As a Particle Physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Dr. James Beacham is trying to unlock the secrets of the Universe. We talk Dark Matter, Dark Energy, how the Universe started, how the Universe will end, time travel, the Multiverse, Magic Numbers and why everything might be made of math. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Space Things.
Dr. James Beacham: 02:19ish
Pointless: 59:51ish
Top 5: 01:17:45ish
nickvinzant@gmail.com (Show Email)
316-530-7719 (Show voicemail)
https://www.tiktok.com/@jbbeacham (James Beacham TikTok)
https://jbbeacham.com (Dr. Beacham’s Website)
Particle Physicist Dr. James Beacham
Nick VinZant 0:11
Welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, particle physics and space stuff,
Dr. James Beacham 0:19
than what my research is all about, is really trying to understand the basic building blocks of reality. What are the basic building blocks of the universe, your body is mostly composed of empty space, you have about a billion particles of something called dark matter flowing through your body every second. And so that's kind of like, if you ask the question, what was before the Big Bang, we don't really know how to formulate an answer to that right now. But we do have a, you know, we have there is an idea that is out there that we could be one universe in a possible, possibly infinite number of multiverse, or sorry, universes in a multiverse sort of landscape, if you will. Maybe mathematics is the actual underpinnings of everything around us in existence, maybe our universe is secretly made of math,
Nick VinZant 1:07
I want to thank you so much for joining us, if you get a chance, subscribe, leave us a rating or a review, we really appreciate it, it really helps support the show. So our first guest is trying to unlock the secrets of the universe. He's a particle physicist, working on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, I'm not going to pretend to understand the ins and outs of the lot of a lot of the things that we talk about. But he does a fantastic job of not only kind of diving into the details, that if you're really interested in know about particle physics, there's a side of it for you. But for people like me, he does a fantastic job of summing up what this all means. And for me, it really changed the way that I look at the world around us. And I left with a new appreciation of the universe. Because some of this stuff is just mind blowingly cool. This is particle physicist, James Beecham. What are you guys doing over there? I know what you're doing. I don't know what you're doing. So yeah,
Dr. James Beacham 2:23
so we're doing a lot of things. But at the end of the day, what CERN does, and what our research here is, what my research is all about, is really trying to understand the basic building blocks of reality, what are the basic building blocks of the universe, and the way that those building blocks interact? So, for example, you know, we, it you know, we have this enormous you. So CERN to be clear, is is a host, it's a physics laboratory, right. It's an enormous physics Particle Physics Laboratory. And it was founded in the late 50s, early 60s, by a bunch of scientists that were determined to have a Physics Institute that was specifically designed to investigate the fundamental physics of the universe, specifically for non militaristic purposes. So to try to have you know, Europe and the world heal after World War Two, this entire thing, this enormous endeavor. At the end of the day, I just like to remind people that it all all this research, if it seems very arcane, and weird, and like, it, just kind of like I can never understand this fully. At the end of the day, all of what we're doing comes down to a sliced bagel, I adapt, adopt a New Yorker, so in New York could take a bagel and cut the bagel in half, and then cut the half and half, how far can you go? Eventually you get to a molecule, right? Well, we know that a molecule exists. So then you ask, Can I cut a molecule? Yeah, we know that a molecule is made up of atoms, you know, for example, water is h2o, two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom stuck together. So then you ask, Can I cut an atom? Yeah, it turns out that an atom, like I said, has a nucleus in the middle, and some electron particles swarming around in the cloud, then you ask the question, Can I cut an electron? As far as we know the answer right now is No, there's nothing inside of an electron. Then you ask? Can I cut the nucleus? Yes, of course. The nucleus is made up of protons and neutrons stuck together. Can I cut a proton? It turns out yes, there's stuff inside of a proton. There's three little particles called quarks held together by other particles called gluons. I didn't call them glue on some Joker did back in the day, but whatever. The so these individual particles called quarks, then you ask can I cut a quark? The answer as far as we know right now is no as far as we know, an electron is a tiny individual zero volume point of stuff. That doesn't make any sense like how can something have zero volume, but still have things like mass and energy and charge and spin all these kinds of quantities? Turns out this is possible with the kind of weird rules of quantum mechanics we can talk about quantum mechanics if you want, but you know, this is so turns out that when you add when you ask a seemingly simple question like that, how small can I cut anything very childlike? Quite origin? Turns out, you're secretly asking a much more profound question to begin with, which is what was holding anything together to begin with? Right? So this the, you know, the nucleus and the electron, they're not just held together by magic, right? So this it ends up that particles interact with other particles, these tiny individual uncuttable things via forces of nature. And as far as we know, right now, the ones that we've discovered, there are 17 different species of individual uncuttable particles in the universe. And basically, everything around you that you see is composed of these. So that's what we do here at the Large Hadron Collider, we do that kind of at CERN in general. But specifically at the Large Hadron Collider, we're trying to understand what are the basic fundamental building blocks of the universe. You know, the things that make up everyone around everything around us. But so the 17, this kind of List of 17 known species of different particles, and they have names, things that you might have heard in papers or on the news like the electron, okay, you know, the electron, you're swarming with electrons, you've heard of the photon, this is the particle of light, you've heard of quarks, like I just said, there's things called muons. There's things like tau particles, Z particles, w plus minus these kinds of things. But we have a list of what the known particles are. However, we know for a fact that this cannot be the full and complete picture of the entire universe. This the 17 species of particles that I just described, they basically account for all the stuff around you and me. And so we kind of you know, as humans, we get kind of hubris stick, you know, in fact, back in the day, it's like, yeah, we're the center of everything. You know, the Earth isn't the center of the universe, it's everything's about us, it's like, well, No way, man. So in fact, these particles are only account tech can only account for about 5% of all the stuff that we know is in the universe, the 95% of this stuff is stuck into other forms that we currently don't know what they are. So we give them the name, dark, dark energy, dark matter, you have about a billion particles of something called dark matter flowing through your body every second, it's been going on your entire life, it never touches you, it's always there, we have no idea what part of what kind of particle this is, I talked about forces, there's only four known forces that we know of. And three of them are the ones that we care about in particle collisions. Because the fourth one gravity doesn't even rate when I in the Large Hadron Collider, we collide protons, too little protons come together, hopefully, they get close enough to collide. And when they collide, you can calculate the different types of way that they can interact. And in fact, that collision doesn't mean that we're smacking them into each other and stuff flies out of the proton, that's not what happens. In fact, we want them to get close enough so that the particles inside the protons can start to feel each other. And they can start to interact by themselves. So for Imagine we take two quarks out of these protons and they collide. So then that's what happens with a little delta. So we can calculate the types of forces that will that will participate potentially, in this collision. And gravity does not even rate the gravitational force between two protons is basically nothing escapes you. It doesn't even matter. So this is a big open question. We don't actually know why gravity is so weak compared to the other forces of nature, it spits a huge open question. That's, again, we can get into the details of your why it's really quite fascinating. That's one of the questions that's consumed me since I was a child, and, you know, 10s of 1000s of my colleagues as well, and this large hadron collider. For those that don't know, it's a 27 kilometers circular tunnel here on the border of France and Switzerland, about 100 meters underground. And in this tunnel, 100 meters underground, we use superconducting magnets. Some of you may have you may have seen these, these photos online of these big blue tubes that say CERN on the side of them. These are these are casings that contain superconducting magnets inside them. And we use the superconductor we have to keep these superconducting magnets colder than outer space. And we use these to accelerate protons again, you're mostly made of protons and neutrons and electrons, we take protons, and we accelerate them to almost the speed of light 99.999999% of the speed of light, it kind of sounded like I was glitching there, but I was not 99.99999% at the speed of light. And then we once they get to that speed and the highest energy that humans have ever used in the collider experiment, then at four, there's two different beams that are going in opposite directions around the ring. And at four points on that ring. We bend the beams together, cross the streams, we bend the beams together, and then those beams those protons start to collide. And the place where you where you collide these protons, you better build an enormous detector because quantum field theory magic, okay, it's not actually magic. Quantum Field Theory magic is going to happen. And for example, by by big I mean enormous. So the one that I work on is called Atlas is six storeys high, 46 meters long. It's like an enormous soda can tipped on his side. The reason why we have to build something huge like that is because when you collide protons at such high energies and speeds, you're briefly Reek we are briefly recreating the conditions of the universe as they were just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang 13 point 8 billion years ago, because understanding what was happening back then, which we don't currently understand. Understanding what was happening back then will help us explain the universe we see now
Nick VinZant 9:59
you know, When I hear about stuff like this, the thing that always gets me is like, How can this be real? How can this be so small? How can the universe be really this big? I just can't even imagine it.
Dr. James Beacham 10:10
Yeah, it's pretty weird. I completely agree with you. And obviously, that comes from at least I don't know, obviously. But for me, this these kinds of urges, they come from the fact that you and I, as humans, honestly, we evolved for a very long time, with a really, really rare set of conditions that the universe does not overwhelmingly does not have in it, right. So for example, like you and I, as a species, we evolved in a very friendly planet for this kind of a thing with, you know, just the right distance from a star so that the sun has the energy coming toward it was just enough to be able to like heat it in just the right way at the right time. So that then it sort of developed this atmosphere, and just the right conditions with the temperatures and things so that the water and that you'd have that kind of primordial soup, where different types of chemicals came together, and just the right way over a very long time periods, to eventually evolve to this thing that we know is life, and then evolved to you and I. So we existed, we evolved within a very, very fuzzy, friendly range of conditions that the universe overwhelmingly is not like. So these kinds of these kinds of urges that we have where it's like this can't this doesn't make any sense. It comes from the fact that you and I don't didn't evolve in that, that either of those ranges, either the range of the very small, or on the realm with a very, very large.
Nick VinZant 11:31
So if we figure out this dark matter, right, that 95% of the universe, or the number that you said, if we figure that out, then what changes,
Dr. James Beacham 11:39
what would change is hopefully it would deepen our understanding of what the universe is made of, at the end of the day. That's like a big open question for science that it seems obvious we'd have to solve, right? If I tell you, yeah, we are very good at you know, as physicists as astronomers at taking a sort of like budget stuff budget of the universe. And we can say that 5% of the universe is stuck into stuff, that's you and me, we call this baryonic matter doesn't matter. Don't Don't worry about the note name, but it's just stuff that you and I, you know, potatoes and Beyonce are made out of, you know, these things are this is baryonic matter, we know that about 25% of the universe, give or take is dark matter. And the rest of the universe is that thing called dark energy. If we find out what dark matter is, in principle, we will answer that question what, you know, to know what at least 25% of the universe is made of, however, it's entirely possible, what if that, what if we don't understand gravity correctly, maybe there's something else we need to understand, right? So if, for example, we look for dark matter, particles, and all the possible ways that we can think of it so we talk to our theorists, friends, and they give us 10 new ways that we hadn't thought of to do an experiment for dark matter. And we all those are ruled out, then maybe we have to go back to the drawing board and say, hmm, maybe we have to change Einstein a bit, maybe we have to actually change our understanding of gravity, maybe, for you and I, gravity is one thing here on Earth, but maybe on galactic scales, as gravity gets farther away from the center of a galaxy, maybe you have to modify things. And in fact, one of my colleagues from from the Netherlands, he hasn't even wilder idea that gravity is not actually a force, it's an emergent premise, if I can get it right, an emergent property of spacetime due to the fact that the fundamental building blocks of the universe are not quantum particles and fields, but in fact, are informational qubits that create a kind of pressure. So that even goes beyond me. So if you're like, I didn't understand that. I don't understand that either. So this is my friend, Eric. And he has a really great theory about this. But this is just just to say, like, you know, we if we understand if we discover what dark matter is that will allow us to better understand at least 25% of the universe, how can we haven't figured it out yet. That's a tough one. Because we don't have a good suggestion, a theoretical hint, or some kind of like really good suggestion as to where like an arrow pointing, you should do an experiment here. And you should find a discovery. And that's super weird, because we have kind of had these all the time in the past for physics. And that's why right now in physics is a very, is a very exciting time to be a physicist because we have huge open questions. And we're kind of running out of this sort of theoretical hints as to what kind of an experiment we should design to either discover the thing or rule out the one thing that could be I'll give you an example of what I mean. So this particle we discovered back in 2012, here at the Large Hadron Collider is called the Higgs boson sometimes in the press it's referred to as the God particle. None of us like that name because it you know, God honestly, since daily deities are kind of in okay, we can disagree with deities to be there and to a lot of physicists, their human inventions and it kind of does a sort of disservice to this particle as to how awesome it is. So, the but this particle we discovered this, the existence of this particle was predicted way back in the 60s and in fact it turned out that it was there waiting for us discover all along. But we had never built a large enough experiment to discover it. So that's the same way with future, you know, future discoveries. So like the dark matter, the reason why we can't just say, oh, let's go and discover where Dark Matter should be, is that dark matter is a concept. It's a, it's a phenomenon that we observe. But we don't have any idea number one, if it is a particle, but if it is a particle, we don't know what the mass of this thing should be. So it's basically impossible for us to say, oh, we should build this experiment. And we should, you know, either it's there, or we rule it out and have to go back to the drawing board. And the mass of this dark matter could be over an enormous range. So that's why it's both scary. And also kind of, you know, wonderful to be a physicist at this moment. Because we have huge open questions. And we're really out of like, the big theoretical hints, like the flashlights, it's like, go over there. And that's where your discovery is. We don't have those anymore, you know, is it Dark Matters flowing through you all the time, and it's never touched you. So that means that dark matter either never interacts with you and I type matter? Or if it does, it operates via some new force of nature, that is so so so, so, so so weak, that it almost never happens.
Nick VinZant 16:12
I guess the thing that I kind of don't understand about it is it seems to be like, we can't find it, but it's everywhere. It's very rare, but it always happens.
Dr. James Beacham 16:20
Well, the way I would put it is that it never actually interacts with you at all. Think of it this way, your body is mostly composed of empty space. This is a weird thing to think about. Because like you look at your hand, you're like, No, yeah, like James, what that what
Nick VinZant 16:34
you're talking about the seasonal thing. Right, right.
Dr. James Beacham 16:37
Yeah, it's like, look, I can punch my hand, I'm very solid, right? Okay, that's great. But in fact, if I look at your body, if I look at what you're made of, so for example, your body is overwhelmingly made of four elements, we've got hydrogen, we've got carbon, we've got oxygen, we've got nitrogen, basically, like 99 point, something percent of your body is made up of these four elements. But then you ask the question, what is a hydrogen atom? Do you remember what a hydrogen atom is from from chemistry?
Nick VinZant 17:07
It's made of hydrogen. It's okay. If I noticed a list of hydrogen hydrogen atom.
Dr. James Beacham 17:13
No, that's cool. But it's you know, it's a thing you can think of it in your head, right? If you want to, it's like your body is made up of these like atoms. And maybe these atoms are sort of spherical in a way, right? Think of a bunch of balls that are stuck together in a way. And so your body at a very, very small scale, all these balls are kind of like bumped into each other, and some are overlapping a little bit. And that's what you're made of. That's what an atom is. But an atom of hydrogen. My job as a particle physicist, is to say, okay, the atom of hydrogen is not actually like a little ball. Let's look inside this thing, maybe this stuff inside. And it turns out there is stuff inside of a hydrogen atom, a hydrogen atom is made up of a little nucleus in the middle, which in fact, only has one proton. And then it has it has a cloud that's composed of an electron, one single electron particle that's moving so fast around it, that it makes it kind of cloud of electrons ish stuff, which gives it the the the impression, it gives it the effect of be behaving like a sphere. Does that make sense? Like
Nick VinZant 18:10
it's spinning around so fast that like, I'm imagining my finger trying to poke into it, but it's spinning around so fast that I, I'm always hitting the electron no matter what. Exactly.
Dr. James Beacham 18:20
Yeah, exactly. It's always a zoom, zooming around like that. It recreates a kind of a cloud and, and, you know, for physics terms, that has a particular force attached to it. But yeah, but from a distance you like, you know, not a super far distance with like, oh, yeah, that's a sphere of the hydrogen atom with one electron moving super, super fast, that creates a kind of shell around it, right? So that's what you should have in your head. But it we know that inside that thing, that it's composed of one single particle in the middle called a proton, and then there's one particle zooming around at a very high speed called an electron. Okay? But what if I were able to and I could do this, you know, if I'm a physicist, I can stop time, and I stopped the electron, and the proton is sitting there in the middle. So then if I do that, I can then measure what the size of these these individual particles are, right? Again, because what we see is a phenomenon is an effect due to the fact the electrons spinning around so fast. What if I stopped the electron and I have the proton in the middle? Then I asked, okay, how big are these things? How how much stuff is there actually in a hydrogen atom? So if, if a proton in the middle, so the effect the electron, as far as we know, has zero size, zero volume, it's like a little point of something that point and of nothingness that can still carry things like charge and spin and mass and things like that. The proton actually has a size. So for example, if my if a proton in the middle of a hydrogen atom, and the distance between these two things, the proton and the electron is actually so huge that it kind of like it's, it's really hard for me to even like wrap my head around it, and I'm a physicist. So if the proton in the middle of a hydrogen atom were the size of my fist And then the most likely place, you'd find the electron particle going around, it would be something like two and a half kilometers away. That's an I don't know how to translate that into miles. But like two and a half kilometers, that's a large amount of space away, and in between my fist and the electron is nothing, it's empty space. There's nothing inside there.
Nick VinZant 20:24
And then if you go in all directions, that's an incredible amount of space, right? Like in every
Dr. James Beacham 20:30
think about that. So think about if your body is overwhelmingly made of hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon and oxygen, and those other ones are similar in size to the you know, the size is about the same. A hydrogen atom, if your body is made up of a huge number of hydrogen atoms, the hydrogen atom is fact is one proton, that's the size of my fist, and then electron that is two and a half kilometers away. And in between is nothing. It's empty space. So your body is overwhelmingly empty space, the electrons are zooming around at such a rate that it gives this effect of you being solid, but you're not actually solid.
Nick VinZant 21:07
So is there any chance that I could someday just walk through a wall, then?
Dr. James Beacham 21:11
Yes, there is. I don't want to get into the details here. But it actually doesn't have so much to do with the empty space part of you. It has something to do with quantum mechanics. And if if you know if some of you want to dig into quantum physics on your own, there is a probability that if I were leaning against a wall, and I leaned against the wall for long enough, all of my particles, but could spontaneously tunnel through the wall and appear on the other side of the wall. But this, the time that I would have to lean against the wall to make this happen to eventually allow this to happen is something like I forget the number like maybe 10 to the power 35 years, I'm not probably not going to live that long, especially given the fact that the universe is cold. Currently, the age of the universe is currently only 10 to the power 10 years. So the reason I said this, the reason I said this is to answer your question is that your body is overwhelmingly like this empty space. So we know for a fact that there are particles moving through your body all the time, that also we know for a fact they exist. And they also don't interact with you at all, like I said, you actually have every second you have about one particle called a muon going through your head. And this is coming down from and the muon is the kind of a more massive cousin of the electronic and your body is swarming with electron particles, if keep everything the same about the electron, but increase its mass of it, and this particle called a muon. And we know that these are raining down on us all the time from the upper atmosphere, they don't harm you, they don't touch you, they've zoomed through your body, they zoom through your body as if you're not even there, because they almost never interact with your particles. And because they just go through this empty space. And it's not even a problem for them. They're going to the same rate as the electrons, so there's no reason for them to ever bump into like
Nick VinZant 22:49
zipping right through me. Hmm, wow.
Dr. James Beacham 22:52
Yeah. And if you hold if you hold up your thumb, every second, you have about 65 billion particles called neutrinos coming from the sun and going through your thumb, every second 65 billions from the sun through your thumb. So when you think of it that way, it's actually makes a lot more sense that there could be something like dark matter that we just don't currently know what it is. That's also zooming through your body all the time. And it just never touches you at all.
Nick VinZant 23:20
Are you ready? For some harder slash listener submitted questions?
Dr. James Beacham 23:23
Please, please bring it on. When you run a
Nick VinZant 23:25
test? Do you feel it? Does it have a smell? Does it have a sound? Like what's it like being there during one of these tests? Or is it just like, there's one happening in the other room right now? And I wouldn't even know.
Dr. James Beacham 23:37
Well, it's an interesting, it's a very fascinating facility, because CERN is a host laboratory. And there's a large number of projects going on everywhere all at once. And the largest one, the most prominent one is this one called the Large Hadron Collider, right? Because it's very huge, just the largest experiment in human history, a 27 kilometer or 17 mile circular tunnel, you know, under 100 meters underground, that has something, you know, 10s of 1000s of people working on it around the globe, a lot of them are based here, but other ones are based all over the globe, or universities all over the globe working on this research. But on the campus of CERN, which is also quite large. There's a bunch of other experiments going on at all times. So if you ask the question, what you know what happens when we're doing a test if number one, what experiment you're talking about the Large Hadron Collider, that one is always happening 100 meters underground, so you don't hear or see or smell anything. So if you're talking about what happens, what would it be like to experience the Large Hadron Collider colliding protons, you would not be able to get close to the collision when it happened, because there's no possible way for you to be underground. When the collision happens. There's going to be a little bit of radiation whenever you have, whenever you accelerate charged particles like protons to very high speeds and energies and smash them together. Inevitably, this ends up with some things that we think of as radiation. It's not dangerous to humans because it dissipates very quickly after you turn off the machine. But there is some radiation which means that you can be downstairs 100 meters underground, when the collisions are happening, is there a
Nick VinZant 25:04
chance you'll blow up the world? This is
Dr. James Beacham 25:06
a very good question. And the answer is very obvious. The answer is very, very simple. No, there's no chance. So he discovered
Nick VinZant 25:14
dark matter, and then all of a sudden it blows up the world.
Dr. James Beacham 25:17
That's never gonna happen. Think about it. If we discovered dark matter, Nick, that just gives us information about the universe. Like there's still nothing you could do with dark matter. Think about it. Like, we know that dark matter is all around us all the time. Like I can't say if I suddenly know what it is. I can't like collect it and do stuff with it. It's still, what am I going to collect it with? My hands? That's been going through my hands my entire life. I can't touch it. I can't do anything with it. So there's no way if we discovered dark matter, there's no way for us to make like dark buildings out of dark matter. That's not why we do the research we do. We don't do it. Because we're looking for profit or for products or for things. We're strictly curious about the universe full stop. That is awesome in and of itself. And so no, there's no possible way for us to blow up the the earth. And I'll give you a very concrete reason. If you're not satisfied with the, you know, with the answer, trust me, bro. I will give you a reason as to why this is. So when I say the Large Hadron Collider is it currently we're colliding protons at the highest energies that humans have ever used in the collider experiment, maybe that sounds very dangerous or daunting. But the key phrase is that one in the middle by humans, so this highest energy by humans, is you know, we say 13 point 6 trillion electron volts. And we're like very proud of our proton collisions at these high energies. But we're actually no match for nature itself. So above your head just now, for example, there are way higher energy collisions going on in the universe all the time. In fact, some of them very, very close to you right now. So what I mean is that if you go up into the upper atmosphere right now of our Earth, if you go up in the upper atmosphere, the upper atmosphere is constantly being bombarded by cosmic ray particles from far away in the universe, like protons, in fact, that are coming from weird sources far away other galaxies, others, you know, other sources, and they've been traveling for a very long time, and eventually get to the earth. And they're coming in at very, very high speeds and energies, and they're smacking into the atoms in the upper atmosphere. And these are also collisions, these are high energy collisions. So these particles are coming in smacking into the upper atmosphere. And these, as that smacking happens, there's a bunch of sort of a cascade of, of collisions that happens, and a bunch of low energy particles come down, for example, these muons that I said, you have about a one muon going through your head every second. This is sort of this muon rain, that is a result of cosmic ray, high energy particles smacking into the upper atmosphere from outer space. And these collision energies are way higher, it can be way higher than that we use those we use of the Large Hadron Collider. So it's sometimes 1000s of times the energy that we use with the Large Hadron Collider. So if you're worried that this energy, when I say high energy, that some kind of dangerous thing, it's only danger, it's only high for humans, and the universe has way, you know, we're no match for mother nature, she has much more interesting things going on much higher energy the weekend. So it's totally safe.
Nick VinZant 28:09
How does the universe end? Do we freeze to death or burn to death?
Dr. James Beacham 28:13
Whew. That's a very good question. I would probably answer in two different ways. So if you mean, how is the universe itself going to end? Number one, we don't know the answer. We have some good candidates. And it seems likely that our universe, the one thing we do know right now about our universe is that it's expanding, which means that everything in all directions is moving away from everything else. And the farther you get away from us, things are moving away from us at much higher speed and at very, very high speeds, very fast speeds. And so we know that everything in the universe is moving apart from each other, everything is expanding. And as far as we know, right now, this is going to continue. And in fact, it's going to speed up indefinitely. So we know right now, as far as we understand, the universe will continue to expand forever. And so the short answer to this question is that likely our universe will continue to continue to expand indefinitely, and eventually some far, far, far, far future, you know, not even like, we can't even wrap our brains around it, you know, 10 to the power 60 years tend to the power 100 years 10 to the power 10 to the power 1000 years, something like that, eventually, somewhere along this timeline, everything in the universe will eventually decay. So you know, if you feel bad about you know, for example, getting old, it's like, oh, my buddies, you know, deteriorate is like, Don't worry, everything in the universe is going to eventually decay, not just your body, not just planets and stars, but individual protons themselves will eventually just gave birth, and they'll turn into like just kind of raw energy. And eventually the universe would be completely dominated by black holes, and the blood and again, black holes don't care about us at all. These black holes will sit there for a very long time until eventually, even black holes will evaporate. They will give up all their stuff, and there'll be nothing in the universe. It will just be kind of a is a fuzz soup of kind of energy. And eventually it will reach the what we refer to, it seems that it will eventually reach what we refer to as a kind of a heat death, meaning the sort of meaning that the universe will attain a state of nearly maximum entropy, you don't need to know anything about is basically a state of disorder, basically completely disordered, chaotic universe, and nearly absolute zero temperature, which means that nothing can ever happen ever again in the universe, ever. And it will stay that way, probably for eternity. So that's as far as we know, now, the universe will probably end in this kind of like, cold death, it'll just sit there indefinitely. I see look on your face, you want to ask a question or something?
Nick VinZant 30:41
I guess? Well, then how did it? Right let's let's let's go into the let's go into the big question that everybody always wonders, right. So then how did it get here?
Dr. James Beacham 30:51
Yeah, we we do we do know a lot about that, in fact, that's one of the one of the great successes of modern science, right is the fact that we do know, a very large amount of the history of the universe with a few kind of key gaps along the way that we're filling in now, from when the universe was, you know, currently, our universes is about 13 point 8 billion years old. So if you run this in a way, and we know that it's expanding, right, we know that everything's expanding in all directions. So if you just take like the YouTube slider of the universe and slide it backwards, right, as you go backwards, everything has to go get smaller and smaller, and eventually go all the way back closer and closer to something known as t equals zero, the beginning of the universe, everything had to have at some point had to have been packed into a tiny, dense little point, that then started to expand. And we can go in that we actually know quite well about our universe from now, way, way, way back to when the universe was about, I guess, 10 to the power minus, I don't know, minus 15 seconds old 10 to the power of power minus 20 seconds old, something like that. So if you have 0.000, the 25 zeros and then a one, that number of seconds, old, up to 13 point 8 billion years. That's pretty good. There's of course, there's just a lot of gaps in there that we're still trying to understand, like, how did particular types of stars evolve? Like, what kind of black holes were made at the beginning of the universe, all this kind of thing. But that's pretty remarkable, right? So we can go back to like, 10 to the power minus 15 seconds and kind of know what was happening. But that's not enough for us, right? As physicists, we're like, Okay, well, what would before that, what happened before 10 to the power minus 15. That's basically what we do. When you build enormous machines like the Large Hadron Collider, what you're doing is you're built when you build a larger machine of higher energy, you're actually looking farther back in time. So as you go to a higher energy machine, you can, you're not satisfied with 10 to the minus 15 seconds, you want to see what happened 10 to the minus 20 seconds, 10 to the minus 30 seconds, you know, this kind of a thing. So so we know quite well, the way the universe was behaving way back toward the moment of the so called Big Bang, you know, the words that we use to refer to the way the universe started, started to expand and then kind of slowed down its expansion and then sped up the expansion we know quite well, the way this happened. However, if you didn't ask the question, which I think is kind of what you're asking, what was before that,
Nick VinZant 33:09
like, where did all this stuff come from? Right?
Dr. James Beacham 33:13
Where did it all come from? Exactly? That's a huge open question. That is an open question for science. We do not have an answer for that we have a lot of really fascinating kind of edge of knowledge, speculation about what you know, where this kind of universe could have come from. Because at the end of the day, it's also related to, it's related to a question that I think about a lot. And a lot of my colleagues think about a lot. It's weird, because our universe is not just expanding. It's not just enormous and empty, and wonderful and curious, inducing, curiosity inducing, and just like kind of gobsmackingly cool. And always, it's also super weird. Because our universe is kind of filled with magic numbers. What I mean is that there are constants of nature that are just kind of numbers that are put there that we measure that we have no particular way to explain why those numbers are what they are. So I'll give you an example the electron, you remember, you know, learning about electricity and physics, like you know, you have charged like an electron has a particular charge to it, right? And this particular electron charge is the measure of how strong the electromagnetic force pulls on this thing. But why is that number the way it is? We don't know why that number is the way it is it just add that it's just as it's nice that it is because it's really good that our universe is here, right? But why is that number the way there's another one that's like the called the gravitational constant. And this may be something you've never heard of. But in our equations for gravity, there's always this G factor, which is something we just measure. It's like, it's nothing that comes from a theory, nothing that comes from like a clear understanding of the universe. Like Eureka. I'm a theoretical scientist and I write down a mathematical way. This predicts of the universe is just this number there that we measure, and it's always there. It basically measures the strength, the sort of broad global way with which gravity interacts. things interact via gravity. It's just a number. It's always the same. So why is that number the way it is? There's no, there's no explanation. There's no mechanism. And physicists, we love mechanisms. That's what we're looking for. It's like, it's not enough, the physicist says, the person for whom that's just the way it is, is never a satisfying answer. Also, this, we haven't talked about it. But the reason your particles like electrons, the reason they have the property known as mass, is that everywhere in the universe everywhere is permeated with this thing called the Higgs field. And the Higgs field is more or less like an invisible jelly that permeates all of space everywhere, you don't feel it, but your individual particles do. And as they move through the universe, a little bit of their energy is stuck into a point it's kind of dragged by this jelly like an electron, as it moves through this jelly, a little bit of as dragged, it's kind of like, you know, firing a bullet into a vat of molasses, it's going to slow down a little bit, you know, so a little bit of his stuck into this point, we measure his mass, but it doesn't and and the extent to which this particle is dragged a little bit by the jelly, and it gets some mass is set by a particular number known as the Higgs vacuum expectation value, you don't need to know the details of that just, it's trust me, trust me, it's a number that we can measure. And it's just, it doesn't have to be that number. But it is that number of and it but it's really good that that number is the way it is. Because if it was something different, our universe would not be here, the way it is right now, like atoms would never have formed. And you and I would not be here to have this conversation. So it's good that our universe is filled with these magic numbers. But why are these numbers the way they are? It's really dissatisfying to a lot of physicists, because we have no mechanism to explain why these numbers that are they are and it's really, it's really dissatisfying to say, well, maybe that's just the way it is, because it does, it's not satisfying, right? It's like that's, that's not good for physicists. So, some people are like, Okay, what if there's nothing to say it kind of makes, you know, the sort of like, the weird ones amongst us think it's like, well, maybe our universe is very special, maybe something was kind of a rain specially just for us, right? And then it sounds very kind of like weird and sort of like woowoo, in a way. But some of us instead start to think, okay, maybe the reason, we have these particular numbers, these magic numbers in our universe, maybe the reason is that our universe is actually nothing special. And in fact, these numbers could be something on a very large range of values, in fact, a nearly infinite range of values of that number. And in fact, all of these other values, in fact, do exist as the correct values in other universes in a multiverse. And so when I say multiverse, we're not talking about like Marvel movies, we're not talking about superheroes, we're talking about the fact that our universe, when it started, way back at the moment of the Big Bang, it was something tiny, and it started to kind of like expand in this sort of light in all directions, right? Maybe, and it has all these really nice properties, the electron charge, the Higgs vacuum expectation value, the gravitational constant, these values were just right, to allow, you know, stuff to form and then atoms to form and then you know, life to evolve, and for you and I to have this wonderful conversation. But there could be an almost infinite number of other universes in a kind of landscape of universes in a multiverse that also started to pop up next to ours at the same time, but these other universes took on nearly all the other values, right? Took on nearly all the other values of these possible magic numbers. And in most of the those other universes, the values were wrong, so that nothing ever happened, they started to expand, and maybe they everything was wrong. And so they collapsed immediately, or they started to expand, and they're particles in them, but the particles didn't have mass. And so an atom is never formed. And they're just completely chaotic, empty spaces for you know, for basically eternity. So that means that statistically, at least one of these had to be like ours, right? And so that's kind of like, if you ask the question, what was before the Big Bang? We don't really know how to formulate an answer to that right now. But we do have a, you know, we have there is an idea that is out there that we could be one universe and a possible, possibly infinite number of multiverse, sorry, universes in a multiverse sort of landscape, if you will, that these other universes could have also kind of bubbled into universes at the same time where you know, it's hard to define what time is and this concept, but that's kind of an end run around the question what was before the Big Bang? We don't know as before the Big Bang, but if our Big Bang came from this kind of like multiverse landscape, that in principle could provide a mechanism as to why our universe is the way it is right now. All that being said, we have no way to test this hypothesis. If I say, Well, maybe the universe is in a multiverse. I have no way to test this
Nick VinZant 39:54
without getting into necessarily like the religious aspect of things. Is there a plan in case we accidentally prove or disprove that a god exists? Like, is there a plan on paper somewhere where like, hey, what if we prove this or disprove it? Like, what are we going to do?
Dr. James Beacham 40:14
Yeah, that's a good question. And it's also a question that has absolutely nothing to do with particle physics. And I don't mean that in a in a rude way. I mean, I'm, I don't mean that in a rude way at all, I just mean that the, the particular set of thoughts and feelings and sensations and psychological, you know, phenomena and emotions that go into this kind of realm of and also political and social, this realm of things referred to as religion. That's a totally and completely different set and separate thing than what we do in physics.
Nick VinZant 40:53
So this is this is a this is a safe space here. What is your most outlandish theory? Like, oh, I can't share this with my physicist, buddies. Yet?
Dr. James Beacham 41:06
Most physicists were totally obsessed with outlandish theories, we we are trying desperately to find answers to these questions that have been sometimes open questions for like 100 years, like, you know, almost 100 years, you know, for example, one of the big open questions and sciences, how do gravity and quantum mechanics work together, you don't really know the need to know the details of those words. But essentially, we have, in physics, we have these two fantastically good theoretical models that have that are, that describe our universe really, really well, we have one that's called general relativity. And this was by Einstein. And this is the this describes how this is a set of mathematics that really, really, really accurately describes how gravity works on very large scales, that we have a completely separate set of mathematics known as quantum physics. And this, this governs the world of the very, very small particles, like the things that I work on. And each of these by itself, these models, these theories, each of these, by itself ranks among the most impressive intellectual achievements of humankind. But there's a huge problem, because when we do try to kind of naively combine these two, hoping for a more kind of fundamental theory of the universe, everything goes crazy and breaks, we get like nonsense answers like infinite energy, I don't even know what that means. Or like, probability is greater than 100%. Like, what does it mean to have a probability greater than 100%? Like, that doesn't make sense. Like, it's a 200%, there's a 200% chance that it's going to rain today. What? No, that doesn't make any sense, right? I know, when that when this happens, this is the universe's way of telling us that we need to think harder, right? So this is, you know, and so as physicists, we love new ideas. You know, we love new, scientifically based ideas. So I really wouldn't say there's anything kind of outlandish. However, there is one theory that's not mine, that I find fascinating from a kind of philosophical and also scientific perspective. But it's also one that I currently,
I would have no problem with talking with my physicist colleagues that, you know, appears, you know, at beers and burgers, but it's also one that like, I can't really even wrap my mind around, even as a physicist, and so that's why I think I'm kind of drawn to it, because it's also it's almost kind of like, it's really hard to like, understand what the hell it means. I guess this is what it is. So a colleague of mine, Max Tegmark, he came up with an idea a few years ago, Max had this idea is like, Okay, so the weird thing about are you another weird thing about our universe? From a kind of philosophical perspective? Like I just kind of said earlier, like, we have like these magic numbers in our universe, why are these numbers the way they are? Senate score is almost like metaphysical, right? It's sort of like woowoo, man, it's like philosophically, like, why is our universe the way it is, man, you can also think about it in the sense that, from a mathematical perspective, our universe seems to follow certain kinds of mathematics really, really, really well. And for those of you that haven't taken a math class for a long time, Matthew probably means like two plus two equals four, or like, you know, taking a derivative of something and like, you're like, Ah, this is too much. I totally sympathize with that. But math, in fact, is super, super more wonderful and complicated once it gets wonderful when you get to the more complicated stuff, because math is really about the relationships, complicated relationships amongst things and the way that different types of quantities work together. And you can in fact, write down particular types of mathematics, like a mathematician can write down at a large number of possible ways that math could behave specifically in the context of physics. So for example, like I said, very beginning of our conversation, everything around you that you interact with is made up of 17 different species, separate species of kinds of particles and the way those interact. And in fact, I can write down a mathematical set of equations that are based upon some pretty straightforward math that you know, things like group theory and you know, Lagrangian theory and CAC. Kill isn't all these differential equations, it's pretty straightforward. Once you get into it, I can write down a theory that describes all this stuff really, really, really well, like almost shockingly well. And it's a but it's also a kind of a weird theory, you don't need to know the details. But for example, the gauge group of our universe of the standard model is something called su three cross su one cross cross, sorry, su three cross su two cross u one, u two, the none of the details of that, except for the fact that it doesn't have to be that. Why is it? Why why is it su three? Why can't it be su five? Why can't it be su can? Why can't there be something else on the front of that? For some reason, our universe chose this one particular gauge group, and it went and ran with it. It's like, why is that that way? Also, why does our universe governed by these statistical distributions? So well, like everyone listen to this, if I were to take your average resting heart rate and put them on a little chart, I would take your heart rate, it would make a little kind of Gaussian bell curve, like a normal distribution, right? This is just the way our universe uses statistics all the time. statistical distributions, we call these, if you stand on a street corner, the rate with which cars will pass, you will follow some kind of thing all that plus on distribution. Again, you don't need to know the details. But just to know that our universe loves statistical distributions, and I defy you to hear a nerdier statement sent today. But what this means, when you start thinking about this from a kind of philosophical perspective, like, wait a minute, I thought that math was just this kind of thing that humans invented, to better understand the universe around us, right, which is, like magical and mystical. And all of this, you know, majestic is all its glory. Like it's math is our sort of like human, you know, shortcut to better understand like a language right away, like we invented languages, to better communicate, we invented mathematics to better understand, you know, and describe the universe around us. And it's good, the math of good, but it's never perfect, right? It's never a little bit. It turns out that in physics, it's almost perfect. And that's super weird, because Why did our universe choose this particular set of math to use, but as a mathematician, the mathematician can write down a huge number of other possible mathematical structures or equations that are our universe doesn't seem to us at all. Like, why is that? So it starts to make us think that maybe humans did not invent mathematics. Maybe humans discovered mathematics. Maybe mathematics is the actual underpinnings of everything around us in existence, maybe our universe is secretly made of math, secretly, fundamentally made of math, behind the scenes, if you're able to, I don't even know what behind the scenes means. But for example, if you were to look outside of the universe, or like on the multiverse, or you were to look down at the very, very smallest possible thing smaller than we could ever possibly we could ever possibly look, maybe the fundamental structures of the universe are mathematical. And so math is the very basic nature of our universe. I don't fully understand what this means, honestly. But I think it's fascinating because I started to think about it like, it starts to make my brain break. And I like this in a good way. I like it, when somebody comes up with an idea that sort of starts to make my brain break in a good way, because it stretches me out of my comfort zone, I like to, I like to be stretched out of my comfort zone. So this is one, this is one, this is possible candidate for the answer to the question. It's a kind of theory that's very speculative. And not even no one really fully understands what it means. And I'm not convinced that Max does either, and I don't think he does. But this is a fascinating concept that I think is worth considering. Because in the past, you know, thinking about things like this have sometimes led to really profound insights in the future, you know, about the universe. You know, for example, back in before 1915, when Einstein came up with this general theory of relativity, which is a profoundly different way of thinking about gravity than the way it was before, no one could have come up with that, like ex nihilo. It's like, it's like this would come from nowhere. Einstein had to think very deeply about the fundamental underpinnings of everything around us. And it's like, after a long time, it's like, it's like the emoji with the hand like, this is like Einstein was like this for a long time. It's like, and eventually, oh, wait a minute. What if gravity is not actually a force where like, the moon is attracting the earth? What if instead, gravity is a phenomenon that arises, because the presence of a certain amount of stuff within a certain volume of space creates a kind of sink hole in the fabric of space itself? Maybe space is not nothingness. Maybe space is not empty. Maybe space has a kind of fabric to it. And so when stuff is in there, it's sort of warping the fabric of space like a sinkhole, and as the moon is attracted to Earth, what it means is that it's constantly falling toward the earth in this sort of vortex Because in space, like that's mind blowing, no one could have come up with that, you know, to begin with. And if you kind of had that idea to begin with, you wouldn't even know how to formulate it. But I suppose it was those who was the person who's like, you really need to think profoundly about the very, very deep fundamental underpinnings of everything. And once you do that, eventually, sometimes the new profound insight will will come along.
Nick VinZant 50:22
So is it I'm guessing that a part of that potential theory that's not worked out, right, yet would be like, well, how can the universe be made up of something that doesn't physically exist?
Dr. James Beacham 50:32
Well, that's exactly you're asking a really key philosophical question here. What does it mean for something to physically exist? You know, because here's the thing, I totally agree with you, I don't know what it means for math to physically exist. But the kind of connection you can make is, like I said earlier, our universe seems to use certain mathematical structures that can that is a mathematician doing their her job would be able to write on a blackboard a very large number of possibilities. Our universe chose this one. Why did it not choose any of the others? Okay, whatever, we chose this one, that's fine. So does that mean that our universe has a kind of possible set of an infinite number of possible mathematical structures that are being instantiated by universes like ours? And again, it's kind of related to multiverse theory in a way. But again, I don't know what it means for for math to physically exist. But it is a hypothesis that I think is worth thinking about.
Nick VinZant 51:27
Are we going to go back in time? Can we go back in time? Is that going to happen?
Dr. James Beacham 51:32
Short answer, probably not. Time travel? Well, okay. First of all, if somebody asks, can't will we ever travel through time? The question is, yes, and you're doing it right now you're traveling through time, at a rate of one second per second. So we're all traveling through time. And indeed, we are. However, if you want to do some other kinds of travel to a time where you're, for example, you know, traveling at one year per second, then that's something that we have to work on. It seems right now, with the kind of theoretical limitations that we have within, you know, special relativity and general relativity, these kinds of things, we, it seems likely that we'll probably never be able to do backwards time travel, I'm happy to be proven wrong. But the short answer is that we might be able to, at some point, be able to travel into the future far future. But traveling backward in time seems to be less likely. And there's a lot of reasons for that one of them is mathematical. Again, at the end of the day, we have this thing, we have these mathematical rules that are part of relativity, it seems as though it's probably not likely for us to have so called closed timelike curves. I mean, I'd be happy to prove or be proven wrong. But we don't have any evidence that that's really possible forward time travel could be possible, but backward might be impossible.
Nick VinZant 52:45
Why would backward be? Not possible, but forward be possible? Like what's the,
Dr. James Beacham 52:51
it has to do with a kind of technicality of the equations that we use to describe so called relativity, this thing called relativity, basically, when you have objects that are moving at very, very high speeds, or at speeds that are beyond what light can do, there are certain limitations to what they can do. And in the equations of relativity, you can, you can come up with trajectories that certain people that objects like us physical objects, certain trajectories that we could even in principle take. I don't think I've been describing this very well. But you can think of it in the sense that moving forward into space, there's a lot more possibilities that we have, because the future is not really you know, we haven't lived the future yet. Because the past has a particular has a particular set of strictures on it that have already existed, it's harder for us to find a kind of physical way that you could ever go backwards in time. There's, it's a, I don't think I'm answering this very well. But it takes a much longer discussion. I
Nick VinZant 53:47
think I kind of get it right, we can go forward because we don't know what the path is. But we can't go backward because we can't go backward on a specific path.
Dr. James Beacham 53:56
It's a rough way of thinking about it. It's a rough way of thinking about it. Yes. However, another reason to answer another way that I won't answer your question is that it also seems that if you can find closed timelike curves, which means if you could find a way to travel backwards in time, it might take such extreme gravitational conditions, such as those that are only found in the middle of a black hole, that it would probably just rip your body apart, and you might not be able to survive the trip. So even if you were to find some kind of backwards time travel thing, you might not survive the trip at all. Again, this is all speculation at the moment, because we've never been able to see it. There's other reasons to think that backward time travel might not be possible, because you might ask the question, if backward time travel is possible, why haven't people from the future visited us yet? Why is this never happened? Why have they never you know, and people this has been done a few times in the past people like scientists or speculative fiction fans, they're like, let's have a party. Let's just announce it's like, we're all going to be at this one place at one time. And we'll just advertise the universe, both in the future in the past in the future, especially Meet us here is a safe space meet us to say hello, aliens from the future whoever future humans meet us there if if future if backwards time travel is possible, if we discover this in the future, and just meet us here, and no one showed up. So it's this is kind of a logical way of thinking that probably backwards time travel is possible. It is not possible.
Nick VinZant 55:19
That's pretty much all the questions that we have. I mean, is there anything else that you think we missed? Or anything like, Oh, she know about this? Or did we kind of cover?
Dr. James Beacham 55:28
You know, we could go on for hours about all these topics and more, I just, you know, I think that for me, you know, the main thing to keep in mind, when we think about these concepts, who's going to in a conversation like this, we've touched upon a lot of different things, right? Both sort of like, boots on the ground Science here at CERN, the Large Hadron Collider turning back on and world record of the highest energy ever, you know, and, and then we got into philosophy and we talked a little bit about religion and these kinds of things. At the end of the day, all of this stuff to me, you know, the human endeavors that we have, you know, doing science, big science, like the Large Hadron Collider, smaller science, like chemistry, you know, your chemistry professor will do like, you know, tabletop experiments, you know, exploring the universe. All of these things, especially in a moment like this, especially in a moment of extreme, you know, stress and strife and hardship, you know, like large scale war has literally returned, you know, large scale war work waged by a fascist has returned to Europe for the first time in almost 80 years, like a pandemic that's, you know, killed so many of our loved ones, it's like, really a really a bad time. And in moments like this, I like to keep in mind that science, you know, like, big projects, like the Large Hadron Collider, that are mounted solely because our universe, our species is curious about the universe. There's no reason for this research. Other than just curiosity, we want to know how the universe works better. These projects demonstrate that. So 1000s of people come here from around the globe, to strictly work on, on curiosity for the universe strictly because, you know, for the sake of peace, right, the things that connect us, as humans are much, much stronger than the things that are put in place to separate us. You know, I'll give you a physics example. I said earlier that an individual electron right is sometimes you can think of it as a little point of something like a little particle like a BB moving through space. But in fact, if you think about it from a more fundamental way, it's kind of a little wavy packet of vibration that's moving through space. Turns out that that's not actually the most fundamental way to think about an electron, and therefore about all the particles that make up you. Turns out, if you look at the math just right, we've talked about math, if you look at the math just right, it turns out that the much more fundamental and accurate way to think about an electron moving through space, is that it's not a chunk of something moving through space, but in fact, is the little vibration in a field that permeates all of space everywhere, all the time. And this little thing is a vibration in this field, imagine you're playing with a cat on your bed, you're playing with your cat on your bed, and you take your sheet and you spread, you stretch the bed sheet tight, and you put your finger and make a little tent and the sheet and you move this tent around, and your cat chases this thing, right. That's actually what a particle is, is the much more if you took the sheet away you put your finger up cat wouldn't care about that is because it's gonna lick himself and go back to sleep. But if the fact that there's a sheet there makes it so the thing exists is possible to exist, and this electron moves around. Turns out, that's the much more fundamental way to think about our universe and everything in existence. And therefore what that means is that you and I, and everyone listening to us, everyone in existence, we are all collections of particles, that are excitations in the exact same quantum fields that permeate all the universe, we are all connected at a much deeper, much more fundamental way than any of the ways that other people try to separate us. So I like to keep this kind of a thinking thing in mind. And I just want to say I do I mean, I have my own problems. And the world is really frustrated and you know, terrifying sometimes even to me, I like to keep this in mind. And I like to hope to try to inspire other people. To keep this in mind. When you know, next time you get short with someone or you start to make a judgment on someone or make you know, some kind of biased, you know, viewpoint, just catch yourself and realize that we are all part of the same universe. And in fact, I'm really glad that you're all in this universe with me.