Did this particle cause the Big Bang?

Daniel and Jorge talk about the inflaton particle, and whether its responsible for EVERYTHING.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Daniel, do you do anything about economics? Very little? Actually,
it's a big mystery to me. Can you think about
it like a physicist? You mean like give everything terrible
misleading names. Hey you said it. I didn't, But I
just mean, like, can you could explain economics using I
don't know particles? How would that work? You know? Like
what causes the recession? Answer a particle called the recess on?

(00:33):
Or what causes inflation and infloton? Yeah? I guess so
you could apply that strategy to anything, Like how do
cartoons get their ideas by the carton? Actually we get
our ideas the same way physicists due using the napton?

(01:02):
Hi am or Hey, I'm a cartoonists and the creator
of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist
and a professor you see Irvine, And I'm doing experiments
to measure the minimum possible nap. Yeah, because I guess
your naps are quantum. Also, like, are you napping and
not napping at the same time? Because then that way
you can get paid for it for your job. Right,

(01:22):
I am getting paid while I nap, that's true. But
I'm experimenting to see what is the shortest useful amount
of nap? Interesting, So you have an alarm clock and
you're actually taking data. That's right. I'm exploring the fundamental
nature of nap at the smallest scale. I'm wondering, like,
you know, is a four minute nap really rejuvenating? Can
you take a two minute nap and feel better afterwards?

(01:43):
This is the kind of stuff I work on every day.
I see you mean shoddy science and if little evidence,
they call it subjective evidence. Look, if I need to
take a lot of data here to prove my point,
I'll do it, you know, for the science. Yeah, take
naps all day. Yeah. But welcome to our podcast. Dan
and Jorge Explained the Universe, a production of My Heart
Radio in which we break down the fundamental nature of

(02:05):
the universe, of space and time, of black holes, of
neutron stars, of galaxies, of particles, of strings, of everything
that came before and everything that will come. We asked
the biggest, deepest, hardest, craziest questions about the universe, and
we expect answers not from you, but from science. And
when we don't have the answers, we tell you about

(02:26):
everything that science has thought about these crazy amazing topics
and where we might be headed. That's right, because the
universe is huge and mysterious and full of questions, and
the search for answers doesn't take naps. The human quest
to find answers to the biggest questions in the universe
is ever going, and there's always someone in the world
doing it, so technically it never sleeps, and thank gosh

(02:49):
for that. It's sort of incredible to me that we
can tackle these biggest of questions. You know, how big
is the universe where did it come from? That we
actually have like a mechanism as these time little cree
cheers on these tiny little rock in one corner of
the universe to reach our minds out and maybe solve
these cosmic puzzles. Yeah, it's amazing. And we've only been
doing it for like a few hundred years, I mean

(03:10):
in earnest right, and so we've been able to do
a lot just from this little tiny floating rock in
one corner of the universe with the coded basically a
lot of where the universe came from. Yeah, and a
lot of those few hundred years were spent napping, and
so you know, it's even more impressive how much we've learned, right,
most of us done in Europe, I guess right. So
it's a siesta kind of afternoon tea. Though sometimes you

(03:32):
get great ideas during naps, often to wake up from
a nap and have like three good ideas for what
to do next, And you say often do you mean like,
sometimes you get terrible ideas too, and it's a wash
at the end. What's what's your head rate for nap? Brilliant?
All the ideas I have are terrible. But that's the process, right.
The first idea is always terrible, but sometimes it inspires

(03:54):
a better idea, maybe in you, maybe in the other
person you tell this idea to. Honestly, jokes aside, that's
one of the joys of collaborating with all the young
people in my group is that they come in with
a terrible idea and it inspires another better idea in
somebody else. That's the whole process of science. I thought
you were going to say that the joy was that
you can come up with terrible ideas and then they'll

(04:15):
do it, and then they'll tell you when it doesn't work,
so you can keep napping. There's that also, But it
is amazing how these naps, and these terrible ideas have
somehow coalesced into a pretty nice cohesive view of the
whole universe, of how it works, of its ancient, ancient history.
It's amazing what we've learned without really exploring, just by

(04:35):
gathering information from the light and the particles that happened
to fall on Earth. Yeah, and so we have a
pretty good picture of the universe, at least the observable universe,
and all the amazing things that happened in it, and
even its origin. We have a pretty good picture of
what happened when the universe was born, and how it
happened and how fast it happened. But there are still
big questions about it, that's right. One of those questions

(04:57):
is exactly how you define when it was born. And
we keep pushing further and further back in the cosmic history,
thinking back to how galaxies were formed, and before that,
how stars were formed, and before that, how the gas
that made those stars were formed, and before that, how
the particles that went into the gas were formed, and
even further and further back. But the further back we pushed,
the harder it is to understand what the causes of

(05:19):
those causes are, yeah, because looking for the causes of
the causes is what science is all about. And in particular,
we're asking this question about the beginning of the universe,
the Big Bang, or there's sort of a more technical
term for it, right, that's right. These days, an important
part of what we used to call the Big Bang
is this period of incredible expansion of the universe, which

(05:40):
we now call inflation, borrowing a term from economics. That
things get more expensive in the universe, also very rapidly
in those first moments technically, right, I mean, things and
things went up in value a lot. You used to
be able to buy a whole solar system with one star.
Now you need like a binary star system. Eventually you
need like a trinary star system. Eventually every star sist
is going to have like five or six stars in it.

(06:02):
Right yet, I mean, technically the universe used to fit
in your wallet before. Now you need a whole banking system,
if not more. That's right. And we keep getting these
descriptions of earlier and earlier times of the universe. But
as you say, we don't just want to find the
cause of this particular event. We want to find the
cause of that cause, and if that cause, and of
that cause, and hanging over this whole question, of course,
is the deeper philosophical question of was there a first

(06:25):
cause or do the causes just go back forever into
the depths of time causing each other. Yeah, and so
today we'll get to the root of the whole universe
here by asking a pretty big question about what caused
the Big Bang and inflation. So today on the program,
we'll be asking the question, what is an Inflaton? Now, Daniel,

(06:49):
is that Inflaton or Inflaton? It's French, so it's inflate inflict.
Feel like you've in sold so many French speakers in
both Canada and France when you for your French accent,
My attempt to speak French is insulting to the very
French language. Is that what you're saying? I am not French.
I'm just happy you're not trying to do a Spanish accent.

(07:09):
Oh yeah, exactly. Well, you know, in my brief attempt
to speak French, people who were actual French speakers told
me that my French accent was terrible. So then I
tried an exaggerated French accent like a pepper lepew sort
of insulting French accent, and then they were like, yes,
that's much better. No, they said better, They didn't say
it was good exactly. You should always take their word.

(07:30):
It's always an iterative process. But in this case, physicists
called this an infloton. Usually particles we invent we have
the suffix of on, like photon boson for me on.
So this would be an inflocton. I guess that gives
it sort of an element of individual nous or like succinctness,
you know, or like you know, wholeness. There's a unitarity
to it, yeah, I mean, it's not the electron ish
or the proton ing right. It's the proton right and

(07:54):
the electron Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so this is a
pretty interesting question. What is an inflocton? And did it
cause the Big Bang through inflation? And so, as usually,
we were wondering how many people out there had heard
of this interesting and theoretical and mysterious particle. So Daniel
went out there and as people on the internet, what
is an imfloton? And you don't have to be on

(08:15):
the internet to participate, You just have to be a
listener who wants to answer silly physics questions without the
opportunity to do any research. So reach out to me
if you'd like to participate to questions at Daniel and
Jorge dot com. I'll email you the questions and you
can just zip back the audio to us. Please participate.
Everybody's welcome. So think about it for a second. Do

(08:36):
you know what an infloton is or how would you
try to describe it? Here's what people had to say.
The word inflaton makes me think of inflation, So I
think an inflaton is theoretical or mathematical placeholder to explain
dark energy. So I have no idea what an inflaton is,

(08:57):
but it does make me think of me maybe particles
that are in an electro magnetic um shield, like what's
happening around Earth. I think inflation is happened at the
beginning of the Big Bang, where the space and all
the matter inflated into what we see. Now. You have

(09:20):
no idea. I've never heard about it, and I literally
could have just thought like maybe a new particle discovered
or based on the name, something to do with any
kind of inflations in the universe, maybe other than being
some type of particle. I have no idea. An inflaton
is a theoretical particle that is related to the mechanisms

(09:44):
of the inflation of the universe. Maybe it helps explain
why or how that happened. If I had to guess,
I'd say an inflaton has to do with inflation the
inflationary period of the early universe. So maybe a particle
that only existed during inflat So maybe this particle is
actually well named. What do you mean because nobody knows

(10:04):
what it is, because everybody has the idea that it's
connected somehow to cosmic inflation. Yeah. Yeah, it's a pretty
good naming this time. Well, I don't know. I mean,
let's find out what it does and how it's related
to inflation first before passing a judgment, you're almost going
to say something positive about a particle physics name, and
then you pull back at the last second. Check back

(10:24):
with me in an hour here, all right, we'll do
I'll let you know. But yeah, I guess most people
connected it to inflation, which is good, although some people
try to connect it to dark energy maybe and some
people just had no idea. Yeah, And the connection to
dark energy is not a terrible one, because inflation is
a big expansion of the universe, and dark energy is
just the observation that that's expansion. This accelerating expansion is

(10:47):
still continuing to present day. So as we might dig
into later, there might be connections between inflation and dark energy.
All right, well, let's take the first step here and
let's talk about what is inflation. So we talked about
how it's part of the Big Bang, but it's not
sort of the whole Big Bang, right, that's right, And
this sort of an evolution of what we mean by
the Big Bang. I think the initial idea for a

(11:09):
big bang is sort of like a tiny little dot
of matter sitting in deeply empty space and then exploding
that you had infinitely dense matter of singularity like you
might imagine exists in the heart of a black hole,
which then exploded all the way through space, and then
that matter is moving through space. That's sort of like
the early ideas of a big bang, right right, Like
we thought maybe it was like a grenade or something

(11:31):
that was just sitting there in space exactly these days
we have a different concept of how the Big Bang
might have happened. The crucial difference is that it's not
an explosion of stuff through space, but an expansion of
space itself. The space itself gets stretched, and so you
don't need like a tiny dot of matter inside big
empty space. You can have space itself be already infinite

(11:53):
and already filled with matter. But that matter was hot
and dense, and then it got stretched out, it got
banded into a cooler, more separated, more dilute universe. So
that's the idea of inflation, that you took space itself
and stretched it and expanded it. So we've reimagined the
Big Bang is having this period we call inflation where

(12:13):
the universe goes from very very dense to very very
not dense. It's like the whole room where stuff was
actually is what also got bigger. Right, It's not just
like the stuff got bigger, it's like the room got
bigger too, exactly. And another important difference is that this
doesn't need a singularity like one problem with the idea
of a big bang is this concept of a singularity.

(12:34):
When the universe was like infinitely dense, infinities don't really
appear in nature as far as we can tell. I mean,
the universe might be spatially infinite, it might be infinite
all way back in time, but nobody's ever observed any infinities.
This is a concern also for singularities at the heart
of black holes, which we think are inconsistent with quantum mechanics.

(12:54):
So this singularity the beginning of the universe. For the
early Big Bang models, it's always sort of a problem,
and this replaces it. This says, well, you don't have
a singularity. You just start out with something really, really
hot and dense, and then you get this massive expansion
of it. And this expansion is really dramatic. We're talking
about an expansion of the factor of ten to the thirty.

(13:14):
That's ten with thirty zeros past it. Right, It's like,
I don't even know what the prefix for that is.
I think it's an influent number, right, it's an influllion.
I think it's a gazillion number maybe, but the gillion anyway,
it's a huge number. It's hard to even really imagine.
And the whole thing happened intend to the minus thirty
two seconds. So it's this incredible expansion. You know, something

(13:36):
the size of a centimeter now becomes trillions and trillions
of kilometers long, all intended to minus thirty two seconds,
and that's just to paint a picture that's like zero
point and then thirty two zeros and then a one
seconds exactly. So it's a really short amount of time, obviously,
especially in the context of the whole history of the universe, right,

(13:56):
which is fourteen billion years, and it's maybe the most
dramatic thing that's ever happened. It started with a bang.
But is it a coincidence that, you know, the during
inflation the universe expanded by tend to the thirty intend
to the negative thirty two, like that seems like pretty symmetric.
Somehow they do seem sort of related, But there's a
lot of uncertainty in those numbers. Different models of inflation

(14:16):
give you different numbers. Some models of inflation have more expansion,
tend to the fifty even up to tend to the seventy,
and some models of inflation to think this might have
happened faster down to tend to the minus thirty six
even for example. So there's a lot of uncertainty. So
you're saying your theories are like plus or minus to
thet you know, just a small error. Yeah, and later
on we'll talk about you know, mistakes. We've made that

(14:37):
a factor tend to the one hundred. So you know,
when you're taking on big questions, you sometimes make big mistakes.
Just like we said, sometimes your first idea is wrong.
In fact, nine of your ideas are probably wrong. Sometimes
you have a bad nap. I tend to overslept by
tending the thirty hours, and now the universe is over.

(14:58):
As long as I get overpaid by tend of the
thirty that's no problem for me. And so this is
kind of a crazy theory, right, I remember talking about
this for our books, sent for some of the stuff
that we do together. And it's sort of a crazy idea,
right that the the fact that the universe expanded so
fast and so much in such a little amount of time.
But that's sort of the only thing that makes sense,
right from what we see and from our theories about

(15:20):
the universe. Yeah, this idea is not just something invented
by theories too have a bad nap. It's something which
solves a lot of problems with the old Big Bang theory.
The old Big Bang theory and this explosion of a
big universe grenade didn't explain what we actually saw out
there in the universe. It was hard to sort of
make that fit. And one of the biggest problems with

(15:40):
that theory is that it didn't explain basically how smooth
the universe is. Like we are getting photons right now
from parts of the universe that are very very far apart.
Like if you look to the left, you're getting photons
from the very beginning of the universe, and those photons
are coming from very very far away. And then you
look to the right and you're getting photons from a

(16:01):
totally different part of the universe that have been traveling
for the whole history of the universe. Now in theory,
those photons are meeting for the very first time. So
the patches of the universe that they came from have
never been in contact before, right, Their photons have been
traveling the whole history of the universe, just meeting today
for the very first time. They've had no chance to
coordinate or talk to each other. But what we see

(16:23):
out there in the universe is that everything seems to
be about the same temperature, like those photons have about
the same energy, And that's the kind of thing you
expect to happen when stuff is in contact with each other,
like when you first pour cream into your coffee, you
have hot spots and cold spots. But then you wait
a little while and this stuff talks to each other
and exchanges photons, and everything becomes smooth and evenly temperatured.

(16:46):
The universe seems sort of smooth and evenly temperatured, even
though parts of it never have spoken before. Right. Right,
it's like you look to the right and you look
to the lout and you don't see any like hot
spots or could spots in the universe. Right, It's like
the universe had come from a grenade. You might expect,
like when one direction it would look hotter and the
other direction would look colder. That's right, And we do

(17:06):
see some very small variations. We'll talk about that in
a minute. In the cosmic microwave background radiation. That's this
very very old light that we're seeing from the very
early universe. But it's remarkably smooth. It's much smoother than
it really should be. And so inflation solves this problem
because inflation says, oh, no big deal. These guys were

(17:27):
in contact fourteen billion years ago before I stretched the
whole universe. These things were close enough to be exchanging photons,
to be talking to each other, to be sharing their energy,
to smooth out any big lumps, any big variations. And
that's why the universe looks so smooth, because it had
a chance to sort of mix and become even temperatured

(17:47):
before it got stretched out to be so massive. I guess,
are you assuming that before the Big Bang, before this
inflation period, things were stable, like things were hanging out
in this superdense state for a while, or are you
saying just from being so crunched together so much that
they would have had a chance to even out. Yeah,
I wouldn't say a while, because we're talking like ten

(18:08):
to the minus thirty seconds, but long enough to thermalize,
long enough to come into equilibrium. We think that whatever
happened before inflation was there for long enough for things
to smooth out mostly smooth out to the level where
all you expect are random quantum fluctuations. Like nothing in
the universe is perfectly smooth because of quantum mechanics, you're

(18:29):
always getting virtual particles bubbling up and and creating tiny
little pockets of extra density. But that's the idea that
the universe had a chance to even out and smooth
out down to the level of quantum fluctuations. And so
if that's true, then you should look out into the
universe and see it be mostly smooth with a few
little wrinkles. But the Big Bang theory would suggest something

(18:50):
much more dramatic, right, would suggest that things have never
been in contact before, and so there's no way that
these things could be so smooth. Right, So I guess
the only way to plane the sort of even temperature
of the universe is if it's space itself with some
what's crunched together before, and we don't expect it to
be perfectly even, right, we have these quantum fluctuations. Any

(19:11):
field in space is never gonna be like totally even
or smooth. There's always gonna be virtual particles bubbling up
in small quantum randomness happening. And so inflation also explains
why we have structure in the universe today. Like, the
universe is not totally smooth. It's not like we have
one hydrogen atom per light year or something like that.
We haven't spread out matter through the universe like peanut

(19:33):
butter on a piece of bread. It is a little
bit lumpy, right. You have planets and stars and galaxies,
and those lumps come from these little initial quantum fluctuations
in the pre inflationary matter whatever that was before inflation,
there little quantum fluctuations. It's mostly smoothed out. You get
little quantum fluctuations, and then those get blown up by

(19:54):
inflation to be the seeds of the structure that we
see today. Right, Well, I guess you expect gravity to
give a smooth universe structure. But I think what you
said before is that gravity isn't enough to give us
the structure that we see today, right, like the galaxies
and the galaxy clusters, like, you need something more to
explain the structure. And one good source for that structure
to come from is from the quantum fluctuations, which would

(20:17):
only happen if space itself also crunched together. Yes, so
these initial quantum fluctuations get blown up by inflation to
be on a larger scale, and then gravity takes over,
as you say, and you know, you have a universe
filled with matter with some variations in it, and then
gravity takes over and clumps that stuff together and you
get big blobs which turn into galaxies and stars and
planets and all that kind of stuff. But gravity can

(20:39):
only do that if it has something to start with,
if it was perfectly smooth to begin with. Gravity can't
get a foothold because everything is being pulled in all
directions but at the same amount, and so there's sort
of nothing to get it going, all right, So then
inflation makes sense because it sort of explains the way
things are and what we see out there in the universe,
and it also makes some predictions out some of the

(21:00):
background radiation that we see out there, and so let's
get into that. But first let's take a quick break,
all right, Daniel, we're talking about inflation and why Hamburger

(21:22):
costs more these days because of the Big Bang, right,
because because it was made in the forge of quantum fluctuations.
It's because of the Hamburger on particles. Yeah, Now we're
talking about the beginning of the universe and the period
during the Big Bang in which things blew up really
fast and lot, and that's called inflation, and we're talking
about what might be costing inflation. But first we talked

(21:44):
about sort of why inflation makes sense, because it is
a crazy idea and we know it sort of explains
a lot of things, and it also makes some predictions
which we can verify. Right, you have to cast your
mind back about years before we had really detailed measurements
of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Remember, these are photons,
which are the sort of the oldest light in the universe.
The universe was a hot and dense plasma like the

(22:06):
center of the Sun. And when a photon is emitted
in the center of the Sun, it doesn't just like
fly out of the Sun. It gets reabsorbed because the
Sun is opaque. So the whole universe was like that.
It was thick and opaque, and photons that were made
were just reabsorbed. Then things cooled down enough so that
suddenly the universe became transparent and photons made at that
moment are still flying around through the universe. So that's

(22:28):
the oldest light that we can see, and that gives
us a sense for like what the temperature was at
any place in the universe, and there are little hot
spots and there were little cold spots. So this light
was first discovered in the sixties. It was really evidence
that the universe used to be hot and dense, and
then later on people discovered, oh, there's some hot spots
and some cold spots in it. But before all those

(22:51):
hot spots were measured to great detail, inflationary models, the
folks working on this kind of cosmology predicted that there
would be those wiggles. They say, if you measure this really,
really carefully, you'll find that it's not all the same temperature,
it's not all the same energy photons. You should see wiggles,
and you should see wiggles that look just like this.
And then people develop these satellites and these telescopes to

(23:13):
look at that light with great precision, and they saw
exactly those wiggles that inflation predicted, right, And it didn't
sort of like predict what the wiggles would exactly look like.
What they predicted like things about it, right, like they
should be like this curvy and this bumpy and this
you know at this you know general frequency. Right, It's
like it predicted what they should the general properties of

(23:34):
these wiggles. Yeah, they didn't predict like where one wiggle
would be, like where you would have a hot spot
and where you would have a cold spot. That's random.
But what they can do is predict how big should
those hot spots be, how big should those cold spots
be like should an entire half of the sky be
a hot spot? Or should the hot spots be like
one degree in the sky or point one degree in
the sky. And very specifically, what inflation predicts is that

(23:57):
you have quantum fluctuations all throughout inflation. It's not like
you just had quantum fluctuations before inflation. As the universe
is inflating, you keep getting quantum fluctuations. And so what
that means is that you should get wiggles of all sizes.
You should get wiggles of one degree in wiggles, a
point one degree in point oh one degrees and all
those things. So if you look for these, you should

(24:19):
expect to see all different kinds of wiggles, like basically
at all different scales. And that's exactly what they see,
and so that's really exciting. It really suggests that you're
like you're seeing quantum fluctuations as inflation is happening. It's
almost like a fractal kind of like you should see
a certain level of fractalness in the wiggles of the universe. Yeah,
some people think of it like we're watching time click

(24:39):
forward as inflation is happening. It's leaving this imprint on
the universe as it happens. So that was pretty exciting.
That's pretty convincing that inflation really is a good description
of what happened, right, right, And so again, inflation is
this idea that the space itself expanded by this crazy
amount to everything was crushed together, and then at one
point in time time it expanded by a factor of

(25:01):
tent to the thirty in ten to the minus thirty
two seconds. And that's pretty wild, right, Like that's a
huge amount of expansion and space and things moving and exploding.
But there has to I guess the big question is
like what costed? Like why would the universe suddenly do that? Yeah,
what we've done so far is just describe what we
think happened, Like in order to create the universe that

(25:22):
we're looking at, what sequence of events do you need
to orchestrate? Now we need to take the next step
and say, all right, that describes what we think happened.
But why did it happen? What caused that? Right? And
this is this eternal chicken an egg? Who ordered that? Yeah?
Who laid this egg? Right? And when we figure out who, say,
we're like, all right, well, where did that chicken come from.
And you know, it might be an eternal question that

(25:43):
we keep going further and further back, but it's a
fun question. And this is the process, right. We need
to nail down what we think happened, and then we
can look for explanations for what might have caused that
and nailed down with the parameters of that are, and
then we can ask, okay, well, you know, does that
make sense? And what could have caused that? And what
can editions do you need for that to work? And
this is the process of science. This is how funny

(26:04):
little monkeys on a tiny little rock in a corner
of the universe can peer out at photons landing on
the surface of their planet and learn things about the
very origin of the universe. Yeah, just being curious and
asking questions. Ask a question is sort of like one
of those annoying kids sometimes and asking the government for
billions of dollars in fancy eyeballs to use to look

(26:25):
at this crazy light right, right and to think about
it doing your naps, that's right. And so to summarize
what we need the universe to have done is to
have this crazy period of expansion, right, really really rapid
expansion and then stop. Right, we don't think that that
expansion is still going on today. It happened and then
it stopped happening. And we also need quantum fluctuations before

(26:45):
inflation and during inflation, and then we needed to all
somehow turn into the matter that we have today in
the universe, right, and then also the structure and the
way it's sort of arranged all that that we see today.
And so a big idea that might explain this is
this idea of an infloton, like a special particle that
caused inflation. Yeah, that's basically the go to strategy for

(27:07):
particle physicists. Right, It's like, well, we have some process,
what causes it? A quantum field? Right, that's like the
only thing we know how to put into the universe.
And so the game of particle physics is sort of
like what set of quantum fields can you put together
that give you the behavior that we see, Like for electrodynamics,
for you know, electricity and magnetism, we see, Well, if

(27:28):
we make a photon field and an electron field and
we have them talk to each other this way, does
that reproduce what we see in the universe? And so
now we have a set of requirements, and so people
have built this field. It's called the infloton field, and
it's a quantum field that fills the whole universe. And
like other quantum fields, you know, it can contain energy
and it can have particles in it. These would be

(27:49):
Inflaton particles. And they try to construct this field in
a way that satisfies all those requirements we just mentioned,
a rapid expansion, a stop to the rapid expansion and
allowing some quantum fluctuations and then turning into regular matter. Interesting,
so really you're sort of inserting a new field. That's
sort of the more sort of proper way to do
it theoretically. And did you consider just calling it the infield?

(28:15):
I stopped short at making that idea. That idea comes
out of left field, or yeah, it's a deep field idea.
So this field might explain things, and so how does
this explain inflation? Like how can field do that? And
why did it stop suddenly? Why isn't it also expanding
things today? So to understand how a field can do that,

(28:36):
we need to think about what it means for a
field to be vacuum, Like when we talk about empty space,
or the vacuum. What we really mean is that space
has no particles in it, no like little objects flying
around carrying kinetic energy, energy of motion. We don't mean
that it can't have any potential energy, right like we
think that empty space is filled with quantum fields, and

(28:57):
those fields do have energy in them. For example, the
Higgs field is a field that fills all of space,
but at its lowest level, as most relaxed point, it
still has energy in it that's potential energy. And so
people think that maybe the in phloton field was some
field that started out with a lot of potential energy,
no matter at all, no particles, just a lot of

(29:19):
potential energy. An interesting thing about a quantum field that
has just potential energy is that it causes rapid expansion
of space time. And this is an idea we've run
into before when we've talked about dark energy. One way
we try to explain why the universe seems to be
accelerating its expansion today is this idea of a cosmological constant,

(29:42):
which is just like a potential energy that fills all
of space. If you put that into the equations of
general relativity, it creates this negative pressure which expands all
of space. And so just like adding a cosmological constant
sort of makes the universe accelerate its expansion. Now, if
you create a quantum field very early in the universe
with a lot of potential energy, it has the same effect. Well,

(30:06):
I guess let me step back a little bit. So
there's the idea that maybe that the universe is filled
with fields like the electron field, the court fields, and
the all the particles have their own fields, and these
are like sort of like the things that just perme
It's sort of like a fog that fills every every
bit of space in the universe. And you're saying that
just having a field with energy in it expands space.

(30:28):
That's right. Every quantum field has to have energy in it.
That's called this zero point energy, and we've talked about
it in the podcast before, like it manifests itself as
the Casimir effect and other areas. And so we think
that every quantum field has a minimum energy in it,
and any field with energy this is always expanding space.
So why is that? Why does space itself expand when

(30:50):
that the field has energy? Space itself will expand when
a field has potential energy, Right when it's in the
vacuum state when it has any sort of potential energy,
because that's the way it enters into the equations for
general relativity. General relativity is a way to understand the
effect of matter and energy on space, and mostly it's
pretty simple, like you put a blob of mass into space,

(31:11):
it will curve space. That makes sort of sense because
you can imagine that it changes like the way things
fly and why photons get bent around the Sun, etcetera.
And that's also true for energy. You put a lot
of energy into space, it will curve it. But there
also are other effects that go beyond sort of like
the simple replication of Newton's Gravity can also do other
weird things, it turns out, and one of those weird

(31:32):
things is that if you have potential energy all throughout space,
it creates this negative pressure. And negative pressure is really
weird because it's like repulsive gravity. We're used to gravity
only attracting things like you are attracted to the Earth
and the Earth is attracted to the Sun. Well, Einstein's
general relativity tells us that gravity comes from this distortion

(31:52):
of space and time, and then it's sensitive not just
to mass, but also to potential energy, but potential energy
does something really really weird, that sort of unfamiliar and
hard to grapple with, which is that it creates this repulsion,
this negative pressure, which expands space itself. And you might ask, well, look,
why does it do that? And you know, I don't
have a great clear answer for you. It's just sort

(32:14):
of like that's the structure the equations in general relativity,
which seem to describe what we see. And Einstein, when
he first saw this in his equation, he thought, well,
that's nonsense. Let's just ignore that, because there's no way
the universe is doing that, right, And so he overlooked
this idea of a cosmological constant any sort of repulsive gravity,
And now we sort of needed to describe the universe

(32:35):
that we see. We don't exactly know why that happens,
but it's just sort of like the shape of the
equations that we can use to describe what we are seeing.
M I see. So it's sort of like fields of
energy and that puts pressure on the universe to make
it expand, sort of like air inside of a balloon. Maybe,
like if you have a lot of pressure a lot
of energy inside of the balloon that those tend to

(32:55):
want to expand the space it's in. Right, Yeah, that's
a fine way to think about it. And so if
you want to describe the universe as expanding very very rapidly,
you need to have a field that has a huge
amount of potential energy. And so this can be like
a vacuum. We're talking about no particles, but still a
field with a lot of energy. And sometimes we call
this in particle physics, we call this a false vacuum

(33:17):
because it's not like energy equal zero. We talked about
this before in terms of the Higgs field. Higgs field
is the field that has energy in it, some vacuum
expectation value. It's it's relaxed. It's sort of like at
its lowest state, but that lowest state is not at
zero energy. And that's why all the particles have mass,
because they interact with this field which has this energy,
and that's where the energy for the mass of all

(33:38):
the particles comes from. So it seems like, you know,
we have all these fields to describe all these particles,
and they're all trying to make space bigger all the time.
But we're now we're trying to explain this particular period
in the in the universe's history where it thinks inflated
exploded expand its super fast and the super joid amount
of time. And so maybe the theory is that maybe
there was a field with a huge amount of energy

(33:59):
at that point, then that caused that huge expansion exactly.
So when this field has a huge amount of potential energy,
you get rapid expansion of space and time. But remember
we need not just rapid expansion of space time, we
also need that to stop, right, because we don't think
inflation is still happening today. So the idea is that
instead of this potential energy being stable, you know, instead

(34:20):
of this being like a field that's sort of like
stuck in a well, that it's sort of like unstable,
that it's like a boulder the top of a hill,
and that hills like a little bit slanted. So eventually
the universe rolls down from the top of this high
potential energy into a state with lower potential energy. And
just like when a boulder rolls down a hill, it
turns some of that gravitational potential energy into the energy

(34:43):
of its motion, right, And so in this case, what
would happen is that potential energy in that field, that
infloton field, which was driving the expansion of the universe.
Now that potential energy decreases, so the universe's expansion stops
and that energy has to go somewhere, So it creates
inflot on part of goals. So you go from a
vacuum with a lot of potential energy to something which

(35:04):
is no longer vacuum because you have all this energy
and all these infloton particles which are whizzing through space
right right. Well, I'm not sure a bolder is helping
me understand this as much, but I think what you're
saying is that it had all this energy, it caused
the universe to inflate super rapidly, and then it was
basically like spent, right Like it just diluted. Once space
expanded that fast, it just basically all that energy went away,

(35:26):
sort of like maybe a balloon once to pop it
the pressure so it dissipates, But the energy doesn't go away.
It just turns into infloton particles. It goes from one
kind of energy into another kind of energy. It goes
from high potential energy into energy of these particles. Why
don't the particles cause inflation? Though, because those particles are
now mass and energy, which has a different effect on

(35:47):
the shape of the universe. You only get that kind
of rapid inflation when you have high potential energy. Now,
when you have a lot of mass, right, mass itself
doesn't cause accelerated expansion of the universe. Only potential energy
does that. Sort of like the energy went from one
field to another field, right, yeah, where the field itself change.
It used to be that the field had a lot
of potential energy, and now it doesn't have a lot
of potential energy, and so that energy goes into something else.

(36:10):
Just like that boulder. You know, it had a lot
of potential energy when it's sitting up on the top
of a hill, and then when it falls off the hill,
that energy is still there, but now it's like the
energy of the motion of the boulder. So you can
turn energy from one kind of thing into another kind
of thing. Like you can take this potential energy and
create particles out of it. So you went from this
state of high potential energy, which is inflating the universe,

(36:31):
into a state of lower potential energy. Now inflation has stopped,
the expansion has stopped, and you're filled with all these
crazy inflaton particles. But also, I mean, I imagine some
of it has to do with the dilution of it, right,
because space expanded, now suddenly it's sort of less powerful too,
whatever energy was there. Yeah, although it's really tricky to
think about the conservation of energy in these terms. Remember

(36:51):
we had a whole podcast about whether energy is conserved
and it's not actually conserved when space is expanding, because
sometimes more energy is being created. Right, as you create
more space, you also create more energy. But you're right
that the energy is getting diluted because we went from
very hot, dense universe to one that's not very hot
and not very dense. I see, all right, Well that

(37:12):
might be then where all of the energy from inflation
went to and why the universe stopped expanding so quickly.
So it might be this imfloton. And so let's get
into more of this particle and whether or not it's
real and whether we've seen it. But first let's take
another quick break. All right, Daniel, we are inflating people's

(37:42):
minds here today talking about inflation and the inflaton, which
might explain the rapid expansion of the universe during the
Big Bang. So I guess the question is we have
this theory of the infloton and the inflaton field, is
it real, like, have we seen it? Do we have
confirmation that it exists. It's a great question and it's
one that we are still struggling with. You know, first
you come up with these ideas and then you think

(38:04):
about their consequences. Then you think about ways to test them.
And we have some promising ways to maybe explore this
because we can think about what happened to those infloton particles, right,
the universe expanded, all that potential energy turned into infloton particles,
but those infloton particles are not still around today. The
universe is not filled with infloton particles. We think what

(38:25):
happened is that those particles then turned into normal matter,
you know, quarks and electrons and all kinds of stuff,
which then led to the universe we see today. And
so we might be able to trace back and say, well,
can we see evidence in sort of the patterns of
those corks and those electrons that support that they came
from in photons, that their history is sort of in photons?

(38:47):
WHOA wait, are you saying that a lot or most
or some of the matter that we see till they
came from this energy that exploded the universe directly. If
this theory is correct, it would be all of it,
every little piece of matter which exists to day, came
from an infloton, Every cork, every electron, every timing thing
out there used to be an infloton particle, used to
be the whole universe just was this. All it was

(39:10):
was the infhoton field and infloton particles, and then all
of those turned into the matter that makes us up right,
But through these other fields, are you saying those other
fields didn't exist or they didn't have energy before. How
does this relate to the other quantum fields that we
see today. That's a great question. And we have to
remember that our picture of these fields electrons and quarks

(39:30):
and whatever is something we've only really ever seen when
the universe is cold and old, and so it's like
a useful description of how things work. We don't think
it's fundamental. We don't think that these this is like
the basic description of true reality is just sort of
like the physics that works today. It's sort of like
if you wanted to describe the physics of fluids, you
know how do fluids flow. Well, that works when fluids

(39:53):
are a certain temperature. When fluids get really really hot,
and all those equations go out the window, and when
fluids get really really cold, those equations go out the window.
So one idea is not that sort of the in
photon fields and these fields, the cork fields, and the
electron fields all exist at the same time, but that
when the universe is hot and dense and crazy, the
in photon field is the way to describe the universe.

(40:15):
And then later when it gets colder, a picture of
the same universe is to use these fields that we
have today. None of these fields are like a deep,
fundamental true story. They're just sort of like an effective
mathematical story we tell about today's situation. It's like the
story changes kind of first it had these characters, and
then and then these and then it had these other
characters in it. Yeah, And physicists talk about this as

(40:37):
a phase change for a reason, right, Because when phases
of matter change, different rules seem to come into play. Right.
There's different rules about how crystals work and how plasmas
work and how fluids work for a reason. And so
because we don't have a fundamental theory of the universe.
We can just describe it in terms of different phases.
We think the universe at a very hot, dense temperature
in the bay beginning is described by different physics, and

(40:58):
that's the in ploton field. The universe today is described
by the physics that we have been developing. Interesting, you're
saying that sort of at the very at the very
beginning of the universe, when it expanded and it was
super hot and dance and it was expanding super fast,
then the star of the show was this infloton field,
and in ploton particles were flying all around, and then
the story changed and then those became sort of what

(41:19):
we see today. Yeah, exactly, like the universe sort of
cooled down and crystallized and new stuff happened, and that
stuff is well described by having electrons and quirks and
all that kind of stuff. You were saying, we're living
in the reboot of the universe with a new cast. Yeah,
we're living in the ice ages. Man. You know, the
most dramatic thing happened, you know, in Act one, and
we're in like Act fourteen billion, and everything is cold

(41:41):
and desolate, except that we don't know this might go
into syndication for another unred trillion seasons. That's right, we
should be so lucky as to have fourteen billion seasons.
So tell me about this inflaton, I guess, is it
just like any other particle? Could you make things out
of this infloton? Like was there imfloton matter at the
beginning of the universe during the Big Bang? So this

(42:01):
is the wild West of theoretical physics. There's lots of
different ideas for these in photons, what they could look like,
how they work, what mass they even have, whether their
mass really even makes sense, because in some sense, the
mass of a particle depends on how it moves, which
depends on the potential energy. And here we're talking about
potential energy that's changing, and so like you know, these

(42:21):
in photon particles might have variable mass, or they might
be ridiculously massive, you know, like trillions of times the
mass of the proton, or they could be as light
as the Higgs boson. So there's basically every flavor of
in photon theory out there, depending on the one that
you like. There's inflation in the number of theories about
the inton. But that's what happened in physics. Right, there's

(42:44):
a big problem. Nobody knows what to do. Somebody creates
a sort of new class of idea and all of
a sudden it opens up the door at to lots
more creativity. People say, oh, maybe it's this. Maybe it's like, oh,
look what I did with this. If I just tweaked
this over here, I get something totally different which has
these exciting properties. So that's sort of like a gold
rush when it comes to theoretical physics, and this is
now a huge area of research. But one thing that

(43:05):
people are working on is trying to imagine if we
can see evidence for these particles if they left an
imprint on the universe today. Interesting, well, I guess couldn't
we recreate some of these conditions, Like when you're smashing particles,
don't you create you know, the matter and energy density
to the point where you might see an infloton or something.
That's exactly the goal, And that is why we do

(43:27):
collider physics, because we want to probe the universe not
just at the cold, boring temperature that it is today,
but as far back as we can go. But you know,
our colliders are limited, and so we can create things
that are sort of warm compared to a typical environment,
but we can't get anywhere near the energies necessary to
create an infloton particle unless we build something like the
size of the galaxy. Then again, we don't really know

(43:49):
the mass of this thing, and we don't really know
what the rules are, so it could also just be
around the corner we build a collider twice as big
as we have now, maybe we make infloton particles. We
don't know, Like most people suspect that it is somewhere
up near the plank mass, and so you'd need some
ridunculously large particle accelerator to ever recreate these conditions. I
guess you know that the imploton existed when the universe

(44:11):
was tend to the negative thirty times smaller. That they
might have existed right up until the very end of
that range, right, in which case we might be right
over the range where you could see them. Yeah, Or
you might need an accelerator that's tended the thirty times
bigger than hours in order to see it, which might
cost tend to the times exactly. So we might need
to wait for financial inflation of research budgets before we

(44:32):
can probe that. So then could we ever test whether
this imfloton exists or do we have to rely on
theoretical work. We can test to see if it left
an imprint on the universe, because you know, the way
to see whether something happened a long time ago is
just to look for clues. If you can't recreate the events,
you look to see if it left a mark on
the universe. And one of those marks might be, for example,

(44:54):
gravitational waves. You know, any time you have expansion of
space that way, you're going to create ripples in space itself.
So there are theories about the gravitational waves that were
left by inflation, and so we listen really really carefully
for these gravitational waves. We might be able to detect
those that come from the very early universe. And we

(45:15):
had an episode about this cosmic gravitational background and whether
advanced detectors could detect it. And so there are promising
areas of research. They're interesting, like the echoes of the
Big Bang in space itself, in space itself. So far,
our detectors are only capable of hearing like extremely loud
shouts and screams in space, you know, when huge black

(45:35):
holes combined with each other. These would be more like whispers,
much much quieter and also hard at a pinpoint. All right,
They're not like an individual source, and so it takes
a little bit more work. But it's possible that they
could hear these things. If you're interested in those details,
check out our episode on the cosmic gravitational background. And
then I guess another quick question is, you know, is
inflation related to the current expansion of the universe, like

(45:58):
our current expansion be related or be a part of
that inflation and maybe due to in photonstitute. We just
don't know. I mean, we see that there is a similarity,
that there was an expansion of space in the very
early universe and this an expansion of space in the
late universe. Remember that dark energy isn't sort of something
that's been happening the whole time. We think it turned
down about five billion years ago. So we don't understand

(46:21):
like why in photons would be created now to cause
that expansion. Some theories do connect them, that there are
these theories of quintessence that suggests that the same field
might be responsible for that and for these but fundamentally
we just don't understand it. And we don't understand dark
energy either. Right, We've tried to do these calculations to say, well,
we see the universe is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating.

(46:43):
We can measure how big a potential energy with cosmological
constant you would need for that expansion, and then we
try to explain that. We say, well, is there that
much potential energy in the quantum fields of space? And
we do the calculation and we get a number, and
that number is tend the one hundred times too big.
So we just don't understand the connection between quantum fields

(47:05):
potential energy, and the expansion of space. Where like at
the very very beginning, this is where we really need
a theory of quantum gravity that would explain all this
to us. I think I got it, Daniel, I think
I know what happened. Oh and you waited to the
end of the podcast to tell me. Yeah. I mean, clearly,
the imflotons woke up, they did inflation, and then they
took a nap, and they're just now waking up to

(47:27):
cause expansion. I mean, I think that my nap theory
explains at all. Isn't it the ten billion year nap?
That's a great theory. I love that. What's a short
nap if you consider that the universe might go on
for trillions of years, it could be And there are
also a few other ways we might get hints about
whether the in photon was there. Other than just gravitational waves.
People can look for even more details in this cosmic

(47:49):
microwave background radiation. Remember that Bicep experiment that thought they
saw evidence for in photons because of the sort of
twists and turns in the cosmic microwave background radiation. And
are folks looking at like correlations of where galaxies are
in the sky to look for like triangle shapes which
might come from the way the infloton decayed, Like three
infloton particles might lead to like a trio of galaxies

(48:13):
out there in space. So sort of like late structure
of the universe and early wiggles in the universe were
digging deep into those to look for evidence of these inflotons. Yeah,
it's amazing how we're sort of like scraping the bottom
of the barrel almost, or like we're trying to figure
out the whole universe, this little tiny people that we
have in our little corner of the universe. But it's
all we've got, and it's amazing what we've been able

(48:35):
to do so far. It's sort of like flabbergasting, you know.
And the thing that's wonderful about that is that you
can extrapolate forward and think, like, what will humans do
in a hundred years or in five hundred years. We
would be amazed the things that they might have learned
from like tiniest little hints of the tiniest little photons
that happened to land on our eyeballs. Yeah. I think
we talked about this in our first book about how

(48:57):
we're almost sort of going through a big bang in
this sense of human knowledge about the universe. Right, Like
if you look at the history of humanity, our knowledge
about the universe and how what it's made out of
and how it started and how it's range really sort
of exploded in the last few hundred years, right, So
we're sort of in the middle of this inflation of
human exploration. That's right. We've been making a lot of

(49:18):
progress in the last hundred years. And also physicists been
taking more naps than the last hundred years, So maybe
there's a connection there. Maybe it's gonna stop. Yeah, just
like inflation is going to be a ten billion year nap. Daniel,
you think, or when can we expect more progress if
we have ten billion more dollars. Hey, I'll turn that
into more science and you'll wake up. You'll wake up
for ten billion dollars. But not less, no less than that.

(49:40):
All right, Well, again, this is a fascinating theory. It's
an incredible sort of idea that the universe expanded that
fast and that quickly, and that we might have an
explanation for it, and that it might just be another
interesting way that quantum fields interact with space and sort
of more like a class of explanations right now, because
there's a lot of for an ideas. But it's really

(50:01):
exciting that we have sort of a framework, a framework
that predicts these crazy events that were now pretty sure
did happen, and that let's just ask deeper questions about
you know, why would that field exist and what could
cause it? And you know what came before that field.
And it's led to some really cool, crazy ideas like
this single bounce theory of the universe, that the universe
has been contracting for infinity down just before the Big

(50:24):
Bang and then it bounced, and it will only bounce
once after the big bang, and now we'll expand forever
some really beautiful interesting ideas that just give you a
different sense for the whole scope of the universe, right,
or can that turn around too, and like keep bouncing
through infinity? There are multiple infinite bounced theories. But also
there's this new theory of a single bounce, which I

(50:44):
find sort of cool. I see no more naps. I
guess physics will find a way physically. That's right. We'll
leave that to the engineers, maybe let them figure it
that out. But yeah, it's sort of amazing to think
about the beginning of the universe because a lot has
happened since. So then next time you look around you
and think about the things that are around you and
the stuff you're sitting on or writing in, think about

(51:06):
how it all came from this incredible state that the
universe was in, and how maybe we all came from
in photons. And maybe one day we'll discover the chicken
that laid that egg, that growed to be that chicken
that laid that egg, and get all the way back
to something which sort of makes sense on its own
and doesn't require an explanation, or maybe not. Maybe we'll
just keep digging forever. Right, Maybe was the chicken ton,

(51:28):
the plan, the foul on? Well, we hope you enjoyed that.
Thanks for joining us, see you next time. Thanks for listening,
and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio. Or more podcast from

(51:49):
my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. No