Speaker 1: Welcome to the quark Side Quantum Physics podcast, an exploration
Speaker 1: of the fundamental structure of reality, where quantum laws govern matter, energy,
Speaker 1: and information. Here, uncertainty is a feature, not a flaw,
Speaker 1: and understanding begins of the smallest scales.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I want you to imagine you're a software
Speaker 2: developer and you're staring directly at well, the universe's source code, right,
Speaker 2: the ultimate programming Exactly, You're looking at the fundamental code
Speaker 2: that governs absolutely everything from the phone in your pocket
Speaker 2: to the stars in the sky. But there's this massive problem.
Speaker 2: Oh there always is, right, because for sixty years, you
Speaker 2: and basically every other top tier developer on Earth have
Speaker 2: been obsessing over this one specific line of code because
Speaker 2: it looks undeniably like a glaring typo.
Speaker 3: It just keeps glitching.
Speaker 2: Exactly every single time you run the program in a
Speaker 2: real world test, it glitches. The output just does not
Speaker 2: match the code. And that glitch was so persistent that
Speaker 2: the entire physics community became absolutely convinced our foundational understanding
Speaker 2: of the universe was broken.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they really thought the core framework was just fundamentally flawed.
Speaker 2: But imagine discovering more than half a century later that
Speaker 2: the code was actually perfectly written all along, we were
Speaker 2: just using the wrong math to read it.
Speaker 3: It really is the ultimate plot twist in modern physics.
Speaker 3: I mean, for decades, the scientific community is relied on
Speaker 3: this theoretical framework known as the Standard Model, right, the
Speaker 3: Standard Model, Yeah, you can think of it as our
Speaker 3: master blueprint for reality. It's the theory that categorizes all
Speaker 3: the known fundamental building blocks of matter, and it dictates
Speaker 3: exactly how they are allowed to interact to one another. Okay,
Speaker 3: and yet for sixty long years there was this one tiny,
Speaker 3: incredibly stubborn mismatch match between what the Standard Model predicted
Speaker 3: on paper and what particle accelerators were actually showing us
Speaker 3: in the physical world.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't just like a rounding error, right, No.
Speaker 3: Not at all. It was this tantalizing neon flashing hint
Speaker 3: of a completely unknown fifth force of nature just waiting
Speaker 3: to be discovered.
Speaker 2: And exploring that sixty year mystery is exactly our mission today.
Speaker 2: We are tracking this monumental achievement by an international team
Speaker 2: of scientists, a team who dedicated a full decade of
Speaker 2: their lives to running the most precise calculation in human history.
Speaker 3: Ten whole years. It's just incredible, it is.
Speaker 2: So we're going to figure out what a tiny, elusive
Speaker 2: particle called the muon revealed about the fabric of reality
Speaker 2: and why it took immense supercomputers ten years to solve
Speaker 2: the puzzle. Right, And then something I find profoundly interesting,
Speaker 2: why proving ourselves completely brilliantly right actually felt like, well,
Speaker 2: a bit of a disappointment to the people who did it.
Speaker 3: That's the real twist. But to understand why the greatest
Speaker 3: minds in physics thought the universe was broken, I have
Speaker 3: to start with the prime suspect, the center of the anomaly,
Speaker 3: the muon, exactly the muon itself. So we're looking at
Speaker 3: a subatomic particle that is essentially the electron's much heavier,
Speaker 3: much more unstable cousin.
Speaker 2: Okay, so it's like an electron but bigger.
Speaker 3: Pretty much, it carries the exact same electric charge as
Speaker 3: the everyday electrons powering the device you're listening to right now.
Speaker 3: But a muon is about two hundred times more massive. Wow,
Speaker 3: two hundred times.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's heavy, and it only exists for a tiny
Speaker 2: fraction of a second before decaying into other.
Speaker 3: Particles, which raises an immediate question for me, Why is
Speaker 3: the muon the star of this mystery?
Speaker 2: You mean, well, if it's just a heavier, shorter lid electron,
Speaker 2: why are physicists building giant underground facilities to study it?
Speaker 2: Why not just look at the everyday electrons that are
Speaker 2: already literally everywhere.
Speaker 3: That's a great question. It all comes down to a
Speaker 3: property known as the magnetic.
Speaker 2: Moment magnetic moment.
Speaker 3: Okay, right, So, like the electron, a muon acts like
Speaker 3: a tiny microscopic bar magnet, and when you place a
Speaker 3: magnet into a magnetic field, it's going to react naturally. Specifically,
Speaker 3: a muon wobbles, and according to foundational quantum theory, there
Speaker 3: is a very strict ratio that dictates exactly how the
Speaker 3: muon wobbles relative to the strength of the surrounding magnetic field.
Speaker 2: Okay, so there's a mathematical rule for the wobble exactly.
Speaker 3: That ratio is known as G, and the standard model
Speaker 3: predicts that G should be exactly the number two.
Speaker 2: Just a clean, simple two, just a two. But the
Speaker 2: universe is rarely that clean in practice, right, because the
Speaker 2: vacuum of space isn't actually empty it's not just a void, no,
Speaker 2: not at all. It's constantly boiling with hidden, invisible particles
Speaker 2: that are popping into existence and vanishing almost instantly.
Speaker 3: And those hidden particles are the key to the whole
Speaker 3: glitch because even though they exist for less than the
Speaker 3: blink of an eye, they exert these tiny electromagnetic and
Speaker 3: weak forced tugs on the muon while it's wobbling right
Speaker 3: wells wabbling in the magnetic field. So those invisible tugs
Speaker 3: slightly alter the muon's magnetic strength. It shifts the wobble
Speaker 3: away from that clean number two by just a tiny, tiny.
Speaker 2: Fraction, and physicists refer to this shift as the anomalous
Speaker 2: magnetic moment right or G minus.
Speaker 3: Two exactly G minus two.
Speaker 2: So, because the moon is two hundred times heavier than
Speaker 2: a standard electron, is it like well, is it like
Speaker 2: placing a heavy bowling ball on a trampoline instead of
Speaker 2: a ping pong ball.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's a good way to look at.
Speaker 2: It, because the ping pong ball might not even register
Speaker 2: a ripple in the fabric, but the heavy bowling ball
Speaker 2: is going to be incredibly sensitive to any invisible things
Speaker 2: bouncing around in the trampoline's material.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the sensitivity actually scales significantly with that extra mass,
Speaker 3: so that heavy bowling ball isn't just sinking deeper, it's
Speaker 3: magnifying the effect of every single hidden fluctuation in that
Speaker 3: quantum trampoline. Because the muon is so massive, it is
Speaker 3: exceptionally sensitive to any unknown particles hiding in the quantum vacuum.
Speaker 2: So that's why they were studying it so intensely, exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, researchers scrutinized the muon's wobble with such intensity because
Speaker 3: they were hoping those unexplained tugs were being caused by
Speaker 3: a brand new, undiscovered particle or even a fifth force
Speaker 3: of nature interacting with the muon.
Speaker 2: And the experimental data totally backed up that hope, right.
Speaker 2: I mean, we are talking about decades of massive, incredibly
Speaker 2: expensive experiments.
Speaker 3: Oh, absolutely, generations of work.
Speaker 2: Scientists that SERN in Europe tracked this in the sixties
Speaker 2: and seventies, then the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York
Speaker 2: took over in the early two thousands, right, and most
Speaker 2: recently Fermolab in Illinois ran with it. They were measuring
Speaker 2: the muon's wobble with just mind boggling precision, and every
Speaker 2: single time, across generations of physicists, the experimental value stubbornly
Speaker 2: disagreed with the prediction from the standard.
Speaker 3: Model, and the persistence of that anomaly is what drove
Speaker 3: the physics world wilde. The experimental data was so rigorously
Speaker 3: conducted and continually verified that it actually won the breakthrough
Speaker 3: prize in fundamental physics.
Speaker 2: Wait, really, just the experiments won the prize.
Speaker 3: Yeah, The scientific community accepted that the experimental data was
Speaker 3: rock solid, The wabble was real, and it was undeniably
Speaker 3: deviating from the mathematical prediction.
Speaker 2: Which means, if the physical experiments were right, the math
Speaker 2: had to be wrong plecisely. And to find out where
Speaker 2: the math was failing, physicists had to wrestle with the
Speaker 2: absolute most stubborn, difficult force in the entire universe.
Speaker 3: Yeah. To grasp the sheer mathematical wall these scientists hit,
Speaker 3: we need to quickly contextualize the four fundamental forces of nature.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's hear them.
Speaker 3: So, gravity keeps planets in orbit, electromagnetism gives us light
Speaker 3: and chemical bonds, and the weak force governs radioactive decay.
Speaker 2: Right, those are the first three and those three.
Speaker 3: Are relatively well behaved mathematically. But the fourth force, the
Speaker 3: strong force, is an entirely different beast. Oh so well.
Speaker 3: For when it is about one hundred trillion trillion trillion
Speaker 3: times stronger than.
Speaker 2: Gravity, I wait, I can't even conceptualize a number with
Speaker 2: that and the zeros one hundred trillion trillion trillion.
Speaker 3: It's massive. It's the force that binds sub atomic quarks
Speaker 3: together to form the protons and neutrons inside the nucleus
Speaker 3: of an atom.
Speaker 2: Okay, so it's the ultimate cosmic superglue.
Speaker 3: Exactly, and its behavior is completely counterintuitive. Consider gravity or electromagnetism.
Speaker 3: The further away two objects get, the weaker, the attraction
Speaker 3: between them becomes.
Speaker 2: Right, that makes logical sense to us.
Speaker 3: The strong force does the exact opposite. It behaves incredibly
Speaker 3: like a rubber band. When quarks are very close together,
Speaker 3: the strong force is relatively relaxed. They can move around
Speaker 3: somewhat freely.
Speaker 2: Okay, But what happens when they separate.
Speaker 3: The moment you try to pull two quarks apart, the
Speaker 3: tension increases massively. The strong force robber band stretches and
Speaker 3: fights back, getting harder and harder to pull the further
Speaker 3: you stretch it.
Speaker 2: But in the physical world, a rubber band eventually snaps
Speaker 2: if you pull it far enough. What happens when you
Speaker 2: apply enough energy to pull the strong force past its
Speaker 2: breaking point?
Speaker 3: Ah, This is where it gets weird. The energy required
Speaker 3: to stretch that strong force rubber band is so immense
Speaker 3: that before the connection can actually snap, the sheer kinetic
Speaker 3: energy you are applying undergoes a profound transformation, a transformation
Speaker 3: like what Well, thanks to Einstein's E equals mc squared,
Speaker 3: we know that energy and mass are interchangeable, right, So
Speaker 3: the sheer act of pulling the strong force apart literally
Speaker 3: forces that energy to convert into mass. It creates brand
Speaker 3: new particles out of thin air to absorb the tension. Wow,
Speaker 3: and those newly spawned particles instantly interfere with the very
Speaker 3: mathematical state you are trying to calculate.
Speaker 2: Okay, here's where it's really interesting and honestly a bit absurd.
Speaker 2: If pulling this microscopic rubber band apart literally spawns brand
Speaker 2: new particles out of pure energy, how can anyone possibly
Speaker 2: do math on a system that continuously changes its own
Speaker 2: ingredients while you're looking.
Speaker 3: At it that's the million dollar question.
Speaker 2: I mean, isn't that like trying to mathematically calculate the
Speaker 2: exact weight and chemical makeup of a cake, But every
Speaker 2: time you put it on the scale, Thattter spontaneously spawns
Speaker 2: an extra dozen eggs and another bag of flower.
Speaker 3: That it's a perfect analogy. It's a logistical nightmare. And
Speaker 3: standard mathematics, specifically a technique called perturbation theory, which physicists
Speaker 3: usually use for these calculations, it simply cannot handle a
Speaker 3: system that aggressively recursive.
Speaker 2: It just can't keep up with the extra eggs and flour.
Speaker 3: Exactly, when you try to calculate the interactions of those
Speaker 3: constantly spawning particles using continuous equations, your math just blows up,
Speaker 3: blows up. Yet the answers shoot off to infinity and
Speaker 3: become completely useless.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: Because of that impossibility, theoretical physicists were stuck for decades.
Speaker 3: They had to rely on estimating the strong forces contribution
Speaker 3: to the Muon's wobble based on past experimental data from
Speaker 3: other particle collisions, so.
Speaker 2: They were basically guessing based on old data.
Speaker 3: Basically, those estimations were the absolute best the scientific world
Speaker 3: could do at the time, but they were ultimately what
Speaker 3: led to the false hope of the fifth force.
Speaker 2: Right, they were using a blurry stitch together map to
Speaker 2: navigate a precise quantum maze, very bory. So to finally
Speaker 2: solve this changing ingredient problem, an international team led by
Speaker 2: Penn State physicist Zultomfhodor had to invent an entirely new
Speaker 2: computational approach. And they didn't just spend a weekend on it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not at all.
Speaker 2: It took them ten long.
Speaker 3: Years ten years, and the methodology they pioneered completely changed
Speaker 3: the game. Instead of relying on that blurry map of
Speaker 3: past experimental estimates, photos team utilized a technique called lattice
Speaker 3: quantum chromodynamics.
Speaker 2: Lattice quantum chromodynamics that is quite the mouthful.
Speaker 3: It is, but the concept is brilliant. To stop the
Speaker 3: mathematical equations from blowing up to infinity, they abandoned the
Speaker 3: idea of continuous space.
Speaker 2: Okay, so what do they do instead?
Speaker 3: Instead, they simulated the strong force by breaking space and
Speaker 3: time down into a microscopic, discrete grid a lattice.
Speaker 2: So what does this actually mean for the math, Because
Speaker 2: it sounds like they took an impossibly complex, perfectly smooth
Speaker 2: photograph of the universe and purposefully pixelated it.
Speaker 3: Pixelated is exactly the right word for it.
Speaker 2: So, instead of trying to calculate the physics across a
Speaker 2: smooth continuous image where the details infinitely spiral out of control,
Speaker 2: they zoomed in. They calculated the physics inside one tiny,
Speaker 2: manageable pixel at a time, and then zoomed back out
Speaker 2: to see the big picture.
Speaker 3: Yes, the pixelation is the crucial mechanism that saves the
Speaker 3: math because in a smooth continuous model of space, the
Speaker 3: distance between two interacting particles can theoretically shwink all the
Speaker 3: way down to zero, and when distances approach zero in
Speaker 3: these quantum equations, the energies approach infinity, which is what
Speaker 3: breaks the calculation.
Speaker 2: Ah okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 3: By creating a grid by pixelating space time, you establish
Speaker 3: a hard mathematical limit. The particles can only exist on
Speaker 3: the intersecting nodes of the grid. They can never get
Speaker 3: closer to each other than the distance between two.
Speaker 2: Pixels, so they can't ever reach zero.
Speaker 3: Exactly. That simple structural rule prevents the equations from ever
Speaker 3: reaching zero distance, which stops the map from exploding into infinity.
Speaker 2: But mapping out the quantum interactions of the universe pixel
Speaker 2: by pixel requires an unfathomable amount of computing power.
Speaker 3: Which is why they needed immense supercomputers running calculations for
Speaker 3: a full decade. The computational load is just staggering. You
Speaker 3: have to calculate the interactions of the strong force across
Speaker 3: all these tiny discrete cells.
Speaker 2: While solving the equations of the standard model within those
Speaker 2: strict boundaries.
Speaker 3: Right, and even with a decade of supercomputed they couldn't
Speaker 3: simulate the entire universe at maximum resolution. They had to be.
Speaker 2: Strategic about it, right, Because the lattice grid works best
Speaker 2: for very short distances where the strong force acts the
Speaker 2: most chaotically.
Speaker 3: Exactly, so they employed a brilliant hybrid approach. They use
Speaker 3: their highly complex lattice calculations for the short and intermediate
Speaker 3: distances those tiny chaotic pixels. Then they mathematically combined that
Speaker 3: grid simulation with highly reliable existing experimental data for the
Speaker 3: long distances, where the measurements were already well understood.
Speaker 2: And where the math didn't suffer from the infinite energy problem.
Speaker 3: Precisely, by combining those two methods and by using finer
Speaker 3: vastly more detailed grids than any previous study had ever managed.
Speaker 3: They radically reduced the room for error, so.
Speaker 2: They shrank the pixels down smaller than anyone thought possible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they did.
Speaker 2: This wasn't just a clever theoretical idea. This was ten
Speaker 2: years of relentless dedication to programming, custom computer architecture and
Speaker 2: advanced mathematics, a monumental effort, And when those supercomputers finally
Speaker 2: spit out the answer after a decade of crunching the grid,
Speaker 2: the result was a massive triumph for human knowledge. It was,
Speaker 2: but surprisingly it was a genuinely bittersweet, almost heartbreaking moment
Speaker 2: for the scientists involved.
Speaker 3: Yeah. When the new highly precise lattice calculation was finally complete,
Speaker 3: the team folded it into the grand mathematical prediction of
Speaker 3: the standard model, and when they did, the long standing
Speaker 3: sixty year mismatch with the physical experiments entirely vanished, just
Speaker 3: disappeared completely. The discrepancy between the theory and the real
Speaker 3: world wasn't a fluke in nature. It was simply a
Speaker 3: fluke in the old estimated way of calculating the strong force.
Speaker 2: So theory and experiment suddenly agreed within half a standard deviation. Yes,
Speaker 2: the glaring typo in the universe's source code wasn't a
Speaker 2: typo at all. The code was pristine. We just needed
Speaker 2: a ten year supercomputer grid to read it correctly.
Speaker 3: And the sheer precision of this achievement is difficult to overstate.
Speaker 3: Four Door's team successfully combined the mathematical influences of the
Speaker 3: electromagnetic force, the weak force, and the strong force into
Speaker 3: a single unified prediction.
Speaker 2: Which is wild, right. These are three forces that behave
Speaker 2: so differently they usually require entirely separate theoretical tools to
Speaker 2: understand exactly.
Speaker 3: Yet this new calculation aligns with the physical experiments perfectly,
Speaker 3: strengthening our confidence in the standard model to eleven decimal place.
Speaker 2: Eleven decimal places.
Speaker 3: It is accurate to parts for billion.
Speaker 2: That's just incredible. But then you have the deeply human
Speaker 2: element of this story.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, the emotional fallout exactly.
Speaker 2: You have the reaction to the biggest mathematical triumph of
Speaker 2: the decade photo or openly admitted quote. I feel somewhat.
Speaker 3: Sad it sounds so contradictory.
Speaker 2: It does. The physics community wanted a new fifth force
Speaker 2: to upend our understanding of reality. They wanted to.
Speaker 3: Break the universe, they really did.
Speaker 2: Instead, they found out the old interactions explained the muons
Speaker 2: wobble completely. Why is it considered a disappointment when a
Speaker 2: sixty year hunt for a shiny new law of physics
Speaker 2: ends up proving that the old laws were right all along.
Speaker 3: Well, it speaks to the fundamental drive of a scientist.
Speaker 3: Every physicist dreams of finding the crack in the foundation.
Speaker 3: Anomalies are what lead to scientific revolutions like gins. Exactly
Speaker 3: when Einstein overturned Newtonian physics, it was because Newton's math
Speaker 3: couldn't quite explain the orbit of mercury. Finding a fifth
Speaker 3: force in the Muon's wobble would have opened the door
Speaker 3: to entirely new fields of physics.
Speaker 2: It could have provided clues to massive unsolved mysteries like
Speaker 2: dark matter or dark energy.
Speaker 3: Right finding out that there is no fifth force hiding
Speaker 3: in this specific anomaly feels like watching a door slowly close.
Speaker 3: The unknown space where new physics could be hiding just
Speaker 3: got much much smaller.
Speaker 2: It's like spending your entire career searching for a hidden
Speaker 2: room in your house. You're completely convinced that a draft
Speaker 2: under the door means there's a secret passage.
Speaker 3: Oh, I love that.
Speaker 2: And then you finally rip up the floorboards, only to
Speaker 2: realize the house is just perfectly flawlessly built and the
Speaker 2: draft was just the ac unit working exactly as designed.
Speaker 3: That's exactly how it felt. But while they didn't get
Speaker 3: the thrill of breaking the universe and rewriting the textbooks,
Speaker 3: we really have to look at the magnitude of what
Speaker 3: they actually achieved.
Speaker 2: It's still a massive win.
Speaker 3: It is they provided the absolute best proof humanity has
Speaker 3: ever generated of quantum field theory, that theory is the
Speaker 3: underlying foundation on which our entire modern understanding of nature
Speaker 3: is built. Right by proving it to eleven decimal places,
Speaker 3: they demonstrated that humanity actually understands the fundamental mechanics of
Speaker 3: the universe at an incredibly deep, almost unfathomable level. The
Speaker 3: disappointment is valid, but the triumph is enduring.
Speaker 2: So let's look at the incredible journey we've just mapped
Speaker 2: out today. We started with the puzzling wabble of the
Speaker 2: meuon the heavy bowling ball, bouncing on the quantum trampoline,
Speaker 2: magnifying the hidden particles of the vacuum.
Speaker 3: Great image.
Speaker 2: And then we moved through the unbreakable, infinitely stretching rubber
Speaker 2: band of the strong force, which completely defied continuous math
Speaker 2: by spawning new particles out of pure energy, the extra
Speaker 2: cake batter exactly. And finally we saw how a dedicated
Speaker 2: team spent a decade building a supercomputer grid to pixelate
Speaker 2: the universe, stopping the math from hitting infinity and proving
Speaker 2: that our master blueprint of reality is spectacularly accurate.
Speaker 3: And you know, the rigor of this process is deeply
Speaker 3: relevant to how how you consume scientific information today. So well,
Speaker 3: the next time you see a sensationalized headline claiming that
Speaker 3: our understanding of physics is broken, or that a single
Speaker 3: new observation has upended everything we know about the universe,
Speaker 3: remember the story of the muon right.
Speaker 2: Take it with a grain of salt, exactly.
Speaker 3: Remember the sixty years of questioning, the ten years of
Speaker 3: agonizing patients, and the massive computational power required to actually
Speaker 3: verify the mathematics. Science isn't just about chasing anomalies to
Speaker 3: break the rules. It is equally about the painstaking, grueling
Speaker 3: work of proving how deeply and beautifully those rules hold
Speaker 3: our reality together.
Speaker 2: It is a profound testament to human persistence. But of course,
Speaker 2: the universe never gives up all its secrets at once.
Speaker 2: It definitely doesn't, because if the Standard Model is now
Speaker 2: proven accurate to an astonishing eleven decimal places for the strong, weak,
Speaker 2: and electromagnetic forces, while it still entirely leaves out the
Speaker 2: fourth fundamental force.
Speaker 3: Gravity, the great outlier, the Standard Model, for all its
Speaker 3: precision and predictive power, simply does not account for gravity
Speaker 3: at all. Our understanding of the quantum world and our
Speaker 3: understanding of gravity remain entirely separate frameworks.
Speaker 2: So if the code isn't broken here and the muon's
Speaker 2: favorite hiding spot for new physics has been firmly closed
Speaker 2: by Fodor's team, where exactly do we look for the
Speaker 2: missing puzzle pieces of the universe?
Speaker 3: That is the big question there.
Speaker 2: Right, We might have spent ten years proving that the
Speaker 2: code we can read is absolutely perfect, but there's clearly
Speaker 2: a whole lot of the universe's source code we haven't
Speaker 2: even found yet.