Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Don Lincoln: Did Einstein Waste The Last 30 Years of His Life? [Ep. 439]

Episode Date: July 14, 2024

Join my mailing list https://briankeating.com/list to win a real 4 billion year old meteorite! All .edu emails in the USA 🇺🇸 will WIN! For centuries, we have observed the night sky and wondered about the laws of nature, matter, and our place in the universe.  Once rooted in theology and philosophy, these questions are now being explored through the prism of high-energy particle physics with one goal in mind - to discover the final, definitive theory - the theory of everything. But what is a theory of everything? And does it even exist? Here today, to explore these questions with me, is none other than Don Lincoln, a renowned experimental physicist and host of the Fermilab YouTube channel! Don has recently published Einstein's Unfinished Dream, a book in which he explores the cutting-edge research of modern particle physicists that is slowly pushing us towards a theory of everything.  Tune in! Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:20 Did Einstein waste the last 30 years of his life? 00:01:49 Israel presidency  00:02:37 Judging a book by its cover 00:05:47 The grand unified theory and the theory of everything  00:14:56 Is there anything significant about the Planck length?  00:19:13 The path to discovery nowadays  00:24:17 Why do theorists get all the attention?  00:28:35 Is there a fascination with symmetry?  00:39:36 Is space-time a metaphysical concept?  00:43:53 Alternatives to string theory  00:53:44 LHC and its discoveries  01:02:04 Muon collider  01:10:45 Dark matter, neutrinos and quark mysteries  01:21:05 Science communication  01:28:25 Audience questions  01:45:12 Outro — Additional resources: 📝 Get one month of Snipd Premium for free with this link: https://get.snipd.com/Cx7S/brianSnipd Snipd lets you take Smart Notes 🧠 with AI 💡 — it’s my favorite podcast player 😀 ! ➡️ Connect with Don Lincoln:  💻 Website: https://drdonlincoln.com/  ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/drdonlincoln ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For centuries, humans have gazed up to the night sky and questioned the nature of matter. Energy, fields and forces, and questioned our place in the cosmos. Once rooted in theology and philosophy, these questions can now be explored to the lens of high energy, critical physics. We strive to understand the ultimate laws of nature and discover the final theory, the theory of everything. But does it even exist? But despite our progress, there's so much we don't know, and there's so much hype surrounding the issue, many of which comes from past guest on the podcast. Luckily, though, today our guest is someone who embraces this uncertainty and is a driving

force in the experimental quest to understand the cosmos. Meet Don Lincoln, a renowned experimental physicist and the host of the Fermilab YouTube channel who's here to discuss his latest book, Einstein's Unfinished Dream. This book answers the question, what did Einstein actually believe? Join us as we explore the most mesmerizing content in the universe and search. for the final theory of everything. Let's go. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Don Lincoln. Welcome to the program. Well, thank you for inviting me. Don, did Albert Einstein waste the last 30 years of his life? No, no. He tried to solve what is a difficult and thus far intractable problem. I don't think that's a waste. Obviously, I'd like it better if you were able to come up with a solution that, you know, moved our understanding of science a great deal forward. But, no, I don't think he wasted his life. He was offered the presidency of the young state, the four-year-old state of Israel in 1952.

He turned it down, saying he's deeply moved, but saddened and ashamed that he cannot accept it. Would he have been remembered fondly if he had become a... president of a large country. Politics tends to taint the greats. I mean, especially when you're not a politician yourself. I did not know Einstein personally. I can't speak to that. But he's known for his sort of dreaminess and his sort of dreamy genius.

And it's unclear to me that the rough and tumble of practical politics, especially at that time, would have served him well. I guess I'm glad for his sake and for his memory's sake that he didn't do it. Yeah, I always joke. It's too bad he didn't accept it because otherwise he could have been, had a good career. We have a lot of puppets here. But, you know, Einstein was known for his dreams. And before we get into some of my favorite examples of Einstein as an experimentalist,

as a patent holder and other topics that you don't touch on in the book, but are fascinating to discuss with an Einstein expert, a fellow experimental physicist. I thought we would do our favorite segment here on the Into the Impossible podcast, which is to judge this book by its cover, which people tell you not to do. But quite frankly, what else do you have to go on if you haven't already read the book? So I always disregard that advice. So, Don, take us through the title, the subtitle, and this cover art, which depicts the cosmos, my favorite subject.

So Einstein's unfinished dreams. Einstein, well, basically that was his dream, was to come up with a theory of everything, with a single, actually, I wouldn't go so far. Well, his big dream was probably think of a theory of everything, but his intermediate dream was to connect electromagnetism and gravity. But either way, he believed in a single unifying principle from which all other laws of the universe would derive. And he tried to do that and failed. So that's what the unfinished part is. I mean, it is a dream that other people have taken up. I mean, he's gone now, but others have taken up the torch and moved ahead.

That thing, that same question interested me as part of why I became a physicist. So that's the title. The practical progress towards a theory of everything. I was trying to bring an experimentalist perspective because in the popular press there is this, I don't know, this conceit, this sort of wink and nudge lie that all we need is yet one other Einstein. They'll have some bright idea, whoever he or she is, and it will all fall into place. And as I discussed in the book, I think this is, in fact, very unlikely. the pace at which we have grown to understand the universe has picked up, but this is still something that will not happen in weeks or months or even years. This is a process that will take

centuries or perhaps millennia. And of course, the picture is of a very deep space because the point is it was trying to drive home that we're really talking about a theory of everything. And so that is perhaps, I think, the best way to convey that. A fun fact, I designed the cover mostly. And what I really wanted to do was the picture you see of Einstein where he's folding his hands together, looking a little bit cocked. And I asked the publisher to do that, and they looked into it. And it turned out that that was going to be too expensive. So unfortunately, Einstein's picture, which I really wanted on the cover, didn't get there.

Too bad. But there are a lot of, you know, discussions of Einstein's dreams. And before we get to, you know, some of my favorite ones, I think he was a deeply closeted experimentalist because most of his breakthroughs came from the, you know, a realization that a freely falling observer would experience no gravitational field, which to me indicates that AI will have a hard time, you know, becoming AE. But before we get there, the question I've always wanted to ask, I always do ask my, theorist counterparts. I've had probably 10 Nobel Prize winning theorists on the podcast to date. But why do we need a toe? And aren't we not, aren't we putting the toe, the theory of everything, before the gut? I had on Shelley Glashow. And, you know, he had many unsuccessful attempts, a brilliant man, obviously, but to construct a gut, but we don't even have a grand unified theory. Take the listener who may not be familiar through the definitions of grand unified theory and why the theory of everything gets so much more ink or electrons on a screen. Well, let me take a step backwards because the idea of a unified theory sounds grand and it sounds a little mysterious. But the reality is this has happened more than once in the past.

For instance, if we were to jump into a time machine and go back to say the 1650s or so, at that time, there were two phenomena that seemed to be unrelated. There was the march of the comets and the stars and the planets across the cosmos, and there was what happens when you trip and fall. And these seem to have very, very little to do with one another, but it took the brilliance of Newton to realize that the same force that brings a, you know, drop cheerio from a toddler's hand down to a waiting puppy is the same thing that governs the march of the planets. That is why it's called the unified theory of gravity, Newton's

unified theory. And so that was the first sort of formal unification of a physics theory. And then we jump ahead 200 years into the 1800s, and you have two other phenomena that seem to have nothing to do with one another, a small magnet picking up a paperclip or something like that, and lightning bolt emblazoned across the sky. Again, seemingly very unrelated things, but it was, well, a series of people who did the heavy lifting. But finally, James Clerk Maxwell, who kind of brought it all together and realized that there was but one force, electromagnetism. So we have historical precedent of this unification concept.

So now getting to your question, over the history of our understanding of modern science, what we have done is we have seen that things that initially seem to be unrelated actually have a single underlying cause. And the current state of affairs is that we know of three or maybe four, depending on how you talk about them, fundamental forces, forces that seem to be unrelated. Gravity, the strong nuclear force, which holds the nucleus of an atom together, and then electromagnetism, which of course is electricity and magnetism, but also holds atoms together and is responsible for light, and the weak nuclear force, which is responsible for some types of radiation. Now, in the 1960s, we realized that electromagnetism and the weak force were in fact related,

so we now talk about the electro-week force. So that's why I say there's either four or three forces, because depending on whether or not you think about electroweak or not, you would say you'd count them as three or four. But scientists do know that both the electroweak force is a thing. And so the grand unified theory is the hope that we will eventually able to unify the forces for which we have a quantum understanding, an understanding of how they behave on the microscale. And so the electro-weak force we understand on the very small scale,

the strong nuclear force we understand on that scale. And the idea is that there is perhaps a single underlying force from which those originate, and that would be the grand unified force, or a grand unified theory is what governs those. And then it is hoped from our theoretical colleagues, that at a slightly higher level, at a smaller energy, smaller size, higher energy scale, that we will find that gravity, which currently resists all attempts to describe it in the quantum realm,

that we will find out that Einstein's theory of gravity actually ties together to these quantum forces, and that's the theory of everything. And so at least with the forces of which we're aware now, and there may be some yet to be discovered, it. But of those known forces, the idea is a theory of everything will blend together all of the force, and it'll be that there's a single force from which the other forces originate, and even more so, not just the forces, but in the same way that we know that atoms are made of molecules, or scrap back the other way around, molecules are made of atoms. atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. And that was a great simplification,

where you have over 100 elements, and now you have three constrictions. of them. And we know that protons and neutrons are themselves made of smaller things. But the hope is, is if we look deeply enough, what we'll find is there's a single building block which makes up eventually the protons and the electrons. And so that's what a theory of everything is. In the real conceit, the real goal, and maybe it will fail, is that we will find that at the very, very basic level, the smallest building block reality, there is one particle and one force, and all the rest is just an illusion from not looking at it the right way. Isn't that, though, sort of a human-centric bias?

I mean, I always think that there's no obligation for nature to provide us with a theory of everything. It's not like she's under contract with us or God or whoever you like. So isn't this sort of, you know, kind of the continuation in some sense of this, you know, reductionist dream or this fascination with simplicity and beauty? is this not sort of a challenge in some sense to the notion of human centristism that Copernicus should have disabused us about 450 years ago? Yes and no.

So the path that I just described forward is the one that many theoretical physicists will tell you is sort of the natural thing. So in that, you should be entirely skeptical of what I just said. But the idea of a theory of everything, or perhaps a couple of theories of everything, It is possible that gravity is inherently and fundamentally different from all of the quantum behavior. I mean, that is a possibility. Or there may be forces or phenomena of which we're unaware that don't unify. It may be that when we truly understand everything, that it turns out there's two or three or a number of principles that are independent.

But nonetheless, that will still be a theory of everything. So when I think about this as a person who has spent my life looking at these, of things. I'm not, I'm not wed to any theoretical idea. I just want to know the answer. And I don't anticipate that I will know the answer in my lifetime. And I expect it will be a very long time before, you know, we come close to this, this goal of having a deep understanding of the laws of nature. But I mean, there are laws of nature. I don't know what they are, but there are. And that's really the goal. The goal is to understand how the universe works, why the laws of universe are what they are. People talk about multiverses, which is a, you know, at least an interesting, if somewhat sketchy concept. I mean, there may be that that's true. But what we really want to do is understand this fantastic cosmos in which we live and why it is what it is. Could it have been something different? Questions that in the past have been theological and then philosophical are growing more. and more scientific. Now, it may be that we will not solve this. It's true. But I do hold it as a

truth that there are laws, that they are discoverable, and we should work towards that. Hey there, fellow explorers of the impossible. I'm so sorry to interrupt this smashing interview with Don Lincoln, but I'm trying to devise a theory of my own in an attempt to get up to the same number of followers as Don has on Fermilab. I need your help. I need to figure out why only 50% of you are subscribed or following the channel on YouTube or your favorite podcast app player of choice. Help me out. All the data I'm seeing shows that you love this content and you want to see more of it. The best way you can ensure that costs you nothing.

Just hit subscribe and follow the podcast on audio. And that will be helping yourself finally discover the theory of everything, at least when it comes to podcast. Now back to the episode. Is there anything fundamental about the plank length? you're not on Twitter, I don't believe, so your sanity and IQ are much more balanced than I'm mine. But about six months ago, Elon posted something like, well, the plank length only sets a fundamental limit on how many digits of pie we actually need, because at some point you get a circle the size of the plank length, and pie would no longer need to have that many significant figure. And, of course, he's got his fans, millions of people.

But I've asked this of many people, Kamran Vafa and others, but is there anything significant about the plank length? Or is it just, you know, kind of a coincidence. I mean, we have, I was doing some coincidence calculations in preparation for this interview. And if you take something like the geometric mean of the size of a neutrino, you know, if you convert its classical cross-section into a radius, take the square root of that. And then you take the Hubble radius or the universe, and you take their geometric or logarithmic mean. You get something like a meter. Oh, that's pretty cool. And if you do the same for the epoch of Big Bang nucleosynthesis in the current age of the universe, you get a day.

So all these coincidences, but you wouldn't say there's something fundamental about a day or about a meter, right? So what is it about the plank length? If anything that makes it fundamental, is it important? Because it obviously plays a big role in this book and your work. Of course, the numerology is always fun. There's a long history of people, you know, taking the ratio of, you know, the size of a cat and how many days it takes to, you know, bake a loaf of bread or something. And somehow that means something. And, okay, that's fun, but it not is so meaningful.

So what you've asked is actually a very excellent question because in many popular science books, often written by theorists, what they will tell you is that the plank length is the sort of. smallest size. Or, alternatively, it is, if you look small enough, it is the size at which quantum gravity is supposed to take over, and it is the smallest size of space. So if you think of, and this is really neat, so we know what water is. I mean, water is smooth, it's continuous, it's everywhere, but you also know that there's water molecules. And so if you dive down deep enough into a glass of water, you will find that it's not what you think it is. It's in individual water molecules. The same idea is that space seems to be everywhere. You can split it up. You can make smaller and smaller bits of space. But once you get down to the plank scale, that's it. Space is that

size. So that is a very common explanation you see in sort of popular science descriptions of this. But the truth is different. The truth is if you take Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, what you can find is if you take you know, Einstein's laws, and you get down to the plank scale, what happens is the laws give fundamentally nonsensical answers. So really the, I think the true meaning of the plank length, it is a size scale at which our current understanding of the universe must break because the mathematics itself fails. Now, that does not mean. that it is the smallest size. It is conceivable. There could be smaller things. But if there is, and we wish to describe the behavior of those smaller things, it will require that we create a new

theory with understanding of principles that we don't have any clue of right now. At least that's the way I think of the plank size, is it's the place at which we're absolutely certain that we have no clue what happens beyond that. And everything else is kind of hand-waving, oh, gee, we know that the laws break down. Maybe quantum gravity kicks in at that scale. So then that's where we need to look because then everything will be revealed. But the truth is, all we know is that's a veil beyond which our current theory is incapable of looking. And when we think about some of the open questions, again, people tend to be attracted to.

I know you get these emails. You mentioned it in the book. You must do. Yeah. So, you know, Professor Keating, you know, I have this new theory that I'm hoping you'll help with because I'm not good at math. But when we win the Nobel Prize, I'll share some of the prize money with you. Oh, okay.

Thank you very much. And then I'll always say, as you say in the book, they'll say, well, you know, Einstein wasn't good at math. You know, Einstein flunked out. And you make short work of that. We don't have to go into that pernicious. misattribution of Einstein's genius. But there's so much, you know, actual science, you know, to do. But, but, you know, before we get to, at the end, very end, we'll take questions from my audience. And I included

some that, you know, you may scoff at, I may scoff at, but these people are very serious. I mean, I get books mailed to me. I get gifts. I have shapes, 3D printed object. It's incredible. But when you hear people like that, they're often met with some, you know, some level of derision from professional scientists. But then we have people like past guests, Michi Okaku, on the podcast, who will say, quoting, you know, Stephen Hawking, that, you know, once we have the theory of everything, you know, we'll know the mind of God, which is what Hawking said about it. Is it really overblown, you know, this, a hero worship of these lone genius working in obscurity until they make their big breakthrough and fame? And, you know, is that really a path to discovery nowadays,

if it ever was. Well, there's a lot hidden in that. It's partially a question and partly a commentary on our mails received. And yes, I have actually, right over there, a bookshelf full of books

and letters and so forth. And the sad thing is these are passionate, well-minded, you know, well-minded people. They have a fundamental misunderstanding of the difficulty

of the problem. They think that, you know, driving home in their car, they'll get some idea And it'll just pop into their head. And, you know, the fact is for, well, at least the last century, really, really, really smart professional people have been thinking about this, and they failed. And, you know, it's an extraordinary conceit to think that all of a sudden this some person

who's, I really do believe is well-meaning is going to have some fundamental answer. And I think it's just because they don't have the training that we professional scientists do, to be introspective. And the first reaction to any cool idea I have is, okay, how can I disprove it? You know, that's what, I mean, that is the thing that makes you a professional scientist is to figure out, you have a cool idea. And, you know, honestly, you want to kill it yourself before you open your mouth and tell some other scientists and have them kill it. And then you feel like an idiot, you know. But historically, you know, I mean, certainly of America.

society, we venerate like the lone hero. I mean, there's a something in our culture, a mythology of the frontier trailblazer, the Lewis and Clark or, you know, the Columbus. We talk about Columbus, and of course, he did very bad things, but when I was a kid, he was a hero, right? He was the guy who discovered the new world. Never mind that there were three ships with, I don't know, a couple hundred guys on it. I mean, he didn't do it alone, but we remember the name. Now, Einstein was a singular individual in the sense that he really did have some really brilliant insights. Of course, he had some that were incorrect.

He was under his intuition on quantum mechanics was perhaps faulty. And, you know, that's not to denigrate his memory, but the truth is he did have a few really good thoughts. And that's possible to happen. But, I mean, he was also a man in his time. He would probably not have had the success he had, had he not, had there not been, you know, people, his predecessors, 50 years before him, understanding even the question. I mean, sometimes getting the, understanding the question is half of getting the answer. And at any rate, I think it's more about at least American and perhaps Western culture that we, simply venerate that one leader, the brilliant one, who has the answers.

And the reality is that's overblown. And especially now, it's becoming harder and harder, which is not to say that someone out there might not have a brilliant idea that does move the goalposts. I mean, it could very well be that some new idea will change how we think about the world, but to go from there to we have all the answers to all questions, you know, that's a heavy lift. Yeah, no, we speak so. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast.

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Hubris is only attributable to physicists like us. Speaking of physicists like us, why do you think that theorists get all the attention? Why do you think, I mean, you're much more of a household name, you know, thanks to all of your incredible outreach as well as your research. But the names, if you ask somebody, who's the name of physicist, you know, besides some of the name, saying, you know, is that phys ed? Does phys ed count? But physicists, like, you'll get, you know, Stephen Hawking, obviously Einstein, Feynman, you'll get, you know, if you're lucky, you'll get, you know, someone more recent in the book. But, like, you cover in the book, but they're almost, you know, Brian Green or, as I said, Mitchie Okaku, these are all theorists. What's the experimental

Why are we kind of the, are we, you know, truly the underclass, the lower caste of modern physics, and at least in the public imagination? I have some ideas, but I like to hear what you think. Well, I'm glad you said in the public imagination because clearly experimentalists are the upper caste. I just want to be clear on that. Well, there's a couple of things about that. It's because, you know, minus the math, which most people dispense with, the ideas of theory, they are, they are more akin to philosophy. They're more akin to theology. There's, they're big questions. And if you don't have to solve everything, you can sort of describe these big ideas. Now, experimentalists, we have to actually make a measurement, right? I mean, and at some level, making a measurement is fascinating because you make, I mean, all right, I assume this is true in your field as well.

But when one of my students, I say, go off and measure something, they'll come back in a week with an answer. And I will say that is fantastic. And then I will beat them up for the next year to get the uncertainty right. Because the uncertainty is key. Well, it's not the only thing. You need the answer, but you need to know how certain you are. And that, you know, it's like with engineers where someone has to work out all the tolerances on a, I don't know, a piston in a car or something like that. If someone doesn't do that, it's not going to work.

But someone who thinks about, well, I have this wonderful idea of how this car will work. Well, that's okay. You know, so there's, I think there's a little bit of that is that the, the experimentalists really have to get in the nitty-gritty details. And we live and die on our uncertainties, you know, but uncertainties are not a grand thing. They don't, they don't excite the imagination in the same way of thinking, wow, space bends. Okay, well, space bends is a cool idea. But now how do we measure it?

How do we make some, you know, gravity probe B, that, actually works out how space is dragging. And it turns out you make this very precise measurement and you see it. Or LIGO, you know, the small shifts in the speckle pattern of a laser proves that two black holes or something collided a billion light years away. I mean, you know, in the theorist's defense, they have grander ideas. My objection is maybe not to that. because grand ideas do engage the public, and I think that's good because they're thinking about questions that I find interesting. But theorists then write many of the books. And so the thing is,

like Brian Green's book, his first one, was lovely. I mean, it was a wonderful book. However, it was very easy to get the impression as a non-sceptical reader that it was the answer and it was just a matter of proving it. And that's true of a tremendous amount of theoretical books. For instance, the thing we described with the plank length. In a theoretical book, people will say, the plank length is the smallest size. That's where space becomes quantized. And that's just not really true. But yet that nuance is never given in the books written by theorists. In fact, that's one of the reasons why I write books is to try and counter that, to inject a little bit of, you know, reality into the discussion. And I think that is true. I mean, it's often said, and maybe you'll get

this, you know, kind of quote or if I mangle it, but, you know, a theorist only has to be write once in her career to have it last her whole lifetime. But an experimentalist only needs to be wrong once in his life before he ruins his career. And I'm living proof, I think, with my first book

that at least you can make some mistakes and still go on to some significant work, although it's still a work in progress. But I also think it's sort of the grander... Feynman once said something like, you know, physics is the crown jewel of all of science. or something like. Everything else is, you know, applied physics or blah, blah, blah. And then the

mathematicians say, you know, hold my slide rule because, you know, they think of physics as applied math. But the point being that the human race seems to venerate the intellectual above the physical and the most, most, you know, mental and kind of cognitive that you can get to in most people's imagination is doing physics, but then especially doing theoretical physics. Even though I make the case, quite frankly, that outside of, well, I would say inside of fundamental particle physics, all the developments in the last 50, you know, 45 years that have actually come to roost or provided more interesting, fascinating questions and answers have come from experimentalists. And so to that extent, where particle physics is at the apex of the public mind of physics, and then at the top of that is a band of, you know, theologian-like theorist, that makes it, somewhat sensible why the public would feel that way. But I want to turn to the book now in a little bit more detail and talk as physicists. And keep in mind, my audience is the most brilliant in this known neighborhood of the multiverse, so we can go as deep and technical as you like. You talk about matter, antimatter asymmetry in the book. And you expressly talk about the Sakharov conditions and Saccharov was brilliant and had this incredible life and so forth and was persecuted. But you talk about the Sakharov conditions. I wonder if we could go through those and talk about. And about in detail, you know, all of them and the different conditions in which they apply,

because I think we make a lot in physics about symmetry and a lot of the goal of the theorists of everything that I encounter are looking at symmetry and so forth. But all the interest occurs due to broken symmetry, right? If there were perfect symmetry, there'd be no us. There'd be no podcast. We would not be speaking or would be annihilated long ago. And in fact, even in the world of, say, People magazine. So they did a survey once, or they did some, someone did a study where they said, like, who is the most handsome man alive?

And you and I weren't available at the time. So they selected Brad Pitt. They selected Brad Pitt. But then somebody did a thing, and they said, well, why is he so beautiful and so handsome? And why is his wife, Angelina? And they said, oh, because there's symmetry of their look. So someone said, is that really true? And they took their picture,

and they divided it down the middle, and they do two different comparisons, left and right symmetric reflections. And they look hideous. They look horrendous. So my question for you is, why is there this fascination with symmetry if, in fact, even in the human existence, we don't perceive perfect symmetry as beautiful, and we owe our existence to the breaking of symmetry.

So let's go through breaking symmetries. What does that mean? Spontaneous symmetry breaking. And then let's go through, culminate with antimatter or matter asymmetry. In fact, I'm going to use the matter, antimatter, to start answering that question. So, antimatter was, if we go back to the 1920s, a physicist was trying to meld quantum mechanics and relativity. And in doing so, the equations, there was basically the equation squared equals one, to all intents and purposes. And so we know how to solve that.

You take the square root of both sides, and so you have the equation equals plus or minus one. and plus one was our universe, was the matter of which we're familiar. They were looking at, he was looking at electrons. But there was the minus one. And he basically said, I believe in my theory, if there's a plus one, there must be a minus one. And he didn't know that it was antimatter. There was, you know, some interesting history going on there. But just two years later, the antimatter electron was discovered.

And so in the ensuing, well, that was 19. So the ensuing almost century, we now know that Einstein's equation equals MC squared says that you can convert energy into matter, but only if you make an equal amount of antimatter at the same time. So that's what happens. Energy makes matter and antimatter and they're equal. So that is a symmetry. So, and that symmetry just simply means they're equal in this context. That's put that aside. Now let's, let's Let's take Einstein's other big advance, again, improved by others, and we have general relativity. And in general relativity, if you fart around with the equations enough, you come to the big bang where the universe was much smaller, hotter, and denser, and full of energy. That universe has been expanding over the last 14 billion years. But early on, that's important.

The universe was full of energy. That energy converted into matter, and it should have converted to matter and antimatter. in equal quantities. And yet, when we look at the universe around us, we're made entirely of matter. And so here is, you know, a dichotomy. We have the observation that the universe is made solely of matter, and that's what you're describing. That's why we're here. But we see in the behavior of antimatter, when we make it in our accelerators, that matter and antimatter are the same. This is clearly some some problem. And what we think is that early in the history of the universe, the laws of physics broke somehow. They slightly favored matter over antimatter. And the degree to which there was a

slight favoring, you'll get different answers depending on which person you do the calculation. But you'll get numbers that say roughly for every billion antimatter particles, there were a billion and one matter particles. The billions canceled leading to the cosmic microwave background, which is your bailwick, and that little one leftover turned into us. And I want to be clear, this is ratios. It wasn't like there was one matter particle. So with all that background, now we can sort of answer your question in a bigger sense. So if we just look at the universe around us, clearly this symmetry that I've described, which matter and antimatter are equal, it's terribly broken because all we see is matter, and that is indeed a fascinating thing

that allows our cosmos to be what it is. But the symmetry is kind of neat because as you dig deeper and deeper into the behavior of matter, and this is just one example, what you find is you find there are facets of the laws of nature where things that seem to be different are the same. We have a sculpture. You can see out my window here at Fermilap called Broken Cemetery. So there's three arcs moving up and they're different heights and they come together like this and they touch at the top and then there's another one coming there. And it's an ungainly thing. And if you look at it from the side, one's taller than the other and you look at one side, it's orange, the other side it's black and it's just kind of odd. But then if you look at it straight from

underneath, looking straight up, you see those three steel, beams separated by 120 degrees. You see this beautiful symmetry. And this is sort of like how a lot of physics over the last hundred years has been understood is that we see something ungainly, something weird about the laws of nature. And yet, if you continue to look at it in different ways, and you finally look in the right way, you see that, in fact, there is a symmetry. There is something about the laws of nature that has this beautiful, unchange, thing in the sense, you know, like you said with the flipping the faces back and forth, where they look the same. And so the thing is, while a theorist will tell you the symmetry is wonderful and broken symmetry comes later,

what's really usually discovered is we see what we see, and with a lot of hard work, that symmetry is finally revealed. That's the nature, I think, of symmetry. Now, when you're talking about broken symmetry, well, that is working in the other direction. That is when you know there is a symmetry, you know that there is something like matter and antimatter should be the same, or there are others which we could talk about. Even though we know the laws of nature have this fundamental symmetry underneath them, we know that when we finally look at the universe,

those laws are not manifested. And so something has to have broken the symmetry. So in terms of our example here, something early in the very history of the universe broke that symmetry. It made matter ever so slightly more likely than antimatter. And then from there, essentially the ball rolled downhill and the laws of the universe did what it did. And here we are. So it's kind of a nice thing because we see our universe, then you twirl around the laws and you finally find a symmetry. but you realize that symmetry doesn't reflect us.

And so as soon as you find the symmetry, you have to find the thing that breaks that symmetry. And so that's kind of the, you know, a long answer, I think, to your question. But I hope it clarifies. Hey there, it's me again. Your favorite cosmological experimental physicist. Are you enjoying these interviews with incredible minds like Don Lincoln and Nobel Prize winners? Are there luminaries from around the world of STEM? Well, I've got a special offer for you.

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And now back to the smashing conclusion of this wonderful episode. Taking a big picture of you, is space time really a part of physics? Or is it somehow a metaphysical concept? You know, that is indeed fascinating. I'm, uh, you know, as you know, I do books and videos and stuff. I'm doing a commercial product right now. And one is, what is the nature of

space? And this is incredibly difficult concept because mathematicians will tell you one thing, physicists will tell you another thing. And I get so many questions where people take a little piece of what a mathematician says and a little piece of what a physicist says, and they blend them together. And everything they say is right, but they really don't understand the nuances of all of those things. and they don't realize that they're picking a piece here and a piece there. It's very tricky. So in a mathematical sense, space is a very abstract thing. It's the place where things happen.

There's not anything to do. It's simply you set up a coordinate system, and the coordinate system allows you to move in all directions and so forth. And our laws of physics, for instance, the quantum laws of physics presuppose that there is this coordinate system there, and that's that. But now a physicist will start talking about physical properties of space. Now, that's a different thing than the mathematical abstraction that many, well, certainly mathematicians and even some theorists will talk about. For instance, we talk about the curvature of space, and that is something the cosmologist and the relativity experts will talk about. But in the quantum world, we talk about how if you look to very small scales, space is not this smooth sort of thing that you think about when you think about space, but it's a riving, bubbling quantum mess with particles appearing and disappearing.

And this is something you can't see, but we have experimental evidence that it appears to be true. So with all that said, space, I think space is certainly part, it is a fair topic for physicists to look at because it is, while it is the scaffold on which reality relies, it has physical properties, we can measure it. We can even alter them in a very small way. Well, we can alter them easily by putting a lot of matter together and bending space time that we can do. But if you, this quantum foam, this bubbling that we see down at the very small scales, if you take two plates and you put them very close together, these particles are appearing everywhere, but the idea, this is a thing called the Casimir effect. But the idea is, since particles are also waves and waves are particles,

If you put these two plates close together, outside, there's no constraint on the particles that can appear. But between those two plates, only particles with a short enough wavelength can appear. And because that's true, that means effectively there's more particles outside than inside, and that gives a small pressure, and it pushes the plates together. And this has been tested. In putting those plates together, we have modified the quantum nature of space, which I think is pretty cool. So the fact that we can do that and we can study that, I think it's completely fair to say that, you know, physics is, I'm sorry, that space, time is something that physicists can and should investigate. But I cautioned your listeners and viewers that when they start trying to take some of the words I've said and bring them together, you have to be exceedingly careful about taking mathematics.

abstract ideas, physics ideas, both the relativistic cosmic ideas and the quantum ideas, and stitching them together because it's awfully, awfully easy to do that. And you get Frankenstein's monster and not a truly beautiful mix of those ideas. And in the book, you go through a variety of different theories. I would call them almost all alternatives to string theory. And as you know, undoubtedly the notion of string theory as not only having failed, but being, you know, horrendously detrimental to the progress in theoretical fundamental physics for 50 years now with only breakthroughs coming, you know, at the definitions of what string theory actually is. You know, it's – but the thought – and it'll pivot right back to space time in a second.

But the thought is – occurs to me that every single alternative that you present in the book, not only has fewer reasons to recommend it, but in some cases has been outright proven to have failed. And yet we still have brilliant authors like yourself mentioning them. And I know why you do it because you want to be thorough and be intellectually honest about it. But a lot of other theorists that I've talked to, Carlo Rovelli and others, still promoted, even though despite it having been falsified. So let's talk about loop quantum gravity. The reason I asked that on the heels of the space-time, you know, part of physics, you know, in the same sense as, you know, is the origin of life part of biology? I mean, maybe, maybe not.

I often say, I don't even think the Big Bang, if it's the beginning of the universe, is part of cosmology. It's interesting, but it's related, but it may not be part of it. It may be some other attribute of some other deeper theory. But let's get back to loop quantum gravity. I talked to Carlo about it on the podcast a couple of years ago, and I brought to his attention, you know, that this gamma ray bursts at very distant cosmological locations. I would have accrued enough phase delay between long and short wavelengths that it should be observable, and yet it's not. And he always pushes it all, oh, you need more observations. So that experiment was up 14 years ago or that observation.

No other observations have come forward. I've presented a test using polarization states. you could do the same thing, as for the time delay between vertical and horizontal polarization or circular left and right. He's never pursued it. Why do we still talk about it? And why do they have the standing, the moral standing done to criticize string theory as a theory that failed and has been lost in math that Sabina Hassanfelder it often calls it. Well, being a little snippy, I'm not sure the word morality and theorist, you know, should be in the same sentence. I digress.

I salute that. I salute that. And it's nifty and snarky as we want against those eggheads. All right. So a couple of things. So here's a true story. So I have said what you said, the phase delay between long and short way links and I make videos. And I got a polite but rather pointed email from Carlo Rovelli saying, you know, we have disproved that.

We now have a new version of quantum gravity, which does not have the phase delay and that theory no longer, or sorry, that measurement no longer, it disproves quantum gravity. So the reason I mention it is because theorists are, well, for one thing, they're very smart. They're clever lads and lasses. And they're kind of grasping in the wilderness, so to speak. So loop quantum gravity, it's not like there is just one form of loop quantum gravity anymore. There's one form of string theory.

So especially when we talk to your viewers. there are variations of it. It is not difficult for a theorist to say, here is the theory, an experimentalist to say, no, that doesn't work, and the theorist can then tweak the theory so that that particular experiment is no longer relevant. And this is very common. It happens a lot in my field, super symmetry being very noteworthy. It was very easy for a non-scientist to think of super symmetry as a theory, when indeed it's not. It's a principle of theory must have. And so it's very, very confusing because in the press, you'll hear super symmetry is destroyed,

then super symmetry is real again and back and forth and so forth. And so part of the reason I talked about loop quantum gravity is, as you said, to be thorough, but because it remains possible to wiggle the theory still. And the same thing with super strings. I mean, I actually would love super strings to be right. I want it to be right. I like the idea. I don't believe it.

And this is a very important aphorism that I tell my audience is you should never make the mistake of believing what you think because it could be wrong. But I like it. I like it very much. And the fact that it has not proven anything concrete and testable, is a significant criticism, but it doesn't mean it's wrong. It just means it has not, you know, there's no way to know it's right or wrong. And so any, I think, reputable scientists just kind of shrugs their shoulders and says, yeah, maybe get back to me when you tell me something I can test.

Or we ask the, are we experimentalists to be clever enough to think of something that they can predict? You know, there's this huge disconnect between what they can test. predict and what we can test. And anyways, with the loop quantum gravity, I mean, Raveli is, as you say, a partisan of this, but they are trying to accommodate the gamma ray burst measurements that you're describing and say, well, okay, the big picture is still right with this tweak. And so that is partly why I keep it, because until you can kill it so dead that no tweaks are possible, it has to be kept in the maybe category. And, you know, it's not like anyone should believe it, but it has to be dead, to be dead.

When I, you know, come down too harshly on alternative theories, and there are many in there, E8 from Garrett. We see a proud son of UC San Diego, so, you know, don't be too overly critical. Well, and I'm a past guest, and we've had our conversations. I've also had on Stephen Wolfram and many others. But lest I be too harsh on the portenders to the throne of string theory, let's go to some statements I've heard from my string theory friends, including Kamran Vafa, who when I challenged him on the paucity of experimental predictions

and results from string theory, he retorted with, that's not true. We have made a prediction on the mass of the electron. I said, oh, really? That's fat. I had never heard of that. I thought exclusive scoop for the Into the Impossible podcast. Here we go, catapulting to number 490 on Spotify. And he said, no, we predict that the electron mass will be somewhere between 10 to the minus 5 plank mass and 10 to the minus 40 plank mass.

I said, okay, so this is something you're proud of or this should be influential to us. And when I asked the same question to Michi Okaku, he said something to the effect of, well, it's up to you. He asked me, and I'll ask you, Don't, you know, how many vacuum states are there of electricity and magnetism in Maxwell's equations? How many different gauges can you choose? How many different, it's up to the, it's up to the, you know, the experimentalist, not the theorist to select which one of the different vacuum states that you live in. And, you know, I'm just a simple experimental cosmologist. So how do you react to this? The extremely wide, you know, kind of wider than the, you know, outfield at Wrigley Field, or the ivy-covered walls of Wrigley Field.

But tell me, Don, how do you react to these statements? Are they the last gasps of a dying emperor? Or is there something really we should take these claims seriously? Well, you have to be careful because, I mean, and I dislike, you know, being overly harsh to any individual. but Chiu-Cakou is, for a long time, embraced very speculative things. There is a discipline that professional scientists have to have, and he may have them in anything he writes, but in front of a TV camera or something like that, it is possible to be grand and speculative and to not have that harsh reality of empiricism.

staring at you, you know. And so we've both, I mean, well, you know, you do a podcast, I do videos and books and so forth. And we have ourselves in answering questions not always been quite as rigid as we would if we were talking at a conference and we were both staring at each other, daring each other to get something wrong. There's a, there's a degree in which popular science, you have to loosen the rules just a little bit. Now, I would say, that Kakku loosens him a little bit too much, you know. But, you know, getting back into that, the fact that you can think about something doesn't mean it's real. And in the end, it always comes back to proving it. And if you can't prove it, then it might be right. Yeah, let's see. If you can't

prove it, it might be right until you disprove it. Which is our job, right? Our job is to disprove things. I always tell people. It's not to prove people right. Right. I mean, and, you know, there's a lot of truth to that. sciences that you all you can prove that the best of scientific theory can be is not yet wrong now pivoting back to our you know how the bread gets buttered at least in in your household perhaps let's talk about the lhc and it's it's discoveries and i want you to react to you know some statements i've heard by unknown unnamed uh physicists that basically you know it yes it wrote you know there's And 3,000 papers, you know, with combined, if you just multiply that by the number of authors on each paper, you're into the many millions of at least names, and sometimes the papers

have more names than text for the result. But it's just produced 3,000 papers. And sure, Don, the discovery of the Higgs bosom is monumental, but many physicists argue it leaves us with more questions and answers or at least no new breakthroughs on the horizon from the LHC. So how do you justify not only the, what, you know, keeping it right? running and yes, perhaps making incremental benefit, but the end of chapter 8 of your book concludes with some speculations about how much a new circular, a new collider could do and doesn't

really get into too many details on the cost of it. But is it worth it? So these two things. What has the Higgs given us besides the incredible discovery of the Higgs boson? But besides that, what is it done to sort of justify attention to it and possible future contributions monetarily and otherwise. All right. Well, the thing is, we have to remember before the LHC was built. Well, in fact, even now, there is a boundary between known and unknown.

And quite literally, by definition, we can't know what is in the unknown. And before the LHC was built, there was a strong sense that it would find the Higgs boson, because there was sufficient hints in prior data that it existed. And so that would at least give us an important confirmation to the standard model, and that is a very good reason to build it. But there was always the hope that when you increase the energy by seven, all of a sudden you would be in a new regime, a new realm, and new things would happen. But you can't know that until you get there.

All right. And so as it happened, the energy increase from the Fermilab Tevatron to the LHC, a factor of 7 in energy, did not break the worldwide open. But it could have, and there was no way to know in advance. So now when people talk about a future collider, for instance, the future circular collider at CERN, the FCC that people are thinking about potentially making, it is a factor of seven. It is a factor of seven in energy. And in the same way as prior to the LHC, there's no guarantee that there will be a discovery. But there might be. And so then you have to ask yourself, are answering these questions important?

And that is, of course, a question themselves that each person has to answer. But, you know, I point people, you know, at the first few words, of the Bible. And whether you're religious or not, it talks about the origin of the universe. And the Bible was first written down about 2,500 years ago. It relates stories that were perhaps 500 years old at the time. And what that tells us is that over 2000, perhaps 3,000 years ago, humanity was interested in these big questions, the creation of the universe, the nature of the universe. There's another Sumerian tablet, which is called the Unuma-Lish, same thing, a little bit older, the same thing. Different place, different culture.

Egyptians had their Book of the Dead of... Yeah, exactly. If only you and I could get, you know, one percent of their book sales of the Bible. God's got a great agent. He certainly does. So, you know, the thing is, people have been asking these questions for thousands of years. These are not modern conceits. These are things that have troubled humanity forever.

And so what we have done over the millennia, is we've learned some stuff. There's still stuff to learn. And so, you know, that that intellectual heritage is maintained by the scientists looking forward. Now, it is completely fair to ask, is a next collider worth it, given that there is no guaranteed future benefit? And there isn't. So there's a couple of comments there. One, the LHC cost about as much, as the America's most recent aircraft carrier. One aircraft carrier versus an instrument that has the potential of rewriting the laws of physics, or at least rewriting our understanding of the laws of physics. Furthermore, in one case, a single country paid for it, and the other one is

spread across the world. So it is, relatively speaking, modest costs, assuming that people are motivated by these ancient questions, which, of course, I am, or I wouldn't have devoted my life to doing this. There are, of course, pragmatic things as well. I mean, you know, the Fermilathevatron, we didn't invent superconductivity, but we helped industrialize it. And in doing that allowed us in industry to make bigger magnets that are superconducting, and these superconducting magnets were then, that technology was then used in hospitals. and now if your kid is playing soccer and twists their ankle and they have to give them an MRI, plop them in a magnet with superconducting technology, and it's a very strong magnet, and you can look at the leg. Now, I cannot claim that Fermilab invented this. It didn't. But in developing the technology necessary to answer the questions that we tried to answer, there were spin-offs. And of course,

you and I are talking over the web, which was used so that physicists were able to communicate across the world. So, you know, Pierre and Paris and Mikhail in Moscow could talk about things. And now we have what we're doing here. And absolutely, certainly, the World Wide Web, the increase in the world economy, the amount of money generated for nation states has certainly paid for the LHC and, you know, the next 10 accelerators. So it's not like it doesn't pay off, albeit indirectly. So that's my little bit of soapbox. But the truth is, I don't know that the next accelerator will do something.

What I do know is that about every five years or so in Europe and independently in the U.S., scientists get together and they say, all right, they take stock of where we are. They ask, what are the big unanswered questions? They look around at the technology that is currently available and they project forward the technology for five or ten years. And they say, what should we spend our time on? Because scientists aren't idiots. We want to answer questions. We don't want to go off willy-nilly looking at this thing and that thing. We don't care.

We want to know, you know, the important thing. So one of the things that was recommended was the big accelerator in Europe. And you being a CMB guy, you know, CMB4, that was very, very high list looking to understand the cosmic microwave background. And why? because it tells us something about how the universe came to be. Come on, this is amazing. And so, you know, as well as I do, the NSF is now worried about infrastructure at the South Pole. They want to build or buy two airplanes.

I mean, two airplanes. This is, you know, for the cost of a nation state, it's nothing. And we should do that. I mean, because these are questions that while our ancestors cared about and we care about, I absolutely promise that my great, great, great, great, grand, kid, some of his peers will be asking the same questions

because it's just something inherent in humanity to want to know the answer. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

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matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. I like to kind of equally get your impressions as an experimentalist about these MUN-Colider desires. Is this kind of just do it because it's there like Hillary said about Mount Everest?

What do you make of these ideas to build a muon collider and what are some of the challenges there? So the Muon Collider, okay, the idea with the muon Collider is we'd like to explore the Higgs sector better. So the LHC discovered the Higgs back in 2012, or at least we announced the discovery of it. And the ensuing 10 years, we have made measurements that have validated that the particle we discovered was not a particle that looked like the Higgs or A Higgs, but is leaning towards being the Higgs. So it seems to be validating a theory from the 1960s. However, the problem is, is the LHC collides protons together.

And protons are messy, ugly, monstrous things. They're beanbags full of stuff. And, you know, people have spoken about colliding protons as like garbage cans smacking into one another because a little piece inside hits another little piece inside. And, you know, that comes out. But so does all the other crut. very, very tricky. So in the past, what we've done is we've made electron antimatter electron machines because electrons have nothing inside them. So when an electron antimatter electron collides,

all of the energy goes into exploring new physics and there's no debris, no leftover debris. So it's a fantastic methodology for making precise measurements. And so you would think that you would like to make an electron positron machine to study the Higgs in detail. The problem is, that the Higgs boson is a vibration of the Higgs field. The Higgs field is what gives mass to fundamental particles. And what that means is the more the Higgs field interacts with a particle, the heavier it gets. So it's very common for people to say the Higgs field interacts with heavy particles. That's wrong.

The Higgs field interacts with some particles and makes them heavy. But that means that the Higgs doesn't like to talk to electrons. Electrons are the lightest known particle except for the neutrino and the photon. And so if you had an electron, an antimatter electron collider, it would be very inefficient in making Higgs bosons. Now, the muon is 200 times heavier than the electrons. So if you were able to collide muons and antimatter muons, you would have a significant increase in the ability to make Higgs bosons.

And that would allow us to study it in more detail. And if we measure things precisely, we might find deviations from the standard model. So you asked what's the difficulty. The problem is electrons live forever. But muons live for 2.2 millionths of a second. And so, and furthermore, you don't make muons directly, typically. What you do is you smash together, say, a proton and stuff.

A bunch of stuff comes out. Some of these are particles called pions, which are basically light protons. The pions decay in about 10 to the minus eight seconds into muons. And then the muons only live for two millionths of a second. Now, relativity helps you if they're going fast. Their lifetime is extended a little bit. But in order for a muon collider to work, you have to take protons, smash them into something, make pions, have the pionons decay into muons, gather the mons, gather the mons, guide them into an accelerator, cool them down enough so they'll get into accelerator,

guide them into an accelerator, and then accelerate them and cause them to collide before they decay. Piece of cake. I mean, this is really hard, and that's why, of course, we haven't built it because all of those steps are very challenging technically. But my colleagues, some of my friends have spent a lot of time thinking about how to do that, and they've made progress. And there's a reason we don't have funding to make it because still there's progress to be made. But what it would do is it would be a method for, I mean, the goal really ultimately,

would be a way to precisely study the Higgs field and maybe show that the theory from that Peter Higgs and colleagues predicted back in the 60s is almost right. and almost right tells you that it's not quite right and not quite right is a thread that you can tug on from which you can pull apart the entire tapestry of what we know now. Last month or about two months ago now, your colleague across the buffalo herd out there, Joshua Freeman announced along with their team some limits, interesting limits, on both dark energy evolution and neutrinos. I don't want to necessarily talk about those specifically, but I want to ask maybe a sociological question. We in cosmology, now with DESE and upcoming soon with the Simon's Observatory and perhaps other instruments, are poised to not only set a limit on the inverted versus normal hierarchy of neutrino masses, but also to perhaps measure them, even if they have the minimum mass in the normal hierarchy,

actually measure the sum of the neutrino masses, would your colleague, and this would be a first, right, Don? It would be the first time an astronomical measurement made a measurement of an elementary particle. Never happened in human history, even for things. The most similar thing would be the discovery of helium on the sun, which occurred, you know, as I always tell my students at night. You know, astronomers had to go at night.

Of course. But, Don, tell me, would your colleagues, you're very, very skeptical. call it, you know, one of these cosmologists really do. Would they believe it? Would they start using it? Or would they wait for, you know, 2100 until some large laboratory, so-called laboratory experiment,

could make the discovery, quote-unquote, for real? I think, well, the short answer is scientists or information holds will take anything we can get from anywhere. And that doesn't mean that we're going to believe it straight away, because, after all, All measurements are suspect, even ones we make. You know, you need confirmation.

So, and, you know, the Hubble tension is one thing, right? I mean, this is not what you talked about, but there are a couple of measurements of the expansion rate of the universe. And it could be that that's telling us some great new physics, or it could be there was a mistake made by something. Similarly, here at Fermilat, the G minus 2, which is measuring the magnetic properties of the muon. The theory and the data disagree, and one or both could be. wrong. And so if the cosmological community came up with an answer, that would be certainly taken under advisement, but we would like confirmation. And I think it's not completely fair because actually, when you think about this, neutrino oscillations first seen in, or at least

the heavy data scene for it, in the deficit of solar neutrinos that were expected. And then atmospheric neutrinos, again, you know, here was cases where, where, where the, maybe not the cosmological community, but the astronomical community was pointing to something that then the particle physicists were able to study. But the actual observation of neutrino oscillation was from atmospheric neutrinos. Super K found a different amount of oscillation from neutrinos directly above, which had only traveled about 20 kilometers or 12 miles, versus ones that had traveled on the other side of the earth. So, you know, here is a very clear case of where particle physicists have accepted astronomical results. And even, you know, the sort of confirmation using plank data that there seemed to be three neutrino species. Now, this was something done at LEP and done extremely well at LEP, but it was reassuring that cosmology was able to confirm it.

So I think it's unfair. I think that we will absolutely take data from the astronomical community or cosmic community, but we would, you know, what does it trust but verify? If you had a rank, I have this project in my YouTube channel I call the assayer, which is based on this finger puppet. Where is Galileo hiding? I have Galileo's most influential book, at least in terms of the scientific method that we talk about, is called the Izzagittori, which means these assayers.

So an assayer is a guy who has a piece of useless stone, and then you send him something like, well, this isn't useless stone. This is actually a meteorite, which I send to all of my listeners who have.edu email addresses, because I want to get them rewarded for being a part of the journey in science. It's a real meteorite for a billion-plus years old. And the assayer had a piece of stone called a touchstone, and you'd rub and scrape this thing that was claimed to be gold, maybe by the king. And he would see if it's actually real, if it had anything. verifiable that could trace, so here's Galileo, that could actually trace the origin and explicate whether it was really gold or not or whether it was useless rock. So the touchstone wasn't valuable, but the things that it could prove or disprove had incredible

worth. So that's a project I call the Asseer project on my channel. And it's really meant to kind of formalize a framework by which we could test and falsify competing theories of everything. And even in my own research where I really can't prove inflation with a detection of gravitational waves, but I can falsify, you know, Roger Penrose's model or Paul Steinhart's model or, you know, the claims that the Big Bang never happened even, right? Those have become popular lately. So if you have to kind of rank order, you know, the fundamental physics theories,

ways to have Einstein's dream not end in a nightmare, how would you rank them? What do you think are the most promising ones before we pivot to the audience? You mean, I'm still not completely understanding me, what are the most promising theories or what are the most promising paths forward? Yeah, paths forward using technology that, you know, we can conceivably build or new theoretical technology that allows us to make, to tighten up the prediction, say, of the mass of the electron from, you know, from loop quantum gravity or something. What will be the kind of key unlock if you had to rank order them or even speculate probabilistically?

I honestly think that there is enough. thing that will be done in the next 50 years that will answer the question. But I do think there are some huge, huge unanswered questions, one of which is it appears that there is five times more matter in the universe than ordinary matter. And that could... Dark matter. Yeah, dark matter, exactly. So that could be dark matter. Or it could be we don't understand the laws of gravity, or it could be we don't understand the laws of inertia. And if you'd ask me over the course of my career, maybe 20 or 30 years ago, I would have leaned more towards, well, that we just don't understand gravity as well. But with the observation of the bullet cluster in the Dragonfly

DF2 and DF4, I have now leaned more in the other direction as well as looking at the bumps and the CMB, you know, the overtones. So I'm, so I am now much more firmly in the dark matter side of the question. But the reality is nobody is made and seen and proven that dark matter is true. I'm very skeptical that any indirect approach, so looking out

into space and seeing the interactions of dark matter in our telescopes is going to be fruitful because if you see more gamma rays, it could be there's neutron stars. You don't understand it. It's just the background is too poorly known. But doesn't the existence, sorry to interrupt you,

but doesn't the existence of nutrient a neutrino's fit every definition of dark matter, except there's not enough of the damn things. That is true. So isn't that a huge kind of vote in favor of particulate dark matter as opposed to Mond or something else, even for axions, which have even less support, although we're trying to do that with the RC&B experiments? We have some interesting hints, but, you know, but Don, isn't it true that, you know, the existence of a massive, weekly interacting particle, more or less proves that dark matter. matter exists, but okay, so it's not enough. But just as there are, you know, 116 elements on the periodic table, it's not necessary for any one element to make up the, you know, the majority, or even the dominant amount of dark matter. So how do you react to that?

I would say that the existence of neutrinos is a proof in principle of particular dark matter. I am not persuaded that the existence of neutrinos means that there's some, I don't know, light of supersymmetric particle or I don't know what it is but you know it just shows that it's not foolish but by no means does it confirm anything to me now I honestly think that it's likely and if you ask me if you really pushed me hard the fact that we have looked really hard for you know what used to be called well it's still called whims weakly interacting massive particles when I was young the idea was that those particles interacted via gravity and the weak nuclear force, and that was okay because the weak force was so weak, and they were just out there.

But, you know, in the last 20 years or maybe a little bit more, our sensitivities increased by a factor of a million, and we haven't found them. And all of the dark matter particles, I'm sorry, the dark matter searches have ruled out a vast majority of dark matter particles that interact via the weak nuclear force and gravity. that doesn't seem to be the case. So I'm personally leaning in the sense that, you know, if we were betting, that it may be that dark matter only interacts gravitationally and does not interact via the weak force. And so, you know, one of the options is a thing called Wimpzilla. So these are big, well, not big. They're still subatomic, but very heavy particles that only interact via gravity. And do I know that's true?

No, of course I don't know that's true. But that's my guess. That's my guess today. So anyway, so dark matter is a big one. The antimatter asymmetry is a really big thing. It'd be nice to find more examples of which matter and antimatter is favored. So, of course, here we at Fermilab, we are building the Dune experiment, looking at the neutrino sector, trying to see if the behavior of neutrinos and antimatter

neutrinos differ. So, as you know, neutrinos will actually transform. There's three types of neutrinos that are not. and they'll transform into one another, and possibly the transformation rate of neutrinos and antimatter neutrinos might be different. Now, we're not the only place looking at that. There's a, well, actually, there's an experiment already here at the lab trying to find it, and there's another experiment in Japan, and there's a big race to see if that's happening,

and it may be that, in fact, the transformation properties from neutrinos and antimatter neutrinos are the same, in which case we're looking in the wrong direction. But the fact that there is something like, something has to be. happened early on where there was this disparity of a billion to a billion and one. I mean, that's a big thing, and we should be able to see it. So these are some of the things I'd like to look at. In addition, the one that bugs me just drives me nuts. Why, when you look at the quarks and leptons, we have the quarks and leptons, which are the

building blocks of ordinary matter. The proton and neutron inside the center of atoms are made up of two different. kinds of quarks. Then you have the electron and you can make atoms and here we go. But there are two carbon copies. And you know, I, nobody knows why there are carbon copies. It's like, who ordered that? Why are they there? And so I think there's some mystery there. And I certainly, when we turned on the LHC, I hoped very, very much that the extra energy would allow us to look inside these quarks and leptons and see that they were bigger and resolve this, it didn't turn out to be true. And so I'm very sad.

But, you know, I hope that were the case. So these are some really big mysteries that are not answered. And certainly I would like to see, you know, the stuff you're working on. I would like to see the, you know, a confirmatory or, for that matter, falsifying measurement of the curl modes versus the linear modes in gravitational waves. I mean, those, you know, that would tell us not so much about the laws of nature, but that inflation at least either was a thing or if it wasn't a thing, or if it's not confirmed, we will rule out a series of theories of, you know, that postulate that.

So those are the things I mean, I'd like to see people look at, honestly. Last two questions from me. what's a bigger mystery or what, you know, would you like to see answered, perhaps? This question of, you know, the multiple generations or the non-existence of the only half-integer spin that seems to be missing is spin three halves. Is that a mystery? Is that something you concern yourself with? Why don't we have any, even any models I'm aware of, except for one or my friend Eric Weinstein

that suggests that there's a reason for that? But tell me, is there a reason or should that be of course? concern that there's this, you know, kind of a missing tooth in the picture of spin three-half that doesn't seem to appear. Well, there could be five-haves, too, right? I mean, three-havs, five-havs, seven-haves. I think this is just a case of there being no evidence that they exist. I mean, and certainly a theorist could write some model, which has these higher-level spin states, and I'm sure they have because there's, you know, so many theories out there. But you'd like to see a hint of it before you get too excited about it. I certainly would not rule out a three-haves

fundamental particle that absolutely could be true, but in the absence of seeing something, I just put it in the, yeah, sure, it could be a case, but there could be another force, too. There could be a lot of things. I'd like to see some hint before I get too excited about it. Okay. Last question for me involves your work as a popularizer. We spent an awful lot of time about your science and the book, which is phenomenal. Talk about the contributions and where you rank those. I often claim, and you might disabuse me of this silliness, but I claim that all scientists have a moral obligation to explain complex scientific topics,

the work that they do in simple terms the public, who are their bosses in substance, should be able to understand. I simply don't agree that, well, I'm not good at it. I always say to people like when I have this battle with Sabina Hossensfelder, but she said, oh, well, they should stick to what they're good at, stay in the lab. And I said, oh, yeah, I forgot. You know, it's too hard for them to learn. And I said, oh, yeah, I forgot.

You were born knowing quantum field theory. You know, you just came out, you know, after nine months. But, you know, she didn't respond to that. But the point is, Don, we don't really require it. And imagine you work for, you know, Oracle or you work for Google. And your boss, project manager comes in and says, hey, Don, what are you working? And he said, you can't understand what I'm doing. It's too complex for you.

and you just wouldn't, you know, get it. I'm doing very specialized things with specialized things. They would say, you know, please, please pack up your desk and your ID card no longer works here, Don. So what is it about it? How do you balance that and how do you take maybe criticisms? I often hear, oh, kidding, you're not a real scientist. If you do popularization, you know, Neil deGress Tyson isn't a real scientist, either, blah, blah, blah. So tell me, these, these criticism, how do you balance the professional work that you do,

which is as hardcore as you can get, with these. with the need or desire to popularize to the public. And then part two, how do you react to criticisms of doing that exact thing? All right. Well, there's a lot in there. So the first thing, let me relate or respond to the everybody should do it. And, you know, in the best of all worlds, I think that's probably true. But the reality is people do have, have talents.

There are charming people. I mean, you go to a cocktail party. There's the wallflower and there's the life of the party. And that maybe the wallflower could learn to be. be the life of the party, but are they ever going to be as good as the natural life of the party? And I think the answer is probably no. And so while I do think that scientists should communicate with the public, I am okay with people specializing in the sense that, you know, here on the experiments that I have, we have people

who love to build detectors, people who love to do analysis, people who really live and die on statistics, people who like to do programming and way. And if some people just enjoy speaking with the public, I'm okay with the division of labor. And that's just because in the same way that I will never be the world's best AI machine learning programmer on my experiment, because there are people who just live and breathe and love that, let them do it. And then, you know, be good at something else. So I'm personally okay with that. And yes, I do have to balance that.

I have certainly, when I was young, I was strongly advised that it would kill my career if I were to do as much outreach as I did. And at least for many years, I would say it certainly did not benefit my career. Now, I did, you know, I wasn't a fool. They told me you must do this, this, and this, and this will allow your academic career to progress. So I made sure to do this, this, and this because I didn't want to be kicked out of science. but I do outreach because I personally think it's important. And it's for a very simple reason. I grew up in what one might charitably call an academically impoverished household,

meaning my dad didn't finish high school. My mom had me way too young. And it's not like I would go home and I would talk about these really cool science things and have my dad say, oh, yeah, let's, you know, have these great intellectual conversations. It was much more interested in NASCAR and professional wrestling and how to fix cars. and things like that. But when I was a kid, there was Carl Sagan. There was Isaac Asimov. There were the people of the 70s, the scientists who themselves were, well, Asimov was, had the training as a scientist, but he went to be a full-time writer. But Sagan was certainly a

scientist, and he felt the need to commute, you know, to translate things to the public. And it became clear as I got older that I command English pretty well. And I have some skill at communicating science. And so I am sort of paying it forward. And I have some indication that it is successful. Well, I have two comments that. One is we have something like 300 summer interns here at Fermilab. So it's astonishing. There are 300 youngsters coming every year to do some stuff over the summer and they leave, and something, you know, slightly less than a third of them, mentioned my YouTube videos as a reason for applying to Fermilab and not some other laboratory. And so that is telling me that I have some effectiveness in, you know, getting the word out there. And while it's true

that the scientific community, even lab management did not support this, early on, as I have become more visible and more effective, I mean, these are smart people. They can see that there is some benefit to this. And so while I can't say that they're pushing me out here, you go do this and this is all you should do, they have gone from being opposed to, to sort of begrudging acceptance to saying, you know, it's okay. If you do this, it's acceptable. And, you know, I've been making YouTube videos for 13 years now.

And we made like 200 of them. If you look at the YouTube subscriber base that Fermilab has, well, the one very interesting figure of merit is if you take all of the Department of Energy Office of Science Laboratories and you add up their YouTube subscribership and you add the CERN. who's a very well-known facility, you add their subscribership. Fermilab beats that all of those added together. And so this is saying that it's doing something. And the fact is, while people will still say, you know, you should spend more time doing analysis or whatever, and that would have led my career in a different direction.

I might have been, you know, director of the lab or something. There are people that have more impact on the field than I do. who run the labs, people who run the funding agencies, and those are important people. But if I had been a standard senior scientist here at the lab, running, building gadgets and running a group of people, I would not have had the impact on society that I've had by speaking publicly. And I can live with that. I can sleep well at night knowing that's true. Okay, let's turn to some questions from your millions of fans around the world, or at least those that follow me on X and on you, you where I take questions always, Dr. Brian Keating on all those platforms. You can ask questions

of all my guests. So go first with Anna Mike Bosch, who asked you, when making particles collide in an accelerator, is there a chance, even small, of creating a black hole? And could that black hole swallow the earth? This was popular back in 2010 when they first were turning on our upgrading LHC. Can it happen? So that's a fantastic question. But there were two questions in there is, can it happen and will it swallow the earth? So the answer to those two questions are, I surely hope so, and no, there is no danger. So according to all known theories, there is no possibility that the colliding energy will make a black hole. That's impossible. It's easy to prove. However, there are some theories that say that maybe there are more extra dimensions other than

the three dimensions of forward, backward, up, down, left, and right. And if there are extra dimensions and these dimensions are small. If we collide enough energy into a size equal to those smaller dimensions, then gravity will get strong. And these extra dimensions are invented to explain why gravity is weaker, the other forces. If that's true, gravity becomes strong, we'll make a black hole. And if we do that, then we will show Carlo Rovelli, whether or not he's right about the quantum gravity, because we'll be studying quantum gravity. And that is a fantastic thing. So I, absolutely hope that we can. Now, the question is, is it safe? And the answer to that is yes, and how do I know that? Well, not because I'm just saying it, but because nature has done the

experiment for us. So the Earth, the sun, all astronomical bodies are constantly being pummeled by things called cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are typically protons accelerated from from astronomical sources, colliding neutron star, supernovae, you know, all the craziness that happens in space. And those protons are accelerated at very high speeds and shot across the cosmos. And sometimes they hit the Earth. So a proton, high-energy proton hitting the Earth, well, it hits a proton or a neutron that's in an atom. So you have a proton hitting a proton, which is exactly what happens in the LHC. And we know what the energy spectrum is of these cosmic rays.

Most of them are not super high energy. But every so often, they are crazy high energy. They are much, much higher than anything we can generate here on Earth. And so those cosmic rays hitting the Earth, if they do, maybe they do make black holes or make some other thing we don't know about. But the fact that the Earth has been pummeled since it came into existence, four and a half billion years ago. And it's still here means that Mother Nature has done this experiment. And so not only are black holes, if they, you know, microscopic black holes, if they

exist, not only are they safe. It's also true of any other thing you can imagine that might be, you know, conceptually dangerous. The fact that the Earth is here means that there's Absolutely no way that the LHC can do something that's that kind of catastrophic. And so getting back to the final answer, I surely hope so. I hope we find liables. Excellent. Okay. Very controversial question, Don.

Please feel free to ignore this. We'll redact it out. Sam World asks, where do you get your shirts from? Oh, that's okay. So where do I get my shirts? Lots of places. and, you know, sometimes I make them myself. Sometimes I buy them.

You know, I watch social media. And once you buy one thing, you get ads for every geek shirt you can see. And I see some that I like. And then I just buy them as I see. If you see a phrase on a shirt that I like, you should Google it. And maybe you'll actually just see where I bought it. I also occasionally design them myself. And then Cafe Press is a company that if you, you know, if you send them down a

JPEG with your picture of whatever you want, they'll plop it on your shirt and send it to you. And so some of them might do that way. John Anderson and no name left, which fun fact, I was going to choose that for my daughter's name, no name left. But they both ask questions about G minus 2. John says, I met you, Dr. Don a few years ago to our Fermi Lab. He wants me to ask you if the MUNG-M-2 team is ever going to release any more data. They're at least two years behind what they promised in 2021. And are they still standing by 4.3 sigma?

And then there's another question about the G-minus-2 standard model calculation. So these are very brilliant listeners. As you know, we have the most brilliant listeners in the known multiverse. So first take that. New data. Are you standing behind, not you, but the team standing behind G-minus-2 measurement deviation standard model, 4.2-sigma. Unfortunately, there's not a simple answer to that.

So let me give you the slightly more complicated answer. So the G-minus-2 experiment, so let me, for the people who are not up to date on that, muons are like heavy electrons, they have charge, they have spin. If you have something that has spin, an electric charge, it makes up a magnet. And so what we do is we plop that magnet, the muon, in a magnetic field, and it precesses like a top does when you put it here on Earth. And what you can do is you can measure the procession frequency. And so there was a prediction back in the 1930s, and it turns out that the strength of that magnet is about 0.1% higher than 1930s quantum mechanics predicted.

And that was where the relativistic quantum field theory, what we call QED, was originated, where we realized that there was, there was. a lot going on near an electron or a muon that modified its magnetic properties. So that's the background. So now what has been happening over the last, oh, I don't know, about 25 or 30 years, is we have measured the magnetic properties of a muon and calculated that. And we can calculate it by some measures to 12 significant figures, which is absolutely freaking crazy. Then you look at them in the theory and the data agree digit for digit until the 10th place and then they disagree. So if you believe their prediction and the uncertainty on the prediction

and you believe the theory, sorry, the measurement and the uncertainty on the measurement, these two things are kind of like this. They disagree. There's a measurement and a prediction, I'm sorry, a measurement and uncertainty and a prediction and uncertainty, and you notice that they don't overlap. And so that's what your viewers are talking about. So there was a measurement at a laboratory called Brookhaven, and that's where this discrepancy was first really observed. That laboratory was not able to make as many mules as we could, so they brought the facility here to Fermilab, where we make more, and we did the same measurement. The measurement at Brookhaven and the measurement at Fermilab agreed with each other perfectly.

And you might say, well, it's the same facility, of course, but that's not fair. Once it got here, it really got worked over. all of the equipment got pulled out, and the only thing that was retained basically were the magnets. And so everything else was changed. And so the fact that these two things agree with each other is a significant thing. It's probably because they're measuring the same thing, and they're getting the same answer. Now, over on the theory side, that's very tricky. Anytime you try to predict something with that accuracy, it's very, very hard. And it turns out that it is so hard that there comes a point in the theory where it's simply unable to be calculated with modern techniques

or it had for a long time. And so what the researchers did is they simply said, okay, we don't know how to do this piece of that calculation. What we're going to do is we're going to cut it out, put it over here. We're going to go out and find a measurement of something similar and plop it in. And so that's even better because it's a measurement. So it must be the truth. And so you do that calculation, And that's where you get the discrepancy, get the discrepancy between the prediction and the measure. And so far, so good, those things stand. However, a little later, there was a new calculation. And this calculation said, we're not going to cut out that difficult part. What we're going to do is we are going to brute force it with superconductor, or not superconductors, supercomputers.

And we're going to get an answer for which there is no data. input. And that new theoretical prediction did not agree with the old theoretical prediction. In fact, it was closer to the measurement. So that suggests that there is some uncertainty in the prediction that was not completely represented by the uncertainty. In addition, another measurement of that little thing that had been inserted in the original prediction. So there's another measurement. And that other measurement doesn't agree with the first measurement. So if you take the piece from that new measurement and plop it in like you did in the old ways, you get a different answer. So now, if you just look at what you see, you see that the data has been measured now three times, and those three

times have, they agree with each other again and again with an uncertainty. However, the predictions wandering around. And that is not to criticize or insults. the theorist. This is an insanely difficult thing to do. But, you know, welcome to frontier science. Doing frontier science is hard. And, you know, you do your best to get it right. And sometimes you do and sometimes you do. And even if there's a little disagreement, remember, they were, they did agree digit for digit for 10 places. So if they goofed up, you know, that that's okay. At any rate, what I am thinking, and I would not bet a whole lot of money on that, is it appears that we need to wait for the theory to settle down.

And then I think we can revisit this whole potential controversy. The G-minus-2 experiment will release their final result, but given that they've already done a couple and they agree with the earlier result from Brookhaven, I suspect that what we will do is we will find another measurement that decreases the uncertainty a little bit, continues to confirm the measurement. And so that's good.

I'm very happy to see confirming measurement, but I think we need to keep an eye on the theory and just wait till that to settle down. Okay. Last question before I let you go tend to your Higgs Bison. Mike Newman on YouTube on my YouTube channel says Don Hoffman, fellow Don, most recent guest as well, theorizes that space time and the standard model are not fundamental. And I actually just talked to him about this last week. He's got a lot of kind of mashed up conjectures, but some of them are, founded on very solid theoretical frameworks from people like David Gross and Nima Arkhani

Hamad, things like amputhedrons and other things. But this, Mike Newman's asking you, if it's indeed true, what do you, Don, think about the other Don's take on this theory and therefore the concomitant result that Don Hoffman believes we won't be able to ever perceive reality until we have this truly fundamental theory of space time itself first. Well, the short answer, I'm going to disappoint your question, is I don't know enough about the other Don's theory to actually make any kind of significant commentary on it. He says the nicest things about you, Don. Well, in that case, he's probably right.

So I can't answer that. But if, I mean, it is certainly true that this theory of everything for which I think this, you know, mankind is pursued since time immemorial, it will require understanding. the nature of space. And if it turns out that space, time is not fundamental, it's emerging from some deeper principle, that is something we'll have to resolve. So I can talk in the generalities that, yes, I agree, but the truth is I have no comment on any specifics of his actual thinking. You may or may not know this podcast is named after a famous phrase from Sir Arthur C. Clark, who said the only way of knowing the limits of the possible is to transcend them and go into the impossible. He was a master of quips. He had,

had many of them, including for every expert. There's an equal and opposite expert. I love to drop that on my department chair from time to time. And he said the following thing. He said, when an elderly, okay, I'm not calling your elderly. Great here. But elderly, but I got to get you my Sharpie. I'll put you in touch with my Sharpie dealer, okay? Get the, the ones that are called Magnums. Those are the ones you want. Gotcha. Don, Arthur said, when an elderly distinguished scientist says something is possible. He or she is very much likely to be right. But when he or she says something is impossible, Don, they are very much likely wrong. And I want to ask you to comment on a time when maybe you've been wrong or something you might have changed your mind about, if anything. Well, certainly, I think that's unfair, although there is certainly truth to the fact that people grow fond of their theories as they get older and maybe hold on to them a little more strongly. I have changed my mind on, well, okay, back up. When I was a kid, when I didn't have gray hair, part of the reason I am into science or into physics is because I heard about quantum mechanics and relativity and my reaction to them as a 16-year-old was, and I quote, that's all bullshit. Got to be wrong. And I'm going to go into physics and figure out why things are deterministic and why, you know, the mass of, you know, relativistic mass and things like that are wrong. Well, I turned out that, you know, the old farts actually were pretty smart.

So that is the first case I can think of where I went clearly from ignorance and learned that, in fact, the world is definitely weirder than I thought it was. But in the course of time, I at one point was really willing to lean towards dark matter not being real, but simply the laws of physics not being well understood. and I have changed my thinking to be more in the direction of dark matter. And when I was young, I thought fairly seriously about the possibility that quarks and leptons themselves had constituent particles, and I thought that that was pretty likely. But I have now looked at, you know, read and understood the theoretical criticisms of those concepts and spent a lot of time trying to look at the data to see if my ideas were true, only to find out that I have absolutely zero evidence that I was right. And so now I put that

in the thing I kind of hope to be true in my gut, but I put it in the, I certainly don't believe it now. I just kind of think it might be true. So, you know, over the years, there have been a number of things that I thought were perhaps wrong. Even the, um, Neutum, um, Neutum, neutrino oscillations from the sun, given that the neutrino oscillations depended on the fifth power of the temperature of the core of the sun. So all you had to do was do a little goof-up in your measurement or your modeling of the core of the sun, which you can't see, and you'll amplify that by to the fifth power, and odds are there was a goof-up. And it turned out that, in fact, the original measurements back in the late 60s were, correct. So there's been a lot of times where I had an answer, what I thought the answer was,

only to find out that I was not right. Don Lincoln is an American physicist, author, and host of the YouTube channel Fermi Lab and a science communicator. He conducts research and particle physics at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and was an adjunct professor at the University of Notre Dame, although he is no longer affiliated with the university. He received a PhD in experimental particle physics from Rice. And in 1995, he was co-discovered of the top quark. He's authored hundreds of papers, and he was a member of one of the teams that co-discovered the Higgs boson 12 years ago.

I can't believe it, Don. Can you believe it? It'll be 12 years. Well, actually, it's 12 years coming up now, right? Yeah, that's crazy. And it's incredible. Don Lincoln, thank you so much for sharing so much of your valuable time. And I wish you a great day, tending bison or whatever you guys do out there in the cornfield.

I'll be out in Chicago in a month. Maybe we'll grab a deep dish pizza together. That would be awesome. Thanks for inviting me. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.