What's a proton made of?

Daniel and Jorge crack open the basic building block of matter and find.. anti-matter!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, or hey, do you know what you are made
out of? I think I'm mostly made out of bananas
and granola and cereal. That's my main diet, all right.
Well what's that stuff made out of? Right right? I
think it's made out of protons, neutrons and electrons, right right,
And then those are made out of those are made

(00:29):
out of um up corks, down corks, and also electrons.
All right. That's like, what's the other one percent of me?
Made out of? All sorts of weird exotic particles? Now
I feel exotic. You call me exotic, Orge, I said,
I don't have any exotic tigers. Well it's not just you,

(00:52):
it's everyone and everything. It's actually normal to be exotic.
Every tiger has exotic particles. Hi am jorhand made cartoonists

(01:14):
and the creator of PhD comics. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm
a particle of physicist, and I'm made of the same
particles that you are. That I am the same, like
we share the same particle. I thought my particles were
exclusive to me. Are we going to break? Your electrons
and my electrons are all just different wiggles on the
same electron field. Man, Oh, we're all connected, dude. Yeah,

(01:37):
we're all just different fluctuations in the same quantum field. Well,
this is me waving at you with I guess the
wave function in the same field. Yeah, you're not just
waving at me. You are a wave at me. We
are We're all waves. We are all waves exactly. But
welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explained the Universe,
a production of I Heart Radio in which we wave

(01:59):
our around the mysteries of the universe, talking about the deepest,
biggest questions, the nature of reality, what everything is made
out of, how it all works, what science has figured
out about the tiniest little particles and the largest galaxies
and everything in between. We don't shy away from the biggest, deepest, scariest,
most interesting questions that define the nature of human existence

(02:22):
and the context of our lives. We dig right into
them and explain all of them to you. That's right,
because it is an exotic and also exotic universe, full
of interesting mysteries and questions and lots of interesting kinds
of particles and celestial bodies to think about, to wonder about,
and for us to discover. That's right. It's a crazy,
beautiful universe. Out there with so many weird things, and

(02:44):
we would like to understand all of them, not just
like one or two of them, or even nine of them.
We want to figure it all out because we want
to have a deep, comprehensive understanding of the entire universe.
We're greedy that way. Yeah, Physicists are just basically pulled
him on collector, Right, you got to catch them all.
You can't leave any Pokemon ball unturned, that's right. And

(03:06):
sometimes we want to evolve our particles from the lowest,
most boring particles to the weird, exotic forms that we
can use to defeat our neighbors. Yeah. And in this episode, Daniel,
we're sort of stretching the maybe the limits of these
quantum fields because we are more far apart than usual.
This is an interesting international version of Daniel and Horge
explaining the universe. That's right. This is late night Coast

(03:28):
to Coast with Daniel and Jorge. Yeah, we just need
that groovy jazz music maybe in the background. Can we
work that in? But you're right. I'm coming to you
live from Copenhagen, Denmark, where I'm spending my summer on
a mini sabbatical doing research at the niels Bore Institute,
Nice Neil's Bore. He's a pretty big name in physics. Right.
He discovered sort of the structure or the initial structure

(03:50):
of the atom. That's right. He had a big role
to play in the early derivation of quantum mechanics, which
is one reason why it's called the Copenhagen interpretation of
quantum mechanics. And here at the niels Borg Institute is
sort of an old fashioned physics institute. Back in the day,
if you had an institute named after you, you were
also in residence there. So some of the buildings here

(04:11):
at the niels Bore Institute are like his apartments, and
then later they all got turned into graduate student offices,
some of which have like his bathtub in them. That's
where he yelled eurek and ran down the street naked. Right,
Is that is that the famous bathtub? That's right? Am
I thinking of another discoverer? No? I think every science
story involves a bathtub and somebody yelling eureka, well naked,
every single one. And if it doesn't, it should because

(04:34):
because why not, that's right, because you need the drama. No,
it's an exciting place to be if you've seen the
play Copenhagen. That's all about Niels Born Werner Heisenberg's conversations
about vision and quantum mechanics during World War Two. It
takes place here the Niels Born Institute and the park
right behind it, so it's a place that sort of
steeped in history. So yeah, it's a nice place to
come and do some science. So are you recording this

(04:57):
from Niels Boor's closet or are you actually in his bathtub?
I'm in Neil's bors podcast booth. Of course, he was
a famous podcaster back in the day. That's right. You
cann't shut that guy up. And she's loved to talk.
He invented everything quantum mechanics, structure, the atom, podcasting. Also,
he was the first Instagram star. I heard, the first
TikTok dancer. He definitely was not boring. He's a man

(05:19):
of many talents. But anyways, we're here to talk about
the universe and try to explain it to you because
it is a pretty interesting universe. And one of the
biggest questions in this universe that we can ask is
what are we made out of? Like what are humans?
What are people? What are dogs? What are watermelons? What's
it all made out of? And Daniel, we've made a
lot of progress, not just in this podcast, but as

(05:42):
a human species trying to figure that out, and we've
broken things down pretty well upting out. Yeah, I am
impressed with how far we have gotten. Several hundred years ago,
we knew that things around us were made out of, like,
you know, about a hundred basic elements, which is already
huge progress. Right, to describe all those things you mentioned
in terms of just a hundred building blocks is a
huge step. Right. It could have been an infinite number

(06:04):
of building blocks that describe all the things around is
it could have been that every kind of thing had
its own particle. Watermelons could have been made out of
little water melon ETOs, for example. But in our universe, weirdly,
everything can be built out of a smaller set of stuff.
So even being able to describe the universe around you
in terms of like a hundred elements is a huge deal.
But we have made progress since then, Right, we have

(06:26):
shown that those elements are made out of just a
few smaller particles from which you can make lithium and
technetium and uranium, all with the same ingredients. So, yeah,
we have made a lot of progress. And as you say,
it's not just about the universe around us, it's a
very personal question. We are asking what we are made
out of? What is the recipe for me? And I

(06:46):
like to think that I'm made out of the right stuff.
I don't know about you, or at least the mostly
right stuff. Sometimes I feel like there's a bit of
wrong stuff in there, but mostly the right stuff, mostly
wrong right. It is a pretty interesting arc for sort
of our our journey as a human species to sort
of think that there's all this stuff around is it's
made out of that looks really different and looks very

(07:06):
varied and wonderfully diverse. But it turns out that as
we dig down deeper and deeper, it's all sort of
made out of the same stuff. First it's made out
of the same elements and there and then the same particles,
and so right now we have a pretty good picture
of where we stand in terms of what we're made
out of. We do have a sort of a good picture.
We've made a lot of progress. As you say, we

(07:27):
boil it down from like a hundred elements to just
the proton, the neutron, and the electron. And now, of
course we know the proton and neutron are just made
out of a couple of quarks, So it sort of
seems like, wow, we've really narrowed this down. Everything we
are made out of has only three basic ingredients. But
you know, there's a twist to this story. As we
dig down deeper, we discover that the answer is not

(07:49):
quite as simple as we thought, and that some of
those other weird particles we see in colliders and in
strange exotic cosmic rays from space might also be playing
a role in making us up. Yeah, because I think
you know, as we've talked about in this podcast a lot,
and then people who have read our books, we know
that the like the atoms and elements, they are made
out of protons and electrons, and protons are made out

(08:10):
of quarks. But you're saying some more complicated pictures than that.
That's right. It turns out the deeper you dig, the
weirder we are to be. On the podcast, we'll be
asking the question what's inside a proton? Daniel, I'll assume
I'm not going to find tigers, exotic tigers, or bananas

(08:31):
and crenulas in there. You might just actually you might
tigers and anti tigers. Oh my. But when I was
a kid, I always wondered, like, what were the particles
themselves made out of? Like I had this idea that
a proton was like a scoop of particles stuff. You know,
It's like a tiny little spinning ball made out of

(08:52):
some particle stuff. And really the question was, then what
was that stuff? What is like the basic clay of
the universe out of which you built these particles, Because
that's more interesting than you know, like the fact that
you happen to take a scoop of it to make
a proton. So to me, that was always the more interesting,
deeper question. Well, it's kind of interesting that, you know,
we me in high school, we sort of learned about

(09:12):
protons and electrons, and then you learned that protons are
made out of quarks. And it feels like you call
these things particles, but really they're made out of smaller
particles inside of them. Yeah, exactly. Everything is just shells
within shells within shells until we get down to the
smallest particles we know of, which we think of as
tiny little dots, which contain all sorts of weird energy
and interactions. So it's sort of like we are made

(09:35):
out of legos, and then those legos are made of
smaller legos, and those legos are made of smaller legos.
So the proton is a pretty basic particle. But I
guess the question we're asking today is what's inside a proton?
And as we talked about, most people think that it's
just quarks inside of them, but maybe there's more to them.
So we were wondering how many people out there have
thought about what is exactly inside of a proton, whether

(09:55):
or not it's just quarks or not. So it's usual
Dina went out there into the Internet to ask people
what is inside a proton? So thank you to everybody
out there in the Internet who was willing to volunteer,
And if you would like to participate for future episodes,
please don't be shy right to us. It's fun, there's
no pressure, you'll have a good time, and you'll hear
your voice on the podcast. So please send us a

(10:19):
note to questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com. So
think about it for a second, what do you think
is inside a proton? It was what people had to say.
I think it was free quarks but I don't know
which ones. Isn't that two plus quarks and on minus court.
It's been a long time since I read any of
the stuff, so I forgot a lot. But I think
that's it. I know that there are sub atomic particles

(10:42):
inside a proton. I think you don't you break it
open and find isn't it quarks inside? I can't remember
it's glue ones or something. There's something inside it. I
don't know. I'm just gonna say in general quirks. I
know that there's some up ones and some down ones,
and some strange intron's and I don't know which ones. Proton,

(11:02):
it's uh a particle, and well, together with neutron and
electron makeup the atom. Um, that's it. I think a
proton being a sub atomic particle is just a oscillation
of the electro weak force or something like that. Well,

(11:23):
in a proton, you have three quarks. I can't remember
if it's two up quarks and a down quirk or
two down quirks in an up quark, but there are
three of them. And from reading I've recently read this
really amazing book called We Have No Ideas by these
guys called Daniel and Joe, maybe you've heard of them.
I don't mean a name drop. There's a lot of
energy wrapped up in the bonds holding those quarks together.

(11:45):
So I'm gonna go with three quarks and a ton
of energy in the bonds. All right, some pretty consistent answers.
I feel like everyone who maybe listen to this podcast
has this pretty basic idea that what's inside of a
proton are basically three quarks and yeah, mostly hands down
people thought quirks and a few glue ons to stick

(12:06):
them together. There's even a nice plug for a great
sounding book in They're called We Have No Idea that
tells everybody all about the mysteries of the universe. Oh yeah,
what is this book about? And four are the two
handsome gentlemen that wrote it. It was gost written by us,
but it looks like it was written by two handsome gentlemen.
It's all about everything we don't know about the universe,
all the big open questions that science still has not

(12:28):
figured out, that scientists on the very forefront of knowledge
are digging down into the minds of truth that try
to understand. It's a fun book all about physics with
hilarious cartoons drawn by Jorge, and you should check it out.
It's called we have no idea. Yeah, at least one
of our listeners read it, according to this sample of responses,

(12:48):
but most people seem to have this idea that protons
are made out of good three quarts. So maybe Daniel
has started with that, what are the basics of what
we know about what's insidet a proton? That's right. The
first answer, this sort of best approximate answer to what's
inside of proton is exactly what our listeners have said,
which is three corks. Right, you take two up corks
and one down cork, and you put them together and

(13:11):
you make a proton. And that's already sort of fascinating
and weird because you know, the proton has charge plus one, right,
is the opposite charge of the electron, which is of
course charge minus one. So how do you get three
corks to add up to a charge of plus one. Well,
it means that the corks themselves have weird fractional charges,

(13:33):
like the up cork has an electric charge of plus
two thirds and the down cork has an electric charge
of minus one third. So you take two up corks
for a total charge of four thirds, and then you
add a down cork which has a charge of minus
one third, and boom, it adds up to one the
charge of the proton. And I always thought that was weird, Like,

(13:55):
how exotic to have particles with fractional charges, you know,
two thirds words minus one third? How strange is that? Right,
that's weird because like one third, it's it's not an
even numbers, like it's a it's an even fraction, but
it's it's one of these sort of infinite numbers. Right, Yeah,
it is weird. And you might think, well, you could
have just defined the charges of the proton and the

(14:17):
electron to be plus three and minus three, right, because
then the upcork would have charged plus two and the
down corp would have charged minus one. So in that
sends you would avoid like any fractional charges. But the
weird thing is that we don't see any other intermediate values,
Like we don't see particles that have charge one in

(14:38):
two thirds or minus four thirds or something like that.
We only see integer charges sort of the macroscopic level.
The proton, the electron, you know, the neutron has charged zero.
But they are made out of particles that have fractional charges,
so they just seem to always add up to these
integer values, which is kind of weird. Yeah, it's weird
also that it adds up to like plus one, exactly

(14:59):
plus one, which just happens to be the opposite of
the charge of the electron, like exactly the same exactly,
because the electron is not made of quarks, right. The
electron is made out of the electron as far as
we know, it's not made of anything smaller. So the
fact that the corks add up to exactly plus one,
which balances the electron, that's totally necessary for chemistry, right,

(15:20):
for the hydrogen atom to form. But according to our theory,
those are very different things. You're balancing completely different ingredients,
and they happen to exactly balance, and in our theory
that's sort of an accident. We have a parameter in
the standard model for the electric charge and another one
for the charge of the quarks, and there's no reason
they have to balance, but they somehow do. And that's

(15:41):
a hint, right, that's a clue that says that something
is going on here that you haven't really figured out.
There's some connection between the corks and the leptons. The
electron that we don't understand. But that's a mystery for
another day. But I guess maybe the basic takeaway is
that inside of a proton, the basics of a proton
involved is having three quarts inside of him, two up

(16:02):
works and one down. Right, that's the basics, and for
most things it will do. But as soon as you
take a closer look, you realize that can't be the
whole story. There must be something else going on in
the proton, because just these corks by themselves can't explain
the way the proton is really it has some strange behavior. Well,

(16:23):
first of all, look at the mass of the proton.
Like the proton wags one giga electron voult. That's like
a billion electron volts, but it's made out of quarks
whose masses are much much smaller than like a thousand
times smaller. There are a few million electron volts. So
how do you make something out of millions of electron

(16:44):
volts and end up with a billion electron volts? Right?
That's pretty weird. That's like taking a few million bucks
and turning into a billion dollars. Right, there's some sort
of like stock market magic pre so the proton is
much much more heavy than the things it's made out of,
which tells you something else must be going on. It
sounds like a dot com boom, which means where are

(17:05):
we headed for? Like a universal crash? Here Daniel with
the particles? That's right? Can I interest you in investing
in my proton fund? It's not a bubble. I promise
you it won't collapse. The proton is stable. Yeah, But
I think the basic mystery is that you know, each
cork weighs a little bit, but once you put them
together into a proton, suddenly the whole thing weighs a lot.

(17:26):
And so the question, I guess the first mysteries like
where does that extra mask come from? Yeah, Like, imagine
it takes three lego pieces and you put them together,
and all of a sudden, the thing you've made is
now like super duper heavy. It weighs a thousand pounds
or something. You wonder like, WHOA, what's going on? And
so already we know that there's something else in the proton,
something else that's contributing a lot to the mass of

(17:49):
the proton, and the number one missing element there, of course,
is the thing holding those corks together. Those the gluons
and the photons that are binding these corks together. Because
remember that corks are special in a really important way.
They feel the strong nuclear force. Strong nuclear force being
the strongest, the most powerful, and also the weirdest force

(18:12):
in the universe. And it's the source of like fusion
and fission and all those crazy sources of energy. It
powers the stars. It's the dominant force in the universe,
especially at these very short distances. And so to hold
these corks together into a stable particle called the proton,
you have to have a lot of energy, and that
energy is whizzing around inside the proton in the form

(18:33):
of gluons, right, So it's all this extra energy inside
holding the three quarts together that gives the proton. It's
extra mass. That's kind of how you explain how it
has so much more mass in the three corks. Yeah,
and you have to get away from the idea of
mass as just being the mass of the stuff it's
made out of. When you calculate the mass of an object,

(18:54):
it also gets mass from the energy inside it. So
there's energy inside and object. If you have to put
energy into those legos to combine them together to make
a proton. Then that energy also contributes to the mass
of the object. Right E equals mc squared. So as
you add energy to an object, it gains in mass.

(19:15):
And so the mass of the proton is not just
the mass of the stuff that makes it up, but
also the energy of those objects, and that energy is
represented in particle form in terms of gluons, these massless
but very energetic particles that are whizzing around between the corks. Yeah,
so the proton is not just a simple like three
building blocks stuck together at three quarks. It's like it's

(19:37):
got this weird sort of quantum mechanical the sea of frothing,
sea of other particles also holding the whole thing together.
And so let's get into what that c is made
out of, how exotic it is, and how we know
what's going on inside of the proton. But first let's
take a quick break. All Right, we're talking about what's

(20:08):
inside the proton, and Daniel, I assume it's not bananas
an ice cream metaphorically speaking, yet it's kind of bananas
an ice cream. I mean, we talked in the beginning
of the podcast about how, yeah, mostly the proton is
upquorks and down corks, And that's sort of conceptually true
that it's mostly that, but from like an accounting point

(20:29):
of view, it's mostly not. Right, most of the proton
is this c Most of the mass of the proton
comes from the energy of these gluons. So actually you
can sort of like ignore the upquorks and down corks
and say that mostly a proton is just like a
seeding mass of gluons, right right, Well, this is kind
of a difficult concept, maybe for a lot of people

(20:50):
who might be listening to this. Is like we're saying
like that the mass of the proton is mostly the
energy that it takes to bind them together. But then
you're saying that this energy sort of exists glass that
are kind of popping into and out of existence. Is
that what you mean, or is that mass sort of
just in the potential energy of holding these courts together. Yeah,
that's sort of a deep philosophical question, and people are

(21:11):
divided about how to think about it. You know. One
way to think about it is that you have the
real objects, the up corks and the down corks, and
they have these strong forces between them, like strong with
the capital s, like the strong nuclear force, and those
forces can be represented in two different ways. One is
as a field. You say like, well, there's a lot
of energy stored in the quantum fields of the strong

(21:34):
force inside the proton. So some people think of it
as like particles and the energy is the fields. And
from that point of view, you could also think of
the up corks and down corks. It's just like part
of the upcork and down cork fields. So you think
of it like, it's all fields, right, the forces are fields, matters, fields,
just energy stored in quantum fields. There's another way to
think about it in terms of the particles. You say, well,

(21:55):
the particles are the real thing. Up corks and down
corks inside the protons are particles, and then what about
the forces in between them? When you can also think
about those forces in terms of particles. And so when
we say like the energy is stored into the form
of gluons, what we mean is that the strong force
which holds all these particles together is exchanging gluons. Like

(22:17):
the energy of the strong force is used to make
these like virtual gluons which whiz back and forth. It's
just like another way to think about how to account
for that energy. Is it in the fields is it
in these virtual particles? Mathematically it's sort of equivalent philosophically,
makes you think about it conceptually differently because I imagine gluons,

(22:37):
I mean, they're not theoretical, like they have a mass
to them, right, Gluons have mass. Gluons are do not
have mass, but they are not theoretical there are a
real thing. But yet gluons are massless just like the photon,
but they have energy to them, right, They have energy
to them, and so they move at the speed of light,
just like photons do. And just like photons, they have energy. Right,

(22:58):
Photons canna have energy even though they have no mass, right,
But mass is energy, so I'm sort of right, sort of. Well,
it's especially complicated because photons don't have internal energy, right,
Mass comes from internal stored energy, and a photon doesn't
have any internal stored energy. Like you look inside a photon,
there's nothing there. All it is is the motion. So

(23:18):
you don't get mass from having like energy of motion.
You get mass from having internal stored energy, which is
why you can weirdly have a photon that has energy
but no mass. And also if you want to go
there for those listeners, really into the details of the
full equation for the equals mc squared has another term
to it equals mc square. The m there refers to
the rest mass of the particle. There's another term for

(23:40):
adding momentum of the particle. And photons, of course have
no rest mass because they can't ever be at rest,
So there's some fine print there. So then maybe can
you give us an explanation of how these gloss or
how this kind of stored energy gives something more mass?
Like is it that if I try to push a proton,
I also have to sort of, I don't know, create

(24:00):
these gluons interacting between the course, and that takes some energy,
and so that's why it's harder to push the proton.
You know, I wish I could, But it's not something
that physics really understands. It's just something we sort of describe.
Like we notice that if you have more energy stored
inside something, it has more inertial mass, Like this is
something we observe and describe. We do experiments. We see

(24:22):
that if you add internal energy to something, then it
takes a larger force to accelerate it. So somehow there's
a property of internal stored energy that it has inertia. Right,
that energy takes a force to move it around. And
I wish we had like a deep, fundamental understanding of
why that is. But it's just something we sort of
observe about our universe and describe. It's a massive mess

(24:46):
to try to it is. You have intuitively sort of
an understanding of why objects that have mass take a
force to accelerate them. Right, Like, if you want to
push on a really big rock and get it going,
it takes a big force. It's sort of hard to
wrap your mind and around, like why if you give
that the internal energy, if you like make the rock hot,
why should it take a larger force to accelerate it? Right?

(25:08):
But that's because you think of the rock in terms
of like the stuff inside of it. But really, mass
is not a measure of the stuff inside of it.
It's sort of more like an indicator of how much
energy there is inside something. That's really what mass is.
It's like a dial that tells you how much energy
is stored inside this thing, either in terms of the
masses of the particles it's made out of or the

(25:30):
energy between them. So then all this extra mass I've
gained the summer. That's really just energy, is what you're saying.
You could probably turn it into lots of energy for
it to go for a long, long jog. Yeah all right,
well so but you're saying, one interpretation of this extra
energy that's that's stored inside is as a sea of particles,
meaning like there's a throbbing kind of quantum sort of

(25:52):
volume that where particles are popping into and out of existence. Yeah,
every time two corks interact with each other, they're very
deep inside these like on states of the strong force.
Every time they interact with each other, you can think
of it like they're passing a gluon back and forth,
the same way you can imagine, like what happens when
two electrons repel each other is that they use a photon.
Because a photon carries the electromagnetic force, a gluon carries

(26:15):
the strong force. And so when two quarks interact with
each other, they're passing a gluon back and forth. And
so that means that the best picture of what's inside
a proton are like three tiny little dots and then
a huge swarm of these luons going back and forth
between and around all those corks, right, so then they're
creating gluons, and then the gluons trying to other particles. Right,

(26:36):
that's where this weird sea of particles come from. That's right,
because gluons don't just hang out. They're very energetic, and
they fly through space, and they are quantum objects, and
when they fly through space, they have a lot of
options for what they can do. They can just stay
a gluon do nothing. That's sort of the most boring,
most likely thing. But they can also turn in two
pairs of particles. Like the same way that a photon

(26:57):
flying through space can momentarily turn into an electron and
its anti particle, a gluon can do that. Also, a
gluon can turn into a cork and an anti cork.
It can also turn into two gluons. A Gluons feel
the strong force themselves as part of the reason the
strong force is so strong, because gluons make more gluons,

(27:18):
which make more gluons, And so these gluons don't just
fly through space simply. They create this flickering blob of
virtual other particles, quirks and antiquarks all the time. So
then is the idea. Then the three quarks inside of
our proton there constantly interacting with each other even though
they're just sitting there. They're constantly in a sort of
quantum mechanical virtual way, changing gluons all the time, and

(27:41):
those gluons are creating other particles, so there's like a
virtual party all the time inside of a proton, exactly
the same way that like an electron flying through a
field is surrounded by a swarm of photons, and those
photons are turning into like other pairs of particles all
the time, So every particle is actually surrounded by a
little frothing virtual massive particles, but especially where there's a

(28:05):
lot of energy, And so you're exactly right. These corks
are constantly interacting the same way like a proton and
an electron, which makes a hydrogen. Those two things are
bound together, which means they are interacting. They're held together
by their electromagnetic force in the same way quarks are
being held together. So they're interacting constantly, and the gluons
that are passing back and forth between them don't just

(28:25):
stay gluons. They turn into all sorts of crazy particles
all the time, right, So then that's sort of the
answer to the question of what's inside a proton is
that there's quarks, two up quarks, one down cork, and
also a whole bunch of other particles like gluons and
and all these other crazy particles that gluon's turned into.
That's right, and that's sort of the other side of
this story that we discovered that mostly we are made

(28:49):
out of a few simple particles up quirks, down corks,
and electrons, but there are other particles out there. In
our collider experiments and in cosmic rays, we discovered weird
particles muons and town halls and other corks, strange quirks
and charm corks and bottom quirks and top corks. And
we thought, well, what do we need those four We
don't really need those to make up ourselves, to make

(29:10):
up ordinary matter. But actually it turns out that those
do play a role in matter, because when the gluons
are flying around inside the proton, they can turn into
any of those particles. They can turn into a pair
of corks, right, any quarks, even bottom quarks, even top corks.
So that means that the proton has inside it not
just up corks and down corks, but a little bit

(29:30):
of everything, a little bit of everything. Everyone's coming to
the party, that's right. It's like when you go to
the kitchen and you just sort of like take all
the spices and you put them inside your dinner. Like
that's what the burton is. It's a little bit of
every flavor. It's an international pot pourri. And I guess
it's not just the proton. I mean any one of
these sort of composite particles that are made out of
multiple corks. Maybe they're also a big party in themselves. Yes, exactly.

(29:53):
Neutrons have a very similar story, and even particles that
we think are fundamental, right, like the electron on is
surrounded by a swarm of virtual particles. Even when it's
not like bound into a hydrogen atom together with a proton,
it's still interacting. It still has an e M field
around it, which means photons, and those photons are doing
the same thing these gluons are doing. They're turning into

(30:16):
muons and towels and corks and all sorts of crazy
stuff all the time. So there's some cool consequences of that, right.
It means that these particles don't just have matter in them,
because when a gluon turns into corks. They can't just
like create corks out of nothing. It has to at
the same time create antiquarks, or like a gluon can
become up anti up or bottom anti bottom or top

(30:39):
anti top. So what that means is that inside every
proton there's also antimatter. Whoa then wouldn't then antimatter touch
regular matter and then explode It does exactly. So what
happens is the gluon is flying along and it turns
into a particle anti particle pair, and then very quickly
those to annihilate back into a gluon. And that's what

(31:00):
happens when matter meets antimatter turns into a gluon or
photon or some other kind of energy carrying force particle.
If you have a lot of it around that it
very quickly turns into a lot of energy, and that's
very dangerous. Here they're just turning sort of back into
the gluon or back into the original photon they came from.
I see what you're saying is that it's a pretty

(31:20):
good party inside of it is definitely stuff happening. All right, Well,
let's get into how we actually know what's going on
inside the proton and what it could all mean for
our understanding about particles and what we're made out of.
But first, let's take another quick break. All right. Then

(31:48):
we're talking about what inside of a proton, and it's
a lot. It's not just a couple of quarks. It's
not just two up corks and a down cork. It's
also this virtual sea of quantum particles popping into and
out of existence, gluons turning into antimatter and other kinds
of particles. I guess a big question then that a
lot of people might have is how do we know
this thing? Is this something like we know out of theory,

(32:11):
or how we actually observed this crazy party inside of
the proton? Yeah, we have actually observed this crazy party.
We know that you and I are all made out
of all this stuff, including antimatter. And you know, I
remember learning this fact that, like WHOA, I'm partially made
out of antimatter. It made me sort of feel different
about like who I am and you know what I

(32:31):
made out of I really thought myself as solidly in
the matter category. Now I felt like, oh, those lines
are blurred a little bit. It's like when you grow
up and you start to have more conservative values and leadings.
You're like, whoa, what's going on? What's going on inside
of me? Yeah? Exactly. I won't say which political side
of the spectrum is matter and which side is antimatter,
but exactly everything turns out to be more complicated when

(32:52):
you grow up. Welcome to adulthood. You're partially made out
of antimatter. But yes, exactly. There's a long series of
experiments here dating back to the early nineteen hundreds that
have allowed us to probe what's going on inside our bodies.
And as usually, you have to be really careful with
the question you are asking, like, what do we mean
when we say we're made out of this stuff? You know,

(33:13):
because in science you can only do experiments. You can't
talk about like what's there when you're not looking at it?
You can only talk about what are the results of
experiments you can do, And here, specifically, there's only one
kind of experiment we really can do, which is basically,
shoot particles at something and see what it bounces off.
So when we say, for example, what's inside a proton,

(33:34):
what we really mean is what happens if we shoot
particles out of proton? What does it bounce off of.
And we know that mostly it bounces off of up
corks because there's two of those in there, and sometimes
it bounces off of a down cork. And when we
say there are gluons and top corks and towels and
all sorts of stuff inside the proton, what we mean
is that sometimes when you shoot a particle out of proton,

(33:55):
it bounces off of a top cork or bounces off
of a towel. And so this comes from a long
line of really fascinating experiments, beginning with Ernest Rutherford, who
did this kind of experiment in the early nineteen hundreds.
He was the one that discovered that like the atom
has something inside of it called the nucleus. He shot
alpha particles at a sheet of gold and saw that

(34:15):
occasionally these things bounce right back, meaning that he found
like something hard inside the nucleus to bounce these particles
off of. And everything we've been doing in particle physics
for the last hundred years is basically an extension of
that one experiment, but zoomed in a little bit. So
like in the nineteen sixties we did these experiments called
deep in elastic scattering, where we shot electrons into the proton,

(34:39):
and what we saw there was that there were sort
of three hard nuggets you could bounce off of, and
those were the corks. That's how we know that there
are corks inside the proton. If you shoot really high
energy electrons inside them, the sort of bounced back from
three specific points for real, like you can take a
picture of inside of a proton kind of right, Like
you you shoot a bunch of particles electron at it

(35:00):
and you sort of get an image. On the other side,
you're saying that you can actually see these hard nuggets
of the corps inside of it. Yeah, it's sort of
like taking an image. Unfortunately, you can only shoot one
particle at an individual proton, so to really image it
the way you're describing, you would have to shoot like
a lot of particles at a specific proton, like hold
it in place or something. We can't do that because
once you shoot one electron at a proton, it blows

(35:22):
it up. You just get one measurement. But statistically we
can do it many many times over many protons and
just like count the number of electrons that bounce back,
you know, they indicate they hit something hard versus the
number of electrons that like went right through the indicates
that they sort of missed all the good stuff inside
the proton. And from all those calculations, so then we
can calculate like how many hard points are there inside

(35:44):
the proton. And so that's the same basic thing that
Rutherford was doing basically a hundred years ago, but now
we're just like doing it with higher energy and we're
doing it to the proton instead of doing it to
the atom. So it's it's sort of almost like an
X ray of the proton, but you have to do
it in bulk. Yeah, you have to do it involved.
And what we can do are specific calculations for like
what would happen if there were also a little bit

(36:05):
of bottom cork inside the proton, and what would it
look like if there was occasionally how particles inside the proton,
Because these particles are all different, they all would give
like a different reaction spectrum from the electrons you're using
to shoot inside there. So that's like one way we
can get a sense for what's inside the proton or
like X raying it with electrons, as you said, all right,

(36:26):
so that was in the sixties. So what's sort of
the cutting edge right now in terms of looking inside
of the proton. So people really want to understand in
detail what's going on inside the proton in terms of
how much anti matter is there. It's really sort of
exciting and cool to think that there is antimatter inside
of us, and we want to understand how much anti
matter is there and what kind is it specifically and

(36:48):
mostly interesting people want to know, like is there more
anti up corks or anti down corks inside the proton
or are there the same number? We figure like, you know,
a gluon has the same chance to turn into an
up anti up pair as it does to turn into
a down anti down pair, so there should be the
same amount of anti downs and anti ups inside the proton.

(37:12):
So those are the kind of questions people are asking now.
And there's a new experiment being going off for the
last couple of decades that's trying to understand exactly the
anti matter component of this sea of gluons and stuff
inside the proton. And so the experiment is called c Quest.
That's a pretty cool name. Sounds like a TV show
or the nineties cartoon. It is the name of a

(37:33):
TV show, And I don't know if the experiment or
the TV show came first. But this has nothing to
do with the ocean of water, right, It's like thinking
about the ocean of gluons, and so this is a
very different kind of sea than like underwater science fiction adventure. Right,
although technically water is made out of protons, which has
a sea of particles to really, all quests are sequence.

(37:56):
You're right, we're all from the ocean originally, and so
this experiment, it's a little bit different from the ones
they did in the sixties. Here, what they're doing is
they're taking the proton itself and they're smashing it into
other stuff. One reason for that is that they're doing
this experiment at Fermulab, and Fermulab is a place that's
good at accelerating protons. We used to have the largest

(38:17):
particle accelerator in the world. They're called the Tevatron, where
the top cork was discovered in So they're very good
at making protons and accelerating them. So they decided to
sort of reuse that and smash protons into stuff to
see is sort of what they turned into. The original
experiment was like X ray the proton by shooting electrons
at it. Here, it's like, take the proton and smash

(38:39):
it into stuff and see what comes out, and try
to deduce from what comes out what's inside the proton, right,
and so what have they found. So they've been doing
these experiments where they shoot protons at two different kinds
of stuff. One is a target just of hydrogen, which
is basically pure protons, and another is a target with deuterium,
which is a combination of photons and neutrons. And now

(39:02):
neutrons have a different mix of up corks and down corks, right,
they have more down corks than up corks, whereas the
proton has more up corks and down corks. So by
shooting it at hydrogen and then shooting it deterium, you
can get a sense by looking at the ratios for
like how much down corks there are and how many
up corks there are. So they smash protons into these

(39:23):
two different targets, and sometimes a cork in the proton
in your beam interacts with an anti cork in the target. So,
for example, maybe an up cork in the proton you're
shooting from your beam interacts with an anti upcork inside
the neutron or inside the proton and when that happens,
you can tell because it creates a photon because they annihilate,

(39:44):
and that photon sometimes creates like a muon anti muon,
And that's what this experiment looks for. It looks for
these pairs of muans and anti muons coming out of
these collisions, and by looking at those muans and their energies,
they can get a sense for like, oh, did we
hit an anti upcork or did we hit an anti
down cork? And so people expected to see the same
amount of anti down corks and anti upcorks inside the proton,

(40:07):
but what they found is that there's actually a lot
more anti down corks than anti up works. There's like
more anti down corks than anti upquorks inside every proton.
I think this is where it gets confusing, because you're
saying anti ups and I'm thinking anti up is just down.
But that's that's different than anti down, which is not up. Yeah, exactly,

(40:29):
it's anti in a different way. That's the sort of
confusing but also awesome thing about particle physics is that
there are all these reflections. Right, You're right that the
up and down are reflections of each other. But in
sort of like a different direction than the anti particle way.
And there's other reflections, right, Like the charm is like
another reflection of the up but in terms of particle flavor.

(40:50):
So there's like this multi layers, many faceted symmetries, and
particle physics can be hard to keep track of, right,
But I think what you're saying is that this experiment
sequence is trying some smashing protons and it's trying to
determine to the amount of antimatter inside of these protons.
And the weird thing is that you're seeing a lot
more antimatter of the kind that comes from down course

(41:12):
then from the antimatter that comes from up corks. And
that's weird. That's weird. It's not what we expected. Yeah,
we expected sort of a balance there, because you know,
where's the anti matter come from. It comes from gluons
and photons flying around inside the proton. It only exists briefly,
and we think that those luons should have the same
chance to create down cork type antimatter as upcork type

(41:33):
anti matter. Why would they prefer one to the other.
That's really strange, and it's a clue that something else
might be going on something we don't yet understand. So
it's a nice little like thread to pull on to
try to unravel some of the other mysteries of particle physics.
Guess that the weird thing is that it likes one
kind of antimatter and not another kind of antimatter. Is
that what you're saying. Yeah, it likes them both, but

(41:54):
it likes on more. And so that's a pretty interesting mystery.
But what does it all mean? What that tells about
what's inside of the proton? Well, it's interesting because the proton,
is we learned, is mostly gluons, right, mostly this energy
from the strong force. So if you want to understand
what's inside the proton, meaning what you and I are
made out of, you really have to understand the strong force.

(42:15):
And this is something we've been struggling with for decades
since we discovered the strong force. It's very weird and
very hard to understand. And one reason is because it's
so strong and it couples to itself, right, Like gluons,
they feel the strong force themselves. So every time you
create a gluon, you're creating the chances for more gluons,

(42:35):
and then those gluons can create more gluons and more
glue ones. The same is not true for photons, Like
photons do not feel electromagnetic forces right because they do
not have a charge. It's sort of like if the
photon had plus one or minus one electric charge and
it like created its own electromagnetic fields and crazy stuff
like that. So the strong force is very difficult to

(42:57):
deal with because anytime you do a calculation, you instantly
have to account for like infinities and infinities of gluons.
So we don't really know how to do calculations using
the strong force. It's much harder than calculations for electromagnetism.
So we can't answer simple questions about what would happen
if you put together quirks into a proton, Which means
that we need to look into nature to see what

(43:19):
actually happens and use that as a guide to say, well,
how should we build our theory what's going on with
the strong force. So to get a better understanding of
the strong force, we can't just like think about it
inside our heads and do computer simulations. We need to
actually go out into the universe and see what it's doing.
I think you're saying that looking inside of the proton
and discovering all these virtual particles and these gluons turning

(43:41):
into other things. It's sort of our window into how
these basic forces behave, and it's kind of our in
into understanding how they actually work. Yeah, we are watching
them at work because we don't understand how they work,
and so by watching them, hopefully we can get ideas
and glimmers for what's going on and how to just
gribe these things. You know, we have a mathematical tool

(44:02):
for describing the strong force, but it doesn't work very well.
We can't use it to make predictions and calculations. It's
sort of like impossible to use. It's like if somebody
told you how to calculate something, but there was like
an infinite number of steps. You say, well, that's not
very useful. I can't use that to do any calculations.
And so if we want to understand these things, You're right,
we have to look at them in action. We have

(44:23):
to watch them actually happen and hope to observe some trends,
some ideas which can help us come up with a
better model. When we can actually use to play with
theoretically and understand how these things work, well, then what's
on the on the horizon? I know, this experiment found
an interesting mystery, but are there any other experiments sort
of looking into what's inside of the proton? Yeah, so
these guys found interesting mystery. And I love this experiment

(44:45):
because they're sort of like a scrappy bunch. They don't
have a lot of money, so they like repurposed stuff
from other experiments, you know, like they used old scintillators
left over from another lab, and old particle detectors left
over from another experiment, and iron slab is used from
the fifties in the Colombia, And so they sort of
like build this experiment from spare parts, which is really
pretty cool. And they're doing it again. They're making a

(45:08):
new experiment called spin Quest. Spin Quest is going to
reuse most of the same parts, but it's gonna pro
even deeper and try to understand another basic question about
the proton, which is why does the proton spin have
the value that it does. We can't understand the spin
of the proton from the spin of the corks, the
same way we can't understand the mass of the proton

(45:31):
just from the mass of the corks. This is the
same kind of question about the protons spin. So they're
gonna do an experiment to try to understand where the
spin of the proton comes from with the same people
in the same re used parts. Interesting, So, like, the
spin of the proton is like the sum of all
of the spins of all the things inside of it,
which is a lot, which is a big party. Yeah,
it's not just from the spins of the upcork and

(45:51):
down corks. Those gluons and photons also contribute to the
spin of the proton. So if we can measure the
spin of the proton really accurately, we can try to
get another handle for what the proton is made out of.
What this mystery cake that we're all built out of,
how it was actually cooked? Right? What are all these
exotic flavors and tasting that's right? I thought I was
pretty vanilla. It turns out from a little spicy, it's

(46:13):
a lot of tiger flavors in there. And I like
how you're like sitting on top of your LHC multibillion
dollar experiment and looking at these other experimenters coupling together
with spare parts and calling them cute. Yeah, you know
this thing only costs a couple of tens and millions
of bucks. What a fun little experiment, just like a
Saturday project. All right, Well, I think the main takeaway though,

(46:35):
is that we are not as simple as we thought
we were are. Even though we're only made out of
quarks and electrons, those corks that make up the proton,
there's a lot going on in there. It's not just
quarks inside of our protons and neutrons. It's also all
these crazy exotic particles, virtual particles popping into an out
of existence, influencing how much we weigh and how much

(46:57):
mass we have. And there's also a lot of antimatter
inside of us. Yeah, so these exotic particles that we
discovered in cosmic rays and in colliders are not just
an intellectual curiosity. They're not just clues about the organization
of the universe. They are also part of me and you.
They are part of the definition of what it means
to be a proton, which is the basic building block

(47:19):
of everybody and everything and every dinner you have ever had.
So exotic is a new normal. That's right. We're all exotic,
so nothing is exotic. Yeah, Well, we have all enjoyed
eating antimatter, for example. So I don't know if that
counts as exotic. I'll give it an anti review. I'll
give it an up review, which is really an anti
down review, which is actually a good thing. Right. That's

(47:42):
if particle physicists had built YELP, there would be up down,
anti up, pro down, all all of them. I'm down
with that, if you're up for it. Yeah, and you
can give it five to an infinite number of stars, yeah,
fractional stars. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that
and got you to think a little bit more by
what we're made out of, what you're made out of,

(48:02):
what that banana you're eating is made out of, what
the stars are made out of. Because it's a much
more interesting story than we think it is, and the
story continues. In this arc of understanding what we are
made out of. We have discovered many surprises along the way,
and I'm sure there are many more to come. I'm
just glad this podcast wasn't boring, even though you're at
the meals board exactly. I hope that it's annealed your

(48:26):
understanding of the non boring nature at the oh Man,
that was an extra I tried to put a little
Danish on it, all right, Well, enjoy your bath there
in the bathtub. Daniel, we'll talk to you next time
you hope you enjoyed that. Talk to you later. Thanks

(48:50):
for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The
Universe is a production of I Heart Radio or more
podcast For my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.