Are dark photons as sinister as they sound? What did the curvaton do in the early universe? And is everything really made of preons? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/spaceman and get on your way to being your best self. Visit BetterHelp to get 10% off your first month!

Support the show: http://www.patreon.com/pmsutter
All episodes: http://www.AskASpaceman.com
Follow on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/PaulMattSutter
Read a book: http://www.pmsutter/book

Keep those questions about space, science, astronomy, astrophysics, physics, and cosmology coming to #AskASpaceman for COMPLETE KNOWLEDGE OF TIME AND SPACE!

Big thanks to my top Patreon supporters this month: Justin G, Chris L, Alberto M, Duncan M, Corey D, Robert B, Naila, Sam R, John S, Joshua, Scott M, Rob H, Scott M, Louis M, John W, Alexis, Gilbert M, Rob W, Jessica M, Jules R, Mike G, Jim L, David S, Scott R, Heather, Mike S, Pete H, Steve S, wahtwahtbird, Lisa R, Couzy, Kevin B, Michael B, Aileen G, Mark R, Alan B, Craig B, Mark F, Richard K, Stace J, Stephen J, Joe R, David P, Sean M, Tracy F, Sarah K, Ryan L, Ella F, Thomas K, James C, Syamkumar M, Homer V, Mark D, Bruce A, Bill E, Tim Z, Linda C, The Tired Jedi, Gary K, David W, dhr18, Lode D, Bob C, Red B, Stephen A, James R, Robert O, Lynn D, Allen E, Michael S, Reinaldo A, Sheryl, David W, Sue T, Josephine K, Chris, Michael S, Erlend A, James D, Larry D, Matt K, Charles, Karl W, Den K, George B, Tom B, Edward K, and Catherine B!

Hosted by Paul M. Sutter.

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION (AUTO GENERATED)

We've heard of all the usuals. Electrons, protons, quarks, neutrinos, and if you're a fan of this show, then you've also heard of some of the other rarer particles. You know, the WIMPs, the tachyons, the monopoles, the whole family of supersymmetric partners, the, yeah, the selectrons, the squarks, and, yes, even the we know bosons. But that's not enough to satisfy your curiosity, is it? Like a collector of rare and priceless artifacts, you feel compelled to go just a little bit deeper, a little bit weirder.

I understand that desire, and I am here to help. So come over here. I've got something to show you. 5 of the weirdest, strangest, rarest, most hypothetical particles in the universe. These particles are so rare, we're not even sure they even exist.

And I think you're gonna like them. I have to give my usual disclaimer whenever I give a list of things. These are presented in no particular order, so feel free to rank them by whatever criteria you prefer. You know, interestingness, cheerfulness, propensity for potential cheese making, and and so on. But let's get started.

Number 1 is the dark photon. Everybody loves the photon. You know, it gets along with so many particles. It has infinite range. It makes flashlights work, but it may not be the only kind of photon out there.

And that's why we think there might be the dark photon, which is like the regular photon, but dark. So the motivation here is what the heck is going on with dark matter and dark energy. We've we've learned over the past few decades that visible matter, the normal matter, something we call baryonic matter, you know, the stuff of protons, neutrons, and electrons with all of our complicated forces, makes up less than 5% of the total energy contents of the universe. We know a huge component, dark matter, is about 25% of the universe, and this is some invisible form of matter, that we have yet to identify that makes up the mass of of almost every single galaxy and anything larger. And then there's dark energy, which is the name we give to the accelerated expansion of the universe, which makes up about 70% of the stuff in the universe.

Okay. So we've got these 2 giant components to the universe, and we have to ask, the physics that we know about, which is the baryonic physics, the light loving physics, is absurdly complicated. We have a particle zoo. We have multiple forces. We have all sorts of interesting interactions.

We have chemistry. We have the whole deal. So is the rest of the universe, dark matter and dark energy, are they big and simple and dumb, or are they big and complex and rich and interesting? Are there additional forces operating between dark matter and dark energy? Are there different species of dark matter particles that interact with each other?

Are there new forces of nature that only operate in what we call the dark sector of the Universe, the collective of dark matter and dark energy? What's adding a little bit of gasoline to this speculation is that dark matter and dark energy are weirdly coincidental. There's a lot of dark energy, and there's a lot of dark matter, and there's more dark energy than there is dark matter. But if we look at the span of history throughout cosmic evolution, 1000000000 of years ago, there was essentially no dark energy. And billions of years from now, the universe will be almost completely dark energy.

You get more dark energy as the universe expands. And so either we live in this extremely coincidental time where dark matter and dark energy just happen to be roughly within the same order of magnitude ballpark of each other, or there's something fishy going on. There are additional forces between dark matter and dark energy that keep them on track with each other, that make them interact so that they always have roughly the same amount of, energy density in the universe. We honestly don't know, but we are developing, theoretical models to to explore these options. And these theoretical models include new forces of nature.

So there are new ways that dark matter can interact with itself. There are ways that dark matter and dark energy can talk to each other and so on. And these forces need force carriers, and we call those force carriers the dark photons. Now anytime you create a new particle or you you just sit around bored one day and you're like, you know what? I think there should be a new particle in the universe.

You can't just come up with a cool name, although that is priority number 1. But after you come up with a cool name, you need to list its property. You need to list its mass, its spin, its type, its charge. It's how does it interact with the other particles that we know of in the universe? And so with the the dark photon, this isn't just one kind of particle.

It's actually a family of particles that have the general characteristic that they talk more to the dark sector of the universe than they do to the the light side of the universe. But within that family, there are a broad range of possible masses and a broad range of possible interactions with normal matter. We're not gonna cut it off completely. We we say, okay. Maybe the dark photon exists, and it almost always talks to dark matter and dark energy.

But maybe sometimes a dark photon interacts with, like, a regular photon or you and me, just extremely rarely. Otherwise, we would have seen it by now. But maybe it's not impossible. And so we go out and we come up with these families of particles, and then we try experiments to to go looking for them. And when it comes to the dark photon, if it doesn't have mass, if if the actual dark photon actually exists and it doesn't have mass, then we will never be able to see it or directly detect it.

It will always be hidden in the dark sector of the universe, and we'll only ever get circumstantial evidence for its existence. If it does have mass, if it has just a little bit of mass, then it can interact or potentially interact with normal matter. It opens up some channels because if it does have mass, then the dark photon can spontaneously decay into other particles. And maybe it spontaneously decays into dark matter, but also maybe it spontaneously decays into a positron electron pairs or it converts into a normal photon. Yeah.

We don't know. We're just guessing here. We're just creating opportunities for the dark photon to be detectable in our experiments. And we have a wide variety of potential experiments where we can go hunting for dark photons because once you introduce a new particle into the universe that has mass, that can spontaneously decay, that can interact with other stuff, you start messing with the physics of the universe. So we're talking particle collider experiments.

You're gonna get different results if dark photons are at play. You're gonna get different results with Big Bang Nucleosynthesis with the production of of the first elements in the first few minutes of the big bang because there's an extra player playing around messing up with the physics. You're gonna mess with cosmic rays. They can also mess up the interiors of neutron stars. They can change, how quickly or slowly they lose their heat.

The most fun way in my opinion is of detecting dark photons is through something called black hole superradiance which deserves its own episode. Because there's another cool concept behind black hole superradiance, which is something called black hole bombs, which sounds really fun, but is not today's subject. Don't let me get sidetracked. But fee please feel free to ask. But the general gist behind superradiance is that dark photons can get trapped in orbit around spinning black holes, and then they get their energy boosted, and then they just, like, blow up.

Overall though, if the dark photon exists, it's nearly impossible to find. We've searched in our laboratories, in our experiments, in astronomical observations, and we found nothing. We see no evidence for the existence of the dark photon, and so we've had we've placed intense limits on the properties it's allowed to have. So we've drew out this broad family of particles with potential masses, potential interaction strengths, potential interaction channels, energy levels where they tend to show up, and we can just start checking it off the list. Like, okay.

It can't be that. It can't be that mass. Can't have that interaction channel. Can't have that interaction strength. They're just moving right down the list.

And right now the possibility of the dark photon existing is very, very slim because if it does exist, its ability to mix into regular matter must be very limited. It's something like a 1 in a trillion chance or even lower. On the other hand, it may exist only in the dark sector, and we'll never be able to directly detect it. And we can only build circumstantial evidence for it, which is an unsavory state of affairs, but that's the way it is with these rare particles. Our number 2 particle today is the curvaton.

That's right. This is not a transformers bad guy. It is a real hypothetical particle. And so I don't know if that's an oxymoron, but here we are. So let's go back in time a bit to explore the kerbiton because we need to talk about inflation.

Inflation is this hypothetical event that occurred in the extremely early universe where the cosmos rapidly expanded in a blink of an eye. It expanded by a factor of 10 to the 60 in in in less than 10 to the minus 35 seconds. You know, something crazy. And inflation was powered by an entity. There was something behind inflation.

We believe it was driven by a quantum field. This quantum field, we call the inflaton because that sounds convenient. The inflaton drove inflation. Now what inflation did, it did 2 things. 1, it made the universe really, really big.

And then 2, at the end of inflation, and this is kind of a big deal, it laid down the seeds of structure formation. So what we see as galaxies and clusters today got their start at the end of inflation in that very, very early epoch. Now we have no idea what powered inflation. We have no idea what the inflaton is. Again, remember, priority number 1 is the cool name, and then priority number 2 is everything else.

We don't know what the inflaton was. We don't know what properties it had. We don't know why it kicked into high gear in the early universe. We don't know why it went away and stopped when it did. And in fact, the most annoying thing about inflation is that it's really tricky to get right.

Because if inflation lasts too long, then you end up with a dead, cold, frozen wasteland of a universe. If it ends too quickly, then you're not able to solve some of the problems that inflation was designed to solve. And so you need to tune inflation a little bit to get it to behave in the way we expect it to behave. And the real problem is that is that there are many, natural or simple models of inflation that do the job, that behave the way inflation is supposed to have, where it it turns on at the right time, expands the universe in the right way, and then turns off at the right time. There are ways to build relatively simple models that do not require a lot of fine tuning where just inflation just does its thing.

But we have a lot of trouble getting those models that allow inflation to do its thing without really needing to go in and fine tune and sharpen and get these precise values of where it's just like, okay. If you have an inflaton with these generic properties, the universe inflates and you're done. We have a hard time reconciling those models with what inflation needs to do at the very end, which is lay down the seeds of structure. This is because we would like everything to just line up and be nice where you have a simple generic model that there is some quantum field, and through its very nature of existence, you know, the properties it's supposed to have, it just drives inflation, expands the universe, and then lays down the seeds at the end. It seems like we can't have both.

So maybe the inflation wasn't alone. Maybe the inflaton wasn't the only thing out there in the early universe. Maybe there was something else, the kervaton, which is a companion to the inflaton. And the idea here is that during inflation, while the inflaton is powering the accelerated expansion of the universe, the kervaton is just hanging out. It's grabbing a soda.

Then at the end, once the inflaton goes away and inflation is over, the kurbiton takes over the cosmic scene, jiggles space time a little, lays down the seeds of future structures, and then goes away. The advantage of this setup is that now you have a lot more freedom for inflation to be natural or simple, where inflation just naturally arises out of the universe because of the fundamental properties of quantum fields, and that you don't need to worry about anything else. And you don't need the inflaton to do all the work of inflating the universe and creating the seeds of structure because now you have something else taking over that second job. The disadvantage is that considering that we have no idea how inflation works and we do not even know the identity of the inflaton, it's a little cheeky to introduce yet another unknown entity into the cosmos, but what are you gonna do? Honestly, the kurbiton probably doesn't exist, but these models are still helpful because we are trying our best to poke and prod at the extremely early universe.

It's not like we have direct observational evidence of this epoch. So we don't have a lot to go on. So we just have our models. We just have our creative ideas. And if we explore in any viable direction, including introducing new entities into the early universe like the, you know, maybe we might strike upon something interesting.

Maybe we might find an interesting combination that is testable or or reveals a lot more about how inflation works. But even if the Curvaton did exist, it doesn't exist anymore because as soon as it did its job by design, it has to go away and not leave an imprint on the later universe because if it did, if you have the curvaton lasting minutes or hours or years into the big bang, then you're gonna mess up big bang nucleosynthesis. You're gonna mess up the cosmic microwave background, and we don't see any evidence of big bang nucleosynthesis or cosmic microwave background or anything else being messed up. And so the had to go away, but it still had an impact, so that counts. Our number 3 weird particle today is the glue ball.

If you crack open a proton, you'll find 3 quarks bound together with the strong nuclear force. The carrier of the strong nuclear force is a particle known as the gluon of which there are 9 varieties. Just for reference, the electromagnetic force has only 1 carrier, the photon, and the weak nuclear force has 3 carriers. In the delightful parlance of nuclear particle physics, the quirks have a property known as color charge, which basically means that they can feel the strong nuclear force. Particles without color charge can't feel that force, just like electrically neutral particles can't feel the electromagnetic force.

Here's the fun thing about the gluons, those carriers of the strong nuclear force. They have color charge too. That's right. You heard it here first folks. The carriers of the strong nuclear force can feel the strong nuclear force.

And so our best models of the proton tell us that they are, well, just hot messes of strong force interactions where you have quarks exchanging gluons to glue themselves together, but then the gluons themselves feel that same strong force and so they interact with each other and so on. And they're not the only hot messes of strong nuclear force interactions. The protons are made of 3 quarks with their gluons and so are the neutrons. Then there's this whole other family of particles called the mesons which contain just 2 quarks plus all their gluons. And and in general, the strong nuclear force is really really good at making large composite particles, big complicated particles with big complicated interactions.

So we've got all these combinations of quarks and gluons held together with the strong nuclear force, and we give different names to these different combinations. But if gluons feel the strong nuclear force anyway, why don't we just skip the quark part? I mean, why make it so complicated? Just keep it simple. And that's how we came up with the glue ball, which is a hefty particle, a massive composite particle made of nothing more than a collection of gluons all, well, glued together, I guess.

We're talking of a particle made of nothing but force carriers, which is kind of weird and also kinda cool. What makes the glue ball so elusive is that it's incredibly ephemeral. It lives less than than a microsecond, which isn't that surprising. You know, every single combination of quarks and gluons except the proton is also unstable in isolation. Yes.

Even the neutron. If you take a neutron out of a nucleus, and just let it free float, it will decay in about 15 minutes. But the glue balls are expected to have exceptionally short lifetimes. Otherwise, we would have seen them floating around in our backyards by now, and we don't. So we know they can't live long.

But one of the challenges with the glue balls is that the predicted mass of the glue ball is in the range of just about every other composite particle made in particle colliders. So when we turn on our particle colliders, we make these showers of particles. We see all sorts of protons and neutrons. We see all sorts of mesons. We see more exotic ones.

And the glue ball is probably sitting in there with them, but we have a hard time telling it apart from the other ones. Like, if you just see a particle, if you if you, you know, run some giant experiment and and you you crack these atoms open and you let their guts spill out and they start transforming into all these showers of particles, usually, the first thing you get to quantify the easiest thing to quantify in a new experiment is a particle's mass. You say, oh, okay. You you look at all the proxies. You say, okay.

We've got some particles over here with this mass. We've got some particles over here with that mass. Usually, you don't get to see the other properties. You need more detailed experiments to get those other properties. And in this case, with the glue ball, when we run these experiments, we see candidate glue balls.

We see new particles appearing that have the right mass range to be a glue ball, But the problem is these candidate particles, these new particles that show up that we've never seen before also have masses that are compatible with, like, just new kinds of mesons or new kinds of baryons, other combinations of quarks and gluons. It's hard to tell when we see that interesting new particle and it shows up on our plot if it's a glue ball, which would be beyond exciting, or just another Maison, which is kind of exciting, but not as exciting as a glue ball. So nowadays, there's a whole experiment called GlueX that is designed to find glue balls not just based on their mass because we have a bunch of candidates that might be glue balls. But try to verify that what we're seeing is actually a glue ball based on what it decays into. Because a glue ball, when it finally disappears and decays into a shower of other things, the products that it creates should be different than what a normal Maison or Baryon creates.

And but it's only through those tiny, tiny differences, like, 1 in a 1000000 differences, that we'll be able to definitively say that a glue ball exists. And that's hard. We haven't done it yet. But the reason we are so interested in glue balls is that they are the last major undetected prediction of the standard model. The standard model of particle physics emerged in the 19 seventies and made all sorts of predictions about the nature of fundamental particles.

The Large Hadron Collider was designed to finally determine the last predictions of the standard model and then also hopefully move beyond it. One of those last major untested predictions was the Higgs boson, which we found. And then the other one was the existence of the glue balls, which we have yet to find. We have candidates. We see some interesting signals, but we can't yet determine if those really are glue balls.

But the hunt is on. Our number 4 particle today is known by the cryptic name of x 17, which sounds like a secret military base. But no. It's just yet again a cool name for a particle. We've been trying to move past the standard model of particle physics pretty much as soon as we invented it.

The standard model is hugely successful, perhaps the most successful scientific perhaps the most successful scientific theory of all time. Some predictions created by the model are validated to within one part in a quadrillion, which is indeed pretty impressive. But despite that success or because of that success, we've been trying to find any crack or any flaw in the standard model so that we can move past it. We know the standard model is incomplete. There's a whole list of things we do not understand about particle physics.

Please feel free to ask about what are the major outstanding questions in the standard model. That would be a very, very fun episode. And so we've been trying. We've been trying to find a flaw because we could hopefully use that flaw to learn something new about the universe and move past it. One of the difficulties of this is that experiments testing the standard model are huge, extremely carefully calibrated, and take years of data to lead to a result.

So progress is a little slow. But in 2015, physicists got a signal that something might be wrong with the standard model. It was at ATOMKI, the Hungarian Institute For Nuclear Research, And the team had assembled an apparatus to search for dark photons of all things. The setup involved firing protons at lithium 7, which then transformed into a beryllium 8, and then that beryllium 8 promptly decayed and produced pairs of electrons and positrons. These pairs go off flying at various angles, and then you can use nuclear physics calculations to predict the spread of those angles.

And then if you're getting extra of these particles compared to where you expect them to be at various positions, it might be because dark photons are getting involved that then decay into normal matter as they might or might not do and and just generally mess up your experiment. And what do you know? The Hungarian team found extra electrons and positrons more than they expected from theoretical calculations from the standard model. To recreate the signal, there had to be a new particle involved in the process with a mass of 17 mega electron volts, which to give you a sense of scale is about 34 times the mass of the electron. And so this mysterious new particle got a name, x17.

In the following years, the Hungarian team has built up an impressive list of accomplishments that all point to the reality of this new particle. They've calculated the statistical significance of this signal, and it's up above 6 sigma, where 5 sigma is considered the gold standard in particle physics. And here they are at at even 1 sigma higher, like, the the the probability of this result being due to random chances is so incredibly small. They've changed up the experimental setup, the number of detectors. They've played around with their experiment, and they still see a signal.

They tried it again with helium 4, a different atomic nucleus, and they saw the exact same signal. They've tried different beam input energies, see if that's causing the issue. Nope. They still see the signal. And they've worked with collaborators around the world to build experiments, and then those experiments also see a signal.

X 17 would be huge if this were a real particle because this would be a primo dark matter candidate. You're talking about a lightweight particle that hardly if ever interacts with normal matter. That is the definition of dark matter, and so this would be huge. But despite all of this, most of the mainstream physics community has its doubts. All the independent confirmations around the world have some sort of fingerprint from the original Hungarian team in them.

They they participate in the collaboration, or they go help build the detector setup, or they work very closely and they they exchange a lot of information as the other group builds their experiment. And nobody else outside of the Hungarian team has been able to reproduce the fact the effect. You know, someone not connected to them, not talking to them, building their own experiment with their own design to search for the signal. Whenever someone does that, they don't see anything. And other researchers have pointed out that if x 17 exists and has the properties that the Hungarian team says it does, then we should've seen it in other collider experiments throughout history.

You can say, okay. If there's this particle and it does this thing, it can't just do that one thing in your experiment. It has to do that thing throughout the entire universe. So like we talked about with dark photons in general, once you create a new particle, it's there throughout the entire universe. So it should be messing up neutron stars.

It should be messing up cosmic microwave background. You should see it in the Large Hadron Collider. You should have seen it in particle experiments from the 19 fifties. There should be evidence for it, and we don't see it anywhere else in the universe. Also, the Hungarian group has a history of claiming new detections of particles only for those claims to just kind of vanish over time, so they don't exactly have the most reputable track record.

And finally, there are some somewhat plausible explanations for the anomaly due to the geometry of the detector setup. It might be more efficient at detecting electrons and positrons at certain angles. And so it looks like a bump in the signal. It looks like you're getting extra beyond the theoretical calculations, but that's only because your detector setup is more efficient at that, position. And so it would look like a strong signal.

It would look like a 6 sigma result, but it would actually be totally bogus, because you didn't account for this systematic uncertainty or systematic error in your experiment, which is why it's a bad idea in general to rely only on statistical significance, but that's that's a separate discussion. Given that we don't see any new evidence for the particle as much as I would like for x 17 to exist, I'm not going to get my hopes up yet. And our last particle today, particle number 5 is the Patreon. That's patreon.com/pmsutter, p m s u t t e r. It is through your contributions that this show keeps going.

I can't thank you enough for all of your support. I I genuinely do appreciate it. I'm just kidding. It's the Preon. Check this out.

Okay. You've got your fundamental elements, like helium and aluminum, and there are so many of them. And the best we could do for a 100 years was just list and catalog them. But then we discovered that the fundamental elements weren't so fundamental after all. And actually, all these elements are just combinations of 3 more fundamental particles, the proton, the neutron, and the electron.

And so this was a massive step forward in simplifying the universe. You have this zoo of elements, and then you discover that this zoo of elements is really just interesting combinations of only 3 particles. But then in the mid 20th century, particle colliders started popping out ridiculous numbers of particles. And like the pion, the kaon, and then we actually had to stop giving them names and just assign letters to them, like the k minus, the d, and the b. We're just throwing letters out there that were producing so many different kinds of particles.

The best we could do for decades was list and catalog them. But then we discovered that the fundamental particles weren't so fundamental after all, and they're actually just made of combinations of a few fundamental, even more fundamental, subparticles, the quarks and the electrons. The electrons got to say electrons, but the protons and the neutrons and the pions and the kaons and the ds and the bs were all just made of quarks. This was a massive simplification. We were able to reduce the complexity of these particles that we were observing because we discovered that they they were really just interesting combinations of a fewer number of sub particles.

And now, well, we don't have a zoo of elements or a zoo of particles, but we have a zoo of these fundamental subparticles. We now know that there are 6 quarks, and there are 6 leptons. The electron is just one of those. There are also the muon and the tau and the 3 neutrinos. Plus, there are all the antiparticles.

Plus, there are all the force carriers. And right now, all we can do is list and catalog them. So maybe, just maybe, the fundamental subparticles, the quarks and the leptons, aren't so fundamental after all. And they're really made of even smaller object called prions. Not prions as in mad cow disease, but pre as in prequarks, as in before quarks.

Prions. The idea is that there are only a small number of prions. In one model, there are just 4 of them called plus, antiplus, 0, and anti 0. And that these prions combine in interesting ways to make all the variety of of quarks and leptons, which then go on to be protons and neutrons and atoms and then go on to be the elements. One of the biggest motivations for prions, aside from the fact that this general strategy of reduction has been working well for quite some time, so why stop now, is that many particles are extremely similar to each other but just differ in some tiny way.

Like like the positron and electron have the exact same mass, the exact same spin, they just differ in their charge. Or the electron and the muon, exact same charge, exact same spin, they just differ in the mass. Or the up and down quarks, they have different charges and just slightly different masses. When you see all these particles that have almost but not quite the same properties, it's very tempting to suspect that they may arise from some other interactions. I mean, string theory has followed a similar logical pathway, so we can't just throw out the concept altogether.

Prions have been proposed to explain just about every outstanding problem in the standard model from why there are only 3 generations of particles to the nature of dark matter, but nothing ever quite seems to stick. And that's because no experiment has given any hint that quarks and leptons are composite particles. So that stinks. We try as hard as we can to smash quarks and leptons apart, but they just keep on being themselves. And then there's this massive problem with the mass.

Experiments have shown that quarks and leptons are point like down to less than 11,000th the width of a proton. And so if a quark, which we know is no bigger than 11,000th the width of a proton, if it's made of a prion or combination of prions, those prions have to be moving around. And but they have to be moving around confined to an incredibly small volume. And the Heisenberg uncertainty principle tells us that if these particles are confined to that small of a volume, then they must have an incredibly high momentum. They have to be buzzing around in that tiny tiny little box with incredible velocities, with incredible energies, with incredible mass.

This means that the prions have to be so massive that they're more massive than the quarks and leptons that they supposedly build up to be. So in order for this to work, there has to be some sort of binding energy or some sort of interaction that cancels out all that mass, but that seems a little weird and non productive. Because you're trying to build quarks and leptons out of prions, but the prions have to be more massive than the quarks and leptons themselves. So you need to introduce some in other interaction which is making this whole point of simplification a little too complex. So the jury is still out on prions.

There's honestly not a lot of work in this direction because of the issues I just mentioned. And also not many people want to risk their careers on an idea that seems unlikely to pan out, which is unfortunate as string theory has sucked all the air out of the particle physics room for the past few decades and doesn't have much to show for it, but that's a different show. But like I said, this program of reductionism has been working well for so long. Let's not quit now. Prions, you all have a place in my heart.

And that's it. But that is my list of 5 weird rare particles, but don't worry folks, that's only the end of this list. I picked 5 weird particles for today's episode, but there are plenty more out there. We'll have to save those oddities for another day. Thank you to Lucas l and Jacqueline r for the questions that led to today's episode, and thank you to all my Patreon supporters.

That's patreon.com/pmsutter. I would like to thank my top contributors this month. They are Justin g, Chris l, Alberto m, Duncan m, Corey d, Robert b, Nyla, Sam r, John s, Joshua, Scott m, Rob h, Scott m, Lewis m, John w, Alexis, Gilbert, m, Rob w, Jessica m, Jules r, Mike g, Jim l, David s, Scott r, Heather, Mike s, Pete, h, Steve s, Watt, Watt, Bert, Lisa, Arcosi, Kevin b, Michael b, and Eileen g. Thank you, everyone. Please keep those questions coming.

That's askaspaceman.comoremailaskaspaceman@gmail.com. You can also ask through Patreon, and I even respond to you on Patreon and give you a little teaser of the answer when you ask a question. Please keep those questions coming. Keep the reviews coming that really helps the show visibility, and I will see you next time for more complete knowledge of time and space.

Comment