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Speaker 3: Oh hey, it's your three half scratched off to do
Speaker 3: lists that you really should combine into one. But then
Speaker 3: you'd have to confront the tasks that you want to
Speaker 3: do the least. Hi Ali Ward, what is life? Where
Speaker 3: do we come from? Why do I have thoughts? Where
Speaker 3: does my spirit go when I die? Does anything matter?
Speaker 3: Does anyone know anything? These are just some of the
Speaker 3: exitential crisis you're about to enjoy, all under the guise
Speaker 3: of understanding particle physics. It gets spooky and I love it.
Speaker 3: Come along, So you're about to meet u see. Riversides
Speaker 3: Associate professor of theoretical particle physics who studied mathematics and
Speaker 3: physics at Stanford and Cambridge, got a pH d at Cornell.
Speaker 3: He's also so lovable. Oh you don't love him. So
Speaker 3: his life's work and passion is figuring out how an invisible,
Speaker 3: mysterious matter fits in our understanding of a universe and nature.
Speaker 3: So we recorded this before the holidays, and I have
Speaker 3: been hanging on to it so excited to finally release
Speaker 3: it into the cosmos and into your face. So I
Speaker 3: went to campus on what I later found out was
Speaker 3: the very first day of UC Riverside's fall semester. It
Speaker 3: was a broiling hot September afternoon. I took my little
Speaker 3: grubby purse full of chords and microphones. I showed up
Speaker 3: at his office door like someone waiting to meet a
Speaker 3: Broadway star.
Speaker 4: Hello, I'm ally it's such a pleasure to matri It's
Speaker 4: I Justica cotest for I left.
Speaker 3: It's so good to me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm super excited. I feel like I should be
Speaker 4: interviewing you now. Is there anything you need, like, oh
Speaker 4: my god, I mean other than like a time machine
Speaker 4: and a hairdresser than that.
Speaker 3: So we chatted in his office and I made him
Speaker 3: tell me his life story and also explain things that
Speaker 3: are way above my own pay grade. But before we
Speaker 3: get into it, just a quick thanks to patrons of
Speaker 3: the show who make it possible, and you can join
Speaker 3: and submit questions for just a dollar a month. We're
Speaker 3: about to record a new slew of episodes, so get
Speaker 3: them in before then. Also, thank you to everyone who
Speaker 3: rates and reviews the show. I honestly read every single
Speaker 3: one and his evidence. Thank you to Hyungski, who wrote
Speaker 3: Ali is the Internet data I never knew I needed,
Speaker 3: and also that I've always wanted. Beware, you can't just
Speaker 3: listen to one of these, so carve out like four
Speaker 3: to nine years of your life to obsess over everyology.
Speaker 3: So thank you Hyanski. I appreciate it, and every single
Speaker 3: person who wrote a review this week I read it.
Speaker 3: So Okay, onto the episode. What is universe made of?
Speaker 3: How do stars die? Why are we colliding particles? Underground?
Speaker 3: Who first noticed dark matter? What is the best vintage insults?
Speaker 3: Are there space ghosts strapping to rearrange your perceptions of existence?
Speaker 3: Get ready to cut some banks? Boy, Howdy you're gonna
Speaker 3: text a crush and maybe buy a box of GROLSCPT
Speaker 3: cookies because it's about to get weird with theoretical particle physicist,
Speaker 3: dark matter expert and Scoto hilologist doctor Flip to Nato.
Speaker 4: So my name is Flip Tonato. My pronouns are he him.
Speaker 3: Mm hm doctor doctor, yeah, doctor flip and recently tenured,
Speaker 3: recently tenured. Yeah, when did that happen?
Speaker 4: This happened officially July first.
Speaker 3: That's huge congratulation. Thank you. I don't fully understand what
Speaker 3: it takes to get tenure because I'm not an academic,
Speaker 3: but I know it's a really big deal. Did you celebrate, I'll.
Speaker 4: Be really honest with you, we didn't. So the story
Speaker 4: is getting to that path. That last year is a
Speaker 4: roller coaster, and so I had basically felt every single
Speaker 4: possible emotion you could feel about this twice or three
Speaker 4: times by the time we actually got the letter and
Speaker 4: I thought, okay, there was the exhaustion, the excitement, the fear,
Speaker 4: everything it all had been felt. Me and my partner.
Speaker 4: We'd all been on that journey several times. Then I
Speaker 4: was visiting my parents. I still have my parents addresses,
Speaker 4: my main address, and there is an envelope completely nondescript,
Speaker 4: and it looked like every other envelope i'd gotten from UCR.
Speaker 4: I said, tear it open, just to make sure what
Speaker 4: caused it now, And then it was a letter from
Speaker 4: the chancellor saying congratulations. And so I still have the
Speaker 4: paper somewhere, but there's a big tear on the side
Speaker 4: because I'm sloppy about it.
Speaker 3: Oh, what a great surprise. I hope there are some
Speaker 3: like jalapeno poppers and like whatever is the best way
Speaker 3: to celebrate tenure track I would go to a buffet probably,
Speaker 3: I appreciate that.
Speaker 4: Well, we'll see, we'll see, Okay.
Speaker 3: So I don't come from an academic family, so I'm
Speaker 3: a little murky on the concept of tenure or what
Speaker 3: the protocol is for celebration. But it means that it's
Speaker 3: like indefinite employment at that institution. You really have to
Speaker 3: screw up for them to fire you. It's lifelong job security.
Speaker 3: From what I gather, It's like having your crush proposed
Speaker 3: to you, except with a letter that looks like junk mail,
Speaker 3: and no one kisses you on the mouth. Also, I
Speaker 3: didn't know that some scientists get to name their labs
Speaker 3: after themselves. I thought our Trickology guest doctor Valerie Horsley
Speaker 3: worked at the Horsey Lab by chance or because of
Speaker 3: a family legacy, and she's like, no, you get to
Speaker 3: name your lab after yourself. So asking smart people, unsmart questions.
Speaker 3: It's why we're here, and now, okay, help me out
Speaker 3: with theology here. Oh gosh, okay, I have wait, I
Speaker 3: have some propositions, a couple of potential ologies. Okay, please
Speaker 3: know I don't know what these words mean. Non buryonic highlology.
Speaker 3: Highlology is the study of matter. Oh I like that.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna save that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, so highlology is matter, and I was looking
Speaker 3: up what dark matter might be. And then also I've
Speaker 3: seen in the literature dark matter cosmology or dark cosmology,
Speaker 3: because physics obviously does not have anology, I mean.
Speaker 4: Unfortunately not.
Speaker 3: Do you ever hear like, how do people tend to
Speaker 3: describe this field?
Speaker 4: Okay, okay, so the highlology that that got me. So
Speaker 4: usually the people doing theoretical dark matter it might be
Speaker 4: their main focus. But we do a lot of general
Speaker 4: purpose particle physics. So there's a sense in which the
Speaker 4: thing that we work on our quantum fields. If we
Speaker 4: want to be more specific, the particular types of things
Speaker 4: work on our invisible so they're not actually dark, they're invisible.
Speaker 4: And one of our senior theoretical physicists at UCR, like
Speaker 4: the person who really founded our group, Ernest Ma, had
Speaker 4: a paper that had a funny title.
Speaker 3: A few selects from doctor Ma's publication collection twenty twenty
Speaker 3: one's universal scotogenic for me on masses in left right
Speaker 3: gauge model or his follow up dark su two gauge
Speaker 3: symmetry and scotogenic direct nutrinos scutogenic Indeed.
Speaker 4: And he used scotto, which is the Greek word for dark. Yes,
Speaker 4: so scotology, which sounds a little bit dirty. Scotology would
Speaker 4: also be a good one, but I think dark highlology
Speaker 4: just sounds super cool.
Speaker 3: Scotto highlology really means dark matter.
Speaker 4: I like that.
Speaker 3: We may have just pioneered.
Speaker 4: That is really nice.
Speaker 3: I contributed something to the field, my only possible contribution. Now, okay,
Speaker 3: walk me back a little bit. Theoretical fields I think
Speaker 3: you just mentioned. So let's start at the base. Is it?
Speaker 3: Most people on Earth have no idea what you do?
Speaker 3: What the fuck it is?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, all right, So we care about the fundamental building
Speaker 4: blocks of matter, so we know there are atoms. Atoms
Speaker 4: already these are already a hard sell if you really
Speaker 4: think about it. We've never seen atoms. Maybe we have
Speaker 4: these weird electron microscope pictures, but what do those actually mean?
Speaker 4: But we're pretty happy that adams exist. And then you
Speaker 4: just go down the rabbit hole. But the atoms are
Speaker 4: the main idea that there's some unit of stuff. And
Speaker 4: maybe Einstein taught us that it's not just stuff, but
Speaker 4: there's energy. Maybe there's a unit of energy. So the
Speaker 4: quantum in quantum mechanics has to do with quantizing energy levels,
Speaker 4: like there are discrete levels. I can't give you one
Speaker 4: point five sense, I can give you one penny or
Speaker 4: two pennies. And energy turns out to behave like that
Speaker 4: in certain systems. And that was the thing about quantum
Speaker 4: and twenty around the nineteen twenties. If we fast forward decades,
Speaker 4: we build this edifice of theoretical physics, which is fairly mathematical,
Speaker 4: but all to answer the question of what are the
Speaker 4: fundamental things that, if you understood them, could describe slightly
Speaker 4: bigger things and those that describes bigger things. And eventually
Speaker 4: one of those things is an Adam and Adam's makeup
Speaker 4: all these other stuff that we know.
Speaker 3: And did you set out to become a theoretical physicist,
Speaker 3: a dark matter expert? How does one land in? Like?
Speaker 3: What I feel like is the hardest field possible?
Speaker 4: All right, here is my origin story. I wanted to
Speaker 4: be an author. Really, I had no idea why, but
Speaker 4: I was very passionate about writing, the idea that one
Speaker 4: could have a voice, and so growing up I was
Speaker 4: a huge fan of LeVar Burtons because of Reading Rainbow.
Speaker 4: Love love reading a Rainbow.
Speaker 6: But you don't have to take my word for it.
Speaker 4: So I would watch Reading Rainbow and at some point
Speaker 4: in the back of my mind I realized, this person
Speaker 4: who does reading Rainbow is also on this TV show
Speaker 4: Star Trek, And in high school I started watching Star
Speaker 4: Trek a little bit. It was still on at the time.
Speaker 4: I picked up the book The Physics of Star Trek
Speaker 4: by Lawrence Krauss, and this was a really fun ride
Speaker 4: because it was the first time I thought about a
Speaker 4: scientific subject as something where there are open questions, and
Speaker 4: these open questions are fun and creative and exciting and
Speaker 4: any time that I lost track of it being exciting,
Speaker 4: I just watch LeVar Burton as Jordan LaForge as a
Speaker 4: chief engineer.
Speaker 3: Well, oh my gosh. My sister and I used to
Speaker 3: watch an extra.
Speaker 4: Well it was the best.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we can't change the gravitational constant of the universe,
Speaker 3: but if we wrap a low level warkfield around that moon,
Speaker 3: we could reduce its gravitational constant, make it lighter, so
Speaker 3: we can push it.
Speaker 4: So I think that's what got me into this idea
Speaker 4: that hey, these black holes in the show, these are real.
Speaker 4: We should understand these things. Or there are fundamental questions
Speaker 4: that are not only abstract and things you'd find in textbooks,
Speaker 4: but they're fun ideas. And it was the creative spark
Speaker 4: that was really exciting that someone could write a science
Speaker 4: fiction piece about these actual things. And that's what got
Speaker 4: me going with physics.
Speaker 3: Do you write still at all?
Speaker 4: I was never a great writer, and you can ask
Speaker 4: my collaborators that my paperwriting is slow and tortuous. But
Speaker 4: I would like to eventually write something as a popular book.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I feel like that is in your future.
Speaker 3: And also, everyone who writes hates writing, Oh absolutely, everyone
Speaker 3: hates it. And there's the old Dorothy Parker quote, I
Speaker 3: hate writing, but I love having written, which is everyone
Speaker 3: it's supposed to be torturous or else. I think you
Speaker 3: don't care. But when it comes to matter and dark matter,
Speaker 3: I mean it slow it way down for baby brains
Speaker 3: like mine. But from what I understand, and the first
Speaker 3: time I ever read this was like, Okay, all of
Speaker 3: the matter that we can see and touch and feel
Speaker 3: and everything makes up about fifteen percent.
Speaker 4: Yeah, depending on how you're counting, but yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 4: a tiny fraction.
Speaker 3: Like a third of that. So everything that you can
Speaker 3: see and feel and touch and smell, that's five percent
Speaker 3: of the universe's mass and energy. There's another ninety five
Speaker 3: percent of pure mystery. So then what the fuck is
Speaker 3: everything else? That is?
Speaker 1: What is?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that is the This is the mind blowing thing.
Speaker 4: We've known about dark matter indirectly for over one hundred years,
Speaker 4: Like there's been evidence for this for over one hundred years,
Speaker 4: and I think it hasn't been until fairly recently that
Speaker 4: this has come to the forefront of we really ought
Speaker 4: to figure out what this stuff is because, as you said,
Speaker 4: we spend all of our lives learning science, art, history,
Speaker 4: everything you learned from a textbook is basically about that
Speaker 4: really tiny slice of visible normal matter and the history
Speaker 4: of that normal matter in this universe and in this world,
Speaker 4: in our culture. But it turns out for every see
Speaker 4: what's the fraction. I think if you look at the
Speaker 4: amount of energy, so energy is a good measure for stuff.
Speaker 4: Twenty five percent of the universe is made of dark matter,
Speaker 4: and only five percent is made of the stuff that
Speaker 4: we're used to. And so there's five times more dark
Speaker 4: matter than ordinary stuff. And in fact it's so much more.
Speaker 4: That we look at our galaxy. We think our galaxy
Speaker 4: is huge. Our galaxy is almost everything, everything we possibly
Speaker 4: care about. Our galaxy is only here because it is
Speaker 4: swimming in an ocean of dark matter that provides the
Speaker 4: gravitational pull to keep the galaxy there, like the galaxy
Speaker 4: formed because there was dark matter. So where we are
Speaker 4: right now with scutto highlology is that we're doing. Yes,
Speaker 4: this is the fish scientist discovering for the first time
Speaker 4: that there's this thing water that we're swimming through. We
Speaker 4: should figure out what this water is. Wow.
Speaker 3: And now the other, let's say, is the other seventy
Speaker 3: percent dark energy good yeah.
Speaker 4: So that is a great I was both hoping and
Speaker 4: hope and not hoping that you would bring that up.
Speaker 4: So twenty five percent dark matter, five percent ordinary matter.
Speaker 4: That doesn't add up to one hundred percent, and so
Speaker 4: the rest is indeed dark energy. And I'm excited that
Speaker 4: I have no idea what dark matter is and that
Speaker 4: there are great things to do in that field. I
Speaker 4: have no idea what it is dark energy. I have
Speaker 4: no fucking idea, and I'm terrified. And that's there's a
Speaker 4: reason why I don't work on it. It's one of.
Speaker 3: Those shows, right, of course, very much, especially this topic.
Speaker 3: There's gonna be a lot of boggling, trust me. So
Speaker 3: what I mean, Okay, so about one hundred years ago
Speaker 3: was that when we realized I say we the Royal
Speaker 3: we hear like that something is not adding up that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: when did we realize that?
Speaker 4: I think this was about one hundred years ago the
Speaker 4: first astronomical observations were and this is what was really
Speaker 4: really trippy. The origins of Scottohilology were really in astronomy,
Speaker 4: and people would look at galaxies and look at how
Speaker 4: fast stars were moving in those galaxies and just using
Speaker 4: ordinary non fancy Newtonian physics, the type of physics that
Speaker 4: students grown over in high school. They figured out that
Speaker 4: these stars around, moving around these galaxies were going a
Speaker 4: little bit too fast. It's as if there was more
Speaker 4: gravity than they had accounted for just by counting stars.
Speaker 4: And I'm going to do a great disservice to my
Speaker 4: astronomer colleagues. But for the most part, the astronomy field said, huh,
Speaker 4: that's curious. For maybe fifty years, sixty years, because there
Speaker 4: are lots of curiosities in astronomy. Right over the next
Speaker 4: one hundred years, we had more and more mounting evidence
Speaker 4: that this additional gravity, which in the nineteen twenties who
Speaker 4: Carries if Red just didn't happen to count all the
Speaker 4: stars correctly. But now there's more and more evidence, coming
Speaker 4: from more and more sophisticated measurements, that not only is
Speaker 4: there more stuff, but that stuff cannot be the stuff
Speaker 4: that we're made of.
Speaker 3: So there is stuff all around us, out massing us
Speaker 3: and out energying us, maybe by a factor of twenty,
Speaker 3: but we can't see it and we don't understand it.
Speaker 3: So this whole time, we thought that we were a
Speaker 3: cookies and cream milkshake. We're just the oreo bits and
Speaker 3: we're surrounded by an invisible milkshake that can seep through us.
Speaker 3: We don't know what it is or what it does.
Speaker 3: So dark matter it doesn't interact with light or electromagnetic forces,
Speaker 3: which is why we can't see or feel it. So
Speaker 3: why do we know it's there. Fritz Zuwiki first coined
Speaker 3: the term dark matter in nineteen thirty three. More on
Speaker 3: him later, But it wasn't until this astronomer named Vera
Speaker 3: rube crunched some numbers and hypothesized that dark matter exerts gravity,
Speaker 3: and without that gravity, galaxies would just fly apart and
Speaker 3: scatter if it all just depended on the normal matter
Speaker 3: or buryonic matter, which is the atomic stuff that we
Speaker 3: know of, like protons and neutrons and electrons. So when
Speaker 3: did she figure that out? Oh, just in nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 3: We just found this out a split second ago in
Speaker 3: the universal timeline. Get this, So, doctor Vera Rubin, she
Speaker 3: did her calculations at this observatory that didn't even have
Speaker 3: women's restrooms. There were no ladies rooms at the observatory.
Speaker 3: She had to cut up a silhouette of address and
Speaker 3: paste it on one of the men's rooms, and then
Speaker 3: when she was done crafting, then she pioneered some giant
Speaker 3: theories about the existence of the universe. And she died
Speaker 3: in twenty sixteen. She was never awarded the Nobel Prize,
Speaker 3: and they unfortunately do not hand those out posthumously, which
Speaker 3: is a bummer. But you can name your dog Vera
Speaker 3: or your cat Reuben and remember Vera rubin that way.
Speaker 3: But anyway dark matter it is, it's something else.
Speaker 4: It cannot be the stuff that we're used to from chemistry.
Speaker 4: And then the fundamental particle physicists, the elementary particle physicis
Speaker 4: realized we've been spending the past five decades trying to
Speaker 4: categorize the elementary particles of nature. We're trying to have
Speaker 4: the most fundamental periodic table. And you're telling me that
Speaker 4: there's something that we're missing and that we definitely have
Speaker 4: to put on here. Wow, and this became a big thing,
Speaker 4: if you'll permit me.
Speaker 3: In a side, Yes, I was hoping you to say that.
Speaker 4: So I'm going to get the history a little bit jumbled,
Speaker 4: but this is the moral history. This is the way
Speaker 4: that we're going to remember it. In the eighties and nineties,
Speaker 4: there was one big hot question in particle physics, and
Speaker 4: that question had to do with the Higgs boson. So
Speaker 4: the Higgs boson that in twenty thirteen won the Nobel Prize.
Speaker 4: It's discovery, big deal, big fucking deal.
Speaker 3: And now that's sometimes wrongly called the god particle.
Speaker 4: Yes, okay, yeah, right, that is the quote unquote god particle.
Speaker 4: And if you ask physicist in my generation, its discovery
Speaker 4: was more like the saking particle, where we had to
Speaker 4: really do some soul searching because in the eighties and
Speaker 4: nineties we had realized there's probably a Higgs. If there's
Speaker 4: not a Higgs, things get way more interesting. But if
Speaker 4: there's a Higgs, something isn't quite right in the theory
Speaker 4: because for all the reasons that we needed to have
Speaker 4: the Higgs, if the Higgs had the mass and the
Speaker 4: properties that we needed to have, somehow it just didn't
Speaker 4: seem right. It was far lighter in mass than it
Speaker 4: really ought to have been, so we now know it
Speaker 4: weighs about one hundred and twenty five times the mass
Speaker 4: of a proton, which is pretty honking for a fundamental particle.
Speaker 4: And our prediction naively if I gave that calculation to
Speaker 4: a first year grad student, they'd say, it's probably way
Speaker 4: heavier than that. It's like balancing a pencil on its tip.
Speaker 4: The quantum corrections to its mass would make the Higgs
Speaker 4: heavier than it actually And just.
Speaker 3: Some very brief background on this. So Higgs particles make
Speaker 3: up the Higgs field, which is this big cloud of
Speaker 3: bosons or particles. So matter started out zipping around like photons,
Speaker 3: just unencumbered by mass, but interaction with the Higgs field
Speaker 3: is what makes matter interact with gravity and have that
Speaker 3: mass be gravitationally attracted to each other. But Higgs bosons
Speaker 3: very hard to find. You have to get a large
Speaker 3: hadron collider, say maybe twenty seven kilometers under Geneva, and
Speaker 3: then you've got to raise protons at each other, you
Speaker 3: got to explode them, and then you got to measure
Speaker 3: what's left, aka a decay signature. And if you're looking
Speaker 3: through all those pieces and you have pieces and parts
Speaker 3: for what could have been a Higgs boson that existed
Speaker 3: for a fraction of a millisecond, then that's almost almost proof.
Speaker 3: But for a long time, this possibility of the Higgs
Speaker 3: particle had vexed science for years. One leading scientist wanted
Speaker 3: to call a goddamn particle, but his book publisher was like,
Speaker 3: let's go softer, and naively made the face palm modification
Speaker 3: to just call it the god particle, which has been
Speaker 3: making physicists cringe for decades now. But yes, essentially, things
Speaker 3: just didn't add.
Speaker 4: Up, and so this was a huge puzzle. It's analogous
Speaker 4: to having an ice cube sitting in an oven and
Speaker 4: you turn the oven on and the ice cube still there. Wow.
Speaker 4: So we called this the hierarchy problem, and for people
Speaker 4: like me, we wade it with a capital H. When
Speaker 4: we were at our academic papers. It was a big deal.
Speaker 4: It seemed to be the reason why our theory of
Speaker 4: particle physics just could not be complete.
Speaker 3: So prior to twenty thirteen, they knew something new.
Speaker 4: It wasn't quite right, and so we had these great
Speaker 4: exotic theories. They had funny names supersymmetry, extra dimensions, compositeness.
Speaker 4: You know, maybe the electron and its cousins are not
Speaker 4: fundamental but are are actually made of smaller things.
Speaker 3: Oh wow.
Speaker 4: So this was the heyday in the nineties of doing
Speaker 4: particle phys and right around that time, as we were
Speaker 4: developing these really awesome theories. People realized, Hey, in order
Speaker 4: for this theory to work, meaning in order for protons
Speaker 4: not to decay too quickly, in order for the universe
Speaker 4: actually look like the way it does, we need to
Speaker 4: tweak it a little bit. And one output is we
Speaker 4: get these new particles that stick around. They don't decay,
Speaker 4: they're just around. That's kind of weird. And I imagine
Speaker 4: there's some physicist, particle physicist, sitting in his office saying this,
Speaker 4: and astronomer walks by and says, you have particles just
Speaker 4: sitting around contributing mass. Have you heard about this anomaly
Speaker 4: that we have there's more mass in these galaxies. And
Speaker 4: so particle physicists were, I mean, we're kind of smug,
Speaker 4: just said, oh, yeah, okay, good, I have discovered what
Speaker 4: your dark matter ought to be. You. In fifteen years,
Speaker 4: when we turn on this collider, we're going to discover
Speaker 4: what this particle is. We'll measure how heavy it is,
Speaker 4: and I'll tell you exactly what's in these galaxies that
Speaker 4: you've been looking at for the past one hundred years.
Speaker 4: This was the promise. Yeah, And so particle physicists didn't
Speaker 4: even care about the dark matter, because that was the
Speaker 4: output of this elegant theory that solved the capital H
Speaker 4: hierarchy problem.
Speaker 3: And just a side note, so the Capital S standard
Speaker 3: Capital M model of particle physics involves this uniform framework
Speaker 3: for understanding electromagnetic and weak and strong interactions, and the
Speaker 3: hierarchy problem is the difference between the way a weak force,
Speaker 3: which is a force that allows protons to become neutrons
Speaker 3: and then back and forth vice versa. So that weak
Speaker 3: force is actually not week at all. It's ten to
Speaker 3: the twenty fourth times stronger than gravity, but only at
Speaker 3: really short distances. So this was the big strong weak
Speaker 3: elephant in the physics room.
Speaker 4: So that's how I was trained as a grad student,
Speaker 4: And the year that I graduated was twenty thirteen. I
Speaker 4: had written some papers on extra dimensions and all of
Speaker 4: these exotic new things that we would predict that we
Speaker 4: would see at the LHC. And by the time that
Speaker 4: I turned in my thesis, it was pretty clear that
Speaker 4: none of those things would be discovered. Wow, we had
Speaker 4: discovered the most basic, most boring version of the Higgs boson,
Speaker 4: and none of the things that we predicted for the
Speaker 4: overarching theory that explained why it was there, and then
Speaker 4: we got stuck, Oh, what of mine better? H And
Speaker 4: I think this is where there's been a bit of
Speaker 4: a renaissance in the theory of dark matter, because, on
Speaker 4: the one hand, the smug particle theorists like me, who
Speaker 4: would assume that we, of course dark matter is this thing.
Speaker 4: All of our best theories predict this thing, Well, that's
Speaker 4: out the window. But dark matter is still out there.
Speaker 4: And meanwhile, actually, all of these theories that we spent
Speaker 4: our time building and cutting our teeth understanding may be
Speaker 4: the simplest versions of those guys are out the window too,
Speaker 4: So what are we working on? So several of us
Speaker 4: are still working on understanding the Higgs, but armed with
Speaker 4: all of these new fan and see techniques for building theories,
Speaker 4: several of us went on to think about dark matter
Speaker 4: because now we can look at this problem with fresh eyes,
Speaker 4: without the prejudice of, well, this is more important problem
Speaker 4: that has this more important solution, and this is just
Speaker 4: the byproduct that thing. Now we've been thinking more open
Speaker 4: endedly about what dark matter could be, not just what
Speaker 4: we expect it to be.
Speaker 3: Did you all expect to flip a switch on the collider,
Speaker 3: some things would go p p and pew, and then
Speaker 3: suddenly a lot of calculations would make sense. Is that
Speaker 3: how does that even? Do you expect to flip on
Speaker 3: a switch and suddenly it's quantum leap and we're in
Speaker 3: a different dimension, Like, wow.
Speaker 4: This is back. Yeah, this is a great question because
Speaker 4: you're bringing me back to grad school. Where So particle
Speaker 4: physics in particular, but physics in general, is a really
Speaker 4: funny science because our community is split between theorists and experimentalists,
Speaker 4: and the theorists who work more on the mathematical superstructure
Speaker 4: and the experimentalist who are actually the club everyone's who
Speaker 4: test the theories and see how you do the scientific method.
Speaker 4: Let's be honest.
Speaker 3: So theory directs experimentalists where to look because this is
Speaker 3: team effort. There's no eye in dark matter. Well, I
Speaker 3: don't know. There might be, we don't know what's.
Speaker 4: As a grad student, the particle theorist who all had
Speaker 4: our pet theories that we wanted to discover, and the
Speaker 4: experimental grad students were all buddy buddy, and we go
Speaker 4: to the bar together and they would get so pissed
Speaker 4: off at us because that was what you described was
Speaker 4: exactly how we thought it would work. You just turn
Speaker 4: it on and everything works. You just turn it on,
Speaker 4: you get all the data, and we just confirm this
Speaker 4: theory versus that theory, where of course, these colliders and
Speaker 4: these detectors are gigantic, cavernous, intricate, subtle machines, and doing
Speaker 4: a proper search for a new particle that is most
Speaker 4: likely invisible is incredibly subtle. So it is a bit
Speaker 4: of a long slog. So I think the LHC, depending
Speaker 4: on what you call turn on, turned on right around
Speaker 4: two thousand and eight, and it wasn't until twenty twelve
Speaker 4: that they were pretty sure they saw the Higgs. In
Speaker 4: twenty thirteen that they had the Nobel Prize.
Speaker 3: So the Nobel Prize in Physics for twenty thirteen was
Speaker 3: awarded jointly to Francois Anglaire and Peter Higgs for quote
Speaker 3: the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our
Speaker 3: understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, which
Speaker 3: was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle
Speaker 3: at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. So the LHC, by the way,
Speaker 3: had the juice to discover that decay channel of the
Speaker 3: Higgs boson where they were like these pieces of parts,
Speaker 3: these were Higgs at one point. Because the LHC is
Speaker 3: a collider that finally has enough energy to really ramp
Speaker 3: up those photons and smash them real good scientifically speaking,
Speaker 3: and they do it trillions of times over, just smash, smash, mash,
Speaker 3: one hundred meters below the Earth, collecting all these data
Speaker 3: from particle parts starting back in September two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3: Do you ever hear theories about as soon as it
Speaker 3: went on that we've shifted into a different universe or
Speaker 3: a different dimension.
Speaker 4: There are things like that. They're a little bit wonky.
Speaker 3: Yeah, things like it was. I thought it was called
Speaker 3: the Berenstein Bears, the barren Stein Bears and all of
Speaker 3: these things.
Speaker 4: If only we hadn't turned on the LHC.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we're in a completely different universe. What about
Speaker 3: the name dark matter and dark energy, because it's invisible at.
Speaker 4: Best, right absolutely?
Speaker 3: Who decided that it would be called dark Who decided
Speaker 3: that it would have a spooky name?
Speaker 4: That is a great question. I think it was z Wiki,
Speaker 4: who was a famously cantankerous physicist in the early part
Speaker 4: of the twentieth century.
Speaker 3: So yes, this was nineteen thirty three with Caltex Fritz
Speaker 3: Zwicki and when you hear the words famously cantankerous, I
Speaker 3: know you want the story time and among a lot
Speaker 3: of different legends and slander and feuds and jealousy and
Speaker 3: what sounds like a maybe a touch of old timey
Speaker 3: verbal abuse. If his enemy stories were to be leaved,
Speaker 3: Swicky would allegedly call his colleagues scatter brains and spherical bastards.
Speaker 3: Spherical because quote, they are bastards every way I look
Speaker 3: at them. Ooh messy, I love it. But a two
Speaker 3: thousand and eight article in Discover magazine features testimony from
Speaker 3: Zwicky's daughter, Barberina that doctor Fritz was just so brilliant
Speaker 3: that he had a lot of haters. But he was
Speaker 3: the one.
Speaker 4: Who coined the term dark matter, and what he meant
Speaker 4: was that it doesn't interact with light.
Speaker 3: Ah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So usually we think things that are dark don't
Speaker 4: interact with light, but actually probably there's some junior high
Speaker 4: student out there who'll say, no, no, no, things that
Speaker 4: are dark absorbed light. They're actually maximally interacting with light.
Speaker 4: If you're an astronomer dark means you don't see any
Speaker 4: photons from it, So I think that's why they use
Speaker 4: the word dark. And to the best of my knowledge,
Speaker 4: I think dark energy, which was discovered a little bit later,
Speaker 4: as a big question mark. Yeah, they latched onto the
Speaker 4: to the branding that we developed, and they used the
Speaker 4: word dark to mean just like dark matter. We don't
Speaker 4: know what this is, but at least dark matter, we
Speaker 4: had the idea that this was stuff. These were particles.
Speaker 4: I'm ninety nine point nine percent sure dark matter is
Speaker 4: at least one particle. Dark energy definitely behaves differently, and
Speaker 4: it's a much weirder thing.
Speaker 3: Do you drive around in traffic and think about this stuff? Like,
Speaker 3: can you ever escape theorizing about this?
Speaker 4: Oh that is a great question. I think the imposter
Speaker 4: syndrome and me says, yeah, I escape it way too much.
Speaker 4: But traffic in la as you know, is not a
Speaker 4: great place to have happy thoughts. But I often find
Speaker 4: myself thinking about physics in a swimming pool. Really, so
Speaker 4: for example, there's this idea of we are fish in
Speaker 4: an ocean of dark matter. That was something that I
Speaker 4: was thinking about while swimming, and I guess being in
Speaker 4: a mathematical discipline. You're your equipment, Like having the finest
Speaker 4: equipment is really having a clear mind. And I can
Speaker 4: sit in my desk and I can do a calculation,
Speaker 4: I can write a paper. But the creative spark is
Speaker 4: something that usually happens outside of those environments. So walking
Speaker 4: around or having tea on my patio, that's that's where
Speaker 4: the magic happens.
Speaker 3: And do theoretical physicists get together and just have like
Speaker 3: brain dumps and try to spark ideas.
Speaker 4: Too, So you already know the secret of theoretical physics,
Speaker 4: that is exactly it. Two of the meccas of theoretical
Speaker 4: physics in the United States are the Aspen Center for
Speaker 4: Physics in Aspen, Colorado and the Kavil Institute for Theoretical
Speaker 4: Physics in Santa Barbara. And to good approximation of what
Speaker 4: these things are, are places where you can have summer
Speaker 4: camp for theoretical physicists. And why would you need this
Speaker 4: because we all end up being specialists in it's not
Speaker 4: even just our particular subfield, but the particular language that
Speaker 4: we use to understand the mathematics, the particular analogies that
Speaker 4: we like, the particular intuition that we develop. That the
Speaker 4: real sparks happen when you bring us into the same place,
Speaker 4: you give us a chalkboard, you remove every other distraction,
Speaker 4: and you let us ask each other. So what are
Speaker 4: you working on? Oh, how do you think about that?
Speaker 4: And then everything happens it's, oh, well, you know, I've
Speaker 4: been thinking about this other thing, and the language that
Speaker 4: I use is this, and here's how idea with this calculation,
Speaker 4: and that's how new ideas come about. And oftentimes you
Speaker 4: could spend two weeks at one of these places over
Speaker 4: the summer, go back to your home institution, do your teaching,
Speaker 4: but spend the rest of the year working at these ideas,
Speaker 4: having zoom calls every once in a while, but it's
Speaker 4: kind of the momentum builder of our field.
Speaker 3: And be honest with me, without having to name names,
Speaker 3: how many astrophysicists out there think that dark matter might
Speaker 3: be ghosts? What if dark matter is ghosts? What if
Speaker 3: dark energy is ghosts? What if it's all ghosts? What
Speaker 3: if we're swimming in ghosts.
Speaker 4: There is a famous quote from Nima Kuni him Med
Speaker 4: before the LHC turned on, and the quote was something
Speaker 4: along the lines of we might turn it on and
Speaker 4: dragons might pop out. We have no idea what's going
Speaker 4: to happen.
Speaker 3: So in a March two thousand and eight New York
Speaker 3: Times article, this particle theorist, who was at the Institute
Speaker 3: for Advance Study in Princeton, told the paper that there
Speaker 3: was some probability of almost anything happening, even a minuscule
Speaker 3: chance that quote, the large Hadron collider might make dragons
Speaker 3: that might eat us up. Maybe he was just ahead
Speaker 3: of the curve and predicting the twenty eleven premiere of
Speaker 3: Came of Thrones, But either way, people were rightly pumped.
Speaker 4: And that kind of encapsulated a lot of the excitement.
Speaker 4: There is something to be said about maybe dark matter
Speaker 4: is something much more exciting than particles. And there are
Speaker 4: theories where the dark matter plural could form dark atoms,
Speaker 4: just like you have protons and electrons. Maybe something like
Speaker 4: a dark proton and a dark electron that we can't
Speaker 4: see but they can see each other, and those form
Speaker 4: dark atoms, and then it's not hard to imagine, well,
Speaker 4: those dark atoms could have dark chemistry, that dark chemistry
Speaker 4: can form dark life, That dark life could maybe maybe
Speaker 4: it's an entire sentsion civilization living in our dark matter
Speaker 4: halo where our galaxy is sitting, and we just don't
Speaker 4: realize it. But because there is five times more of
Speaker 4: them than there is us, we are the ghosts were
Speaker 4: We're weird, the weird thing.
Speaker 3: Wow, oh my gosh. Dark atoms that don't interact with
Speaker 3: light or electromagnetic forces, just having a whole ass life
Speaker 3: all around us. Physicists even think that dark matter travels
Speaker 3: straight through normal matter, just sailing through closed doors and
Speaker 3: bathroom stalls and rocks and planets like some kind of
Speaker 3: spooky cosmic horror movie. Do you still look to sci
Speaker 3: fi for inspiration at all? Or do you pick apart
Speaker 3: sci fi?
Speaker 4: Oh? I, let's see. That's a great question, and it's
Speaker 4: something where it's one of the things I'm really thankful
Speaker 4: to be at UC Riverside, where we have this fantastic
Speaker 4: creative writing department. Until very recently Nala Hopkinson was here,
Speaker 4: and she's an amazing sci fi writer. I actually tried
Speaker 4: to pitch that idea as being the ghost to the
Speaker 4: dark matter scientist, but no, sci fi is still a
Speaker 4: huge part of my life and it's not as simple
Speaker 4: as I read a sci fi story and say, hey,
Speaker 4: I'm going to incorporate that into one of my funny theories.
Speaker 4: But I love seeing how creative people play with physical ideas,
Speaker 4: So I guess you would say I like hard sci fi.
Speaker 4: I've never really understood the distinction. But my favorite author
Speaker 4: at the moment is Ted Chang. And Ted Chang who
Speaker 4: wrote the short story Story of Your Life, which was
Speaker 4: what the movie Arrival was based on.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 4: Yes, most people think the movie Arrival is about linguistics,
Speaker 4: and part of it is. But when I read that story,
Speaker 4: that story was about quantum mechanics, and it was about
Speaker 4: a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, and it was very
Speaker 4: clear to me that Ted Chang took some quantum mechanics
Speaker 4: class or read a textbook and understood it incredibly well
Speaker 4: and said, Okay, I'm going to make a universe literally
Speaker 4: with these physical laws, with the one small tweak, and
Speaker 4: let's see how that plays out into a dramatic story.
Speaker 4: And that's something which I draw tremendous inspiration from because
Speaker 4: that's exactly what people like me do. Where we have
Speaker 4: a question that we have to answer, what is dark matter?
Speaker 4: We have a theoretical edifice something called the Standard model
Speaker 4: of particle physics. It's a couple of equations.
Speaker 3: And remember that standard model of particle physics that involved
Speaker 3: a framework for understanding electromagnetic and weak and strong interactions.
Speaker 4: We are constrained that any theory that we make up
Speaker 4: has to agree with what we currently observe. So I
Speaker 4: has to agree with this standard model theory in the
Speaker 4: regime where you can make those measurements, and that game
Speaker 4: of how do you create a predictive theory of dark
Speaker 4: matter subject to these constraints really reminds me of Ted
Speaker 4: Chang playing the game of I'm going to take these
Speaker 4: physical laws, make a tweak, and see how that pans out.
Speaker 3: Okay, so Arrival came out in twenty sixteen, So I
Speaker 3: love you. But you've had ample opportunities to view this
Speaker 3: or to have it spoiled, or maybe you saw it
Speaker 3: on an airplane and you didn't even even totally understand it.
Speaker 3: But to avoid a spoiler, just fast forward about ninety seconds.
Speaker 3: If you have seen it, listen because it'll make you
Speaker 3: like the movie more. What was the tweak that he made?
Speaker 4: He made the tweak. Let's see. So in the Story
Speaker 4: of your Life, the main character could view her entire
Speaker 4: timeline and the principle of least action. This is jargon now,
Speaker 4: but there's something called the principle of least action and
Speaker 4: quantum mechanics, which tells you to get from point A
Speaker 4: to point B, to get from the universe at right
Speaker 4: now to the universe right now. We actually went through
Speaker 4: every single possible historical evolution. Maybe I was sitting in
Speaker 4: this chair, maybe we're in different chairs. Maybe I moved
Speaker 4: over there and came back. All of those things quote
Speaker 4: unquote literally happened. And the path that we took, the
Speaker 4: most likely path quantum mechanically is the one that minimizes
Speaker 4: some function. So people sometimes call it a sum over
Speaker 4: histories interpretation of quantum mechanics. And Ted Chang said, maybe
Speaker 4: this character can see that entire history, and the tweak
Speaker 4: was because she understood this alien language which is based
Speaker 4: on this idea. So in our universe and in the
Speaker 4: way that quantum mechanics works, one wouldn't actually see the
Speaker 4: entire history. But there is a puzzle there, and every
Speaker 4: single student who learns this puzzles over what it means
Speaker 4: that these equations seem to imply that these particles know
Speaker 4: about the future.
Speaker 3: You mentioned something about dark atoms and dark chemistry. You're
Speaker 3: trying to make sense of dark matter using a field
Speaker 3: of math that applies to everything else. Is there a
Speaker 3: possibility that there's a dark math, that there's just a
Speaker 3: completely different way of.
Speaker 4: Okay, that is one perhaps for the philosophy department. And
Speaker 4: I say that very carefully because I think usually when
Speaker 4: a physicist says that's for the philosophy department, that's probably condescended.
Speaker 4: That's probably dismissive. That's how we say I don't want
Speaker 4: to think about that. The assumption is math is logical rigor,
Speaker 4: and so that just has to be true. And I
Speaker 4: don't even know how to think about a different reality,
Speaker 4: a different universe that has different loss of math. I
Speaker 4: can imagine a different universe where the fundamental constants are
Speaker 4: a little bit different, maybe there are more particles, fewer particles,
Speaker 4: but I don't know how to think about one where
Speaker 4: math is different.
Speaker 3: Is there a myth that you would love to bust
Speaker 3: about dark matter? Like? What is one thing that the
Speaker 3: public thinks they know about it that they don't other
Speaker 3: than that it's ghosts?
Speaker 4: Oh, that's great, that is a great question. I'll start
Speaker 4: with a basic one. It's not antimatter. Okay, it's not antimatter.
Speaker 4: It's probably also not black holes. Okay, so these are
Speaker 4: the other two like exotic things that you learn from
Speaker 4: Star Trek yees. So it's not antimatter because if we're
Speaker 4: swimming in the sea of dark matter, and if the
Speaker 4: dark matter were antimatter, it would keep annihilating with ordinary
Speaker 4: matter and producing light. So the fact that I was
Speaker 4: gonna say that we're not a glow stick in the universe,
Speaker 4: but really the fact that our galaxy is and just
Speaker 4: being burnt up by the antimatter. That means dark matter
Speaker 4: is not antimatter. Nice. Until fairly recently, we would say
Speaker 4: it's not black holes because black holes are a totally
Speaker 4: different thing. But there have been some thoughts recently that
Speaker 4: there might be little, tiny black holes that were formed
Speaker 4: in the universe that would behave like dark matter.
Speaker 3: How tiny are we talking.
Speaker 4: That's a good there's a range of sizes. But the
Speaker 4: story of little black holes is funny. For a long time,
Speaker 4: people were worried that turning on the LHC would produce
Speaker 4: lots of little black holes that would eat the Earth.
Speaker 4: Sounds like fun but we were pretty sure that little
Speaker 4: black holes evaporate and would be relatively harmless. Little black
Speaker 4: holes are like little particles.
Speaker 3: And do you think that those could be just on Earth,
Speaker 3: in just little pockets here and there.
Speaker 4: Chances are no, I would bet no, But it is
Speaker 4: a theoretical possibility. It's attached to a whole bunch of
Speaker 4: other weird things. I think to make it work out gravitationally,
Speaker 4: you need to have extra dimensions, and maybe a few
Speaker 4: extra dimensions. But it was a fun thing to think
Speaker 4: about ten years ago.
Speaker 3: Do you think that dark matter could be extra dimensions?
Speaker 4: That is a great question. That is what I spent
Speaker 4: my summer vacation thinking about. So extra dimensions are a
Speaker 4: really funny quirk in the history of theoretical physics. I
Speaker 4: think the modern way of thinking about this is the
Speaker 4: people who work on extra dimensions don't necessarily literally believe
Speaker 4: in if I could just step in the right way,
Speaker 4: I'm going to be in some parallel universe. But in
Speaker 4: the mathematics one realizes that if I can write a
Speaker 4: theory in three dimensions of space plus one dimension of time,
Speaker 4: I could write a theory in four dimensions of splace
Speaker 4: plus one dimension of time, or in five dimensions of space,
Speaker 4: in one dimension of time, no problem. It's just it's
Speaker 4: another number that you add onto your mathematical expressions, and
Speaker 4: so people it was easy to play with. And in
Speaker 4: the nineteen nineties one of the huge revolutions in theoretical
Speaker 4: physics was this observation that particular types of theories with
Speaker 4: extra dimensions end up giving mathematically equivalent predictions when you
Speaker 4: ask the right question to a type of quantum theory
Speaker 4: that is really hard to calculate. This is something called
Speaker 4: duality in physics, and it meant that I could calculate
Speaker 4: something in my wonky theory of extra dimensions, and that
Speaker 4: calculation would actually mean something in an ordinary theory. Ordinary
Speaker 4: meaning three dimensions of space, one dimension of time. That
Speaker 4: is highly quantum mechanical, but a perfectly plausible theory. And
Speaker 4: it was a type of theory that we really didn't
Speaker 4: know how to deal with until we had tools like.
Speaker 3: This, tools like the large Hadron glider.
Speaker 4: And so one of the fun things to play with
Speaker 4: is we have this really powerful machine to make predictions
Speaker 4: where we couldn't make predictions twenty years ago. Maybe we
Speaker 4: can describe cool theories of dark matter, that one could
Speaker 4: explain why we haven't discovered dark matter, and two could
Speaker 4: motivate interesting different searches. Because this is this is where
Speaker 4: we are right now, that we need to figure out
Speaker 4: what is the best way to test these different theories
Speaker 4: of dark matter.
Speaker 3: It better happened in my lifetime. I mean, I'm sure
Speaker 3: you think the same thing, given that this is your
Speaker 3: life's work.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, yeah, and and in fact this is for me.
Speaker 4: This is a difference between dark matter and dark energy.
Speaker 4: Both of them are things we have no idea what
Speaker 4: they are. I certainly have no idea what they are.
Speaker 4: Dark matter, we have an experimental program and we know
Speaker 4: enough about it that I have faith that we have
Speaker 4: a sporting chance that we will learn something deep about
Speaker 4: dark matter in my lifetime. Dark energy, I'm not sure
Speaker 4: if we'll learn anything about it in the history of humanity.
Speaker 3: Do you have a Google alert set for dark matter?
Speaker 3: Just in case there's some news that breaks that you're like, wait,
Speaker 3: when did that happen?
Speaker 4: I have an RSS feed and I follow some Twitter accounts,
Speaker 4: so yeah, there are funny things about things like this
Speaker 4: in particle physics. I've forgotten what the network is, but
Speaker 4: there are there are astrophysical events that it's it's all
Speaker 4: hands on board. When the moment this happens, the next
Speaker 4: supernova is going to be the most exciting thing in decades.
Speaker 3: A supernova heads up is this giant explosion caused by
Speaker 3: a star burning out of fuel and then collapsing on
Speaker 3: itself and going cape and NASA urges you to imagine
Speaker 3: a star one million times the mass of Earth collapsing
Speaker 3: in fifteen seconds. What's left behind is this cloud of
Speaker 3: gases called a nebula. Or if the star is big enough,
Speaker 3: like ten times the size of our Sun, you might
Speaker 3: even get a black hole out of it. So a
Speaker 3: supernova can also happen with a white dwarf, which is
Speaker 3: like an Earth sized star that's run out of fuel,
Speaker 3: it gets too close to another star, it siphons off
Speaker 3: some of its matter and then cuplousies. But will there
Speaker 3: be maybe like a supernova this week, this month you
Speaker 3: can watch? Is there a Twitter account you can follow?
Speaker 3: Probably not. They only happen in the Milky Way a
Speaker 3: few times every century, but when they do, it is
Speaker 3: the equivalent of a giant legendary house party. For physicists.
Speaker 3: It is on It is a Rager.
Speaker 4: There's a story of supernova nineteen eighty seven, a where
Speaker 4: we learned a lot about neutrinos. And now that we
Speaker 4: know gravitational waves exist, now that we have all sorts
Speaker 4: of really exciting complimentary satellites and astrophysical observatories, there is
Speaker 4: this network where if anybody realizes that there is a supernova,
Speaker 4: all of these telescope all these detectors will drop whatever
Speaker 4: it is are doing and they will point at that
Speaker 4: part in the sky and take all the data that
Speaker 4: they can. That's a Twitter feed that I like to
Speaker 4: be debscribe too.
Speaker 3: Can I ask you questions from listeners?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 3: Okay, I mean, for the most part, we got a
Speaker 3: lot of what is it? Who can blame them? But
Speaker 3: before we get to those questions, with the amazingly affable
Speaker 3: doctor flip to NATO, who's your favorite particle physicist, let's
Speaker 3: scatter some money into the cosmos, specifically toward two causes
Speaker 3: of the ologists choosing. And the first that he picked
Speaker 3: is the Point Foundation, which is the largest scholarship granting
Speaker 3: nonprofit for LGBTQ students and powering them to achieve their
Speaker 3: full academic and leadership potential. Despite the obstacles often put
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Speaker 3: them and the second charity he chose is Feeding America
Speaker 3: Riverside San Bernardino, which distributes over two point five million
Speaker 3: pounds of food per month and partners with over two
Speaker 3: hundred and fifty local nonprofits. Both of those causes will
Speaker 3: be linked in the show notes, and thank you to
Speaker 3: sponsors for making those donations possible.
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Speaker 3: Okay, let's shed some light on your burning dark matter queries? Okay?
Speaker 3: Will Clark first time question asker also known as p Willy,
Speaker 3: is dark matter the absence of matter or something measurable?
Speaker 3: We now know it's something measurable, right.
Speaker 4: Yes, absolutely, Okay, so dark matter. This is one of
Speaker 4: the great things where it's fairly ordinary that it is
Speaker 4: a thing. It is, it is stuff, it is matter.
Speaker 4: M h.
Speaker 3: It's something that was also asked by patrons Jessica Smith, Ruby,
Speaker 3: Chanfrey On, freglore Ed, Maetzivak, Jackie and first time question
Speaker 3: askers Lucas water Body and Sam Phillips quarreling. So let's
Speaker 3: dip in to the next question. Leahy Anderson first time
Speaker 3: question asker asked what is a hidden valley? And says
Speaker 3: Serin mentions it on their web page about dark matter?
Speaker 3: Is there a potentially parallel universe occupying the same space
Speaker 3: that we have it? What is hidden valley? It is
Speaker 3: not a side of ranch. I'm guessing that is a
Speaker 3: great question. So hidden valleys are a class of theories
Speaker 3: that were developed by Matt Strassler and Catherine Zurich in
Speaker 3: the mid two thousands, I believe, and they are actually
Speaker 3: related to some of the extra dimensional signatures that I
Speaker 3: mentioned earlier. It's really funny that the listener asked that question.
Speaker 3: I was reading the Hidden Valley paper recently for some
Speaker 3: research that I'm working on.
Speaker 4: We were looking forward to the LHC. We all had
Speaker 4: these favorite theories supersymmetry, extra dimensions, and the Hidden Valley.
Speaker 4: Authors were thinking about what are more exotic things that
Speaker 4: could come through at the LHC. We all have this
Speaker 4: idea that you turn it like theorists. You turn it
Speaker 4: on and you just see all the new particles.
Speaker 3: It's easy.
Speaker 4: What if it's not so easy? What if the new
Speaker 4: particles don't really behave like ordinary particles, or what if
Speaker 4: they have really different signatures? And the Hidden Valleys were
Speaker 4: a type of theory that were constructed to show other
Speaker 4: physicists how weird and how unique these experimental signatures could be.
Speaker 3: And you know, we mentioned a little bit about dimensions,
Speaker 3: but a few folks, including listeners, He wanted to know
Speaker 3: and says, sorry if this one is a little too
Speaker 3: sci fi. E no need to apologize for that here. Absolutely,
Speaker 3: if you consider the theory of multiple universes, could another
Speaker 3: universe be made entirely of dark matter dark energy? But
Speaker 3: you mentioned dimensions, But what's the difference between multiverses and
Speaker 3: different dimensions or are they used interchangeably?
Speaker 4: Good good good, good good good. Okay. It becomes a
Speaker 4: question of where do we start agreeing on what words mean.
Speaker 4: What is a universe? So if we assume a universe
Speaker 4: is some self consistent, perhaps imaginary everything, So a universe
Speaker 4: is has some number of dimensions of space and time.
Speaker 4: If there's more than one time dimension, I have no
Speaker 4: idea how to make sense of it. It has some
Speaker 4: kind of governing physical theory, so some there's some equation
Speaker 4: telling you what the particles are, how they move. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's that's a good approximation for what I think of
Speaker 4: universe is okay. So a multiverse would be a collection
Speaker 4: of different universes that really should not interact at all.
Speaker 4: Oh okay, So whether or not the multiverse is real
Speaker 4: is such a weird question. Not because if it is real,
Speaker 4: something exotics going to happen. But if a multiverse is real,
Speaker 4: by definition, those other universes have nothing to do with us.
Speaker 4: You can't traverse them, you can't pass through them. But
Speaker 4: the idea is they would have very different laws of physics.
Speaker 4: If I said that our universe, if you characterize our
Speaker 4: universe by some list of numbers, the mass of the electron,
Speaker 4: the strength of the electric coupling, the strength of gravity.
Speaker 4: There's some list of numbers and you just push them
Speaker 4: into your theory. A different universe would be one with
Speaker 4: different numbers. And what the Marvel cinematic universe has done
Speaker 4: for us has given us this idea that if there's
Speaker 4: a multiverse, then you can go between them and you know,
Speaker 4: harve whatever infinity stones and bringing them back. But that's
Speaker 4: not quite how it works.
Speaker 3: What about everything everywhere all at once? I see that movie.
Speaker 4: I love that movie.
Speaker 3: Across the multiverse. I see thousands of evidence. See not
Speaker 3: how that works.
Speaker 4: One of my favorite students in my particle physicist class
Speaker 4: last term brought that up in class and said, can
Speaker 4: we talk about this afterwards?
Speaker 3: You love it as a work of fiction.
Speaker 4: I love it as a work of fiction.
Speaker 3: Yes, And just to side oue, the Academy Awards are
Speaker 3: in March twelfth, twenty twenty three, and those who listen
Speaker 3: to this after that date will know if that film
Speaker 3: won any oscars. Oh, speaking of MB wants to know
Speaker 3: time travel? Yes?
Speaker 4: No, maybe ooh, we are definitely traveling in time right now.
Speaker 3: We are definitely.
Speaker 4: Traveling in time, and that by itself is kind of
Speaker 4: weird because we know that if you're moving faster, the
Speaker 4: way you perceive time is different, and so ordinary traveling
Speaker 4: through time in the forward direction is already pretty exotic.
Speaker 4: If they asked me, I don't think any more exotic,
Speaker 4: doctor who level time travel is possible? Certainly not our
Speaker 4: within our existing theories. But I'll be fully honest. Part
Speaker 4: of that is because our existing theories put in by
Speaker 4: hand that causality is really important. And causality is this
Speaker 4: idea that you cannot have grandfather paradoxes where you go
Speaker 4: back in time and you kill your grandfather. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Also, uh, what are these grandpas doing? You know what
Speaker 3: I mean? Like, yeah, what.
Speaker 4: Beef do you have? I guess that's a big jump
Speaker 4: for a scientific experiment.
Speaker 3: Everyone's grandpa is such a dick. Marie wants to know
Speaker 3: what would the universe look like if there was no
Speaker 3: dark matter, and what would happen if it suddenly disappeared?
Speaker 4: Great question, Great question. Okay, so let's start with if
Speaker 4: there were no dark matter. Okay, if there were no
Speaker 4: dark matter, there would be us.
Speaker 5: I'm not here.
Speaker 4: I think a good benchmark is the quantum fluctuations of
Speaker 4: dark matter in the early universe. So the universe was hot,
Speaker 4: small things were blipping in and out of existence. Every
Speaker 4: once in a while, there'd be a little bit more
Speaker 4: blipping into existence over here rather than over here, and
Speaker 4: that overdensity of stuff of dark stuff would gravitate and
Speaker 4: pull more dark stuff in, and that would be what
Speaker 4: we call it dark matter halo. The big dark matter
Speaker 4: halos were so strong gravitationally, they're so massive that they
Speaker 4: would bring in the little tiny specks of dust of
Speaker 4: ordinary matter, and slowly those little specks of dust would
Speaker 4: collect and turn into our galaxy. So if there were
Speaker 4: no dark matter, we wouldn't have the collection of ordinary
Speaker 4: stuff that became our galaxy, and we wouldn't be here
Speaker 4: to wonder about it.
Speaker 3: So whatever dark matter is, it's helped collect all the
Speaker 3: atoms and scattered ingredients to make us. I know here
Speaker 3: we are breathing, living, loving and crying, having good days,
Speaker 3: eating cheese for dinner, and farting into pajamas, watching tiktoks
Speaker 3: of earwax removal. It's a beautiful life. Dark matter, thank
Speaker 3: you never leave.
Speaker 4: Probably if all the dark matter suddenly disappeared, that's a
Speaker 4: good question. I'm actually not quite sure what would happen.
Speaker 4: I have not done the calculation to figure out if
Speaker 4: our galaxy would stay here or if maybe the smaller
Speaker 4: galaxies around us would what's the word kind of scatter?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yes, yeah, if you were to whip something around
Speaker 3: and just exactly, you know, like a merry go round,
Speaker 3: just like scatter off of it.
Speaker 4: Right. Yeah. So, in fact, it would be very similar
Speaker 4: to the question that I think we ask a lot
Speaker 4: of our freshmen physics majors if the Sun disappeared, what
Speaker 4: would happen to the Solar System? Eventually everything would just
Speaker 4: fly away because the gravitational pull that was holding them
Speaker 4: together would be gone.
Speaker 3: So mass attracts mass, and that is why smaller planets
Speaker 3: have we hear gravitational forces, and why you can hop
Speaker 3: like a bunny on our tiny moon if you can
Speaker 3: manage to get a ride there. And a few patrons
Speaker 3: asked this next one, such as Anichis kat Ariya, Earl
Speaker 3: of Gramulcan, Elder Zamora, and theoter Vissian. Is there anti
Speaker 3: dark matter to correspond to anti matter?
Speaker 4: I love that question. The answer is almost certainly yes.
Speaker 4: And it's almost certainly yes because the laws of physics
Speaker 4: that we understand seem to imply that everything has an antiparticle,
Speaker 4: with the caveat that sometimes they are their own antiparticle. Ooh,
Speaker 4: so photons are their own antiparticle. There's no antiphotony. So
Speaker 4: dark matter exists. It's a particle. You can define a
Speaker 4: mathematical operation that turns dark matter into anti dark matter.
Speaker 4: And it is an open question whether the anti dark
Speaker 4: matter is the same as dark matter. And I'll mention
Speaker 4: one last thing. It's the same questions true for neutrinos.
Speaker 4: Neutrinos are the other invisible particle, and we do not
Speaker 4: know still whether or not neutrinos are their own anti particle.
Speaker 3: So a neutrino is just the littlest, wee darling little
Speaker 3: particle with no charge. It's nearly massless. It's so light,
Speaker 3: and they're everywhere in the universe. They originate from exploding
Speaker 3: stars and from the nuclear fusion in the Sun, and
Speaker 3: there's millions of them. They're just mosy, almost at light speed,
Speaker 3: right through your dang body every day. Two physicists discover
Speaker 3: them in the nineteen fifties. They won the Nobel Prize
Speaker 3: in Physics forty years later, which I'm sorry. It seems
Speaker 3: like a long lag time. And I don't feel bad
Speaker 3: saying that because I know I'll never be up for
Speaker 3: a Nobel Prize. In physics.
Speaker 4: The paper about neutrinos said, you could explain this thing
Speaker 4: if there were some really weakly interacting, nearly massless particle.
Speaker 4: But I'm sorry to have predicted a particle that has
Speaker 4: no chance of ever being detected.
Speaker 3: I love that there's like a yeah, sorry.
Speaker 4: This is not good science. We found it.
Speaker 3: Ah, that's rad. We got them.
Speaker 6: We found them.
Speaker 3: And Jackie wants to know what would happen if I
Speaker 3: had ten pounds of dark matter in my hand, and
Speaker 3: then some other folks asked. Jackie also asked how much
Speaker 3: dark matter is in the room right now? How much
Speaker 3: dark matter is in us?
Speaker 4: All right? So we actually know this? Oh okay, I
Speaker 4: only know the rule of thumb that where we're sitting
Speaker 4: in our galaxy, in your coffee mug, you have about
Speaker 4: one gram of dark matter, so you could you can
Speaker 4: do the unit conversion for how much dark matter is
Speaker 4: in the room. But it's a pretty normal scale thing. Yeah,
Speaker 4: here's the caveat So if I tell you have one
Speaker 4: gram of dark matter. You don't know if that's one
Speaker 4: particle that weighs one gram or a thousand particles that
Speaker 4: will each way one milligram, or anything in between. Right,
Speaker 4: So we don't know the number density of dark matter,
Speaker 4: but we know the mass density of dark.
Speaker 3: Matter, and we can't measure that on a scale that's
Speaker 3: actually measuring grams because that is using gravity. So it
Speaker 3: would be a completely different scale to measure that.
Speaker 4: This is something that we have inferred from, not from
Speaker 4: anything terrestrial, but from the motion of stars in our galaxy.
Speaker 3: Oh that's absolutely nuts. I mean, I just do you
Speaker 3: does it change the way you live your life at all?
Speaker 3: Knowing that we are surrounded in such mystery, do you
Speaker 3: just like ever take more chances or just say like,
Speaker 3: screw it, I'm gonna live for today, get the whipped
Speaker 3: cream on the ice blendid Like why not?
Speaker 4: So last year we have a science book club, and
Speaker 4: last year we read Katie Max's book The End of Everything. Yes,
Speaker 4: and there is definitely a week where I thought it
Speaker 4: doesn't matter how bad things are, the universe is going
Speaker 4: to end eventually.
Speaker 3: I was reading that before bed the other night, and
Speaker 3: I was like, this is a little depressing but oddly liberating.
Speaker 3: It's a great book. So we did a two part
Speaker 3: Cosmology episode a few years back with doctor Katie Mack,
Speaker 3: which of course I'm gonna link in the show notes,
Speaker 3: and I I urge you to pick up her since
Speaker 3: released book, The End of Everything, Astrophysically speaking, it's really
Speaker 3: funny and informative, it's terrifying, it's comforting all at once.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna link it on my website. Earl of Gramblekin
Speaker 3: wants to know what is the best music to listen
Speaker 3: to while researching dark matter?
Speaker 4: All right, that is a great question.
Speaker 3: Do you need classical music or like no fash metal.
Speaker 4: I'm looking over at my laptop because I have a
Speaker 4: nineties indies rock channel playing on YouTube music right now.
Speaker 4: That's so that's what I use for class preps. So
Speaker 4: for research, I think there are these lo fi hip
Speaker 4: hop channels with no words. And this is just a
Speaker 4: life pro tip for anyone, anyone doing something mathematical. You
Speaker 4: want to have background music so you don't you're not
Speaker 4: just hearing the echoes of your room. You want something
Speaker 4: with no vocals. And for the added bonus, there's a
Speaker 4: different web page for generating cafe sounds. So I make
Speaker 4: myself a hot tea and I have all the on
Speaker 4: beyond stuff cass a, but I'm sitting at my desk.
Speaker 4: That's genius.
Speaker 3: I love it, and like life, tips from an astrophysicist
Speaker 3: is something that I would definitely tune into. Like at
Speaker 3: any point I.
Speaker 4: Get technically, I'm not an astrophysicist. Are you a theoretical
Speaker 4: theoretical particle physicist?
Speaker 3: Now, what's the difference between an astrophysicist and a theoretical
Speaker 3: And pardon me, because this is just me learning, But
Speaker 3: what is the difference between the two.
Speaker 4: So if you're my department chair, Yes, an astrophysicist can
Speaker 4: get money from NASA and a theoretical particle physicist gets
Speaker 4: money from the National Science Foundation, But the two fields
Speaker 4: are actually blending. I collaborate with theoretical astrophysicists on dark matter.
Speaker 4: There are topics where they're really you really can't distinguish.
Speaker 4: But the tools of the trade for a particle physicist
Speaker 4: are really quantum field theory and an entire tradition of
Speaker 4: how we think about fundamental particles. Astrophysicists have a slightly
Speaker 4: different toolkit that patches on with observational astronomy and cosmology
Speaker 4: and a different scale of what are the interesting problems.
Speaker 3: I thought Lucas water Body had a great question. I
Speaker 3: know we can't observe it, but after working on it
Speaker 3: for years, you mess get some weird imaginary images in
Speaker 3: your head when you think about it. What does dark
Speaker 3: matter look like in your head?
Speaker 4: Ooh yeah, okay, so the I think the honest answer
Speaker 4: is I have pictures, but the pictures are never of
Speaker 4: the dark matter. The pictures are of my toolkit for
Speaker 4: understanding dark matter. So if I'm thinking about dark matter
Speaker 4: as something that could be described with extra dimensions, and
Speaker 4: I say it very carefully because I'm not saying there
Speaker 4: are extra dimensions, I'm saying mathematically, I can do a
Speaker 4: calculation in the extra dimension and that means something. Then
Speaker 4: I think about literally and an extra dimension, and I
Speaker 4: have tons of these pictures I draw with my grad
Speaker 4: students about what does the wave function look like? Does
Speaker 4: it ripple, what does it look like at the boundary?
Speaker 4: Does it interact with other things? Is a wiggly? Is
Speaker 4: it exponentially increasing or exponentially decreasing. That's a picture which
Speaker 4: is not the same thing as a picture of the
Speaker 4: invisible quantum field, which is not really a tangible thing,
Speaker 4: but it's a picture that I hold on to. The
Speaker 4: Other thing are Fineman diagrams, which are these really cute
Speaker 4: tinker toy looking things that that particle physicists used to
Speaker 4: describe quantum scattering, so any process. They're actually shorthand from mathematics,
Speaker 4: but it's a way of engaging the visual part of
Speaker 4: your brain to make sense of something which is otherwise
Speaker 4: pages of calculation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in otherwise so abstract.
Speaker 4: So we think in analogies. That's a punchline.
Speaker 3: It's so interesting to think of a theoretical physicist also
Speaker 3: thinking in like almost tinker choice to try to get
Speaker 3: a handle on like, Yeah, indimentionality is a big ask.
Speaker 3: One more listener question, Ema Rose wants to know does
Speaker 3: dark matter have a sound?
Speaker 4: Oh gosh, there are so many great answers to that question.
Speaker 4: One of my colleagues, you should Saige at Notre Dame
Speaker 4: hit a great paper about something called dark acoustic oscillations,
Speaker 4: which I mean, which is literally answering that question. It's
Speaker 4: in it's the word So acoustic oscillations are about sound
Speaker 4: waves in the yearly universe. So dark matter, which were
Speaker 4: particles that were forming these halos, when there's a shock
Speaker 4: to the halo, they form sound waves ripples in the
Speaker 4: dark matter substrate, so they literally form sounds. It's both
Speaker 4: exciting and cool, but completely mundane, right. It's you can
Speaker 4: imagine sounds start traveling and water sounds traveling. If I
Speaker 4: knock on wood, sounds traveling through wood. It's literally the
Speaker 4: same kind of sound.
Speaker 3: Wave, but it's going through dark matter, going through darkness,
Speaker 3: and it's the sound that we can't hear the matter
Speaker 3: that we're made up of yet exactly. Yeah, unless maybe
Speaker 3: somehow we create something that can capture that.
Speaker 4: It's an interesting question of if dark matter has some motion,
Speaker 4: does that help us have some new handle to detect it.
Speaker 3: Can you imagine if one day there's just Jordy LaForge
Speaker 3: banana clip eye pieces and you can just like three
Speaker 3: D glasses just see dark matter? Oh yes, yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: so everyone's asshole, Grandpa's there as it goes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you guys all, sorry about that experiment we did.
Speaker 6: Ye.
Speaker 4: Sorry, we can actually do that using gravitational lensing. And
Speaker 4: so this was a result from maybe ten to fifteen
Speaker 4: years ago from I believe it was Tom Abele at
Speaker 4: Slack was one of the first people do this, where
Speaker 4: they used astrophysical data to map out where the dark
Speaker 4: matter is and they form these filaments.
Speaker 3: And gravitational lensing side note, let's break it down. It's
Speaker 3: the way that mass bends a light source, so that
Speaker 3: a shift in light is a clue that something with
Speaker 3: a lot of mass nearby is affecting it.
Speaker 4: What the dark matter distribution looks like. They look like filaments.
Speaker 4: In fact, when I look at them, they look like neurons.
Speaker 4: They look like a network of neurons where you have
Speaker 4: dark matter halos and there are little filaments that connect them.
Speaker 4: We understand why they formed this way. Yeah, but it's
Speaker 4: it's a really striking quote unquote.
Speaker 3: Picture, and we think that that is how they are
Speaker 3: forming and how they're existing.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, I mean that's kind of a fundamentally huge way
Speaker 3: of visualizing it, right, just to think that there's all
Speaker 3: these like spidery kind of webby filament things.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So so Star Trek Discovery used something similar as a
Speaker 4: conceit for intergalactic travel, and I was a little bit
Speaker 4: myth that they didn't actually use dark matter.
Speaker 3: It's like, call me you're right here, you're in La
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah. Take a meeting in Beverly Hills. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 3: Like meet me at the Earth Cafe. We'll talk it out.
Speaker 3: Oh man, you know what I mean? What about what's
Speaker 3: the hardest thing about being a Scoto Highlologist, Scoto Highlologist,
Speaker 3: there are a lot of different things.
Speaker 4: It's there's the pace of experimental discovery compared to theoretical creativity.
Speaker 4: So it's really easy to well, that's right, it's not easy,
Speaker 4: but that in principle, the time scale to come up
Speaker 4: with the idea and play with it is relatively short.
Speaker 4: In practice, you spend a lot of time honing that creativity.
Speaker 4: But to actually test something, it's a whole different thing.
Speaker 4: To convince federal funding agencies, And we'll start off with
Speaker 4: your experimental colleagues. You know a lot more about actually
Speaker 4: doing experiments than you do to do something and invest
Speaker 4: resources from elsewhere to do a particular type of search
Speaker 4: is it takes a long time. One of my mentors
Speaker 4: has a joke that I absolutely love, and the story is,
Speaker 4: you have a brilliant theorist who writes down the theory
Speaker 4: that just is so beautiful, and she says, oh, this
Speaker 4: is it. This is the most elegant, beautiful theory. So
Speaker 4: she goes downstairs. Theorists tend to be on the top floor.
Speaker 4: She goes downstairs to her experimental colleague and says, I
Speaker 4: have the theory and it's predictive. I predict these three things,
Speaker 4: and I think your lab should be able to do this.
Speaker 4: So the experimentalist is excited and he says, okay, let
Speaker 4: me apply for grants. So he spends the next quarter
Speaker 4: writing grants. He sends them all off the funding agencies
Speaker 4: get back to him. He's able to recruit some new
Speaker 4: grad students, hire some postdocs. Over the course the next
Speaker 4: three years, they decide to build a new experimental apparatus,
Speaker 4: which involves contracting out types of equipment that never been
Speaker 4: made before, creating their own whatever high tech kind of thing,
Speaker 4: and then they run and running These things can take
Speaker 4: ten years, so grad students, graduate, postdocs move on to
Speaker 4: new jobs. They hire new undergrads take care of the experiment.
Speaker 4: Ten years later, everyone has gray hairs, and the experimentalist,
Speaker 4: I imagine, like a doc matrix printer, pulls out the
Speaker 4: piece of paper and looks at it. Really solemn walks
Speaker 4: up the stairs to go to his theory. Colleague knocks
Speaker 4: on her door and says, I'm really sorry, null result,
Speaker 4: it's not this theory. And she slams her hand on
Speaker 4: the table and she says, can you believe that it
Speaker 4: took me two weeks of my life to write that paper? Oh?
Speaker 3: No, oh these experimentalists? Oh my god? And so are you?
Speaker 3: Do you feel like you have more theories than you
Speaker 3: will ever be able to write up? Like you know
Speaker 3: what I mean?
Speaker 4: No, I wish it were like that. Yeah, there are
Speaker 4: some people who are like, I really admire that. For me,
Speaker 4: a lot of it really is taking a few core
Speaker 4: ideas and running with it. And some of those core
Speaker 4: ideas are mine, some of them are from my colleagues,
Speaker 4: my friends, and we tinker and we cross pollinate, but
Speaker 4: oftentimes it's very slow and incremental, even on the theoretical side.
Speaker 4: M hm.
Speaker 3: Are there any any life advice you would have from
Speaker 3: a someone who studies the universe and what we are
Speaker 3: and what it is? Is there any perspectives on life
Speaker 3: that you would you would want to share with your
Speaker 3: younger self or with others.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So it's the beginning of the term here at
Speaker 4: UC Riverside. So I've been thinking a lot about this,
Speaker 4: like what advice would I give to freshmen? What advice
Speaker 4: do I give to myself? Like general advice? You know
Speaker 4: the who was it Baz Luhrman did the graduation song?
Speaker 4: I think they attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, And it was
Speaker 4: actually somebody else who wrote the article wear Sunscreen.
Speaker 3: So the ware Sunscreen opus was actually penned by a
Speaker 3: Chicago Tribune columnist named Mary Schmich who wrote the article
Speaker 3: for the graduating class of nineteen ninety seven, and then
Speaker 3: it was released as a song in nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 5: You will not understand the power and beauty of your
Speaker 5: youth until they faded. So trust me, in twenty years
Speaker 5: you look back at photos of yourself and we're calling away.
Speaker 5: You can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you
Speaker 5: and how fabulous you really looked.
Speaker 3: It's a doozy.
Speaker 4: Here's my ware sunscreen advice. Ladies and gentlemen, do your homework.
Speaker 4: Just that, do your homework, and I have contact. So
Speaker 4: when you're doing dark matter research, any type of research, anything.
Speaker 4: If I forget research, anything that you're doing in your
Speaker 4: life as an adult, there are no solutions in the
Speaker 4: back of the book. If you're doing anything exciting, you
Speaker 4: don't know if you're doing it right, and you have
Speaker 4: no feedback, and all you have is the intuition that
Speaker 4: you build up that you're going in the right direction.
Speaker 4: It's painfully true in dark matter research, where you can
Speaker 4: say maybe dark matter is this type of particle, you
Speaker 4: can just be completely wrong. So I tell the first
Speaker 4: year physics students that I hate homework. I hated doing homework,
Speaker 4: I hate giving homework. I absolutely hate grading homework. But
Speaker 4: I give homework as a service to them because that's
Speaker 4: my commitment saying there's something that you should do, and
Speaker 4: I know what the right answer is. I will help
Speaker 4: you get to the right answer. And if you get
Speaker 4: the wrong answer, that's great. We can work together and
Speaker 4: figure out what needs to be adjusted so that you
Speaker 4: have the right intuition to get to the right answer.
Speaker 4: And that's the critical thing. It's building that intuition of
Speaker 4: I've gotten this wrong before, but now I am wiser
Speaker 4: because of having gotten something wrong. And that I think
Speaker 4: is a general life advice. And that's exactly how theoretical
Speaker 4: physics works, where a lot of the work that we
Speaker 4: do is conjectural, and we work it out and then
Speaker 4: someone says, oh, but if you do it that way,
Speaker 4: the proton decays, Oh yeah, dummy. Okay. Now I know
Speaker 4: that this type of theory needs to have this type
Speaker 4: of tweak, and I've built up a toolkit that I
Speaker 4: could only have had from making the mistake.
Speaker 3: And that is something I feel like. People who are
Speaker 3: outside of science in general are so afraid to fail.
Speaker 3: But there's so much failure absolutely in learning, absolutely the
Speaker 3: only way we learn anything right. Absolutely, So don't be
Speaker 3: afraid to fuck up a little.
Speaker 4: Absolutely. And this is like the joke about the clever
Speaker 4: theorist where when I die, if any of my research
Speaker 4: papers have any element of literally being true, I'd be ecstatic.
Speaker 4: But a lot of the speculative work is I think
Speaker 4: this is the way things work, and even the ones
Speaker 4: where I get it completely right, the universe might just
Speaker 4: not be that way. But there's value in one going
Speaker 4: through the process of being creative and two learning why
Speaker 4: the universe is not that way.
Speaker 3: What about your favorite thing about what you do?
Speaker 4: Oh gosh, I love that on any given day there
Speaker 4: are new things to learn, and either it's some experimental
Speaker 4: result that I want to understand or some related field
Speaker 4: where I never had the chance to take that class
Speaker 4: as a student, but I see that there's an opportunity
Speaker 4: where dark matter might be able to do something, and
Speaker 4: then I can dig into and say I have an
Speaker 4: excuse to spend my time reading this textbook or reading
Speaker 4: this recent article, or talking to my colleague from a
Speaker 4: different department. That's the fun part.
Speaker 3: It's just always always learning and getting to get outside
Speaker 3: of that discipline.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 3: I mean, I love that. For the rest of my life,
Speaker 3: I'm going to be walking around thinking about a gram
Speaker 3: of diet patter in my coffee cup and sparkly webs
Speaker 3: and maybe ghosts.
Speaker 4: Maybe ghosts.
Speaker 3: You don't have to commit to that on the record,
Speaker 3: I just for my own fun.
Speaker 4: Well, I would add to my yes, and would be
Speaker 4: thinking about all of the dark matter scientists who are
Speaker 4: thinking about us, and we're the maybe ghosts.
Speaker 3: I love that. Thank you so much for doing this.
Speaker 4: This was a joy you out.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh. Yeah, So ask the smartest people you
Speaker 3: can find, the simplest questions, because that's why they study this,
Speaker 3: and probably no one at their own Thanksgiving even understands
Speaker 3: what they do. For a living. So thank you to
Speaker 3: the incredible doctor flipp Nato for letting me barge into
Speaker 3: his office with so many questions Huh what a gem?
Speaker 3: You can follow him at Twitter dot com slash flip Tonado.
Speaker 3: We'll link that in the show notes, along with the
Speaker 3: Point Foundation and Feeding America, Riverside and San Bernardino. Links
Speaker 3: to sponsors are also in the show notes. And if
Speaker 3: this episode had too much swearing for you can feel
Speaker 3: free to hit up Oarsmologies episodes. Those are linked in
Speaker 3: the show notes. Those are shorter versions of classic episodes.
Speaker 3: They're trimmed of language. They're shortened for shorties. You can
Speaker 3: find them at aliboard dot com slash smologies too. Thank
Speaker 3: you Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio for making those with
Speaker 3: assists from Sikh Fredrigez Thomas of Mindjam Media. We also
Speaker 3: have bleeped episodes and transcripts by Emily White of the Bordery.
Speaker 3: Those are up at alleyboard dot com slash ologies, dash
Speaker 3: extras bleeped by kayleab Patten, Aaron Talbert Admins the Ologies
Speaker 3: podcast Facebook group, Susan Hale Handles our merch and so
Speaker 3: much more. Noel Dilworth does scheduling. Kelly R. Dwyer made
Speaker 3: the web page. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music. Assistant
Speaker 3: editing and engineering was by the man Ann Mullet Jarreed
Speaker 3: Sleeper of Mindchammdia, with additional editing from Mark David Christensen,
Speaker 3: and lead editing was done by Canadian treasure Mercedes Maitland
Speaker 3: of Maitland Audio, who is linked in the show notes.
Speaker 3: And if you stick around until the end of the episode,
Speaker 3: I tell you is secret and this one is that
Speaker 3: Sarah McNaulty, squid expert and tothologist from her episodes, you
Speaker 3: may know her. She was in town and she stayed
Speaker 3: at our house for a few days, which was wonderful.
Speaker 3: And we watched Puss and Boots, and uh, first off,
Speaker 3: I always thought that Puss and Boots was a duo,
Speaker 3: and like fifteen minutes in the movie, I was like, wait, okay,
Speaker 3: so there's no boots. Then it's just one cat named
Speaker 3: Puss and he's wearing the boots. Okay. But also, if
Speaker 3: you've watched Puss and Boots, I think the animators have
Speaker 3: definitely done at least like guided Mescaline Therapy or hit
Speaker 3: a DMT at a party, or maybe they grow their
Speaker 3: own trooms. But it is a trip and I definitely
Speaker 3: cried at a cartoon cat, so there's that. Okay, byebye pacadermatologyology,
Speaker 3: crypto zoology, lithology and technology, meteorology, pathology, anthology, seriology.
Speaker 4: We do so much about dark matter.
Speaker 3: Get value.
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