated into two. We were just categorizing the different parts of it separately and had to recognize that it makes much more sense when they're connected. So we said, okay, let's just call this one force electromagnetism, right? So it's like the same force. It just sometimes acts to create currents inside of wires, and sometimes it acts. to repel magnets apart, but it's the same thing. You're just one guy. Sometimes you're happy.

Sometimes you're grumpy, right? Like, are you a different person when you're grumpy? I mean, some people might say so, but I know deep down, you're really the same person. And so it makes much more sense to say, oh, this is different sides of somebody's personality. This is two different aspects of the same thing. Sometimes, like, different feelings of it or different behaviors of it. Yeah, exactly. And what we've discovered is that the photon and the W and the Z,

bosons are all just parts of one force that we called the electro-weak force. And you notice what happened there is that we merged electricity and magnetism into electromagnetism. And then we added the weak force and like magnetism just kind of got squeezed out. It should have been called the like electromagnetic weak force or something. Electro-week magnetic force. Or magneto-week force, right? Screw electricity.

Wachromagnetic is how I would have maybe called it. So you're saying then that electrons and W, the W, and the Z bosons, they're all, those are different, but they're all carriers of the same force. Yeah, there's one larger, more complex force that we call it ElectraWeak, and it has four carriers. The photon, the 2Ws, and the Z, and it has four carriers to it. Does the weak force have, like, charge, you know how we talked about? Electromanicism has charge, and the strong force has... Color, yeah.

And the weak force has its own thing. It's called weak hypercharge, which is like... contradictory branding. Another great name. I know. Super awesome, not that awesome charge. It's kind of confusing. It has weak hypercharge.

And then together, the combined electro-week force has something called weak isospin, which has nothing to do with spin. So it's a big mess, and it comes from a historical naming accident, really. The main lesson is just that they can be described by sort of the same, what is it, terms in the equations of the universe kind of yeah exactly they have the mathematics is very similar and in fact when people were looking at that they notice like these things are so similar but why is the photon have no mass and these other particles have a lot of mass right like that's why electricity and magnetism seems so different from the rest of the force because this one particle

the photon has no mass but the other ones have a lot of mass so that was a big puzzle like 50 years ago And that's the puzzle that inspired Higgs himself to think up the Higgs boson. He said, well, maybe there's this other particle out there, this other field, and it's interacting with these bosons, and it's giving them mass. And he came up with a really clever mathematical way to make that happen to give mass to just these particles and not to the photon. So I think the conclusion of all of this then is that the weak force, it's there. It's kind of like the conjoined twin of electromagnetism, right?

It's not its own thing. That's right, yeah, exactly. And it's not very consequential in the universe, meaning that you can take it away, but we wouldn't instantly feel it. But it's sort of necessary, right? It's part of the universe. And in fact, it kind of gave us a lot of clues about the universe,

including the Higgs boson. That's right. And you can sort of blame it on the Higgs, right? The Higgs is the reason that the W and the Z have so much mass, and that's why it's so weak. So if it wasn't for the Higgs holding it down, the weak force would have had a much different career arc. Maybe we should call it the, I hate the Higgs force.

Exactly. Probably more reflected's a mental state than the weak force. Yeah, but there's like, you know, many Nobel prizes have been won along the road to understanding this. Understanding that electricity and magnetism are together with the weak force, understanding the Higgs mechanism, all this stuff. These are a lot of really important ideas. All a really complex mathematical machinery was developed just to understand that. And it's really beautiful when you learn that because it shows you how the structure of these theories really are deeply mathematical, how much mathematics really reveals the way the universe works. All right. And then on a note of beauty. That's pretty cool.

Yeah. So for those of you interested in learning more about it, I encourage you to get a little bit into the group theory because it connects for you the symmetry of these things with the idea of particles carrying these forces and why it has to be that way. It's really deep and fascinating. And we should dive into it on another. podcast episode. All right. Thanks for joining us. I hope you enjoyed that. We'll see you next time. Thanks for tuning in. I hope it wasn't a week episode. I hope it had a forceful impact on you. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge. That's one word. Or email us at feedback.

at Daniel and Jorge.com. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, we're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the I heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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