The following is a conversation with Don

Lincoln, a particle physicist at Firmeny

Lab, who has spent decades working at

the frontier of high energy physics.

This was a mind-blowing and inspiring

conversation. Don turned out to be one

of my favorite people to talk to about

physics. truly a unique mind with that

Richard Fineman ability of taking very

complicated ideas and explaining them

simply without losing any of the

essential brilliant insights at the core

of those ideas. This is the Lex Freedman

podcast. To support it, please check out

our sponsors in the description where

you can also find ways to contact me,

ask questions, give feedback, and so on.

And now dear friends, here's Don

Lincoln.

In describing the search for theory of

everything in physics, you describe the

history of physics can be told

effectively as a kind of history of

unifications.

There's this centuries long quest to

show that these distinct phenomena are

actually linked by some unified

underlying principles. uh even starting

with Newton that you can think of the

effort of physics as one as trying to

unify the laws of nature. So I was

wondering if we could talk through the

history of unification that lens of

physics. There are of course lots of

different ways to do physics, but the

the way that I would say that particle

physicists, cosmologists do is they are

trying to to really find basically the

underlying principles that govern the

laws of of nature. If we go back say to

the I don't know 1650s or so, uh you're

the most brilliant person around and

you've noticed two things. One you've

noticed is that when you trip, you fall.

That is the nature of gravity that that

we all experience daytoday. But then

there's sort of astronomy where you look

out at the heavens and you see the stars

march across the sky. You see the

planets move through the stars and there

that seems to have absolutely nothing to

do with what happens when you drop your

sandwich and and the dog grabs it from

you. So

>> yeah,

>> the brilliant thing was when Newton

looked at that and he thought about

maybe the moon is falling but it's

missing the earth. So what we had is

that in maybe 1650 you had what we might

call the laws of celestial gravity, the

gravity that governs the heavens and

terrestrial gravity, the gravity that is

here on Earth. Now we don't think of

that that way anymore. We think of it as

just gravity. But at that time that

wasn't at all obvious. And in fact, if

you look in the books, Newton's theory

is Newton's law of universal gravity.

The universal is there. And the reason

is is because he realized these two

things that seem to have nothing to do

with one another were indeed one and the

same. I mean, this is absolutely

brilliant. I mean, Newton is arguably

one of the most brilliant humans I of

which I'm ever aware. But at any rate,

it is the first sort of easily to

describe unification of physics that you

can state in a way that sort of makes

sense to to modern humans. I mean, you

can go back farther than that where

people are talking about chemistry, the

nature of atoms. You go back to Democrus

who was wrong about very many things,

but the idea that there was a smallest

particulate form of matter is right. So,

it's kind of funny. You talk, you read

the chemistry books and they say that

the idea of atoms goes back to Democrus

and you know he his idea was that like

um there was a smallest atom of oil

which was smooth and it was smooth of

course because well oil is smooth. There

was a smallest atom of vinegar because

vinegar is tart and it pricks your

tongue so therefore atoms were little

sharp pointy things. Um and so he was

wrong about a lot but he was right about

the idea that there was a small particle

and and we now know a very we have a

very different concept than he did. So

you can go back farther than that but

getting to unification there are more

examples. For instance if you go back to

say 1830 or so scientists were trying to

understand electricity for instance and

there was a lot going on. people really

understood things. But at the time you

would have two phenomena that are

familiar to us now. One is a magnet

which you know at the time mostly

magnets were were simply little pieces

of iron that had been magnetized and

they could stick to steel. And then you

had electricity which was at the time

they were generating little sparks that

they could play and and have fun with or

more broadly a uh a lightning bolt

blazing across the sky. And so when you

think about this, that lightning bolt

and that little magnet seemed to be

really unrelated.

>> Mhm.

>> Um but over the 1800s, a number of

scientists were exploring little aspects

of it. What happens when you run

electricity through a wire? It seems to

make a magnetic field. You know, they

was a whole bunch of experiments and

there were a lot of names. But in about

the 1860s or so, James Clark Maxwell

took all of those ideas that had been

percolating around for the previous 50

years and wrote his laws of

electromagnetism.

And they're really fascinating. If you

look at the laws of electromagnetism,

they are they're differential equations

or integral equations. But basically

what they say is on one side you have a

bunch of terms that have electricity in

them and then you have equals on the

other side a magnetism thing. So

forgetting all of the mathematical

symbols you have electricity side equals

a magnetism side. Electricity equals

magnetism. And that is a staggering

concept. The fact that these two things

a lightning bolt and the magnet that

holds your kids art to the refrigerator

are one and the same. And this was

another case where electricity and

magnetism became unified into

electromagnetism. So now we have two

examples. One, gravity being unified,

terrestrial and celestial gravity, and

then electricity and magnetism. So I

I'll tell you about some more in a

moment. But one thing that's kind of

important because the goal is of course

to to unify everything that if if I

could do what I want to do, I would have

some unified theory that would explain

all the behavior of all energy, matter,

space and time, which is a grand goal.

>> And and we should say that maybe one of

the goals of science more broadly

outside of physics even is to construct

uh models

that can generalize

the world. So if you look at Darwinian

evolution that was a very beautiful

theory that captures another layer of

reality of like how this particular

thing that we see here on earth happens

right

>> so when we talk about theory of

everything in physics that's capturing a

different layer of abstraction about the

functioning of the universe

>> right the whole Darwinian evolution the

fact that our genetics has significant

overlap with genetics of a banana is is

pretty staggering is astonishing that

that works. So that is amazing. Um but

for at least the class of of scientists

that I am what we think of is well sure

biology is interesting and all but when

you get right down to it it's it's it's

caused whatever happens in biology is

caused by the movement of molecules. And

then you say, "Well, that's great and

all, but molecules, they do what they do

because they're made of atoms."

>> And then the next step is, well, you

know, atoms, that's great, but atoms

work the way they do because of the

nucleus and the electrons. And then the

nucleus is protons and neutrons. And so

there are those of us, myself included,

who want to dig down at to the very very

bottom and find out what is the smallest

building block of nature from which all

of these other far more complex and

interesting and abstract things are, but

what is at the very very bottom? And

also that's great, but if you know um

what the smallest building blocks are,

that doesn't tell you the story. That's

like having a whole bunch of Legos but

not knowing how to put them together.

You also need to know how they interact,

how they work. And so that's what we

study forces. So there are the various

subatomic forces of which we're

familiar. And um for instance,

electricity and magnetism are components

of electromagnetism which then governs

the behavior of things like this is

amazing. Electric electromagnetism

explains of course electricity magnetism

but it explains how light works. It

explains how much of chemistry works. So

electromagnetism 1860 or 70 uh the

wonderful thing about that is if you

take Maxwell's equations and you apply a

little bit of calculus it's very easy to

see that the laws of electricity and the

laws of magnetism combined together

make what's called a wave equation which

that's shows that these electric and

magnetic fields oscillate. they they

vary. And if you have a something that's

varied, that's a wave. And the wave then

moves. And if you do the math, you find

out that the speed at which these waves

move is the speed of light. And so

people said, "Wow, the speed of light

comes out of those equations." And that

had to be, I think, very persuasive. And

of course, electromagnetism also plays a

really significant role in chemistry

because after all, atoms are held

together by electromagnetic forces.

There's more to how atoms work. There is

all the quantum mechanic stuff. But if

you did not have electromagnetism or if

electromagnetism was very different,

then atoms would be very different. So

it plays a very big role in in holding

us together. So it it's a a staggering

advance in science to have a good

behavior on that. And of course

being able to to tame electromagnetism

is why people can hear you when you do

your podcast because through the

miracles of the internet just or just

electricity running the computers. I

mean, this is a case, if I can get on a

small soap box, where people back then

said, "Well, why are you messing around

with magnets and sparks and who cares?"

Well, that very

fundamental digging into the laws of

nature has spin-offs. And it has

spin-offs. One of the big spin-offs is

our entire technological society.

without being able to govern

electricity, we'd still be farmers and

shoemakers in cities, but we certainly

would not have everything that we do.

So, off my soap box, but it's really a

lovely thing to show how this this

digging into deep fundamental, not

understood, mysterious things can 100 or

200 years later transform the world. And

the type of science I do now, people

often ask, well, what good is knowing

about how the inside of atoms work, how

the inside of quarks work. And I don't

know the answer to that. Um, but just

being a little more pragmatic, if I go

back, say, hundred years, where people

were trying to understand how the

protons and neutrons inside atoms held

together, how they split, how they they

how you could combine them and so forth.

This has led to nuclear power. Now,

whatever you think about nuclear power

and some people like it and some people

don't, but it is powerful. It will

generate uh energy for humanity and and

it may be that is the path that that we

take as we move away from digging fossil

fuels out of the ground. Humanity is

going to need power no matter what.

Nobody is going to go back to the way

things were in the 1700s. And one

enormous source of energy that is there

for us to take if we so choose is the

modification of the nucleus of atoms

seem to have absolutely nothing to do

with anything. And yet it provides

humanity with an opportunity which of

course requires that we think carefully

of how we do that and and if we want to

but it gives us something that we didn't

have before. Yeah, it's very clear that

nuclear fusion and nuclear fision will

unlock huge amount of energy that's

required for a civilization to flourish.

But that's almost like near-term.

>> Mhm.

>> Longer term, you can think about things

like we'll talk about dark energy crisis

and antimatter. Maybe if you figure out

some of the mysteries around antimatter,

that too would lead to energy sources,

how to produce energy, that too might

lead to counterintuitive propulsion

systems

>> for us humans to travel through through

the universe. Now, right now it seems

farfetched, too expensive, too

complicated, too difficult. But

breakthroughs in the fundamentals

theoretical physics might lead us to

unlock some incredible energy sources,

incredible technologies that uh will uh

allow humans to explore the universe.

And of course, we should also mention

that as always with technology, it's a

double-edged sword. It will most likely

lead to the development of more

dangerous weapons or other sources of

harm. And then we uh as a civilization

kind of have to walk that uh line and

hope we figure out how to do more good

than bad with the technologies we built.

>> Right? But but we have to really

remember while people worry about

nuclear weapons which are admittedly

very dangerous and even nuclear power

which has waste that has to be dealt

with.

What science is doing is

working out finding power that nature

has presented to us. This is not new.

Fire is like that too. Fire can burn

down your house or it can cook your

steak. Power is like that. And that's

just something that we have to

understand as humanity. And that's why

this needs to be a you know when we talk

about science it has to be a broad

conversation by all of society because

what scientists can do is figure out how

the world works. Society has to figure

out how we wish to apply that or not

apply that.

>> Also solving the mysteries and the

puzzles of the universe in itself is

effing awesome.

>> It is. It is. So, I mean that that's the

thing that makes us human in part is

looking at a thing and saying, "How does

this work?" And then together, uh, a

bunch of apes get together like poke the

thing, kind of shake the thing,

>> and then over time you have rockets

going out into space, you build roads

and bridges, you build the internet.

Anyway, so we talked about Newton, we

talked about Maxwell. That takes us in

the 20th century in terms of

unification. There's a guy named

Einstein on whom you wrote a book who

did quite a lot of progress on the

effort of unification.

>> Sure. So Einstein, he's a pretty amazing

guy. In 1905, he had his miracle year

where he wrote multiple papers. The one

that most people know about is special

relativity where he showed something

that makes no sense to anybody who's not

really dug into it very hard. And that

is that two people experience time

differently. Time, you know, is a

fascinating thing. We don't really

understand what time is, which is weird.

You think that that'd be something we'd

understand very well, but we really

don't. We know a lot about it, but

really understanding it, not so much.

But, um, Newton thought that time was

just universal for everyone. So my time,

your time, some person's time on Mars or

on Alpha Centator, everybody experienced

time the same. What Einstein showed was

that that wasn't the case. That

different people moving at different

speeds with respect to one another

experience time differently, which is

absolutely a mindblowing concept. Now,

most people think that Einstein then

said, well, he invented spaceime that

that space and time are the same thing.

and he was behind that. But that actual

insight came from one of his teachers, a

guy by the name of Minowski, who looked

at Einstein's equations. Mowski was a

little bit more mathematically inclined

than Einstein. And he saw that if you

look at the equations, you have

basically one person's space and time

equals some numbers times this person's

space and time. And so that's kind of a

a staggering thing. So, so that is where

Einstein and Manowski really did this

unbelievable concept that that space and

time are actually pretty much the same

thing that runs a foul of our

understanding of how the world works

because time just moves. It's

continuous. We we know what it is at a

visceral level

and an experiential level. We might not

understand it at a formal level, but we

know what time is. It's what keeps makes

today today and not yesterday or

tomorrow. Space is a little different.

You can walk somewhere, you can walk

back, you can move around. You have more

freedom to move in space than you have

to move in time. You can always move

forward in time. It's just moving

backwards. It turns out to be a little

more difficult. But yeah, Einstein's

understanding that that is the case, it

caused everybody to think about the

world very very differently. And that

was in 1908 when Minkowski really laid

it out in the strict spaceime.

>> Uh and that also led to the work on

special relativity led to the speed

limit, the speed of light.

>> Well, it was a premise. He had two

premises. One was that the laws of

nature are the same for everybody. So if

you're moving at some speed or if I'm

moving at some speed, I can say I'm not

moving and saying you're moving at some

speed. That's not controversial. That is

what we call Galilean relativity. It's

from hundreds of years ago. But what

Einstein said that was controversial was

that everybody measures that the speed

of light is the same irrespective of how

we're moving with respect to each other.

You'll measure the speed of light to be

a number. I'll measure the speed of

light to a number. And that's very very

different from what Newton would have

said or Galile or any of the old guys.

And it was taking those two things

together that caused all of the

weirdnesses of special relativity. Now

you could then very easily say, well

that second premise that everybody

measures the speed of light to the same

is just dumb and that you know you could

test that. So that's where testing

relativity comes in and Einstein's

equations which include those two

assumptions it predicts the behavior of

everything perfectly well. Now we've

actually measured

uh done experiments where we can say

that the speed of light is the same for

everybody. That's not how that's been in

the beginning. It was really that

assumption leads to predictions. The

predictions are true. So the assumption

is true. Now there is a for for those

people for your viewers who want to say

well how do you measure that the speed

of light is the same for everyone the

particle physicists do this and the way

you do this is the following there are

some subatomic particles that when they

decay they emit light that's their decay

product and so you collide two things

together so you know when the particle

was created then you have surround your

collision point by a detector and you

measure how long it takes for light to

get to your detector and by God it's the

speed of light which it should be.

However, sometimes in these collisions

some of these subatomic particles you

make are coming out at very high speed.

They might be coming out at 95 or 97 or

very large fraction of the speed of

light and then they decay into photons.

And so you measure how long it takes for

the photon to get to your detector and

it says it's light travels at the speed

of light. Now if it were that

if Einstein's conjecture was incorrect,

you'd have a particle coming out at near

the speed of light. It would be decaying

into a particle traveling at the speed

of light. Then that particle should have

traveled at say two times the speed of

light or something like that. So it

should have taken half as much time to

get to the detector. But it doesn't. So

this is a hard serious measurement that

shows that something you know we we can

measure the speed at which light comes

out of this stationary created particle

and it's the speed of light then we can

measure what the speed is of it coming

out of something that's moving and it's

still the speed of light. So that is an

actual measurement but that is not

something that was possible in

Einstein's day but it is now. Just to

take a small tangent. Uh how weird is it

in the full ranking of weirdness that is

physics? How weird is it that there's

that speed limit of this speed of light?

>> Well, I have to tell you, when I first

encountered this, it's pretty freaking

weird. It's like pegs the weird meter.

But as you become more familiar with it,

as you become more more comfortable with

the idea, the thing to remember is the

speed of light. It's the speed of light

through spaceime. Once you embrace that,

that makes a whole ton of sense. It all

of a sudden makes everything fall much

more into place. I think that there is

an ultimate speed isn't that shocking.

It just simply says that it's a property

of space in the same way that there is

you know space can can transmit a

certain strength electric field. like

trans it can support a certain things

whatever space is and we don't know what

space is but whatever it is it has the

capability of of transmitting these

things at that one speed through space

or time and everything else comes from

our insisting that we keep space and

time different that's that's how I view

it and at least for me that once I

accepted that it all became very

comfortable

>> so The nature of my question actually

here that will apply over and over

>> is trying to empathize, trying to put

ourselves in the shoes of the people

before space and time are unified into

spaceime

>> and and really experience and think

through how difficult of a leap is that

>> huge.

>> The reason I I sort of say that is we

are now in the modern day in the 21st

century and of course we're going to

have to make leaps like that in our

future. Mh.

>> So what are the unifications we're not

seeing in front of our eyes? So for

example, there's so many examples

through through your work, through your

lectures of um uh Paul Durak taking

antimatter seriously.

>> Mhm.

>> Looking at what the math shows and

saying, I really think this thing

exists,

>> right?

>> I mean, it just sounds insane.

>> It does.

>> And so I think this is a good warm-up.

The space-time unification is a good

warm-up as we march through the 20th

century because it gets uh in my view at

least weirder and weirder even with

Einstein himself.

>> Well, let me give you an even more basic

example. Sodium and chloride.

Sodium is an explosive metal. You put it

in water and and it's kind of neat. You

put it in water and it just it doesn't

quite explode, but it gets hot and it

pops around. Chlorine, it's a gas. It's

going to kill you. So these two things

are deadly. They're awful. And yet when

you mix them, you put it on your food at

night. Salt, right? And so this is a

case where where this whole a

unification and b this deeper

understanding in this case of chemistry

of how two things that that are

dangerous can be brought together and

turned into something not only innocuous

but necessary for human life. And so

this is not unusual that what what

you're describing. I mean when you think

about it, forget about everything else.

Just the fact that you know we tell

little kids little kids that the world

is made of atoms. Now that's crazy. Most

people have never seen atoms and yet

nobody really doubts it anymore. And I

think it's just a a case of of

familiarity and then the culture slowly

accepts it and it's then it's real even

without the evidence. In fact, one of

the courses you described there, um, how

we know what we know. I think that's a

valid question. How do we know there are

atoms? And, and of course, there are

ways we do. And by the way, on that

front, I would love to go through how we

know the building blocks in the universe

as we march towards quirks. That in the

course that you mentioned is one of the

most fascinating things of this

philosophy of atoms being around for a

very long time. Then you concretize and

you actually can prove or have

strong observations that indicate that

there is atoms and then there is a

nucleus, there is electrons, there is

photons, there is quarks and I mean it

gets weirder and weirder and now we're

facing the mystery. Is there building

blocks even smaller than that? But

anyway, Einstein turns out didn't just

do special relativity. By the way, I I

really think he deserves three Nobel

prizes. He got it for photoelectric

effect. The fact that he didn't get it

for general relativity is a crime

against humanity. I don't understand.

Obviously should have gotten it for

general relativity and and special

relativity. I mean I think special

relativity is separate for general

relativity in ter as far as Nobel prizes

go. Uh so general relativity is another

unification.

>> Yes, that's right. What Einstein

realized was that if you were in a

rocket ship and the rocket ship was a

very quiet rocket ship and it was

accelerating, it would feel like you're

experiencing gravity. And so, as as you

say, it's one of his happiest moments

when he realized that acceleration and

gravity feel very much the same. What

I'm impressed by is that idea, which is

already a pretty neat idea,

somehow led him to take his space-time

idea, take this acceleration gravity

idea and realize that he could describe

gravity as the bending of spacetime.

Spacetime being constant like east,

west, north, south, that's already hard

enough. But now he's saying, well, you

know, take your your map and crinkle it

and bend it and so forth and that's

gravity. That is a staggering

mind-blowing idea.

>> I guess I wonder if you can comment on

what do you think is the idea generation

process that leads to that. So it

probably in Einstein case has to start

with what if gravity is itself

space-time geometry. You you have to

have a thought like that, right?

>> Yes, I think so. There's a lot about

science. There's of course knowing what

went before. There is knowing the

mathematics that allows you to figure

out the implications of your theory.

There is the discipline to argue with

yourself and other people because most

ideas are wrong. But then there's what

you just described that intuitive spark

and that is something that is very very

difficult to to create. There's a reason

that we venerate these people is because

it is an unusual

feature and most people only have that

aha moment once in their lifetime if

they have it at all. Mhm.

>> And then there's a tricky business

because I'm sure you do and I get a lot

of letters from from creative thinkers

who don't have all of the the history

and the mathematical discipline and the

the self, you know, self-critique that's

necessary. Um, and so they come up with

these ideas and often it's easy to see

where they just don't play out. Um so in

order to be that person who changes the

way we see the world, ideas themselves

are not enough. These these creative

ideas that's not enough. You need it

with the discipline and the critique.

And it's that amalgam of those things

that you know make you a genius that

that history remembers.

>> But it's hard to know in in a field of

people you might uh be tempted to call

crazy, there could be geniuses there.

And it's hard to know which is which. We

should mention that Einstein himself

couldn't see the genius in quantum

mechanics initially. Couldn't see the

the correctness, I should say. So he

could see the the insanity of

gravity bending spacetime, but quantum

mechanics was too weird for Einstein.

>> In all fairness, it's weird for me, too.

But um

>> but the thing is even while that is true

and Einstein maybe spent the last few

years of his life trying to to blend um

electricity and magnetism, gravity in a

a single thing and he was unsuccessful

but he still was a very very valuable

critic of quantum mechanics. It's not

that he didn't understand it because he

did understand it. He thought about the

implications and all this quantum

entanglement business. Well, not all of

it, but he was responsible for saying,

well, if you're right, then this. And of

course, then people went out and found

out that that Einstein's implication of

quantum mechanics was real. And so they

could say, see, quantum mechanics is

real. So, you know, he was thinking

deeply about it. And he was doing

exactly that thing I said. There's that

spark idea, but there's that critique

idea. And if you're able to critique an

idea, you might kill it. And that is

it's always depressing when I have this

brilliant idea and it gets killed, but

it's better to be killed than to keep it

around and waste time on it. Um, and so

he was in that case not generating the

the aha, but he was saying is, "All

right, let's take your aha. Let's see

it's right. What does it mean? It means

this." that allows people to go test it.

And so he was contributing very

crucially

to that other part of scientific

advancement, which is not just the aha

moment, but the beat it to death, test

it, critique it, and make sure it's

real. And it's only after all of that

has been done that you really are sure

you're right. And that's why science is

such a a powerful tool. It is that that

combative just downright kind of jerky

critique that most people don't like.

They don't like people saying your

ideas, you know, might be wrong.

But that is it is crucial. It is crucial

part of the scientific process.

>> Plus, there's that quote on the other

side of it that I've heard you mention

which is uh you know, I believe your

idea is crazy, but is it crazy enough?

Was that

>> Yes. Yes. We all agree that your idea is

crazy, but is it crazy enough?

>> And there is some degree of taking those

leaps uh of crazy, but it has to be

backed with rigor,

>> right?

>> And the unifications continue that as we

uh take steps towards the standard

model, which is such an incredible part

of of physics in the 20th century. So,

can you describe that unification?

>> So, you know, we're sort of jumping

forward here now to the 1930s or

thereabout. And at by that time people

had realized that there are four

distinct forces that do not seem to be

connected. One is gravity, two is

electromagnetism, and those are things

people are relatively familiar with. But

there are two other forces that only

have any real importance inside the

nucleus of atoms, which is why most

people have no experience with them. One

is the strong nuclear force which holds

the nucleus of the atoms together and

the other one is what we call the weak

nuclear force which is responsible for

some types of of radioactivity. And

since most people don't play around with

nuclei and most people don't play around

with radioactivity, they don't know what

that is. But um by the 30s scientists

had done enough experiments, done enough

theorizing to to say that there were

these four forces and that was already a

triumph. I mean we in our goal for a

theory of everything we'd like to think

that there is one force which is what

we're talking about the unification.

Maybe these four forces are are just

different ways of looking at a single

underlying force. But in the 30s that's

where we were. there were the four

forces.

So we move ahead and in the late 50s and

early 60s some people were thinking that

maybe the weak nuclear force and

electromagnetism

actually were the same. So they were

working on trying to bring together

these two forces to show that they're

connected. And it came true. They were

able to show that electricity and

magnetism were actually two different

facets of a single force that we now

call the electroeak force. Mhm.

>> Now, the story that you're told in in

articles about this about what you

people have called the Higs Bzon or the

God particle, the story is very very

simplified

because in 1964

the um there were three groups with six

individuals who came up with important

papers talking about what's called the

Higsfield. I'll get to back get to what

that is in a minute. But the Higsfield

is important. But it wasn't until 1967,

so 3 years later, that Steven Weinberg

and and some others actually unified

electromagnetism and the weak force.

Sheldon Glashau, Abdul Salam and Steven

Weyberg successfully unified

electromagnetism and the weak nuclear

force that uh showing that high energies

uh these two forces were merged into a

single electroeak force,

>> right? And that was in ' 67. All right.

Um everybody talks about this thing

happening in ' 64, but it it really

wasn't. It happened over quite a few

years actually. But all right. So now

let's what you said is true. So um uh

Weinberg, Glacial and Salam showed that

electromagnetism in the weak force at

high energies were the same. There was a

problem however and the problem is that

electromagnetism has an infinite range.

Um and we know that because we can see

stars that are millions of light years

away. I mean that shows you that the

range of that force is essentially

infinite.

>> The weak force however um basically

becomes non-existent on distances much

smaller than the size of a proton.

>> Mhm.

>> So that you know to say oh they're the

same and yet one can reach across the

universe and one can't reach out of an

atom. Well that's just dumb. I mean the

obvious

thought here is well we just proved that

that whole idea is stupid so throw it

away ridiculous. And that is where these

ideas from 1964 came in and saved the

day. So how can it be true

that the electroeak force is real and

electromagnetism

and the weak force act so differently?

The way that could happen is if these

forces were transmitted by a particle

moving from one subatomic particle to

the other. In the case of

electromagnetism, it's the photon. In

the case of the weak force, we call them

now the W and Z particles. So the idea

is that that Higgs and his colleagues

came up with is saying all right

electroeak force is real.

The way we make it so that there is now

an electromagnetic force and a weak

force is the force carrying particle of

electromagnetism has no mass. The force

carrying particle of the weak force has

a mass. And so what was done is a field

was postulated that there was this

additional field that was kind of

distinct from this electroeak field and

we call it the Higs field. And the Higs

field permeates all of space.

And and here's the kicker, some

particles interact with a field and some

particles don't interact with a field.

The ones that interact with the field

get mass and the ones that don't

interact with the field don't have mass.

And so that's the idea is that the Higs

field gives the weak force particles

mass. However, the photon laughs at the

Higs field, doesn't see it, and it has

no mass. And I should say here, going to

perplexity, the big picture view, the

Higs field is a quantum field that fills

all of space and gives many elementary

particles. Just as you're saying their

mass through their interaction with it,

the Higs Bzon is the particle associated

with ripples or excitations of this

field. In modern particle physics, every

type of particle corresponds to a field

that exists everywhere. The Higs field

is one such scalar field, meaning at

each point in space, it has a single

numerical value rather than a direction.

The Higs field differs from most other

fields because even in empty space,

empty in quotes by the way, empty space,

it's uh average value is not zero. This

nonzero vacuum value is what enable it

to endow particles with mass.

>> Right? So let's talk about something a

little more familiar just to to try and

hang some some intuition on those words.

All right? So right in front of us there

is a gravitational field. Now, you can't

see it, but right there. Right there.

Check it out.

>> Yep.

>> If I were to take something, a pen or

whatever, and put it there, it feels a

force and a falls.

>> Mhm.

>> Very insightful. I know. So, we have the

gravity field and we have the pen that

has a mass. And the mass and the gravity

field interact and it drops. Now, if we

had another

>> I have uh object for you demonstration

purposes,

>> performance art. Here we go. This is

great.

>> This thing has mass and we drop it. How

remarkable. It falls. But when we step

back and think about what really

happens, it's the mass of this thing and

the interaction with this invisible

field we see here. That's what gives

this weight.

>> Now, I have this particle here that you

can't see, but it's there. It has no

mass and I leave it there. Well, since

it has no mass, it doesn't feel gravity.

It's still floating there.

And that is really all the Higs field

is. Some particles have effectively what

you could call the Higs charge that

interacts and sees the field and other

particles don't. And that is really what

what what you read just basically means.

Now it's kind of neat because in the

ordinary day there is a Higs field right

there and the Higs field is not zero

just like gravity is not zero and things

will get mass but at super high energies

the Higs field the strength of the Higs

field goes to zero so whether things

have mass whether they have a Higs

charge or not they have no char or they

have the Higs charge Higs field zero

they don't interact it has no mass so

that's kind of what uh Weineberg and

Salam Glass show said is at very high

energies, the Higs field is zero. Since

the Higs field is zero, the weak force

particles don't feel mass and therefore

they can travel at the speed of light

just like the photon does and

everything's happy.

>> Mhm.

>> It is when the universe cooled down

after the big bang. It was very hot,

very high energy. Nothing had mass. the

universe cooled and at a certain

temperature what happened is the Higs

field turned on and at the moment it

turned on it gave mass to the weak force

particles did not give mass to the

photons. So that's what we call

electroeak symmetry breaking. So, it's a

mouthful, but all it says is there was a

moment in time early in the history of

the universe at 10 the -12 seconds after

the big bang, the Higs field turned on

and particles got mass. So, that's the

whole idea. So, this is another really

neat thing. So, the electroeak symmetry

theory doesn't need Higs because that

only really applies at very very high

energies. But in order to make it work

at low energies, you need to fix the

theory. And you need to fix the theory

by effectively putting a band-aid on the

theory. Higs theory is just a band-aid

on top of electroeek symmetry theory.

And that is the band-aid that fixes it

because it gives mass to particles at

low energy. Well, how does then Higs

this band-aid the field and uh the Higs

Bzon come into play on the experimental

front on the evidence? Okay.

>> Discovery front. So, what is this uh

Higs Bzon?

>> Okay. Excellent.

>> So, we have never seen the Higsfield.

Higsfield is a hypothetical theoretical

thing.

>> But that is true of of most of our

fields. We've never seen the

electromagnetic field. We've never seen

the gravity field. We've seen the effect

of the field. And so all of these

theories are now what we call quantum

field theories. And that the whole idea

of quantum fields if you have a quantum

field, but that field can vibrate like a

drum head. And so it doesn't vibrate

just exactly like a drum head, but it

vibrates locally. So you can have

specific localized vibrations. And those

specific localized vibrations are the

particles. In the electromagnetic field,

the vibration is the photon. In the Higs

field, the vibration is the Higs Bzon.

And so what we can do is not see the

field, but we can actually excite the

field, make it vibrate and detect the

vibrations. So the Higs Bzon idea was

predicted in ' 64. It became useful in '

67. And then scientists started looking

for it. So in the early 2000s,

people were starting to think that we

had built part particle accelerators

more powerful or powerful enough to

actually to be able to create these

vibrations and detect them. So the

accelerator that was working at the time

was a large particle accelerator outside

Chicago at Firmeny Lab called the

Tevatron.

>> And we were colliding protons and

antimatter protons at near the speed of

light at very high energy. And that was

the accelerator at which the top quark

was discovered in '95.

But we had upgraded our apparatus. We

had 10 times the number of collisions

per second. We had slightly more energy

and we were banging the protons and the

antimatter protons together hoping that

we would actually find the Higs bzon.

>> Can you actually back up a little bit

and look at the bigger picture? So,

Firmy Lab has this legendary accelerator

that there's also a personal story with

you connected to it because I mean

there's a million questions uh I want to

ask you and we'll ask you about some

aspects of that. So, this idea of an

accelerator, the design and the physics

of an accelerator, how is that

productive for understanding

and discovering uh different aspects of

particle physics?

>> Well, I'm so glad you asked.

I mean, this is fascinating. All right,

everybody has heard Einstein's equation

E= MC². Nobody knows what it means.

Maybe they heard that energy equals mass

and mass equals energy. I don't know,

you know, but they've heard the

equation, the most famous equation in

all of science.

But buried inside that equation is a

really thoroughly fascinating concept

that energy and matter are equivalent.

And you can in fact convert movement

energy into mass. And so this is

something that we've known for a long

time. This was predicted back in

basically 1928. So a long time ago,

actually almost 100 years ago. And it is

not in the slightest bit controversial.

We can do this all the time. So the

simplest thing is to take two particles

that have no no structure. So you know

the closest thing you can have to BB's

that are just true mathematical BB's. If

you smash those two things together,

it's coming in with a huge amount of

energy from one direction, a huge amount

of energy from the other direction, the

directions cancel. So the net momentum,

the net energy of this has no motion. So

you have these two things coming in with

a you know exactly balanced energy and

if they collide they could stop. Well

that energy has to go somewhere and that

energy can literally create mass create

particles. Now there are special rules

about what happens if you have two

things coming together and it creates a

particle. It has to create an antimatter

particle to balance it. That's just kind

of the rules of the laws of nature. Why

is that the case? Well, we have some

ideas, but in many respects the answer

is because those are the laws of the

universe and that's the things that we

try to understand. But this is

absolutely true. So what what particle

accelerators do among other things is

simply transform energy into particles.

And so basically any uh particle that

doesn't exist in nature we can make in

this way. You can make the antimatter

electron by taking two particles,

smashing them together. The energy sits

there and it will make an electron and

an antimatter electron and it just does.

And we know that the antimatter electron

was discovered in 1932.

This is all pretty easy. The antimatter

proton was discovered in 1955 at the

Berkeley Bevatron.

And so this is just what you do. You can

convert energy into a matter antimatter

particle. Now the converse goes true and

that's something we might talk about.

You can take matter and antimatter and

bring it together and it'll make energy.

It's the uh the process can go both

ways. Energy can make matter and

antimatter. Matter and antimatter can

make energy. And this is just true. We

do it all the time. There's no question

that this is the case. We should also

mention that uh this is the reason why

Firmeny Lab had a nice stash of

antimatter particles. So as as a side

effect, you can also collect antimatter

in this kind of way.

>> You can produce antimatter, but it's an

extremely costly

>> well very very costly. Um in order at

the Firmeny Lab machine, we would have

to smash 100,000 protons into something

to make one antimatter proton. So I mean

it it took some work. Is there some

extremely precise recipe of uh of being

able to produce particular kinds of

particles and all this kind of stuff

when you smash two things together? Is

there like how can you control

accurately which kind of particles

you're trying to produce? If you want to

make antimatter electrons, you smash

together energy at a certain it's just

easier with electrons because the

electrons to the best of our knowledge

have nothing inside them. So they're

simple. They have a certain mass and

that's that. So if you smash particles

together with the right energy, you can

make them very very easily because you

can it's like a old style radio back in

the day where you had to dial it in. you

could get right on the station and you

could hear the the signal and if you

were off a little it didn't work. The

problem for things like protons and so

forth is they're not pointlike

particles. They're kind of like garbage

cans full of stuff and so it's very

difficult to make antimatter protons.

Now you can get more of them by

increasing the um energy at which you

collide two particles together. If

you're at below a certain energy, the

and you collide, say you collide two

protons together at kind of low energy,

you just don't have enough energy to

make an anti-roton

>> and so it doesn't happen. You get to a

certain energy and you can just barely

make them. The more energy you collide

them together, the more you make. So

that is just sort of how it works. More

is better. And then uh with with CERN if

you compare maybe CERN and Firmayab

going to perplexity here CERN's

accelerator the large hydron collider

LHC is the world's highest energy proton

collider while Firmayab's current and

plant accelerators focus on intense

proton beams for neutrino physics rather

than pushing the absolute energy

frontier. Absolute energy frontier

meaning highest possible energy

smashing of protons together.

>> Correct. So one we were talking about

like accumulating antimatter. Yes. All

right. And so um there that is typically

making anti-roton as opposed to making

all particles in general. So let's focus

on the anti-roton side to begin with.

All right.

>> So formula doesn't make anti-rotons

anymore. We stopped making them in 2011

and it's because we shut our big

accelerator down to concentrate on a

different facet of particle physics.

However, at the time we would smash um

protons with a an energy of 120 GEV and

in that we would make anti-roton. So

that's a ton of energy.

It's true that the CERN accelerator, the

big accelerator, is now much higher

energy than the Firmenab accelerator

was. No problem. But that's not how they

make anti-roton.

The all of these big beam uh big

laboratories, it's not one accelerator.

At Firmay Lab, there were five distinct

accelerators and it was basically like

shifting an old standard car cuz you

couldn't just go zero to super speed in

one accelerator. you had to go from one

to another getting higher and higher.

Well, at CERN, they use one of the

basically their second gear in their

very big accelerator complex to make

antimatter protons. And their

accelerator is only 26 GEV compared to

the 120 GV at Firmeny Lab. Firmay Lab's

not operating, but when it was

operating, it operated at an energy of

about four times higher than what CERN

is doing now. And why is that? Well,

it's because what CERN needs to do is to

not make as many anti-rotons as Firmay

Lab did. They are doing a very different

current experimental program. They're

doing a fascinating experimental program

including trying to figure out does

anti-gravity fall up or down, which is

kind of neat and we sort of know the

answer to that different that's

separate. But anyways, so getting back

to the anti-roton business.

>> Yeah.

>> Well, Firmay Lab doesn't do it now. It

was top dog. It's not anymore. Um, the

only really big anti-roton accelerator

creator is a small accelerator at CERN.

Okay, so that's the anti-roton thing.

And if we get back to antimatter, we

could talk about that because that is

way cool.

>> Yeah. So,

>> now the other side of your thing about

making high energergy unknown particles,

bigger is better. And it is true that

the LHC is a very high energy machine.

It is about seven times more powerful in

terms of energy per collision. It is

also about a hundred times more

collisions per second than the Firmeny

lab machine. So it is true that the LHC

can make bigger heavier

uh particles that the old firm lab the

Tevatron ever couldn't and that is true.

So if you want to look at high energy

stuff, yeah, you go to CERN now. Which

is why many of my colleagues including

myself once we had

measured all of the sort of frontier

measurements we thought we could make

with the Firmeny Lab accelerator, we saw

this bigger, more powerful machine with

seven times the energy and 100 times

more collisions per second. We said,

"Heck yeah, let's go work on that." And

to give you a sense of scale, the top

quark, which is the heaviest particle

ever discovered, discovered at Firmeny

Lab in 1995. There were two discovery

papers and the one on which I was a

co-author. We had worked for a good

chunk of between 6 months and a year of

collecting collisions and there were a

lot of collisions and our paper had 38

top quirk candidates. 38. And we knew

that half of them were crap because when

you make a detector like that, there's

what you call background. So you have

the background and the good stuff. And

we know it was about 50/50. So we had

maybe 19 top quarks after working for

between 6 months and a year of

collecting data. But now at the LHC, we

make a top quark every second.

And that's what higher energy and more

collisions per second will do for you.

That extra energy, you're above

threshold. You make a ton of them. And

when you compare the 1995 Firm Firmab

accelerator to the current CERN

accelerator, it's probably a thousand

times of collisions per second. So it

went from painstaking, pulling teeth to,

yeah, now top quarks are a background.

We try to get rid of them. There's just

too many of them. They get in the way of

searching for the stuff we really want

to search. They are like so 30 years

ago. By the way, is there something to

be said about the the kind of sort of

signal processing here? How you remove

the noise, how you remove the

background, how you determine which

particle is which. There's probably some

like incredible nuance there

>> even outside of the scope of this

conversation.

>> So, let me just throw some numbers out.

All right. So, at the CERN accelerator

when it's operating, the collisions

occur at a prodigious rate. We get about

a billion with a B collisions per

second. Now each one of those Yeah.

Yeah. That's what I said. Wow. Now it

turns out some of them are happening at

the same time. So there's about of order

40 million moments in time per second

where you would take a shot and inside

that moment there might be 20

collisions.

>> So that's why where we get to the

billion.

>> Yeah. But can you individually pinpoint

the collisions

>> sort of to a to a degree. So the beams

are, you know, the when people think of

beams, they think of like laser beams,

but that's not really what particle

beams look like. Particle beams look

like little tiny sticks of spaghetti,

except they're much thinner. They're not

as fat as a stick of spaghetti, and

they're at the LHC. Different

accelerators are different. They're

about this long. And so you have one of

them going one way full of protons and

another one going the other way full of

protons. And they pass through each

other. And as they pass through of each

other, you should think of this as like

a swarm of bees. And this is like a

swarm of bees. And mostly the bees pass

through each other and don't do

anything. But every so often some of the

bees hit nose on and stripes and and and

wings and everything everywhere.

>> That's awesome.

>> And so as they collide through each

other, you know, one collisions here and

one's here and one's here and you can't

tell too much side to side because the

beams are really small. They're sort of

the thickness of a human hair. But you

can see along the direction and there,

you know, this is about the right size.

And so we have detectors around them and

we can actually see, oh, particles came

from here and particles came from here.

And that's amazing. All right. So at any

one crossing, there's maybe 20

collisions. Now, most collisions are

absolutely boring. They're boring

because they are they they exemplify

physics that we know a great deal about

already. We've tested it for for

decades. We know all about it. We don't

care. I mean, it's kind of blas that we

can say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, we're making a

billion partic subatomic particles every

second, but who cares?" Because, you

know, but that's just the way of, you

know, frontier scientists. So, what you

need is you need to pick out the cool

ones, the weird ones, the ones that

nobody's seen before. And so what

happens is uh these things these beams

uh collide and we surround the collision

point within the enormous detector.

There are two absolutely ginormous

detectors at the LHC. One of them called

CMS which is the one I'm on and the

other one is called Atlas

>> which is the other one and we don't

speak of because well no they're both

really amazing.

>> Okay. It's good to know that there's

friendly competition even inside

that's awesome.

>> I mean the fact is they are both amazing

absolutely amazing detectors

>> but CMS is just a little cooler than

>> Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean you know in in in

particle physics we really absolutely

want our competitors to do extremely

well just not quite as well as we do.

>> Got it. All right. So these two giant

detectors

>> right. So but one of them our detector

the CMS detector it's the small one. It

is 70 ft long, 50 ft high, 50 ft wide.

It's 5 stories tall. It weighs 14,000

tons.

>> Small

>> small. Atlas experiment is 150 ft long,

80 ft across. It weighs only 7,000 tons.

Just piece of cake.

>> You could take the Atlas detector and

you could put four of them on a soccer

or football field and it would fill the

field up with just enough room on the

sidelines for the cheerleaders and the

water boy and the coaches and stuff.

That's how big they are. So these are

absolutely ginormous detectors and

basically they're cameras and what they

can do is they can take pictures 40

million times per second. Now all the

data comes streaming off that detector

and we can't record it all. It would

just fill up all of our tapes and it

would be full of all these boring things

we don't care about. So what we do is as

the beams pass through one another, we

teach our detectors to say we only want

one where there are certain

configurations that might be interesting

like there's gobs of energy in the

detector or there's a gob of energy on

one side and nothing on the other side

or there's four gobs of energy or

whatever. These are called triggers. And

so these what we have is fast

electronics that take the 40 million

possible pictures per second and it says

you know about a 100,000 of those are

really cool. We should think about them.

And then it passes not all of the 40

million but those 100,000 to the next

level which are commercial processors

that have uh basically our final uh

analysis code but optimized to run very

very quickly. And what they do is they

do a really quick and dirty analysis to

say to to further refine what's good and

what's not. And that that computer form

then accepts about a thousand collisions

per second and we record those for

further analysis. So that's what's

really happening of the 50 million

possible collisions per second the fast

electronics and then the computers pick

the thousand and then we pass those

through analysis software and hand them

to the graduate students and they pick

through them looking and finding the

handful that are the next Nobel Prize.

So that's how that works and that that

is truly astonishing. I'm hats off to

the accelerator builders, the detector

builders, the the the people who make

the software work, the people who make

the not not gigabytes, not terabytes,

but pabytes of data flow around the

world seamlessly. It's really amazing.

I'm very grateful.

>> Uh so take me to uh July 4th, 2012, the

discovery of Higs Bzon. So this is

really fun because the people searching

for the Higs, it's a it's a community

and the entire community knew that the

LHC was coming online. So even though

many of us had been working on the

Firmenab accelerators, a lot of us were

transitioning to the CERN uh

accelerator. So we were in the very

funny business of wearing our Firmenab

detector people hats trying desperately

to find the Higs Bzon at Firmeny Lab

>> while simultaneously wearing our CERN

hats knowing that CERN was going to be

able to find it if existed. And so you

know we were a little neurotic kind of

wanted you know our old stuff to work

and and there was an awful lot of people

on both experiments. Did you um have a

sense that one of the two places would

be able to find the Higs? First, did you

think the Higs Bzon existed? And second,

did you think that these accelerators

have the chance to find them?

>> So, I was cognizant of the fact that the

Higs Bzon might not exist, but there was

a lot of evidence pointing in the

direction that it might be. I knew that

both experiments, the Firmeny Lab

accelerator and the CERN accelerator

would either find or rule out the Higs

if it existed.

>> Rule out?

>> Well, that's a possibility. I mean,

maybe the Higs theory was wrong.

>> Yeah.

>> Right. Until you until you know it's

there, it might be wrong. It's like dark

matter. People talk about dark matter.

It might not be real.

>> I mean, I it probably is, but it might

not be.

>> So, you knew at these energy levels, you

would be a you should be able to find

the Hig boson.

>> Yes. So that's the nice thing about this

kind of physics because there was a

theory that theory made predictions. Now

there were parameters in the theory we

didn't know if the mass was this we'd

get this thing. If the mass was this we

get this thing. But we could do the the

calculation for every conceivable Higs

mass. And so then we could search look

well let's say the Higs mass is 100 in

some units. Did we see it there? No.

then it's not 100. Well, let's look at

103. Is it there? No. So, we could do

that. Both accelerators could either

find it or definitively rule out the

predictions of simple Higs theory. 100%

guaranteed.

>> However, the CERN accelerator had 10

times the collisions per second and

three and a half times the energy. So

remember when I said it with the top

quirks it was like 6 months for 19

versus one a second. There's no question

the writing is on the wall. The h the

the LHC was going to have an easier time

of it if it was real.

>> However, so but you know I'm a Firmay

Lab scientist and we wanted Firmen Lab

you know come on we want Firm Lab to win

not you know. So we were busting our

butt and we had done what I said. We had

ruled out this region. And we had

certain R mass ranges. We knew it wasn't

there. And we finally said if there was

a Higs Bzon, if it existed, which we

didn't know at the time, its mass was

somewhere between, if I recall, between

like 120 and 145. All right, we'd ruled

out all the other stuff. And so, wearing

our our CERN hat, we said, "Okay, we're

going to find that." But we were really,

really, really trying to do it. Now, if

we had had another 2 years or maybe 3

years of running the Fermy accelerator,

Fermy Lab would have discovered or ruled

out or in this case turning out

discovered the Higs boson because it's a

real thing. We would have found it

without a question, but we didn't have

enough data in July of 2012. We needed a

couple more years. Unfortunately,

in 2008, or fortunately, the LHC had

turned on. It broke. They had to fix it.

Turned on again in 2010. It ran poorly

in 2011. In 2012, they pushed up their

sleeves and said, "Let's do this." And

it turned on. And so, you know, there

was this the Firmy Lab knew if it didn't

have it now, it wasn't it was too late.

Anyways, come 2012 rolls around and um

like two days before

uh the announcement at CERN was July

4th. So two days before that, Firmayab

made a measurement and said we can rule

out certain regions but certain regions

we can't rule out but what we know and

this is important. If the Higs Bzon

exists, it must be in this region for

which we are not capable yet of ruling

out. So that's where we were 2 days

before the LHC said we got it. That was

uh July 4th, 2012. So detecting the Higs

Bzon confirmed the existence of the Higs

field, the mechanism through which

fundamental particles like electrons and

quarks acquire mass in the standard

model. Correct? Although let's be very

specific of what we did then we found a

particle consistent with the existence

of the Higs boson. There were

alternative theories at the time that

predicted not one but multiple Higs

bosons. So there's a theory called super

symmetry which said that there was not

one but five Higs bosons. The standard

original 1964 Higs theory says there

were one. And so all we really knew at

the time was we found a theory. We did

not necessarily confirm that Higs was

right. We found data that said that it

looked like Higs was right. But until we

ran for longer, we were unable to rule

out other alternative theories. So

that's the the deal. Now in the fullness

of time, it is after all uh what 14

years now later, we have been able to

basically rule out some of those other

things. And by now we have validated a

things. We found the mass of the

particle. We know the spin of the Higs

Bzon. It has a spin of zero. We have

discovered Hig Bzon decays. It

preferentially decays into the heaviest

particles. It can through energy

conservation can't decay into top

quarks. It's too light to decay into top

quarks, but it can decay into bottom

quirs. It can decay into W and Z

particles. Can decay into a weird way

into photons. And we have looked for all

of the hypothesized decays of the

original Higs theory. And we have

validated that it decays in those ways

at the rates that theory predicted. And

so now in the fullness of time, I'm

pretty comfortable saying Peter Higgs

and Robert Brout and Franco and his

colleagues, they were right back in the

60s. But we weren't sure on July 4th.

All we knew is we found a particle

consistent. But the thing is with these

discoveries, they're often just barely

discoveries. it takes a while to go and

do the more complex detailed

measurements and that's what we've done.

>> So at the time I remember being called

referred to as the god particle.

>> Uh you also uh had a minor in theology.

So throwing that all together. So

calling it the god particle is speaking

to the importance the potential

importance of discovering this particle.

Do you think uh that is in some degree

justified like if we look at the big

impact of it on the the history of

physics? How important was it to find

and show that the the the Higs fields is

real?

>> Well, I don't think it is as important

as for instance some of Einstein's

stuff. I mean it was it's an important

prediction like the prediction of quirks

was very important and interesting in

validating this. The Higs was kind of

like um validating that quirks existed.

it it's an important stepping stone and

I I do not wish to to denigrate it in

any way but there's ones that change the

way we thought about the world like

Einstein did it wasn't that sort of

thing and there is a funny story so the

reason they call it the God particles

this book by Leon Letterman and um and

if you read his book he uh he says well

you know we we call it the god particle

but but we should call it the godamn

particle because it's been causing us so

much trouble trying to find it.

>> And Leon ran Firmy Lab. So, and he wrote

a a forward for one of my books. And you

know, I talked to him. He's he was a

really funny guy.

>> And the real truth was the book was

called The God Particle because his

publisher thought it would sell more

copies.

>> But but you know, then that got into the

mindset of the reporters and so forth

and we called it the God Particle. Leon

never really thought of it as anything

to do with a religious or even I mean he

was an incredible jokester. the goddamn

particle.

>> It is a really important part of our

model of the universe. It is that

there's this field that it gives mass to

some particles and not others. That's

>> right. It it's a huge thing but it was

part of the standard model. The standard

model had known forces. It had known

particles. It had all that. The the Higs

Bzon the one thing that is true is it

was the last

unvalidated

piece of the standard model. The

standard model does not answer all

questions which is why we have

unanswered questions in physics. But it

was a punctuation point end of about 50

years of discovery and searching where

we finally were able to say the standard

model while while incomplete, it's

mostly right as far as it goes. Quick

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And now, dear friends, back to my

conversation with Don Lincoln. We did a

whirlwind tour of the history of physics

and took a little tangent on this

incredible discovery of the Higs boson.

Uh, but we didn't go all the way yet.

There's this dream of the grand unified

theory, the gut that uh is a step

towards the toe theory of everything. So

can we talk about the gut first? So what

what's what's entailed in the gut? So

the gut is short for grand unified

theory. We talked about that there were

four known subatomic forces. the um

electromagnetic force, gravity, the

strong force and the weak force and

electroeak symmetry unification merged

the weak force and electromagnetism into

the electroeak force. So what gut hopes

to do is to merge the electroeak force

and the strong force into one grand

unified force. Now that leaves gravity

outside because gravity is seemingly

fundamentally significantly different.

Then subsequently it is hoped that a

higher energy we will be able to blend

the theory of everything together with

all of the known subatomic forces the

strong weak and electromagnetic forces

and then gravity but so as you say gut

is sort of a a way station along the way

that's the goal and uh at this point I

would have to say that I do not see a

fast progress in the immediate future. I

think we're a ways away from that at

this point.

>> You mean on the gravity front?

>> Maybe we'll come up with something

really cool. We certainly had some ideas

back in the early 80s that we tested and

they didn't pan out.

>> Uh speaking of which, string theory is

the thing you're referring to.

>> Uh so string theory posits that

particles are tiny vibrating strings and

by tiny we mean extremely tiny at the

scale of a plank length. Uh then there's

there's other leading candidates like

loop quantum gravity. Uh maybe there's

some alternate theories in the works. So

can you uh linger on that a little bit

more? Do you think a theory of

everything exists? So I hold personally

that there are rules that govern matter

and energy space time and they probably

are rules that I don't know. There are

probably phenomena I'm not aware of. But

I do believe that something there are is

a rule that governs reality. And so in

that sense once we understand the rules

that govern reality, the fundamental

rules that would be a theory of

everything. You know there are things

that are unknowable like for instance

inside black holes we don't know what's

inside there but that doesn't mean that

there's not something inside there. So

there's a distinction between what we

can know and truth. So I I do believe

that there are the rules and I do

believe that with sufficient time,

technology, effort, we will be able to

figure this all out. Now, this isn't a

thing in my lifetime. It's not a thing

in my grandchildren's lifetime or even

their grandchildren's lifetime.

>> Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's a pretty strong

statement, right? That's a pretty strong

statement saying we're

>> we're 50 to 100 years out from finding a

theory of of everything. It took 200

years to go from unifying gravity to

unifying electromagnetism. It took a

hundred years to go from unifying

electromagnetism to unifying the

electroeak force. Now you could say,

well, gee, that's went from 200 to 100.

So it's getting faster, but it's also

getting harder because the unification

scale is of order 10 the 15, which we

can do the math. That's a quadrillion

times higher than the highest energy

accelerator we can build today.

>> And it was one thing to, you know, we

are reaching diminishing returns. We get

something like a factor of seven

increase in particle accelerator energy

every 20 years. And so we have to get to

a quadrillion times. Now, you know, if

you really did believe uh a factor of

seven every 20 years, then that's we're

talking like 500 years, but you know,

this is like Mo's law that it doesn't

continue forever. We're not going to

every seven year. I mean, every 20 years

get another factor of seven. So, yes, I

I think it's a very long time. That's my

prediction. Um, you know, some people

are far more optimistic and we can talk

about that. We should also actually

mention

that I guess your intuition behind that

is not just the part where you come up

with a theory that's beautiful and seems

to be internally consistent, but you

have to have a theory that's making

falsifiable testable predictions.

>> Correct? And you have to have a a

feasible

engineering construction a methodology

for creating an experiment that tests

that prediction. So I think a lot of

your this is 50 100 200 years from now.

Intuition is maybe about the second part

of that which is like you need to have

an experiment. Yeah. Yes. Yes. But you

know let's say I mean you alluded to

super strings. I haven't answered that

question. And I'll table that for a

moment. Super strings is a fascinating

idea. I don't believe it. Um but I love

it. I hope it's true. And there's a

real, you know, apherism and it says you

should absolutely never believe what you

think. So even if you think Superstrings

is true, you shouldn't believe it

because it hasn't been tested.

>> Now let's say super string is correct.

I mean hypothesis it's correct. 100%

correct. I don't know it's correct. So I

don't care. I mean, you know, it could

be correct, but I don't, you know, until

it's validated, it's just a wild ass

guess, you know. So, I we have to have a

way of validating it. So, yes, the the

the empirical side of it is important. I

mean, you could wake up tomorrow and

have the theory that is the perfect

theory, but if I can't prove it, I don't

care. If we were to think, this is going

back to the great courses on the

evidence for modern physics,

>> we're talking about energy levels and

tiny particles

to the degree where the kind of

prediction we would be making is not

accelerator type predictions. So,

it's probably going to be impossible to

build an accelerator that detects

something like a string.

So you have to make predictions

about macrocale behaviors.

>> That's another alternative.

>> It's a different kind of prediction.

>> Sure.

>> Do we even have intuitions about what

kind of predictions they would be? So

one one of course one of the lines of

intuitions has to do with black holes

where in the singularity

the physics of black holes combine

certain elements of general relativity

and quantum mechanics. So there

>> you could see some kind of predictions

you can make.

>> Uh but you can't really mess with a

black hole. It's not like you can create

a black hole in the lab.

>> And the energies that you were talking

about, the sizes we're talking about are

inside a black hole, which you can

intrinsically never see.

>> Yeah.

>> So you know, you can only see the

outside of a black hole, not the inside

of a black hole. So what you said, you

did say something that was incredibly

important and incredibly correct and

probably won't happen, but that's still

good. Okay. So we have two choices when

you talk about super strings. Either

super strings are correct and they're

making predictions up at the plank

energy scale at which point we have to

somehow build facilities that can

generate plank plank energies. That's

possibility one. Possibility too is this

theory which is currently only

applicable at plank energy scales.

Someone figures out a way to take those

equations and solve them in a way that

say predicts the mass of the electron.

>> Mhm.

>> Right. And that is a tricky business.

Um, I am not a string theorist, so I

can't tell you that that's likely, but I

can tell you that they've been working

on it since the 80s, and they haven't

gotten very far. Furthermore, if I uh I

think it's fair to characterize that

string theory is still a a vague idea,

and that's unfair. But let me tell you

why I say that. Because what they have

are approximate solutions to approximate

equations.