Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Why can quarks never be alone?

Episode Date: January 21, 2020

Can quarks ever be free? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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podcasts. Hey, Jorge, did you know that not all particles are created equal? Huh, you mean like some of them are heavier or more charged than others? Oh, that's definitely true, but also not all of them have the same rights. Same rights? I mean, is there a particle constitution that grants them certain freedoms? Only some of them have freedoms. Electrons can be free, but quarks cannot. Oh, man, poor quarks. Somebody ought to hit the streets and protest for them. That's right. I can see this clever signs already. Set the quarks free.

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'm an activist for the freedom of quirks. And welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio. in which we talk about all the amazing and crazy and wonderful and beautiful and insane things about our universe and try to explain them in a way that makes you laugh and hopefully makes you understand the way they work. That's right. We talk about all the big things in the universe, the origin of the universe, how big is the universe? And we also talk about the smaller things in the universe, the little bits that make up everything around you. I feel like it's kind of cheating that in physics or in particle physics, I get to work on both the biggest, the baddest, the most original,

the cosmic questions, and also the tiniest. I'd be like it's at both extremes of the universe. Right. Everything in between, you don't care. That's chemistry, man. Who cares? Chemistry, biology, philosophy, life, your happiness. That's right. Democracy, human rights. That's all beyond the scope of your physics research. Yeah, exactly. And I don't mean to say nobody cares about chemistry. Chemistry is really important. Otherwise, we wouldn't have pharmaceuticals and all that good stuff.

I also said human rights, I did it, but you don't seem to want to caveat human rights as well. I'm more worried about backlash from chemists than people advocate. That's like, chemists have acids, acids and dangerous things that can kill you. Yeah, but maybe it's just that, you know, that stuff is harder. It's more complicated for me, physics at the extremes. They're really tiny and they're really big. Sort of the simplest questions, the most basic and therefore the most interesting and also easier to grapple with. Well, today we're getting into some things.

that are kind of the opposite of that, right? We're getting into the nitty-gritty complex details of the legality of particles, kind of. What rights particles have? Yeah, because when we study the universe, what we'd like to do is to take it apart. If I look at the banana in front of me and I say, what's this made out of?

I mean, what particles is it made out of? And when you do that, you're sort of taking an intellectual leap. You're saying this banana could get blown up into its constituentured particles. You could break it up into these little bits. And that's an important part of how we think about understanding the universe. But it's not always possible to actually separate those particles. Right.

Do you actually have a banana in front of you, Daniel? I have a metaphysical banana here in front of me. Here, I'll pass you my banana using the Ray and Kylo-Ren teleportation system. Just digitize the banana and email it to me. Oh, there you go. There you go. Somebody should develop a device that scans a banana, turns it into an electronic banana signature. And then at the other side, like 3D prints a banana.

Right, using AI. Don't forget AI. Using AI precisely because every kitchen appliance needs AI now. But anyways, we are going to be talking about some of the rules that govern the universe at the smallest levels. Because there are rules, and that's kind of what physics is a little bit all about, right? Yeah. And once recently on a podcast, we talked about magnetic monopoles, how you could take an atom and separate its positive. and negative charges and move them far away to infinity and they could ignore each other.

But you can't do that with the north and the south of the magnetic monopole. And today we'll be talking about a sort of similarly confusing, sticky topic in particle physics. Right. It's a rule about the universe that physicists don't really know why it's there, right? It's kind of another of the big mysteries in nature. Yeah, I think that describes every rule about the universe. You know, we don't know why any of them are there. Some people write in, they ask me questions like that to say,

why is electromagnetism this way and not that other way? And I think, wow, you're a physicist because that's the question we all want the answer to. We don't know. You're a physicist because you don't know anything. You too can get paid for it like I am. Because you embrace your ignorance and you want to ask why. And it's a deep question in physics. Why is something this way, not the other way?

You know, maybe someday in the future of physics we'll be looking at the equations of the universe and we'll say, oh, it makes sense. This is the only set of equations we're going to. could possibly have. And so it has to be this way. Or we can be looking at the equations to say, well, this is one of 10 to the 100 possible universes. So why is it this way, not the other way we might not ever know. Right, right. Again, you don't know. That's the way you summarize physics. In some, we don't know. We have no idea, which is the title of a great book I've heard which everyone should check out. I don't know. I heard it has a lot of puns in it.

Oh, like the, are they as good as the ones we have in our show here? They're better because they're edited. Thank you, Courtney. Well, today on the podcast we'll be tackling a pretty sticky subject, and it's the question of a special rule that governs one of the particles of nature. So today on the podcast we'll be tackling the question, Why can quarks never be alone? Yeah, so it turns out that one of the fundamental particles in nature,

the quark has some special rules that govern what it can and cannot do. That's right. Quarks feel the strong nuclear force, and electrons don't. And anything that feels a strong nuclear force is subject to that force's really weird properties. We've talked about it a few times in the podcast, how it has strange properties like color. But today we'll be talking about one very special property that really likes to stick these quarks together. Yeah, and so the question is, whether, Quarks can be alone by themselves. And, you know, does it, does it mean alone, like, um, like psychologically, like they feel alone? Or is it like alone where they have to be in, they can't be in a room by themselves? Yeah, you, uh, you can't put them in solitary confinement for too long or they go crazy. Is this another kind of quark you never heard about? Not the strange cork or the charm quark, but the crazy quark.

The, uh, that's right, the inmate quark. No, that's not a laughing matter. Solitary confinement is pretty serious stuff. But we have. have found in physics, and as you said earlier, we don't know why, but we have found in physics that when you try to separate a quark, to pull it far away from everything else to isolate it, the way you could take, for example, an electron and put it in the middle of space. You just can't do that with a quark. It's physically impossible. Wow. The universe doesn't allow it. It would take an infinite amount of energy, which would then just collapse and do a bunch more quarks. All right. We'll get into that in more detail. But first, as usual, we were curious to know how many people out there, first of all, I had heard of corgs, and second of all,

knew whether or not courts can ever be alone. So UC Irvine was closed for the holidays, and so these questions went to random strangers at coffee shops who were amenable to answering questions. And as usual, at UC Irvine, 99.9% of random students are willing to answer my questions, but the rate of acceptance at coffee shops is much, much lower. Which I think says something awesome about students at UCI. So a physicist wearing sandals and scraggly hair is normal at a college campus, but in a commercial,

regular coffee shop, you're seen with more skepticism. Yeah, or, you know, maybe it's just the slice of people that you encounter at a coffee shop are less open to that kind of stuff. I'm surprised you did it twice and they didn't kick you out the first time. I had to go to a variety of coffee shops. Oh, I see.

You try never to hit the same one twice. That's how you can... They have my picture up on the wall now, and so... Oh, good. They press that little red button under the counter when they see me coming in. Oh, man. I can picture you walking into one in a disguise just to try to get your coffee. That's right.

I'm disguised as a chemist sometimes. You wear the grouch marks, you know, glasses and nose and mustache. But no, wait, that's already you. No, I just put on a lab coat and safety goggles, right? I see. I see. You wear nice clothes. Is that what you're saying?

To disguise yourself. Physicists have to dress up to become chemists. Yes, that's definitely true. All right, so here's what people at that coffee shop had to say. And have you guys heard of the particle called a quark? Yes. No. Did you know that quarks can never be found by themselves?

No. I've heard of it, but I don't know too much about it. Did you know that you can never find a cork by itself that can never be alone? No. Yes. Did you know that corks can never be alone? No, I did not know that. Although there are two meanings for quark.

I wasn't sure if you meant the yogurt meaning or the particle meaning. I think yogurt can be alone, yeah. I have, but I can't tell you what it is. I haven't. Did you know that quarks can never be alone? Is it an animal? No, it's a tiny little particle. Okay.

Yes. You know that corks can never be by themselves? Actually, I didn't know that. I guess I haven't looked into it deep enough. No? I actually think I have. And I have no idea why. I wouldn't know that or what it is.

Yeah. You have? Of course. They're made up of gluons, I believe. And they make up protons and electrons, and I think neutrons too. Cool. Did you know that quarks can never be by themselves, they can never be alone? Yeah, because they have to switch between, because they're, I don't, I tried to study this,

but I don't completely understand it because I know, I can't remember, is it quarks that are labeled red, blue, green? And they have to switch from zone to zone. to zone. They always have to be occupied, and they can't exist by themselves. Yeah, that's right. Do you know why? I do not know why. No, I couldn't figure that out, actually. Q-U-A-R-K? No, I haven't. All right. I guess not a lot of people had heard of the quark. No, there's not a lot of familiarity about the quark, the particle, though one friendly person commented on quirk the yogurt. Oh, again. All right. It must be a really popular brand of yogurt. It's a whole dairy product, I think. It's not even just a brand. It's like a kind of thing, you know.

Well, I like how this person said, do you mean the particle or the yogurt? Because this person knew about both. And he's like, let's clarify, are we talking food or physics here? She was ready to talk about cork the yogurt or cork the particles. Yes, I was impressed. It's a renaissance person right there. Yeah, precisely. And there were some misunderstandings about corks, people who think that they are made up of gluons or that electrons. are made up of quarks. So definitely a topic that we should cover, explain to people what quarks are and how they were.

Right, because obviously they're not made out of gluons. Everyone knows that. No, of course not. Glue is made out of glue ones. That's right. It's a sticky subject, of course. Yeah, so let's get into it. So first of all, Daniel, what are corks?

And talk to me about this idea that they can never be alone. Yeah, so quarks are one of the fundamental particles. If you take matter apart, you'll find, of course, that it's made out of atoms, and those atoms have inside them electrons whizzing around the nucleus. And then inside the nucleus, we have neutrons and protons. Even glue is made out of those things. Everything is made out of those things, everything that you've eaten, at least. There are kinds of matter out there in the universe that are not made out of atoms, dark matter specifically, but everything that you've encountered, everything you've sat on, everything any human has ever eaten or thrown at

each other is made out of atoms. And so it's a pretty universal recipe. Right. What if my kid ate some dark matter? Should I call the doctor or? I think you should call Sweden because you're getting a Nobel Prize. Oh, really? For proving that dark matter exists.

For feeding my child dark matter. Are you talking about the dark matter that goes into your child or out of your child, though? Because that's a whole different topic. All right. Let's move on before. Somebody calls social services on me. No, but the amazing thing about this is that it's a recipe for all kinds of stuff. Like everything out there has the same number of protons, neutrons, and electrons.

I just can't get over this fact. Like every kind of material out there, every element, right, has one proton per electron and just about one neutron per proton. So it's one to one to one no matter what it is. Right. And so it's not just any particle or any random or insignificant particle in nature. This is like the particle, right? I mean, you and I are made out of them.

Everyone is made out of them. it's one of the big two particles that make up everything. Yeah, and so the most of the stuff that's inside you is made out of these protons and neutrons. But the protons and neutrons are not actually themselves fundamental. They're made of these smaller particles. And those are the quarks, the up quark and the down quark. And you mix those together in one way, you get a proton.

You mix them together. Another way, you get a neutron. But of course, the proton and the neutron, you know, those are the physical particles that we can see, we can interact with, we can separate them. you can have like one proton and have one neutron over here. And for a long time, people thought that they might be fundamental. But then in the 70s, by shooting super high energy electrons at the proton, we found that

there was structure inside the proton. We found that there were particles inside there. And so that's what the corks are. Right. And so that's what a cork is. And there's something funny about them because, for example, electrons can be by themselves. You can't have like a single electron in your hand, for example. But quarks, you're telling me

have kind of a special rule that they can never be alone. Yeah, the way that we found out about electrons, you know, is that we separated them from their atom. We isolated them so we could study them. We talked about in the podcast, JJ Thompson, ionized atoms and made beams

of electrons before he even knew what he was doing. And the way we discovered the nucleus is the same way. We separated it. We broke the atom into pieces so we could study it. But with the quarks, we've never been able to do that. What we've been able to do is poke the inside of the proton and see the quarks sort of bouncing around in there. We have been able to break up the proton into quarks, but we can't ever see the quarks

by themselves. They are so much in love with being together. You always find them in pairs or triplets. Well, I'm a little bit confused because you told me that, you know, at the large Hadron Collider, you take protons and you smash them together. But when you smash them together, you're saying they don't actually break apart. smash protons together at the large hadron collider. You're right. I was not lying. And what happens there is that the corks inside one proton interact with the corks inside the other proton, but there's a rule about sort of the maximum distance that a cork can ever be from

another quark. And so what happens there is you can have like two corks go pair off to be their own little particle, but the quarks can never leave by themselves. Oh, so you smash protons together, which are made out of corks inside. But when they smash it together, it's not like an explosion where everything flies off in all kinds of directions. The quarks, you know, you can't have a cork flying off from a collision by itself.

That's right. You can't do that. They always have to be found in pairs or in triplets. There's no way to find a cork all by itself. Oh. Well, you've never seen it by itself, right? Yes, you're right. In physics, we should never say never.

We don't think it's possible. Nobody's ever seen a free thing. quark, nobody's ever isolated a cork by itself. Quarks are, in that sense, more mathematical than any other kind of particle because we've never seen them on their own. They only exist sort of as part of our model for what's inside all these particles that we think are made up of quarks. You've got protons. You've got protons. And you mix quarks and lots of other ways, you can get all sorts of other crazy particles, pyons and mesons and ada particles and omega particles and all sorts of crazy stuff. Right. Bananaons.

You're just going to try to slip that in there like I didn't notice. I was hoping. You would just go with it. But I guess paint the picture for me, right? So at the large Hadron Collider, you have protons kind of going at each other, right? They're coming at huge speeds. And in each proton, you have three quarks kind of bound together.

They're stuck together at each one. And then the two protons smash into each other. They do. And you create this mess. And you're saying that, you know, everything that leaves out of that collision, that explosion, has to be paired up. Like, no matter how you smash them together, somehow the corks always pair up when they fly off together. That's right.

And one possibility is that you just sort of rearrange the quarks. You say, I got three quarks from this proton. I got three quarks from the other proton. So I'll just pair them up. Maybe I'll get like three pairs of quarks and this is going to go fly off and make me three pions. That's one possibility. But sometimes if you put enough energy into these things, the quarks. sort of try to go free.

Like you push one quark off in one direction, another one off in another direction, and none of the other original quarks from the proton are near it. And it's like flying off into outer space by itself. But physics says no. And what, yeah, and what happens there is that some of its energy gets converted into making a new quark. It pops a new quark out of the vacuum so that quark doesn't have to be by itself. Wait, what? So you're saying one of the quarks after the colloquy,

was going off to the left, but because physics says no, it like it disappears and it reappears somewhere else? Say, for example, you have a cork going off really fast to the left and another cork going off really fast to the right. So the distance between them is growing. Well, what happens is that takes a huge amount of energy and that energy gets converted into making new corks. Like you create new corks, one for the one going to the left and one for the one going to the right. So each of them now has a companion. So they're not by themselves. The university is like, you're going off by yourself. Here, I'll make you a companion. Yeah. And that's because the strong nuclear force is super duper weird. And we'll talk about that

in more detail in a minute, I hope. But the short version is, unlike electromagnetism, where as the distance between them grows, the force gets weaker and fades. In the strong force, as the distance between them grows, the force gets stronger. So it takes more and more energy to separate them. And eventually, there's enough energy to create new matter. All right, let's get into the details of that a little bit more. But I think it's pretty considered of the universe, not to be looking out for quarks like that, you know? Depends. I mean, if you're corking, you just want some, like, me time, then it's not so considerate.

And it's a curse. I see. Love is a curse, you're saying. If you ever grew up in a house that's kind of crowded, you'd know that there's value to time by yourself, you know? You want time with your book and just, like, nobody asks me to do something or ask me a question, you know. My family is pretty cool. quirky and quirky. You got some strange quarks in your family and some charming quarks, you know, of course. Right.

All right. Let's get into more of this kind of mysterious force that makes quarks just so that they're not alone. But first, let's take a quick break. hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances.

Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious.

Wait a minute, Sam. 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.

I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Othia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstyles play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us.

Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss Session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Daniel, so it seems like the universe doesn't like for quarks to be alone to the point where it even makes up new quarks when it needs to, whenever it sees a cork going off to be alone, it makes a new cork to pair up with it, which is

pretty amazing. And you're telling me that this is all because of the force between quarks. Yeah, one of the three or four fundamental forces of nature, depending how you count. We have gravity, which we don't understand quantum mechanically. We have electromagnetism and the weak force, which I think of together as bound as part of the electroweak force. And then we have the strong nuclear force. And this is a thing that holds the proton together and holds the neutron together. And also it's a thing that holds the nucleus together because there's little residual bits of it left over after you've made the proton and the neutron. But this force is really powerful and really different from any of the other forces. It's called the strong force,

right? Yeah, not the strange force, though. Maybe they should have called it the strong nuclear force. If you get a PhD in the strange force, does that make you a doctor strange? It absolutely officially does and gives you power over time. It's happened to everybody. Right, right. Even the Benedict Cumberbatches of the world. Yeah. And, you know, we like to categorize things in physics.

We like to say, all these things are all similar to each other and what connections can we draw between them. But we also like to contrast things. We like to say, look, these forces are similar because they're all forces, but they have some big difference. in them. And so those things can teach us like, what kind of forces can there be in the universe? Right. And the strong force is different in basically every

way that it can be different from the other forces. Really? Huh. So it's one of the four fundamental forces, but it's very different than the other three or the other two? Yeah, it's very different from, I would say, the other two. For example, gravity has one way you can push, right?

You can only pull things together. And that's because there's only one kind of mass. You can't have positive and negative mass. So gravity is only attractive. Electromagnetism, right, works on positive and negative charges. And so we can both push and pull. It pushes if two positive charges or negative charges come near each other. It pulls if you have opposite charges near each other.

Right. But the strong force is weird because it has three charges. And we call those red, green, and blue. And so it's, it just blows your mind and thinking like, whoa, there can be like a three different kinds of charges and it requires different kinds of math, like to balance them out, to neutralize them and all sorts of stuff. Right, because I was just thinking that the one

I think most people are familiar with is the electro magnetic force, right? In terms of if there being charges, we're so used to just there being two, right, plus or minus. Yeah, you're used to there being two and used to be, there being two kinds of magnets, right? North and south. What if they were like three kinds of magnets?

Right. North, south, and east or something, and the east magnet was super weird and like, it it would be a really different force. Well, that's what the strong force is. It has three kinds of charges. Like a plus, minus, and X. Well, red, green, and blue.

And that's why you can have bound states of two quarks, because you can have, like, a red and an anti-red, or three quarks if you have, like, a red, green, and blue. Because red, green, and blue add up to neutral. Well, I guess step me through this a little bit more because I know that, you know, if I have a plus charge and a minus charge, they'll attract each other in electromagnetic forces.

Or if you have two pluses, they'll repel each other. So how does it work if you have three? You know, it's like two I know, three is kind of a weird thing. Are you asking me how to have a threesome in particle. Yes, I was trying to avoid that. Menage of Tois reference. But if you want to go there, let's go there. I mean...

It turns out to be pretty different. You have two pluses and a minus or two minuses in a plus. I see. It's a whole different genre of the thing, right. Exactly. No, it's a very different kind of situation. And the weird thing is basically anything that has color that isn't neutral will attract the other thing. So red will attract red, red will attract anti-red, well, red will attract green, green will attract blue, blue will attract anti-blue.

It's basically always a party when it comes to the strong force. Wait, so anything that has a color charge attracts other things with color charge. Anything that has a color charge will interact with the other things that have a color charge. Whether or not they attract or repel depends on where they are, how close they are. Well, if you take a red quark and an anti-red quark, if they're too close together, they will repel each other. If they're too far apart, they will attract each other. Oh, I see. So they like to be sort of a specific distance apart.

Yes, they like to be a specific distance apart. Anything else takes more energy. So if you have a red cork and an anti-red corkork and you want them closer together, you got to squeeze them because they repel that. They avoid that. Similarly, if you want them further apart, you've got to put in energy. I see. And as they get further and further apart, it takes more and more energy. And that's the thing that's really weird about the strong force. Like with electromagnetism, you take plus and a minus and you pull them apart. The force between them starts to fade, right? As they get further and further apart, it goes like one over R squared. But what about like

a red and a green? Same situation. I mean, there's some little details there for a higher order calculations, but roughly it's about the same. Oh, so everyone wants to be with everybody else. But not too close. But not too close. So why isn't everything just being pulled together? Why aren't my red quarks just totally, you know, pulling the red quarks in my microphone or in the sun to me?

Because your red quarks are all in color neutral bound states, mostly protons and neutrons. Oh, they're happy. They're happy. They're in a happy threesome. They're in a happy threesome, yeah. And, you know, why is the nucleus held together? Because it's a little bit of strong force that leaks out of the proton and holds those protons together. So, mostly they're in a totally happy state.

But, you know, sometimes the neutron decays into a proton. Oh, I see. It's like asking why aren't all my plus charges in my body attracting the plus charges in the sun? And the answer is that my plus charges are all happy stuck with a negative charge inside of me. Yeah, exactly. Most of your plus charges are in neutral atoms. And so the neutral atoms don't really interact unless you get really close and then it depends on how close you are to the plus part or the minus part. But on average, you're neutral. And so you don't interact with the electric charges in the rock or in your Mazdo or whatever. So if I had like the power to create a red cork right in front of me, like poof, I just made one in front of me, it would be super attracted to or maybe not. would look for the closest single quark and get attracted to that. That's right.

But it would take an enormous amount of energy to create that quark and have it be really far away from any partner. Oh, because the potential energy would be so big. Precisely. Think about the opposite. Say you had a quark and an anti-red quark and you wanted to separate them. How much energy would it take to separate them to be like, you know, one galaxy away from each other?

Well, every meter you separate them would take more and more energy. It's not like with electromagnetism where once you get them far apart, they basically ignore each other. You know, a cork here would feel a cork in Andromeda super duper powerfully. That would be, you know, an incredible amount of energy. And that's the really weird thing about the strong force is that the power of the force doesn't degrade with distance. It gets stronger. It's like a spring. It's like a mechanical spring.

Exactly. It goes, it's linearly with a distance, just like a mechanical spring. And so is that how you explain why there? you can't find one alone in nature? Is that it just, it would just take too much energy? Yeah, and that energy prefers to turn into matter. So if you did take a cork and an anti-cork and you pull them apart, that would require a huge amount of energy, you'd be pouring energy into it to separate them.

And nature prefers to not have that much unstable energy. It prefers to decay into lower energy states like we talked about another time, and it creates new corks. And so it creates a new partner for those corks you were trying to pull apart. so that no cork is by itself. So let's say I grabbed one cork with my right hand, and I grabbed the other cork, another cork with my left hand, and I start pulling...

I hope you're wearing safety goggles here. I always wear safety. They're called reading glasses. All right, so you're pulling your quirks apart? Yeah, I'm pulling apart, and I have big muscles, and I'm just pulling them apart, and it's like, oh, it's really hard, it's really hard. And then at some point, the universe just snaps, like it just...

You know, it'll just, it'll be like the spring broke, and suddenly I'll have two quarks in one hand and two quarks in the other hand. Precisely, yeah. And you can even generate more particles. In fact, what you just described is essentially my job. That's what we do with the Large Hajon Collider. You wear a safety glasses.

I do wear safety glasses, but we smash protons together, and that pushes effectively the quarks away from each other. And when that happens, we see particles get created out of the vacuum, out of that, that energy gets turned into particles. And you don't just get one. Sometimes you get a whole stream, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 particles,

depending how much energy you've created. It's like the universe says, you know, it's too much effort to pull these two quarks together. It's too much effort to fight Jorge's amazing biceps and muscles. I'll just pair up the corks that in each of his hands. That's right. Jorge versus the universe.

The universe wins. That's right. No, think about it like tension in a string. You know, it stretches and stretches and stretches, eventually it snaps, and it just prefers to be in a lower energy state. And that lower energy state means having those particles exist. We talked about it statistically on another podcast. You know, the universe prefers configurations where there's lots of possible ways for it to be. And so it will always decay to a low energy configuration where that energy can be pointed in lots of different directions.

And if you create these particles, then there's lots of different ways to arrange them. Or if you have all the energy just stored in that field, between the cork and anti-cork is one configuration. So just an entropy argument tells you why a very tense single configuration, high-energy state will decay to a bunch of particles. And what is that distance at which the string breaks? You know, like if I'm pulling them apart,

what is the distance at which it just pops and it becomes four quarts? It depends on the energy, but, you know, we're talking femtometers. That's the preferred distance for quarks. Quarks like to be, you know, a few femtometers apart. And so push them further away,

and you'll start to create new corks. Right. And you put in really a lot of energy, you can create heavy quarks, you know, charm corks and bottom corks and that kind of stuff. Oh, wait. What if I pull, it depends on how I pull them apart? Well, the universe, we don't know how it randomly decides, but if you have enough energy, it can create heavier particles.

And not all the quarks sort of cost the same in energy. The up cork and the down cork are the cheapest corks, are the lightest ones, but the charm and the strange and the bottom, these are heavier. cost more energy to make. So if you put enough energy, then you sort of go up the menu and you can make some of these heavier quarks do. Interesting. And so what is it that makes the quarks pair up in threesomes, in pairs of, and what do you call triplets? The reason is that you can neutralize the strong force using three of these charges. It's because the strong force has

these three charges. And so, for example, two ups and a down and two downs and an up can give you a neutral object in color space, in this strong nuclear charge, right? In electromagnetism, you can't imagine putting two pluses and a minus together to get zero. The math doesn't work. But in color space, in strong nuclear charge, a red, a green, and a blue equals zero. And so that's why you can get a threesome of quarks because they can balance each other out. That's a stable configuration. That's a stable configuration. So you can have pairs or you can have triplets. And And recently, people have been trying to figure out ways to get like pentacorks, like combinations of five quarks that are stable together.

But that's sort of a cutting edge research. So if I have a red and a green paired up together, that would be looking for a blue to join it. Yes, precisely. It would be desperate for a blue to finish out its color party. And, you know, the strong force is really strong. I mean, it's strange also, but it's much more powerful than any other force we've ever seen. Wow.

You should call it the strong force. Thank you. I think we will. You know, in comparison, it's more than 100 times the power of electricity and magnetism. At the same distance or at the same sort of, you know, magnitude. Yeah, precisely at the same distance. At one femtometer, it's 100 times the power of electromagnetism. It's a million times the power of the weak force. And it's 10 to the 38 times the power of gravity.

So it's really the most powerful force we've ever seen. Even more powerful than my biceps. Even more powerful. And it's really weird. You know, nobody had ever thought about how a force could get stronger with distance. And it took some really clever mathematics to explain this. And there was a Nobel Prize just for that idea, the idea that maybe this is how the strong force works. And that's Frank Wilczek, MIT won the Nobel Prize just for explaining the strong force.

All you had to do was add a minus sign to one equation. and that explained it. Well, that's what I'll do. I'll just put minus science in all kinds of equations and hopefully one of them will get me a Nobel Prize. All right.

That seems like a great strategy to me. Go for it. All right. Well, that kind of explains why quarks can't be alone, sort of, I think. And so let's get into what it all means for the universe

and for you and me and my quarks. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 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. 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, 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 politics? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them.

I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Brand-Brandt. And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Afea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right?

In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post, or real, it's how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us.

Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, so quarks can't be alone. Although I feel like it's kind of a, it depends on your definition of alone. Like, what if a cork feels that one femtometer is alone enough?

Then it can be alone, right? Yeah, that feels pretty cozy to me. You know, like when my kids are fighting on the couch about who's getting how much space, if they're one femtometer apart, then... That would be trouble. That would definitely be trouble. Yeah. I don't really feel like I'm alone if I'm going to the bathroom and there's somebody one femtometer away from me. Well, depends how big you are? You know, how big is a cork, Daniel?

How big is a cork? A cork is a point particle. So it really has no volume. Really? No meaningful size. Yeah. So you're saying a femtometer is infinitely far for them? Yeah, I guess so. That's a good point. Maybe they're like, you know, folks in a marriage feel like they're always having a shout across the house at each other. What? What did you say? Yeah, okay, so quarks don't like to be alone, caveat more than a femtometer apart, right? I guess that's maybe a better way to say it.

And so that's weird. And you're saying it all because that's just how the strong force works. Like after a femtometer, it just decides to create more quarks instead. It's easier. They're like stuck in a little valley, right? They just can't get out. Right. And so that's a weird rule for the universe.

but I guess that's just kind of the way the universe is, right? Like if it was any different, we wouldn't be here. We wouldn't be here, yeah. Or there would be something else here. There would be something else. Maybe a funnier podcast. Impossible. That's right.

The laws of the universe prevent there to be a funnier science podcast. I have calculated the maximum humor for a physics podcast, and we have reached it. Did you put a minus sign in it, though? Maybe it's missing a minus sign. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. I'm going to go back to check my calculations. Well, this is probably the funniest podcast about science

with a cartoonist and a physicist that I have heard of. Named Daniel and Jorge from Southern California. That's right. Put enough caveats in and you're number one in the universe. Put enough minus science, you'll get an overpriced. That actually does work, yeah. All right, let's get into then what it all means. I mean, this seems like a weird rule.

But what practically does it mean for physics and for us? Well, I think not practically, but philosophically, it means something pretty profound. You know, it means that forces can be really different from the forces that we're familiar with. And this is a recurring story in physics that we think the world works one way and then we discover, oh, there's an exception. Actually, the exception is much more powerful than everything we've been thinking about. And so it's just another reminder that we need to open our minds and that probably there's basic assumptions we're making about how the world works. that are wrong and we just need the counter example to prove to us that there's something else going on. So it's just an example there. And we'll always be asking the question like, why is this

that way? Why is this the other way? Why is this the other way? Why is network this other way I would have preferred? And I hope that one day we have those answers. But right now we're totally clueless. We're just like, we don't know. We're just looking at it and try to at least describe it, not even necessarily understand it. But it also has some practical consequences. Yeah, step us through. What does that mean for what we can and can make out of stuff? Well, one of the tempting things about the strong charge is that it's super powerful. You know, it powers nuclear weapons and nuclear power. And so you might think, wouldn't it be awesome to apply that to everyday life, you know, to have things like batteries that source, the strong force. They could be super small and, you know, some version of electrical current and electrical power that's powered by color instead of electrical charge, right? That would be super awesome, but you can't. Because it's such a powerful force.

Could we somehow harness that power to something practical to, like, charging our cell phones? Yeah, could we carry that power around, and can we store that power and use it to transmit things? And we've done it very briefly. That's, you know, what nuclear bombs are and your power. But it's tempting to think about, you know, having, like, a current. Like, why couldn't you have a current of that kind of power? But you can't because that relies on isolating the charge. charges. Like a battery, you can separate the electrons and have them kind of flow along your

wire to power your cell phone, but you couldn't do that with quarks. Like if you try to separate the quarks, the universe wouldn't like that. Yeah, the universe is like, uh-uh, a nice try. It would snap fingers in a Z pattern, like, uh-uh. I see what you're trying to do there. And nope. Yeah, you get a big fat nope. So it just means that there are things you can't do with that force that you can do with other forces. And one of them is, you know, build a version of electricity, which is too bad because it's such an awesome, powerful force. It'd be cool to call it quarticity or... Quarticity. I'm not sure that one's going to catch on. I don't even know how to spell that. Does it have a KT in it? It has a minus sign, hyphen in the middle. That's why I'm getting my

little bit. Well, that is a minus awesome idea. Oh, good. Why did you go with plus or minus? Why couldn't you go with like that's a red, red hot idea there? That's a cool blue idea. It's kind of a blue-green idea. But it also has consequences for me and for particle physics because it makes our job a lot harder.

Because it makes it hard to kind of separate these things and study them? Yeah. If I am interested in understanding what happened inside a particle collision, I got to look at the stuff that flies out because I can't see some heavy, new, crazy particle that I hope was made in the collision. It doesn't last very long. I just see the stuff that flies out. And so I'd love if that stuff that flies out was sort of simple and clean, like it just turned

into two electrons or something I can measure. But very often in these collisions, because we're smashing protons together, we get quarks to fly out. And the quarks make these big streams of particles. And so instead of having one very simple, nice and neat cork that flies out, I have 50 particles that fly out and it's a big mess and they're interacting and they splash into the detector and we call that a jet of particles. Because when you pull that quark apart, all that energy in the strong force turns it into a jet of other particles. Yeah. All the energy gets

turned into 10, 20, 50 other particles with other quarks which then combine to make a whole sorts of crazy particles. And so it's a big mess. So you're saying it impedes your rights as a particle physicist? Yeah, it obscures the universe a little bit. You know, we'd love to pull these protons apart and study the quarks by themselves. You notice we don't have a cork collider, right? We have a proton collider. And that's why we're really interested in cork-c-c-corc interactions, but we can't build a quark collider, we have to build a proton collider.

And then we have to, we can't see the corks interacting and the corks flying out. We have to see the mess that they make afterwards. You know, it's like you want to study preschoolers and, you know, they leave a mess behind them. You're like, you know, why can't these preschoolers just tell me what they're thinking? Oh, I see. Instead, they wreak havoc wherever they go and you have to try to reconstruct from their tantrums, what might have been going on in their minds. Preschoolers are complicated, and so are quarts.

Yes, preschoolers are complicated, and so are quarks. And so that makes our job a little harder. Well, so I guess that means then that that's just how the universe is. The universe has rules for quarks, and quarks don't really have alone rights, right? They can't ever be alone because the universe always wants them to be paired up or in threesomes. That's right.

And there's one exception. Oh, wait. What? Quarks, they can't be alone, but there's one time when they don't have to be in parisomes. Pairsums, is that a word? In Applesomes or Pairsums or banana sums. And that's when they're in a huge party.

It's called the Quark-Gluon plasma. Wait, what? Uh-huh. Yeah, if you create enough energy density, And you pour enough energy into a tiny little space, then you can sort of free the quarks because you make this, like, big frothing mass of stuff where there's too much energy to bound these things together. And they're sort of, like, bound into a huge mass instead.

We do this experimentally by smashing heavy ions together, like the nucleus of a lead atom and the nucleus of a lead atom. Smash, like, hundreds of these things together makes this big, big frothing mass. Oh, in which that suddenly it doesn't, they're not particularly paired to another quark or two other quarks, but they're sort of like a, it's like a giant big party. Yeah, it's like a plasma. The same way you've got a bunch of hydrogen atoms, they're happy with every electron being paired with a proton. But you squeeze them together enough, and there's still overall balance of electrons and protons, but the electrons are sort of free to hop from proton to proton. The same way, you take protons and you squeeze them together enough

and the corks sort of smoosh together and then they can sort of swap back and forth very quickly between states. And so it makes sort of like a big plasma of corks and gluons, yeah. Like a, oh, I see. So you can't have a cork by itself, but you can have free corks, but only if they're in a soup. Yeah, so basically they like to be in pairs, triplets, or in a big party. And we've actually made that happen.

We've collided these things together and created them in colliders, and we think that it happened in the very early universe when the universe was hot and nasty and dense, that there was this quirk gluon plasma. But these days, they're mostly found isolated in these pairs and triplets. I see. And can, do these soups, do these crazy soup parties happen in nature or only in colliders? Only in colliders now. The universe is too cool for that to happen. Although some people think that maybe at the center of some kinds of stars, there might be some quirk glue on plasma. Like neutron stars, maybe? Neutron stars probably not dense enough, amazingly, but there are these stars called strange

cork stars where there might be a cork blue and plasma, but nobody's for sure. All right. So it can be free a corg, but it can be alone because it can only be free when there's a whole bunch of other corks, right? Yeah, precisely. They can never be by themselves. Right. It can never be alone, but it can't be free if it's not alone. Oh man, that's a tough trade off there. Would you trade your freedom for some alone, some me time? I don't know. I think the quirk's got to have his lawyer explain to it exactly what that means. That's a new job description. Particle lawyer. Quantum lawyer. I'm a quantum lawyer. Sounds like a scam. It's definitely a scam. Do not pay anyone for quantum lawyering advice.

All right, well, that's another pretty interesting fact about the universe that, at least I learned today, is all these rules that govern our most fundamental particles. That's right. They control how your protons and how your neutrons are stuck together and why they're stuck together. So you should be grateful that all those quarks are stuck together and doing all that work for you. We hope you enjoyed that. See you next time. So enjoy your quarks and enjoy your corks.

and talk to you guys soon. 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 is a production of IHeart Radio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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. 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. Now, hold up.

Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I was diagnosed with cancer on Friday and cancer free the next Friday. No chemo, no radiation, none of that. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive

to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. Professionally, I started at Deadwell Records. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into the soul of the music and the purpose that drives it. Listen to Culture Raises us on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Thank you.