Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What was the first particle ever discovered? And how was it discovered?

Episode Date: September 3, 2019

What does it mean to be first? Join Daniel and Jorge to learn about the first ever particle discovered. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA. terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

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

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey Jorge, why do you think people are preoccupied with being first? What do you mean? You know, like first person on the moon, first person or run four-minute mile. Yeah, I see what you mean. There's kind of an obsession, right, with being first. But, you know, I think last can be good, too. What? Who wants to be laughed?

You know, like the last cookie in the box is always the tastiest. The last person to arrive at the party makes you the coolest person. That's true, that's true. Last person to turn in their project, but still be on time. That's right. I am a big believer in optimal procrastination. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of Ph.D. Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. And I'm sitting in a closet in Aspen, Colorado. I didn't know you were in the closet, Daniel.

I'm more literally in the closet than figuratively in the closet. Oh, I see. Only in Aspen, Colorado. That is a wild place. It is a beautiful place. I'm here because I'm at the Aspen Center for Physics for a week, where people come from all over the country to sort of sit around and think about big ideas and think about the future of physics and brainstorm new experiments and think about the history of physics also. Oh, wow. Pretty cool. Is that something that happens every year? Yeah, every summer. Physicists come to Aspen and think big thoughts, well, surrounded by rich people. You're saying like that's an exclusive thing. You can't be rich and a physicist. Well, it feels like an Aspen is two kinds of people, the rich people and the physicists. But it's fun to be here and to think about, you know, all the physics that's been done in the last 50 years,

the physics that will be done in the next 50 years. And it also makes me think back about the origin of physics, you know, like where this all started. Yeah. So welcome to our part. Our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I-Hard Radio. That's right, our podcast in which we think about all the big things, the hard things, the new things, the old things, and try to explain them to you in a way that we hope is educational, understandable, and maybe a little entertaining. First things, the last things, the things that made it just in time not to be late, all the things. That's right. We should do a podcast on people who won the Nobel Prize and their discovery came in just in time before the threshold. Well, I always say that, you know, when I see grad students really stressed out, I always tell them that, you know what, even if you get a C, you still get a PhD.

That's true. It took me a while to understand that nobody in graduate school cares about grades. Like, you get an A, you get an A minus, you get a B. It doesn't really matter anymore because just surviving is all that matters. Yeah, but they do care about in science about being first, right? Like, that's a huge deal. It is a huge deal. And first counts for a lot. Like, if you are the first, person to publish an idea in a paper, even if you're first by one day, which means the other folks were thinking about it at the same time as you were, they just didn't put their paper out, you get primary credit for it. So it matters a lot.

Yeah, you get the particle named after you. You get people making videos about you online. Yeah, there's basically first, and then there's everybody else. And I'm not saying that's the right way to do it, or that it's fair, or that it's healthy. It's a little bit insane, but it's sort of the way we do things. There's a system where we put articles on the Internet, and the order in which the articles appear on the Internet for that day's listings depends on how close your submission was to 4 p.m. Eastern Time.

So every day at 359 Eastern Time, there's a bunch of physicists sitting around their computers trying to click their paper in just past the deadline. It's like in Internet comments where the first person always says first comment. Exactly, exactly. You're saying, because there are just a bunch of internet trolls. That's right. Internet trolls with PhDs. Yeah, that basically describes our field.

Yep. But first to discover is a big deal, but maybe an even bigger deal is to discover the first of something, right? Like the first planet or the first moon or the first asteroid. Those are pretty big, too, even maybe more important than getting the credit. Yeah, it's sort of like a categorical discovery, right? You discover a whole new kind of thing. the first person to discover, you know, a new kind of, like marsupials or something, right? It's like, whoa, it's not only, you found a new animal, you found a whole new category of animals.

That's pretty cool. Yeah, it changes everyone's perspective about things, right? I mean, to be the first to discover a giraffe, I mean, that probably blew people's mind. Yeah, and that's the idea is that the first person is one that really carries the most information, right? If you have the first person to have this new idea of a new way of thinking about the universe or the first person to find something out, that's the piece of information, right? That's how humanity sort of learns about it.

And that's why I think being first is prized. It's not just like Usain Bolt, you know, running over the finish line a tiny bit faster than the next guy or the next gal. It's really about who's delivering the information, who is making that sort of intellectual leap forward. Yeah, like who planted that flag on that new continent, right? Like you're literally out there by yourself.

Yeah, except that it turns out there is usually indigenous. people that you've slavled along the way. But that aside, let's not make the analogy between physicists and conquistadors. Let's not promote white-based Euro-central colonialism on this show. But yeah, say you're the first person to land of the moon, right? Then you're doing something no human being has ever done before. That really is an important moment. And so today, this might be the first in a series of episodes about first. And today we're We're going to be talking about the first particle. Who discovered the first particle?

And what was the first particle discovered? Yeah, and this is a fascinating story. Not only did he discover particles, he sort of invented the concept of particles, which is something we're sort of still struggling to figure out, like, what is a particle? We've talked about on this podcast a few times. Like, what does that mean philosophically?

What does it look like? What are we really talking about? about do we have more than just a mathematical model? Do we have like a complete understanding of what a particle is anyway? And so it's instructive to go back to sort of the first time anybody said, oh, look, I found a particle to understand what made them think it was a particle? What ideas did they have that justified this creation of a whole new concept? Yeah.

And it's a big deal because everything is made out of particles, right? It's what makes up the things in the universe. Everything's made out of a particle. Well, yeah, everything, if you mean everything, the 5% of the universe that we know. always made out of particles, right? I didn't tell you that I know what dark matter and dark energy I were made of. I didn't, I forgot to mention that I was the first. I'm pretty sure you mastered those concepts.

It was more for our listeners. I know that you're aware of dark matter and dark energy, but, you know, it's dark energy. We don't know what it is. Dark matter might be made of particles we don't know, but it might not. But, yeah, the rest of all the stuff in the universe, stars and ice cream and hamsters and all that great stuff is all made of particles, right? Yeah. And so it's fascinating to think about it.

And I think we should clarify here. When we talk about particles, I'm thinking about it in the modern sense. We have like 12 matter particles we've thought about, five force particles we've thought about, not in terms of like elements, which sort of an earlier development. Which of the current particles that we think of is not divided into smaller bits was discovered. Right. And there was a time in our human history where we didn't know these things, right? Like we didn't know that we were made out of particles.

And we didn't know how many there were. We didn't know what they were, what they looked like, how big they were. And it's pretty recent, right? Yeah, most of human history, we really had no idea. I mean, Greek suggested this concept of an atom that maybe matter was divided into tiny bits. But that was just one idea they had of, like, you know, lots and lots of ideas. So the fact that that one happened to be right, I think people give them too much credit for. But the modern idea that matter was divided into these tiny little Lego blocks, essentially,

that what seemed to us to be smooth and indivisible and continuous was actually just like made of super tiny little pixels. That's a pretty modern idea. The origin of it comes in the 1800s, you know, with chemistry. People started to think about, you know, reactions between different gases and stuff, and they noticed that these gases had reactions in these patterns, which suggested that there was like indivisible little units of the gases, which, of course, turned out to be atoms and molecules.

Right. I imagine that maybe not a lot of people out there, know what was the first particle discovered, right? I mean, if I had to guess, I don't know what I would say. You know, protons, the particles I'm thinking of, the 12 matter particles, we have six leptons, those electron, muon, tau, and then three neutrinos, and then six quarks, right, the up, down, strange, charm, bottom top. So of those particles, I was wondering, did people know, you know, which was the first

discovered? People have any idea? And so I walked around and I asked people, what was the first particle discovered? And again, these interviews you'll hear were not done at UC Irvine, but actually in the airport at Heathrow. And so you'll hear some international voices. So think back if somebody asked you what was the first, what you think the first matter particle discovered was? What would you say to a random stranger at an airport in London? Here's what people had to say.

Who asked you physics questions. Before you call security, think about what your answer would be. Well, here's what those travelers had to say. Iron, I don't know. Proton? Oxygen or? Probably the electron. Electrons, I imagine. All right, a lot of good guesses there.

Some people said iron. Some people said the proton. Some people said oxygen. Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of people, when I said particle, they thought elements, they thought atoms. And I'm not sure if that's because they weren't aware of the structure of matter sort of below the atomic level,

or they just thought that that still counts as a particle. But in modern day particle physics, we don't think of oxygen as a particle. It's basically like a huge construction. You know, it's massive on the particle scale. Yeah, and we're talking about the discovery of the things that atoms are made at. We know that matter is made out of molecules and molecules are made out of atoms and atoms are made out of smaller things that we so far don't know that they can be split anymore, right? That's right.

And we know that these particles, that some of those particles make up atoms, right? up quarks, down quarks, and electrons make up atoms. But there are other particles out there, right? There's lots of other particles. There's 12 of them. And so it could be that when you discover a particle, it's not a particle that exists in the atom, right? Or it could be a particle that helps solve the puzzle of how the atom is put together. Right.

So there's more particles out there than sort of exist in your ice cream. Besides the chocolate chips, right? And the sprinkles. That is a fundamental unit of happiness, but not a fundamental unit of the universe. And which one is more important? You can't slice chocolate chips up. But so at some point we thought atoms were like the smallest things in the universe, right? But then we found out that they're actually made out of particles.

And so one of those particles was the first one discovered. And so the question is, which one was it? That's right. So I thought it would be fun. We'll walk you through the experiment from the point of view of the experimenter, right? What were they doing? What were they trying to figure out? Why do they do it?

What do they learn? And at the end, we'll reveal what the first particle. was that was discovered by this experiment. A mystery, an ice cream mystery. Exactly. Nobody dies in this mystery, we hope. Well, they're technically dead. They did die, but at the time they were alive.

Not due to this mystery. Nobody was killed by this particle. All right, let's get into it. Actually, that's not true. People are killed by this particle all the time. All right, let's get into the story. But first, let's take a quick break. Ah, come on.

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

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

To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're trying to piece together the story of which was the first particle discovered ever. So the first time that we figured out that the atom is not the fundamental unit of the universe. So step us through, Daniel.

What year is it, what year are we in and what were people thinking? Past your mind back 13 or so decades to the late 1800s. And back then, physicists were really just starting to make any progress in understanding the thing around, the stuff around us. Back then, physics was like, okay, we got this kind of thing, we got magnetism, we got, you know, people get electrically zapped, we got gravity, we have just like a long list of things that we don't understand. And compare to modern physics where we feel like most of the stuff around us,

We understand, you know, at a macroscopic scale, right? It's rare these days that you see something happen. You're like, whoa, that's just totally a mystery. Back then, there was a lot of stuff going on that people didn't understand. And so people were just sort of investigating it, playing with it, right? They didn't understand what gamma rays were, x-rays were, and all this stuff. Now we have a holistic understanding, but back then there were a lot of these mysteries. Wow.

And one of them, one of them was cathode rays. This is something people had created and were playing with, but didn't really understand. Wow. Wow. It's amazing to think, have that mindset, right? Like there's so many weird things going on and you're just like, oh, well, I'll just go about my life anyways. Yeah. And, you know, also there were many fewer people doing science back then. And so there's just a lot less progress being made. And I wonder what it's like sometimes to live in a universe where, you know, there are natural things happening for which we just do not have an explanation, like in your everyday life.

Yeah, like you're walking around and it's like, oh, look at that cloud. I have no idea what the thing is made out of. Yeah, exactly. I like the sky is blue. I have my idea why it's blue. Who knows? Somebody painting it blue. Yeah, right.

Or why is lightning strike? Or what is lightning, right? All this kind of stuff. Or what is disease, right? People had no idea how disease was transmitted. My wife tells me this story about how, until fairly recently, doctors used to go from doing autopsies on cadavers to delivering babies without washing their hands because they just didn't understand, right, what disease was.

And so it's hard sometimes to put your mind in the mindset of what people were like back then. But back then, people were playing with cathode rays. And until recently, cathode rays were pretty common. They're what used to make TVs work. It's a little beam of electrons that used to sweep along the back of the screen and make the picture on the screen. These days, everybody has a flat screen.

But you know those old deep TVs, the ones that are pretty thick? Yeah. Yeah, those have a little beam of particles at them. back then people were playing with them because they were pretty easy to make all you need to do was make some like glass tube it was mostly that was a pretty good vacuum

and you'd put some material and it's some metal and you'd heat it up and then it put some electrical voltage across it and you would get these crazy glowing rays that shot from one side of the tube to the other oh whoa yeah and they were like it was like a side show

people were like go around like you know circuses like oh here see the bearded lady see the man who can make glowing rays in a tube you know and nobody understood it but it was just this like weird thing and that's why it's called a cathode ray tube like a yeah you know like those old monitors and TVs are they're called CRTs because that's what it stands for right exactly and you know cathode comes from the fact that you have a voltage across it's you have an anode and a cathode right and um and you would get these weird rays and nobody understood like what is this ray you couldn't like put your hand in there

because it was inside the tube and, like, touch it, people were wondering, like, is a ray a fundamental thing of the universe, right? They didn't know. It's just like magic. Like, I can make this thing glow. But, you know, everything in the universe is a mystery is indistinguishable from magic

until physics basically takes it apart and understands it. And either, you can say that's either ruining the magic or, you know, revealing the mysteries. That's right. Physicists, killing the magic since the late 1800s. Physicists capturing the magic to make better TVs for you. How about that? Physicists, overthinking the magic and then publishing a long paper about it

in hopes that they get the Nobel Prize about it. And getting it in just on time before the deadline. So we were in late 1800s, and I imagine there's all kinds of weird things going on, right? Like Tesla was around that time too, right? And just the people were playing with electricity and with magnetism. And people were just starting to understand. how those two things were connected. Right.

But there was lots of, there was, like, every day there was some physics experiment somebody did with the result that people didn't understand, you know, which almost never happens anymore. Right. But back then, there was just like tons of stuff that nobody understood. It was a, it was a field day for physics. Okay. So this one in particular led to the first discovery of a particle.

So step us through it. Who is playing with this? So it's a guy named J.J. Thompson. And he was curious about what these things were. and he was like, well, let's try to, you know, poke them. Let's, like, see what we can do to affect these rays. So the first thing he did was like, oh, right, I'm going to make my cathode ray, and then I'm going to put the cathode ray tube inside another electric field.

So remember, there's already a little electric field inside. You have a cathode and anode. You're applying a voltage across it. That's what makes the rays. But then he put that inside another electric field to see if he could bend the rays. His question was like, can I move the direction of the rays by applying an electric field? Because, you know, like, why not, right? Yeah, like, you know, this is how you do science.

You have a limited number of tools and you just try to poke everything you can with those tools and see if they give you any information. Do you think that was the first thing he tried? Like, did he try, was he sitting around like, what if I put a banana on the beam? Or what if I, you know, what if I light a fire under the beam? Or what if I blow on it? That's a great question. And I bet his log notebook contains a bunch of hilarious stuff.

But this is a banana, no. What if I dipped the cathode ray in chocolate? This is the first productive set of experiments he did. And what he found was that if you put another electric field on it, you can bend the rays. So instead of just having straight rays across the tube, he could make the rays hit the side of the tube instead. Whoa. Like he was bending the light rays. Like he was bending this magical glowing ray.

Yeah, and it like glows purple or whatever. And he was bending this ray. And that must have been pretty cool, right? right? Because you can turn up and down the electric field and you can see the ray bending. So you're like, wow, I have power over this ray, you know. And that's not something you can do with light. Like if you light a flashlight, that beam is not going to get bent noticeably or at all by a magnet. That's right. A magnet or electric field will not change the direction of light.

You can do it with a black hole, though. But I don't think you have one around in your workshop. He didn't have a black hole in the 18th. He did not have a black hole. Or I'm sure he would have tried it, right? dip the black hole in chocolate, combine the black hole with bananas, you never know.

These rays you could bend, which was weird, right? And that told him that they probably had some electric charge to them, right? That this wasn't just like neutral light. This was something with special property to it. Because the only things

that have electric charge, the positive or negative, get moved by electric fields, right? Everything else just ignores electric fields. So I told them these rays had some charge to them. So that was the first hint that they had like some quality.

Rather than being glowing and cool, they carried a charge. Meaning like they prefer or get repelled or attracted by like the opposite ends of a magnet. Exactly, exactly. Okay, so this told JJ Thompson

that there was something to this glow, right? Like it wasn't just like empty light. There was something to it. Yeah. And then to confirm that he did another experiment, which is he swapped out

the electric field for a magnetic field. And remember, any particle that feels charged will also get bent by a magnetic field that works a little bit differently. And so this sort of confirmed to him that it really was something that was charged because he could also bend them

when he used a magnetic field. So he turns the magnetic field on and the rays bend. And if you use a magnetic field, they also bend. Yes, they also bend with a magnetic field. So it bent to an electric field and it bent to a magnetic field.

So that really told him that there was something there with charge. But the real genius of his experiment came in the next step. What would he do? Other people had tried this kind of stuff, but he was the first person to combine the electric field and the magnetic field at the same time. But the cool thing about this, combining them, was that an electric field bends it based on how much charge it has. The magnetic field bends it based on how much charge it has, and also it's more sensitive to the mass. Right?

So by measuring how much the electric field bends it versus how much the magnetic field bends it. bends it, you can measure the ratio of the charge and the mass of this ray, this thing, right? So he's shooting this particle through the cathode ray. He's bending it one way with the electric field, another way with the magnetic field. He's measuring all that. It lets him know that the ray has mass, right? The thing that's inside the ray that's causing this glow has some mass. And it lets him measure the ratio of the electric charge to the mass.

Because like if something is heavy and has a negative charge, it'll bend one way. But if something is light and has a negative charge, it'll bend differently. Yeah, it won't bend as much if it's heavier, for example. Okay. So the stronger the charge, the more the bending, the higher the mass, the less the bending. And because the electric field and the magnetic field are sensitive in different ways to these two quantities, he could measure this ratio by measuring both of those things. So this is like experimental cleverness.

We hear lots of stories in the history of physics of like theoretical genius, right, moments of insight. But experimental cleverness, you know, has really paved the way. This is like people figuring out, how can I solve this puzzle? How can I make the universe tell me this answer? How can I arrange things in a way that nature cannot escape, right? So I like these stories. How can I out clever the universe? Yes, exactly.

It's like being a detective, right? It's like, how can I prove, you know, how can I rule out this alibi? How can I construct a situation where the suspect has to reveal to me who is the real killer, right? That's experimental cleverness. And the answer he got blew his mind because he measured this charged mass ratio and he was enormous, right?

The charge was much, much, much, much, much, much bigger than the mass. So he saw that whatever this ray was, it was supercharged, basically. Like it had a huge amount of charge but very little mass. Yes, exactly. And so he was like,

well, whatever this thing is, there's stuff to it. has mass, but it also has charge, but he's got this, like, way more charge than it has mass. But that must have been kind of mind-blowing, right? Like, this ray has mass, like, it has substance to it. That was the moment when particle physics as a concept, as a field, was born. He was like, aha, now I can say that this ray is made of something that has stuff to it, right? And he, that's when he took this first step, he created the concept of the fundamental.

particle. And he's like, there's something in there that has both charge and mass. Right. So it's like a dot in space that has more than one property, right? And that's sort of the idea of a particle. It's like, it's just a point in space that we could put labels on. But how do you know it wasn't just another atom or that it was just another like fluid or something? Well, we knew it wasn't an atom because the, well, atoms are either neutral or they have positive charge. He didn't know the structure of matter right at this point. He didn't know what atoms were made out of right but no atom had this charge to mass ratio right atoms were much more massive compared to their charge so this was definitely something this is definitely something new because

remember atoms are dominated by protons and neutrons which are much much heavier than electrons oh okay so and that was a big deal do you think that really kind of blew his mind did he write like eureka on his notebook yeah i think that was a great moment you know and other people had tried and failed, mostly because they didn't have a good enough vacuum in their cathode ray tubes, and so they didn't achieve these results. And so, you know, he worked carefully. He had some good ideas, and so he was the first one across the line. So because he was the first one across the line, of course, he got the right to name this

thing, right? He created this whole concept of a particle. And I think it was a mind-blowing moment for him because he thought pretty grandly about it. But I don't think he'd be very impressed with the name he needed this thing. All right. Well, before we reveal the name of this first particle, let's take another quick break. Ah, come on, why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient.

Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity, with Intel core ultra-processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance. It keeps up with your business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves. Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo.

Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast,

so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age.

And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend, really cheated with his professor or not. To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

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 T-Dose. AWA 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 hard. 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. All right, we're talking about the first particle ever discovered, and we've been talking about the story of J.J. Thompson, who did some

clever experiments and he found that these rays of glowy stuff had a lot of charge but not a lot of mass and so I'm trying to figure out Daniel how this you go from that to like oh it must be little tiny particles that's basically it right he said that is what a particle is it's a point in space that has some mass and has some charge and that's like he knew this was something new it hadn't been discovered before and so he thought like I'm I'm going to call this thing something. It must be something because it has some mass to it. You know, these days, though, in modern particle physics, right,

we don't have to have mass to have a particle. Sort of generalize the concept of a particle to just be like a dot in space that has labels. And those labels can be like, do you have electric charge, yes or no? Do you have quantum color charge, yes or no? Do you feel the weak charge, yes or no? Do you have mass, yes or no, right? Do you have spin, various answers to that? And so we've sort of generalized this concept of a particle to be like a dot in space with various labels.

But to my understanding, this is the first moment in history when that idea was used. Like here's a thing, it's an it, and it has a special property of mass and a special property of charge that are, you know, sort of like labels on it. Yeah. And remember, he's imagining these rays to be made up of these things. And they're all identical, right? they all have the same charge to mass ratio. So it's like this, he's imagining it to be this stream of little special dots. And so that was the birth of particle physics.

Yeah, yeah. Although he didn't call it a particle. His talents were in experiments and in cleverness, but not necessarily in, you know, naming things. He and I would not have been friends. No, he called this thing that he found the corpuscule. Oh. And I think Corp comes from like, you know, incorporation, not like a company, but like a corpse, you know, like matter, like. Like a body.

Yes, like a body, exactly. And so I think he was going for like, you know, corpsito with corpuscule, like a little body, you know, or something. If he had been Italian, the history of physics would have been totally different. That's right. Exactly. Or Spanish or something. Oh, I see. So he called it as corpuscule.

he saw this weird glow and he thought, and he figured out that it has mass in charge. And so he imagined that it must be little tiny things. And he called them corpuscles. And he called them corpuscules. And he was pretty pleased with himself. I mean, it's a pretty big discovery. And he named this thing.

And then he imagined, aha, well, maybe I haven't just discovered what makes these rays up. Maybe everything is made of these things. And, you know, there's this tendency in physics when you make a discovery to generalize it, too expansively to imagine that maybe you've cracked like a really deep secret in the universe. And so he imagined that, you know, maybe atoms were made out of these things. And he had found the basic building block of the whole universe.

He kind of wasn't that far off, right? Like, in a way, everything is sort of that we know about is sort of made out of these corpuscles. Corpuscitos. That's right. He was right that the little corpusculitos were boiling off the cathode, right? And so it was reasonable for him to imagine that maybe everything had these little corpuscules inside of them. Of course, there's a deeper question there, right? Like, because these things are negative and most matter is neutral.

So you had to answer the question of like, you know, what's balancing it out? So he imagined that his model of matter was, you know, basically a bunch of his little corpuscules. And then some like thin, positively charged jelly that filled the universe to balance out those elect those, those, the, the negative charges from his little corpuscules. Well, corpuscule and jelly. That's right. He was thinking about dessert, clearly, right? Well, let's not keep our listeners in suspense anymore, Daniel.

So this corpuscle was later renamed into what we all know and love as? The electron. Most of the time in particle physics, whoever discovers the particle, we give them the right to name it. And even if it's ridiculous or silly, we usually keep it. But this one, for reasons I don't understand, was later renamed, and his, the inventor, the discoverer's choice of corpuscule, was tossed aside. Oh, man. There was like a vote.

I don't know. I have to dig into the history of that a little bit. It's like, we love you, JJ, but... You got skills, but these aren't them. We love you, but that's a dumb name, man. And it is a dumb name. I mean, I'm so, I'm glad to be a particle physicist and not a corpuscule physicist. Is it, I don't know.

I mean, is Electron really a better name than corpuscule? I mean... It sounds kind of silly as well. I'm corpuscule. It sounds like a disease or something. I'm sorry, sir, you have corpuscules. I'm going to prescribe chocolate-covered bananas for the rest of your life. I'm sorry, sir.

Every atom in your body has a bunch of corpuscules. And that is true. You're infected with corpuscules. There's nothing we can do about it. I'm sorry to be so negative. Ha, ha, ha. So that was the first particle then that was ever discovered by humans. It was the electron.

That's right, yeah. And he was right. that electrons or corpus fuels, as he said them, as he called them, are inside all of matter, right? He was wrong about the structure, the atom, and where the positive charges are, but he was right that that corpus fuels play a role in matter, and that's pretty cool. Wait, wait, I'm not made out of some positive jelly? I'm positive that you're not made out of jelly. And, you know, to round it out, we now have a pretty solid, modern understanding of what happens inside cathode ray tubes, right,

and why they work. And, you know, very quickly, you have the cathode on one side and you heat it up and the electrons boil off. Then they get slurped across by the electric field to the other side. But the interesting little nugget there is that if you have a perfect vacuum,

you won't see any cathode rays, right? Electrons are not really visible. They don't glow. The reason that J.J. Thompson saw rays is because he didn't succeed in making a perfect vacuum. He still had some gas in there. there, and that gas was getting ionized by the electrons, and it was glowing. So the cathode rays he was seeing weren't actually electrons.

They were glowing gas caused by the electrons. Like the electrons hit the gas, and then that's what makes it glow. Yeah, exactly. So if he had been a better experimentalist and achieved a better vacuum, he never would have discovered the corpus fuel. If he had been the first to create a vacuum, he would not have discovered the electron. That's right, exactly. So it takes a combination of luck, skill, cleverness,

ineptitude. All right. So that's the first particle ever discovered, the electron. And I have to say, I think that's the one I would have guessed, probably, the electron. Yeah, because electricity is sort of immediate and tactile. Yeah. Is that why you would have thought of the electron? And I just associated with the 1800s a lot, you know, they knew about lightning and

Tesla's coils and things like that. Do you have like a steampunk image of physics in the 1800s? Basically. Everything I know is through comics, basically. You know, well, that's probably pretty accurate, so I won't dispute it. And so what do you think would have happened if we had stayed with Corpus Cool? Like, would this be my Corpusronic watch that I'm wearing? And I'm listening to Corpusconicronica?

I don't know. And I can't even imagine, like, if we had stuck with that as a sort of precedent, what would we have named the other particles, you know? We have to follow the corpse ethos. Or the cue all these things. The cuele pattern. Yeah, the cuels. So that's pretty cool to think about how things are discovered, you know, like to imagine

not knowing anything about the things around you and to be the one who comes up with some crazy idea or some crazy experiment that cracks it all open. As always the case, when you look at the history of science, it seems pretty straightforward. Like, you didn't have to have any special materials, the kind of stuff he had around, lots of people had around. He just combined it in a sort of unusual way. And it's easy to look back and think, oh, I would have done that. But remember back then, there were a lot of things people didn't understand. And having these ideas and recognizing the significance of the results you have, that's really where the genius comes in and knowing which experiments to do and what they

mean. And so we should give a lot of credit to J.J. Thompson. We made a little bit of fun of him, but he really kicked off this whole field of particle physics. And so I certainly owe him a lot. Right. And there's still a huge number of things we don't know. So any one of our listeners out there could be the one, could be the next J.J. Thompson. Could be the next person to discover something amazing. Yeah. And maybe with the materials you have in your garage. Just maybe give it a little more thought before you name it. Just to put it there. Yeah. You do discover a new particle. Please call Jorge his very reasonable consulting rates. I work for bananas. So very reason. All right.

All right, thanks for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed that. See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the universe.

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