What is a quark gluon plasma?

Daniel and Jorge talk about the hottest state of matter ever created, and make up silly names for it.

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Jorgey, you're a fan of oatmeal, aren't you. Yeah, I've
been done too eatable every once in a while. So
how hot do you like your oatmeal? Well, you know,
not too hot, not too cold, you know, maybe in
the Goldilocks zone. So then, in physics terms, does that
mean like hotter than the surface of Pluto, maybe colder
than the surface of the Sun. Yes, somewhere in there.

(00:30):
That's kind of a big range. All right, let's narrow
it down. Maybe hotter than room temperature on Earth, colder
than room temperature on Venus. Yeah, I'm not sure which
one's hotter or colder, but that that sounds about right. Well,
maybe we should use chemistry instead, like hotter than a
frozen cube of oatmeal, colder than oatmeal plasma. I'm not
sure I should leave you in charge of my breakfast.
I'm just trying to come up with creative menus for

(00:51):
the Daniel and Jorge restaurant. I'm not sure I should
leave in charge by lunch either. H I am Poor
hammy cartoonists and the co author of Frequently Asked Questions

(01:13):
about the Universe. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist
and a professor at UC Irvine, and I'm not a
fan of menu writing. Oh have you had to do
it several times? No, I mean that I'm a critic
of menu writing, and I'm not often impressed. You know,
those menus to have things like wild Mountain raspberry sauce
or you know, they just keep adding adjective to everything

(01:35):
to make it sound more impressive. I see you just
want like what food like you know, menu options, food
and dessert. That sounds pretty good. Yeah, make it direct,
like surprised me, none of this flower language. Yes, I'll
order dinner please. Why even have a menu, Daniel, Just
go to a restaurant and just haven't bring you food
that sounds great. Actually, I would love to be at

(01:56):
the chef's whim. You don't have to make any decisions
fight it could just put a tube down your throat
and then you'd be out of there in five minutes.
Eating is a hassle anyway, But anyways, Welcome to a
podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of
I Heart Radio in which we serve up the entire
menu of all of the mysteries of modern physics and
the questions about the nature of reality and our universe.

(02:20):
We serve up the delicious dish of all of our
curiosity about the way things work, how everything came together
to form the universe that we know and love, and
how it may all fall apart in the future. Yeah,
because we try to nurse you with amazing facts about
the universe and fill you up with nutritious and sometimes
hot titbits about our amazing cosmos. The universe is quite

(02:43):
a meal, after all. It's more than an appetizer, that's
for sure. It's more like a litter or brunch. What
do you think. I think it's an all you can
eat buffet. I mean I could just keep going back
and back and back until I blow up with physics knowledge.
Doesn't that violate the love of energy conservation and endless fae? Well,
as long as the universe keeps expanding and my waistline

(03:04):
keeps expanding, then we're all in harmony. Oh man, Wait,
wouldn't you turn into a black hole eventually? My plan
is to just red shift my way down to weight loss.
I see red. It's a slimming color. Is that what
you're saying? If I'm moving away at high speeds, then
technically I have less energy absolutely. Oh yeah, And there's
also like left contraction right as you're moving faster, you

(03:25):
seem smaller, but only in one direction. So just make
sure they get your good side. I'll rely on that
when I whizz by the photographer. Wit, how do they
take your picture if you're going faster than the speed
of light? And do you actually post before the pictures taken?
You know, the whole sequence of events here gets all
you know, relativity confusing. Yeah, I think we're confusing ourselves
with physics and pr I don't think they're a good combination.

(03:47):
But it is a pretty wonderful universe, full of many
options for us to dive into and explore and taste.
I guess it's sort of like there's a tasting menu
and and this is what this podcast is. And the
universe offers so many stories that so many different temperatures.
You can study the frozen interior of crazy ice planets,
you can study the hot, intense environment at the center

(04:09):
of our sun. There are mysteries at all temperatures. Oh,
that's an interesting question. What is the range of possible
temperatures in the universe? Right, Like you could have zero
degrease kelvin. That's one extreme. Could you have infinite temperature?
On the other side, We did a whole podcast episode
about the hottest things in the universe and another one
about the coldest things in the universe, so check those
out if you're interested. But briefly, we know that things

(04:31):
can't actually get down to zero degrees kelvin because quantum
and certainty requires things to always be vibrating a tiny
little bit. Quantum fields can never relaxed actual zero, but
you can get pretty close. On the other side, there
is a temperature above which we don't think temperature really
makes any sense. It's called absolute hot, and it's sort

(04:51):
of the maximum temperature you can have in which things
sort of stay. Things above that quantum gravity has to
take over them. We don't even really know how who
describe the universe at that crazy high energy density, Well,
it sounds like a vodka brand. Absolute hot, So what
does that mean. It's like when the matter particles are
moving it close to the speed of light. It's more
than just the particles moving near the speed of light

(05:14):
because velocity is relative. It's about energy density. It's about
having things being really compact and also having high speeds
when things get really really crazy compact, then gravity takes over.
But if you have really small distances, then quantum mechanics
is important. And so it's sort of like asking the question,
what is the state of matter at the heart of
a black hole? We just don't really know, and extrapolating

(05:35):
to those conditions from our knowledge of the universe doesn't
really even make sense. So absolute hot is sort of
like a statement about we can't really say anything above
this temperature because we're pretty sure our theory would be wrong. Well,
that's absolutely interesting, it is, and thermodynamics is very complicated.
These connections between density and temperature, some of them break
down our ideas of like what temperature is. And if

(05:58):
you're interested in those questions and the subtle connects between
energy and density and velocity, check out our episode on
what is the hottest thing in the universe. Yeah, so
there's how hot things can get in the universe, and
then there's how hot are the things that we've seen
in this universe. And things can get pretty hot as
far as we've seen in this universe, right, that's right.
The buffet of our universe offers a lot of different

(06:19):
things to explore from the temperature that we are used to,
sort of like between zero and a hundred degrees celsius.
Two hotter things inside stars or inside neutron stars, or
sometimes even hotter temperatures whoa hotter than a star is
in a star sort of like the hottest anything can get,
right like at the center of the Sun or the
center of neutron star. No, it actually it turns out

(06:41):
that some of the plasma in between galaxies and in
between stars can be even hotter because the particles are
moving very very high speeds. But again, those guys are
not very dense, so if you put yourself in the
interstellar plasma or in the intergalactic medium, then you would
freeze really quickly because there isn't a lot of heat there.
But the particles are moving really really fast. So technically

(07:03):
there are super high temperatures. But the hottest things in
the universe are actually things created here on Earth by
particle physicists. Well, they are pretty hot. We are the
hottest people in the universe creating the hottest things in
the universe. We are too hot to handle. Yeah, I
think that's what I mean. It's like if you have
a particle out there in space and it's moving it

(07:24):
close to the speed of light. Wouldn't technically the space
around it be super duper hot, right, because temperature is
sort of like about the average like per particle kinetic energy. Yeah,
well we talked about in that episode. The definition of
temperature is a statistical property, so it's something you can
talk about for a set of particles. And most theorists

(07:44):
say the temperature isn't defined for a single particle, like
it just doesn't have a meaning. It's something, as you say,
it's about the average motion of these particles, not the
specific velocity of one. So what's the temperature of a
single particle flying through the universe? It's not defined. Temperature
is some thing you can only really talk about for
a set of particles. What about the temperature for a

(08:05):
dred particles moving at the speed of light. I feel
like we're gonna have this negotiation and you're gonna ask
me what's the smallest number of particles for which you
can talk about temperature? At one point? Can you say
something is hot? Daniel? So this is thermal physics, and
temperature is a macroscopic quantity. It's something which emerges from
the motion of microscopic quantities. It's sort of like the

(08:27):
concept of value in economics. You know, what is the
value of a certain painting. If there's only one person
in the world, and they can say the value is
whatever they want, they have to be able to sell it.
They have to be able to transfer to somebody else.
So value in the market depends on there being like
a bunch of people buying and selling something, so you
can get a sense for the value. It's sort of
the same with temperature. You can't have the temperature of

(08:47):
an individual particle. You have to the temperature of a
set of objects. There's no like fixed threshold where you
can define temperature, and the concept of temperature sort of
loses meaning as the number of particles gets smaller and smaller.
So what's the threshold? I don't know. A hundred is
probably safe, but you're on the edge. It sounds like
we need to write a new best selling book called
physics economics. Sounds pretty freaky. But anyways, we are talking

(09:12):
today here about something that is maybe even hotter than
the inside of stars, something that is actually made here
on Earth by physicists. So today on the podcast will
be tackling the question what is a quark gluon plasma.
But that's kind of a worth mouthful to say it is.

(09:35):
But it's super fascinating because it lets us explore how
the universe looks different at different temperatures. You know, the
universe at its smaller scale of made of something we
don't know. But as you crank up the temperature, all
sorts of really fascinating and interesting properties emerge. You know,
normal matter or gases or plasmas. All these properties sort
of arise from how these lower level bits come together.

(09:58):
It's really cool to make the universe show you like
a new thing that it can do. Mmmm. I think
you guys just sit around and pair up different interesting
words together and then then and then that sets your
research agenda. You should just like cork gluon plasma. Sure,
let's go with that. Yeah, next we're gonna look for
like the cork tiger plasma. That sounds pretty cool. Yeah,
and maybe a hit Netflix show as well. But this

(10:20):
is an interesting state of matter, something that's maybe hotter
than the insights of neutron stars, which is a little
mind blowing. But as usually, we were wondering how many
people out there chart to her of these three words
put together cork glue on plasma. So Daniel went out
there into the internet to ask people what the cork
gluon plasma. So thank you very much to those who

(10:40):
volunteered to speculate on this question without the chance to
google it. We're very happy to know your thoughts, and
if you out there listening right now, would like to
hear your voice on the podcast for everyone else to appreciate.
Please don't be shy right to us two questions at
Daniel and Jorge dot com. So think about it for
a second. What do you think a cork glue on
plasma is? Here's what blood to say. I don't know.

(11:02):
I would guess that it has something to do with,
for example, pressure or temperature. Being at such an extreme
point that matter, but the state of matter changes drastically
and becomes something similar to well plasma or both Einstein condensate. Well,
the plasma has probably obtained when you have really high temperatures,

(11:27):
so I guess this probably existed in the early state
of the universe. I don't know, just guess. A quark
gluon plasma is a small unit of blood glued onto
an organ to increase the absorption of oxygen. Well, I
know the quirks are what make up the lutron and proton,

(11:50):
and the gluons are what buying them together using the
strong nuclear force. Since they can't exist on their own
without being closely bound. I would assume it's high energy
state that the gluons are in the kind of bind
them together, almost like a liquid adhesive. I mean, I
guess that a quark gluon plasmas when you have a
high enough energy state so that the quarks can actually

(12:12):
break out of their groups of three and roam around
freely with gluons passing back and forth between these quirks.
I don't know if this level of energy is possible
in our current universe, but maybe it could have been
in the very early stages of the Big Bang. This
is something that hardy might be inside a netron star

(12:34):
as far as I know. That's when you have a
lot of energy and matter. Basically, uh, the separation between
protons breaks down and all these quirks just sort of
mingle in like a soup of quirky goodness. Oh, I

(12:55):
know that it's a plasma of quirks and gluons really hot,
all right? It sounds like someone confused blood plasma with
physics plus. Right, that's something in your blood, right, Yeah,
plasma is something in your blood, but that's totally different.
That's just the same letters. That means something completely different
than sort of physics plasma. So don't get a physics
plasma injection next time you go to the doctor. And

(13:18):
that's for the vampire physicists to do rasor truck exactly.
Quark gluon vampires. That's the next crossover event. But some
pretty good answers here. I think most people sort of
associate plasma with something really hot, I guess, and then
it did a lot of people here seem to know
it's a state of matter, and so I guess you
just kind of put two and two together, and so

(13:39):
it's a plasma of quarks and gluons. They're on the
right track in thinking that it's a new state of matter,
like another thing that matter can do, another way the
universe can operate. It's one that really lets us explore
deep and fundamental questions about the nature of the universe
and the early universe and why we are all here. Yeah,
but most people seem to also know that it's associated

(14:02):
with temperature and so that that it's something really hot,
and so let's dive into it, Daniel, Let's maybe take
it back to the basics. What is the basic definition
of a cork blue on plasma? So cork gluon plasma
is an extension of our idea of states of matter.
So you're probably familiar with solids and liquids and gases
as different states of matter. You take the same basic
objects in this case atoms, right, helium, hydrogen, neon, whatever,

(14:26):
and it's just a question of how hot they are,
and the temperature they are determines how they move. So
that's what the states of matter are. In a solid,
the atoms are bound together in a lattice, right, it's
like a crystal where they're like not moving and they're
squeezed together. As that melts becomes a liquid and the
particles are free to slide around, but you're sort of
constant volume. And then if he heats up even more,

(14:47):
the particles loosen up even more and they fly around
freely and they're going everywhere. Beyond that, there's another state
of matter, plasma that people are probably heard of, where
you break things up even further. So you take the atom,
and now you crack it open. Instead of just having
atoms flying around, you have the constituents of the atom
separating from each other. So the electrons leave the nucleus

(15:08):
and go off on their own because there's enough temperature
for them to like escape from the energy bonds of
the nucleus. So now you have charged particles. So plasma
is like a gas, but with charged particles instead of
neutral particles, which makes it much more complex and intense. Right,
I think you sort of hit when you said that
it's something escapes the bonds of something, and so I

(15:28):
think that's a big thing in these this idea of
states of matter, right, because you know, at the at
the end of it, insologist particles put together in different ways,
but there seems to be some sort of like transcision
points or things that either like stuck together in a
certain way or not stuck together or not stuck together
at all. Yeah, exactly. So the whole universe is just
like particles put together in different ways, and in the

(15:51):
end you should be able to describe any configuration using
like the most fundamental rules of how those particles work.
We don't have those most fundum mental rules. We don't
really understand the basic rules of the universe. But what
we do have are these effective rules. Like we say,
in this configuration, when things are stuck together, the most
important thing are these bonds between the atoms, and they

(16:12):
can be described roughly using this kind of mathematics. Fascinating
things as you say that there are these transitions when
like things get loosened up, and now you can use
a different kind of mathematics to describe it, Like the
math of crystals is totally different from the math of fluids,
from the math of gases, right, And it's fascinating that
there are these transitions. That's why we even say that

(16:33):
we have states of matter instead of just saying, hey,
look we've got particles and here are the rules. It's
because these phenomena emerged, just like we were saying earlier,
the temperature is an emergent phenomena, the property of many objects.
The whole idea of states of matter, of solids and
liquids and gases emerges from what's going on underneath, right,
I guess what I mean. It's like, it's not something

(16:53):
we're imagining, right, It's not like the universe is actually
sort of like a continuous grade in between things are
pact really close together and things that are just out
there loose. It's like the universe really does sort of
like click into certain ways of arranging matter. That's a
really subtle philosophical point. Whether this is our interpretation or
whether this is inherent to the universe, it really depends

(17:15):
on what you think about, like the primacy of mathematics,
whether it's part of the universe or just part of
our thought. You know, we might, for example, meet alien
physicists who think that, like our definition of phases are
a nonsense, and they have a different way of looking
at it because different quantities are important to them. And
so I think it's not clear whether this is like
part of the universe or just our description of it.
But either way, it's something that's very useful for us, right,

(17:38):
because it's a way for us to simplify things and
have like simple mathematical stories that work without having to
every time go down to string theory and new calculations
from there. Right, It's not like the universe like actually
changes or like the rules of the universe change, Like
the universe is continuous, you know, things don't like suddenly change,
but there does seem to be sort of this interesting

(17:59):
thing where like when I'm sort of sort of closing
up to each other, then certain forces become more dominant,
and so then things, for example, click into place as
a crystal. But if you sort of exceed some sort
of energy level, then other forces are more important, and
then the particles the items don't arrange and crystal as
they sort of arrange as a liquid. You're exactly right,
and that's the most important thing. That the universe is

(18:19):
following the same basic laws the whole time, whatever those
basic laws are, and we notice these patterns. It's sort
of like if you wanted to categorize books in the library.
You know, all the books in the library follow the
same rules, are like sequences of words that follow each other,
and you're like, oh, these are dramas, these are comedies,
this one on the edge. I'm not really even sure
or somebody invented a whole new genre, right, Where is

(18:39):
a genre? After all? It's just a way for us
to like categorize things that we see, patterns that emerge
in writing, things that work, and so in the same way,
like phases of matter are ways for us to simplify
a whole set of phenomena in terms of simplistic mathematical descriptions.
And you might think, well, why can't we just use
the most fundamental theory every time? And you know the

(19:00):
answer is that we just can't do those calculations. It's
really complicated, the same reason that you can't like predict
hurricanes even if you understand how drops work, because chaos
prevents you from extrapolating from the very small scale to
the very high scale. And also we don't even know
if there is a fundamental theory, like maybe all of
our theories, even like the ones about corks and leptons

(19:20):
and the standard model, maybe that's just an effective theory,
the same way like fluid dynamics is and the ideal
gas law, you could all just be like ignoring what's
going on underneath because we can't see those details. Right. So,
so far we have sort of four basic states of matter.
You said, solid when which is when the atoms are
stuck together kind of in a grid. Liquid when the

(19:41):
atoms are moving about but sliding around with each other.
And then there's gas, which is when the atoms are
flying around freely. But then there's the fourth type of matter,
which is when the atoms start to break apart, right,
and then you sort of have a gas of free
flying um protons and electrons. Yeah, protons and new trons
and electrons. So you have atomic nuclei. You know. For example,

(20:04):
if you have hydrogen plasma, then it's just protons and electrons.
There are no atoms there. There isn't really hydrogen anymore.
That if every proton having an electron pair. Now the
protons and electrons are just all flying around on their own,
so they're not like confined to each other anymore. They
can move freely throughout. And so that's what a plasma
is relative to a gas. Plasma is sort of like

(20:25):
a gas of charged particles, right, but the nucleus still
stays together, or the nucleus breaks apart. In these atoms
that are in the plasma, the nucleus still stays together,
like the protons and neutrons are still bound together to
each other. I see. It's just that the in the
regular plasma, the electrons separate from the nucleus, and so
you have nuclei and electrons flying around like a gas exactly,

(20:47):
and that is a gas of charged particles. That's what
a plasma is. And it makes sense that a plasma
is hotter because in order for that to happen, you
have to pump a lot of energy into those electrons
so they can climb all the way of that energy
better and eventually basically be free. It's like you've given
the electrons enough energy to reach their escape velocity from
the nuclei. Right. It's like when you give too much

(21:08):
sugar to a kid. They started to, you know, separate
from their family at the park exactly, they go into
really fast orbits and then they were gone. We but
we see plasma and everyday life. It's not just like
a weird idea. You know. The Sun, of course, is
a huge ball of plasma, so you see it every day.
There's also a plasma down here on Earth. Like lightning
has plasma in it, light bulbs have plasma in them.

(21:30):
We create plasma all the time to do fusion research
like a tocomax and stuff like that. So plasma is weird.
It's not something you can touch, but it is a
part of our everyday life. Yeah, It's what makes a
fluorescent lights. Right, Like if you're work in an office
or any time you go to any kind of commercial space,
there are fluorescent lights, and that's plasma, right, that's plasma,
and plasma is a different kind of state of matter

(21:52):
because it doesn't follow the rules of gases. You need
different kinds of mathematics to describe plasma. It's called magneto
hydro dynamics, and it combines electrodynamics, you know, the laws
of how electrically charged objects feel each other and push
on each other, with fluid dynamics hydro dynamics. So it's
massively complicated, and it's one of the reasons that fusion

(22:14):
research is really complicated because charge gases are very unstable
and very hard to confine and very hard to do
any calculations with as well. Yeah, they're very nasty. They
even sound like a marble supervillain with those names together,
and so so then that's when the atom starts to
break apart. So, but you can go even further maybe
and break apart the nucleus if you keep I guess,

(22:34):
pushing the temperature, pushing the energy of the system exactly,
And so you can get to the next stage of
matter by cranking up the energy even hotter so that
you break even more bonds. As you're saying, states of
matter a sort of defined by the transitions where you're
breaking bonds and different things become dominant. So the next frontier, then,
beyond plasma, is to break open the nucleus and break
open the protons and neutrons inside of it. All right, well,

(22:57):
let's get to the next frontier of the states of matter,
quark gluon plasmas. We'll dive into that, but first let's
take a quick break. All Right, we're talking about Marvel supervillains, right, Daniel,

(23:20):
We're always talking about Marvels. Marvel should be paying us,
or at least um funding a good part of our podcast.
I guess they pay us in movies somehow, entertainment. I
suppose so. But everybody else out there who's not making
a podcast is also getting those movies. But we, I
guess we get to talk about it. We can hopefully

(23:41):
fair use man fair use, we get to make good
jokes about it. Well, but the latest superhero here we're
talking about is called the core gluon plasma. And we
talked a little bit about states of matter and how
you can go from solid to liquid to gas too. Plasma,
this kind of plasma is sort of like the next
level of a state of matter. Like if you take
plasma and what you heat it up even more, if
you take gas and you heat it up even more,

(24:03):
then you can break up the next level of confinement,
the next thing that's sort of making this up. And
so if you take the simplest sort of thing like
protons and electrons, and you take those protons and you
heat them up, then you can break them open into
what's inside them. Right, And remember that protons are not
fundamental objects and not point particles. They're actually made of

(24:24):
smaller pieces that are inside them, the same way in
atom is made of a nucleus and electrons. Proton is
made of smaller bits and those bits are quirks held
together by gluons. But I feel like you skip the
step though, right, Like we've heard plasma, and that was
nuclei and electrons flying around, and if you heat it up,
at some point, the nuclear i break up into protons

(24:44):
and neutrons. Is that called anything or do we just
totally ignore that? Or is that also just a regular plasma?
That would also be a regular plasma that's sort of
like fission. Right, You take a big nucleus and break
it up into smaller pieces that's fission. That's something we
can do. Breaking open the proton and breaking open the
nuke leaves are related because breaking open a proton means
cracking the bonds between the quarks inside the proton. Well,

(25:06):
what's holding the nucleus together anyway? Like why does the
nucleus stick together If it's a bunch of protons and
a bunch of neutrons that's only just charged particles plus
charges and zero charges, Why does that anyway stick together?
It sticks together because of the bonds between the quarks
inside them, And so anyway, you can sort of think
of a nucleus is sort of like a really big

(25:26):
quirky particle where all the corks are held together not
just into protons and neutrons, but also those quirks are
holding onto the other quarks inside the other protons and
neutrons to keep it together. So really, what you want
to do to get to quark glow and plasma is
just crack open all those quirky bonds, right, But I
guess there is sort of an intermediate step, is what
I mean. It's like, you know, you have plasma with

(25:47):
nuclei and electrons, and at some point you break open
the nuclei into protons and neutrons. Is there a state
of matter where it's like protons still held together, neutrons
and electrons flying around. Yeah, that would just be a
plasma there. You've taken heavier nuclei and you've broken it
down into hydrogen, because hydrogen is protons. Okay, So then
at some point you heat it up so much that
the protons stands start to break apart. Yeah, then you

(26:09):
can break open those protons. And so protons have three
quarks inside held together by gluons, but these are held
together really tightly. The energy of the bonds holding the
proton together is much greater than the energy of the
bonds holding the electron to the proton, so it takes
much higher temperatures to crack open that proton. Yeah, it's
a lot of energy. I mean, even just to break

(26:31):
up the nucleus is a lot, right, Like an atomic
bomb is basically what happens when you start breaking up
nuclei in in atoms exactly. And so in order to
break up the proton into its bits, you need to
get up to trillions of degrees kelvin. So five and
a half trillion kelvin is an estimate for the temperature

(26:53):
of the next stage of matter. And that's what a
cork gluon plasma is is to break open the proton
so the quarks and then luans inside can now run free.
So just in the same way that a plasma is
breaking open and atom, so the electron and then proton
can fly free. Now you're breaking open what's inside the
proton so that it can run free. You're saying, like,

(27:14):
do you heat things up and things are moving and
crashing into each other so crazily that it actually like
breaks open the protons. Yeah, that's basically like the melting
point of a proton. You heat it up to five
and a half trillion kelvin and there's enough energy for
the quarks to break the bonds of those gluons and
to fly around free. You have a bunch of them

(27:35):
all together, and you basically get a soup. You get
a super particles that are not neutral in the strong force. Right.
A plasma is interesting because it's like a gas, but
it's not neutral electrically. A quark gluon plasma is like
a gas, but it's not neutral in the strong force
what we call color charge. So you have a gas
of colored particles. Whoa interesting, Well you you've got a

(27:59):
soup before, but now you're saying, like the bits of
the super Now they're charged not just with electromagnetism but
also the strong force color charge. Yeah, exactly, they're charged
in every possible way. They're charged in the weak force,
they're charged and electromagnetism because they have electric charge and
they have color. So they can now move freely. You know,

(28:19):
corks are usually confined. They're like stuck inside a particle
that we've ever seen. An individual cork usually just like
trapped inside a proton or a neutron or some other
kind of particle like a pion or you know other masons.
But here, now the corks can like fly free in
the same way like electrons and a plasma are now
flying freely. They're not trapped to an individual nucleus. The

(28:39):
quarks and a cork glue in a plasma can now
move freely all the way around anywhere inside the plasma
like all by themselves. Right, that's the idea that they're
not stuck to anything else. They're not stuck to anything else,
but they're also not all by themselves. A cork by
itself in space, wouldn't be a cork glue on plasma,
it would just be a cork and corks can't really
be by themselves and base it would have so much

(29:01):
energy you would just pop all these other particles out
of the vacuum. A quark, glu and plasma is when
you have all huge density of particles, also all at
high temperatures, and so they're sort of like happily living
in this frothing vacuum. Mm hmm. I see, well, I
guess maybe before we go further, just an naming question,
like why still call it a plasma. It seems like,

(29:21):
you know, this should maybe get its own category of
state of matter. What you call it, like a quirklue
and banana? Yeah, why not? I mean, if you're giving
me the naming rights, sure, let's go with the bananas
state of matter, because it is pretty bananas, right, like
the trillions of degrees um sells. That's that's pretty crazy.

(29:41):
It is pretty crazy. I like the name plasma because
it borrows the concept of the plasma we're familiar with
that you're breaking things open and now you have charged objects,
but they're just charged in another way. So it's sort
of like generalizes the concept of plasma, and the plasma
we're familiar with should be called like electric plasma um,
and so this could be called like a color plasma
or something like that. But you know, there's a relationship

(30:03):
between the plasma we're familiar with and this kind of plasma.
So I think it works. But you know, whatever, I
have a name. How about calling it coasma because you
know it's a quantum cork plasma coasma? Yeah, what do
you think? Quasma? That sounds like something that leaks from
your wounds when they haven't been treated well. But that
that's good, right. It brings up interesting associations. I mean,

(30:27):
it's better than coming up with a blood that's true.
That's true. That is pretty weird. But this stuff is
also super weird and super fascinating to study. You know,
not only would it be really really hot, it's also
is super duper dense. Like a cubic centimeter of this
stuff like a tea spoon, you know, with weigh about
forty billion tons here on Earth. It's incredibly strange stuff. Wait,

(30:51):
I guess you're confusing me here bringing in density. Now,
I guess I think what you're saying is that this
weird state of plasma which we're going to called kasman now,
maybe only happens if you have that much density, right,
Like you, The only way to break open a proton
is if things are like super dense, right, because as
you said, if you just have a proton out in space,

(31:12):
it's not going to split open. Or if it is
split open into corks, the courts are just gonna you know,
explode or disappear. So you sort of need this super
dense state in order to have a cosma. Yeah, and
remember that there's a tight connection between temperature and density.
You can object to a certain temperature and you squeeze it,
it gets hotter, right, And so increasing the density also

(31:33):
increases the temperature. And so the conditions under which we
have created cork gloom on plasmas are this temperature and
this density. And also think in your mind of like
that phase diagram maybe you learned about in school. The
transitions between phases are not just temperature dependent, they're also
density dependent right there, depending on the pressure. So for example,
where water freezes or where it turns into gas, it

(31:55):
doesn't just depend on the temperature. It also depends on
the pressure the effectively the density of the material. I see.
So when you're saying like this is the state of
matter that happens when things get really hot, that's not
quite the whole truth, right, Like you have to get
it both hot and dance in order to get a quasma. Exactly,
A single proton flying through the universe at very high speeds,
or even a hundred of them flying at very high

(32:17):
speeds don't get you a quasma. Yeah, that keeps saying it.
If you keep saying it, it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen.
It's kind of growing on me. It's fun to say quasma. Yeah,
it doesn't make you cleans. And you're right. You need
density and temperature, and so all of these phase transitions
are temperature and density dependent. Mostly we think about them
as temperature because that's the dominant effect. But there really

(32:39):
is a two dimensional diagram you have to keep in mind, right,
or just one dial, which is the bananas dial, right,
Like if things get more bananas, you know, if you
take a solid and put it under bananas conditions, it's
gonna melt right, right, Well, then the question is, because
there's a maximum temperature absolute hot Is there a maximum bananas?
Can you get to absolute banana? Is in the universe?

(33:00):
I don't know, you tell me. Is that basically what
this podcast is about, the search for absolute bananas, the
absolute state of bananas. That's the you know, most major
religions are after that state of enlightenment. We'll get there
one day, another hundred episodes or so. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's a journey. But yeah, so a quasma danas when

(33:22):
things get so bananas that even protons break apart. And
so you have this soup and you're saying that it's
so intense that actually if you try to like grow
this or have like a whole sun full of quasma,
it would be crazy, would be like super duper you
basically maybe even get a black hole. Yeah. I haven't
done the calculations, but it would be incredibly intense, and
the amount of energy to make a sun sized blob

(33:45):
of quasma would be astronomical. Absolutely, We've only ever made
super tiny amounts of it here on our colliders on Earth.
M M. All right, we'll get into whether we've seen
it and what it all means, but I guess, but
the main picture you're trying to paint is that it's
sort of like a quantum It's not so much as
super like a quantum mechanical soup, right, like, because quarks

(34:08):
can really be by themselves, so they need to sort
of be around gluons kind of for them to stick around, right,
And so it's very sort of quantum mechanical dependent. I
guess what I mean. It's like it's a quantum mechanical thing.
Is definitely a quantum mechanical thing. And one of the
reasons it's super fascinating is that we are forcing the
universe to reveal a different kind of thing that it

(34:29):
can do. You know, solids and liquids and gases. These
are all just like the dances of lots of tiny
particles operating together, and it's incredible what emerges, you know.
And so here we have forced the universe to show
us another trick that it can pull off. How many
phases are there? We don't know, right this is like
an idea that came about a few decades ago, and
we achieved it and improved it and are studying it.

(34:51):
We don't know how many different phases of matter there
might be and what each of them might tell us
about the most fundamental picture in the early universe. Yeah,
and I guess why. What I mean is that in
a quasma you can't really keep track of one court,
can you. It's like it's all sort of like bound
together in weird plant of mechanical ways, but not as
bound as in the inside of a proton, but it's

(35:12):
still sort of like, you know, it's all sort of entangled,
I guess, is what I mean. They're all bound together
and slashing about, and there's a huge amount of energy,
so you're constantly creating new corks and anti quarks and
then destroying them as well. So in that sense, he
has like a frothing pile of these particles. Yeah, and
it's hotter than anything that we've seen, right, even like
the inside of a neutron star is not as hot.

(35:34):
That's right. It was the champion in our what is
the Hottest Thing in the Universe? Episode? The neutron star
interior might get up to like a hundred billion degrees kelvin,
but cork glue on plasmas, we think, reach into the trillions,
and so it might actually be the hottest thing in
the universe, unless, of course, alien particle physicists are even

(35:54):
hotter than we are, and they've reached absolute banana. Maybe
they are bananas, which automatically makes them hot, I guess,
depending on how hungry you are hold on. If aliens
are bananas, then what's their favorite snack? Is it podcasters?
Let's hope not. Maybe they have a whole podcast where
they joke around about eating or what ortunists or physicists. Well,

(36:19):
I guess. Then the question is, can you have a
quasma cork gluon plasma naturally out in nature, Like can
you imagine anything having that like? Or would you have
to like maybe go inside of a black hole for that.
We don't know what's going on inside a black hole.
It's possible that you get that kind of thing there.
We also don't know what's going on at the heart
of neutron stars. It's also very hot and very dense.

(36:42):
Probably not hot and dense enough to make cork gluon plasmas,
but still uncertain. However, we do think that there was
a moment in the history of the universe when everything
was a cork gluon plasma, when that's all there was.
The whole universe was nothing but quasma. You mean, I
get the big Bank yes, very early on. Before there
were particles, before there were protons, before there were bananas,

(37:04):
there was quasma. All right, well let's get into more
of the Big Bang and whether, if not, we've recreated
this Coasma or corn blue on plasma here on Earth.
But first let's take another quick break. All right, we're

(37:29):
talking about Coasma, the latest um Marvel supervillain that we
just made up. All rights reserve. I think I think
it was one of the Infinity Stones, maybe the Quamas Stone.
You know. We got a question on Twitter yesterday about
how I laugh at your jokes and whether I'm actually
laughing every time or if I have a button eye
press over here to just like generate the same chuckle

(37:52):
over because my jokes are so bad? Is that the idea?
I don't know, Or maybe I just laughed the same
exact way every time and it sounds suspicious like a laughter.
I see. Well, I have a button right here, It's
my whoa button. Whenever you say something mind blowing, I
just go whoa. The same something should sample about to

(38:14):
make a song just based on my laughing and your
what yeah? Yeah, I will not be listening to that.
It makes me very queasy in klasmic. Alright, we're talking
about couark glue on plasma, which is I guess sort
of like a fifth state of matter or would you
say it's still part of the fourth state of matter.
It's definitely its own state of matter. How many states
of matter there are is another question, you know, like

(38:37):
does a Bose Einstein condensate count as a state of matter?
Some people would say yes, So the number of states
of matter is a little bit fuzzy. But this is
definitely its own thing, right, And you said that it
doesn't happen or maybe it probably doesn't happen at the
center of neutron stars, which get up to you know,
hundreds of billions of kelvin, which is kind of crazy
to me because a neutron star is basically the like

(38:59):
the hottest thing in the universe right now, and it's
like one step removed from a black hole. So you're saying,
like a quark glow and plasma basically sort of can't
really happen naturally in the universe. Yeah, if you think
humans aren't natural, then it can't really happen naturally. We
think that at the heart of neutron stars there are
still neutrons right that the protons and electrons have been

(39:20):
squeezed together, so the electron is forced inside the proton
and basically converts it into a neutron, and that what
you have is a very powerful soup of neutrons with
very strong forces that we struggled to calculate and to
understand the pressure and the density and all that stuff.
We did an episode recently about Nicer, which is a
telescope trying to study the interior of neutron stars, specifically

(39:42):
to answer that question what's going on? And it's so
hard because the strong force is really tricky to do
calculations with. But we don't think that the pressure and
temperature inside a neutron star are hot enough to actually
break those neutrons up. So you have like essentially one
big object. You can think of a quark glowing plasma
sort of like a super particle, where all the quarks
are all bound together into one big object because they're

(40:03):
all feeling each other. Or conversely, you could think of
like a proton is like a tiny little serving of
quirk gluon plasma. Make a little teaspoon of it. What
about like in a supernova, like if a star explodes.
Could you have a little bit of a quasma moment momentarily,
at least potentially, you could get collisions. Right. The way
to make a cork glue in plasma is to recreate
super high energy collisions, and we do that here on Earth,

(40:27):
and so it's possible that there are cork gluon plasmas
produced in supernovas. It's also possible that there's tiny amounts
of corklu and plasma produced when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere. Remember,
super high energy protons or iron nuclei are hitting the
atmosphere all the time. So you strike it just right
and you might get flashes of cork gluon plasma. Whoa,

(40:47):
we could be like being rained down upon by quasima
exactly Quasma rain. I think that was a song by
Prince right. Well, the artists formally know just like quasma
is the state of matter formally known as the cork
gluon plasma exactly. We always sounds so hip yeah, so um,

(41:08):
I guess you're saying it happens in collisions, and so
you make it basically at the particle collider they're engineering,
we do make it, but you can't make it by
just smashing protons together. There aren't like enough quarks and
gluons in there. What you need is really much more
like a soup that we make it when we collide
heavier stuff. Our collider is capable not just of accelerating protons,
but also of accelerating things like lead or gold nuclei.

(41:31):
You strip away all the electrons again just by heating
it up. You have like a gold or lead plasma.
You take all the positively charged stuff you put into
the accelerator, you zip that around a really high speed,
and you smash it together, and you make this crazy
soup of quarks and gluons all smashed together. And so
people have been doing that for decades and trying to
see if we can make a cork gluon plasma. Very

(41:54):
briefly in the collider. M I guess if you just
smash protons together, like but proton smashes another proton, you
will get sort of a soup of courts and fluance. Right.
It just maybe won't last very long or I'll just
fly off. Yeah, there's not really enough there to make
the density you need. You can't break protons open by
smashing them against each other. That's what we do. When

(42:15):
you get cork quirk interactions directly, you don't really get
this new state of matter the same way like you know,
two particles don't make a gas. To define this state
of matter, you need the temperature and you also need
the density, and then it has to follow these new
rules of this state of matter. They're like equations that
define what happens in this state of matter. So to
quirks and sort of like float around freely. That doesn't

(42:36):
happen when you just have two protons smashing into each other,
and maybe even like trading quirks. The quirks don't have
a chance to like muck around and do all sorts
of interesting things that they couldn't otherwise do. I see,
because when you're smashing I guess, as you smashed two protons,
you really only have six corks to play with. And
I think what you're saying is that, you know, six
courts still make a quasma. It's sort of like if

(42:56):
you have two cars, people can swap cars, and that's
what happens when two pro putons collide, Like two quarks
go over here, two quarks go over there. What we're
talking about is more like you got two busses and
everybody gets off the bus and has a party. And
that's pretty different than people just like swapping cars. And
so it's the physics of that party between the quarks.
When the quarks can really fly around free, that makes
it a quark glue on plasma, right, And you're saying

(43:19):
that you can do that in the collider by smashing
gold nuclei together. And so what's going on, like this
nuclei smashing to each other and all the protons and
neutrons inside of those nuclei break apart, and then you
have that quirk party for a little bit. That's what
we think happens, but it's really tricky to figure out
if that's what's actually happening, because even if you don't
get a quark gluon plasma, when you smash two nuclei together,

(43:41):
you get a big mess, right, you destroy both nuclei,
you get protons and neutrons and all sorts of other
things happening. It's sort of like you have, you know,
eighty proton collisions on top of each other. All sorts
of crazy stuff is made. So to figure out whether
a quark glue on plasma is made or another big
kind of mess. Was a big challenge and required a
lot of subtle so of statistical analysis and thinking about

(44:02):
like what that quarkloo on plasma does for the brief
nanoseconds that it exists, and how you can tell that
it was there. Right, that's the other thing about it,
because it's a little weird that you would call it
a state of matter because it basically doesn't last, right,
It's not actually a state. It's more like a like
an explosion maybe, or like a crash that you you know,
pause in the middle kind of because you know, you form,

(44:23):
you smash these gold nuclei together, everything sches together. Then
the quarks are sort of like floating around briefly, but
it's so crazy and bananas that it just all flies
off and explodes immediately, right, almost not quite immediately. We
think it lasts for long enough to do some sort
of quirkloow on plasma e kind of stuff, And that's
why we concluded that it's there. That's a real thing,

(44:44):
that it actually is a state of matter, because it
lasts long enough to produce effects that you can't otherwise get.
You're right, that doesn't last very long and unless it's
surrounded by other corkloo in plasma, you will definitely just
expand and cool and then just turn into a bunch
of particles. So it doesn't last for very long, but
it does last long enough to do unique things things
you can't see without a cork gluon plasma. And that

(45:06):
time is short but not zero, right like maybe for
a brief you know, Nana. Second, it follows the rules
of a coasma exactly. And one of the things that
a quasm that can do that a plasma cannot is
that it seems to have, for example, a very very
low viscosity. Like these things act like sort of super fluids.
Works can move from one side to the other without

(45:26):
facing sort of any resistance at all, which is very
confusing because quarks have very strong interactions with each other.
And so this is like property that just sort of
like emerges when you have all these quirks in this
crazy condition, take a party, like everyone becomes more uninhibited.
They do exactly you're saying, it last like a nanosecond.

(45:47):
How long does it last? And when you do it
in the collider, it doesn't last for very long. We're
definitely talking about times less than a pico second. The
precise lifetime depends a little bit on the energy and
on what went in. But we're talking about super duper
tiny amounts of time, less than tend of the minus
twelve or ten of the minus fifteen seconds. But I
guess you could still claim that for that brief amount
of time, you created a court luan plasma. Yeah, exactly,

(46:10):
because we've seen evidence of it. Like they can do
calculations and they predict what a qurkloan plasma can do,
like this low viscosity condition or the kind of particles
that shoot out of a cork luon plasma. Corklan plasma
has its own special density, and so it tends to
like stifle particles from flying out. If you didn't have
a quarkloan plasma, you tend to see like more particles
flying out at weird angles. And if you don't see that,

(46:32):
it suggests you probably did see a quark luan plasma
like quenches the emissions of some of these particles, and
that's one of the signatures that led them to conclude
that they really had created this thing at the large
hage On colider m. I see, it's like if if
you didn't have the quasma, things would just fly off,
like they would just kind of bounce off of each other,

(46:53):
all this stuff. But if you sort of do click
into this new state of matter, at least briefly, it's
going to change how all the things. The thing actually
explodes exactly, and it does other really weird stuff like
changing into a new kind of matter changes also the
temperature of the thing in a really weird way, because remember,
temperature depends not just on the velocity of the objects

(47:15):
inside you, but also in the number of ways that
they can wiggle. If you've done any statistical physics, you
know the temperature is related to the number of degrees
of freedom, which means like can you have vibrations? Can
you have rotations? And a quark gluon plasma has more
ways to wiggle because you've broken the particles up into
their constituents. And so actually what happens when you create
a quark gluon plasma is that the temperature goes up

(47:36):
briefly because now you have more degrees of freedom, more
ways to wiggle. So the temperature is like has a
new definition and it goes up, and then of course
it very rapidly cools, and so there are these very
strange thermal effects of a quark gluon plasma. It gets
like even more banana exactly, it approaches maximum banana. And

(47:56):
in the end, it's something that we want to understand
because we do think that our whole universe came from
a cork gluon plasma that in the very early days,
the energy density was so great that before protons and
neutrons were made, everything was just this big soup of
quarks and gluons, and you know, how they came together
to make particles really determines how the universe is shaped.

(48:17):
Like the reason we have protons and neutrons, the reason
the protons and neutrons have the mass that they do
is because the power of the strong force to bind
them into these particles. So it's something we'd really like
to understand, something which will really reveal the whole structure
of the matter of the universe that we enjoy. Right
Like I think if you sort of like hit the
rewind button on the universe, you start with now, which

(48:38):
is that things are solid and liquid and gas and
some plasma here and there. But as you turn back
time towards a big bang, closer to the Big Bang
things sort of, we're all plasma and even closer to
the origin of the Big Bank than things were quasma. Right,
that's what I think what you're saying. It's like before
there was plasma and stuff and planets and things like that,
everything was just a big quark glue on soup. Yeah,

(49:02):
and who knows what's beyond that was like what's beyond quasma?
Maybe banasma? There you go, Can we can we get
credit for coining it? I don't know it's going to
create a coin asma, big banasma, big banasma. That's the
new theory of the origin of the universe. But jokes aside, Yes,
exactly as you crank back time, you go up in temperature,

(49:25):
and so you reveal that the universe went through these
phase transitions, and we think that there are even more
beyond quasma where the rules of the universe are effectively different. Right,
in every different temperature regime, the rules of how things
work tend to change, right, you know, the same way
that like the rules of solids and gases and liquids
are different from plasmas and quasmas and Banasma's the effective

(49:47):
laws of the universe are different. We don't know what
the fundamental laws are. If there's like the highest temperature,
there's the deepest level, or it's just like an infinite
stack of effective laws. But we'd like to learn what
those laws are and understand as far back as we can, right,
because I think you do have sort of ideas for
this banasma, right like closer to the Big Bang is
kind of when like even the quantum fields start to

(50:09):
melt together, right, Yeah, exactly, the very rules of quantum
theory change, and for example, the weak force is no
longer weak. Like a quasma exists when there's already a
Higgs field that tells the corks how much mass they have.
At some time the very early universe, at very very
high temperatures, the Higgs field hasn't even relaxed to its
low level, and so particle masses aren't even well defined.
At some point, all particles have zero mass in the

(50:31):
very very early universe, so the effective laws of how
things work are completely different. That's not something we can
achieve in our collider today, of course. Well, but it's
interesting to think that maybe you know, right now you're
smashing these things together and you're get into this quart
gluon quasma. Is it possible you think that one day
you'll smash things together so much that you'll actually like
get to that banasma level where even the quantum fields

(50:54):
are getting melted together. It's possible because cork could be
made of even smaller particles. They could be bound together
by something else. So if one day we can smash
open corks and see what's inside them, then eventually maybe
we could smash corks together at such high speeds that
we can make a plasma of whatever is inside corks.
We have no idea if those particles exist, and what

(51:16):
energy would be required to make that sort of next
level plasma, we don't know, but in theory it's probably possible,
And you know the structure of the universe, it seems
to be hierarchical. It seems like as you get down
to the smaller and smaller pieces, it's always made of
something smaller, which is made of something smaller. Very unlikely.
We are now at the smallest level, so it's very
likely that corks are made of some smaller things. So

(51:37):
in principle, that state of matter can't exist and probably
did exist in the very early universe. Well, it must have. Right, Yeah,
we don't know, but we don't understand, and at some
point our whole theory of quantum mechanics breaks down because
gravitational effects start to be important because the energy density
is so high. At that point, you need a theory
of quantum gravity, which we just don't have. And so

(51:57):
that's when you get to like absolute hot and beyond that,
we just can't even predict what matter or you know,
the universe itself would be like right right, you need
banessma theory to peel away and the secrets of the
universe to slice it up into your very hot oatmeal,
slip it through that, you know, moment of truth. And
it's really the forefront of particle physics because it's the

(52:18):
thing that we understand the least. The strong force is
the strongest force, but it's also the hardest to probe
because it's so powerful that almost everything around us is
already tightly bound by the strong force. For example, electrodynamics
has been tested like one part in a billion, the
weak force has been tested like one part in a
few thousand. The strong force has only been tested to

(52:38):
like one or two parts in a hundred. So it's
the thing that we understand the least, but it's maybe
the most important part of the universe. So corkol and
plasma is super awesome because it lets us test our
understanding of the strong force. Right, Yeah, it's pretty amazing that, like,
as humans who are the product of the universe, we've
been able to recoil at least you have been able
to recreate, you know, conditions in the universe that are

(53:01):
closer to the Big Bank than anything it existing out
there basically in the universe, Like the universe itself hasn't
been able to go back to that state probably, but
like humans playing around with um, some magnets can. Yeah,
we think that the cork gluon plasma probably existed like
ten to the minus ten seconds after the Big Bang,
and very briefly only for like maybe ten to the

(53:23):
minus six seconds. So it's been a long time since
the universe has been making this stuff. So yeah, maybe
it's sort of like nostalgic. It's like, oh, I remember
that that was cool or mazed going what are you doing?
You're gonna kill us all one of the two maybe,
but we'll learn something along the way. All right, Well,
that's some cork gluon plasma, which we are calling in

(53:45):
this episode coasma. Again, we totally made that up. And
don't go to a physics conference with a paper titled
quasma unless you, I guess give us credit. Right, Yeah,
good luck with that. But it is interesting to think
about kind of all the different states of matter that
matter and energy in the universe can take, right, It's
almost like it likes to um play around at different levels. Yeah,

(54:06):
and it's sort of another way to explore the universe.
Instead of taking one particle apart and looking inside of it,
and then looking inside of that one, It's like, let's
make the universe reveal the different kind of dances that
it can do. What happens when you take a lot
of particles and squeeze them together. What mathematics emerges that
can describe that in a simple way. It's mind blowing
to me that it's even possible. You know, why are

(54:27):
there simple mathematical rules to describe how gases work. It
should be incredibly complicated. It should be like chaos that
emerges from string theory. It should be impossible. But for
some reason, our universe is describable in terms of simple
mathematical rules. At lots of different levels, and here we
have found another one. Right. Well, it's because these forces

(54:48):
have sort of different ranges, right, Like, some forces are
important at the microscopic level and some forces are more
important at the at the grander level. And so you
you can have these sort of rules that describe it, right,
you can, But it's not always possible. You know, why
are hurricanes hard to describe because it's a chaotic combination
of lots of smaller things. Even if there is just

(55:09):
one rule describing how drops interact, it's not trivial to
describe the motion of billions and trillions of drops altogether.
It's chaotic. It's hard to model. But sometimes it's not.
Sometimes you can find a simple mathematical story that summarizes
the important bits and ignores all the details. Why that
happens is a mystery to me, but I'm glad that
it does. Yeah, we'll leave it to the hurricane plasma

(55:31):
or harasma physicist to figure out. I think we've coined
enough terms for today, so we better wrap up. We
reach our allowance. Our heart is gonna be like, all right, guys,
wrap it up, all right. Well, the next time you
look up at the sky, or the night's car, even
the day's guy. Think about all the quasimas that's being
may be formed out there and raining down upon you,
showering you with little bits of matter that hasn't existed

(55:54):
since the beginning of the universe. And think about all
the amazing and crazy things that our universe can do,
and all those things that you can taste on the
buffet of the universe's physics. Thanks for joining us, See
you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel

(56:16):
and Jorge explained. The Universe is a production of I
Heart Radio. For more podcast from my Heart Radio, visit
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listen to your favorite shows.