Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Who ordered the muon?

Episode Date: November 19, 2019

This mysterious particle is part of our Universe, but not part of the atom Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Jorge, do you have a lot of cousins in your family? Yeah, I've got a few. I have maybe over 36 cousins. around that number?

Wow, that's a big family. Well, would you be surprised to discover sort of late in life a brand new cousin you'd never even heard of before? That would be pretty amazing, kind of weird, I guess, but maybe, yeah, I would be surprised. All right, and then what if that cousin turns out to be exactly like you, like look like you in every single way? Okay, yeah, that's getting kind of weird. All right.

And then what if this cousin looks exactly like you, except they are 200 times. more massive. Dun, dun, don't. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I do not have 36 cousins. Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, explore your family tree. In which we examine all the amazing and fascinating things about the universe, about the big things, the small things, and about how things are related to each other. Yeah, so no, that's not the name of our podcast.

It's actually Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeart Radio. In which we do examine crazy things about the universe, and we try to make them relatable. We try to present them in a way that you can understand them so they connect a topic. that matter to you. Yeah, in a way, we do sort of explore the family tree of the universe, you know, how you came to be here, what sort of pairings and fusions occurred for you to be here in this universe, appreciating it and listening to funny podcasts. Yeah, I think one of the reasons people are interested in the origins of the universe and the creations of our cosmos is because they want to understand how we got here and what it means. In the same way, people explore their

family tree. They want to know, where did my family come from? What stories are in? our past? What is my personal context? And also, I think it's a useful way for us to sort of organize our thoughts. You know, when we think about the universe in terms of particles, we sometimes think about how those particles are related to each other, like do particles have families? Yeah. And I think, you know, every part of anyone's family tree or origin tree kind of tells you a little bit of the story of the whole thing, right? Like how you came to be, how things work, and how things move about in life. And other ways your life could have gone. Like if you have a very successful cousin that's a gazillionaire, then you know, you wonder, hmm, could I have made different choices and been a

gazillionaire? Or if people's paths in life diverge. Yeah, or if you are that bazillionaire cousin, then good for you. Please, please contact us. We would love to take your donations. That's right. It would be awesome to have at least one gazillionaire listener. Who is our richest listener? That's a good question for an episode one day. To prove it, you have to send us a check. whoever sends is the biggest check that doesn't bounce wins this little plaque here that I'm just now putting together. It's made of platinum, right?

Yeah, well, it's going to be once we get those checks, yes. You'll get a drawing of a plaque that's made of platinum. Oh, my gosh, even more valuable from a well-known internet cartoonist. Exactly. But we do try to understand the world around us, And sometimes that means putting things in context and understanding what are the patterns, what are the structures there,

and what clues do those patterns give us about the sort of fundamental nature of the universe. Yeah, so today on the podcast, we'll be talking about a particle in nature that is maybe not the most famous one and maybe not the most well-known one or consequential in your existence, which does, I think, tell you a little bit about

and told humanity a little bit about how the universe works. Yeah, this is the non-gazillionaire cousin. This is the cousin that ended up maybe sleeping under the overpass and wearing funny clothes to the family reunion. I feel bad for this particle now. This particle doesn't need your help. It's very massive.

Yeah, so in today's episode, we'll be talking about... The Miwan, the electrons mysterious, lesser-known, much more massive cousin. And I'm biased, of course, because I'm a particle physicist, but I think it's really fascinating to think about how we know each particle is there. We talk about the standard model of particle physics sometimes, but

that's a theoretical construct. It's like our idea for how these particles might relate to each other, and that's fascinating, and we'll dig into all that. But I think it's also really important to remember each of these were discovered. There's a story behind each particle. Humanity didn't know what existed, and then boom,

some experiment revealed it. And on the podcast, we've talked about the first discovery of the particle, how the whole concept of a particle was created, the electron. Then we talked about how we know the photon is a thing, how we know it's really a particle, the photoelectric effect. And so now we're going to take the next step and talk about the discovery of the muon. Yeah, because, you know, I think that every particle tells a story, you know, and also every story is made out of particle. So there's kind of this really weird, confusing loop there that honestly gives me a headache.

Yeah, this is like the superhero origin story, particle version. Yeah, so the muon is not a name that rolls off the tongue. It makes me think of maybe cows, muons, maybe. Muon. Muon, muon, mu off. Muon, mu off. I was thinking sort of a karate kid thing there. Oh, I see.

Back to the 80s references. Yeah, back to the 80s references. And it's funny, actually, because the name muon is totally inappropriate. We'll dig into it later, but they named it before they discovered it. because they thought it was going to be a different particle. And then they sort of changed the name later. It's not a great history for naming particles. Oh, boy, my favorite topic in science.

Yeah, and so I was wondering, how much do people know about muons? Is it a famous particle? Or is it sort of the darker cousin of the electron that nobody really knows about? Hasn't gotten the same Instagram attention. The black sheep, the goatee-wearing particle of the family. tree. Now you're setting it up to be like the grumpy particle that's going to come in with some evil plan to finally get its revenge and it's... You already made this particle the homeless particle that lives under a bridge, so... Yeah, that was the sad particle that deserves our love

and compassion, not the one that's been plotting its victorious return to the center of attention. Well, you never know with these particles, you know. Physics is full of surprises. There is a lot of drama. But as usual, I walked around and I asked people if they knew what the muon was and how we knew it was a thing. Yeah, so before you listen to these answers, think about it for a second. If someone asks you what a muon is, would you know what it is? Have you heard it before? Here's what people had to say.

I'd say it's a unit of measure. It's like one of the fundamental elements or a particle of what makes up everything. A muon? No. I believe this to be the name of a subatomic particle. Luans, muons. shoot, I don't remember what classification they fall under as far as the naming conventions. Fundamental particle of some sort, it's real small.

Subatomic particles, how do we know what it does? How do we know new ones exist? So what's your opinion of these answers today? Pretty good. It sounds like most people have heard of it or heard of the word before. you know, very, only a few people said, never heard of it. Or I think it was a unit of measure. Like, you know, how much water would you like?

I'll have seven muons water. I wonder though if you pronounced it correctly. Maybe they knew about it, but just under a different pronunciation. You think I'm mispronouncing the name of muon? I don't know. I mean, what's the correct way? Is it Muon or muon? Like, if you're making it sound like a Disney movie,

like, oh, my favorite Disney princess is Mulan. My favorite Disney prince is Muon. Mouan. Oh, that is a great way, though, to get more attention for particles in the mainstream. We should get Disney to name the next Disney princess after a particle. Why not that? Why, it could be the next Pixar movie, what it's like? What's the emotional roller coaster ride of being a fundamental particle of nature? Yeah, there's so much to explore there. And I expect that we will be getting checks from Pixar when they make a billion-dollar movie out of it.

But I was impressed with these answers, though I want to pick a bone about one thing. People say, yes, it's a fundamental particle, totally cool. People also say it's a subatomic particle, or it's one of the fundamental particles that make up everything. And that's really a key idea that I think people have not understood about muons, that you can be a tiny particle and not be subatomic, not be part of the atom. Oh, I see. Subatomic doesn't just mean it's smaller than an atom. you're saying that it means that you're part of the atom.

Remember, fundamental particles have no size. They're dots. They're zero volume. So they're all smaller than the atom in that sense. So being fundamental guarantees you to be smaller than the atom. I think to me, subatomic means it's part of the atom. Like you break it up and you find it inside the atom. Okay.

So we'll get into that. But let's break it down for people first. What is a muon? And why does it sound like an electron, you know, it ends with O-N, but it's not the electron. Yeah, but it really is related to the electron. It's sort of like the electron's cousin. And by that I mean that it's identical to the electron in so many ways.

It has the same electric charge. It has the same interactions with matter, like it interacts via the weak force and via the electromagnetic force, but it doesn't feel the strong force, just like the electron. It has a neutrino, just like the electron has its neutrino. in so many ways, it's exactly the same as the electron. It's not like when you discover a new particle and it's totally different. Like a cork or a glue on this is just completely

different from the electron. This one is very, very similar to the electron. It's like weirdly similar, but then with one important difference. Okay, so it's a particle. Let's start with that. Oh, back it up. Yeah, let's back it up a little bit. It's not a cow. It's not a Disney princess.

So it's a particle, meaning like it's one of these things that you see nature in the universe, like things that pop up and you can touch them and it's a thing. Yes, muons are a thing. They are a little thing. They are particles. And they are little dots of matter.

They have mass and they have charge and they interact. Okay. So it's a particle like the electron, but you're saying, and you say it's a cousin of the electron, not that they share, like, not that their parents were siblings, but just like in the sense that it's very similar to the electron. Yeah.

When we organize our knowledge, we look for patterns, we look for similarities, right? Like when we were 100 years ago when the state of knowledge about the universe was the periodic table, we didn't just have like a pile of different elements and say, here's an element, there's an element. We said, oh, look, this one is similar to that one.

They're both really active, or these are really similar because they're both really inactive, or this one weighs a tiny bit more than that one. We notice patterns, we put those patterns together. In the same way, we're looking for patterns in the fundamental particles, so we try to figure out which ones are related to each other, and we have only a few handles on each particle.

There's only like a few things we can know about a particle. Right. And so is this a particle that we can see in our everyday lives? Like is it floating around? Does it move around wires and electricity like the electron? Or is this kind of a weird, one of those weird particles that you don't ever actually see? Yeah, you don't see the muon because it doesn't last for very long. It lives for 2.2 microseconds.

turns into an electron and some neutrinos. But they are actually everywhere. There's 10,000 muons going through a square meter of Earth every minute. So there's lots of muons everywhere, but you just can't really see them very easily because they don't last for very long. Wait, what I mean? How can they be everywhere, but also only last 2.2 microseconds? Does that mean that they're constantly coming into existence, lasting for 2.2 microseconds, and then

disappearing and breaking up? Or what does that mean? How can they be all around? but also evaporating at the same time. Well, there's two things going on there. One is you're right. They're being created when particles hit the atmosphere. So protons hit the atmosphere and they create a shower of particles,

some of which include muons. And those muons fly along a little bit. But they don't last very long, just 2.2 microseconds, and then they turn into electrons. But they last for 2.2 microseconds according to their clocks. Because they move really fast, there's a relativistic time dilation. So according to us, that 2.2 microseconds take. longer to click. And so for us, it can take like seconds or minutes for muons to decay.

Oh, but for them, if you're sitting on top of the muon, it would only last, you would only be alive for 2.2 microseconds. Yeah, that's the half-life of a muon. So a muon is not stable. It's not like an electron. It can just sit there for eons and eons and just be itself. A muon is a heavy particle, and heavy particles like to decay into lighter particles. In this case, the muon turns into an electron very quickly, according to its clock. Oh, I see. The ones that we see, the ones coming from the atmosphere are moving fast, so they last longer. But if I just created a muon here in front of me, it would last only for 2.2 microseconds. And it's not going anywhere.

If you could bake muons in your oven, you take them out of the oven. 2.2 microseconds later, boom, they turn into electrons. You got to eat them up real quick. Exactly. They're like making fortune cookies. Or toss them really fast, have him pop out of the toaster really fast, in which case it would last longer, technically, right? That's true. Yeah, exactly.

Somebody could shoot muons into your mouth and it would last long enough to get there. I wouldn't recommend that, though. That's not a suggestion for something somebody should do. And actually 2.2 microseconds is kind of a long time for a particle that's this massive to last. And so what does it mean that it disappears or breaks up? Like it's just unstable?

Like it's just, it's made out of other things and it breaks up or it literally just kind of evaporates into energy. and that energy turns into something else. Yeah, that's a great question. These are fundamental particles, so they're not made up of anything else as far as we know. The muon turns into the electron. It's not like it has an electron inside of it,

and it breaks up into an electron and other stuff. It converts. It goes from a muon. It turns via the weak force into a W particle and a neutrino, and then the W particle turns into an electron and another neutrino. So the muon turns into an electron, and two different neutrinos, but it didn't have those bits inside of it.

Remember, particle physics is like alchemy. We can convert one kind of matter into another kind of matter. Okay, so it doesn't break apart. It's just somehow, it's very existence. The universe sort of doesn't like it. Like it can't, it just ceases to exist and in favor of other things existing instead of it.

Yeah, and this is true for every particle that is pretty massive. The universe doesn't like massive particles. It's like putting a particle on the top of a hill. Eventually, it's going to roll down. And so the muon is like at the top of the hill, and the electron is rolling down to the bottom of the hill. Eventually, the muon is going to turn into the electron.

And every particle in nature that can do this does this. The only reason the electron doesn't is that there's no lighter particle for it to turn into. Oh, and that's why we are able to exist because the universe does seem to like electrons and quarks. which make us up. And so that's why we're stable. But if we were made out of mions, we would disappear pretty quickly. Yes, exactly.

We are made up of the lightest particles out there. Up quarks and down quarks are the lightest corks of the lightest corks. Electrons are the lightest version of that kind of particle called a lepton. So the matter that makes us up that's stable is made out of stuff that can't turn into lighter stuff because there is no lighter stuff for it to turn into. Right. Yeah. There's nothing for it to turn into.

So we stay where we are. but a muon is heavy and could turn into something else so it does. Precisely. And for those of you wondering, like, well, what about a photon? Why can't an electron turn into a photon? A photon is massless. Remember that there are rules about how these things happen, and one of those rules is conservation of electric charge.

An electron has minus one charge, so it can't turn into a photon, which has zero charge because you'd have to somehow disappear that charge. The only way for that to happen is for an electron to hit a plus one positron, and then they can turn into a photon together. But for a particle to just spontaneously decay, it has to convert to another particle that has all the same sort of quantum mechanical numbers. Okay, so the muon is the electron's massive cousin or massive sort of like alternate universe version of the electron, right? Yeah, it's 200 times the mass of the electron.

It's really, really massive. That's a lot. It's like 200 mists crunch into the same meat. Yes, exactly. It's like if you met another version of you, but you weren't bigger, you were denser or something. You're 200 times as much mass, but still fundamental. And it doesn't hang around existence very long. It usually breaks up into, or not breaks up, but it turns into lighter particles.

So we don't really see it around that much. But still, it's sort of an important part of the universe. And it seems that it's an important part of the universe. And also tells us a lot about the mysteries of how everything is put together. Yeah. And it actually lasts a long time for a heavy particle. Other particles that are heavy like the Higgs boson, they decay much more quickly. They decay in like 10 to the minus 20 seconds, whereas this one decays very slowly.

It's just 2.2 microseconds. And the reason is that it decays via the weak force, which is very weak. To the weaker the force, the longer takes for that decay to happen. All right, let's get into that a little bit more and also how it was discovered and why it is such an important particle. But first, let's take a quick break. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone to land this plane.

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Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so the muon decays by the weak force. What does that mean? How can something decay via a force? Like the force makes a decay? Yeah, the force sort of provides the avenue for the decay to happen. Like how does a muon turn into an electron just and just roll down a hill and say, now I'm an electron.

It has to be an interaction there. And so what happens is the muon turns into a W particle and a neutrino. And the W particle, remember, is the particle of the weak force. It's like the weak force version of the photon. And so that's what we mean when we say uses the weak force to decay. It doesn't just spontaneously happen. Something has to sort of carry that information. Something has to make it happen.

It's like a reaction. And that reaction always includes one of the forces. And in this case, it uses the weak force. Right. And that weak force came out of just its own energy. It uses the mass, right? The muon has a huge amount of energy in it because it has so much mass. And that mass is turned into the energy of the electron and the neutrinos that come out of it. So yeah, the weak force turns the mass of the muon into very small masses of these other particles and gives them a lot of energy. Right. And it ends up as an electron and two neutrinos.

Precisely. All right. Well, tell us, Daniel, how was it discovered and why is this an important particle? Well, it was discovered initially in cosmic rays. People saw these particles just sort of shooting from the sky, and they didn't understand what was making them, and they thought, oh, well, you know, we found a few particles, so these are probably electrons. This is, you know, in the early 1900s,

we didn't have a really deep understanding of how particles work. We didn't have a good bench of particles. And so people thought, you know, everything they saw, they thought in terms of the particles at the time. So you have to sort of wind your mind back to what we knew at the time, Back then, we knew about protons, we knew about neutrons, we knew about electrons. And so people saw these particles shooting from the sky. They didn't know what made them.

But what they saw was that they penetrated really far into matter, much more than electrons could. We saw the actual nuance, not what it looks like after it decays or turns into something else. Like we actually, you can actually see and feel the nuance. You can't really feel them, but you can make particle detectors that can detect them. You can actually do this in your garage using something called a cloud chamber. They were able to see them using detectors that they put together. And these detectors were like a cubic piece of film. Like remember the old way films worked, like light was exposed on the film.

You didn't have a digital camera or anything. And that made some kind of chemical change. You're saying you can make like a solid cube of this? Yeah, you just take a solid cube of it. You leave it up on a mountain and you leave it there for like six months. And then you cart it back down or you ask your grad students to do that. Then you slice it into pieces, and then you can develop each of those. And what you do is you see all the particles that shot through it in those six months.

And so they can see, and when they did this, they saw all these particles shooting through this film. And they were surprised at how far they were going, because electrons shouldn't get that far. Electrons penetrated in a little bit, and then they stop. But these particles were shooting all the way through. It's kind of like a bull in a china shop, you know, versus like a mouse in a china shop. Yeah, and they didn't understand that. They thought, well, are there two kinds of electrons? Are there sometimes electrons can penetrate really far?

It was really a puzzle at the time. What made them think it was an electron? Why couldn't it be like some kind of new atom or something? We did know it had negative charge. And so I think that's what made people think it was more likely to be an electron or something like an electron than something positive, like inside the nucleus. And remember at the time, we only knew basically about protons, neutrons, and electrons. And so everything we saw, we were like all of a sudden having this imagination that we could just explain everything in the universe in terms of these particles. And that was a great success of the particle model at the time, right?

Like everything could be built out of protons, neutrons, and electrons. What a wonderful simplification. And so when we first saw these particles that penetrated really far, we thought, well, it must be one of those. Right. But it was not. It was not. And people were able to then later produce it in the laboratory using collisions and all sorts of other stuff. And they discovered that if you put it in a magnetic field,

it didn't bend as much as an electron. And that's when they decided, you know what? This must be a different kind of thing. It's like a new version of the electron, a different flavor of the electron because it must be more massive, which is why it doesn't bend inside the magnetic field as much. It doesn't get deflected as much because it has so much mass, it just has more inertia.

Precisely. It takes a stronger magnetic field to bend a muon than it does for an electron. And this was kind of a scandal in particle. physics at the time. Scandal. Yeah, people were upset. They were like, what? A muon.

Who ordered that? Like, we don't need this. Get out of here with your ridiculous new particle. We have this beautiful description of the universe. We don't want more particles. Up until then, everything that you knew about helped make the universe. It's kind of what you're saying. Like, everything you knew about had a purpose.

Yeah, we had taken apart the stuff around us and found the basic building blocks. And then we didn't, some people were like, I don't want to hear stories about other building blocks that could be out there, it just sort of confuses the issue, right? It's a shift in the question, not just what are we made out of, but what is the basic organizing principle of the universe? It shows you all of a sudden that there's a larger question you didn't even think to ask. It's like you find something and you don't know what to do with it. Like it doesn't help you with what you knew about how things work. Yeah. You're putting together jigsaw puzzle and all of a sudden somebody hands you like a really big piece that just doesn't fit. And you're like, what? I didn't ask for

that. I don't need that. That doesn't help me with my problem. Like, well, but okay, but this piece is here and it's not going away. Right. Yeah. And so it makes you think that maybe there's another puzzle or that the puzzle is bigger than you think it is. Yes, all of a sudden you realize this is a three-dimensional puzzle and you've been only playing on two dimensions and it just blows your mind. And so that's, it's sort of an earthquake, an intellectual earthquake through the field at the moment. But it's also, it's a great opportunity. Those are the kind of discoveries that make you realize, wow, there's a whole larger question to ask, and it's a whole world of answers out there.

And of course, now we know there's not just the mule, there's also the tau, which is the even heavier version of it, and that every particle has these cousins. Yeah, I like how this counts as a scandal in physics. Like, was it on the front page of the daily physics news or the national inquiring, inquire of physics newspapers? People had to resign. Tabloids.

People had to give testimony about this. And there were... You know, physicists are not that exciting, so we just got to create drama wherever we can. Oh, I see. There was even more drama because some people had predicted the existence of a particle sort of similar to this.

Hmm. What do you mean predicted? Like, just guessing? Yeah, well, there was a famous physicist named Yukawa, the genius and won a Nobel Prize for all sorts of fascinating stuff. And he was trying to understand

the strong force. He was like, okay, the weak force, we have that one, we have the photon for the electromagnetism, but what mediates the strong force? And he did some calculations, and he thought, hmm, I bet there's a particle out there about 200 times the mass of the electron, and it mediates the strong force. All right, so that's his prediction, right? And back in the day, physicists would just make predictions. Like, here's my idea, and here's what I predict. Like, we need this for this, for what we know to make sense.

Yeah, just like with the Higgs boson. Peter Higgs said, this doesn't make sense to me. But if you look at the universe in a new way, then it makes more sense. And this new way predicts a new particle so you can test my theory. So that was what Yukawa did. And he predicted a new particle about 200 times the mass of the electron. Then they found this particle. And Yukawa was like, woo-hoo, I was right. But it turns out this particle has nothing to do with this strong force at all.

So it's just like a coincidence. Right. And he still got the Nobel Prize. He still got the Nobel Prize. But not for this. And not for this one. But he's sort of the reason why this particle has a strange name. Oh, really?

He was a fan of cows. I don't know if he liked Kobe beef. You know, the guy's Japanese or anything. But he, you know, we had the electron, which is really, really light. And we had the proton, which is like 2,000 times the mass of the electron. And he predicted a particle sort of at an intermediate mass. And so he wanted it called like the, you know, the mesotron, something where meso means like middle. And so that was the sort of the origin of this like, let's call these particles here, you know, in this mass region, we'll call the meso particles.

Wow. Wouldn't you have to call it the meso-on or mezzan-on or? I feel like just to be consistent here. And then later people were like, well, it's not really having to do with these other particles that we found at the same mass. But we'll just keep calling it the muon anyway. Right. I bet he wanted to call it the meon. after himself, yeah.

The I'm so smart on. Yeah, but you know, the physics were like, come on, dude. But it's a fascinating moment in physics because they're like, is it the neon or the yuan? Isn't the meon? How about we call it de mion, done, compromise.

That's exactly how these decisions get made and that's why we have such terrible names for particles. Yeah, so, but now it's a well-known thing. Like everyone knows about mons. They know that they know that they're, there and you can study them you can you can they're coming they're going through our bodies right now at 10,000 times per minute yeah 10,000 muons per square meter per minute and you're right at first it was totally exotic and what is this weird thing and now we know it's a relative of the electron

but also created another field which is cosmic ray physics it was the first cosmic ray scene and at first people weren't sure like where are these particles coming from we know they're coming down from the sky but are they made in the sky or whatever? and people did all these crazy experiments like balloon experiments where they shot detectors up into the atmosphere with balloons and discovered that the higher up you go, the more muons there are. And that tells you that like muons are being created in the upper atmosphere and then they're decaying as it sort of come down to Earth.

And finally people put together this picture that like particles were hitting the top of the atmosphere and creating these showers of particles and we were just sort of picking up the little last bits of the fireworks as they hit the surface. Right. I bet they'd also try to shoot a cow to the moon. That's where the inspiration comes. Well, you know how the Russians put a dog in one of their first attempt to go to space?

I won't comment as to whether particle physicist ever used a weather balloon to launch a cow. Yeah, they're like, we've got to up those Russians. A dog, anyone can launch a dog into space. He launch a cow. This is well before the space race. This is the cow race. But I love thinking about what it must have been to be a physicist. that time and to like crack open a whole new era of discovery by by you know putting photographic

plates up on mountains and just seeing like what's up there there's so many amazing things to discover so many like new worlds were opened up they discover that all this invisible stuff is happening around us that's really wonderful to sort of like crack open a new way of looking at the universe yeah all right let's get into the last bit here which is what does the muon teaches what does to tell us about how the universe is put together. But first, let's take another quick break. Imagine that you're on an airplane, and all of a sudden you hear this.

Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency, and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, until this, pull that, turn this.

It's just, I can do it my eyes close. I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And on our new show, no such thing. We get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise.

And then, as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to No Such Thing on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment, with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities.

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

sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vibras you've come to expect. And, of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community.

You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash, because, At the end of the day, you know, I'm me. Yeah. But the whole pretending and cold, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Your entire identity has been fabricated.

Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths,

and the way in which Family Secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Dinosaur, the Mi-On is a thing. It's there. it's super massive it looks just like the electron we can feel it

it's going through us right now why is it there that's the question that maybe a lot of people have I mean we don't need the muon to make iPhones or pizzas so why is it there is that the standard

upon which we judge things now if we don't need you for iPhones or pizzas you don't need to exist what else is there Daniel that's my whole life basically I just eat pizza and look at my iPhone personally

No, it's a good question. It's a question I'd like to know the answer to why does the muon exist? The short version of the answer is the title of a great book I read last year. It's called We Have No Idea, because we really do have no idea why the muon is there. It doesn't seem to be used for anything is what you're saying. Like neutrinos, I think, also are there, but we don't know why they're there, right? Yeah, neutrinos and muons and many of the other particles are not part of the atom. you don't use them to build up the stuff

that we're familiar with but they sort of can exist they're on nature's menu you might ask the same question about like some of the really heavy elements like why is plutonium a thing well it turns out you can assemble protons and neutrons

electrons in this way that's stable and it hangs out and it does this funny thing we call it plutonium and plutonium also decays right it like breaks up this one actually breaks up into other things but it's also kind of ephemeral Like, it's only there for so long before it becomes something else. Precisely.

And in the same way, we organize our list of particles, and we wonder, like, why are these there? What does this tell us about maybe one deeper layer of reality? Like, maybe the muons and electrons are made out of smaller particles, and these are just, like, different ways to assemble those little internal bits, right? And there's a few ways to assemble them. The way that there's a few ways to assemble protons and neutrons to get different elements. Maybe there's a few ways to assemble these little tinyons. One way is to get an electron, another way is to get a muon, another way is to get a tau, which is the third member of that

family. We just don't know. We know it's a clue, though, right? It's a tantalizing clue that there's something going on here. We just don't know what it means. It's a clue as to some sort of a hint that there's some sort of rule for how electrons exist. Like if you can make an electron that's heavier, maybe that tells you something about what makes an electron an electron. Precisely. And why there are three of them tells you something about how that rule has to play out because there's three electrons, the electron, the muon, and the tau. There's three neutrinos. There's also three up corks. There's three down quarks. There's something really fundamental going on there. We just don't understand, but it seems like an obvious clue. You know, it's like you're doing your jigsaw puzzle and you find this other weird piece. It turns out, oh, that piece fits into a different jigsaw puzzle you didn't even know about. And, you know, it's, is you start to get this larger picture. Right. Or you find that all of your pieces have three sides to them, then you start thinking, you know, whoever made this puzzle, if it was made by somebody had a thing for threes. Yeah. The universe has a thing for threes. And we don't know why that is. The muon was our first clue that particles have copies at all. And now it turns out every particle has three copies. And so that's a huge open question. It's the kind of question, people are going to look back in 100 years and be like, man, that was so obvious. Why couldn't they figure it out?

If I was a physicist in 2019, I would totally have figured it out. But it's not so easy when you don't know the answer, when you have to come up with it. But it's important for people to understand it's not part of the stuff that we are made of, but it does answer this larger question. It's like, what is the sort of context of everything? That's why we're trying to figure out, like, what are all the particles? Because the more particles you put into this table, the more clues we get as to what the rules are for making this table, and then maybe we can peel back a layer

and show how this table is put together. Right. Or I guess maybe a question I would have is how do you even know it's a separate thing? Like, why isn't it just called the heavy electron? Could it just be an electron that just gets a lot of mass added onto it somehow through energy or something?

That's a deep question. It goes sort of to like what do we call a particle? Part of the identity of the particle is its mass. Like that's how we identify what particle we're talking about. We measure the mass and we say, well, if it has this mass, it's an electron. It's sort of semantics, but it's what we mean by an electron.

We mean quantum dot in space that has these properties and one of those is the mass. Oh, I see. And there are only a few. It's not like there's a knob. You can't have halfway between an electron and muon. There's like the electron mass,

the muon mass, the tau mass. There's some notches there. Right. And so this was the first particle that kind of we found outside of the ones that make up atoms. Is that what you're saying? That this was the first one that was weird.

Yeah, precisely. It's weird and cute. I'm glad you're finally putting positive attributes on the, on the muon. You're not trying to make it. I said weird. I didn't say cute.

I think somebody has a particle fetish, and it's not the cartoonist. Yes. Well, maybe the particle physicist has a particle fetish. I will totally own up to that. I love you, particles. I think we all love particles by necessity. We can't live without us. You just like particles when they make up pizza and iPhones, though.

Otherwise, you don't care about them. You objectify particles. And cartoonists. Cartoonists. Well, I think this particle is interesting in that it also kind of hints, you know, that the universe is full of these small little details that people can't explain right now. And then maybe tell us a little bit about that there are other mysteries yet to discover. Yeah.

And, you know, the story of how the muon was discovered is also motivational, right? People saw this weird stuff in these pictures and they could have just shrugged it off. They could have been like, I don't know, electrons are doing something weird that day, whatever. But instead it cracked open this whole other mystery. And we're still doing that. We still don't totally understand the muon. One thing we'd like to understand is the muon's magnetic field. Oh, it's odd.

It has a weird magnetic field. Yeah. These particles, remember, have quantum spin. So they're doing something weird like spinning. That's giving them each a little magnetic field because they have electric charge and spinning charges give magnetic fields. But when we predict the magnetic field of the muon. from what we know about it, and then we go and we measure the magnetic field, it's a little bit different. It's not exactly right. And that little difference, we could say, I don't know, shrug it

off. Maybe the muon is doing something weird that day. Or it could be a clue. It could be that the muon is like interacting with new weird, heavy particles we haven't even seen before. It could be the first evidence that there are more particles out there that we haven't yet discovered. And also, they help us unravel ancient mysteries. Like maybe you heard about how muons are used to take a picture of the inside of pyramids. What do you mean? Like we can make a muon viewer? Like a, like neon glasses?

No, we can use muons to like x-ray a pyramid. Because what happens is muons, there's a zillion muons, shooting from the sky through everything. And if you take a muon detector and you put it on the other side of something, you can tell sort of the density of that thing. Because muons will penetrate air differently than they'll penetrate rock, for example. And so you take a lot of muons, you shoot them through something, you can tell whether that thing is hollow or not hollow.

And so they did this recently by looking at muons that went through the Great Pyramids because we're curious, like what's inside the Great Pyramid, but you don't want to take it apart. And so they use it basically to x-ray the Great Pyramids. Like you put a detector underneath the pyramid or what? Yeah, you take the detectors as far underneath the pyramids as you can in some of those rooms that do exist. And, you know, you can't build.

an x-ray gun the size of the pyramids, but the sky is a muon gun, right? The sky is shooting muons at us all the time. The sky is a muon gun. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah, put on your tin hats, folks, because the sky really is shooting particles at you.

Sounds like I need like a lead titanium hat, not a tin hat. Maybe, you know, maybe the pharaohs had the right idea. Maybe that's why they had those really weird headdresses. Well, that's what I was going to ask is, how do you know what meons... looked like after they go through aliens, if there are aliens inside the pyramid, you wouldn't know.

Wow, I was so ready with an answer to that question until you went to aliens, and now I'm totally at a loss. Well, that's right. That's why I'm here, Daniel, to ask the tough questions that are on everyone's minds. Joking aside,

they did find something inside the pyramids. They think they may have found a new, empty room inside the pyramids that they didn't know about before. Full of cows. Because the way the muons, full of cows, Before the cows are the aliens, actually, to wrap it all up. Then we're in deep trouble when their overlords come and they're like, what are you guys doing?

And they say, welcome to our leader, King, Mewon. The first. The first of his name. No, they found that inside the Great Pyramid, there may be a new hollow section that nobody knew about before. And it's only thanks to muons that we were able to muon X-ray the pyramids. Hmm. A newon chamber they found. Thanks, it's the muon. Yes. So it may not be inside your iPhone and it may not be inside your pizza, but it does help unravel ancient mysteries about ancient civilizations. All right. Well, with that, we will wrap it up and we hope you enjoyed that little discussion about this unknown but super massive and mysterious part of the universe.

Part of our family of cousins, particles, big, small, massive renounce. not, we love you all. At least I do. Thanks for tuning in. 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 Horre. Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases.

Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier.

Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Honey German and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias. Come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with, interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition?

No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending, with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And, of course, the great bevras you've come to expect.

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