The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - What's New in Science With Sabine and Lawrence| New Year's Edition: Big ideas, precision measurements, and prebiotic molecules.

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

New Year’s Eve always comes with that familiar urge to clean the slate, toss out what didn’t hold up, and keep what actually earned its place. That’s basically the spirit of our latest “What��s New in Science” episode with Sabine Hossenfelder.We began with the season’s favorite shiny object: wormholes. The headlines have been everywhere, but we talked through why most of these stories quietly slide from “a speculative tool in a model” to “a virtual phenomenon that might be useful in calculations.” Traversable wormholes of course still run straight into hard constraints like negative energy and the time machine problem.From there we moved to something much more grounded: CERN. ATLAS has now observed the Higgs decaying into muon pairs, which is exactly the kind of precise confirmation you want for the Standard Model, and while it is yet another remarkable confirmation of how well the fundamental feature of the Standard Model works, it once again sharpens the contrast with the inexplicable nature of the only feature that doesn’t seem to fit: neutrino masses. And it leaves us hanging about where to look next.We next spent time on what the future might look like for big particle collider projects and what it says about the field’s priorities, including the signal sent by China’s latest five-year plan, which no longer features a massive circular collider proposal. We touched on a smaller CERN result as well, and used it to reflect on a broader point: some of the most stubborn, interesting physics lives in regimes that are messy rather than glamorous.Then we took a quick detour into a quantum gravity-adjacent proposal about whether the way we average quantities in general relativity could matter for quantum corrections, and finally landed on a genuinely satisfying closer: OSIRIS-REx’s Bennu samples. Finding ribose alongside other prebiotic building blocks makes it harder to dismiss the idea that the chemistry of life might be widespread, and not a once-only cosmic fluke.I hope you enjoy the episode, and I hope you’re welcoming the new year surrounded by friends and family. Thank you, as always, for listening and for your continued support.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Origins podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause, and this is one of my favorite segments of the Origins podcast where I get to spend an hour with Sabina Hosenfelder and we get to talk about what's new in science and critique, hype, talk about things that are exciting and generally sometimes agree and often disagree. But today we'll see.

And I want to give Sabina the first chance, and I think Sabina wants to talk first about a new result having you with lumpy wormholes, whatever they are. Yeah, kind of. So it's a combination of hype and critique, I guess. So I've noticed, like this is a more general theme that I've noticed in the past year or something, that there are a lot of headlines about wormholes that didn't used to be the case. like wormholes used to be this really fringe thing. No one really wanted to talk about it. And now it's become more accepted. So I thought it'd be good that we talk about this a little bit. I think it was kicked off

by this wormhole in a quantum computer story from a couple of years ago. Suddenly other physicists dare to write papers about wormholes. And so for example, one of the headlines that I saw like two months

ago or something was that one of the signals that has been interpreted as a black hole merger like gravitational wave signal from a black hole merger might actually have been a merger with a wormhole and then the next story

is this thing with the lumpy wormholes that you mentioned. You know, wormholes aren't just smooth kind of tube the way that they're typically pictured but they have quantum effects and that makes the Monumpy. And another

story that I read is that dark energy is actually made of teeny tiny wormholes and they're all around us. And actually, entanglement is a type of wormhole and and so on. And I think that there are two different things going on. So the one

thing is that wormholes are actually a solution of Einstein's field equations. Like technically, you can write them down. The best known example is probably the Einstein Rosenbridge that's been known for

90 years or something like 35 or something so they exist and there are other types of warhols that people have played with they all have the same problem which is that you need some sort of negative energy to keep them open otherwise

they'll collapse and no one really knows how to create them like this is like an unknown issue like you can write down a solution or write like it exists for all time, but it also means that it has to have been there since the beginning of the universe. So no one knows how to actually create a wormhole that connects to different places. Okay, but mathematically... Let me interrupt for one second. It's really important that those wormholes,

I mean, that they have negative energy because one of my favorite early results from Kip Thorne was that if there is just a single wormhole in the universe, then you can make a time machine. So that's one of the reasons why I'm pretty sure there are no wormholes in the universe. But anyway, go on. Oh, well, so I mean, this is because, like, whenever you can connect your two places in space, you can move one of them back in time. So then it looks like you can go back in time. Like, personally, I think you can rule this sort of thing out by relying on entropy increase

so that one direction of the wormhole wouldn't be possible. to travel, but it still doesn't solve the problem of the negative energy. So wormholes have like loads of theoretical problems. Whatever. You should say for people listening, there's no, that these are theoretical constructs in general relativity, but no one, there's no evidence of any existing wormholes just in case people are one. Well, maybe the gravitational wave signal was the evidence. Like if you read the headlines, you might actually

get away with the idea. Like, what they did was they looked at the signal of the gravitational waves, and then they compared what you'd get from a black hole merger and from a merger of a black hole with a wormhole. And what they found, so I thought this was quite amusing, was that actually the black hole merger fits better to the signal, like very slightly better. Yeah, and like, I would say like statistically there were both, you know, quite similar And that is like a typical thing. Like basically from any signal that you see from the outside, you can't distinguish the two things.

So look, I think it's fine that they did this analysis. And even though they didn't find anything conclusive, they put it out. And this is all well and good. I just think that, you know, the people who wrote articles about it could have been a little clearer about what they didn't find, basically. And so this is the one side where people are looking at. actually asked to physical observations of that trying to figure out

could it be a wormhole and typically the answer is there's no way we can tell these two apart so while we're even asking the question but the other thing that's going on and this is where this story with the wormhole

in the quantum computer comes from they're being used as a sort of mathematical tool to actually understand quantum effects like so this is where this idea comes from that entanglement can be understood as a type of wormhole, you know, in an abstract sense.

And again, like, I'm not against this. Like, this is fine with me. Like, you're using the mathematics in a new way and that might, you know, give you new ways of thinking about it that might give us some progress in understanding quantum theory or maybe general relativity or both. But, but again, it's somewhat unclear if you read the headlines. It's like, this is a mathematical tool. Like, this was the entire issue with this worm on a quantum computer story.

And the thing with the lumpy wormhorse is kind of of the same type. Like, if you're trying to describe this quantum link that is entanglement, so to speak, somehow, then now it has these quantum fluctuations, so it's not actually a smooth thing. Okay, fine. When we learn from this, I'm actually not sure. Maybe they'll have to think about it somewhat more. someone I wonder like why does the thing like this is a super super mathematically heavy paper like why does something like this make headlines and I think it's just because the word wormhole yes attention yeah and then there's this story about the dark energy like is dark energy actually made up of teen tiny wormholes that are all around us like someone embarrassingly I have to admit I once wrote a paper about something very similar I didn't call it well called it oh yeah I called it.

No, I went shaking my head. I'm sorry I did. Yeah, and so the thing is, you can basically, the only thing you need is you need the density of these things to fit to the way that dark energy behaves, which is a sudden it doesn't dilute. And so this is the only thing you need, and then you can make it work. So it's kind of an empty model, basically. This is why I stopped working on it because you can make it fit anything, like dark matter, dark energy, whatever. you just have to get the distribution right, which is kind of obvious if you think about it, right?

So, yeah, so basically this is my summary of the situation. Like, but I find it from a community perspective, I find it very interesting. It's a similar thing with warp drives that we talked about, I think, last month, that people, you know, they dare to think about it. And generally, I think this is a good thing. So, like, people are getting. more open-minded, but it has this downside that, you know, the popular science press

picks up on it and doesn't give you the context that you mean. You think that, I worry about it because I think that that, for precisely that reason, that if you mention wormholes, even if there aren't real wormholes, like, in fact, there was so many critiques of the Fermilab work that it was somehow exploring a multiverse and there were wormholes, when in fact it was a very simple kind of demonstration of simple quantum computer calculation that people are encouraged do you think people are encouraged to work on it

because they think if they mention wormhole in their paper they're going to get noticed? Some of them certainly. Like you could really see this like after the thing with the wormhole and quantum computer like one or two months later there was like this bulge of papers about wormholes with press releases.

So I think it certainly affects what people consider to be press release worthy? Yeah. And one should say that the kind of wormholes that people are talking about in the context of this quantum gravity stuff are generally kind of virtual, they're not real ones that are hanging out in space.

They're basically virtual mathematical solutions to describe intermediate quantum states that may or may not do something of interest, basically. They're not real wormholes that are, that Jody Foster can go in and see aliens or anything like that. Yes. So basically, if you have actually look at the paper and you look at what they've actually done, usually it's disappointing. Okay, well, from the land of speculation to at least a little bit of reality, not earth-shattering,

but nevertheless, it's kind of nice and frustrating at the same time as we talk about, the standard model of particle physics works frustratingly well, and we keep looking for something where it breaks down. And this recent report from CERN, from one of the two large detectors, the Atlas detector, sees the Higgs particle decay into muon and to muon pair. Now, wow, that doesn't sound particularly exciting a priori. But what it does is actually, actually it falls up in a result reported earlier by the other competing experiment, the CMS experiment, which found this result at three sigma, which is like 99.9.9% I guess likely. And they've increased it to 3.4 sigma. But the interesting thing is the Higgs has discovered one of the properties of the Higgs that makes

it so exciting besides the fact that it's the central feature of the standard model allowing the mathematics to work is that it in principle gives mass to most elementary particles. And it does that, interestingly, in the model, that the, the heavier particles couple more strongly to the Higgs, and the lighter particles cover less strongly to the Higgs. And so the mass you get depends upon how strong you are coupled to the Higgs particles. And if this is the case, if you create Higgs particles and they can decay, you'd expect them to see them decay most of the time to heavy particles, because they're coupled more strongly to heavy particles, and much less often to light particles. That means it's much less, it's much more

difficult to look for Higgs decays to light particles because they happen very rarely. But if you can check that it happens, and if you can check that the ratio of such decays is in the ratio of masses, it confirms that central feature of the standard model, and that's why people have been looking for it. And as I say, CMS claimed to see a result, and now the Atlas experiment sees that result. And, you know, it probably happens a thousand or 10,000 times less often than the decay to heavier quarks, and it appears to be consistent with standard model, which means that this remarkably simple idea that I never really believed early 40 years ago, it just seemed too simple to be true, that particles get massed by the strength of the coupling

to this one particle in nature actually seems to be true. Nature seems to be remarkably simple in that way, and it works. So this simply confirms the standard model, but it is nice and still, remarkable, to me at least, that this simple idea seems to be true. And they confirm it to 3.4 sigma. As you know, in particle physics, we like to have five sigma results to get something that we can tame as gold. In medicine, it's one sigma and at the 90% or 68% confidence level. But in particle physics, where you have millions and millions and millions of events, you like to show the statistics is good enough. This is pretty good. You can see in the paper

that you can actually see, you don't even need the statistics to see the bump where it decays into these things. And so it's nothing earth-shattering, but it is interesting to see the standard model works. And to me, remarkable in that sense that nature seems to be that simple. What do you think? Yeah, definitely. I mean, so the origin of mass is kind of one of the, I guess, the big mysteries you could almost say of particle physics. And that confirms that it actually works the way that we think it works it's also like I find a little bit frustrating because

where you really want to know where the masses come from are the neutrinos and they won't be able to measure this at the LHC and so you know this of course but for other people who are listening the issue with the neutrinos

is that to make this work this mechanism of mass-generating you need a right-handed in the left-handed particle. And from the neutrinos, we've only ever observed the left-handed version. So what gives? Like, either there are right-handed neutrinos somewhere, but we've never seen one, or the mechanism of mass generation for the neutrinos actually has to work differently.

And so this is why the masses of the neutrinos are so super interesting. And this is also why a lot of particle physicists and I've had endless arguments about this actually say that the internal masses are evidence of physics beyond the standard model. And we can argue about whether this makes sense or not. But, you know, there's a rationale for this, which is that, well, we either need this new particle or we need a new mechanism. Something else has to be there. But kind of frustratingly enough, like the energy scale at which you'd be,

able to figure this out, like, well, we should be seeing these new particles, for example, like this is one of the solutions, is like 10 orders of magnitude or something beyond the large hydranton collider. So, yeah, I mean, I do think that the neutrino, it's interesting and frustrating at the same time. Nutrino masses, I would argue, are evidence the other standard model because the standard model doesn't have right-hand neutrinos, and if you do the other mechanism, it doesn't have what's called lepton number violation, which is the other way to do it. So the only way you can neutrino mass is to add something to the standard model. What's frustrating about it, though, is you can add something that basically has no impact on the rest of the standard

model, so it sort of hangs out there on its own. And what we really want is something that shows some central feature of the standard model is wrong or needs to be corrected. So yes, it's evidence of something new, but it's something new that's out there that unfortunately could remain hidden and not impact on any other sectors of the standard model, and at least in an experimentally accessible way. So it's fascinating but frustrating at the same time. Yeah, I guess one could argue that the right-handed neutrinos are part of the standard model, like all the other right-handed particles that belong to the quarks and that's on. I see. And in this sense, it wouldn't be physics beyond the standard model. But this is why I say,

Like, it's kind of a pointless argument. Like, so, but yeah, so this is why a physicist obsessed about the rest of the truth. It's certainly nice to see that it's working and that this strange feature seems to be true. I, as I say, it's a, and it's also an experimental, not quite a tour de force, but it's very, very difficult and it's amazing they can do it. And, of course, if we want to learn more, we might want to build a bigger collier. But China apparently has decided they don't want to do it. So why do you take over from that? Yeah, right.

So let me be honest, I was a little bit surprised about this because I've been following this discussion like for five, six years or something. Yeah. So particle physicists really want to build a bigger collider, like that it reach energies beyond that of the Large Hadron Collider. So the Large Hadron Collider, like the energy in the proton-proton collisions, like it tops out at something like 14, a tera-electron vault.

And at the moment, the way to go to higher energy is just to build a bigger thing. I mean, we can push the magnets a little bit further because the technology has improved. Basically, you have to build a bigger collider. And CERN has plans for doing this. They call it the Future Circular Collider, FCC. And it's a ring with a circumference

of something like 91 kilometers or something. Nineways shoes. I mean, it would go all the way around Geneva and up under the mountains, et cetera. Yeah, yeah. So it's a huge project. And the Chinese have a very similar proposal for something that's called the circular electron politely or something like that. So both of them are like two-stage projects. So there's a lower energy first phase. And then there's a lower energy first phase. And then there's the full thing and both the Chinese one I think that it had a circumference of 100 kilometers so this is kind of a comparable size they'd read the collision energy of about 100 terra electron volts so that's about a factor 6 or something you know give or take some some details about a factor 6 more than what the LHC can reach and and the hope is of course

that the thing would discover something new. But as we've just seen, like, really, where you would expect the next physics to come, that's actually the neutrino masses. So this is like 10 orders of magnitude away. And then beyond this, there's quantum gravity, of course. And that's still, like, I think two orders of magnitude further. And somewhere in between there's grand unification, which may or may not be actually a real thing. But so between the standard model stuff that we've tested at the large.

hydrocollider and and these neutrino masses grant unification plank energy scale there's that's what's been called the desert like there's no reason to think there's anything there of course this is hope there might be something there like like dark matter or something but there's no particular reason before we talked about china let me just jump into it to at least disagree a little bit in the sense that one of we still don't understand this remarkable fact that the scale that the large adventurer looks at where the Higgs exists, which is the scale where the sort of the weak interaction physics becomes important, why it's 14 orders of magnitude smaller, or even more, 16 orders of magnitude smaller than the scale of gravity

and why that huge desert exists. And so I think a lot of people, myself included, assume that maybe there's some important physics to tell us why that scale is the way it is. And that's not a trivial issue because it's the fact that that scale, that scale, exists determines all the properties of the observed universe. So, you know, it's, it's, it's a mystery. And of course, it's a shot in the dark. And it's a very expensive shot in the dark, as you'll probably point out in a moment. But it, but it's not, I don't think it's unreal. I don't think it's completely unrealistic to hope that there's something new and exciting that'll

explain that otherwise totally inexplicable fact about nature. Do you disagree? Yeah, it's written an entire book explaining why I disagree. I think I wrote, I wrote more. Basically, my point of view is, well, why not? Like, why would these scales be any different? Like, there's no reason. It might just be the, this is the way that nature works. That's, that's up.

In any case. You never know until you look, right? That's the problem. You never know until you look at the question. Yeah. This is like, of course, I get this. Like, in an ideal world, we're building all the experiments that we could possibly build.

And my perspective on this has always been okay, but we don't live in that world, right? We have to make decisions. What's the next experiment that we should build? And I feel like at the present time, like building this bigger collider is not the right thing. The Chinese apparently agree with you. This is what you did in the story, right?

The last time I heard something from the Chinese process. Like the Chinese government makes these five-year plants and they just made the next five-year plan for 2026 to 2030. It just came out. And they did not select this bigger Collider project, which surprised me because I saw some slides from a presentation from some people from the Chinese proposal group where they were quite confident.

Like it was looking really good. They were confident that it would be on the next five-year plan. But it wasn't. Instead, the Chinese government went for a smaller circular collider, like something with tau-charm collider thing, whatever. I forgot, you know, as one of these acronyms, at a collision energy in the range of a few giga electron volts. So this is like a factor 10,000 less. The thing has a circumference of 800 meters or something like this. So it's a much smaller thing, much cheaper.

And as the name suggests, I want to use it to study the Taiwan, the charm quark. And so I find this an interesting development because now the question is, of course, you know, will the Europeans move forward with the future circular collider? So, you know, there are two ways you can look at it. Like the one is, okay, if the Chinese had gone for the thing that would have lowered the motivation to also build the thing in Europe, right? And so now basically the Chinese particle physicists will be very supportive of the thing in Europe. On the other hand, you can say, well, the Chinese probably had a reason not to go forward with that, which is likely that they don't think it's particularly. promising, you know,

will it actually help the country in any particular way other than attracting particle physicists? It seems that the answer is no. It's also interesting if you look at what else is actually in their five-year plan. It's

very applied stuff. You know, it's artificial intelligence, obviously, like quantum technologies, but also brain computer interfaces, biotechnology, so you can basically see where the Chinese are coming from, right?

That they want to make an impact. They want to have something that has applications and bigger collages, isn't it? Yeah, no, I think it's, of course, it's hard to know how to interpret anything that Chinese do. It's inscrutable in that regard. But you're right. I mean, it's interesting that in the article that you directed me to

when you told me you're going to talk about this, of course the Europeans are happy. They're claiming, oh, this is a good reason for us to build it. But you're right, the subtle subtext is why did the Chinese not build it? And one of the reasons I think you're right is that maybe they decide it's not interesting. But I suspect given the way the speed with which the Chinese seem to do things. And I'm saying this because I really think that China is going, is already, and perhaps the dominant scientific power in the world and will be for the rest of the century.

It's the center of gravity moved from the United States. China is the new frontier for science, I think, for better or worse. And I have issues with that. But the Chinese do things so quickly. My wondering whether they're saying in the near term, we want to have an economic impact and we want to compete with the West in all the major areas. And if we want to build a big super collider down the road, we can do it in half the time if anyone else anyway. And so the next five-year plan or the one down the road, there's no reason to put it in. now. So it's hard to know what their motivation is, I think. Right. And so the guys who wrote the proposal say they're resubmitted in five years. In five years. And look, and by the way, it's worth pointing out that even that right now, I think that the LHC is good to, is good to continue until 2040, I think. So when we're talking about the next collider, we're talking up, we're talking 20, 20 years down the road at least anyway. And so it's not something that's going to be built now. And many people have argued, and I have in the past that before you make a commitment to what you're going to build, you might want to check, you might want to ensure, well, give the LHC the greatest possible opportunity to give a signal for what you might want to be actually looking for instead of shooting in the dark.

So you might want it to run a little longer to see what directions might be fruitful and which directions are already ruled out before you actually build something. But it is, I was surprised too because I figured that Chinese have an infinite amount of money and could do it all. But obviously they're not, they're deciding they can't, which is interesting. To come back to colliders, there's another, actually it's a press release

from another experiment in the large outer and collater called the Alice experiment, which is something, an experiment set up to look what's called Forward of the Beam, which is sort of events that happen, sort of more or less outset, the core of what's producing the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, interesting physics that's either lower energy or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, and they've been

building that, and they've been working for a long time, and they just produced a release, saying that they have solved the mystery of light nuclei production. I didn't quite know there was a mystery, but, and I, I, I read through this, and I'm not sure it's, if it's interesting or not, I can see how it might be, but the interesting thing is, and it's interesting for the development of ultimately us, light nuclear like Duteron's, which of course are a proton and neutron, are incredibly important in the early universe as an intermediate stage for the helium and other things, and in stars ultimately for helping the fusion process go on. But they're very fragile. They can be created because they don't need a lot of energy to create them, but they

can be broken apart if there's a lot more energy very easily. And therefore, you'd think in any really high-energy environment, you'd break apart Duteron's and anti-Durons at least as effectively as you create them and you might not produce them. And yet they are produced in high-energy collisions like the Large Hadron Collider, which has, you know, energies of tens or hundreds of thousands, actually much more than hundreds of thousands of times the temperatures of the sun, say. And what they discovered is, well, what happens, and it's not too surprising, is that in the really high energy region, they're not produced. But what happens is you produce these intermediate elementary particles, something called a delta resonance, that lasts for a

20th of a second, which may not seem very long in our terms, but in the case of a particle physics experiment, it's long enough for that particle to get away from where all the action is, and it decays producing protons and neutrons that then have much less energy, and by standard nuclear reactions, could produce neutrons and that neuterteron. So basically it says, even in a region where there's lots of energy, and you might think you might produce these particles, you could produce intermediate states that last long enough to escape from that high energy region of where everything would be destroyed and then to decay and there's enough energy to produce by nuclear actions these particles. It's not surprising. In fact, I can't imagine

any other way that it would happen. But now that they at least observed it. And maybe that's relevant for astrophysical processes where cosmic rays bombard materials at very high energy produce intermediate states and produce light elements that are really relevant for later on, stellar energy production or something like that. So it may be interesting. I'm not sure it is, but they've solved the quote-unquote mystery of how it happens. And it happens, I think, in the only way you would have ever imagined it happening in the first place.

And as I say, whether that's interesting or not, I don't know, but it was interesting enough for them to produce a press release. Any comments? Well, so I don't know about this particular reaction that they observed. But I think there's a larger context here that people. people might be missing. So somewhat perplexingly, if you want to describe high-energy collisions at the Large Haddon Collider, that's actually easier than to describe what goes on at lower energies.

Like when you're looking at those nuclear energies, this is because the strong nuclear force has this strange property that's called asymptotic freedom, which means that basically the higher, the energy, the simpler it becomes. And so if you're trying to figure out how nucleus works or why if the particles go out of the collision region, do they form color neutral states like nuclei or meson or delta resonances or whatever? I think that's color neutral. It's got to be color neutral. So that's really, really hard to calculate. And we don't actually really understand what's going on.

so on these nuclear scales. We do have effective models. Like we do have computer calculations, the different types of effective models. This is actually the sort of stuff that my husband wrote his PhD thesis. So I know more about this that I ever wanted to do. But so it's all bottom up, right? So you try to make a work and there's, you know,

you take ingredients to make it work, basically. But from first principles, we can't really calculate it. This is also like the underlying issue with the prediction for the magnetic moment of the of the neuron, basically. And so I think that's interesting because I want to tie this together with another headline which just came out yesterday, I think, which is an old idea going back to actually Ed Witten in the 1980s, which is that dark matter might be. be a sort of quark condensate, which we call that quark nuggets. So it's a little more complicated. It's not just

nuclear matter, but you also need this axon field. But the interesting thing about it is that it relies on these nuclear scale interactions that we don't really understand and it opens this possibility that the stuff that

we call dark matter might actually be made of particles. We've studied like for decades, we just don't understand how they hold together. And so this is why I think these studies of the nuclear interactions, like

this kind of thing and similar stuff, are actually super, super important. And people always get like that, they get flawed by, wow, we go to higher energies. But I'm like, well, actually, you know, this is a way that we should be testing the lower energies. Well, I think

you make a really good point there, which is that it's nice to get firm fundamental theoretical predictions, but in areas where they're difficult to do, you can do you have two choices. You either have computers or experiments. And generally, nature surprises us. And it's an important regime that basically one of the only ways we can get insights into these things.

That is relevant for lots of stuff, including the formation of heavy elements in neutrons, in collisions of neutron stars, The stuff, you know, as one of the things I've often talked about, which is really amazing, do you have a gold ring on or any, do you have any gold and you wear gold at all? No, sorry. Good. Okay, well, people who do, I point, and it still amazes me that if you wear gold and I don't,

that where does that gold come from? The only place we know in the universe that comes from is one of the weirdest things in the world, which is the collision of two neutron stars. And it's just because it's the only way we know to produce that kind of exotic nuclear reactions that are going to produce heavy elements like gold. And that was a theoretical idea. In that case, of course, it wasn't confirmed that a collider. It was confirmed in the universe when after the LIGO detector saw a collision of two neutron stars, saw the gravitational wave signature, all these telescopes looked. And unlike black holes, which are just holes in space,

neutron stars have stuff. And that stuff, when it collides, produces lots of energy. And you can look at it and telescopes of all sorts looked at it. And they actually, she saw the radioactive decay of basically a 1.4 Earth mass stuff that produced gold. And I found so that kind of using the universe and using colliders to try and explore this regime where we really can't do the calculations accurately is useful. And that's why Alice, I think, persists. And this particular result may not be earth shattery, but it's nice to try and explore ideas to see.

Because not only that, when you observe it, it gives you handles, empirical handles that help you build sort of tools, mathematical tools to model what's going on that might be useful for other stuff, what we call phenomenological models, namely they're not fundamental, but they're cluge together to reproduce the observations, and they work. And if they work, maybe those cluges will help us later on in other calculations, perform other calculations we couldn't do with the actual full underlying theory. Okay, well, from the sublime to the ridiculous, I'm not going to say it that way, but from the real to the possible, let's go back to quantum gravity and quantum mechanics and gravity.

That's, you have an, you have something you want to talk to. Yeah, and you just gave me the key word, which is, it's a phenomenon, a logical model. So it's not actually a new theory of quantum gravity or something. It's much more modest. And I found it interesting because, for one, I know the first author of the paper. So we studied together. And we've been in touch ever since because we happen to be born on exactly the same day. So every year, on our birthday, we congratulate each other.

So totally tangential. But just so, you know, I'm somewhat of a conflict. I like folded closure. It's okay. So one of the things that I think people underestimate somewhat about general relativity is that it's a non-linear theory, whereas quantum mechanics is a linear theory, which is in some sense it's more difficult to interpret. It's more difficult to understand, but to calculate, it's much simpler.

And so one of the things that bothers me is that when we, most of the time when we do calculations, with general relativity where we enter a source like it's created by particles, stars, galaxies, whatever, we basically ignore this non-linearity. And the way that it enters is if you want to calculate anything in general relativity, you need to take an average over all those quantum things, basically. So you calculate the average, So this is kind of your classical term.

And then you could use your quantum theory to calculate the uncertainty around it. And so to do these two things, you need to know how to take averages. And so what they point out in the paper is that if you look at the trajectories on which particles move or, you know, in astrophysics, you'd be interested in the trajectories on which, I don't know, star's move or whatever. Then you never deal with the average of the space time itself, which is described by something that's called the metric tensor. But you always have some nonlinear products of the metric and its derivatives. And so now the issue is that the average of the product is not the product of the averages.

And basically these guys point out that the way that one normally deals with the quantum corrections to the trajectories is that one takes the product of an average when we should be taking the average of the product. And so they redo the calculation and they ask like, okay, so what are the quantum corrections to the trajectories of objects in the universe if we do it correctly in their interpretation? And they find that in the solar system doesn't make any difference or, you know, it makes a difference. Like, there's 40 orders of magnitude beyond what we can measure, the kind of thing. But they say that on cosmological scales, there is a new contribution that depends on the cosmological constant. And that is necessarily small. This is what they say in the press release. I'm not sure that's correct.

You know, I looked at the paper and I was like, hmm, it looks to me. like it's small, but, you know, who am I to disagree with the authors of the paper, right? So I guess we'll see about this. And the reason I find this interesting, you know, leaving aside whether the calculation will turn out to be correct. I mean, it's published in a very good journal. I think it's PRD, if I remember correctly. So it's because you remember modified Newtonian dynamics,

they suppose that are alternative to dark matter. Yeah. it scales with the cosmological constant. And no one has any idea why. And so it makes such a lot of sense if that scaling came from a quantum gravitational effect. Like this is where it came from. So because that's basically what we're looking for, right?

We're looking for some kind of connection between the observation that we have of the cosmos out there and some deeper underlying theory. So Monde is, to pick up on what you said earlier, it's a fundamentalological model. It was built to describe correlations that we see out there. So those are there, and the model fits the correlations, not all of them, unfortunately. So this is the entire problem with Monde, not everything wants to fit. But this scale, like with the cosmological constant, or I forget maybe was the cosmological constant divided by three or something like that. It just falls out of the data.

And so I find this super perplexing, like, why? Like, why does it have something to do with the cosmological constant? It just, you know, it seems to indicate to me like we're missing something. Like, there's something else going on that we don't know. And so this is why I find this paper interesting. So, as I said, it's not a new model of quantum gravity. You still need some assumptions about what the quantum fluctuations of space time are that ideally have to come from an underlying theory.

But what they provide is this connection between the underlying quantum gravity, the fluctuations of space time and so on, and something that we can actually observe. So that's why I thought it was interesting. And that's why, I mean, that's why it's interesting, because the problem with quantum gravity is that generally as interesting as it might be theoretically in terms of observations, it's often, well, so far completely inaccessible. And so the Holy Grail for years and years is to find some effect that would allow us to test something. about the quantum mechanical nature of gravity. You know, we, as you know, I've argued that in gravitational waves,

you might be able to do that at some level. But, but, and so that's the point of this paper, is that anytime you find a prediction that might be observable, it's worth exploring. The question, of course, as you say, is whether this calculation is, which is an approximation is right. In the press release, are there other people in that field who comment on that and are skeptical or not?

Do you know? Not yet. Not yet. I mean, I mean, me, right? So I just commented on it and I'm skeptical. Yeah, you just comment on. But no, no, the press release is just the authors of the paper. Oh, just the author's paper.

Okay. Yeah, so it comes from the university. If it is observable, I find it suspicious, I mean, when I read about it, I didn't read look at the paper, but I found that fact suspicious, but we'll see. I also, I guess I'm also not too surprised when scales coincides. after all, the cosmological constant, the dark energy is, we would make it, basically is a scale that's comparable to the size of the universe if you look at a physical scale. So it's not too surprising if you look at other effects that might be relevant on that scale, they're related because it's like the Hubble constant. There's one fundamental scale that determines more or less the age and size of the universe.

And everything, it's not too surprising to other things that happen cosmologically relate to that scale. So it's not, it's so important, it might just be, you know, an accident when you try and fit things, you come up at that scale. But it'll be interesting to see. You know, I do know for a while, there were, and this is probably not related, but there were claims that quantum foam you could also change the trajectory of high energy cosmic rays. And you could somehow, you know, see scatter, high energy cosmic rays scattering off quantum foam and quantum gravity in an observable way. but as far as I know, any such claims have later on been shown not to be the case, or at least not to be observably important so far. So it'll be interesting to see.

Certainly, it will be profoundly important if any quantum gravitational effect were actually observable. And so I do implod people for looking for just that, because it's really the only way we'll know if we make any progress, I think, in that area. In fact. Okay, to go from that extreme of theoretical speculation and high-energy physics to the back to the world that relates to us, I want to do one real discovery that is fascinating that comes from not anthropysics, but planetary science. And it is the recovery of material from the asteroid venue that was, I think, a Japanese experiment. and while the Japanese are looking at it, it's the Osir's Rex experiment that still amazed me

that got material and brought it back for us to study on Earth. And not surprisingly, we're surprised. And it's actually of quite great interest to me that there's already any time you've looked at asteroids or comets, one of the big surprises from years and years ago is that there's complicated organic materials that are created in space, which is very exciting if you want to think about the origin of life.

So the phosphates basis of DNA and amino acids, all of those have been observed in comets and such. But what's really interesting in this case is that, so all of the five phosphate bases, all of the bases of DNA been seen, but DNA is DNA is called deoxy ribonucleic acid, and RNA is ribonucleic acid, because the ribo comes from a sugar called ribos, a five car, carbon sugar and glucose is a six carbon sugar. And what has been seen on the asteroid is ribos for the first time, which is basically the other building block of RNA. You've got the phosphates and then you have this ribose. And what's also extremely interesting is that you don't see deoxyribos, okay, which is the bait which would be necessary for DNA. And so now every single component for what we call an RNA world in the early Earth. Earth. Many people think that the first forms of life happened, not based on DNA, but based

on RNA. And it's a simpler way to do things, and it could be a precursor. It's an interesting idea. But now what's been seen is, in fact, every component for an RNA world now has been seen to be available in the extracellar medium to come to Earth on this aspect. and and the deoxid-inidated part of it, the deoxy rivals, hasn't. So it is suggestive that, indeed, an RNA world might be the way things began. But it's just amazing that all these things exist out there. And the clue to why we're here may be, once again, looking outside. Not that we're created by alien species by any kind of panspermia,

but it could be that simple organic, well, chemistry, and there's lots of chemistry that goes on in space, which is, again, I think, initial surprise. On the surface of ice comets or rocks, there's energy, there's cosmic rays, there's lots of energy available to do chemistry, and it all seems to be happening. And I think that's interesting. Not just that, but there's a kind of gum that was observed that's never been seen, a kind of sticky material, a polymer. So complicated polymer creation of really complicated long organic molecules is happening in space. And that's highly suggestive that the Earth got maybe had gotten a jump start. And we didn't need really exotic processes on Earth to create

the building blocks of life. And so I find it fascinating. Any comments? I find those interesting for two different reasons. One is that we can kind of see how the opinion of scientists about the origin of life changes because of this data that we're gathering. So this is like, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is a fairly recent thing. As you say, like, this is like really surprising

that we're discovering more and more complex molecules out there in asteroids, also in samples from Mars, I think. We talked about this recently. And, you know, with spectroscopic analysis, what's going on in molecular clouds and this kind of stuff, it all builds up to much more complex chemistry than anyone expected. So this is the one reason. I think it's cool because we're learning something new,

which comes from the data, like it's data-driven. and it's happening as we speak. And the other thing is, of course, what does it mean about life and other planets? And I think what it tells us, like, for one thing, it might be much easier to create life than we thought it was because the first ingredients could come from outer space. And the other thing I think that it tells us is that

if there's life elsewhere, it's likely to have similarities to us, at least in this chemical basis that it's built on. It's probably not something completely different. It's not like, yeah, it's not like the Horde in Star Trek. It's not made of rock. Yeah, I want to pick up on both those things. I think it's incredibly important. It reminds me, it goes back when I was a kid.

I learned of the Yuri Miller experiment. You may remember the famous experiment where they basically put, what they thought was the early atmosphere of the earth in a flask and put lightning through it, namely sparks, and they discovered all this goo, all this organic goo. And they said, oh, great, now we can see in the early earth. This is maybe how organic materials are created. The problem was, it turns out the atmosphere they used wasn't the atmosphere of the early earth. And now we've learned that you don't even need that, that you get this jumpstart, which I think is fascinating, as you say. And for me, it means that,

You're absolutely right that I think, I'm personally convinced that life is ubiquitous. I don't mean intelligent life, but organic material-based life. And I have an ongoing bet, which I don't expect to ever win or lose in my lifetime, but we'll see, with people like Richard Dawkins, that the more I've studied ideas of the origins of life, the more I'm convinced that life has found the only mechanism that really works. And I am convinced that if we find extraterrestrial life, it'll not only be similar, but it'll be more or less identical. It'll be based on the same base pairs of DNA and ATP as a power-producing molecule. I think life, by exploring all of the phase space of chemistry, quite likely found the way that works.

And the example of that is that we don't see any other kind of life on Earth. It's all based on the same kind of chemistry. So, well, I'd love to be wrong. I'd love to see some weird form of alien life. I wouldn't be surprised if under the oceans of Europa, if we first discover molecular life, you know, small-scale living things, that they look identical. And we'll see.

But that's a great thing. We'll see, because all of this will be looked at. And it may be surprising. because every time we look out there, we're surprised. So we've got to keep looking. And I think that's a good way to sum up this always incredibly enjoyable chance to chat with you about what's interesting or maybe not interesting in science this month. And happy birthday to your friend who at the same birthday as you.

And I look forward to talking to next month. Thanks, Savina. Next year. Next year. Next year. You're right. Next year, my goodness. Okay, you take care.

Bye. Hi, it's Lawrence again. As the Origins podcast continues to reach millions of people around the world, I just wanted to say thank you. It's because of your support, whether you listen or watch, that we're able to help enrich the perspective of listeners by providing access to the people and ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world and driving the future of our society in the 21st century. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also leave us private feedback on our website

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