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Oh hey, it's your three half scratched off to do lists that you really should combine into one. But then you'd have to confront the tasks that you want to do the least. Hi Ali Ward, what is life? Where do we come from? Why do I have thoughts? Where does my spirit go when I die? Does anything matter? Does anyone know anything? These are just some of the exitential crisis you're about to enjoy, all under the guise of understanding particle physics. It gets spooky and I love it.
Come along, So you're about to meet u see. Riversides Associate professor of theoretical particle physics who studied mathematics and physics at Stanford and Cambridge, got a pH d at Cornell. He's also so lovable. Oh you don't love him. So his life's work and passion is figuring out how an invisible, mysterious matter fits in our understanding of a universe and nature. So we recorded this before the holidays, and I have been hanging on to it so excited to finally release
it into the cosmos and into your face. So I went to campus on what I later found out was the very first day of UC Riverside's fall semester. It was a broiling hot September afternoon. I took my little grubby purse full of chords and microphones. I showed up at his office door like someone waiting to meet a Broadway star.
Hello, I'm ally it's such a pleasure to matri It's I Justica cotest for I left.
It's so good to me.
Yeah, I'm super excited. I feel like I should be interviewing you now. Is there anything you need, like, oh my god, I mean other than like a time machine and a hairdresser than that.
So we chatted in his office and I made him tell me his life story and also explain things that are way above my own pay grade. But before we get into it, just a quick thanks to patrons of the show who make it possible, and you can join and submit questions for just a dollar a month. We're about to record a new slew of episodes, so get them in before then. Also, thank you to everyone who rates and reviews the show. I honestly read every single
one and his evidence. Thank you to Hyungski, who wrote Ali is the Internet data I never knew I needed, and also that I've always wanted. Beware, you can't just listen to one of these, so carve out like four to nine years of your life to obsess over everyology. So thank you Hyanski. I appreciate it, and every single person who wrote a review this week I read it. So Okay, onto the episode. What is universe made of? How do stars die? Why are we colliding particles? Underground?
Who first noticed dark matter? What is the best vintage insults? Are there space ghosts strapping to rearrange your perceptions of existence? Get ready to cut some banks? Boy, Howdy you're gonna text a crush and maybe buy a box of GROLSCPT cookies because it's about to get weird with theoretical particle physicist, dark matter expert and Scoto hilologist doctor Flip to Nato.
So my name is Flip Tonato. My pronouns are he him.
Mm hm doctor doctor, yeah, doctor flip and recently tenured, recently tenured. Yeah, when did that happen?
This happened officially July first.
That's huge congratulation. Thank you. I don't fully understand what it takes to get tenure because I'm not an academic, but I know it's a really big deal. Did you celebrate, I'll.
Be really honest with you, we didn't. So the story is getting to that path. That last year is a roller coaster, and so I had basically felt every single possible emotion you could feel about this twice or three times by the time we actually got the letter and I thought, okay, there was the exhaustion, the excitement, the fear, everything it all had been felt. Me and my partner. We'd all been on that journey several times. Then I
was visiting my parents. I still have my parents addresses, my main address, and there is an envelope completely nondescript, and it looked like every other envelope i'd gotten from UCR. I said, tear it open, just to make sure what caused it now, And then it was a letter from the chancellor saying congratulations. And so I still have the paper somewhere, but there's a big tear on the side because I'm sloppy about it.
Oh, what a great surprise. I hope there are some like jalapeno poppers and like whatever is the best way to celebrate tenure track I would go to a buffet probably, I appreciate that.
Well, we'll see, we'll see, Okay.
So I don't come from an academic family, so I'm a little murky on the concept of tenure or what the protocol is for celebration. But it means that it's like indefinite employment at that institution. You really have to screw up for them to fire you. It's lifelong job security. From what I gather, It's like having your crush proposed to you, except with a letter that looks like junk mail, and no one kisses you on the mouth. Also, I didn't know that some scientists get to name their labs
after themselves. I thought our Trickology guest doctor Valerie Horsley worked at the Horsey Lab by chance or because of a family legacy, and she's like, no, you get to name your lab after yourself. So asking smart people, unsmart questions. It's why we're here, and now, okay, help me out with theology here. Oh gosh, okay, I have wait, I have some propositions, a couple of potential ologies. Okay, please know I don't know what these words mean. Non buryonic highlology.
Highlology is the study of matter. Oh I like that.
I'm gonna save that.
Yeah, okay, so highlology is matter, and I was looking up what dark matter might be. And then also I've seen in the literature dark matter cosmology or dark cosmology, because physics obviously does not have anology, I mean.
Unfortunately not.
Do you ever hear like, how do people tend to describe this field?
Okay, okay, so the highlology that that got me. So usually the people doing theoretical dark matter it might be their main focus. But we do a lot of general purpose particle physics. So there's a sense in which the thing that we work on our quantum fields. If we want to be more specific, the particular types of things work on our invisible so they're not actually dark, they're invisible.
And one of our senior theoretical physicists at UCR, like the person who really founded our group, Ernest Ma, had a paper that had a funny title.
A few selects from doctor Ma's publication collection twenty twenty one's universal scotogenic for me on masses in left right gauge model or his follow up dark su two gauge symmetry and scotogenic direct nutrinos scutogenic Indeed.
And he used scotto, which is the Greek word for dark. Yes, so scotology, which sounds a little bit dirty. Scotology would also be a good one, but I think dark highlology just sounds super cool.
Scotto highlology really means dark matter.
I like that.
We may have just pioneered.
That is really nice.
I contributed something to the field, my only possible contribution. Now, okay, walk me back a little bit. Theoretical fields I think you just mentioned. So let's start at the base. Is it? Most people on Earth have no idea what you do? What the fuck it is?
Yeah?
Yeah, all right, So we care about the fundamental building blocks of matter, so we know there are atoms. Atoms already these are already a hard sell if you really think about it. We've never seen atoms. Maybe we have these weird electron microscope pictures, but what do those actually mean? But we're pretty happy that adams exist. And then you just go down the rabbit hole. But the atoms are the main idea that there's some unit of stuff. And maybe Einstein taught us that it's not just stuff, but
there's energy. Maybe there's a unit of energy. So the quantum in quantum mechanics has to do with quantizing energy levels, like there are discrete levels. I can't give you one point five sense, I can give you one penny or two pennies. And energy turns out to behave like that in certain systems. And that was the thing about quantum
and twenty around the nineteen twenties. If we fast forward decades, we build this edifice of theoretical physics, which is fairly mathematical, but all to answer the question of what are the fundamental things that, if you understood them, could describe slightly bigger things and those that describes bigger things. And eventually one of those things is an Adam and Adam's makeup all these other stuff that we know.
And did you set out to become a theoretical physicist, a dark matter expert? How does one land in? Like? What I feel like is the hardest field possible?
All right, here is my origin story. I wanted to be an author. Really, I had no idea why, but I was very passionate about writing, the idea that one could have a voice, and so growing up I was a huge fan of LeVar Burtons because of Reading Rainbow. Love love reading a Rainbow.
But you don't have to take my word for it.
So I would watch Reading Rainbow and at some point in the back of my mind I realized, this person who does reading Rainbow is also on this TV show Star Trek, And in high school I started watching Star Trek a little bit. It was still on at the time.
I picked up the book The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss, and this was a really fun ride because it was the first time I thought about a scientific subject as something where there are open questions, and these open questions are fun and creative and exciting and any time that I lost track of it being exciting, I just watch LeVar Burton as Jordan LaForge as a chief engineer.
Well, oh my gosh. My sister and I used to watch an extra.
Well it was the best.
Yeah, we can't change the gravitational constant of the universe, but if we wrap a low level warkfield around that moon, we could reduce its gravitational constant, make it lighter, so we can push it.
So I think that's what got me into this idea that hey, these black holes in the show, these are real. We should understand these things. Or there are fundamental questions that are not only abstract and things you'd find in textbooks, but they're fun ideas. And it was the creative spark that was really exciting that someone could write a science fiction piece about these actual things. And that's what got me going with physics.
Do you write still at all?
I was never a great writer, and you can ask my collaborators that my paperwriting is slow and tortuous. But I would like to eventually write something as a popular book.
Oh yeah, I feel like that is in your future. And also, everyone who writes hates writing, Oh absolutely, everyone hates it. And there's the old Dorothy Parker quote, I hate writing, but I love having written, which is everyone it's supposed to be torturous or else. I think you don't care. But when it comes to matter and dark matter, I mean it slow it way down for baby brains
like mine. But from what I understand, and the first time I ever read this was like, Okay, all of the matter that we can see and touch and feel and everything makes up about fifteen percent.
Yeah, depending on how you're counting, but yeah, yeah, it's a tiny fraction.
Like a third of that. So everything that you can see and feel and touch and smell, that's five percent of the universe's mass and energy. There's another ninety five percent of pure mystery. So then what the fuck is everything else? That is?
What is?
Yeah, that is the This is the mind blowing thing.
We've known about dark matter indirectly for over one hundred years, Like there's been evidence for this for over one hundred years, and I think it hasn't been until fairly recently that this has come to the forefront of we really ought to figure out what this stuff is because, as you said, we spend all of our lives learning science, art, history, everything you learned from a textbook is basically about that really tiny slice of visible normal matter and the history
of that normal matter in this universe and in this world, in our culture. But it turns out for every see what's the fraction. I think if you look at the amount of energy, so energy is a good measure for stuff. Twenty five percent of the universe is made of dark matter, and only five percent is made of the stuff that we're used to. And so there's five times more dark matter than ordinary stuff. And in fact it's so much more. That we look at our galaxy. We think our galaxy
is huge. Our galaxy is almost everything, everything we possibly care about. Our galaxy is only here because it is swimming in an ocean of dark matter that provides the gravitational pull to keep the galaxy there, like the galaxy formed because there was dark matter. So where we are right now with scutto highlology is that we're doing. Yes, this is the fish scientist discovering for the first time that there's this thing water that we're swimming through. We
should figure out what this water is. Wow.
And now the other, let's say, is the other seventy percent dark energy good yeah.
So that is a great I was both hoping and hope and not hoping that you would bring that up. So twenty five percent dark matter, five percent ordinary matter. That doesn't add up to one hundred percent, and so the rest is indeed dark energy. And I'm excited that I have no idea what dark matter is and that there are great things to do in that field. I have no idea what it is dark energy. I have no fucking idea, and I'm terrified. And that's there's a reason why I don't work on it. It's one of.
Those shows, right, of course, very much, especially this topic. There's gonna be a lot of boggling, trust me. So what I mean, Okay, so about one hundred years ago was that when we realized I say we the Royal we hear like that something is not adding up that. Yeah, when did we realize that?
I think this was about one hundred years ago the first astronomical observations were and this is what was really really trippy. The origins of Scottohilology were really in astronomy, and people would look at galaxies and look at how fast stars were moving in those galaxies and just using ordinary non fancy Newtonian physics, the type of physics that students grown over in high school. They figured out that these stars around, moving around these galaxies were going a
little bit too fast. It's as if there was more gravity than they had accounted for just by counting stars. And I'm going to do a great disservice to my astronomer colleagues. But for the most part, the astronomy field said, huh, that's curious. For maybe fifty years, sixty years, because there
are lots of curiosities in astronomy. Right over the next one hundred years, we had more and more mounting evidence that this additional gravity, which in the nineteen twenties who Carries if Red just didn't happen to count all the stars correctly. But now there's more and more evidence, coming from more and more sophisticated measurements, that not only is there more stuff, but that stuff cannot be the stuff that we're made of.
So there is stuff all around us, out massing us and out energying us, maybe by a factor of twenty, but we can't see it and we don't understand it. So this whole time, we thought that we were a cookies and cream milkshake. We're just the oreo bits and we're surrounded by an invisible milkshake that can seep through us. We don't know what it is or what it does. So dark matter it doesn't interact with light or electromagnetic forces, which is why we can't see or feel it. So
why do we know it's there. Fritz Zuwiki first coined the term dark matter in nineteen thirty three. More on him later, But it wasn't until this astronomer named Vera rube crunched some numbers and hypothesized that dark matter exerts gravity, and without that gravity, galaxies would just fly apart and scatter if it all just depended on the normal matter or buryonic matter, which is the atomic stuff that we know of, like protons and neutrons and electrons. So when
did she figure that out? Oh, just in nineteen seventy eight. We just found this out a split second ago in the universal timeline. Get this, So, doctor Vera Rubin, she did her calculations at this observatory that didn't even have women's restrooms. There were no ladies rooms at the observatory. She had to cut up a silhouette of address and paste it on one of the men's rooms, and then when she was done crafting, then she pioneered some giant
theories about the existence of the universe. And she died in twenty sixteen. She was never awarded the Nobel Prize, and they unfortunately do not hand those out posthumously, which is a bummer. But you can name your dog Vera or your cat Reuben and remember Vera rubin that way. But anyway dark matter it is, it's something else.
It cannot be the stuff that we're used to from chemistry. And then the fundamental particle physicists, the elementary particle physicis realized we've been spending the past five decades trying to categorize the elementary particles of nature. We're trying to have the most fundamental periodic table. And you're telling me that there's something that we're missing and that we definitely have to put on here. Wow, and this became a big thing, if you'll permit me.
In a side, Yes, I was hoping you to say that.
So I'm going to get the history a little bit jumbled, but this is the moral history. This is the way that we're going to remember it. In the eighties and nineties, there was one big hot question in particle physics, and that question had to do with the Higgs boson. So the Higgs boson that in twenty thirteen won the Nobel Prize. It's discovery, big deal, big fucking deal.
And now that's sometimes wrongly called the god particle.
Yes, okay, yeah, right, that is the quote unquote god particle. And if you ask physicist in my generation, its discovery was more like the saking particle, where we had to really do some soul searching because in the eighties and nineties we had realized there's probably a Higgs. If there's
not a Higgs, things get way more interesting. But if there's a Higgs, something isn't quite right in the theory because for all the reasons that we needed to have the Higgs, if the Higgs had the mass and the properties that we needed to have, somehow it just didn't seem right. It was far lighter in mass than it really ought to have been, so we now know it weighs about one hundred and twenty five times the mass of a proton, which is pretty honking for a fundamental particle.
And our prediction naively if I gave that calculation to a first year grad student, they'd say, it's probably way heavier than that. It's like balancing a pencil on its tip. The quantum corrections to its mass would make the Higgs heavier than it actually And just.
Some very brief background on this. So Higgs particles make up the Higgs field, which is this big cloud of bosons or particles. So matter started out zipping around like photons, just unencumbered by mass, but interaction with the Higgs field is what makes matter interact with gravity and have that mass be gravitationally attracted to each other. But Higgs bosons
very hard to find. You have to get a large hadron collider, say maybe twenty seven kilometers under Geneva, and then you've got to raise protons at each other, you got to explode them, and then you got to measure what's left, aka a decay signature. And if you're looking through all those pieces and you have pieces and parts for what could have been a Higgs boson that existed for a fraction of a millisecond, then that's almost almost proof. But for a long time, this possibility of the Higgs
particle had vexed science for years. One leading scientist wanted to call a goddamn particle, but his book publisher was like, let's go softer, and naively made the face palm modification to just call it the god particle, which has been making physicists cringe for decades now. But yes, essentially, things just didn't add.
Up, and so this was a huge puzzle. It's analogous to having an ice cube sitting in an oven and you turn the oven on and the ice cube still there. Wow. So we called this the hierarchy problem, and for people like me, we wade it with a capital H. When we were at our academic papers. It was a big deal. It seemed to be the reason why our theory of particle physics just could not be complete.
So prior to twenty thirteen, they knew something new.
It wasn't quite right, and so we had these great exotic theories. They had funny names supersymmetry, extra dimensions, compositeness. You know, maybe the electron and its cousins are not fundamental but are are actually made of smaller things.
Oh wow.
So this was the heyday in the nineties of doing particle phys and right around that time, as we were developing these really awesome theories. People realized, Hey, in order for this theory to work, meaning in order for protons not to decay too quickly, in order for the universe actually look like the way it does, we need to tweak it a little bit. And one output is we get these new particles that stick around. They don't decay,
they're just around. That's kind of weird. And I imagine there's some physicist, particle physicist, sitting in his office saying this, and astronomer walks by and says, you have particles just sitting around contributing mass. Have you heard about this anomaly that we have there's more mass in these galaxies. And so particle physicists were, I mean, we're kind of smug, just said, oh, yeah, okay, good, I have discovered what
your dark matter ought to be. You. In fifteen years, when we turn on this collider, we're going to discover what this particle is. We'll measure how heavy it is, and I'll tell you exactly what's in these galaxies that you've been looking at for the past one hundred years. This was the promise. Yeah, And so particle physicists didn't even care about the dark matter, because that was the output of this elegant theory that solved the capital H hierarchy problem.
And just a side note, so the Capital S standard Capital M model of particle physics involves this uniform framework for understanding electromagnetic and weak and strong interactions, and the hierarchy problem is the difference between the way a weak force, which is a force that allows protons to become neutrons and then back and forth vice versa. So that weak force is actually not week at all. It's ten to the twenty fourth times stronger than gravity, but only at
really short distances. So this was the big strong weak elephant in the physics room.
So that's how I was trained as a grad student, And the year that I graduated was twenty thirteen. I had written some papers on extra dimensions and all of these exotic new things that we would predict that we would see at the LHC. And by the time that I turned in my thesis, it was pretty clear that
none of those things would be discovered. Wow, we had discovered the most basic, most boring version of the Higgs boson, and none of the things that we predicted for the overarching theory that explained why it was there, and then we got stuck, Oh, what of mine better? H And I think this is where there's been a bit of a renaissance in the theory of dark matter, because, on the one hand, the smug particle theorists like me, who would assume that we, of course dark matter is this thing.
All of our best theories predict this thing, Well, that's out the window. But dark matter is still out there. And meanwhile, actually, all of these theories that we spent our time building and cutting our teeth understanding may be the simplest versions of those guys are out the window too,
So what are we working on? So several of us are still working on understanding the Higgs, but armed with all of these new fan and see techniques for building theories, several of us went on to think about dark matter because now we can look at this problem with fresh eyes, without the prejudice of, well, this is more important problem that has this more important solution, and this is just
the byproduct that thing. Now we've been thinking more open endedly about what dark matter could be, not just what we expect it to be.
Did you all expect to flip a switch on the collider, some things would go p p and pew, and then suddenly a lot of calculations would make sense. Is that how does that even? Do you expect to flip on a switch and suddenly it's quantum leap and we're in a different dimension, Like, wow.
This is back. Yeah, this is a great question because you're bringing me back to grad school. Where So particle physics in particular, but physics in general, is a really funny science because our community is split between theorists and experimentalists, and the theorists who work more on the mathematical superstructure and the experimentalist who are actually the club everyone's who test the theories and see how you do the scientific method. Let's be honest.
So theory directs experimentalists where to look because this is team effort. There's no eye in dark matter. Well, I don't know. There might be, we don't know what's.
As a grad student, the particle theorist who all had our pet theories that we wanted to discover, and the experimental grad students were all buddy buddy, and we go to the bar together and they would get so pissed off at us because that was what you described was exactly how we thought it would work. You just turn
it on and everything works. You just turn it on, you get all the data, and we just confirm this theory versus that theory, where of course, these colliders and these detectors are gigantic, cavernous, intricate, subtle machines, and doing a proper search for a new particle that is most likely invisible is incredibly subtle. So it is a bit of a long slog. So I think the LHC, depending on what you call turn on, turned on right around two thousand and eight, and it wasn't until twenty twelve
that they were pretty sure they saw the Higgs. In twenty thirteen that they had the Nobel Prize.
So the Nobel Prize in Physics for twenty thirteen was awarded jointly to Francois Anglaire and Peter Higgs for quote the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, which was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. So the LHC, by the way, had the juice to discover that decay channel of the Higgs boson where they were like these pieces of parts,
these were Higgs at one point. Because the LHC is a collider that finally has enough energy to really ramp up those photons and smash them real good scientifically speaking, and they do it trillions of times over, just smash, smash, mash, one hundred meters below the Earth, collecting all these data from particle parts starting back in September two thousand and eight. Do you ever hear theories about as soon as it went on that we've shifted into a different universe or a different dimension.
There are things like that. They're a little bit wonky.
Yeah, things like it was. I thought it was called the Berenstein Bears, the barren Stein Bears and all of these things.
If only we hadn't turned on the LHC.
Yeah, yeah, we're in a completely different universe. What about the name dark matter and dark energy, because it's invisible at.
Best, right absolutely?
Who decided that it would be called dark Who decided that it would have a spooky name?
That is a great question. I think it was z Wiki, who was a famously cantankerous physicist in the early part of the twentieth century.
So yes, this was nineteen thirty three with Caltex Fritz Zwicki and when you hear the words famously cantankerous, I know you want the story time and among a lot of different legends and slander and feuds and jealousy and what sounds like a maybe a touch of old timey verbal abuse. If his enemy stories were to be leaved, Swicky would allegedly call his colleagues scatter brains and spherical bastards. Spherical because quote, they are bastards every way I look
at them. Ooh messy, I love it. But a two thousand and eight article in Discover magazine features testimony from Zwicky's daughter, Barberina that doctor Fritz was just so brilliant that he had a lot of haters. But he was the one.
Who coined the term dark matter, and what he meant was that it doesn't interact with light.
Ah.
Yeah, So usually we think things that are dark don't interact with light, but actually probably there's some junior high student out there who'll say, no, no, no, things that are dark absorbed light. They're actually maximally interacting with light. If you're an astronomer dark means you don't see any photons from it, So I think that's why they use the word dark. And to the best of my knowledge, I think dark energy, which was discovered a little bit later,
as a big question mark. Yeah, they latched onto the to the branding that we developed, and they used the word dark to mean just like dark matter. We don't know what this is, but at least dark matter, we had the idea that this was stuff. These were particles. I'm ninety nine point nine percent sure dark matter is at least one particle. Dark energy definitely behaves differently, and it's a much weirder thing.
Do you drive around in traffic and think about this stuff? Like, can you ever escape theorizing about this?
Oh that is a great question. I think the imposter syndrome and me says, yeah, I escape it way too much. But traffic in la as you know, is not a great place to have happy thoughts. But I often find myself thinking about physics in a swimming pool. Really, so for example, there's this idea of we are fish in an ocean of dark matter. That was something that I was thinking about while swimming, and I guess being in a mathematical discipline. You're your equipment, Like having the finest
equipment is really having a clear mind. And I can sit in my desk and I can do a calculation, I can write a paper. But the creative spark is something that usually happens outside of those environments. So walking around or having tea on my patio, that's that's where the magic happens.
And do theoretical physicists get together and just have like brain dumps and try to spark ideas.
Too, So you already know the secret of theoretical physics, that is exactly it. Two of the meccas of theoretical physics in the United States are the Aspen Center for Physics in Aspen, Colorado and the Kavil Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. And to good approximation of what these things are, are places where you can have summer
camp for theoretical physicists. And why would you need this because we all end up being specialists in it's not even just our particular subfield, but the particular language that we use to understand the mathematics, the particular analogies that we like, the particular intuition that we develop. That the real sparks happen when you bring us into the same place, you give us a chalkboard, you remove every other distraction, and you let us ask each other. So what are
you working on? Oh, how do you think about that? And then everything happens it's, oh, well, you know, I've been thinking about this other thing, and the language that I use is this, and here's how idea with this calculation,
and that's how new ideas come about. And oftentimes you could spend two weeks at one of these places over the summer, go back to your home institution, do your teaching, but spend the rest of the year working at these ideas, having zoom calls every once in a while, but it's kind of the momentum builder of our field.
And be honest with me, without having to name names, how many astrophysicists out there think that dark matter might be ghosts? What if dark matter is ghosts? What if dark energy is ghosts? What if it's all ghosts? What if we're swimming in ghosts.
There is a famous quote from Nima Kuni him Med before the LHC turned on, and the quote was something along the lines of we might turn it on and dragons might pop out. We have no idea what's going to happen.
So in a March two thousand and eight New York Times article, this particle theorist, who was at the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton, told the paper that there was some probability of almost anything happening, even a minuscule chance that quote, the large Hadron collider might make dragons that might eat us up. Maybe he was just ahead of the curve and predicting the twenty eleven premiere of Came of Thrones, But either way, people were rightly pumped.
And that kind of encapsulated a lot of the excitement. There is something to be said about maybe dark matter is something much more exciting than particles. And there are theories where the dark matter plural could form dark atoms,
just like you have protons and electrons. Maybe something like a dark proton and a dark electron that we can't see but they can see each other, and those form dark atoms, and then it's not hard to imagine, well, those dark atoms could have dark chemistry, that dark chemistry can form dark life, That dark life could maybe maybe it's an entire sentsion civilization living in our dark matter halo where our galaxy is sitting, and we just don't
realize it. But because there is five times more of them than there is us, we are the ghosts were We're weird, the weird thing.
Wow, oh my gosh. Dark atoms that don't interact with light or electromagnetic forces, just having a whole ass life all around us. Physicists even think that dark matter travels straight through normal matter, just sailing through closed doors and bathroom stalls and rocks and planets like some kind of spooky cosmic horror movie. Do you still look to sci fi for inspiration at all? Or do you pick apart sci fi?
Oh? I, let's see. That's a great question, and it's something where it's one of the things I'm really thankful to be at UC Riverside, where we have this fantastic creative writing department. Until very recently Nala Hopkinson was here,
and she's an amazing sci fi writer. I actually tried to pitch that idea as being the ghost to the dark matter scientist, but no, sci fi is still a huge part of my life and it's not as simple as I read a sci fi story and say, hey, I'm going to incorporate that into one of my funny theories. But I love seeing how creative people play with physical ideas, So I guess you would say I like hard sci fi. I've never really understood the distinction. But my favorite author
at the moment is Ted Chang. And Ted Chang who wrote the short story Story of Your Life, which was what the movie Arrival was based on.
Oh.
Yes, most people think the movie Arrival is about linguistics,
and part of it is. But when I read that story, that story was about quantum mechanics, and it was about a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, and it was very clear to me that Ted Chang took some quantum mechanics class or read a textbook and understood it incredibly well and said, Okay, I'm going to make a universe literally with these physical laws, with the one small tweak, and let's see how that plays out into a dramatic story.
And that's something which I draw tremendous inspiration from because that's exactly what people like me do. Where we have a question that we have to answer, what is dark matter? We have a theoretical edifice something called the Standard model of particle physics. It's a couple of equations.
And remember that standard model of particle physics that involved a framework for understanding electromagnetic and weak and strong interactions.
We are constrained that any theory that we make up has to agree with what we currently observe. So I has to agree with this standard model theory in the regime where you can make those measurements, and that game of how do you create a predictive theory of dark matter subject to these constraints really reminds me of Ted Chang playing the game of I'm going to take these physical laws, make a tweak, and see how that pans out.
Okay, so Arrival came out in twenty sixteen, So I love you. But you've had ample opportunities to view this or to have it spoiled, or maybe you saw it on an airplane and you didn't even even totally understand it. But to avoid a spoiler, just fast forward about ninety seconds. If you have seen it, listen because it'll make you like the movie more. What was the tweak that he made?
He made the tweak. Let's see. So in the Story of your Life, the main character could view her entire timeline and the principle of least action. This is jargon now, but there's something called the principle of least action and quantum mechanics, which tells you to get from point A to point B, to get from the universe at right now to the universe right now. We actually went through every single possible historical evolution. Maybe I was sitting in
this chair, maybe we're in different chairs. Maybe I moved over there and came back. All of those things quote unquote literally happened. And the path that we took, the most likely path quantum mechanically is the one that minimizes some function. So people sometimes call it a sum over histories interpretation of quantum mechanics. And Ted Chang said, maybe this character can see that entire history, and the tweak was because she understood this alien language which is based
on this idea. So in our universe and in the way that quantum mechanics works, one wouldn't actually see the entire history. But there is a puzzle there, and every single student who learns this puzzles over what it means that these equations seem to imply that these particles know about the future.
You mentioned something about dark atoms and dark chemistry. You're trying to make sense of dark matter using a field of math that applies to everything else. Is there a possibility that there's a dark math, that there's just a completely different way of.
Okay, that is one perhaps for the philosophy department. And I say that very carefully because I think usually when a physicist says that's for the philosophy department, that's probably condescended. That's probably dismissive. That's how we say I don't want to think about that. The assumption is math is logical rigor, and so that just has to be true. And I don't even know how to think about a different reality,
a different universe that has different loss of math. I can imagine a different universe where the fundamental constants are a little bit different, maybe there are more particles, fewer particles, but I don't know how to think about one where math is different.
Is there a myth that you would love to bust about dark matter? Like? What is one thing that the public thinks they know about it that they don't other than that it's ghosts?
Oh, that's great, that is a great question. I'll start with a basic one. It's not antimatter. Okay, it's not antimatter. It's probably also not black holes. Okay, so these are the other two like exotic things that you learn from Star Trek yees. So it's not antimatter because if we're swimming in the sea of dark matter, and if the dark matter were antimatter, it would keep annihilating with ordinary
matter and producing light. So the fact that I was gonna say that we're not a glow stick in the universe, but really the fact that our galaxy is and just being burnt up by the antimatter. That means dark matter is not antimatter. Nice. Until fairly recently, we would say it's not black holes because black holes are a totally different thing. But there have been some thoughts recently that there might be little, tiny black holes that were formed in the universe that would behave like dark matter.
How tiny are we talking.
That's a good there's a range of sizes. But the story of little black holes is funny. For a long time, people were worried that turning on the LHC would produce lots of little black holes that would eat the Earth. Sounds like fun but we were pretty sure that little black holes evaporate and would be relatively harmless. Little black holes are like little particles.
And do you think that those could be just on Earth, in just little pockets here and there.
Chances are no, I would bet no, But it is a theoretical possibility. It's attached to a whole bunch of other weird things. I think to make it work out gravitationally, you need to have extra dimensions, and maybe a few extra dimensions. But it was a fun thing to think about ten years ago.
Do you think that dark matter could be extra dimensions?
That is a great question. That is what I spent my summer vacation thinking about. So extra dimensions are a really funny quirk in the history of theoretical physics. I think the modern way of thinking about this is the people who work on extra dimensions don't necessarily literally believe in if I could just step in the right way,
I'm going to be in some parallel universe. But in the mathematics one realizes that if I can write a theory in three dimensions of space plus one dimension of time, I could write a theory in four dimensions of splace plus one dimension of time, or in five dimensions of space, in one dimension of time, no problem. It's just it's another number that you add onto your mathematical expressions, and
so people it was easy to play with. And in the nineteen nineties one of the huge revolutions in theoretical physics was this observation that particular types of theories with extra dimensions end up giving mathematically equivalent predictions when you ask the right question to a type of quantum theory that is really hard to calculate. This is something called duality in physics, and it meant that I could calculate something in my wonky theory of extra dimensions, and that
calculation would actually mean something in an ordinary theory. Ordinary meaning three dimensions of space, one dimension of time. That is highly quantum mechanical, but a perfectly plausible theory. And it was a type of theory that we really didn't know how to deal with until we had tools like.
This, tools like the large Hadron glider.
And so one of the fun things to play with is we have this really powerful machine to make predictions where we couldn't make predictions twenty years ago. Maybe we can describe cool theories of dark matter, that one could explain why we haven't discovered dark matter, and two could motivate interesting different searches. Because this is this is where we are right now, that we need to figure out what is the best way to test these different theories of dark matter.
It better happened in my lifetime. I mean, I'm sure you think the same thing, given that this is your life's work.
Yes, yes, yeah, and and in fact this is for me. This is a difference between dark matter and dark energy. Both of them are things we have no idea what they are. I certainly have no idea what they are. Dark matter, we have an experimental program and we know enough about it that I have faith that we have a sporting chance that we will learn something deep about dark matter in my lifetime. Dark energy, I'm not sure if we'll learn anything about it in the history of humanity.
Do you have a Google alert set for dark matter? Just in case there's some news that breaks that you're like, wait, when did that happen?
I have an RSS feed and I follow some Twitter accounts, so yeah, there are funny things about things like this in particle physics. I've forgotten what the network is, but there are there are astrophysical events that it's it's all hands on board. When the moment this happens, the next supernova is going to be the most exciting thing in decades.
A supernova heads up is this giant explosion caused by a star burning out of fuel and then collapsing on itself and going cape and NASA urges you to imagine a star one million times the mass of Earth collapsing in fifteen seconds. What's left behind is this cloud of gases called a nebula. Or if the star is big enough, like ten times the size of our Sun, you might
even get a black hole out of it. So a supernova can also happen with a white dwarf, which is like an Earth sized star that's run out of fuel, it gets too close to another star, it siphons off some of its matter and then cuplousies. But will there be maybe like a supernova this week, this month you can watch? Is there a Twitter account you can follow? Probably not. They only happen in the Milky Way a few times every century, but when they do, it is
the equivalent of a giant legendary house party. For physicists. It is on It is a Rager.
There's a story of supernova nineteen eighty seven, a where we learned a lot about neutrinos. And now that we know gravitational waves exist, now that we have all sorts of really exciting complimentary satellites and astrophysical observatories, there is this network where if anybody realizes that there is a supernova, all of these telescope all these detectors will drop whatever it is are doing and they will point at that part in the sky and take all the data that
they can. That's a Twitter feed that I like to be debscribe too.
Can I ask you questions from listeners?
Yes?
Okay, I mean, for the most part, we got a lot of what is it? Who can blame them? But before we get to those questions, with the amazingly affable doctor flip to NATO, who's your favorite particle physicist, let's scatter some money into the cosmos, specifically toward two causes of the ologists choosing. And the first that he picked is the Point Foundation, which is the largest scholarship granting nonprofit for LGBTQ students and powering them to achieve their
full academic and leadership potential. Despite the obstacles often put before them, and Pointfoundation dot org has more info Love them and the second charity he chose is Feeding America Riverside San Bernardino, which distributes over two point five million pounds of food per month and partners with over two hundred and fifty local nonprofits. Both of those causes will be linked in the show notes, and thank you to sponsors for making those donations possible.
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Okay, let's shed some light on your burning dark matter queries? Okay? Will Clark first time question asker also known as p Willy, is dark matter the absence of matter or something measurable? We now know it's something measurable, right.
Yes, absolutely, Okay, so dark matter. This is one of the great things where it's fairly ordinary that it is a thing. It is, it is stuff, it is matter. M h.
It's something that was also asked by patrons Jessica Smith, Ruby, Chanfrey On, freglore Ed, Maetzivak, Jackie and first time question askers Lucas water Body and Sam Phillips quarreling. So let's dip in to the next question. Leahy Anderson first time question asker asked what is a hidden valley? And says Serin mentions it on their web page about dark matter? Is there a potentially parallel universe occupying the same space that we have it? What is hidden valley? It is
not a side of ranch. I'm guessing that is a great question. So hidden valleys are a class of theories that were developed by Matt Strassler and Catherine Zurich in the mid two thousands, I believe, and they are actually related to some of the extra dimensional signatures that I mentioned earlier. It's really funny that the listener asked that question. I was reading the Hidden Valley paper recently for some research that I'm working on.
We were looking forward to the LHC. We all had these favorite theories supersymmetry, extra dimensions, and the Hidden Valley. Authors were thinking about what are more exotic things that could come through at the LHC. We all have this idea that you turn it like theorists. You turn it on and you just see all the new particles.
It's easy.
What if it's not so easy? What if the new particles don't really behave like ordinary particles, or what if they have really different signatures? And the Hidden Valleys were a type of theory that were constructed to show other physicists how weird and how unique these experimental signatures could be.
And you know, we mentioned a little bit about dimensions, but a few folks, including listeners, He wanted to know and says, sorry if this one is a little too sci fi. E no need to apologize for that here. Absolutely, if you consider the theory of multiple universes, could another universe be made entirely of dark matter dark energy? But you mentioned dimensions, But what's the difference between multiverses and different dimensions or are they used interchangeably?
Good good good, good good good. Okay. It becomes a question of where do we start agreeing on what words mean. What is a universe? So if we assume a universe is some self consistent, perhaps imaginary everything, So a universe is has some number of dimensions of space and time. If there's more than one time dimension, I have no idea how to make sense of it. It has some kind of governing physical theory, so some there's some equation
telling you what the particles are, how they move. Yeah, that's that's a good approximation for what I think of universe is okay. So a multiverse would be a collection of different universes that really should not interact at all. Oh okay, So whether or not the multiverse is real is such a weird question. Not because if it is real, something exotics going to happen. But if a multiverse is real, by definition, those other universes have nothing to do with us.
You can't traverse them, you can't pass through them. But the idea is they would have very different laws of physics. If I said that our universe, if you characterize our universe by some list of numbers, the mass of the electron, the strength of the electric coupling, the strength of gravity. There's some list of numbers and you just push them into your theory. A different universe would be one with
different numbers. And what the Marvel cinematic universe has done for us has given us this idea that if there's a multiverse, then you can go between them and you know, harve whatever infinity stones and bringing them back. But that's not quite how it works.
What about everything everywhere all at once? I see that movie.
I love that movie.
Across the multiverse. I see thousands of evidence. See not how that works.
One of my favorite students in my particle physicist class last term brought that up in class and said, can we talk about this afterwards?
You love it as a work of fiction.
I love it as a work of fiction.
Yes, And just to side oue, the Academy Awards are in March twelfth, twenty twenty three, and those who listen to this after that date will know if that film won any oscars. Oh, speaking of MB wants to know time travel? Yes?
No, maybe ooh, we are definitely traveling in time right now.
We are definitely.
Traveling in time, and that by itself is kind of weird because we know that if you're moving faster, the way you perceive time is different, and so ordinary traveling through time in the forward direction is already pretty exotic. If they asked me, I don't think any more exotic, doctor who level time travel is possible? Certainly not our within our existing theories. But I'll be fully honest. Part of that is because our existing theories put in by
hand that causality is really important. And causality is this idea that you cannot have grandfather paradoxes where you go back in time and you kill your grandfather. Yeah.
Also, uh, what are these grandpas doing? You know what I mean? Like, yeah, what.
Beef do you have? I guess that's a big jump for a scientific experiment.
Everyone's grandpa is such a dick. Marie wants to know what would the universe look like if there was no dark matter, and what would happen if it suddenly disappeared?
Great question, Great question. Okay, so let's start with if there were no dark matter. Okay, if there were no dark matter, there would be us.
I'm not here.
I think a good benchmark is the quantum fluctuations of dark matter in the early universe. So the universe was hot, small things were blipping in and out of existence. Every once in a while, there'd be a little bit more blipping into existence over here rather than over here, and that overdensity of stuff of dark stuff would gravitate and pull more dark stuff in, and that would be what
we call it dark matter halo. The big dark matter halos were so strong gravitationally, they're so massive that they would bring in the little tiny specks of dust of ordinary matter, and slowly those little specks of dust would collect and turn into our galaxy. So if there were no dark matter, we wouldn't have the collection of ordinary stuff that became our galaxy, and we wouldn't be here to wonder about it.
So whatever dark matter is, it's helped collect all the atoms and scattered ingredients to make us. I know here we are breathing, living, loving and crying, having good days, eating cheese for dinner, and farting into pajamas, watching tiktoks of earwax removal. It's a beautiful life. Dark matter, thank you never leave.
Probably if all the dark matter suddenly disappeared, that's a good question. I'm actually not quite sure what would happen. I have not done the calculation to figure out if our galaxy would stay here or if maybe the smaller galaxies around us would what's the word kind of scatter?
Oh? Yes, yeah, if you were to whip something around and just exactly, you know, like a merry go round, just like scatter off of it.
Right. Yeah. So, in fact, it would be very similar to the question that I think we ask a lot of our freshmen physics majors if the Sun disappeared, what would happen to the Solar System? Eventually everything would just fly away because the gravitational pull that was holding them together would be gone.
So mass attracts mass, and that is why smaller planets have we hear gravitational forces, and why you can hop like a bunny on our tiny moon if you can manage to get a ride there. And a few patrons asked this next one, such as Anichis kat Ariya, Earl of Gramulcan, Elder Zamora, and theoter Vissian. Is there anti dark matter to correspond to anti matter?
I love that question. The answer is almost certainly yes. And it's almost certainly yes because the laws of physics that we understand seem to imply that everything has an antiparticle, with the caveat that sometimes they are their own antiparticle. Ooh, so photons are their own antiparticle. There's no antiphotony. So dark matter exists. It's a particle. You can define a mathematical operation that turns dark matter into anti dark matter. And it is an open question whether the anti dark
matter is the same as dark matter. And I'll mention one last thing. It's the same questions true for neutrinos. Neutrinos are the other invisible particle, and we do not know still whether or not neutrinos are their own anti particle.
So a neutrino is just the littlest, wee darling little particle with no charge. It's nearly massless. It's so light, and they're everywhere in the universe. They originate from exploding stars and from the nuclear fusion in the Sun, and there's millions of them. They're just mosy, almost at light speed, right through your dang body every day. Two physicists discover them in the nineteen fifties. They won the Nobel Prize in Physics forty years later, which I'm sorry. It seems
like a long lag time. And I don't feel bad saying that because I know I'll never be up for a Nobel Prize. In physics.
The paper about neutrinos said, you could explain this thing if there were some really weakly interacting, nearly massless particle. But I'm sorry to have predicted a particle that has no chance of ever being detected.
I love that there's like a yeah, sorry.
This is not good science. We found it.
Ah, that's rad. We got them.
We found them.
And Jackie wants to know what would happen if I had ten pounds of dark matter in my hand, and then some other folks asked. Jackie also asked how much dark matter is in the room right now? How much dark matter is in us?
All right? So we actually know this? Oh okay, I only know the rule of thumb that where we're sitting in our galaxy, in your coffee mug, you have about one gram of dark matter, so you could you can do the unit conversion for how much dark matter is in the room. But it's a pretty normal scale thing. Yeah, here's the caveat So if I tell you have one gram of dark matter. You don't know if that's one particle that weighs one gram or a thousand particles that
will each way one milligram, or anything in between. Right, So we don't know the number density of dark matter, but we know the mass density of dark.
Matter, and we can't measure that on a scale that's actually measuring grams because that is using gravity. So it would be a completely different scale to measure that.
This is something that we have inferred from, not from anything terrestrial, but from the motion of stars in our galaxy.
Oh that's absolutely nuts. I mean, I just do you does it change the way you live your life at all? Knowing that we are surrounded in such mystery, do you just like ever take more chances or just say like, screw it, I'm gonna live for today, get the whipped cream on the ice blendid Like why not?
So last year we have a science book club, and last year we read Katie Max's book The End of Everything. Yes, and there is definitely a week where I thought it doesn't matter how bad things are, the universe is going to end eventually.
I was reading that before bed the other night, and I was like, this is a little depressing but oddly liberating. It's a great book. So we did a two part Cosmology episode a few years back with doctor Katie Mack, which of course I'm gonna link in the show notes, and I I urge you to pick up her since released book, The End of Everything, Astrophysically speaking, it's really funny and informative, it's terrifying, it's comforting all at once.
I'm gonna link it on my website. Earl of Gramblekin wants to know what is the best music to listen to while researching dark matter?
All right, that is a great question.
Do you need classical music or like no fash metal.
I'm looking over at my laptop because I have a nineties indies rock channel playing on YouTube music right now. That's so that's what I use for class preps. So for research, I think there are these lo fi hip hop channels with no words. And this is just a life pro tip for anyone, anyone doing something mathematical. You want to have background music so you don't you're not just hearing the echoes of your room. You want something with no vocals. And for the added bonus, there's a
different web page for generating cafe sounds. So I make myself a hot tea and I have all the on beyond stuff cass a, but I'm sitting at my desk. That's genius.
I love it, and like life, tips from an astrophysicist is something that I would definitely tune into. Like at any point I.
Get technically, I'm not an astrophysicist. Are you a theoretical theoretical particle physicist?
Now, what's the difference between an astrophysicist and a theoretical And pardon me, because this is just me learning, But what is the difference between the two.
So if you're my department chair, Yes, an astrophysicist can get money from NASA and a theoretical particle physicist gets money from the National Science Foundation, But the two fields are actually blending. I collaborate with theoretical astrophysicists on dark matter. There are topics where they're really you really can't distinguish. But the tools of the trade for a particle physicist are really quantum field theory and an entire tradition of
how we think about fundamental particles. Astrophysicists have a slightly different toolkit that patches on with observational astronomy and cosmology and a different scale of what are the interesting problems.
I thought Lucas water Body had a great question. I know we can't observe it, but after working on it for years, you mess get some weird imaginary images in your head when you think about it. What does dark matter look like in your head?
Ooh yeah, okay, so the I think the honest answer is I have pictures, but the pictures are never of the dark matter. The pictures are of my toolkit for understanding dark matter. So if I'm thinking about dark matter as something that could be described with extra dimensions, and I say it very carefully because I'm not saying there are extra dimensions, I'm saying mathematically, I can do a
calculation in the extra dimension and that means something. Then I think about literally and an extra dimension, and I have tons of these pictures I draw with my grad students about what does the wave function look like? Does it ripple, what does it look like at the boundary? Does it interact with other things? Is a wiggly? Is
it exponentially increasing or exponentially decreasing. That's a picture which is not the same thing as a picture of the invisible quantum field, which is not really a tangible thing, but it's a picture that I hold on to. The Other thing are Fineman diagrams, which are these really cute tinker toy looking things that that particle physicists used to
describe quantum scattering, so any process. They're actually shorthand from mathematics, but it's a way of engaging the visual part of your brain to make sense of something which is otherwise pages of calculation.
Yeah, in otherwise so abstract.
So we think in analogies. That's a punchline.
It's so interesting to think of a theoretical physicist also thinking in like almost tinker choice to try to get a handle on like, Yeah, indimentionality is a big ask. One more listener question, Ema Rose wants to know does dark matter have a sound?
Oh gosh, there are so many great answers to that question. One of my colleagues, you should Saige at Notre Dame hit a great paper about something called dark acoustic oscillations, which I mean, which is literally answering that question. It's in it's the word So acoustic oscillations are about sound waves in the yearly universe. So dark matter, which were particles that were forming these halos, when there's a shock to the halo, they form sound waves ripples in the
dark matter substrate, so they literally form sounds. It's both exciting and cool, but completely mundane, right. It's you can imagine sounds start traveling and water sounds traveling. If I knock on wood, sounds traveling through wood. It's literally the same kind of sound.
Wave, but it's going through dark matter, going through darkness, and it's the sound that we can't hear the matter that we're made up of yet exactly. Yeah, unless maybe somehow we create something that can capture that.
It's an interesting question of if dark matter has some motion, does that help us have some new handle to detect it.
Can you imagine if one day there's just Jordy LaForge banana clip eye pieces and you can just like three D glasses just see dark matter? Oh yes, yeah, you know, so everyone's asshole, Grandpa's there as it goes.
Yeah, you guys all, sorry about that experiment we did.
Ye.
Sorry, we can actually do that using gravitational lensing. And so this was a result from maybe ten to fifteen years ago from I believe it was Tom Abele at Slack was one of the first people do this, where they used astrophysical data to map out where the dark matter is and they form these filaments.
And gravitational lensing side note, let's break it down. It's the way that mass bends a light source, so that a shift in light is a clue that something with a lot of mass nearby is affecting it.
What the dark matter distribution looks like. They look like filaments. In fact, when I look at them, they look like neurons. They look like a network of neurons where you have dark matter halos and there are little filaments that connect them. We understand why they formed this way. Yeah, but it's it's a really striking quote unquote.
Picture, and we think that that is how they are forming and how they're existing.
Yeah.
So, I mean that's kind of a fundamentally huge way of visualizing it, right, just to think that there's all these like spidery kind of webby filament things.
Yeah.
So so Star Trek Discovery used something similar as a conceit for intergalactic travel, and I was a little bit myth that they didn't actually use dark matter.
It's like, call me you're right here, you're in La Yeah yeah. Take a meeting in Beverly Hills. Yeah yeah, Like meet me at the Earth Cafe. We'll talk it out. Oh man, you know what I mean? What about what's the hardest thing about being a Scoto Highlologist, Scoto Highlologist, there are a lot of different things.
It's there's the pace of experimental discovery compared to theoretical creativity. So it's really easy to well, that's right, it's not easy, but that in principle, the time scale to come up with the idea and play with it is relatively short. In practice, you spend a lot of time honing that creativity. But to actually test something, it's a whole different thing. To convince federal funding agencies, And we'll start off with
your experimental colleagues. You know a lot more about actually doing experiments than you do to do something and invest resources from elsewhere to do a particular type of search is it takes a long time. One of my mentors has a joke that I absolutely love, and the story is, you have a brilliant theorist who writes down the theory that just is so beautiful, and she says, oh, this is it. This is the most elegant, beautiful theory. So she goes downstairs. Theorists tend to be on the top floor.
She goes downstairs to her experimental colleague and says, I have the theory and it's predictive. I predict these three things, and I think your lab should be able to do this. So the experimentalist is excited and he says, okay, let me apply for grants. So he spends the next quarter writing grants. He sends them all off the funding agencies get back to him. He's able to recruit some new
grad students, hire some postdocs. Over the course the next three years, they decide to build a new experimental apparatus, which involves contracting out types of equipment that never been made before, creating their own whatever high tech kind of thing, and then they run and running These things can take ten years, so grad students, graduate, postdocs move on to new jobs. They hire new undergrads take care of the experiment.
Ten years later, everyone has gray hairs, and the experimentalist, I imagine, like a doc matrix printer, pulls out the piece of paper and looks at it. Really solemn walks up the stairs to go to his theory. Colleague knocks on her door and says, I'm really sorry, null result, it's not this theory. And she slams her hand on the table and she says, can you believe that it took me two weeks of my life to write that paper? Oh?
No, oh these experimentalists? Oh my god? And so are you? Do you feel like you have more theories than you will ever be able to write up? Like you know what I mean?
No, I wish it were like that. Yeah, there are some people who are like, I really admire that. For me, a lot of it really is taking a few core ideas and running with it. And some of those core ideas are mine, some of them are from my colleagues, my friends, and we tinker and we cross pollinate, but oftentimes it's very slow and incremental, even on the theoretical side. M hm.
Are there any any life advice you would have from a someone who studies the universe and what we are and what it is? Is there any perspectives on life that you would you would want to share with your younger self or with others.
Yeah, So it's the beginning of the term here at UC Riverside. So I've been thinking a lot about this, like what advice would I give to freshmen? What advice do I give to myself? Like general advice? You know the who was it Baz Luhrman did the graduation song? I think they attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, And it was actually somebody else who wrote the article wear Sunscreen.
So the ware Sunscreen opus was actually penned by a Chicago Tribune columnist named Mary Schmich who wrote the article for the graduating class of nineteen ninety seven, and then it was released as a song in nineteen ninety nine.
You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they faded. So trust me, in twenty years you look back at photos of yourself and we're calling away. You can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked.
It's a doozy.
Here's my ware sunscreen advice. Ladies and gentlemen, do your homework. Just that, do your homework, and I have contact. So when you're doing dark matter research, any type of research, anything. If I forget research, anything that you're doing in your life as an adult, there are no solutions in the
back of the book. If you're doing anything exciting, you don't know if you're doing it right, and you have no feedback, and all you have is the intuition that you build up that you're going in the right direction. It's painfully true in dark matter research, where you can say maybe dark matter is this type of particle, you can just be completely wrong. So I tell the first year physics students that I hate homework. I hated doing homework,
I hate giving homework. I absolutely hate grading homework. But I give homework as a service to them because that's my commitment saying there's something that you should do, and I know what the right answer is. I will help you get to the right answer. And if you get the wrong answer, that's great. We can work together and figure out what needs to be adjusted so that you have the right intuition to get to the right answer.
And that's the critical thing. It's building that intuition of I've gotten this wrong before, but now I am wiser because of having gotten something wrong. And that I think is a general life advice. And that's exactly how theoretical physics works, where a lot of the work that we do is conjectural, and we work it out and then someone says, oh, but if you do it that way,
the proton decays, Oh yeah, dummy. Okay. Now I know that this type of theory needs to have this type of tweak, and I've built up a toolkit that I could only have had from making the mistake.
And that is something I feel like. People who are outside of science in general are so afraid to fail. But there's so much failure absolutely in learning, absolutely the only way we learn anything right. Absolutely, So don't be afraid to fuck up a little.
Absolutely. And this is like the joke about the clever theorist where when I die, if any of my research papers have any element of literally being true, I'd be ecstatic. But a lot of the speculative work is I think this is the way things work, and even the ones where I get it completely right, the universe might just not be that way. But there's value in one going through the process of being creative and two learning why the universe is not that way.
What about your favorite thing about what you do?
Oh gosh, I love that on any given day there are new things to learn, and either it's some experimental result that I want to understand or some related field where I never had the chance to take that class as a student, but I see that there's an opportunity where dark matter might be able to do something, and then I can dig into and say I have an excuse to spend my time reading this textbook or reading this recent article, or talking to my colleague from a
different department. That's the fun part.
It's just always always learning and getting to get outside of that discipline.
Yeah, that's great.
I mean, I love that. For the rest of my life, I'm going to be walking around thinking about a gram of diet patter in my coffee cup and sparkly webs and maybe ghosts.
Maybe ghosts.
You don't have to commit to that on the record, I just for my own fun.
Well, I would add to my yes, and would be thinking about all of the dark matter scientists who are thinking about us, and we're the maybe ghosts.
I love that. Thank you so much for doing this.
This was a joy you out.
Oh my gosh. Yeah, So ask the smartest people you can find, the simplest questions, because that's why they study this, and probably no one at their own Thanksgiving even understands what they do. For a living. So thank you to the incredible doctor flipp Nato for letting me barge into his office with so many questions Huh what a gem? You can follow him at Twitter dot com slash flip Tonado. We'll link that in the show notes, along with the
Point Foundation and Feeding America, Riverside and San Bernardino. Links to sponsors are also in the show notes. And if this episode had too much swearing for you can feel free to hit up Oarsmologies episodes. Those are linked in the show notes. Those are shorter versions of classic episodes. They're trimmed of language. They're shortened for shorties. You can find them at aliboard dot com slash smologies too. Thank you Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio for making those with
assists from Sikh Fredrigez Thomas of Mindjam Media. We also have bleeped episodes and transcripts by Emily White of the Bordery. Those are up at alleyboard dot com slash ologies, dash extras bleeped by kayleab Patten, Aaron Talbert Admins the Ologies podcast Facebook group, Susan Hale Handles our merch and so much more. Noel Dilworth does scheduling. Kelly R. Dwyer made
the web page. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music. Assistant editing and engineering was by the man Ann Mullet Jarreed Sleeper of Mindchammdia, with additional editing from Mark David Christensen, and lead editing was done by Canadian treasure Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, who is linked in the show notes. And if you stick around until the end of the episode, I tell you is secret and this one is that Sarah McNaulty, squid expert and tothologist from her episodes, you
may know her. She was in town and she stayed at our house for a few days, which was wonderful. And we watched Puss and Boots, and uh, first off, I always thought that Puss and Boots was a duo, and like fifteen minutes in the movie, I was like, wait, okay, so there's no boots. Then it's just one cat named
Puss and he's wearing the boots. Okay. But also, if you've watched Puss and Boots, I think the animators have definitely done at least like guided Mescaline Therapy or hit a DMT at a party, or maybe they grow their own trooms. But it is a trip and I definitely cried at a cartoon cat, so there's that. Okay, byebye pacadermatologyology, crypto zoology, lithology and technology, meteorology, pathology, anthology, seriology.
We do so much about dark matter.
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