From First Principles - Oldest Molecule, Programmable Proteins, Europa Radar & Light’s Double Life (EP. 3)

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

We go from the universe’s first chemistry to tomorrow’s designer biology, swing by Mars to tune Europa Clipper’s ice radar, and finish with a fresh take on the double-slit experiment.In this episodeThe “oldest molecule” puzzle (HeH⁺), cooling the early universe, and why JWST’s findings matterProgrammable proteins: reassigning codons, recoding organisms, and real biosafetyEuropa Clipper’s REASON radar test at Mars: frequencies, ice thickness & ocean cluesDouble-slit, demystified: single photons, “which-path” info, and measurement realityChapters00:00 Intro • 01:26 First molecule • 22:27 Programmable proteins • 43:05 Europa radar • 55:00 Double-slit • 1:15:03 Sign-off

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Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign, terms and conditions apply. Hello, Internet. This is your captain speaking Lester Nare, joined again by our co-host and resident PhD Krishna Chowdery. This is from First Principles. We have four great stories lined up for you all today, starting with scientists have solved the oldest puzzle in the universe and have earned an invite to our game night. They're going to be on my team. The second story, scientists recode the genome for programmable synthetic proteins. Eat your heart out, a Zempec. Number three, NASA's new radar just pulled off something impossible and may in fact lead us to the aliens. And we will wrap up with our fourth story.

Physicists confirm that like Superman, light has two identities that are impossible to see at once. My friend, how are you? I'm doing well. How are you? I'm doing quite well. Three days in a row, we've been together. Yeah. Now doing episode three. Yep.

Really excited for what we're going to talk about today. Some of these stories are really interesting. So oldest puzzle in the universe, 13 billion-year-old puzzle. Our first story starts from the Max Planck Institute. Yes. Headline. Scientists just recreated the universe's first molecule and solved a 13 billion-year-old puzzle. What exactly did they solve for?

Yeah. The first molecule is an interesting one, right? It's the universe's first composite structure of multiple atoms. Okay? In order to really understand this, this story is really about primordial chemistry. Okay, it's the first chemistry that the universe saw. And it's extremely important for understanding the early universe. And also for understanding like fundamental questions like how we got here, right?

Because obviously small things that happened back then lead to huge deviations when you stretch out the timeline to 13 billion years when it is now, right? Like the butterfly effect. Exactly. And so things that happened back then, you want to really understand at a nitty-grade level in order to really make sense of the universe that we see today. Right. So this story out of Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg,

that's an experimental story, but it also has a theoretical twist. So when you say experimental versus theoretical, what exactly does that mean? Experimentally, meaning that in the lab, they actually created this primordial chemistry, and then they studied it to see what the reactions could be like back when the universe first started. So experimentally, they did this. And then theoretically, they actually got some insight into how we can start modeling that early universe, right? Because obviously we can't go back and experiment on the early universe. The best we can really do is look with telescopes.

But even the James Webb Space Telescope is only going to look as far back as the first stars because it requires light. Right. Right. And the other, I mean, we could look at the cosmic microwave background, which is going to be part of this story. And that thing was at 300,000 years after the Big Bang. So in order to really make sense of this, I think we should start at the very beginning. Okay. Start at the top.

Okay. In the beginning. In the beginning was a point. And the point was extremely small, right? Infinite testifying small, they say. It's a singularity. And then it pops into existence. The Big Bang happens.

And immediately, the physics that we know comes into being. Not exactly immediately. There's a short time right after the Big Bang where we don't know what the hell is happening. Because the energies and the densities and the temperature is so high that current physics understanding breaks down. But if you go past that, the first thing that happens is you're going to get like protons and neutrons. Okay. the stuff of ordinary atoms, except they're not going to be in atomic form.

How do you mean? Okay. Like the sun, for example, the interior of the sun, or most of the sun actually, is in a state called a plasma, okay? Because stuff is so hot

that the electrons don't want to stick around the nuclei. Okay, so you've got hydrogen and helium nuclei on the sun, but like because it's so hot, the electrons can just like go off on their own. And so you have this soup of protons and neutrons and atomic nuclei. And then you have electrons just bouncing around in a soup of light. So atoms haven't formed because you need to be cold enough for the electrons to agree to stick around and orbit the nucleus.

If there's too much energy, then the photon will come in and it'll just bounce it right on away from home. Right. And so that's what the, if you've seen the images of the cosmic microwave background, this beautiful map of the early universe. in blue, red, and green. Yes. And that is the first ever picture of the universe at 300,000 years. We can't go before that. We can't go before that because before that,

light wasn't free to roam the universe because there were no atoms. It would just go from one electron to another charged particle to another charged particle and bounce around, and it wasn't free. Like, okay, the reason why I can see the moon, right? Yeah. Is because the light from the moon is coming all the way.

It's free to travel all the way. It's free to travel all the way, right? Because there's nothing there. Even like you, right? There's air here. Yeah. But the air isn't doing much to the light because it's pretty diffuse. There's not a lot of density.

And a lot of it is neutrally charged molecules, right? It's like the electrons have a neighbor neighboring positive charge that they're interacting with. So the freely flowing light doesn't really interact with it all that much. But prior to that 300,000 year mark, it's basically darkness. Yes. It's basically so hot. that it's like, it's not even, it's like darkness because it's the opposite of lightness. Of like, yeah, you know, like it's, there's so much light that it's so hot that the light can't go anywhere.

And it doesn't mean anything to see something in that context. In that context, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So even though, even using the phrase darkness is not technically accurate. Yeah. Because it's not, but as an analogy to. As an in terms of we can't see it. We can't see the light.

There's like a wall. Yeah. And we can't see further back in time. You know what's funny? This like reminds me of this idea that in software you have like administrator privileges and then users can access certain aspects of the app, but you can't get into how the core algorithms work. Yeah.

And it's kind of like the algorithm of the universe at that very base level. We're currently blocked from being able to actually access. Exactly. And you know, by that analogy, even though you can't see that algorithm, right? Yeah. You would be able to look at the software and know sort of underlying what's under the hood. If you're an experienced coder, you could look at an app or any kind of thing and then know sort of what the structure of the underlying database. You can reverse the year.

And that's sort of what we're trying to do with a lot of the other studies where we're trying to see, okay, what happened before this 300,000 years ago? Like were there gravitational waves that were going and propagating? Was there a discrepancy between matter and antimatter? All of this stuff, you know, because we're pretty good at physics, by. now that we can like look at this picture and like now start looking at the little details and start piecing together stuff that happened before but this story is about stuff that happened after so that's the setup so that's that's so the idea is the reason it's the first molecule is because of where in time we're able to exactly this detection yeah as soon as atoms formed yes right as soon as atmosphere formed

the first thing they want to do is once it's cold enough they want to start forming molecules molecules are just like multiple atoms interacting right like in this in this room we've got nitrogen lot of nitrogen so that's n2 two nitrogen atoms that share electrons okay also oxygen obviously right that's why we're alive over here the universe first created only three elements in the beginning there were only three elements hydrogen helium and a little tiny bit of lithium okay but when I say they created these elements it's the nuclei the electrons aren't anywhere but these new Typically I form, hydrogen is just a single proton, right? It's like kind of a cop out to call it.

But like it's like, okay, you got a proton, that's hydrogen. Okay, helium, you've got two protons, two neutrons. So, and then lithium, you've got three protons, usually four neutrons. Okay, so the lithium seven. As soon as the, as soon as light breaks free, now electrons can start forming atoms. So now you've made a hydrogen atom, you've made helium atoms and lithium atoms. The first atom to actually form was actually helium. Okay.

Okay, not hydrogen. That's interesting. Yeah, and it kind of makes sense when you think about, if you've done chemistry, there's something called the ionization potential. So helium has a higher ionization potential. Basically what that means is it's like, it's, it likes having electrons around it. Okay. The nucleus, it's got two protons, right?

Two protons, it's got these two empty spots where electrons can be. And because there's two protons, the electrons are happy to hang out. With hydrogen, there's a single proton, so the pull isn't that much. And so you need, the electron has to be sort of lower, you know, and the temperature has to be lower for this thing that makes sense. But helium has got more of a pull because it's got two protons. That makes sense. So helium forms and helium is moving around and there's a bunch of protons, hydrogen atoms, right? And so all of a sudden you form something called helium hydride, which is helium with a hydrogen proton but no extra no extra electron so only two electrons in this molecule interesting three proton so it's an ion okay

okay it's an ion helium atom hydrogen proton and then there's the pro the electrons sort of go around it all all three together yeah yeah okay um this is the first first molecule that's that that was formed and having molecules is extremely important for stars and you might be like that's when i first read about this i was like really fuse because stars are helium making factories that take hydrogen and make helium so why would there's no molecules on the sun right right unless that they're in the it's in the outer outer but like inside the sun there's no molecules right okay so why do we need molecules in order to in order to make stars that's the fundamental question right we need molecules in order to make stars the reason why is we need the universe to cool down drastically okay if we're a soup

of hot gas, even if it's neutral gas. Kind of like me this weekend. Oh, yeah, I heard about that. Yeah, but if we're this like soup of hot gas, the way a star forms is you've got some like gas cloud, and then it's going to collapse under gravity, right? It's going to be spinning very slowly and it's going to collapse under gravity,

so conservation of angular momentum, it's going to spin faster. Now, when it collapses, it's going to, going to heat up, right? Stuff is going to bump into each other and start heating up. Heating up means what? Thermodynamics, it means the things are moving faster. If things are moving faster, that's kind of like an outward pressure, right? And if gravity is trying to pull it in, but there's an outward pressure pushing out, there's going to be a balance. You need to keep having gravity pull in. So what you need is some kind of pressure release valve. Okay, right. Okay, that lets go of all that energy.

Right. And that's what we mean by cooling down. We need to cool this thing down and we need to, by conservation of energy, all this energy from the thermal motion has to go somewhere. And it would be best if it just leaves in terms of radiation. Remember, radiation is also energy. Yes. Right?

But the, so there's two ways in which this thermal radiation can go. One is it stays there. So things just keep bombing into each other, getting faster and faster getting faster and faster that's just the energy is getting locked in the heat of the thermal motion but if if we if if we somehow let the radiation just go freely then we're slowing down got it right because of conservation of energy yes and if we're slowing down we're cooling yes and then that pressure is no longer there and so it can contract even more and then cool more and then contract even more so we need some way to dump all of the kinetic energy that is in the motion of

heat into radiation into light okay how do we do that molecules are really good at doing that converting sort of thermal motion into light okay and the reason why molecule can do that so like if you just have an atom it's just a billiard ball i mean atoms obviously radiate right there's the hydrogen energy spectrum where the electron bumps to a higher energy and goes down like these lights that we have in the studio um i don't know i don't know what element these guys are but like old school back when like we have those like white incandescent lights right those were mercury those had a mercury gas and the white would be from the mercury energy levels going up and down because you pump electricity the electrons go up and down

they release light and you get this white light and get that right you get like distinct colors that end up being white light okay so individual atoms can do that but they can't do that under a certain temperature okay because those energy levels are discrete because of quantum mechanics right so under a certain energy level if the photon at that energy is not big enough to kick this transition right then you're just stuck moving around being billiard balls yep because the the temperature is so low that like the the the excitation isn't enough to do this to this okay so all of a sudden now you're stuck this happens at around 10 000 Kelvin okay 10,000 Celsius about 18,000 Fahrenheit okay so the universe is like bigger now

um it's cool down a lot but we need to cool down further atoms won't be able to do this. Okay, so instead what you have is molecules. And what molecules can do is they can vibrate, right? They have like vibrational modes of energy. They can rotate and bump into each other that way. Yep. They can, they have these dipole transitions.

Like each molecule has a quantum state. Like, and so those quantum states are actually at the energy level of this 10,000 and lower. So if you can make molecules and you can have those molecules, then, heat up. Yes. Those molecules will then radiate away. Yes. And then you can finally form these stars.

Okay? Yep. So understanding this chemistry is really important for understanding the speed at which the universe cooled down. Yes. In its first like million years. Yes. Right.

And that's when those first stars formed. Those first stars then created the ingredients for other stars. Like they could be the things that created the galaxy centers that created galaxies. Right. So, so this is very important for us to understand. how we got here to understand the chemistry at the very beginning. The idea is here kind of like we started with. There's a butterfly effect that happens, right,

in terms of where the starting point of the universe is and like where we are here in this space. And there are these interesting transition points. Yeah. One of which is, you know, the transition point from the soup to then having our first molecules. And from the first molecules to then having the first things like stars. and what's interesting is kind of just the way you talked about it,

it's kind of non-intuitive that you need molecules to first exist in order for then stars to actually have the capability to even form. Even form themselves. And so the reason why this 13 billion-year-old puzzle is so important is because it fills in this gap of seeing how it went from first molecules to stars, which now gives us the ability to understand how long did it actually in this early universe we can begin to extrapolate from this

to look at star formation and really begin to have a deeper, more robust understanding of some of those sort of later stage actions. Yes, exactly. Like how did the first stars form? Because when they formed, they would tell us,

it would also tell us how big the stars were. Right? There's a hypothesis that the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies, are actually these dead first stars, right? Because that's the only way you can have like a million solar mass thing. Right. Right.

Right. So it's extremely important to understand like very fundamentally what the universe is about. And what's incredible about this study is that this is not it is, it has theoretical implications for how we do simulations, et cetera. But this was an experimental result. This was an experimental result. So what they did was they were concerned with this helium hydride, helium and H plus. And they were concerned with how this interacts with sort of the next few molecules that arise, which is the next molecule that will probably arise as like hydrogen, right, molecular hydrogen,

which is H2. Now, H2 is not very good at dissipating energy because H2 is a symmetric molecule, right? It's just like mirror image. So like there's some vibrational modes, but there's no. dipole in the sense that like all of the electrons aren't squished on one side. With helium and hydrogen, all of the electrons are basically hanging out near the helium because there's two protons in one, right? So then you have this like electric dipole where like there's this charge imbalance.

Yes. And that charge imbalance gives the molecule the ability to do a bunch more like energy transitions and then like dissipate out more heat. Because there's like this empty block that it needs to resolve for. Yeah. Yeah. There's an asymmetry and then like any tiny little thing. is going to kick it in a weird way.

And, you know, then you get into these quantum states and so on and so forth, which we don't have to get into. But for hydrogen, H2, it's not very good. Hydrogen and deuterium. Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen. Chemically, it's the same as hydrogen. But it's got a proton and a neutron, right? So it's just a little bit heavier.

Got it. Now, if I have a deuterium and a hydrogen, now there's like a slight imbalance of mass, right? So then you can have some sort of other stuff, but it's not nearly as good as helium hydride. So the problem is we want to they wanted to figure out how often does helium hydride transition to helium deuterium. Yep. Okay. Because like if this thing, if this thing is really slow, then helium hydride could stick around for a really long time and dissipate a lot faster. Yep. But what they actually found was that this helium hydride to helium deuterium. Yeah. Is actually quite fast. Okay. theoretically, it was postulated that it would be quite slow because there's like some kind of energy.

They thought that there's some. kind of energy barrier that prevents this reaction from happening. But like new simulations and like somebody actually found like a mistake in the old simulations because scientists are always like, yeah, you know, like, yeah, I don't think you're sure about that. Yeah, exactly. So, so they found this mistake and so it turns out there isn't an energy barrier, right? And what better way to experimentally confirm this than to actually make the thing and

then make the reaction happen? And they, what they found was, yeah, there isn't an energy barrier. So even at very low temperatures, you. you can have this transition happening, which means that the helium hydride is turning into this this other not very good molecule. So that kind of slows down the cooling of this universe a little bit, right? And if it slows down the cooling a little bit, then we need to start resimulating how those stars formed.

If we were under this assumption that the chemistry was happening this way and now it's happening this way, right? It impacts the cooling efficiency. Because everything will shift on the 13 billion year, 13 billion years. year timeline one way or another based on the rate at which the cooling can can happen. Like things either happen sooner. Yeah, or later. Or later. And then on this. Yeah. One of the many, many, many variables in that equation. Right. And then we can use that and then start looking at James Webb stuff. Space telescope observations of the first stars, which are,

I mean, this, this thing is pushing the limits to how far back we can see light. Right. So we're seeing like the first, very first stars that are almost 13 billion. I think there's some that are even older than 13 billion years. Not older than the universe, but like almost immediately when stars could form, we're seeing that star. Right, right, right.

Like, so, um, it's incredibly exciting to be like, okay, like now we have, I think we have a better handle on this primordial chemistry. Yep. And now we can start building these models. Science is an iterative process, right?

So it's like, once you do this, now you can do more complicated things and you can push back the envelope further and further into like, just how much we know. And what about the early universe? And what's interesting is how this kind of ties to, obviously James Webb has been sort of more in the news, in the popular science news, because of its capability set, how much has been spent on it, et cetera. And what's interesting is you have the results we're getting from James Webb over here, but we still have other fundamental science research that impacts how we interpret and analyze this brand new, fresh, highly robust data set in ways that makes it even more valuable.

than the extremely valuable category that it's already been labeled at. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's kind of cool. Like this was done in a lab on Earth, right? Right. Right. Like, so experiments here, experiments here can tell us about like stuff that's happening, you know, the chemistry that's happening like 300,000 years after the Big Bang.

Kind of cool. It is kind of cool. Please keep all the Big Bang theory jokes to yourself as we've already seen them flooding the comments. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Guys, I can talk to girls, okay? I can talk to them sober. So that's a fascinating, the universe's oldest puzzle, one of which we now have an interesting answer for,

courtesy of the Max Planck Institute. And so we're going to shift to another story that's about really small stuff, which is, this one's awesome. Which is now coming out of Yale University. So the story out of Yale is Yale scientists recode the genome for programming, synthetic proteins. A team of synthetic biologists have re-in the genetic code of an organism using a novel cellular platform for producing a new class of synthetic proteins. Very fascinating. A little bit earlier this year, this came out. And so, you know, help us understand the implications

of the ability to recode the genome for specifically programmable synthetic proteins. Yeah. You know, we've talked about synthetic bio on this podcast before, like the power of Chris Barr. This takes it even a step further. Okay. This is like, honestly, I thought this was kind of crazy when I read it. Okay. So Chris Barr is the programmable DNA tool, right? That's the thing that lets us snipe a bit of DNA here and then other enzymes will come in and put in whatever custom bit of DNA we want, right? This thing is making like, so with Chris Bar, one can imagine that this genome sequence was maybe possible without humans, right? Through mutations and stuff like that yes here we're making synthetic biology that like literally could not be possible without humans

The idea is like Chris Barr like the you can see natural processes get the result of what we can yeah maybe in a billion yeah it'll take like forever right here we're like So Chris Barr we're using the same Lego blocks right ACTG right right that already exist we're just we're just reprogramming like how how the ACTG is said because we know what the code is and then we can create our own proteins. Here we're creating new Lego blocks entirely. Does that make sense? So we're adding more letters to the in this analogy. Yes, not to the DNA, but to the proteins. The protein creation synthesis itself.

So let's go over some basic molecular biology, okay, because that's what's going to be needed for this. Okay. So DNA. DNA comes in four letters. Okay. there's four building blocks that make up DNA. And DNA is essential to all life, right? That's where we get the genetic information from.

And that tells us the blueprint of how to create whatever we want to create. Okay, DNA comes in four letters, ACTG. These are nucleotides. They're just like tiny molecules. They've got three parts. And you build a ladder on top of each other, and you create a giant little, I guess, staircase. Yep.

The double helix. Of the double helix, right? And then the unique DNA, you have, unique DNA, I have unique DNA, and that determines like the kind of organism you're going to be, the facial features, everything and everything. It determines whether you have good genes or not. Oh, yeah. Yes, yes. Those are the genes we're talking about people. Not on the body, in the body. No, in the body. And so DNA is pretty standard. Four things. Proteins, on the other hand, there's 20 different amino acids that life uses. Okay. So 20 different building blocks.

Got it. All right. Now, what DNA does fundamentally is it tells the cell which proteins to put in a sequence. Okay. And what these guys have done is created new amino acids. Entirely. Entirely. Beyond the initial list of 20.

Yes. Oh, wow. That's okay. You see what I'm saying? No, no, no. We invented a new Lego block. Yes. We invented a new Lego block for proteins.

That's actually. Okay. Which is the implications of which now. Yeah, we can just let's discuss the implications. First, let's get into the science. Yes. Because I think, I mean, experimentally, this is like such a hard thing to do. Okay.

And I'm going to get into why. So first, why even do this in the first place? Why does it make sense to do this? So here we're going to get into a little bit of mathematics. Okay. So there's four, there's four letters in DNA. Yes. But I want to code for 20 amino acid.

Yeah, let's say 20 distinct words. Okay, sure. Four letters. Four letters, 20 distinct words. Now, I can't just have one word, one letter per word. Right. Because then I'd only have four words, A, C, T, G. Yes.

Okay. With two letters per word, I would have 16, right? I can have A, A, A, A, A, A, C, A, G, and so on and so forth. So four times four, 16 words. Yep. With two letters. But with three, I have four times four times four. That's 64. 64.

Yes. Yeah. So I can do 64. Yep. Different words. Words combinations with those. But I only have 20. Right.

So I need a minimum of three, but that means that there's a bunch of repetition. Right. Right. Right. Because I have 64 different possible words, but only 20 different meanings. Yeah. Yeah. So multiple words are going to mean the same amino acid.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's going to be this redundancy. Yes. And life codes for that. So for example, there's one, there's one three, there's three letter words, TGA, TAA, TAA, and T AG. All of these three, code for stop making a protein.

Okay. Okay. Okay. A TG. So like, you can imagine there's a little like enzyme called all RNA polymerase that like goes down and it tries to find ATG. Okay. That becomes AUG. I guess it tries to find AUG in MRNA.

M RNA uses a different set of letters instead of T it uses you. Anyways, there's a little, there's a little like guy who goes down and he's trying to find AUG. Okay. Once he finds A UG, he's like, up, a protein starts here. Got it. Then he recruits a bunch of other stuff. There's a ribosome that comes in, which is the protein making factory.

Ribosome attaches over there. And then now the ribosome goes, okay, what are these three, what are these three letters? Okay, I need this thing. Okay. Okay. Next. What are these three letters? Okay, I need this thing, right?

And so it keeps going until it reaches something called the stop codon, which is a signal to stop. That's the end of my protein. And there's TGA, TAA, TAA, and T-A-G. There's three different words that mean the same thing. Stop. Right, right. And like in theory, I think I can see where we're going with this. Because what we're sort of saying is there's this natural redundancy where certain combinations all equal the same action.

We don't necessarily need all of those to have the same. action because we already have the action. So I just need one. Yep. We just need one to reliably mean stop. Yeah. And then the other two, what if we coded some crazy meaning? Yeah.

Right. That's never been seen before. Right. So what if I created an amino acid that's never been seen before that has unique chemical properties? Yep. And then I started using that to create proteins that have never been seen before. Right.

Not even in the millions of years of biology. Yes. Right? In the trial and error. Yeah. Because so proteins are effectively this chain of amino acids. And on the back of each amino acid is something called an R group. I think it's called a residual group.

But I might be getting that wrong. In any case, yeah, they'll get us in the comments. The R group is basically the thing that makes the amino acid what it is. Sometimes it's like a sulfur atom. Sometimes it's just a lame carbon atom or a hydrogen atom. Sometimes it's like a phosphate group, which has a charge. Okay. Right?

So you can have like a bunch of things that have charge. And then those charges on either side will start folding the protein and that's what gives it the 3D structure. All of these R groups interacting in this 3D kind of way is what folds this 1D chain into a 3D molecule of a protein that like makes a protein do what it does. Right. But now what if we can have different R groups that like with different elements or like completely unique properties right that start making the protein do crazy things? Because what the because what's interesting is do you have the chain, but. To get the effects, it needs to be into the folded 3D structure. And sort of what we're now saying is, in the wake of something like, as kind of like a side note,

in the wake of something like the Google's product that they put out, which created the library of all the different protein fold structures. Yeah, yeah. Google Alpha Fold. It won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year. Right. And so what you're saying. They're actually using some AI to like try and figure out what effect this kind of stuff would have.

But even if we can see what the protein effect is, what this is sort of saying is we're actually changing the factory that builds them to do it out of the box effectively and create these new protein structures, which have these emergent properties that can be extremely new, completely net new than anything we've ever been able to experimentally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think this is even like, like Chris Barr gives us the ability to make new DNA. Right. But like new DNA in terms of like, with the same letters. With the same Lego blocks. With the same Lego blocks.

This is like new proteins with like, you know, like, who knows what? Who knows what? We could start imagining now we have, we can use a full vocabulary of 64. Which if we started with 20. Yeah. And we now are 64. Look at the diversity of life that we get with 20. Let alone, uh, now almost tripling, right, over tripling the number of, again,

fundamental ways in which you can. generate and so this is actually really yeah dude it's so nuts it's so nuts and like it was actually like so hard to do i can i mean obviously okay it's like so hard to keep a bacteria alive and also like mess with it so much that like you know this poor bacteria is like bro like i have no idea what's going on right so what they did was they first started with a strain that already had one of the i think t a g was so t a g is one of the other stop codons yes already completely eliminated Okay. They had just like they had just like done crisp bar enough to remove all of the TAGs. Okay. In this in a separate context or in a separate context. In a separate context.

They're like let's start with that thing because one of them's already done because someone removed it and everything worked fine. Yeah. Yeah. We're sort of saying. So it's like we feel comfortable that if we recode it for something else. They're not going to be any negative there of impacts of the removal. Yes. That's already been taken care. Yeah. So next what they did was they said okay now I want to I've got two other stop codons Tag and TAA. I'm going to do what I'm going to do is make T. The CAA, the stop codon. It's the stop code on. Okay, that's the thing that's going to tell something to stop making a protein. Yes. TGA is what I want to repurpose. Yeah. There's something else. Okay. So first thing what you got to do is there's something called like, so how does the how does the how does the cell know to remove so to stop? Yes. Once it sees this. There's these these things called release factors. Okay. That are proteins in themselves. Yes. And they look at oh, there's a TGA. Okay. Everybody stop. Stop what you're doing. Okay. Okay. So they got that protein kicked it out. Yep. They got the gene for that, for that thing. They booted it out of the genome.

So now that thing doesn't, so that like policemen. Yeah, yeah. That's there to like say, hey, I see a TGA, you better stop. That thing's gone. So we've defunded the police. Yeah. So we defunded the TGA police. The TGA police.

Right. And we've kept the TAA police. Got it. Okay. Got it. Got it. And we've deleted a bunch of non-essential genes. So we've made the genome a lot shorter.

This one's interesting. So there's three genes. genes in the E. coli genetics where TGA happens in the middle. Okay. But like something gets put in instead. Because TGA is sometimes a subcodone. Because you know, biology, there's never a hard, fast rule. It depends on the context of where this codon is in terms of the rest. So there's three very important genes that has TGA in the middle. So they, they were like careful enough not to completely remove all TGA. It wasn't a blanket delete. Yeah. It was a delete. It was a delete. except for. Yeah, yeah. And the other parts weren't a delete. It was a substitution. Instead of TGA, they put in TAA.

Got it. Got it. Okay. Yeah. So, except for this part, because if they put a TAA, then that protein is done. That makes sense.

Right? So even that, that they're targeting, like, you know, you can't see this. You're not like reading it. You know, like you got to make some molecular machinery and experimental apparatus to actually target the correct ones, leave out the ones that are important.

Yes. So they did. that. Then... You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

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They ran into some problems, which is release factor two, which is the TAA police. TAA police because was starting to get confused because it started not only like it started recognizing the wrong thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, because we've messed with this thing so much. Right, right, right. It started sometimes not recognizing TAA because we put in so much of it. Yeah. And then somebody would put in a triptophan amino acid there instead of stopping the protein production. Got it.

Yep. Yep. So then now they're like, okay, we got to make TAA police better. Right. At being like, no, that's a TAA, you better stop. To understand the new dynamics that have kind of been created now. Yeah. Yeah.

And so they then mess with the TAA genetics. Yep. Okay. Once they did that, they used assays, like, which are basically like, you know, you do a bunch of, like, chemistry and pipetting. And you try to see which proteins. are expressed and so on to make sure that this works. The other thing that I found really interesting was in order to confirm that this work, they would also infect it with viruses,

this bacteria. And the viral, so the way the virus works is it hijacks the bacterial machinery to like make more copies of itself. But if we've done this right, then the virus is coming in, looking at this new machinery like, where's my stop? Like what's going on? Where's the factory that yeah, where's the factory that I normally do? And then it won't work. That is. That's, is that kind of cool? No, that is very intriguing. Yeah. That is, there's so many levels of, I mean, we could have multiple podcasts on just

individual aspects of the story. Yeah. Because there's so many layers of current understanding that are required to even be able to attempt. Yes. To do this. Yeah. The hierarchy of processes that happen within a cell at the molecular level.

Right. Right. I'm talking like, like, yeah, it's just incredible, the understanding that we have. And finally what they did was. So now when they're all done, they have TGA and T.A.G. Yeah. Which are like now, we can do whatever we want. So then they got these two, they're called non-standard amino acids.

Okay. Basically made up by us. Right, right. Outside of that initial list of 20. Yeah. And so then they reworked the chemistry that once, you know, there's a part, the ribosome. It sees some three-letter thing. And then it's like, okay, I'm going to grab this thing.

Yep. It started grabbing the right thing. And to grab this new thing that we made up, we have to make it mimic everything else. Right. So the ribosome doesn't think anything different. It's just like, oh, this is the login key. Right. And so they did that. And then finally they created this new E. coli. They call it O-K-R-E. It's a genomically recoded organism. It's not the first genomically recoded organism, but this is the first one where they've done all of this. Right. Like new, like not just changing. We're not just doing the changing at the DNA level. it is now producing new proteins that we have made up.

With new Legos. With new Legos that we gave it. And it's doing so on its own. Like we've created it such that it can self-sustain this new process. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like alive. And it's alive with all of this new internal dynamics, part of which we just made up from Whole Claw.

Yeah, it's an incredible story. Like it's from the Reinhart and Isaac's, Lab at Yale University. Well, I mean, yeah. This is, we're definitely going to almost certainly come back to the story because I am sure there are going to be a variety of. I mean, now that now that, I mean, this is the first step in creating a 64 Lego block alphabet. Right. Right. Right. Actually, it's got to be 62 because you need one to start, one to stop. Fine. So you, but 62 is a lot more than 20. And if we can, yeah. And right. And so like the amount of, of emergent and derivative. properties, behaviors,

dynamics that result from tripling the number of Lego blocks that are fundamentally a part of this protein and amino acid generation process. I mean, let the imagination run wild in terms of what. It's like we're, it's like

we've been making houses out of mud huts. Like we've been making mud huts. All of a sudden now we got steel. Steel. Right, right. Right. Right. You know, like. You know what this? This is I'll end with this note because And this one thing I wanted to say was like its safety concerns are there.

Of course. Right? And I was reading at the very end of this article, they were talking about like how did we do the safety concerns. One of the things that's interesting is you could make these organisms dependent on this new Lego block. Okay.

Right. And that way, if it gets out, it's just going to die. Right. Because these Lego blocks aren't out here. Right. Right. Like normal E. coli survives everywhere because it depends on the 20 that are found in us, in plants and everything.

Right. But like if it requires like some like weird thing that's only found in labs, well then, yeah. Because I guess the implication of what you're trying to get at is if this newly, if this new form of E. coli were to have a leakage problem, we don't necessarily understand. Yeah. What would happen in a free, in a free environment. Yeah. how it would impact flora, fauna, other ecosystems. Yeah.

Let the conspiracy theories one while. Yeah, yeah. But one way that we could mandate safety is to say that like, okay, how about like you, these E. coli, like, in order to even digest sugar or something, like, that protein has one of these. Yeah, right, right. So then it can't, it's just going to, like, die. The world is going to get very, very, very, very. I'm sorry. I stopped you in the middle of something.

No, because I always try to think of analogs to help me kind of frame some of these topics. And I was talking to someone the other day that they were talking about, obviously, this is related to the UAP issue. And they kind of made a similar point. It's like when you look at the periodic table, you know, we have all this certain number of elements that are on there. But we've only really figured out how to engineer those elements at their current, like, a certain isotopic ratios. So we're, as an analogy, we sort of have like, whatever. the number is at those set isotopic ratios. Yeah.

But if we could figure out how to one create stable states of these other ones or environments where we create the magic number element at like 120 or whatever. Then you open a new set of tools by which you could then engineer things. Yeah. But we have a, we're not using all of the possible, theoretically possible available tools. Yes. In that context, there's a similar. So it's how.

It's similar. Yeah. It's, in that context, I will say that we have a much better understanding of physics and chemistry there. For sure. Right? With biology, because there's like 10 to the 10 more moving parts, the possibility is like, yeah. It's like we're at whereby we're in biology where physics was, I think, in the 1910s, 1920s.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. Which is like when we were like, oh, it's an electron. What is that? Which means we still have not yet had our, you know, our, I guess, what is it? Manhattan Project. Yeah, right.

Like our sort of mid-1900s moment. where there's just this incredible explosion of like literally literally of like practical applications of the fundamental science yeah dude it's what a great story like even though this this story is kind of old i think it was february yeah yeah but like i i came across and i was like this no we have to talk lester's got to learn about this this is this is crazy this is really good this is really good it's unfortunate that it was uh out of our rivals in new haven but yeah well we'll we're part of the We'll give it to them. We'll give it to them.

At least it's not Harvard. Go tigers. Okay, I'm going to have to sleep on that one. Our next story, we're going back into space. That's right. Like our first story. NASA's new radar just pulled off something impossible. So during a close Mars fly by, NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft tested its radar system, reason for the first.

time in space. Yeah. And this is interesting because I said at the top how this might lead us to aliens. So how do we get from a radar at Mars to aliens? Aliens. That's what it's always been about man. It's always about aliens. Not like intelligent life. I don't think there's like you know, see people. Yeah, right. in Europa. But Europa is an extremely important planetoid. It's not really a planet. It's a moon of Jupiter. But if it was going around the sun, it's quite big, honestly.

It's quite big. It's bigger than our moon. And it's a planet that has ice on its surface, and we're pretty sure has an ocean underneath. Right. Okay. And we're also pretty sure that it's geologically active. Okay. So there's like volcanoes.

Okay. And the reason why that makes us super excited is because those are sort of the conditions where we find a lot of life on Earth in deep sea hydrothermal vents. Yep. Right. Those things are some of my favorite places that, you know, if I didn't have a debilitating fear of water, like I would go in a submarine and visit hydrothermal vents. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, I think I'm ever going to do that. It's not happening.

But like those, so hydrothermal events are places on the earth where there's like basically volcanic geothermal activity happening under under the ocean floor. It's been happening probably for billions of years. It's probably where the first life originated around Earth. And it's also one of the only places where the fundamental source of energy does not come from the sun. Oh, interesting. Right? That's what's cool.

Everywhere else on Earth, the fundamental source of energy comes from the sun, right? Right. That becomes like photosynthesized and blah, blah, blah, but geothermal places, I mean, Yellowstone, I guess, is another. The bacteria and those thermal pools, they're getting their energy from the kinds of chemical compounds that are coming from the earth. Hydro thermal vents are pretty nice because, like, there's so much diversity of life down there. There's bacteria, there's like sponges. There's like all sorts of crazy stuff. So we're thinking Europa has that.

And we want to get there. And we want to get there. And we want to look at it. And this radar system, this clipper space. craft ultimately is destined for Europa. It's going to get there in 2030. Okay. So it's not a long ways.

Yeah. It was launched last year. Okay. Um, it already made its way to Mars. It's going to do this like gravity assist. So it's going to go around Mars. Then it's going to come back to Earth. I think 2026.

Oh, gravity assist from us. And then shoot off. So it's a double rainbow. Yeah. All the way. It's doing a comeback. And then it's going to do it. Right.

And it's got, um, it's got a lot of systems to try and see Europa for what it is. Usually when we've set stuff to Jupiter, like Europa hasn't really been the focus. Right. There's so many cool things to see around Jupiter and sun and things like that. So this one is specifically designed for Europa. Very interesting. It's got two things that are really cool. One is it's got a really nice thermal camera.

So with the thermal camera, what you can do is you can look at the ice and see if there's parts that are warm, parts that are cold, which would maybe the warm parts are where the water is coming out or like where the geothermal activity is. is extremely accurate thermal imaging. Then there's also a radar system. This is, the radar is called reason. It means it's a short form for radar for Europa, assessment, and sounding ocean to near surface. Right, because the idea is it's going to be doing its detection at that ice layer and just slightly below that ice layer. Yeah.

And we will be able to then make, have a better picture of what is actually. there. I mean, how deep is the ice? First question. Because if, right, how, like, you know, maybe we want to go there and drill. And drill and it's like, but then it's like, okay, how, how deep do we got to go? Is this going to be Armageddon where we have to send, you know, to drill two miles into the incoming asteroid to get it off course? I think, I mean, they estimate that it's something like 20 kilometers. Oh, wow. Oh, okay. So, and, but, you know, we got robots. Yeah. And we can do it. We can do it. We can do it. Yeah. So the radar, there's two different types of

radar. There's a high frequency radar, which is at nine megahertz. And that's going to give us like up to 30 kilometers in depth. Oh, so we'll be able to see like, okay, what's the depth of the ice? How far away is the ocean? So if it's below, if the ice is only 20 kilometers, then we would be able to basically detect that like the ocean. The ocean. That's the 10 below that. Yeah. And then we also have very high frequency, which is at 60 megahertz. And that gets us to about four kilometers. Okay. But we have a lot higher resolution. Right. And we have a lot higher resolution. on like spatial features and things like that. So there we can see like, what are the fissures in the ice like? Yep. Right? Like how do those move around? What is the geologic history of that ice crust? Right.

You know, because if you look at Europa, there's like these long gashes and like fissures, clearly there's like movement in the ice, right? Got it. Yep. That's coming from, well, one, it's so close to Jupiter that Jupiter's gravity literally like stretches and squishes it. Yep. Okay.

And that's what's causing the geothermal motion, right? the moon is geologically dead. Mars is geologically dead. But Europa and Io, which is the even closer moon, they're geologically active because Jupiter is so massive that it literally like squishes. Like, you know, the moon is tugging on the earth. And because the earth has a fluid, there's tides. This one, this tidal friction, but it's so powerful that literal planet is doing tides.

Right. And it's like squishing and like, so there's a lot of geothermal activity there. There's probably a lot more in Europa. That makes sense. So that's what we're trying to find. And it's going to be really interesting. The cool part to me was, you know, you could ask like, why can't you just? So here, it was right on Mars, and they're testing the radar and the thermal imaging there.

They're doing basically a dry run. It's already on its way. But they're like, while we're on the way, let's just make sure everything is right. And Mars is like the best studied thing outside the Earth and the Moon in the solar system, right? So it's like when we take a picture with the radar on Mars, We know exactly what to expect because we've taken a thousand photos already. So we have something that match it to be like, oh. And then it's like there better not be any new surprises.

Right. Because if they are, it's not Mars. It's your instrument. That makes sense. Right. So everyone's like fingers crossed. Everything worked. Everything worked.

One thing that was interesting was like, why didn't you just like test this here? Right. NASA's JPL made it. Yep. The radar was actually made by UT Austin. The thermal imaging was made by Arizona, I believe. All the universities. And so it's like, why don't you just test it?

Well, the antenna for this radar is like as big as this football field. Oh, right? Like, so in order to test it, like, okay, fine. You can, like, in order to fully test it in the thing, this thing is assembled in a clean room. It's in the biggest clean room in JPL. And that thing can like sort of barely fit this clipper probe because the solar panels are so massive because, like, you know, Jupiter is five times away from the. the sun is earth.

Right. So like you have one 25th of the amount of light. So you need a giant football field size solo panel to like power the radar and the thermal imaging. Right. This thing comes at a cost of energy. Yep. And so you're fitting fitting it in this like in this giant high bay, um, clean room at JPL.

You want everything to be sterile. Now you like in order to test radar, you need to bounce it off something far away. Right. Right. Right. So they tested each individual component, but they didn't test the whole. whole thing right for the first time that they're testing the real big thing and like work everything was great talk about tight sphincters I mean I just I mean I went to I think I

told you about this recently I went to up in Santa Barbara Redwire space was doing a deployment test for their solar arrays for the Artemis program oh yeah and I went into it was a much smaller clean room but it was still quite large yeah and just to see the amount of time and the scale of this thing I mean The scale of this thing is unbelievable. Yeah. So we saw it, you know, deploy itself out. And the reason for that is they want to have it in a smaller, tighter package to get it off the earth.

Yeah. But then still be able to have the surface area like you're saying to be able to be valuable. And even something like that, it was all process, scrub down, et cetera. Yeah. So the scale of this stuff is, is incredible. And I can only imagine, I saw how nervous they were just doing that test here on the ground. And they'd already had a successful one for the first solar array, and they were just doing the second one. So there was already a level of confidence they'd be fine, let alone be like, okay, let's up when it's going by Mars.

Yeah. You know, nothing looks, no, there's no like broken pixel somewhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like they got about 60 gigs of data from 40 minutes of radar on Mars, and the pictures look fantastic. So I think it's going to be a really great thing to see it in 2013. 30 when we get those Europa flybys because it's going it's going past Europa 50 times. Yep. It's going to get as low as 16 kilometers from the surface, which is pretty close.

That's quite close. That's like real close. So if there is, if there is signs, if there's signs of life, that's going to be great. We're going to even, I mean, signs of life would be crazy. Right. Yeah. Like if we, if we, I mean, it does have some equipment to find like, you know, trace gases and things like that. If it came out, but like, even signs of like.

a liquid ocean. No, that's the, no, exactly. Because here's the thing, we, we're trying to understand how many things are unique to our planet. Yeah. Uh, versus abundant in the universe. And as more and more of these fundamental properties become confirmed as being up, because if there's water on Europa, it's fair to extrapolate that water is relatively abundant, you know, more generally in the larger universe, just statistically speaking. And there's a lot of water on Europe. It might be all frozen, but I don't think so. Right.

A lot of people don't think so. And if it's liquid, specifically if it's liquid water, it just opens the door more and more. Again, there are the levels of what we mean by life and biosignatures and not all life off planet. It necessarily is intelligent life. Yeah. But even the presence of microbial life. In our own solar system. In our own solar system.

Right. This is in our backyard. Would have... I mean, I think that would be just magical. But at a minimum, I think what's great about this is, is, you know, good thing we got this thing off last year. Yeah. Before our funding got cut.

Because NASA is really struggling right now. I mean, we're working with trying to get some programs. And it's just, it's just total blood back. No, dude, NASA's definitely struggling. Yeah. So we got it out there. We got it out there. And now it's like, now it's on a trajectory, right?

We can't stop it. Yeah, it's in the vacuum of space. I mean, even the last story that we had with, with Yale. Yeah, yeah. That one's funded by NIH and NSF. And obviously. actually DARPA. I don't like that part.

Yeah, it's like, I don't know why DARPA's doing a... Feels like a Call of Duty game. If anyone remember is the Call of Duty where I think it featured Kevin Spacey as the villain. They basically did this thing where they created a genetic, you know, basically the weapon only impacted people that had this certain... It was very... DARPA's connection to the synthetic protein thing gives me that... It's a little icky. Yeah, it gives me that Call of Duty vibe.

Yeah. Not fun. Not fun. Our last story. Our last story is out of MIT. Yes. It's actually shocking to see some fundamental science coming from MIT. I know Caltech is more well known for that.

But credit where credit is due. Famous double-slit experiment holds up when stripped of its quantum essentials. MIT physicists confirm that, like Superman, light has two identities that are impossible. to see at once. So, you know, one of the things that we always talk about is there's stuff happening at the size that we are, and then there's stuff happening at the quantum level. And our understanding of these two things is relatively robust, but they don't kind of land really well.

Yeah. But it seems like this particular aspect, we're kind of seeing some consistency in both spaces maybe, but I don't know. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's, we're basically finding out that, like, the world's, really is quantum. Okay. And, and it's, it's really a confirmation on something that we already knew. Yep. But it's an incredible experiment in its own right. So that's, that's why I really loved it. We love experimental design. This looks like it's brand new, July 28. Yeah. So this is, again, this

stuff is happening. This stuff is happening now. Every week, all the time. Yeah. So the idea is the double slit experiment. It's one of the most famous experiments in all of physics. It's something that, sort of confirms this duality, this wave and particle picture of light. You know, and it's like, is an electron a particle? Is an electron a wave? I mean, it's like both, but also not both. It's an electron. And a photon, what is a photon?

Well, it's a photon. Sometimes it behaves like waves. Sometimes it behaves like particles. Einstein very famously did not like this. Yeah. Right? This is a spooky. Yeah, he had a lot of problems with quantum

mechanics. One of them was the spooky action at a distance, which is something that we're actually going to come to. And then the other one was this idea of like the wave particle duality. It's like, no, the world is just well defined. Right. Right. Right. Like God wouldn't do that. God wouldn't create ambiguity. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The world is well defined. And like there's, I don't know what you're talking about effectively. Okay. This whole thing started back in 1801 when Thomas Yon. Young made the first double slit experiment with light. He wanted to show the wave property of light. So the idea is the following. You've got a light source, okay? Like from here, you create a single slit, like let's say this way. Yep.

You create a horizontal slit, this way. You've got a light source. Back then he didn't have lasers, right? So he needed a way to create a very, like, sort of monochromatic, like light. You have the same color and things like that. So he's got a prism that spreads it, spreads it apart. And then he targets only one color.

Yep. Right? And then you can like be sure that it's just one. Otherwise white light, there's a bunch of you're not going to get anything. So he has a horizontal slit in this direction that lets in a specific color of light. And then here he's got two slits, one up and one down here. Okay. And the idea is the light is going to, if it's a wave, well, if it's a particle, it's going to like spray like a bullet.

And then there's two slits. So it's going to spray like bullets here. And then if I have a detector. then I'm going to see two lumps of where the light landed. Right. If it's a particle. Right. If it's a wave on the other hand, just like how ocean waves spread out and they interfere

with each other, the light's going to spread out over here. Then it's going to hit these guys and spread out from these two points. And then it's going to create an interference pattern. Right. Kind of like the Moire patterns that we were talking about last week. Yes. Right? Where you have like this, these fringes going out.

And then they create light, dark, light, dark. light dark fringes on the detector. Okay? And when we saw these light dark, light dark fringes, you can calculate from the wavelength of light. You can calculate like how far apart the light dark should be and they're exactly that far apart. You can do the math and like, okay, it's pretty,

pretty awesome that like, yep, it's a particle, right? I mean, sorry, light is a wave. Okay. Then comes a quantum revolution. We start understanding that light might actually be a particle and might be quantized, right? Max Planck uses the quantum of light to demonstrate black body radiation.

which is like why stuff that's hot glows the way it does. And then Einstein himself actually uses light being a particle to explain the photoelectric effect, which is how solar panels work and things like that. Okay, so fine, light can be a particle in a wave, but like you could like sort of justify that by saying that like, you know, even Newton thought light was a particle. And like now we're going back to this idea. Maybe there's some like, you know, um, discreetness in the way. the way that light acts then in 1827 George Thompson won the Nobel Prize for

this he did the same experiment with electrons and he found the electrons also displayed this interference pattern okay so now we're in this spot we're now electrons of becoming waves they used to be particles light that was a wave is now particle on top of that when people try to theoretically formulate all this stuff the people like Heisenberg and Frodinger and Bohr and Bohr They come up with quantum mechanics, which now starts having things like the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, right? This idea that like, okay, whatever system I'm looking at, I can't know too much about it, right? If I know the position well enough, I'm not going to know the momentum, so on and so forth.

Which is such a funny thing. I still find that so infinitely fascinating as a mental thing. Yeah. Even as, yeah. And I mean, Einstein did as well, right? And he's like, this is crazy stuff. Yeah. So then they're like, so so so then Einstein's like one of the rebuttals to this to this this this double-sit experiment was okay, like you've got a bunch of stuff going and so these guys are interacting, right?

What if what if I made the light source so dim that only a single photon ever went through? Okay. This whole thing. Yep. So it went through one and then presumably naively, naively you would think it would go through one of the slits and then it would. Right. Right. But if it went through one of the slits, then I should see just two lumps.

not the interference pattern. Right. Even if I do a single photon, it somehow splits, interferes with itself, which already you're like, what? Okay. Why is it interfering with itself?

What does that mean? And it's creating an interference pattern. Okay. Okay. Next question, next obvious question, is to be like, okay, which slit did it go through?

Right. We only let a single photon through. Right. Which slit did it go through? Well, if we start attaching detectors on the slits, then it becomes a particle again, and we see two lumps. We don't see the interference pattern.

Okay, so this was already getting weird and Einstein had an idea. Okay, so Einstein's like, no, this is this is some weird stuff. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so he he had this ingenious. It's in in 1927 Solve conference. You've seen this photo of the greatest human minds. Yep. Um, at the time in one spot. Never to be repeated again. Right. Never to be repeated again. Honestly, it's never going to happen. Um, like more than half of them won Nobel prizes in physics. Um, just like to be a fly on the wall. It was the. Avengers before the Avengers were the Avengers. Yeah, 100%. And so he has this idea of like, okay, well, you know, I have this first slit right before it gets to the two. Now, if the light is going and it makes its way to the bottom, then it's going to bump the slit up a little bit upwards, right? Because of the momentum transfer. Yeah. Like conservation of momentum, the light got deflected downward. So the slit is going to bump upward. Similarly, if the light goes upward, the slit is going to get bumped downward. Yep. So I could. I could instead of watching the light at the two slits.

Yep. Yep. Einstein's like he's a tough cookie, dude. It's like he's not going to give up. Because like the problem was I was watching it at the two slits. And then and then you know, it's like, oh, well, you messed with it. Yeah. Right.

And but he's like, no, now I'm going to mess with it over here. Yeah. Before it even gets to the two slits. Yes. Okay. I'm going to watch it. I want to watch the slit go up and down and based on that infer which direction it went. Right.

And then from there, I can tell, which. Slitter went. Right. Right. And then my interference pattern should still be there. But I'll also know which way it went. Right. This is a tough one.

Boer, um, Boer said this was a tough one. So he goes back and him and Heism, it was basically the dynamic was Einstein would propose a problem. Yeah. And then Boer and Heisenberg would stay up all night. Yeah. Trying to figure out what was wrong with it.

And then they'd come back the next next day and they'd have an explanation. This was the explanation. It's a very good one. Um, Bore said, okay, in order to actually tell whether the slit was bumped up or bumped down, I would have to know very precisely which way the slit was going before and which way the slit was going after. I need to know a difference in momentum in order to tell if it went up or down. I need to measure that very precisely.

But if I measure that very precisely, if I measure the momentum very precisely, what happens to my position. Oh, you know my position is no longer definite right, which means the slit could be here, here, here, here. The slit's position gets fuzzy. Yeah, yeah, even though I know that it went up or down, but I don't know where it was when it went up or down. You know that it's going up the y-axis or down the y-axis, but the actual tick mark on the on the side, it's yeah, it's fuzzy. Yes, that's fuzzy. That's getting fuzzy, right? And how fuzzy that gets means that you have a pretty wide slit. Right. Which means the light could have. come from up here up down there. Yeah. Which means that this path and this path are no longer

equally distant. Right. So you're not going to get that interference pattern anymore. The interference pattern is going to get smudged out. This, okay. This is does that make sense? And so you can't see even even if you try to do the cheating right before the thing happens to your detector the the, the, the physics knows the cheating. It is happening. It's it's funny. I mean, does this tie to, I mean, is this kind of the ties to the. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Yeah, this is, this is high because the idea is you can only know one of the two.

Yeah. You can't know both position or momentum. Yeah. And like that, it's just what it is. Yeah, it is just what it is. This is, this is what it is, right? And because of that, like you trying to cheat one step before. Doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter because you'll have destroyed the interference pattern already up here. This reminds of like video games where it's like you can't, the rules of the game are defined. And so like if you try to, walk to the edge of the forest, it'll just like, there's no edge of the forest. Yeah, it'll just make you circle around. Right, right. Yeah. So, okay, that, and so I think what's in, there's a long history of people asking these very, ostensibly straightforward. Yeah.

Questions. Where to go? Right. Right. Right. We have two slits. Yeah. We have one singular photon. Yeah. We're sending it towards those two slits. Yeah. Which one did it go through? And which one did it? And it's like, don't ask. Right. And I sign. like bro this is our job as physicists what are we talking about if we can't like like and so that was borr's response right right and so what these guys what these guys at mit did was okay so when we get into that slip problem right we're trying to figure out which way it went yeah um one of the things is you you need the momentum to be so precisely determined to understand which way the photon kicked it right um the photon's momentum is very small compared to even

if I have a one gram mirror, right? Or a one gram thingy. Like that one gram is going to have a momentum uncertainty that's like massive just because it's so big. Right. Okay. So you need to, in order to actually do this thing where I'm trying to figure out which way the electron went, the thing that is doing the electron, sorry, the thing that is doing

the pushing of that photon, the thing that is creating this disturbance of the photon needs to be extremely small. And that's what these guys did. The idea is we were doing this at larger scales before. The split is massive. And so the spectrum of your error is so massive because of the scales. You can't even do the experiment. There's no meaningful results that come from that.

We're just saying if we go really, really, really, really small, you decrease the ban of the possible error, which at least allows you to start to maybe get. At this question, which way did it go? And if I figure out which way did it go, does it really destroy the interference pattern? Right. Right. Because that's what quantum mechanics says.

Right. Quantum mechanics says that no matter how small I make the slit, if I try to cheat and get information about which way it went, I'm going to destroy the interference pattern. Right. Okay. That's what these guys found. They made slits out of single atoms. Okay. So what they did was they suspended these atoms, which it was either lithium-7 super light or dysphrosium.

Disprosium? Yeah. 162. It's a very heavy element on the periodic table. They suspended these atoms in a light beam. You can do that now where you have these like kind of like these optical tweezers that can like, like, these maintain. Like hold atoms, right, at a certain spot in like a little potential well.

And it's ultra cold, so they're really, they're really cold. And then you can have now single photons move through. And they'll interact with the atoms. Yeah. And then create. interference pattern and then what I can do is I can turn off the light and then have the interaction like a microsecond later so gravity hasn't had time to sort of yeah yeah impact it it's still sort of like there suspended but in that fraction

of time now it's no longer in this potential well so it can start spreading out a little bit and then if a photon hits it then it'll kick it right because before it was like confined in this like well so it was a pretty rigid slit basically but now we're getting to this movable where we can measure like I can like in principle figure out which Adam moved more and then be like oh it was that one yeah of the two of these two

sort of yeah yeah in principle they didn't do this but they're like in principle we could have that information and then all of a sudden the interference pattern disappears right and they they they could tune it such that like the amount of like spread that they were getting in these atoms wave functions was proportional to how much the interference pattern was being destroyed. Right? So it's at its very fundamental level. I mean like Einstein and Bohr would couldn't even dream of this kind of experiment right?

Where single atoms are now my slits. Right. Right. But, but that's what they did. And like and they're getting this beautiful interference like and they're they're getting the knockoff of the interference as they do this thing where they're, if you wait longer, then it spreads out more than the interference is even worse. So this is You know As we've gone to a higher level of like let's say resolution By going super super small Yeah It's holding up It's the the light

The wave light Wave particle duality Is holding true Yeah Even at the smallest scales we can get to Yeah Which means that the universe is just weird Yeah it's just a weird thing

I mean this isn't like the biggest test for Monom mechanics, right? Because there's bigger tests. There's like stuff, there's like tests that won the Nobel Prize in physics two years ago. It's like Bell's experiment where you have, where you send two particles far away from each other and then you collapse this one and see if that affected this one, right? It's like looking for correlations far, far away. And this is the non-locality. Yeah, this is the non-locality thing. That's really the thing that Einstein was like worried about the most.

Bore. Because these things are not discreet. Yeah, yeah. Like the, so bore remembers. So like what happened in the 1927 conference. We, we basically have these stories about, oh, Einstein did this and then Bore did this. It's from Bore. Okay.

So like Bore has maybe like embellished it a little bit. And he kind of, you know, now when we revisit history, it turns out Bore might have missed the point on what was Einstein's biggest quorum, which is the action at a distance. I got you. Like Einstein's question was like. Like if I haven't like if I have a, it's a very simple thing, right? Even with this double slit experiment, I've got, I've got an interference pattern here. And you're saying that it interfered with itself. Fine.

I'll even give you that. But then at the end of the day, I only see one particle. Right. It's that if I, if I average over multiple particles, then I see the interference pattern. Right. Because it's like one particle comes in. It puts it here. Another particle comes in puts it here.

And over time, I'll see an interference pattern. But you're telling me there's a wave function that's everywhere. but then I get only one particle. How does the rest of the wave function know that I'm going to collapse here? Right. Right. Right. Right.

Right. It's a very good question. Right. It's like, how does this part of the wave function know, okay, don't trigger the detector? Right. Because the other part is doing it over there, you know? Yeah. And so that was really Einstein's main quang.

Right. Which this is not solving for at all. It's just reconfirming. This is solving this sort of complementarity thing and showing that it really lasts even at the smallest. of scales. So there's still a lot more fundamental research to be done. This was, this was done at MIT by the Fed of Sien and Ketterbach lab, NSF, and DOD funding. Of course. Yeah. All, like all, yeah, really, really valuable fundamental research. Again, we should fund science. We should fund science. Like this kind of, this kind of stuff is so cool.

I'm trying to, I'm trying to dig into the spooky action at a distance. It's so, Quantum mechanics, because you always talk to me about this stuff, even in our private conversations. I'll recommend you a book. It's called What Is Real? I forget the author, but it's an amazing book. I have a copy. I'll say, I'll give it to you. Yeah, no, definitely because there's always this argument.

It's funny earlier you were talking about, like, we're pretty good. The physics stuff, we have a lot of that. We're quite good. The biology people, they'll catch up. But there's this area of sort of quantum mechanics, the inability to quantize gravity, whatever. Like all it it there's always the argument that we've already figured it all out physics all happened in the in this time period that yeah I mean that's what that's what they told Einstein and max blank before they did quantum mechanics right so you never know um it's certainly like I think I think we're poised for um like a lot of cool discoveries both in physics and in biology I think in biology the tools are now there right where it's like we can start doing crazy experiments right before like when with the physics. stuff like the tools were only just catching up because electricity and magnetism had just been mastered in the late 1800s right with Edison and max Maxwell so then we could start we could have like these

like massive electrical apparatuses and and so once electricity and magnetism was solved then we could go on to this thing you know it's like now maybe like once we're getting you know there's a lot lot of possibilities on where this can go and just to just to be clear it's it's it's they're sort of the frame the box the sandbox that we're playing in as well defined there are just some corners of it like this area of quantum mechanics we're still just trying to fill in some of the mosaic but we know with the the boxes yeah right because we're able to do things like this i mean the fact that we're able to do things right like the fact that we're able to suspend two atoms and a laser right that's because we know a lot about quantum mechanics right that we can even

do that right yeah right so it's like it's like i just i continue to be fascinated by this stuff Four really, really great stories this week. Again, we touched on the universe's oldest puzzle. That's right. Fascinating. For being able to really understand how stars form, now being able to sort of resimulate the early universe, connecting to stuff coming out of James Webb, a huge study out of Yale, programmable synthetic proteins.

That one is still nuts to me. That one's crazy, dude. That one's nuts to me. We have the Europa mission new radar reason. It's going to look at the oceans, the potential liquid oceans, but at least the ice. It has two capability sets. And then finally, kind of reconfirming an oldie, but at a level of clarity that kind of puts to bed. Like, this is, we were right, guys.

Yeah, yeah. And it just opens up new possibilities for research. Again, because now we're getting down to this level. again, with everything, you can always move left or right a lane. And it's like, what if we tried this same fundamental concept of how to build the experiment, but apply it over here? And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we always like to talk about first principles here. My name is Lester Nare, joined again by my co-host and our resident PhD, Christiana Chowdary.

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