Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Why is strange matter so strange?

Episode Date: March 17, 2020

Find out why strange matter is so strange with daniel and jorge Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, Jorge, are you worried that something out there in space might kill us all? Every day, man. You mean like aliens? We haven't even started the podcast yet and we're already talking about aliens. Actually, this one time I was not talking about aliens. There are other things out there in space that can kill us? Yeah, there are other things out there that could end humanity. Oh, I see what you mean like a killer meteor?

I'm thinking about something much, much strange. danger. 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 sometimes described as a strange personality. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge explained this strange universe, a production. of iHeart Radio. That's right, in which we go out there on mental journeys into the universe and bring home the strange, the bonkers, the crazy, but the real, and pipe it directly into your

brain. That's right. We'd like to think about and talk about all the amazing things that are out there in space, out there in the far reaches of the universe, and also right here in front of us, and the small things around us that are sort of normal for the universe, but if you as humans sort of think about it, they're kind of strange. We like to peel back the layer of reality that you encounter in your everyday life and reveal to you that the universe is far weirder, far more amazing, far more beautiful, far more nasty, and far more strange than you might have imagined. And potentially far more dangerous than you thought.

Definitely more dangerous. There's a lot of stuff out there that could kill you. Oh, man. What out there can't kill you? Love, the fourth dimension. It's all you need. It's amazing to me how many new ideas in physics end up being potentially deadly. Like, oh, it turns out the Higgs boson field might collapse ending the universe. Or, wow, the universe has this massive expansion, which could isolate us from all other sorts of galaxies out there. It's incredible that none of these new ideas in physics like provide coziness or warmth or like, you know.

I think it's strange to Daniel that you're not surprised anymore. I mean, by now you should know that every time you uncover, you lift the rock, there's something there that can kill all of humanity. Maybe you should stop. Maybe it says something about the fragility of our experience, that anything that tells us that our situation is not typical or not unique and that most of the universe is different shows us how most of the universe is inhospitable to human life and coziness. I think it says more about the fragility of physics funding.

Because if you included in every proposal like, hey, we want to discover this. but we might end up destroying humanity. Then somehow conveniently that doesn't get mentioned. Or maybe we should use that as clickbait in our physics funding. Like fund my research or, you know, a black hole might eat the earth. And that is the birth of a super villain right there. Ladies and gentlemen, Daniel has now officially become a mad scientist villain in a Bond movie. Oh, boy.

You've practiced that, I feel. That just sort of bubbled up out of me. You know, like the moment of birth of me as a super villain. I'll go put my cape on. Wait, villains were cape? Only with the big lapels, if that's this giant lapels. That's right. I'm turning my collar up and being prepared to plan for the end of humanity.

Popping the collar. All right. Well, there are a lot of things out there in the universe and a lot of stuff that we haven't discovered yet, right? And a lot of that might be weird or it might be kind of dangerous, right? For humanity, for the sort of unstable existence of the universe? Yeah, and this is sort of a different dimension of weirdness. Like, we're used to the fact that things out there far away in space might be different.

There are stars and black holes and weird stuff out there that doesn't happen here. But there's another kind of direction of weirdness, which is like, what can matter do? Like, can matter do things that we're not familiar with, can form weird new stable states that we haven't seen yet because we haven't created the conditions? You know, imagine if we lived on a planet, for example, that never had had. iron on it because it just wasn't iron from nearby supernovas and somebody showed up with like iron we're like whoa that's interesting we've never seen that before i see oh like a new kind of matter yeah a new kind of matter what if you could rearrange the lego pieces of the universe into new amazing kinds of stuff because it's incredible like the diversity of different kind

of things you can make with the same lego pieces right the same building blocks you can make you know So helium and hydrogen and iron and ice cream and hamsters and all of that stuff. So there must be new weird kinds of stuff out there we haven't discovered. And so that's totally possible? Like it's possible that there's matter that can be made that we haven't made here on Earth or ever seen. Yeah, it's totally possible. And, you know, there's sort of two branches there.

One is like take the matter and annihilated to try to make new fundamental particles. That's the kind of thing I work on by smashing particles together at the LHC. but a whole other question is like don't smash the particles just rearrange them and try to build up new stuff you know try to put them together

into new combinations and see if you can make weird new kinds of matter and you know that's play Legos with reality yeah the the deepest Legos ever the most universal set of Legos ever

well today on the podcast we'll be talking about one such possible possible or real kind of matter out there that could potentially exist and that which could potentially be maybe interesting and or deadly or dangerous to the universe? I think deadly definitely means interesting. You can't be interesting or deadly. Like anything that's

deadly, definitely interesting. Unlike you, I'm totally not interested in dying. So that is not interesting to me. You're not interested in things that might kill you if I'm like, hey Jorge, there's a huge boulder about to fall in your house. You'd be like, not interested. I'd rather just tell me, get out of your house, you know. You don't have to explain to me what's happening, what's coming towards me. Summarize, summarize, summarize, right? Yeah, too long. Didn't read. Now you're dead. All right. I'll start my emails at the top with, get out of your house. Yeah, priority. Priority, get out. And let me explain to you why. That's fair. That's fair. That's fair. I'll start with a call to action.

Yeah. Yeah, so there's a very interesting kind of matter out there that is theoretical, Daniel. It's for real. Well, that's the question. We don't know. It's currently theoretical, but it might be real. It might be out there in the universe right now waiting to gobble us up and destroy your house. Wow. Well, if it is possible, it is definitely going to be very strange. And so today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question. What is strange matter? Daniel, this sounds really strange to me. It's maybe the one time physicists have given something an appropriate name. Like you guys saw this or thought about it and you're like, whoa, that's strange. That's basically summarized the history of particle physics between the 1940s and 1960s, yeah.

Why wasn't everything else named strange? Why is this particular one? I guess we'll get into it. We'll get into it, yeah. But like, unless you think I'm strange or you're strange, we're made of normal matter. People discovered new kinds of matter, which to them was strange. So strange sort of means not normal. Yeah, I mean, what does strange mean to you, Jorge? Like, hey, I'm going to make you some strange ice cream. Are you expecting like garlic-flavored ice cream? I feel like I'm not going to like it.

I feel right away that it's going to be like garlic with cilantro. That's probably fair. And if I offered you a bowl of strange matter, I wouldn't recommend you actually eat it. All right. But we're wondering, as usual, if this is something that people have heard about or read about maybe or even thought about possibly existing out there in the universe. And so as usual, Daniel went out there into the streets to ask perfect strangers if they had ever heard of strange matter or it's, I guess, really the cousin, Strange Lets.

That's right. And here's what folks around campus had to say when I accosted them with this strange question. No. No. But that sounds cool. Sounds cool. What do you think it might be, take a random guess? I think of dark matter when you say that, stuff we don't really know much about.

Maybe it's not solid, liquid, or gas. No. No, I have not. No, I have not. No. That's what that might be? Matter that doesn't behave like the matter that we already understand. No.

No. Okay. No. I think strange, the only like scientific thing that I know about is isn't a quark. Isn't there a strange quark? All right. I guess that shouldn't be too strange. And nobody had heard about strange matter.

It is strange. but I like how these answers were all like no no no there's not like hmm let me think about no there's like no there's no subtlety here didn't tickle anybody's brain or make them think about something else or give them a hint of something it's like maybe there hasn't been a lot of

clickbait about this or no nova specials about strange matter it hasn't really penetrated the cultural zeit guys nobody's worried about it so everybody listen to this podcast episode and prepare your Strange Matter Proof bunker. Do you think maybe people were suspicious of you? Like maybe they thought you were pranking them. Like, because it does sort of sound like something out of, I don't know, 50 sci-fi, like

strange matter. I don't know. I asked them this question just after I asked them the question about which physics adventure they would like, which we did recently on the podcast. So I think, you know, they were primed to think in a fun way to expand their minds. There was just no reaction there. There's just like, there's rung no bell. This is like if I pick two random words, you know,

know, have you heard of dragon souffle? And they'd be like, what? No, I don't know what that is. And I don't even want to know. It seems like no-to-even wanted to know. It's excellent with garlic ice cream, by the way. Dragon souffle, a little scoop of garlic ice cream on the side. I feel like this is really close to stranger things.

Like, really, stronger things would be made out of strange matter. I don't know what the upside-down is mad of. But, yeah, but actually maybe the upside-down is where every up-cork is a down-cork and every down-cork is an up-cork. Oh, wow. Oh, Daniel, you should totally call them. Yeah, that would be why it's called the upside down. I know, exactly. It was actually a physics reason for something.

All right, so let's get into this strange topic. And Daniel, so explain to us, what is strange matter? Right, so we have a few different concepts. We want to tease apart on the show. One is strange matter, and then later we'll talk about strange lits and strange stars. But when particle physicists talk about strange matter, what they mean is any matter containing this one particular cork, which is called a strange cork. Now, you and I don't have any strange corks in us, or at least not any real strange corks.

Like, you and I are made of protons and neutrons and electrons. And remember that inside the protons and neutrons, we have two kinds of corks, up corks and down corks. This would be matter made out of like protons and neutrons, but in which the quarks inside of them are all this kind of cork, which is a strange cork. That's right. We now know that in the universe, there are six. kinds of corks, up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom, and protons are made out of three

upcorks and down quarks mixed together. And you can put these Lego pieces together to make lots of different kind of particles. You can put the upcorks together to make pyons, you can do all sorts of crazy stuff. But if you add a strange cork, if you use the strange cork Lego, then we call it Strange Matter. Oh, I see. And why was that cork called Strange? Was it like the strange cousin that nobody could figure out? Or was it, is there something particularly strange about this as opposed to like a charm quark or a top quark?

Yeah, well, it comes from the early history of particle physics. We first were trying to figure out like, what are all the kind of particles that are out there? We knew protons and neutrons and electrons. And then people started building particle colliders. And in particle colliders, they would smash stuff together and they could get more energy. And the thing about the strange quark is that it's heavier than these other quarks. It's more massive. So it costs more energy to make.

So this is the first time they could ever make it, and they made these particles that had strange quarks in them, though at the time they didn't know they were strange quarks. And these particles were a little weird. There were caons and sigma particles, and they had sort of strange behaviors compared to protons and neutrons. And specifically, the thing that was strange about these particles is that they lived longer than anyone expected for such heavy particles. Remember, usually, heavy particles decay down very quickly to lighter particles. these new particles strangely stuck around a bit longer than anyone expected before decaying. Oh, wait. So they made stuff that made out of strange matter?

Like they made strange matter and they're like, well, this is weird? Yeah. We do this all the time at particle colliders. It's not that unusual now. I mean, it's still strange in its behavior. But like, we smash particles together and we get caons out. Kion is a combination of an upcork and a strange cork or a down cork and a strange cork. What do you mean?

Like, if they pair together, they form a special particle. Yeah, like we talked in our podcast about how quarks can never be by themselves. And so they either have to be like with an anti-cork or you need triplets. So you need either pairs of corks or triplets. If you get like an up and a strange pair together, you call that a kion. If you get like two ups and a strange together, that's a sigma particle. If you mix up the kinds of the basic particles. And so that's possible.

You can mix like a two up quarks and a strange quark and they'll be happy together. They will be happy together, but not for very long. These particles are all unstable because they have this strange quark in them, and the strange cork is heavy, and it decays. So sometimes it will decay to a down quark. And so these particles are a little weird. And spit out some energy or something. And spit out some energy precisely.

And so these particles are very short-lived. They're very strange. They have weird behaviors. Some of them switch back and forth from one kind to another, but they're all very unstable. But we make this all the time. Every collision we make at the Large Hadron Collider, every 25 nanoseconds, we're producing some strange quarks, and so therefore some strange matter. But it never lasts for very long.

These particles are no longer strange. They just have the name strange from kind of back when you didn't, you couldn't figure them out. Yeah. And it was really kind of an exciting time in particle physics. Sometimes I wonder if they were having more fun back then than here because back then they were, every time they... You want to make physics great again, Daniel? Yes, I want to make physics great again. No, every time they turned on the collider, they discovered a new particle because they were able to get these little corks to fit together in a new way.

Because you've got three different quarks now up, down, and strange. They didn't have the energy to make any of the other heavier ones. There's a lot of different combinations. And so there's a lot of particles to discover. And they didn't have any idea what was going on. So every time you turned it on, you're like, oh, my gosh, here's another particle. Oh, here's another particle. And they called it the era of the particle zoo because they were just like, every time you turn this thing on,

new particles popped out. And then finally, somebody, it took like 20 years. Finally, somebody in the 60s was like, you know what? This would all make sense if you had three basic particles and all this spectrum of particles, all this zoo of particles were just rearrangements of those three. And he was able to explain all of those in terms of these basic idea, these quarks, the up, the down, and the strange.

I see. And that's like a good. And the charm one too, right? Not the charm yet. We hadn't seen the charm. So we'd only ever made particles with the up, down, and strange. And that's like a real moment of insight. Oh, I see.

But so they discovered all three quarks at the same time, like up, down and strange at the same time? Or did they know about the up and down, and then they discovered the strange? They didn't know about the up and the down, like, as a real thing. It was sort of like developing as an idea. And then somebody said, you know, if you have these three particles inside, then it explains all of this that's happening. There are a lot of different ways to try to explain it. It's like everybody's looking at this huge list of particles. And remember, the game in particle physics is simplify.

It is describe everything we see in the universe in terms of the smallest set of building blocks. We're always trying to peel back one layer of reality. So this is a huge success is to say, oh, I have some new idea for an even smaller particle that explains all the weirdness we're seeing. I guess my question is why weren't the up and downs called weird and bizarre? Well, because they're part of me and you. they're normal, they're every day, they're all around us, right? Oh, they saw that regular matter that we're familiar with is made out of just

ups and downs. Yeah, protons and they saw these other versions of normal matter, which was strange, and they found that the, what, that the common ingredient was this strange quark? Yeah, and there's this property called strangeness, which is, turns out to be just like related to how many strange corks you have in you. Strangeness? Strangeness, yeah, is related to how many strange quarks are in a particle. And some forces conserve strangeness and some forces don't conserve strangeness.

And so it was a real puzzle for a while, but it was all put together just by understanding that there are three kinds of corks, and you can put them together in lots of different ways to make this incredible variety of particles. So then strange matter is just anything that has a strange quark in it. That's right. Or that is made entirely out of strange quarks. That's right. Which one? It's anything that has.

at least one strange quark in it. And you can make matter out of just strange quarks. In fact, the guy who proposed this, the guy who had this idea of quarks, he stood up at a conference and he proposed this and he predicted, he said, if my idea is correct, then there should also be this particle

that's pure strange quarks and he predicted how you would find it and how heavy it would be before it was seen and he was right. So that's pretty awesome. He called his shot. Yeah, so that's strange matter. And so I have a lot of opinions

about the way you guys name things as usual. But next, we'll get into what happens to this kind of matter and whether or not it actually is something we should worry about destroying the universe or not. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.

Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back.

In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot.

He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. 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. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance bro? Tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were. racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from

now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it.

And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Daniel, so strange matter you're telling me is just any kind of matter that is that has. a little bit of or is made with this particular quark called the strange quark. And so that's what makes it strange. Like, if you have this quark, then you, are you automatically strange? Like, do you behave strangely or that's just the name you get? That's just the name you get.

And whether you consider these particles to be behaving strangely just depends really on your perspective. It's totally subjective. But at the time when these particles were found, they did things other particles weren't doing. You know, they had weird decay patterns. They would turn into each other. They would slosh back and forth from one particle to another.

They were a little weird. Some of these particles, for example, violate some conservation laws that we hadn't seen other particles violate. Like CP violation, charge parity violation, was seen in the Kion system. And so these particles are a little strange, yeah. They're strange from normal matter, which is us. Yes, and we are made of just up and down quarks or vanilla and chocolate quarks. But, you know, what we don't know is what else. What else can this strange quark do?

Can it create other weirder kinds of matter that we haven't seen here on Earth? We haven't even created in particle colliders that could do bizarre stuff we haven't anticipated. Oh, you mean like, can we, if you were to sort of be more creative with this strange quark, what else could you make with it? Yeah. Or if you had really weird conditions like the center of a neutron star or, you know, the Big Bang or very high energy particle collisions, Could you make new kinds of matter with strange quarks that we haven't seen before that have completely different properties? And that's what people talk about when they talk about strange lits.

It sounds sort of cute, right? Like, you know, something you would name for your pet or something like, you know, Strangelito or something. But it's actually quite potentially quite scary and dangerous. It's cute and dangerous. Great. A lot of things fall in that category. It's like the bunny from Monte Pathan. But so that's what a strange lit is. It's a kind of strange matter. It's a kind of strange matter in a particular configuration that we haven't seen before. Oh, so I see. So it's hypothetical so far. It's hypothetical. Nobody's ever seen strange lists before. Strange matter, we create all the time in particle collisions. Strange lits are a hypothetical new combination of quarks that we've never observed, but could potentially end us. And it comes from this sort of idea of maybe forming an entire. new kind of matter. We were talking earlier about how corks are usually bound into triplets,

you know, like up, up, up, down, or up, down, that's what gives you protons and neutrons, or sometimes into pairs. The idea is that maybe corks, if you squeeze them enough, if you compress them enough, like in the center of really dense stars, they might form some new kind of matter, where it's not just pairs or triplets, but like, you know, 30 or 50 or 100 or a million corks could form some sort of like mega particle. And it all behaves as one, or does it just behave like a big blob? It behaves like one big blob, but it's like in one big bound state. So this is what they call a quark matter.

Oh, I see. You mean like it's stable? Like it doesn't just break apart right away. Like it stays in that blob. Nobody really knows, and it's really hard to calculate these things. And it's completely hypothetical. And they don't think it's stable unless, here's the key, unless you add strange quarks to it. So you make a big blob of corks.

matter. And if you have some strange quarks in it, it could end up in this configuration that is actually very stable. So it could be like an enormous blob, like essentially a single particle like the size of a star that's totally stable. You call it a particle because it's quarks bound together. Yeah. And you know, proton is three corks bound together and a caon is two corks bound together. And so instead of just having like a pile of neutrons, if you squeeze them enough so they become like one big particle, so the bonds between the corks are sort of equivalent anywhere across the particle,

then you think of it like, you know, I think of it like one big particle at least. And you're saying that the secret ingredient would need to be strange particles, quarks. Like without the strange quarks, you couldn't have this happen. Yeah, you need the strange corks to make the sort of theoretical matter happen.

And so that's what strangelets are. There's this weird new combination of up quarks, down quarks, and strange corks in this way that's not like, like bound inside one little particle, but potentially can grow, right? It's not just three corks. It could be five. It could be 100.

It could be 10 million corks. It could be 10 to the 10 of these things. I see. It's like a special recipe because you told me, you said earlier that sigma particles are also up down and strange, but this is like a new recipe for the sigma particle. Exactly. Sigma particles, one kind of sigma particle is up down and strange, but this would be a new configuration of them.

that doesn't decay right away. Yeah, it wouldn't just be three. It could be three or six or a billion, and it doesn't decay right away. And it's the kind of thing, and you can only make it in very high energy, high density configurations

like the inside of a neutron star or, you know, particle collisions. And again, it's theoretical. Nobody knows if you could actually make this stuff, but the numbers, the calculations we do suggest that it might be possible. Okay, so it's a hypothetical type of matter,

which might be super stable, very stable and maybe even contagious. Yeah, that's the amazing thing, is number one, it's super stable. And the reason for that is sort of interesting. It's like you could combine just up quarks and down quarks this way, squeeze them together to make something really dense, but it wouldn't be very stable. And if you add strange quarks, it becomes stable for this weird reason

because the particles don't like to sort of share spots. Like, you know how electrons, when you have them on an atom, they fill up different orbitals. You add another electron, they don't just sit on top of each other. That's because they're fermions and they don't like to be in the same quantum state. There are rules that say that two of these can be at the same spot. Yeah. So you can't add another electron in the same spot, but you could add another different kind of particle.

Like you could have a muon orbiting your proton and it's okay if it's in the same energy levels of the electron because they're not the same kind of particle. And so why are these strangelets so interesting? Are they, just because they're theoretical, and they could be, they could exist? Well, I mean, everybody's interested in, like, new kinds of matter. I mean, who doesn't, like, sit around on a Saturday afternoon wonder or new kinds of matter, right? I mean, everybody does that, right? No, theoretically, they're interesting. Like, could you make this new hyperstable kind of matter?

And in this case, the matter is extra stable because the strange quarks can fill in the sort of lower energy levels that the up quarks and down quarks can't because they're a different kind of particle. And it's fascinating because it could grow. Like if it encounter a new kind of matter, it could spread this sort of strange litness. What? What do you mean? Like, how could it, it would turn, like, I'm made out of up and down quarks. You're saying if I touch one of these blobs of strange lead matter, it would somehow turn some of my ups and down quarks into strange quarks?

Yep. And you become bizarro Jorge or, you know, strangelyly. Strange Jorge. Yeah, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jorge. More strange Jorge. Better than Comberbatch, Jorge. Is that your Benedict? With a deeper voice.

Yeah, so, you know, the only thing that prevents you from being a strange lid is that you don't have strange quarks in you. But any of the down quarks in your body could get converted to strange quarks. They just need some energy. They could get upgraded. They could get, yeah, literally upgraded to strange quarks. And that might happen if I touch some of this strange lit matter. Yeah, and nobody knows, again, does strange lit matter exist? And if so, what properties does it have?

But in some versions of this theory, then, yeah, it adds to itself. When it encounters other kinds of matter, it converts that matter into strangelet matter. It, like, collapses it because strangelet matter is more stable than other kinds of matter. So you can imagine sort of like our normal kind of matter just sort of like waiting to turn into strangelets. And as soon as you get one nearby, it like crystallizes. Like if you put a drop of sugar into sugar water, it'll form a huge crystal around it. It's like a seed that spreads its pattern.

And what would happen to me if I touch this strangelet matter? Would I just automatically get blobified and then absorb into the bigger blob? Or would I still be me except I would be sort of strange and have superpowers? I'm usually the one to ask unanswerable philosophical questions. But would you still be you? Well, you become very dense. because Strange Matter is extraordinarily dense. It's much denser than like the contents of a neutron star.

So the original Jorge particles would be condensed to something like the size of a tiny little drop. And whether you would still feel like you, I don't know. You might feel more like Benedict Cumberbatch, I suppose. More like Paul Ryan and Edman, it sounds like you would get smaller. Yeah, you would get smaller. Maybe that's what the pin particle is, Daniel. Maybe the Pimp particle is real. It's a strange particle, yeah, that makes everything condescending.

All right, well, now you need to write to Marvel and get credit for that one, so we're even then. I'll take half of those profits. We are just rolling the movies advice here. So you were saying that you could maybe create protons and neutrons out of this strange matter, and then you could still have atoms and stuff? We don't think you would have, like, atoms inside of it. There's no, like, division between the particles. You don't get protons and neutrons.

It's like this blob of particles. into the morgue. Yeah, I think it probably would be the end of Jorge, exactly. So I wouldn't recommend it. Oh, I see. Now you tell me. All right, let's get into whether or not this is real and whether it can happen and whether we should be worried about this coming here and absorbing us

and obliterating us and turning us into a strange little matter. But first, let's take another 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.

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

That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professional. 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. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan,

starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand.

It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Daniel, is strange matter, well, we know strange matter is real, but are these

strange lids that might absorb things and destroy everything? Is that real? Should we be worried about it? Well, we don't know if it's real. We can't say that it's not. We've never seen it before, but it sort of theoretically makes some sense. So it's worth taking seriously. I'm not suggesting you change the way you live your life, but it could be that there are a lot of these strange that's out there and we just haven't seen them yet. Oh, I see. You can't disprove it, so therefore you've got to consider it, like aliens. Just like aliens. Or like me being mistaken by Benedict Cumberback.

It could happen. It could happen. And there are a lot of times in physics that we're in this scenario where we haven't really looked so we don't know if it's there. And then the more we look, the more we can say, if it's there, it's rare. And then once we've looked like really exhaustively, we can say, well, either it doesn't exist or it's super duper rare. And we're in that situation with a lot of particles

like magnetic monopoles that we talked about on the project. But in this case, we've only sort of recently begun to figure out like how to look for strangelets. It doesn't happen in normal occurrences, it sounds like it only happens in the core of like super dense stars

or high energy collisions. And like even you created some here on Earth, it might be difficult to sustain, right? Because we're not inside of a nutrient star. You don't need to be inside a dense environment. to sustain it, just to create it. Just like you can make heavy metals in the inside of the sun, and then when they blow up, there's still those heavy metals, right?

Iron lands here on Earth that doesn't just fall apart into protons and neutrons, right? It's stable. And that's the thing with this stuff is that it's hyper stable. Once you make it, it's there. Once you make it, it's there. And anything it touches, it will grow and add onto it because it's more stable than this other kind of matter. So it like collapses normal matter into strange lit matter.

Oh, it's more stable. than regular matter. It's more stable. Oh, boy. It's like a lower estate. So wait, you're saying that if you create some in the large Hadron Collider and it touches the walls of the collider, it can just grow and grow and swallow up the whole Earth? That's exactly what I'm saying.

And is that Daniel interesting or cute to you? Does that sound like a fun, fuzzy outcome for the human race? I think it would be pretty spectacular, but pretty cool to see on screen. It's not something we are worried about. We took it seriously. We thought about it. We did the calculations. And just like whether the LHC will create black holes, we're not worried about it.

Because the same kind of collisions are happening all the time right now in the atmosphere, really high energy particles smashing into other particles from cosmic rays. So we think if that was likely to happen at the LHC would have already happened in the atmosphere. And we don't see that. So we don't think the LHC is powerful enough to create strangelitz if they do exist. You don't think. We don't think. But, you know, hey, keep your ears open.

But you're saying, but a scenario might be that you do create these things and it does sort of like spread and swallow up. And suddenly the whole earth is just a giant ball of strange quarks, you know, floating around like a blob. Not even that giant because it would collapse into a very, very dense matter. So like all the mass of the earth would get turned into strangelets. It'd be like the size of a grapefruit. And then it would just sit there. in place of the earth and still go around the sun and the moon would still go around this blob.

But we just wouldn't be, we'd be all absorbed this one little ball of energy. Yeah, we'd be living our strangest life. And that's one scenario, like if we actually made strange that's on Earth, but not something we're worried about. And you know, we've been turned this thing on years ago. We've been doing collisions every 25 nanoseconds for almost a decade. So not something to worry about.

But it's possible that there are. If you're still here, don't worry. If you're listening to this podcast, then you're fine. The world hasn't ended, right? But it's possible that there are other scenarios out there in the universe that are capable of making strangelets, like the core of a neutron star. We haven't made it here because maybe we don't have enough energy, but there are places with enough energy to make this strangelet matter. If it's real, if it's actually a thing that can happen in our universe, we think it's possible to make them in the core of neutron stars where it's very, very dense. Remember, neutron stars are places where it's had a gravitational collapse.

It stopped burning. There's no more forces or pressure pushing out. So it's like really densely packed. And all the protons and the electrons have gotten squeezed together and converted into neutrons. If you push even further, then we think that maybe the core of that could turn into a strangelet, which would then spread and take over the entire star. Oh, it would go from like a neutron star to a strangelet star. Yeah, to a, they call it a strange star.

And we can look at stars and try to tell if that's happened. Like we've seen some neutron stars, and we can look at them and look at the sort of radiation from them. And so far, all the neutron stars we've seen look like they're just normal vanilla, amazing, crazy, weird neutron stars, that they haven't converted to strange stars. And, you know, this depends on our understanding of what this would look like from really far away, using only x-rays. But so far, it seems like it hasn't happened. And, you know, if the calculations are correct, then it's the kind of thing that you

should happen to neutron stars eventually so if we haven't seen one ever turn into a strange star then maybe it's not possible maybe it's not possible yeah maybe it's just a strange dream maybe it's just a strange idea from afternoon physicists who didn't have enough coffee or too much strange lets right yes strangelets could they be like inside of a black hole or something well actually that's the only thing you can do to to save yourself from strange that's like if you saw a blob of strange that's heading here. There's almost nothing you can do to, like, divert it or, you know, prevent it because anything that touches it just makes it bigger. But if you could somehow funnel it into a black hole, yeah, then you'd be safe. But then you have to worry about the black hole.

Yes, yes. Then you have to worry about the black hole. It's like you've got a rabbit problem, so you put a bunch of wolves on your property. Now you've got a wolf problem. Now you have a wolf problem, yeah. But hey. I like these long-term physics solutions. It's all about putting out one fire. I'm comforted by your long-term view. With another fire. But even if we're not making them inside neutron stars, it might be that they're out there anyway.

There could be what we call primordial strangelets. Primordial strangeness are things that were made in the Big Bang because the densest, craziest, hottest party in the universe, of course, was the very first few moments when things were really hot and crazy. And it could be that a few strangers were made back then, and they're still floating around. And we might not see them. We wouldn't see them.

They don't like glow or anything, but one of them could just like bump into the earth and then the whole earth becomes a strangelet. The whole earth becomes a strangelet. And of course, that hasn't happened yet. And we've never seen a planet disappear and we've been watching for a while. And, you know, so that tells you something about how unlikely it is. But we just don't know. And there's some people do calculations and they suggest that there are more strangelets out

there then stars in the universe. But, you know, I don't know, that's like physicists having way too many cups of coffee. You're like, dude, even that's strange for us. But, you know, it's important to sort of stretch your mental muscles to think about all the ways that the universe could be to anticipate these things and to think about how to protect yourself, you know, fund this proposal to build a shield against strange matter or we might all die. Well, I think it's pretty interesting still to just think about the idea that there are kinds of matter that we haven't touched upon, you know, like there are, maybe there are strange ways to arrange the Legos of the universe in ways that are sort of like cool and interesting and maybe maybe even solve all of our problems. There definitely are. And, you know, another direction of this research is just to make new elements.

You know, use up quarks and down quarks and combine protons and neutrons in a way to make heavier and heavier elements. I haven't kept up with it, but you know, they're up into the teens or maybe even to the 120s in the periodic table. And so there's a lot of really fascinating ways to combine things together to make new kinds of goo. There's a lot of different directions to go. And we've only explored, you know, a little bit. And so it's another one of these angles where you realize that we have a tiny little

slice of the possible experiences that humans can have in this universe. There's all sorts of different kind of stuff out there waiting for us to discover it. or for us to invent, right? Yeah, and then for it to destroy us. Hopefully not. All right, well, I hope you enjoyed this strange trip down into the little Legos of the universe and think about all different ways in which normal and strange

that you can assemble the universe together. And remember that this is mostly a mental exercise. We're wondering how can matter fit together, what kind of things can be in the universe? And for us, it's just interesting and fascinating to think about all the ways that this can happen. It's not something we worry about. I do not think you need to worry about strange that's destroying your house. But yeah, so next time we'll get into Charm Matter, Daniel, or?

We will actually. We're going to do an episode about how the Charm Quark was discovered. That's a pretty crazy story. All right. Well, thanks for joining us. We hope you enjoyed that. See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations,

please drop us a line we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at danielandhorpe.com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the T-Dade. W.A. Terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged. Terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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

with season two of my podcast. Grasias. 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. Listen to the new season of Dacias Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an I-Heart podcast.