Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What is toponium?

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

Daniel and Kelly explain how top quarks talk to each other and potentially form new states of matter.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We smash particles together at the Large Hadron Collider, not just because it's cool, or because we want to know what the universe is made out of. It's all those reasons, but also we want to understand how those basic bits of matter come together to make up our world. Why do they interact this way, not that way? Can they fit together in some new way we've never seen? The story of particle physics discoveries is a story of cycles, swinging between confusion at the many kinds of particles to insight about how they come together.

Today, we'll be tackling a topic that has received a lot of attention recently in the news, toponium. What is it and what does it tell us about the nature of matter and energy? It turns out to be the latest chapter in a rich history of discovery, betrayal, and urination. Yes, that's right, I said urination. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Hi, I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites and space, and I do not know what toponium is. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I do know what toponium is, and I'm also looking forward to declaring the discovery of Whitesonium.

Oh, that would be great. So I await that day. I'm sure it will come. But my question for you today is what is your favorite name for a physics thing? What do you think is like the best name physicists have come up with for something so far? I think one of my favorite names is the rate of change of acceleration, which is called jerk, which is, you know, also a fun word, but it's kind of, you know, you get jerked around. It kind of makes sense.

Yeah, I like that. Yeah. All right. Good. Good job, physicist. You got one. But before you applaud us too much for giving jerk a cool name. A biologist named it, didn't they?

No, no. They went a little crazy after jerk, and rate of change of jerk is called snap. And the rate of change of snap is called crackle. And the rate of change of crackle, you want to guess? Pop. It's pop. That's right. Oh, no.

I bet that. was named by children of the 80s. Isn't that when Rice Krispies hit their zenith of popularity? That's exactly right. Physicists trying desperately for cultural relevance. Sorry, guys. But, you know, we do our best to be relevant because in the end, we are trying to understand the way the world works, what it's all made out of what you are made out of, what your breakfast cereal is made out of. And more than just what it's made out of, but what it can do. Because your Life isn't dominated by fundamental particles, but by those particles put together an interesting, weird, delicious, and hilarious ways. Oh, I like the delicious ways. I think that's my favorite.

So you sent me an outline and said, we're talking about taponium. And I was like, well, this is yet another one of those instances where Kelly gets to learn on air and ask stupid questions because I have no idea what this is. Intelligent questions, Kelly. That's what you're here for. That's right. I'm continuing to earn my pod in physics. Absolutely. Yes. We are also offering a pod in physics to our listeners, and so let's go ahead and hear what they think deponium is. The particle were the most protons, neutrons, electrons, crammed into it to make it the biggest, biggest top of the table element.

Theoretical matter that has a top quark in it or something like that. Probably some type of metal like strontium. That sounds like an element. I don't know, but it sounds like a chemical element. I'm going to assume that Toponium. is related to physics and not biology. So there's a good chance that it's a mathematical equation. It's the opposite of bottominium.

Obviously, a mineral developed for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and then stolen by James Cameron for an upcoming film. Matter, perhaps purely theoretical, composed of top quarks only. Toponium is the top quark matter fraction of unobtainium after quantum centrifugal separation of unobtainium ore. The theoretical element with no protons and no electrons gets its own special row at the top of the periodic table. Thus, toponium.

Toponium or not toponium? That is the question. Rare element, I would say, perhaps a hypothesized element that hasn't been discovered yet. I've never heard of toponium. But it ends in ion. So it makes me think of deuterium or tritium, some sort of combination of things.

But the only top I know is a quark. So it's not some weird combination of only top quarks, is it? I don't know. But if it doesn't sit on top of midium and botamium, I'm going to be very disappointed. These are wonderful answers. I mean, as always. But yeah, this one in particular had a lot of funny answers.

And I'm guessing that's because a lot of people are in my situation, which is to say, no idea, Daniel. Absolutely no clue. And they're trying to reverse engine? from the name, which is smart, but assumes that physicists give names to things in logical ways that can be reverse engineered, which isn't always true. Big mistake. Big mistake. That's right. It's either confusing or wrong or misleading, something like that. All right, well, let's not keep people in suspense anymore.

Toponium is a fascinating new thing recently explored by the Large Hadron Collider, and it has to do with how corks can come together, which is a whole fascinating area. physics that explains how I'm built and your build and how the whole world around us comes together. Plus, it's filled with crazy stories of physicists being outrageous. Amazing. And so when you say recently, do you mean like this decade or yeah, what do you mean by recently? The Topponium paper came out last year. Oh, wow. So yeah, this is a fresh, hot off the press. And a bunch of people emailed me and said, hey, can you explain this? I don't understand it. Because probably the paper was too hard to digest. And even the science communication articles,

about toponium, I felt like they talk about it, but they don't really convey the crucial ideas that I want people to understand about why this is an exciting area of research. And we are here for the one-hour version of all of those things. So let's start from the beginning. What is a quirk? And you gave me the ability to explain this to my daughter the other day. We were talking about quarks, and I felt pretty cool that I could go ahead and kind of explain it. But let's hear it from you. So quarks are something we discovered about 50 years ago. They're what, make up the protons and the neutrons. So you know, you and I are made out of molecules. Those molecules are made out of atoms. Every atom has a nucleus in it with protons and neutrons

surrounded by electrons. But those protons and neutrons are not fundamental. They are made up of other smaller particles called quarks. And in particular, there's two corks, the up quark and the down quark, that make up the proton and the neutron. But we didn't know this for sure until about the late 60s and 70s. And how we figured out the protons and neutrons are made of corks is a really fun story and a tricky one because we can't see quarks by themselves. We have to infer their existence. There's a lot of really cool mathematical puzzles that had to be solved to even suggest that quarks might be there. So to set the stage, we have to go back to like the late 1940s. What was the state of particle physics in the late 1940s? Well, we knew about

electrons. We knew about protons and neutrons. We also knew that they were photons out there, right? Like we had seen photons, Einstein and Planck and those guys revolutionized quantum mechanics with a photoelectric effect and the idea of photons light as a packet. And in cosmic rays, we'd seen a few other weird particles like muons and pyons. But things seemed kind of tidy. Like we had a few particles. They all came together to mostly explain everything we knew. People felt like, hey, we're maybe on the verge of like nailing this, you know, narrowing

things down. We've gone from like infinite complexity of chemistry down to like a hundred basic building blocks in the periodic table. Now we were down to like three objects. protons, neutrons, and electrons that made everything, lava and kittens and ice cream and podcasters and everything, people felt like, oh yeah, we're on track. And then came the 1950s where everything got weird. When you start to feel confident, the universe kicks you in the face. And this came about because we had a revolution in particle physics technologies.

Beforehand, we mostly relied on the universe to accelerate our particles. So many of the discoveries were making of weird particles were cosmic rays, super high energy particles that hit the upper atmosphere and then showered so people would like send balloons up into the upper atmosphere or leave like big blocks of photographic material on the tops of mountains and then slice it super thin and expose it. Fun fact, the first chicken sandwich to go to space was sent up on a balloon by KFC. Anyway, done. Move on. Exactly. You can accomplish a lot of things with balloons. Yeah. These balloons are. amazing also because they start out like pretty big on the ground. And then when they get to the

upper atmosphere because the pressure is so low, they become enormous, like mind-boggling, like football stadium-sized balloons when they're in the upper atmosphere. It's incredible. Anyway, we've been doing particle physics that way. It's just like, hey, let's let the universe accelerate stuff and watch it as it smashes into the atmosphere. And that was useful. And that's how we saw muons and caons and other kinds of particles. But then folks figured out better ways to accelerate particles here on Earth. So cyclotrons and synchnotrons, all these cool technologies to bend particles in a loop, give them a kick and get them going to pretty high energies. Let us smash particles together and open up a whole golden era of discovery for particle physics.

And these things are amazing. I got to go in the synchrotron facility in the UK on Harwell's campus. And it was so cool. They speed up x-rays with magnets and they were showing me how all this stuff works, and it was, I'll never forget it. Anyway, cool facilities. They can't speed up x-rays with magnets. That doesn't work because x-rays are neutral, and so they don't feel magnets. But they probably generate x-rays from high-energy particles accelerated and bent by magnets. That is right. Thank you. I appreciate the correction. Yeah, it's very cool technology. E.O. Lawrence won Nobel Prizes for this kind of stuff. It's why we have Lawrence National Lab, two Lawrence National Labs, actually. He's a really smart dude. Anyway, by smashing

particles into other particles, we started discovering a bunch of really strange particles. Particles we literally called strange, like caons and other kinds of pyons and all sorts of stuff. It was like every time you turned on the accelerator, you discovered a new particle, which is crazy. That just doesn't happen these days. That is crazy. You said particles we literally called strange. There is a particle called the strange particle? There is a particle that called the strange part. There's a strange quark. But initially, there were particles that we classified as strange. We described. We described. them as strange.

These are K-on particles. And these particles were strange because they sort of lasted a long time and then decayed, which people hadn't seen before. It turns out that's because they were decaying via the weak force, which is pretty weak. And so it takes a while for it to work. But we didn't understand that at the time. But it was an exciting moment because, like, every time you turned on the accelerator, you made a new particle, you could name it.

It must have been a really fun time to be a particle physicist. Yes. And they call this time in particle physics the particle zoo. I really love zoos, and I feel like I might be disappointed if I saw a particle zoo instead of a zoo zoo, but that sounds fun. I can imagine physicists being like children enjoying the particle zoo. I'm glad you take it that way because I think it's actually intended as shade against biology. Yes. Because this is the era in particle physics where we were seeing a bunch of stuff, we didn't understand, and we were just naming it.

And so I think they were like, we're basically doing botany. We don't understand anything. but just give stuff names. You guys suck. Yeah, I know. But it's an exciting time to be an experimentalist because you're discovering stuff that isn't predicted. It's not like, here's where the Higgs boson will look like.

Here's how you find it. Go do it. Check the box. Or here's the top cork. It's like, well, we're not understanding anything you're doing. Stop discovering new particles, please, because we're confused. But, you know, for an explorer, that's an exciting time. That's like, well, we're just, you know, collecting new stuff.

Nobody understands. And it was a big puzzle. So people have found all these particles, and they were wondering, like, are they all fundamental? Are we discovering a bunch of new stuff that isn't made out of other stuff? Is there a pattern somehow? So it was a big theoretical puzzle, like, what explains all of these new particles? And people started thinking about it and trying to organize it and like, hey, are there patterns here? Can we look at the masses?

How many particles are there? And a few clever people came up with some ideas to explain all of these particles. And it was called the Eightfold Way. Oh, all right. So I'm just about done stuffing the anger that I'm feeling down about that earlier comment. But you're making me wonder, the word particles, is it particles? Because it's part of other things? Was that why you guys named it particles? Hmm. That's interesting. The etymology of the word particle itself. I think it comes from the concept of particle just being a tiny bit of stuff, like the smallest particle, you know, particularly small stuff. Okay, got it. All right. So, sorry, moving on.

The eightfold way. The eightfold way, yeah. This sounds like something you would learn in a martial arts class, the eightfold way. So why was it called the eightfold way? Yeah, it's like the Tao of physics or something. Yes. Because people were looking for patterns. And they were starting with the assumption that all these particles might be their

rearrangement of smaller bits, a smaller number of basic pieces. So imagine you have like three different kinds of Legos. And then you ask, like, well, what can I build out of these Legos? Okay, they click together this way or that way or this other way. But if there's a small number of them, there's a limited way they can come together. And so people imagine, well, what if we have like four different kinds of Legos? What can we explain? And they noticed that if you arrange the newly discovered particles in a certain way,

that can be explained by having four different elementary pieces that all click together. For example, these pieces all have different electric charge. And so it predicts like a distribution of the electric charges of all the particles you can make with these basic pieces. And so does that mean they went looking then for the four basic parts that would make up the rest of the stuff? Not initially. First thing they did is they said, well, what's missing? Like, are there ways that you can put these four basic pieces together to make a particle we haven't seen yet? And Gilman famously stood up at a conference and said, you know, I predict the existence of this new particle.

He called it the omega minus. which would be a pure combination of the particle we later call strange quarks, so three strange quarks put together. And he even predicted what the mass of it would be. And then they went out and looked for it, and they found it. And that was very compelling. That's like, okay, make a prediction. You know, this isn't just mathematical.

But at the time, a lot of physicists were like, you know, we haven't seen these particles. We're just seeing the combinations of them. And while it's compelling to say, look, I see their patterns in the particles that are consistent with them being made out of a small number of more basic elements, We haven't seen them directly. And so people just thought of them as like, you know, a mathematical, calculational tool. The way people are down on string theory these days, right?

They're like, yeah, well, string theory can solve quantum gravity, but we've never seen a string. So how do we really know it's just mathematics? So people sort of dismissed it as like just a mathematical tool. They called them partons. They weren't like real particles. And in that case, were they called partons because they were part of something? Yes. But that's, okay, but that's not true for particles.

Yeah, that's right. tons are like part of something, but it's a special word because they're like, it's not real, you know, it's just like math. It's not something that you could actually see or interact with. It's not necessarily part of the physical universe. That's how people felt about it in the late 1960s. They were like, this is pretty compelling, but we don't know. Okay.

We also had competing names for them. Murray Gelman, who won the Nobel Prize for this stuff, called them Quarks, but there was another guy named Zweig, who came up with the same idea at about the same time, actually a little earlier, but he wasn't as influential, and he called them Aces. Oh, which name do I like better? I think Aces is cool, actually. Quarks is fun. Aces is cool. Quarks comes from a James Joyce novel, actually. A three quarks for Mr. Mark is a nonsensical phrase in that novel, and that's what inspired Marie Gilman. Oh, cute. Okay, that's pretty cool. Was Gilman generally a very, like, literate dude or into literature? Yeah, he was. He was sort of like a Renaissance.

men, widely read. All right. So now we've got quarks instead of aces. And so, you know, you mentioned string theory. And so one, I remember when we were talking to the string theorists a couple months ago, they were saying that they're not sure that we'll ever be able to test some of these ideas. Yeah.

But luckily, I believe we eventually got to the point where we could test for some of these ideas for these particles. So what was the jump that allowed us to do that? Yeah. So far, we've only seen the combinations of these still hypothetical qubits. works macroscopically in our detectors. And so in order to probe them, people followed in the footsteps of Rutherford. Rutherford around the turn of the century tried to understand the structure of the atom before we knew, like, hey, there's a nucleus inside of it. He tried to understand,

like, where is all this stuff in the atom? And what he did was he shot stuff at it, right? So he shot particles at a gold foil, and he saw that sometimes it bounces back and sometimes it goes through. And that led him to conclude that matter is not evenly distributed in the gold foil is concentrated in these tiny little spots, these nuclei, right? So we did something similar to understand the structure of the proton, right? What's inside the proton? And when we get back from the break, we'll find out what we did. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Brand-Bradford, and in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Ophia and Billy Shaka to explore how our

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

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I guess they would be Kenspiracy theorists. That's right. Are there Jeopardy Truthers? Are there people who say... say that it was rigged? Yeah, ever since I was first on, people are like. They gave you the answers, right? And then there's the other ones which are like. They gave you the answers, and you still

blew it. Don't miss Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings on our special game show week of the Puzzler podcast. The Puzzler is the best place to get your daily word puzzle fix. Listen on

the IHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we just talked about the experiments that Rutherford did to show that atoms have sort of structure, like there's a nucleus. So now let's talk about how we figured out the structure of the proton. Yeah, exactly. We basically copied Rutherford's strategy, and we've been doing that for decades, which is shoot stuff out. at it and see what happens.

And by the angles at which stuff comes out, you can tell the structure of something. So that works for gold. You can shoot particles of gold and see the nucleus. How do you probe the proton? Well, one thing you can do is smash protons together. That's really messy because protons are big bags of goo. So to make it a little bit cleaner, what people did is they shot electrons at protons. Because electrons don't feel the strong nuclear force.

They only feel electromagnetism and the weak force. And we think they're fundamental. so they don't break up into other stuff, they're cleaner. So it's really like poking your finger at a proton, the best way that we can. And so these were experiments done at Stanford in the late 1960s. They're called deep inelastic scattering, if you want to learn more about them, deep because they're very high energy and they're probing the structure of the proton, inelastic because what happens is not that the electron and the proton bounce off each other, but that the electron

shatters the proton and interacts with the stuff inside of it. And physics, we distinguish between elastic collisions where things just bounce off and inelastic, where we've, like, changed the structure or broken something or things stick together. Those are inelastic. I feel like it should have been explosive and not explosive. That's because you're thinking about diarrhea, right? That's a good way to categorize diarrhea, not... I am a biologist. I think we have eight different ways of characterizing feces or something like that.

The Bristol scale. I've read it. Yes, absolutely. Oh, yeah. You married a poop person. Wow. Well, I'm going to take that in the positive way it was intended. Good, good. I adore Katrina. All right. We had a biologist over for dinner the other night, and she just moved down here from

Stanford, and she had to bring all of her poop samples. So she had to drive them down from Stanford to Southern California, 150 pounds of poop in dry ice. That's a lot of poop. And they had to keep the windows down because the dry ice of sublimates into CO2, which will kill you if you keep the car closed into a literally crappy flaming disaster. Oh, I want to. once took a box of infected fish brains across the Atlantic and had to declare it.

And anyway, that was an adventure. Biologists go on so many adventures. Okay, so inelastic, it breaks it apart. Mm-hmm. And so this is the late 1960s, and we probed the structure of the proton with electrons, and we saw three hard centers. The way Rutherford saw, like, one hard center for every atom, we saw three hard centers. Like, we can tell by the angle at which the electron comes back out, whether it's really

bounced off something hard or mostly flown through, and we can tell by the rate at which that happens that there are three hard centers. So Google deep and elastic scanning if you want to learn more about that. But that was proof to us that protons do have structure inside that there really are physical things inside the proton. It's not fundamental. And at this point where all of the physicists like, all right, awesome, I'm totally convinced. No, unfortunately. People were still reluctant. They were like, yeah, I mean, I guess so. But like, are they real physicists are conservative folks in the sense that it's hard for them to like accept a new idea. You need a lot of data. And so at this point, we actually only had three ideas in mind for

quarks, the upcork and the upcork and the up-cork and the down-cork to make up the proton. And then the strange quark, which make up these new weird particles, like the omegas and the caons. So we had three particles. And theorists were like, three is weird because the up-cork and the down-cork make a very nice pair together. But then having the strange cork by itself, that's strange. And it makes all sorts of bizarre calculations. And The physics doesn't actually work. If there's nothing there to balance the strange quark, you predict all sorts of weird behavior. So they said, well, you know, for things to make more sense, there should be a fourth one.

There should be a partner. This is another great example of, like, physicists following their mathematical intuition. They're like, the universe should make sense. It should be orderly. This whole puzzle would look more sensible. It would make more sense to me sort of mathematically and aesthetically if it were complete. So physicists said, we think that there's a fourth quark out there. and they called it the charm quark.

So this is a purely theoretical prediction to solve some theoretical problems, right? We have three quarks up down strange and they predicted the existence of this charm quark just to solve these theoretical problems. Is there an interesting story behind why they decided to name it charm? Still upset about that particle zoo thing.

The reason they named it charm is that they liked it and it brought some new symmetry to the sub-nuclear world. There was this imbalance And it sort of was there to, like, balance the strange quark. And so, you know, some people call it the charm cork. Some people call it the charmed cork. But, yeah, sort of like a lucky charm to make the universe make sense.

Like it would be charming if the universe made sense? It would be charming, wasn't it? I find the universe pretty charming. Yeah, sure. It's both strange and charming at the same time. All right, we agree. So then there races on to look for this new particle. Does the charm quark exist?

And the theorist predicted that if it does exist, you can't see an individual. You can never see corks by themselves, but it would click together with itself in this way so that a charm cork and an anti-charm cork would come together to make a new particle, a particle we could call Charmonium. Oh, it sounds like Charmander. I feel like now we're in the world of Pokemon. But, all right, charmonium. Yeah, so if you take a cork and you bind it with its antiparticle, you call that onium.

So Charmoneum would be a charm quark and an anti-charm cork. And so this is one of the most dramatic and colorful stories in the history of particle physics. There were folks at MIT trying to discover this thing. At the same time, people at Stanford trying to discover this, looking for Charmoneum. And they had very, very different devices. So Bert Richter at Stanford had a whole accelerator, and he could collide electrons and positrons together. When that happens, it annihilates and can turn into some new particle, which can then decay. This is a very effective way to discover new particles if you know already how much mass

that new particle has. Because then you can tune your beams, your electron and positron beams, to have just the right energy. So you're making a bunch of these new particles, and then you can see them decay. So Bert Richter could discover this thing in like a day if he knew what the mass was. So they scanned the mass from low values to high values, and they didn't see anything. So they were like, hmm, that's weird. The same time across the country, Sam Ting was doing a very, very, very.

different experiment. He was shooting protons on a target hoping that charm corks would come out and would make Charmoneum and then would decay in a way that he could see it. It was a much lower rate experiment, but it was more broadly sensitive. He didn't have to know in advance, what is the mouse this thing? If it was there, it would be made. But the data was sort of peter out very gradually. And so he was desperate to win this race. He knew he had a very effective technique, but it was going to take a long time. And while Bert Richter was very fast, but he needed to know where to look. And so Sam Ting really wanted to win this race and win the Nobel Prize. So he needed as much beam time as possible. And so there's a story about how he made sure he got enough

beam time. And it's not a story that I know to be true, but it's a story that exists in particle physics popular culture. And I think we should find somebody to fact check this. But the version of the story I heard from a particle physicist when I was an undergrad was that the person Sam Ting was sharing beam time with kept having electronics difficulties. Like they would come in, they were supposed to have time in the beam, stuff wouldn't work. Oh, it's down. Oh, Sam, you can use the beam. Hmm, how nice. And apparently they installed a video camera and they discovered that someone was urinating on the competing experiment at night. What? So that the electronics wouldn't work. And then Ting and his experiment got more time. Wait, okay, hold on. All right. So why? Why? All right,

You've explained why. This is crazy. But, okay, so... Nobel Prize, that's why. Okay, right. I guess if you needed any reason, Nobel Prize is the reason. But, like, why pee on it?

Why not just, like, pour a little bit of your water on it or something like, because pee has a smell. You're more likely to, like, get someone to realize something wonky's going on. Like, why not just pour a little of your coffee or your wine on it? This is weird. It is weird. And that's the detail that makes me suspect maybe this is an urban legend, you know, because that's a detail that makes the story juicy.

Yeah. It's like a little bit gross and animalistic and whatever. And I've spoken to other particle physicists about this. And some of them suggest that this story might be made up. And it might reflect like anti-Asian racism in particle physics. Oh. Because, you know, particle physics for a long time was Western Europeans and Americans. And Chinese physicists have contributed great things.

Made a lot of discoveries, but they haven't always been as accepted. And so it could be that this is just a product of that. And so, you know, I tell you this story because it's, out there, not because I know that it's true. But that's not the end of the drama. There's reported bad behavior on both sides of the aisle. Oh, all right. So what did the Richter Lab do that was piss poor?

So Sam Ting starts to see evidence of this particle, but still data is collecting very slowly. You know, it's like you're waiting for the water to drain and you're seeing the land features that emerge. And the water is just raining very, very gradually. And the longer you wait, the more precise your results are. but obviously you also open the door to your competition. And so Sam Ting eventually decides, okay, we have enough data, we're going to publish,

and he sets a press conference for like, you know, a few days later. And then Bert Richter knows somehow exactly where to look, tunes his collider to exactly the mass of the particle Sam Ting is about to announce, runs data for one day, gets enough data to discover this particle, writes the paper the same day, and has a dueling press conference the same day as Sam Ting. So you have MIT announcing,

we discover this new particle. We call it the J particle. And Stanford, same day discovering the same particle, and they call it the Psi particle. Oh my gosh, so many questions. Okay, so is the idea here

that the Richter Lab got some, like, whiff of the data coming out from the Ting Lab, and that's how they figured out the mass to look for? How would that data have slipped out? I guess there's lots of ways.

Yeah, a phone call from somebody in the Ting lab, You know, somebody disgruntled or like an ex-partner of somebody in that lab? I don't know. But, you know. Loose lips, sink particle ships. Loose lips share Nobel prizes, exactly. So they did get to share the prize?

Did they both get it? They shared the prize. And the particle shares those two names. So even to this day, we haven't decided, like, who gets primacy. So we call it the J-slash-Sye particle. Oh, it should have been like Rick Ting or Tincter. Yes, so why did Ting name it J and Richter name it Psi? Because the character in Chinese for Sam Ting's name looks a little bit like a J.

Oh, cool. And if you look in the detector, when you create one of these particles at Stanford, it looks a little bit like the Greek letter sigh. All right. Fine. Good names. Descriptive. So that means we have created charmonium. We have created charmonium, exactly. And this will all announce on November 11, 1974. And this is what particle physicists called the November Revolution. Because at that moment, everybody who had had, any residual doubts about whether corks are real finally gave it up. And they're like, okay, this is it. We're in a new era where corks are real because we predicted the existence of this cork and what it would do. And then people went out and found this thing. It was all

very, very compelling. The corks are real. They are the underlying fabric of all this stuff. Because we had predicted and discovered charmonium, a kind of corgonium. Do you all realize you were like 50 to 60 years behind the first November revolution when the Weimar Republic came into existence? Yes, thank you very much. We have our own parallel stories. Okay, all right, all right. Not quite as dramatic, but like Greg Lansberg, he's a physicist I know at Brown.

His father was a particle physicist also, and Greg remembers being a kid in the early 70s and his father getting a phone call and his mom saying like, it's a phone call about something called Charmoneum and his father like leaps naked and wet out of the shower to go get this phone call because like this is a big day. And that made an impression on Greg. I actually read this story in Greg's thesis in the acknowledgment section, which is super fun. I don't know if people realize, but like every famous scientist out there wrote a PhD and their PhD has an acknowledgement section, which is very personal and written when they were young and

like really fun to read. So you should like go read like Paul Dirac's acknowledgement section, you know. It's all out there. And it's always amazing to hear that anyone ever reads any theses ever. Because in our field, it's like, oh yeah, just put it in. in the thesis, it doesn't matter. No one reads those anyway. That's true. So I tell you this whole story, to give you a flavor of like how we learned what the universe is made out of, but also in the context of toponium, right, this is the beginning

of corkonia. This is like, we can't see quirks directly because they never by themselves, but we can see what quarks do together. And corkonia is when you take a cork and you combine it with the anti-cork and you make a special particle out of that. And so that's charmonium is really the beginning of this corkonia era. So does charmoneum? evolve into toponium? Because I, like, I want to lean into this Pokemon thing. Is that what it evolves into? No.

No, Charmoneum is very unstable. It decays very quickly, often into like an electron positron pair. So it would be a mistake if you were like, Charmonium, I choose you. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Exactly. But there are other quirks out there. So at this point, we have up, down, charm, and strange.

And people are like, oh, that's nice. That's cute. I was about to say, oh, you physicists are cute, but we just finished. a story about, you know, possibly you all peeing on each other's experiments. So that's less cute. But people were wondering, hmm, is there another set of these particles, right? Is there an additional pair? Because we had up-down charm strange. And on the lepton side of the world, you know, with the electron, we had the muon. Those guys had a third column. We had the tau particles. So people were like, well, if there's three kinds of leptons, are there also three kinds

of corks. So they predicted the existence of this pair, and one of them was called the bottom particle. And so then the hunt was on in the 70s for what we call botamonium, right? A bottom, anti-bottom pair come together to make a particle we now call the Upsilon. And so this was discovered at Fermilab in 1977. And people like, oh, wow, so bottoms are real. As a mom, I can tell you, I always knew bottoms were real. But in the outline. Another poop joke, wow, I'm impressed. Yeah, yep, yeah. Well, I mean, that's a heinie joke.

But anyway, but so the outline says, botomium. And you said botan, you added some syllables. What is it? How is the longest we could make it? Bottomonium. I think it should be bottomonium, right? Because the particle is a bottom particle. And then you add onium.

So bottomonium. Botomium. Bottomium. Bottomum. Got it. bottomonium. That's pretty cute. And then there's a whole spectrum of particles that include the bee quark. They're called bee mazons, where you can combine bees with ups or bees with downs or bees with strange, all sorts of particles you can make if you have the B particle. And now

we've seen all those particles and we study the wazoo out of them. It's a whole experiment at CERN called LHCB, which exists just to study the bottom quark and all the weird stuff it does with other particles. All right. So let's take a break. And when we get back, let's focus on top quarks and answer our question, what the heck is top ponium? I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, and in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Ophia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual

belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstyles play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about fun, Don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast.

Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, It's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you.

Because it's easy to say like, go blank yourself, right? It's easy. It's easy to just drink the extra beer. It's easy to ignore, to suppress, seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just like walk the other way. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier.

Denials is easier. drinking is easier, yelling, screaming is easy. Complex problem solving, meditating, you know, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I just think the process and the journey is so delicious. That's where all the good stuff is. You just can't live and die by the end result. It's scary putting yourself out there, especially when it's something you really care about

and something that you hope is your passion in life. you want people to like it. Let's get delicious and put ourselves out there. I'm Simone Boyce, host of The Bright Side, and those were my recent guests, comedian Phoebe Robinson and writer Aaron Foster. On this show, I'm talking to the brightest minds in entertainment, health, wellness, and pop culture. And every week, we're going places in our communities, our careers, and ourselves. It's not about being perfect. It's about going on a journey and discovering the bright side of becoming. Few people know that better than soccer legend Ashlyn Harris. journey, it's the people, it's the failures, it's the heartache, it's the little moment.

These are our moments to laugh, learn, and exhale. So join me every Monday, and let's find the Bright Side together. Listen to the Bright Side on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When your car is making a strange noise, no matter what it is, you can't just pretend it's not happening. That's an interesting sound. It's like your mental health. If you're struggling and feeling overwhelmed, it's important to do something about it. It can be as simple as talking to someone

or just taking a deep, calming breath to ground yourself. Because once you start to address the problem, you can go so much further. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have resources available for you at loveyourmindtay.org. All right, we're back, and it's the moment you've all been waiting for. Daniel is going to lead up to his explanation of what is toponium. Right, and so far we've been setting the context, right?

We've been explaining what querconium is, what charmonium was, what bottomonium is. So now we can say what toponium would be if it exists. Toponium, if it exists, should be a bound state of top quarks and anti-top corks, because charm and anti-charm make a particle, bottom and anti-bottom make a particle, up and anti-up make a particle, why can't you make a particle with top and anti-top? And that would be toponium based on the naming scheme, yeah? That would be toponium, but the top cork is different from all the other particles. It wasn't discovered until in the mid-90s, 95, because it's super duper massive.

Like the corks are all very, very light, except for the bottom cork, which has five times the mass of the proton, which is like, that's very heavy for a cork. But the top cork is much more massive than the bottom. It has 175 proton masses. So like an individual top cork has more mass than like the nucleus of a gold atom. And this is why it took us 20 years to find the top cork after the bottom cork was discovered. Wait, if the top quark is so much bigger, why was it so hard to find? Because it takes much more energy to make it.

Like the bottom quark, you can make it a pretty low energy collider. You only need like protons accelerated a little bit. But to make the top cork, you've got to really zoom those protons together to have enough energy to make two top corks, because you can never just make one. You've got to make a top and an anti-top. So it's a huge amount of energy. There's a whole set of colliders built under the assumption that the top cork was going to be like maybe a little heavier than the bottom, and then they didn't find anything.

So it wasn't until the Fermilab Tevatron in the late 90s that we made top corks and saw them. And that's actually what my PhD thesis was about, seeing the top cork and measuring its properties, back when we'd only ever made a few of them. Oh, wait, wait. Were you the first one to describe the top quark? Or, like, after it was seen? I was not the first one. Oh. No, but I remember the day I was an undergrad when my particle physics professor came and said,

hey, today's a big day. We're announcing the discovery of the top cork because it took 20 years to find this thing. It was really exciting when people found it. I mean, we knew it had to be there to complete the symmetry, but it took a long time, so it was really exciting. But the top corks mass doesn't just mean it takes a lot of energy to make. It also means that it's a lot of energy to make. It also means that it's really, really, really unstable. Like, the top cork decays really, really quickly.

Like, when you create it, it only lasts from like 10 to the minus 23 seconds. Like, it basically almost instantly decays into a bottom cork and a W and other stuff. So it only briefly exists. That is pretty incredible. That's something that exists for such a short amount of time we're able to measure and capture at all. Yeah. And so we've never seen a top cork directly. We've only seen what it turns into, an indirect evidence.

for its existence, right? It's like we've seen the hair and the footprints of Bigfoot. We never actually captured one and hung out with it. Bad example, Daniel. Bigfoot doesn't exist. Do top quarks exist?

You hope so. Well, we've seen its hair and footprints, so we think that it exists. We're pretty confident. And so other corks last much longer. Like a bottom cork will last much longer long enough to hang out, find an anti-bottom cork

and form a new particle, bottomonium. Top corks don't do that. Top corks decay almost instantly. So there's really almost no time for it to form toponium, right? Even if you have a top quark and an anti-top cork and they're near each other, it takes time for things like find each other, settle down into a bound state. It's like if you have a proton and an electron, it takes them a while to figure out that they're a match and to settle into hydrogen. Like in our universe, it took hundreds of thousands of years for things to cool down and settle into neutral

hydrogen. So for a long time, the lore was toponium is impossible. because top corks don't laugh long enough. They explode into other particles before they form toponium. So we were stuck at bottomonium. That was the concept people had until about last year. Whoa.

Okay, wait, so you told us that you can't see top quarks happen too fast. You can't see, what are they called, negative top quarks? Anti-top quarks. Anti-top quarks. Have we actually seen toponium? Mm-hmm.

Or is this another hair and footprints situation? So have we actually seen topony? We've seen a sort of maybe version of it. We haven't seen top quarks and anti-top quarks like settle down into a new stable particle that compares to like the JPSI or the Upsilon, these other bound states of quarks. But people had this idea last year that, you know, maybe top quarks don't have time to settle into some new state, but maybe they can talk to each other.

Maybe they like exchange some gluons and influence each other. Maybe there's some like cross talk between the top and the end. anti-top after they're made and before the decay. So maybe they don't have time to fully settle into like a cozy homey existence together, but they at least, you know, exchange a few DMs. That was the idea. And so we looked for evidence of this at the Large Hadron Collider. Where we did is we said, well, what would Top Quarks look like if they didn't exchange any information? And then what would they look like if they did exchange some information? And it turns out if they talk to each other even a little bit, then it makes their spins point in different directions. All these particles have

fundamental spin. Spin is not something we understand deeply. It's just like an arrow we put on these particles to represent some kind of angular momentum they carry. But if they talk to each other, then their spins can change a little bit. And spin is something we can measure of a top cork. We don't see the top directly, but we see what it decays into. And so from that, we can deduce what the spin was from like the angles of the stuff that flies out of the top cork. So you measure the spin of one top cork, and you measure the spin of the anti-top cork. And then you ask, are those spins more likely to come from top quarks that did talk to each other or top quarks that didn't talk to each other?

I'm just going to note I didn't like stuff my anger down far enough because I'm still keeping track of every time you're like, well, we don't really understand what this means and we haven't actually seen this other thing. But go ahead. Keep pooping on biologists. But anyway, I'm glad you guys maybe saw this. Who knows, but you don't understand it. So we looked at all the data.

We studied a huge number of top corks and it looks like they do talk to each other. There's evidence there that they're. that the top corks do interact, and it changes the direction of their spin as they decay. And so people called this toponium, and sort of toponium with an asterisk, because, again, it's not like a stable particle in the same way that other corkonia are, but it is an interaction. And so they gave it a name, Ada sub T, like a top cork kind of inspired particle. And it made a big splash, and because, you know, people were excited about the work they did, they fluffed it up in the popular literature.

And so in a lot of popular science articles, you see it as like, as if we have discovered this new stable form of matter or this new way for top quarks to come together to make a particle, that didn't happen. What we did see is top quarks for the first time interacting with each other before they were decaying, which is still a big deal. Yeah, so if I'm trying to put this big deal in context, so we have a better understanding of how our universe works now. But if we needed such a fancy collider to make it happen, how often is this happening? Let's first talk about our planet and then maybe like elsewhere in the solar system. Where would you expect to see it happening? Yeah, great question. You know, top corks are probably created naturally all the time in cosmic rays.

We talked about how we built particle accelerators because we didn't want to have to rely on cosmic rays. But it's not because cosmic rays don't have enough energy. Cosmic rays are hugely massively energetic. They're much more energetic than our particle colliders. They're just harder to control. And the really high energy particles are rarer. So colliders are good at controlled experiments, but if you want to go really high energy, cosmic rays are the way to go. So all the time, top quarks are made in the atmosphere when protons smash into other particles way, way above the clouds.

But, you know, they last for 10 to the minus 23 seconds. And probably they're creating in pairs, and they talk to each other a little bit before they decay. Does this make any difference in the world? If we lived in a universe where top quarks didn't talk to each other before they decayed, would ice cream taste worse? you know, would biologists be less awesome? No, biologists would still be awesome and ice cream would still be delicious. I think it's a very, very subtle effect. Thank you, Daniel. That's good. I've forgiven you. The anger has gone away. All right. That was my goal, yes. But, you know, it satisfies our curiosity. We want to understand

all the details of how these fields come together. How do they interact? Are there any surprises? Because we expected to see this. And if we hadn't, we would have been surprised. We would said, hmm, something's going on that we don't understand and dug into it more. Maybe that would have been evidence that there's some other field preventing tops from talking to each other or some other particle out there that's doing something. Anytime you see something unexpected, it's a sign that there's something new to learn about the universe, a thread to unravel. So this is just another example of scientists like being clever and trying to find ways to ask the universe a question we can't ask directly. We can't see quirks directly.

So we had to be indirect and understand how they click together to make particles. We can't see top corks directly. So we had to see how they decay and infer their existence. And so now we're trying to figure out like how top quarks talk to each other by looking at the patterns of those decays. It's all very subtle stuff. But to me it's a testament of like the cleverness of experimentalists, you know. You have a question. You want an answer to it.

You've got to figure out a way to force the universe to share that data with you. And, you know, that's the joy of science. is like outsmarting the universe, forcing it to answer your questions. There's such a beauty in cleverly designed experiments. And are you still working on toponium? So I don't personally work on toponium, but there are still people definitely studying this and digging deeper into it. So you expect to hear more about it in the coming years.

But I think I want to underscore the point that you just made, that there really is beauty and creativity in experiments. I think people often feel like theoretical physics is where the thinking is. And experimental physics is like where the engineering is, like, yeah, build, the thing, get it to work. But also this creativity in experimental physics, right? You need to be created, figure out like, hey, how do we see this thing? How do we force the universe to reveal this? How do we trick it? How we corner it so that we learn the answer to our question? A lot of the great discoveries in experimental science come from somebody being really clever about finding a new

way to answer a question people have long had. I love hearing stories about how science is done and the culture of science and seeing how human nature layers upon it. You know, we heard a story about one person may be stealing someone else's data or a piece of their data to make their discovery. Someone else may be peeing on someone's experiment. And here it sounds like there's even within the field of physics a hierarchy for who's the smartest, who's the most clever, whose field is doing the, like, best stuff. And I think it would be very nice if we could remove some of that.

But in the meantime, it is a, it's a human endeavor. and we do do beautiful things. It is, absolutely. Yeah. And there's jealousy and there's back-sabbing. And there's people spreading terrible stories about the other folks, you know, these anti-Stanford stories and anti-MIT stories and all of that stuff. And, you know, you can't remove that from science because science is by the people of the people.

It's for the people, right? If we made it sterile and was all done by AIs, it'd be a lot less fun. Yep. It is a human endeavor with all of our foibles sort of layered in. All right. Well, thanks for taking this journey with us on the humanist. discovery of quarks and the latest research on how top quarks talk to each other just before they perish. And thanks, Kelly, for pushing down your anger by shade at biologists.

My anger has left me because you said something nice about biologists and at the end of the day, we're both friends and it's okay. All right. Thanks, everybody. This podcast serves to educate and it's a cheap form of therapy. The cheapest form there is. Thanks, everyone. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by IHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at Questions at Daniel. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms,

you can find us at D and K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. I just think the process and the journey is so delicious. That's where all the good stuff is. You just can't live and die by the end result. That's comedian Phoebe Robinson. And yeah, those are the kinds of gems

you'll only hear on my podcast, The Bright Side. I'm your host, Simone Boyce. I'm talking to the brightest minds in entertainment, health, wellness, and pop culture. And every week, we're going places in our communities, our careers, and ourselves. So join me every Monday, and let's find the bright side together. Listen to the bright side on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. How serious is youth vaping? Irreversible lung damage serious.

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Tune in to All the Smoke Podcast, where Matt and Stacks sit down with former first lady, Michelle Obama. Folks, find it hard to hate up close. And when you get to know people and you're sitting in their kitchen tables and they're talking like we're talking. You know, you hear our story, how we grew up, how Barack grew up. And you get a chance for people to unpack and get beyond race. All the Smoke featuring Michelle Obama. To hear this podcast and more, open your free IHeartRadio app.

Search all the smoke and listen now. Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship. I'm Emily Tish Sussman and on she pivots. I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps in their lives and careers. I'm Gretchen Wittmer, Jody Sweetie. Monica Patton. Elaine Welteroth.

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