Speaker 1: Welcome to the court 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 at the smallest scales.
Speaker 2: Okay, I want you to do something for me right now.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, it might feel a little bit odd, especially
Speaker 2: if you're on a crowded train or sitting in an office,
Speaker 2: but just humor me for a second.
Speaker 3: All right, I'm listening.
Speaker 2: I want you to look at the space right in
Speaker 2: front of your face.
Speaker 3: We're starting with the staring contest with.
Speaker 2: The air stick with me here. If you're driving, just
Speaker 2: glance at the empty passenger seat. If you're at home,
Speaker 2: look at the gap between you and the wall.
Speaker 3: Okay, focusing on the nothing exactly, Focus on that empty space,
Speaker 3: and I want you to really ask yourself, what are
Speaker 3: you seeing? Well, broadly speaking, most people would say they're
Speaker 3: seeing nothing. Right, Maybe some dust motes if the light
Speaker 3: is hitting it just right. Sure, maybe some air molecules
Speaker 3: if they're thinking scientifically, but mostly empty space.
Speaker 2: Exactly nothing. Avoid that's the intuitive answer, isn't it It is?
Speaker 2: That's what our eyes tell us and Frankly, that's what
Speaker 2: our brain wants us to believe, because it's simple.
Speaker 3: The world is simpler if a box can just be empty.
Speaker 2: But here's the hook, and honestly, it is one of
Speaker 2: those things that has been keeping me up at nights
Speaker 2: as we started reading the source material for what we're
Speaker 2: talking about today. That nothing. It's a complete illusion.
Speaker 3: It is, indeed, and not just you know, a visual trick.
Speaker 3: We're talking about a fundamental misunderstanding of the very nature
Speaker 3: of reality.
Speaker 2: And we're going to talk about a study today that
Speaker 2: just fundamentally shatters that illusion.
Speaker 3: It really does.
Speaker 2: It turns out that what we think of as a
Speaker 2: vacuum absolute emptiness is actually a chaotic bubbling, violent, high energy.
Speaker 3: It's teeming with activity.
Speaker 2: And we aren't just talking about random noise here. We're
Speaker 2: talking about the fundamental building blocks of reality blinking.
Speaker 3: In and out of existence faster than you can even comprehend.
Speaker 2: Right, and for the longest time, for decades, really, this
Speaker 2: was just theory.
Speaker 3: It was math on a chalkboard. It was something physicists
Speaker 3: told each other to make the equations balance out.
Speaker 2: But we have a source today, a brand new study
Speaker 2: published just yesterday February fourth, twenty twenty six in the
Speaker 2: journal Nature. That changes the whole game.
Speaker 3: It's a significant milestone. It's one of those papers that
Speaker 3: I think people will be citing for a long long.
Speaker 2: Time because scientists have found a way to essentially glimpse
Speaker 2: this hidden world fast. They have watched nothing turn into something.
Speaker 2: They have tracked how visible matter, the stuff you and
Speaker 2: I and this microphone and your headphones are made of,
Speaker 2: emerges from that empty void.
Speaker 3: It sounds like science fiction, it really does. It sounds
Speaker 3: like something out of a metaphysical philosophy book. But it
Speaker 3: is very hard nosed experimental physics.
Speaker 2: So let's set the scene before we get into the
Speaker 2: mind bending details. This news comes from the US Department
Speaker 2: of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Speaker 3: And specifically a group called the Star Collaboration.
Speaker 2: Right, And for context, when we say collaboration, we aren't
Speaker 2: talking about three people in a garage lab.
Speaker 3: No, not at all. We are talking about hundreds of
Speaker 3: physicists from institutions.
Speaker 2: All around the world, and they're working with one of
Speaker 2: the most impressive machines human beings I've ever.
Speaker 3: Built, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider or RHIIC.
Speaker 2: A particle smasher, a.
Speaker 3: Particle smasher, yes, but on an incredible scale. It's a
Speaker 3: massive facility designed specifically for nuclear physics research.
Speaker 2: And their mission, the mission we are going to explore today,
Speaker 2: is honestly audacious.
Speaker 3: It really is.
Speaker 2: They're using sub atomic car crashes, smashing particles together at
Speaker 2: unbelievable speeds to turn virtual ghosts into real solid matter.
Speaker 3: And the stakes here are in incredibly high. This isn't
Speaker 3: just about cataloging some new, obscure sub atomic particle that
Speaker 3: no one outside a lab cares about, right. This is
Speaker 3: about understanding the fundamental origins of mass. It's about understanding
Speaker 3: the structure of the universe itself.
Speaker 2: And as we'll find out later, and even connects to
Speaker 2: the future.
Speaker 3: Of computing in a very direct way.
Speaker 2: But we'll get there. First, let's unpack this illusion of nothing,
Speaker 2: because to understand how they turned ghosts into real stuff,
Speaker 2: we have to understand what the vacuum actually is.
Speaker 3: We have to redefine empty.
Speaker 2: You agreed with me earlier that nothing is a lie.
Speaker 2: That's right, it is, But historically we didn't always think that,
Speaker 2: did we. I mean, if you asked Isaac Newton what
Speaker 2: a vacuum was what would he have said.
Speaker 3: Oh, he would have said, it's an empty stage, avoid
Speaker 3: a container where absolutely nothing exists. And for a long
Speaker 3: long time that was the prevailing view in.
Speaker 2: Science, the common sense view exactly.
Speaker 3: But this isn't exactly brand new information for physicists. The
Speaker 3: source material mentions that physicists have known for about one
Speaker 3: hundred years that the vacuum isn't truly empty.
Speaker 2: One hundred years. So we've been living a lie for
Speaker 2: a century.
Speaker 3: Give or take, really since the dawn of quantum mechanics.
Speaker 3: The classical idea of a vacuum that perfectly empty box
Speaker 3: just doesn't work when you get down to the sub
Speaker 3: atomic level. Quantum mechanics came along, and well, it ruined
Speaker 3: the simplicity. It always does, it does, and now we
Speaker 3: understand the quantum vacuum.
Speaker 2: The quantum vacuum, it sounds like a cleaning product from
Speaker 2: the year three thousand.
Speaker 3: It's significantly messier than that, and honestly a lot harder
Speaker 3: to clean up.
Speaker 2: So what is it?
Speaker 3: The quantum vacuum is filled with fluctuating energy fields. You
Speaker 3: can't get rid of them. They are a fundamental property
Speaker 3: of the universe.
Speaker 2: So even if I took a box pumped out all
Speaker 2: the air, all the atoms.
Speaker 3: Every single atom, every photon, every bit of radiation from
Speaker 3: that box, and you shield it with thick lead and
Speaker 3: you cool it to absolute zero.
Speaker 2: The lowest possible temperature.
Speaker 3: Those fields are still there, buzzing with energy.
Speaker 2: But why why can't we just have zero? It seems
Speaker 2: like zero should be an option.
Speaker 3: Because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Speaker 2: Okay, I've heard of that. That's the you can't know
Speaker 2: exactly where something is and how fast it's going at
Speaker 2: the same time rule exactly.
Speaker 3: But it's a bit broader than that. It also applies
Speaker 3: to energy and time. How So you cannot know the
Speaker 3: exact energy of a system for a specific, precise amount
Speaker 3: of time. If you say this box has exactly zero
Speaker 3: energy for all time, you are claiming to know its energy.
Speaker 2: Perfectly, which violates the principle.
Speaker 3: Which violates the principle nature forbids absolute zero energy, there
Speaker 3: must be fluctuations, a little bit of uncertainty, a jitter.
Speaker 2: So the universe forces a little bit of wobble just
Speaker 2: to satisfy its.
Speaker 3: Own rule book precisely. And these energy fluctuations, they aren't
Speaker 3: just abstract numbers, they manifest as what we call virtual particles.
Speaker 2: Virtual particles. Okay, this is a key term for our
Speaker 2: whole discussion. I want to make sure we really get
Speaker 2: this concept.
Speaker 3: Down essential to everything.
Speaker 2: So what exactly is a virtual particle? Is it real?
Speaker 3: It's complicated. Think of them as intang pairs matter and
Speaker 3: anti matter.
Speaker 2: So a particle in its opposite, a.
Speaker 3: Particle and its anti particle counterpart, for example, an electron
Speaker 3: and a positron. They spontaneously pop into existence, borrowing energy
Speaker 3: from the vacuum. Okay, and then almost instantly they snap
Speaker 3: back together and annihilate each other, paying the energy.
Speaker 2: Back, so they appear out of nowhere and then disappear.
Speaker 3: Exactly, they blink in and out of existence.
Speaker 2: How fast are we talking about second? A millisecond?
Speaker 3: Much much much faster. We are talking about time scale
Speaker 3: so short that they are almost immeasurable.
Speaker 2: So short that they're almost not even there.
Speaker 3: In fact, they exist on such short time scales that,
Speaker 3: according to the laws of physics, they are never counted
Speaker 3: as real matter. They don't stick around long enough to
Speaker 3: be detected by standard means, so.
Speaker 2: They don't trigger a Geiger counter, they don't leave a
Speaker 2: trail in a cloud chamber.
Speaker 3: Nope, they live and die in a time so brief.
Speaker 3: They can't directly interact with our world. They are a constant,
Speaker 3: invisible fit.
Speaker 2: So they are like ghosts. Yeah, they're there haunting the vacuum,
Speaker 2: but they aren't really interacting with our world.
Speaker 3: Ghosts is a pretty beecent analogy, yes, but I actually
Speaker 3: prefer the analogy you alluded to earlier, the boiling soup.
Speaker 3: The boiling soup analogy, Yes, let's break that down. Imagine
Speaker 3: a pot of really thick, viscous soup on a stove.
Speaker 3: It's simmering right on the edge of boiling. Even if
Speaker 3: you look at a patch of the soup where there
Speaker 3: are no ingredients, no carrots, no potatoes, the surface itself
Speaker 3: is still moving. It's frothing, right.
Speaker 2: You get little bubbles forming and then plopping almost immediately exactly.
Speaker 3: You have these tiny bubbles constantly forming on the surface
Speaker 3: and then popping right away. The surface is never truly still.
Speaker 2: So that's space. The bubbles are the virtual particles.
Speaker 3: That is space. It isn't avoid. It's a bubbling soup
Speaker 3: of potential energy that's just waiting to be realized. The
Speaker 3: bubbles are the virtual pairs.
Speaker 2: So everywhere I look, in the empty air, in this room,
Speaker 2: in deep space, between galaxies, inside my own skull, there
Speaker 2: are these matter antimatter pairs popping up and destroying each
Speaker 2: other constantly.
Speaker 3: Constantly, trillions upon trillions in times a second, in every
Speaker 3: cubic centimeter.
Speaker 2: Of space that is. That's just overwhelming to think about.
Speaker 2: It makes the universe feel very crowded.
Speaker 3: It is crowded. The vacuum is the busiest place there is.
Speaker 3: This is the bedrock of what we call quantum field theory.
Speaker 2: Okay, but here's the problem I'm having. If they annihilate
Speaker 2: so quickly, they stay virtual, right, Their potential matter not
Speaker 2: real matter. They're bubbles that pop before they can float away. Correct,
Speaker 2: So how do we make them real? How did the
Speaker 2: folks at Brookhaven turn these soup bubbles into something that
Speaker 2: doesn't just pop? Oh that's the big news here, right,
Speaker 2: They didn't just theorize about the soup, They actually cooked
Speaker 2: with it.
Speaker 3: That brings us right to the experiment itself. To turn
Speaker 3: virtual into real, you need to pay a toll, a toll,
Speaker 3: like a bridge toll, exactly like an energy toll. Remember,
Speaker 3: nature has to balance its books. The law of conservation
Speaker 3: of energy is absolute.
Speaker 2: Can't create something from nothing.
Speaker 3: You can't just create matter out of nothing for free.
Speaker 3: These virtual particles are borrowing energy from the vacuum for
Speaker 3: a split second, and then they pay it back by
Speaker 3: annihilating the books are balanced.
Speaker 2: Okay, so it's like a tiny super.
Speaker 3: Fast loan, a perfect analogy. But if you want them
Speaker 3: to stay, if you want them to become permanent, real particles,
Speaker 3: you need to step in and pay that energy debt
Speaker 3: for them.
Speaker 2: So you cover their loan.
Speaker 3: You inject enough energy into that system right at that
Speaker 3: spot to rip those pairs apart before they can annihilate
Speaker 3: each other. You give them such a boost that they
Speaker 3: can fly away and never have to pay the debt back.
Speaker 2: And that's where the relativistic heavy ion collider comes in.
Speaker 3: That's the bank, exactly, the RHICEE. This machine is designed
Speaker 3: to deliver that massive energy paycheck.
Speaker 2: So describe the mechanism. What are they actually doing at
Speaker 2: this facility to pay this tool.
Speaker 3: They are performing proton proton collisions. So they take protons,
Speaker 3: which are the positively charged building blocks of atomic nuclei.
Speaker 2: The stuff we're all made.
Speaker 3: Of, and they accelerate them around a two point four
Speaker 3: mile ring.
Speaker 2: Two and a half miles. That's huge.
Speaker 3: It is. They use thousands of massive superconducting magnets to
Speaker 3: steer them and then get them going fast, so fast
Speaker 3: ninety nine point nine nine nine percent the speed of light,
Speaker 3: so basically.
Speaker 2: As fast as the universe allows anything with mass to move.
Speaker 3: For all intents and purposes. Yes, they are pumping these
Speaker 3: protons full of an incredible amount of kinetic energy. And
Speaker 3: then a head on collision, Yeah, a catastrophic collision at
Speaker 3: the subatomic scale.
Speaker 2: And that releases all that energy they built up.
Speaker 3: It releases a tremendous amount of energy in a tiny,
Speaker 3: tiny point of space. We are talking about temperatures and
Speaker 3: energy densities that haven't existed in the universe since the
Speaker 3: first microsecond after the Big Bang.
Speaker 2: And that fireball of energy is the boost, that's the
Speaker 2: payment for the loan.
Speaker 3: Precisely, that fireball of energy permeates the quantum vacuum right
Speaker 3: at the collision point. It floods those ghosts, those virtual particles,
Speaker 3: with so much energy they are ripped apart and become real.
Speaker 2: I like the way the describes it says, the collisions
Speaker 2: deliver an extra energy boost that transforms such virtual particles
Speaker 2: into real particles. It's so clean.
Speaker 3: It is going back to our soup analogy. It's like
Speaker 3: cranking the heat up on that pot so high that
Speaker 3: the bubbles don't just pop on the surface. They get
Speaker 3: enough energy to break free entirely and become droplets of
Speaker 3: steam that fly away. They become persistent, they enter the
Speaker 3: real world.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we have smashed the protons, We have dumped
Speaker 2: a ton of energy into the vacuum. We have popped
Speaker 2: these virtual particles into reality. Yes, but here's the catch,
Speaker 2: and the source makes a big deal about this. A
Speaker 2: particle collision is an unbelievably messy place, isn't.
Speaker 3: It extremely messy. Messy is a profound understatement.
Speaker 2: It's not like just one pair of these new particles
Speaker 2: pops out in waves of the scientists.
Speaker 3: No, not at all. When you smash protons at relativistic speeds,
Speaker 3: you create a shower of debris. The protons themselves break
Speaker 3: apart into their constituent quarks and.
Speaker 2: Gluons, and all that cantic energy gets converted into new particles.
Speaker 3: Exactly through emsieforticum. You get quarks and gluons flying everywhere.
Speaker 3: New particles are being created from the pure energy. Millions
Speaker 3: of particles can be created in a single one of these.
Speaker 2: Events a storm, a chaotic storm of manner and radiation.
Speaker 3: That's a very good description.
Speaker 2: So this is my question. If you have millions of
Speaker 2: particles flying out from the center, how in the world
Speaker 2: do you find the specific ghosts you are looking.
Speaker 3: For a very good question.
Speaker 2: It sounds like trying to find a specific special rain
Speaker 2: drop in the middle of a hurricane. How do you
Speaker 2: know this particle came from the vacuum and that particle
Speaker 2: came for the proton itself.
Speaker 3: That is the core challenge of detection. First, you need
Speaker 3: an incredible camera, and that's the star detector.
Speaker 2: The star detector, I've seen pictures of this thing. It
Speaker 2: looks like a giant cylinder the size of a house,
Speaker 2: just packed with wires and electronics it is.
Speaker 3: It stands for a Solen oil tracker at RHIC. It's
Speaker 3: essentially a giant digital camera that surrounds the collision point.
Speaker 2: And it tracks everything.
Speaker 3: It captures the tracks of these thousands, sometimes millions, of
Speaker 3: particles flying out from the collision. It measures their speed,
Speaker 3: their charge, their trajectory, their momentum. It builds a three
Speaker 3: D picture of the explosion.
Speaker 2: But again, if there are millions of particles, the detector
Speaker 2: just sees a giant mess, a beautiful, complicated mess. How
Speaker 2: do they filter it?
Speaker 3: That is the crucial question, and that leads us to
Speaker 3: the real detective work of the study. They couldn't just
Speaker 3: look at the photo, right, They needed a specific clue,
Speaker 3: a tracer, something that would act like a die pack,
Speaker 3: distinguishing a vacuum particle from a regular run of the
Speaker 3: mill particle.
Speaker 2: Okay, so this is where the cleverness comes in. They
Speaker 2: didn't just look at any particle. They looked for something
Speaker 2: very very specific.
Speaker 3: They did. They focused on a type of particle called
Speaker 3: a lambda hyperon.
Speaker 2: Lambda hyperon it sounds like a fraternity from a sci
Speaker 2: fi movie. Lambda hyperon it does.
Speaker 3: And crucially, they also looked for its antimatter counterpart, the
Speaker 3: anti lambda. They looked for them in pairs.
Speaker 2: Okay, so why these Why not just look for electrons
Speaker 2: or regular old protons. Why go hunting for something so exotic?
Speaker 3: Because lambda particles contain a very special ingredient, a strange quark.
Speaker 2: A strange quark. Now I love physics nomenclature. Yeah, strange
Speaker 2: is the actual technical name, right, They're not just being poetic.
Speaker 3: It is. In the standard model of particle physics, we
Speaker 3: have six flavors of quarks. You have up and down,
Speaker 3: which are the let's say boring ones.
Speaker 2: Hey, don't insult up and down quarks. I'm made of them.
Speaker 2: You're made of them.
Speaker 3: We all are. That's my point. Protons and neutrons are
Speaker 3: made of up and down quarks. That's the vanilla and
Speaker 3: chocolate of the universe. It's the stable, everyday stuff. Okay,
Speaker 3: But then you have their heavier, more unstable cousins, charm
Speaker 3: strange top and bottom.
Speaker 2: Right. So the lambda particle contains a strange quark and
Speaker 2: the anti lambda contains a strange antiquark. Why is that
Speaker 2: the key?
Speaker 3: Because the protons you are smashing together, they are made
Speaker 3: of up and down quarks. Ah, they do not contain
Speaker 3: strange quarks.
Speaker 2: Ah. I see you're going the ingredients list exactly.
Speaker 3: If you smash two things together that have no strange
Speaker 3: quarks in them, and suddenly you see a strange quark
Speaker 3: flying out of the explosion, you.
Speaker 2: Know it was created fresh. It wasn't just luggage that
Speaker 2: the protons brought with them to the crash.
Speaker 3: It had to be manufactured right there on the spot.
Speaker 2: Okay, so that narrows down the search field immensely. That's
Speaker 2: a huge filter, it is.
Speaker 3: But even that isn't quite enough. Why not, Because you
Speaker 3: can create strange quarks just from the pure kinetic energy
Speaker 3: of the crash. You can transform motion into mass into
Speaker 3: a strange Qurkanta quark pair. That doesn't necessarily prove it
Speaker 3: came from a virtual vacuum fluctuation.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we're getting closer, but we're not there yet.
Speaker 2: We need another clue, a fingerprint that says I came
Speaker 2: from the vacuum soup, not just I was made by
Speaker 2: the energy of the crash.
Speaker 3: Correct. And that final definitive fingerprint is a property called spin.
Speaker 2: Spin. Okay, every time we talk physics, spin comes up,
Speaker 2: and it's always a little bit confusing. We aren't talking
Speaker 2: about a tiny particle spinning like a top, are we not?
Speaker 3: Literally No, though the mathematics is similar, which is where
Speaker 3: the name comes from. Spin is a built in intrinsic quantum.
Speaker 2: Property like charge or mass.
Speaker 3: Exactly like charge or mass. It's related to angular momentum
Speaker 3: and magnetism. But for our purposes today, you can just
Speaker 3: imagine it as a tiny arrow attached to every particle,
Speaker 3: pointing in a certain.
Speaker 2: Direction, a little compass needle, A.
Speaker 3: Little compass needle. Every particle carries one.
Speaker 2: Okay, So I have a virtual strange quark and a
Speaker 2: virtual strange antiquark popping out of the vacuum soup, and
Speaker 2: you're saying they're arrows. Their spins interact in a specific,
Speaker 2: predictable way.
Speaker 3: Yes, the source explains a fundamental rule of quantum field theory.
Speaker 3: Strange corkanti quark pairs generated as virtual particles in the
Speaker 3: vacuum are always spin aligned.
Speaker 2: Being aligned, meaning their little arrows are pointing in the
Speaker 2: same direction.
Speaker 3: It means their quantum states are correlated. They are entangled
Speaker 3: from the moment of their birth. They act as a
Speaker 3: single coherent unit. Their fates are linked.
Speaker 2: Okay, got it. Now, contrast that with a regular messy collision.
Speaker 2: If I just smash two protons together and all that
Speaker 2: energy randomly creates some strange quarks, what are their spins?
Speaker 2: Usually like random absolute chaos. If you look at the
Speaker 2: vast majority of particles emerging from a rhic collision, their
Speaker 2: spins are randomly oriented in every possible direction. There is
Speaker 2: no coordination at all. It's just thermal noise.
Speaker 3: Ah, I see the logic. Now, this is brilliant. It's
Speaker 3: a sorting mechanism exactly.
Speaker 2: The hypothesis was this, If we can find lambda and
Speaker 2: anti lamba pairs emerging from the collision that are spin aligned,
Speaker 2: it is highly highly likely that they didn't just bumped
Speaker 2: into each other randomly in the debris field. It proves
Speaker 2: they originated directly from one of these pre aligned, entangled
Speaker 2: virtual vacuum pairs.
Speaker 3: The alignment is the proof of origin. It's like finding
Speaker 3: two people in the middle of a massive, chaotic riot
Speaker 3: who are perfectly flawlessly dancing the tango.
Speaker 2: That is a fantastic analogy.
Speaker 3: Yes, you know they came together. They didn't just meet
Speaker 3: by chance.
Speaker 2: Yes, if you see the tango in the middle of
Speaker 2: a mosh pit, you know those two are linked.
Speaker 3: So instead of trying to track every single piece of debris,
Speaker 3: they are looking for this one specific telltale synchronization.
Speaker 2: Yes, they are hunting for a signature of order within
Speaker 2: the overwhelming chaos. So the billion dollar question did they
Speaker 2: find the tango dancers?
Speaker 3: Let's get into the discovery, because yes they did, and
Speaker 3: the results are frankly.
Speaker 2: Staggering the quantum twins.
Speaker 3: This is where we bring in the human element of this.
Speaker 3: The analysis was led by Jon Vennick, a physicist from
Speaker 3: the University of New Hampshire who was working.
Speaker 2: At Brookhaven, and we really need to appreciate the scale
Speaker 2: of this work. They didn't just look at a dozen
Speaker 2: collisions or even one hundred.
Speaker 3: No, no, the Star team examined data from millions of
Speaker 3: individual proton collusion events.
Speaker 2: Millions.
Speaker 3: Think about the data storage alone, terabytes upon terabytes of data,
Speaker 3: and then think about the sophisticated algorithms you'd need to
Speaker 3: sift through that to reconstruct every event.
Speaker 2: It's like having millions of haystacks and you're looking for
Speaker 2: one very specific, perfectly aligned pair of needles in each one.
Speaker 3: And they had to be incredibly careful to eliminate biases,
Speaker 3: false signals, random coincidences that might look like alignment but aren't.
Speaker 3: Rigor is the absolute name of the game here.
Speaker 2: You can't just claim you've peeked into the vacuum. You
Speaker 2: have to prove it beyond any doubt, and after sifting
Speaker 2: through millions of these crashes, what was the smoking gun?
Speaker 2: What did they find?
Speaker 3: The result was stunning. They found that when a lambda
Speaker 3: and an anti lambda emerge from the collision close together.
Speaker 2: Define close together? How close are we.
Speaker 3: Talking physically close in space as they fly out from
Speaker 3: the collision point into the detector, when they are neighbors,
Speaker 3: so to speak, in that expanding debris field. Yes, they
Speaker 3: are one hundred percent spin aligned. Wait percent, that is
Speaker 3: what the data indicates, a perfect correlation.
Speaker 2: I feel like we need to pause on that number
Speaker 2: for a second.
Speaker 3: Please.
Speaker 2: In biology, in sociology, even a lot of other physics experiments,
Speaker 2: you get statistically significant numbers. You get eighty percent or
Speaker 2: ninety five percent confidence, you almost never hear one hundred percent.
Speaker 3: It's a statement.
Speaker 2: It is a definitive, absolute statement.
Speaker 3: It's a perfect signal. It mirrors the exact theoretically predicted
Speaker 3: state of the virtual corkanta quark pairs in the vacuum.
Speaker 3: It tells us that the correlation isn't just strong, it's perfect.
Speaker 2: So let me just restate this to make sure I'm
Speaker 2: getting the full gravity of it. Go ahead, They smash protons.
Speaker 2: A flood of energy poured into the vacuum, A virtual
Speaker 2: pair of strange quarks which were just a possibility of
Speaker 2: a nanosecond before got.
Speaker 3: Promoted, bosted into reality.
Speaker 2: They became a real lambda and a real anti lambda particle.
Speaker 2: And because their spins are one hundred percent aligned, we
Speaker 2: know for a fact they are the same entangled pair
Speaker 2: that was hiding in the vacuum soup.
Speaker 3: Precisely, it is as generic put it in the sores
Speaker 3: as if these particle pairs are quantum twins frontum twins.
Speaker 2: I love that imagery.
Speaker 3: It's perform The implication is just profound. It means the quarks,
Speaker 3: which are now trapped inside two separate, distinct particles, somehow
Speaker 3: retained the spin linkage that was established in the vacuum
Speaker 3: before the particles even fully formed.
Speaker 2: That breaks my brain a little bit. The connection was
Speaker 2: made when they were nothing but a flicker of potential energy. Yes,
Speaker 2: and that connection survived the violent birth of becoming something real.
Speaker 3: Yes. Shadming too. Another SNAr physicist and a co leader
Speaker 3: of the study called it a unique window into vacuum fluctuations.
Speaker 3: It proves that the spin alignment that delicate quantum state
Speaker 3: survives the violence of the transformation from virtual to reel.
Speaker 2: So we are literally seeing the memory of the vacuum
Speaker 2: stamped onto real matter.
Speaker 3: That is a beautiful way to put it, the memory
Speaker 3: of the vacuum, the matter remembers exactly where it came from.
Speaker 2: But there was a condition you mentioned, a really important one,
Speaker 2: you said, when they emerged close together.
Speaker 3: Yes, this is where the plot thickens and where the
Speaker 3: story gets in a way, a little tragic for our twins.
Speaker 2: Tragic how so.
Speaker 3: Well, why does proximity matter so much?
Speaker 2: This leads us into the next part of our discussion,
Speaker 2: entanglement and the breakup.
Speaker 3: Right, we need to talk about entanglement properly.
Speaker 2: We hear that word a lot in pop signs, spooky
Speaker 2: action at a distance and all that. What does it
Speaker 2: mean in this context.
Speaker 3: In the study? It refers to that quantum linkage we've
Speaker 3: been talking about the properties of the two particles. Specifically,
Speaker 3: their spins are inextricably connected.
Speaker 2: So you can't describe one without the other.
Speaker 3: Exactly, there are a single quantum system, even if they
Speaker 3: are two distinct particles flying apart.
Speaker 2: Like the twins, they're distinct people, but they share a fundamental,
Speaker 2: deep connection.
Speaker 3: Even deeper than that. It's like having two dice that
Speaker 3: are magically linked. If I take one to London and
Speaker 3: you take one to Tokyo and I roll a six,
Speaker 3: I roll a six instantly, instantly. That is the classic
Speaker 3: idealized view of entanglement.
Speaker 2: But the study found something interesting. When the twins get
Speaker 2: separated by too much, they did.
Speaker 3: This is the other half of the discovery. When the
Speaker 3: lambda and anti lambda pears emerged farther apart in the detector.
Speaker 2: So not neighbors in the debris field, right.
Speaker 3: The one hundred percent spin correlation disappeared. It vanished, It
Speaker 3: dropped off drastically. They were no longer aligned. Their spins
Speaker 3: became random, just like all the other debris in the collision.
Speaker 3: The tango was over.
Speaker 2: Well. I thought the whole point of entanglement was that
Speaker 2: it persists over distance. Spooky action at a distance.
Speaker 3: In a perfect isolated universe, maybe if they were the
Speaker 3: only two things in existence, they would stay entangled forever,
Speaker 3: no matter how far apart they got.
Speaker 2: But they're not in a perfect universe.
Speaker 3: They are born in the aftermath of a sub atomic
Speaker 3: car crash right the hurricane exactly. They are surrounded by
Speaker 3: other quirks, gluons, photons, intense magnetic fields. It is an
Speaker 3: incredibly noisy, crowded, and chaotic environment.
Speaker 2: So what happens to them is they fly through it.
Speaker 3: Jan Vanek explains it by saying that twins sent far
Speaker 3: away or effect did by other things in their environment.
Speaker 3: They get jostled pressure in a way. Yes, as they
Speaker 3: travel through that debris field, they bump into things, They
Speaker 3: interact with other particles with fields, and every single one
Speaker 3: of those interactions is a measurement in quantum terms.
Speaker 2: And a measurement forces a quantum system to choose a state. Right,
Speaker 2: it collapses the wave function.
Speaker 3: It forces them to Decohere, the constant noise of the
Speaker 3: environment effectively washes out that delicate quantum connection.
Speaker 2: They forget their twin.
Speaker 3: They forget their twin. They become just regular independent particles,
Speaker 3: each with its own random spin. Their shared memory of
Speaker 3: the vacuum is erased.
Speaker 2: So the environment itself breaks the entanglement exactly.
Speaker 3: And this is a profoundly important concept, this loss of connection,
Speaker 3: this decoherence, represents the boundary between the quantum world and
Speaker 3: the classical.
Speaker 2: World, the quantum to classical transition. I feel like this
Speaker 2: is one of the biggest, deepest mysteries in all of physics.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 3: In the quantum world, things are entangled, fuzzy, probabilistic, a
Speaker 3: part can be in multiple states at once.
Speaker 2: And in the classical world, the world of chairs and
Speaker 2: tables and planets and podcasts, things are defined and separate.
Speaker 3: My coffee cup is here and it's not anywhere else.
Speaker 3: I don't feel.
Speaker 2: Entangled with it, right, And we usually think of those
Speaker 2: as two totally different realms with different rules. But this
Speaker 2: experiment is actually showing the transition happening in real time.
Speaker 3: It gives us a way to study it directly. We
Speaker 3: are seeing the moment where the quantum weirdness gets washed
Speaker 3: out by the environment and becomes normal matter. We are
Speaker 3: literally watching the magic fade.
Speaker 2: Why does that matter outside of just, you know, abstract physics.
Speaker 2: Does this have any real world application or is it
Speaker 2: just really cool philosophy?
Speaker 3: Surprisingly, yes, it matters enormously for technology, specifically for the
Speaker 3: future of quantum computing.
Speaker 2: Really, how does a giant particle collider help someone build
Speaker 2: a quantum computer? Those seem like they're at opposite ends
Speaker 2: of the size and energy spectrum.
Speaker 3: They are, but they're governed by the same rules. Think
Speaker 3: about what a quantum cup computer needs to work.
Speaker 2: It needs quibbitts quantum bits right.
Speaker 3: And it needs those quibits to stay entangled with each other.
Speaker 3: That entanglement is the source of a quantum computer's immense power. Okay,
Speaker 3: but the single biggest challenge in building a working quantum
Speaker 3: computer is keeping those quibits entangled. They are incredibly fragile.
Speaker 2: The environment gets in the way.
Speaker 3: The slightest bit of heat, a stray magnetic field, any
Speaker 3: noise or of vibration from the outside world can interact
Speaker 3: with them, and the entanglement breaks. We call it decoherence.
Speaker 2: That sounds exactly like what happened to the quantum twins
Speaker 2: when they got too far apart in the debris field.
Speaker 3: It is exactly the same physics. Jude Ming two pointed
Speaker 3: this out explicitly in the source material. He said, the
Speaker 3: physics of this transition is the same whether you are
Speaker 3: studying particle collisions or trying to develop stable quantum hardware.
Speaker 2: So by studying how these landa hyperons lose their connection
Speaker 2: inside a particle collider, we might learn how to better
Speaker 2: protect the quibits in a quantum computer from losing theirs.
Speaker 3: Correct, It's all about understanding how the environment destroys quantum correlations.
Speaker 3: If we understand the mechanism of the breakup in this
Speaker 3: violent high energy system, maybe we can figure out ways
Speaker 3: to shield against it in a delicate, low energy one.
Speaker 2: That is just fascinating. It connects the smallest, most violent
Speaker 2: explosions in the universe to the most delicate futuristic computers
Speaker 2: we're trying to build.
Speaker 3: Physics is interconnected like that. The fundamental rules are the
Speaker 3: same everywhere you look.
Speaker 2: Let's zoom out a bit. We've talked about the vacuum,
Speaker 2: the collision, the twins, and the breakup, but there's a
Speaker 2: bigger picture here. You mentioned mass and the universe.
Speaker 3: This is where we get philosophical again, but with data
Speaker 3: to back it up.
Speaker 2: The source mentions reverse engineering the universe.
Speaker 3: That sounds ambitious, it is, but think about the Big
Speaker 3: Bang for a moment. Okay, In the earliest moments of
Speaker 3: the universe, everything was an incredibly hot, dense, high energy soup.
Speaker 3: There was no solid matter as we know it, just
Speaker 3: a plasma of free roaming quarks and gluons.
Speaker 2: The ultimate vacuum exactly.
Speaker 3: But as the universe expanded, it cooled down, and as
Speaker 3: it cooled those quarks had to transition, They had to
Speaker 3: group together to bind to each other, to farm protons, neutrons,
Speaker 3: and eventually atoms.
Speaker 2: They had to freeze out of the plasma and become
Speaker 2: the matter.
Speaker 3: We see today exactly, And one of the central mysteries
Speaker 3: and physics is how exactly does that process of hadronization happen.
Speaker 3: How do quarks go from being free moving, entangled entities
Speaker 3: into these tightly bound, stable, solid particles with mass.
Speaker 2: And this experiment sheds light on that.
Speaker 3: It does. By creating these particles from the pure energy
Speaker 3: of the vacuum, we are recreating a mini version of
Speaker 3: that primordial process. We are watching it happen in a
Speaker 3: controlled environment. We are reverse engineering matter formation.
Speaker 2: So we are watching the recipe for the universe being cooked,
Speaker 2: one collision at a time.
Speaker 3: Yes, and it connects directly to the origin of mass.
Speaker 3: Most of the mass of a proton, for instance, doesn't
Speaker 3: come from the mass of the quarks inside it. It
Speaker 3: comes from the energy of the strong force binding them together.
Speaker 2: So we're seeing how that energy gets locked into the
Speaker 2: structure of a particle.
Speaker 3: We're getting a new window into that process. And the
Speaker 3: source also mentions that they want to study this in
Speaker 3: even more complex systems, not just proton collisions.
Speaker 2: Right, they can collide bigger things exactly.
Speaker 3: Protons are relatively simple, but they can smash gold nuclei
Speaker 3: into each other or leat nuclei, and they want to
Speaker 3: see what happens to the twins in those environments.
Speaker 2: There was a great analogy in the text about growing up.
Speaker 3: Yes, to use that analogy, he said, we can send
Speaker 3: these virtual pairs through different environments, different types of atomic
Speaker 3: nuclei to see how they grow up.
Speaker 2: So, if I create these quantum twins inside a dense
Speaker 2: gold nucleus versus a less dense proton, do they turn
Speaker 2: out differently?
Speaker 3: Exactly? Does the incredibly dense environment of a gold nucleus
Speaker 3: break their entanglement link faster? Does it affect how they form?
Speaker 3: It's like studying if a child grows up differently in
Speaker 3: a crowded, busy city versus a quiet, rural village.
Speaker 2: Tells us how matter behaves in the complex, messy real world,
Speaker 2: not just in the simple collision.
Speaker 3: Correct. It helps us understand the structure of the nucleus itself.
Speaker 3: It's like we're using these twins as tiny probes. We're
Speaker 3: probing the nuclear environment by seeing how that environment changes.
Speaker 2: The probe looking ahead? Then what is next? We have
Speaker 2: this amazing result, but scientists are never satisfied.
Speaker 3: No, they aren't, and they shouldn't be. The star detector
Speaker 3: is doing incredible work, but Brockhaven is already in the
Speaker 3: process of building something even bigger and better.
Speaker 2: The electron ion Collider or EIC EIC. I've heard of this.
Speaker 2: It's being built right there using the existing RHIC infrastructure.
Speaker 3: Right, Yes, it's the next evolution of this kind of physics.
Speaker 3: The source calls it a sharper tool for a reason.
Speaker 2: Why sharver? What makes it better or different than what
Speaker 2: we have now with RHIC.
Speaker 3: Well, right now at RHIC, we are mostly smashing protons
Speaker 3: into protons, or a heavy nuclei into heavy nuclei. That's
Speaker 3: like smashing two very complicated Swiss watches together to try
Speaker 3: and figure out out how they work.
Speaker 2: It's messy. Springs and gears go flying everywhere exactly.
Speaker 3: The EIC will collide electrons with ions or nuclei, and electrons,
Speaker 3: as far as we know, are fundamental point particles. They
Speaker 3: don't have any internal structure.
Speaker 2: So it's like using a surgical laser instead of a sledgehammer.
Speaker 3: A perfect way to put it. You're probing the complex
Speaker 3: watch with a very simple, clean, precise tool. You can
Speaker 3: see what you're doing, So we.
Speaker 2: Can probe the vacuum and the structure of matter with
Speaker 2: much much higher precision.
Speaker 3: Exactly, it will allow for even more precise imaging of
Speaker 3: the interior of protons and nuclei. It's going to explore
Speaker 3: that connection between the vacuum and the visible universe with
Speaker 3: unprecedented resolution.
Speaker 2: The scope described in the notes for the EIC is massive.
Speaker 2: It says, from sub atomic components to stars, planets, galaxies,
Speaker 2: and even people.
Speaker 3: It sounds grandiose, but it's true. It's not an exaggeration
Speaker 3: because everything stars, planets you me, is made of atoms.
Speaker 3: Atoms are made of nuclei and a electrons. Nuclei are
Speaker 3: made of quarks and gluons, and quarks and gluons. Well,
Speaker 3: as we've just spent all this time discussing, they have
Speaker 3: a deep, intimate and now observable relationship with the vacuum.
Speaker 2: It really does all come back to that fundamental mystery,
Speaker 2: the connection between something and what we thought was nothing.
Speaker 3: That is the core of it. We are usually obsessed
Speaker 3: with the something, the matter, the stuff we can see
Speaker 3: in touch. But this research forces us to look at
Speaker 3: the nothing to respect the vacuum.
Speaker 2: The vacuum isn't just an empty container for the play.
Speaker 2: It's part of the cast.
Speaker 3: It's the source. It is the reservoir of all potentiality
Speaker 3: from which the cast emerges.
Speaker 2: So as we wrap this up, let's just try to
Speaker 2: synthesize the takeaways for everyone listening. We started this whole
Speaker 2: discussion by looking at an.
Speaker 3: Empty room, which we now know is not empty at all,
Speaker 3: but a bubbling, frothing ocean of virtual particles.
Speaker 2: And we talked about how smashing protons together at nearly
Speaker 2: the speed of light is the key to unlocking that.
Speaker 3: Ocean, providing the massive energy boost paying the toll to
Speaker 3: turn those fleeting ghosts into tangible reality.
Speaker 2: We discussed the quantum twins, the lambda and anti lambda
Speaker 2: particles that comme out of the chaos one hundred percent
Speaker 2: spin aligned.
Speaker 3: The smoking gun that proves their origin was in the
Speaker 3: vacuue itself, a direct window into the fluctuations of so
Speaker 3: called empty space.
Speaker 2: And we learned that this incredible quantum connection is fragile.
Speaker 2: It breaks down over distance because of the noisy environment, a.
Speaker 3: Process called decoherence, which gives us vital clues about everything
Speaker 3: from the birth of matter to the future of quantum computing.
Speaker 2: The transition from the quantum to the classical, the moment
Speaker 2: the magic fades into the mundane.
Speaker 3: A beautiful way to put it.
Speaker 2: So why should the listener care, I mean, apart from
Speaker 2: it being incredibly mind bendingly.
Speaker 3: Cool, because it is their origin story. It's everyone's origin story.
Speaker 2: Say more about that.
Speaker 3: Look at your hand, Look at the chair you're sitting on.
Speaker 3: It's made of matter. That matter has mass and structure.
Speaker 3: That mass didn't just appear out of nowhere. The fundamental
Speaker 3: mechanisms that generate mass, the interactions that bind quirks together
Speaker 3: into stable particles, these are the very same processes we
Speaker 3: are now studying in real time at RHIC.
Speaker 2: So in a very real way, we're all just stabilize
Speaker 2: persistent fluctuations of the vacuum.
Speaker 3: We are nothing that has been given enough energy to
Speaker 3: become something and has managed to stick around for a while.
Speaker 2: That's both humbling and a little bit terrifying.
Speaker 3: It's the beauty of physics, isn't it. It connects the
Speaker 3: utterly mundane to the truly cosmic.
Speaker 2: I want to leave our listener with a final thought
Speaker 2: to mole over. Okay, we talked about how that quantum
Speaker 2: length the entanglement breaks when the particles get too far apart,
Speaker 2: the environment washes out the.
Speaker 3: Magic, yes, the decoherence.
Speaker 2: It makes me wonder if the universe creates matter from
Speaker 2: the vacuum and reality as we know it, this solid, predictable,
Speaker 2: classical world is just the result of all those quantum
Speaker 2: entanglements breaking down over distance in time. Go on, what
Speaker 2: does the universe actually look like? If you could see
Speaker 2: the connections before they break, if you could see the
Speaker 2: hidden web of entanglement that connects everything before the environment
Speaker 2: snaps all the lines, that is.
Speaker 3: A profound question. Maybe at the most fundamental level, nothing
Speaker 3: is truly separate. We just perceive it that way because
Speaker 3: the links have been washed out by the noise of existence.
Speaker 2: Is reality just the echo of a broken web?
Speaker 3: That is something to ponder on your commute home.
Speaker 2: Definitely, thank you for taking us through this. It's been
Speaker 2: an incredible.
Speaker 3: Exploration, my pleasure. It's fascinating stuff.
Speaker 2: And to you listening. Next time you stare into empty space,
Speaker 2: remember it's staring back and it is very very busy.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.