Discussing the Frontier of Particle Physics with Brian Cox

take me to the frontier of particle physics today there's tremendous progress being it's such an exciting time in fundamental physics not only particle physics but we said gravitational astronomy the exploration of the force of gravity black holes Quantum information Quantum Computing and all sorts all that stuff is is to me utterly fascinating I I think for the first time it's probably true to say in particle physics we don't know if there's anything else just around the corner which is bad you know but it's also it is our duty to find things out about nature this

is Star Talk Neil degrass Tyson you're a personal astrophysicist and today we are featuring my exclusive one-on-one interview with my friend and colleague from across the pond Brian Cox Brian welcome hi it's great to be back oh my God gosh oh it's it's been been tooo long yeah and we don't usually get to do it in person it's usually over Zoom or something right let's get some of your biography out there for State Side people who might not fully know who you are uh you cut your teeth as a particle physicist is that correct yeah

initially I mean actually my degree is the University of Manchester by the way in the UK I've never left so I started there doing my undergraduate degree postgraduate what do they call you there now you are professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester yeah and Royal Society as in the Royal Society of London yeah Royal Society professor of public engagement in science yeah so we're Kindred Souls across the Atlantic yeah so okay so you never left is that because they wanted you so badly or that no one else wanted you yeah probably the

latter but but I started it was actually um physics with astrophysics my degree so I did a degree physics with astrophysics then PhD in particle physics although the first year was I was working on supernova neutrinos so I crossing over in astroparticle physics as we would call it then I got into particle physics went to the daisy laboratory in Hamburg and works on electron proton collisions so called defc scattering I've seen Daisy online I've seen Daisy simulations of things they simulate like colliding black holes and things fascinating Daisy they Dy theut synchron yeah they they

have a a public facing platform see I didn't know that I didn't know because the accelerator is no longer operational so but it's a big it's it's a huge lab in Hamburg so I did my PhD there that's in particle physics then moved to fermilab in Chicago for a while and then to CERN when we were Building A Large Hadron Collider and then but I've always Switzerland yes in Geneva and remind me that's Center the European Center for nuclear research research acony French acronymed yeah to because it was founded in the 1950s and at the

time so it was it was what part of the Reconstruction of Europe really after the war so it was a that lab was founded I think it's 1954 1953 um and so it was Nuclear Physics at the time there wasn't really such a thing as particle physics I suppose at the time and then and now it's by far the world's largest accelerator particle physics lab yeah I mean the center of mass of that whole world left the United States when we stopped funding our super in Texas yeah the SSC super conducting supering super collider yeah

I would have called it the super duper collider that might have kept its funding at that point but uh yeah so Europe still leads the world in in nuclear particle research it's a it's a it's a very International lab I mean it is the world's cider so um so although it's based in Switzerland and France I would say it's a it's a world lab okay that's very diplomatic of you well it certainly is I mean the US have a tremendous presence there for example while you're saying all this to me you're not describing this this

branch of your life as a musician so just briefly remind me of that yes so when I was uh 18 so traditionally you would go to university there start a Physics degree but I didn't because I was in a band a rock band that I joined just before I'm sure your parents love that fact no they did actually they they they loved it I could go to college and major in physics or continue with my band oh but do you have that thing like a gap year we call it where you say well I'm going

to take a year off the studies before I go to college or university and so I'd said that I'd said I'm going to be in this band and and I'm just going to do it for a year and then I'll go and do physics H but then we got a record deal uh a big record deal with A&M records this is in 1986 1987 it's a long time ago got a big record deal and so we we I came to Los Angeles and recorded an album with uh actually produced by Larry kleene who was married

to Joanie Mitchell at the time and so we recorded some of it in Janie Mitchell studio in Los Angeles so and then we toured with uh my first professional gig with that band was with Jimmy Page in Jimmy pagee and did you open for Jimmy Page yeah we open for Jimmy pagee and and Gary Moore who'd also been in the band thing Lizzy and then Europe the The Final Countdown so you know this song The Final Countdown and Carri was a big h here in the US so we opened for them made a couple of

albums so I did that basically for five years and it charted uh actually no we we just we did Big Shows it was a rock and roll band and then and then we I left that band um went straight back to Manchester and went to start a Physics degree as one do yes but then in that little Gap that I joined another band who then had some hit records so a band called D this is in the early 90s now and we we they didn't have a record deal when I joined them and they got

a record deal as well so when I was at University I was in this band we had a number one hit in the UK and Australia with a song which violates the second law thermodynamics which you'll love call things can only get better which is clearly incorrect certainly things could only get worse globally in the universe exactly so and then so so yeah so I had a two and that song what helped it if I remember correctly some political candidate adopted it their theme song Tony Blair it was very ton Blair yeah it was Tony

Blair in 1997 his associated with his election yeah and came back actually into fashion because we just had a a change of administration in the UK and uh that song came up again and it came up and it got quite popular again so I did Glastonbury this year with the band wait that's that huge Place yeah the big Festival yeah that's the hu any huge scene of musicians in the UK is at that location well it's the world I mean it's probably the biggest Festival in the world I would imagine I would guess but it's

a huge Festival so you and Brian May those we are the two he did it the other way around though he he so he he got extremely well yeah he he got extremely famous and then finished his PhD in astrophysics yeah okay Brian May good Le guitarist of queen queen yes yeah so let's pick up some of the physics we are both here right now now in Las Vegas uh at a world Skeptics conference yeah yeah uh we we're both Skeptics I mean any scientist is a skeptic but problem is when the world does weird

things who's going to put them in check somebody's got to show up at the scene and say no that's not how that works or no the laws of physics prevent that or you so you've you've had to do this in the UK right there's certain resonances between the United States and the UK about how people misthink things so what was your baptism into this world well actually I mean I was only interested in doing research for a long time so I as a postar and that in that part of my career I didn't want to

know about anything else other than doing research and that's all I did but um it was uh I can't remember when it was now but there was one of those regular funding crises as you'll know from here in the US when when government support in particular for research dipped and so I got involved in trying to fight that and we realize I mean it's kind of obvious I suppose but we realize that one of the reasons talking to government that they had cut the research budget was that they didn't think anyone cared so they thought

it was a simple thing to demy you could just and so we we as a Community we were re-ed we we learned again we've learned over the years but we learned again that popular support popular support uh for for what we do is important and and where does the support comes from it comes from understanding and I could there are many reasons by the way why uh talking to people who are not in science about what we are doing as scientists is important one of them of course is just purely democratizing knowledge it's it we

tax payers fund at least in part what we do and therefore they have a right to know so there's that level but on the other level which I think you're suggesting as well um what science does I think it's not it's not about knowing the facts it's not about really it's not about knowing the universe is 13.8 billion years old for example or it's 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang we could talk about that later actually does that mean it had a bite origin in time in the P that anyway but it's not put

in that we'll get back to that okay it's not about knowing facts so much as understanding something about the process by which we acquire reliable knowledge about the world and and science is the process by which we acquire reliable knowledge and so I I think that realiz in that on that well it's yeah in the sense I think in the sense that nature is there whether and and it the job of the scientist is to find out how it works and of course as Richard fan and many others are famously said it doesn't care who

you are or what your opinion is or how popular you are how many votes you got or anything how much money you've got it doesn't care so in that sense I think it is a unique Pursuit because the the standard by which your opinion is judged is is external to us it's nothing to do with Humanity nature is the ultimate judge jury an executioner so so so I think I became involved initially just on that very narrow idea that we wanted to make sure that people understood what we did and what the value of it

is and then that branch that that became bigger and bigger in my career and and Branch Stein's television and and live shows and all sorts of things but it came from that that's I wasn't interested in communicating science I was just interested in doing it for a very long time so you had a certain Duty and responsibility to the world well I think we all do I mean I've realized since that I I think uh actually fan again said it's a very brilliant essay that anyone can download from 1955 I think it is called the

value of science it's just four pages and it's there it's on calex archive I think and in there he says that it is our duty as scientists our duty knowing the the great value of he calls it he defines science as a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance which is a beauti just merely satisfactory it's philosophy of ignorance you start out from not knowing and he said and he said the great value of the satisfactory philosophy of ignorance the great value of freedom of thought to Proclaim that freedom and to try to protect it for all coming

Generations essentially says at the end so but but I like the framing it is our duty as scientist to do that as well as do our job which is to find things out about nature about the natural world and I uh in this conference I am to bestow upon you the Richard Dawkins award for science and reason bestow bestow yes the Richard Dawkins award is something I won last year and uh I was called back in to bestow it upon you a great honor it is a it will be a delight for me it takes

place tonight yeah I look forward to that and just the idea that science and reason is something maybe it's sad that it's something that needs to be rewarded because if it's one of these awards that if the world functioned just right you wouldn't need it and also you know although I said as as fan has said it's it's in in a sense our duty as scientists it is also true that not all scientists want to want to do that or or feel comfortable with it as I said I didn't want to do it um initially

now now I very much enjoy it and think it's very important but it so we don't need everybody to to do it but but some people will and that's that's important right discussing big ideas with experts from physicists and biologists to entertainers and politicians is our favorite way to critically explore the world around us and now with spacex's Starship on track to ramp up its launches Elon Musk is turning Visionary ideas into real progress however since his cabinet appointment in Trump's Administration many are wondering about Musk conflicts of interest his influence on policies and more

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going on at CERN now that the pigs boan is discovered and the Nobel prizes were granted uh what are they doing now well did they just close shop and go home no I mean what what particle physics is because we're talking about quantum mechanics basically it's statistical in the sense that do you Collide what we do there is Collide protons together at high energy and we Collide a lots of protons together at high energy protons have a charge so that you can put them in a magnetic field and accelerate them yeah to very high speed

yeah so so they go so the LHC in kilometers is 27 kilm and that's the number yeah about 60 miles or something like that and uh and the the protons go around that ring uh 11,000 times a second so that's how fast they go that's fast that's 99.999999% the speed of light okay so you you've granted them energy so that when you Collide them you break them apart you're basically deconstructing nature to see what residue comes out of it when I think of doing that for anything else it's going to break right I don't take

chairs and slam them together and still have chairs I have a pile of of kindling okay so who ever thought it was a good idea to smash nature into itself well um I suppose ER is Rutherford initially um so we go back to Manchester the turn of the 20th century and Rutherford was using radioactive decay to um essentially produce the particles I mean it's just the the decay of the decay of atomic nuclei that naturally happens to produce high energy particles which he then fired into gold foil and bounced them off the foil in doing

that he discovered the atomic nucleus so you one way to think about particle physics is that you when you Collide things together what are you doing you you're really building a microscope one way to think of it is that the higher the energy of the Collision the the faster these things are traveling uh the smaller the the smaller the objects you can see so we were talking about seeing for the first time in those experiments the atomic nucleus and you move forward to the um you well ultimately through the 50s and 60s and we have

higher and higher energy collisions you start seeing that the nucleus is made of protons and neutrons and then you start seeing in the 50s and 60s that the protons and neutrons are made of smaller things called quarks and so we discover those that we've not discovered anything smaller than that by the way is it because you don't have enough energy to bust up a quark yes well well or or to resolve what's inside it let's say to build a microscope because right now the inventory of fundamental particles includes quirks yeah so somebody saying that's fundamental

which sounds a little like the Greeks saying atoms are fundamental oh no they won't be fundamental you're absolutely right but uh but they look Point like from the the point view from the energies that we can generate today but that that's one side of particle physics so we've been exploring the structure of matter which is historically you know it goes back to Rutherford I suppose and again you have confidence that when you break matter apart you didn't break the matter you're just deconstructing it yeah you you're it really I think the way to think about

it when you think about what a collision is so let's say you Collide as we did at in my PhD electrons and protons together so you get an electron beam and a proton beam and you smash them into each other what's actually happening what's actually happening is one way that the Collision can happen is that the electron can emit a photon which is a particle of light and the particle of light goes and and and it hits the pH the proton now the the wavelength of that light which is which telling you how small a

thing you can see is proportional to the energy of the thing that's how hard we're smashing the things together so the together yeah so faster you smash together the higher the energy the smaller the the smaller the things that you can see so so that's a way of thinking about particle collision so it really is a microscope in that sense that analogy works I'm just thinking if I were a proton I wouldn't want to be busted apart into quirks that would not be a nice day for me in some ways I suppose it's like having

it's kind of like having an x-ray I suppose isn't it you're right though you hit them hard enough and they fall to bits but that would be the same for you would so but we we would try not to hit ex what the bits that I fell into no one's considered them fundamental bits of Neil but right but the other way to think about particle physics which is I think so you say the higs particle you mentioned so that's not in the proton you're not you're not smashing the things together and finding a higs particle

buried in there somewhere the other side is really so you think of Einstein's famous equation eal mc^2 so energy and mass are interchangeable let's put it like that so it also says that if we have loads of energy in these collisions then we can make new particles that are extremely massive much more massive that would come spontaneously out of the available energy that would otherwise be doing nothing so so we have when you Collide protons together these energies you have plenty of energy there to make a higs particle for example or a top quar which

is a very heavy particle as well far more massive than the protons so so that's I suppose the way to think about trying to manufacture higs particles so you can observe them you need enough energy to make them so you're not just buing them apart you're creating an opportunity to view more massive particles than would otherwise be available to you yeah and the other thing to say so to get a complete picture is these very massive things like higs particles um they they have a very short lifetime so you make them and they Decay away

into lighter particles very very fast so you don't see the higs particles what you see the the debris from the decay of the higs particle and the the the the challenge of particle physics is to get detect all those bits that came off basically and by the way you also have the bits of the protons that all got smashed up as well so it's a big mess and we have more than these these it's very hard because you don't only have one proton Collision per we we we send the particles around in little bunches basically

so you can get 10 20 30 collisions at the same time only one of them on a very good day will be an interesting one and and then so you've got to sift through all this which is the the the difficulty or the professional challenge let's say of particle physics with that reasoning there's always some next energy level that you haven't visited yes where more and interesting physics can reveal itself and this is where it gets um challenging at the moment because so the the so-called standard model higs particle and I should just that for

a minute that that thing the existence of this thing was predicted in the 1960s by Peter higs and others and um it was a suggestion a theory a guess let's say at the time mathematically motivated almost purely by the way mathematically motivated of how things get mass in the universe at the most fundamental level how the quarks and the these these very heavy things called the w and z bosons that how how those things got m um and so it was a a mathematical construct it predicted that there should be in the simplest case one

this thing the higs Bose on but there could be more complicated versions and so we knew that if we collided protons together at the energies that we generate at the large handron collider then we would either discover the higs BOS on and prove this Theory to be correct or we knew that if it wasn't there we would see something else so we had a very clear idea from experiment and theory that we were going to discover something with that machine and you don't know what it is it turned out it was the simplest thing it

was this thing that Peter higs had had dreamt of for all those years ago which is astonishing by the way 50 years after the prediction and there's there's a great essay that you might know by Eugene vigner called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics physical sciences I think that's the one of the best examples it's an astonishing achievement that we got it right and so so we discover the higs Bo on to put Precision on that that winer's the point in that paper it's not that math in a vacuum no pun intended makes discoveries it's the

mathematical representation of a physical idea yeah and then you pursue the math and it applies to the universe but only if the physical idea is has captured reality in some fundamental way although the what it was I think the it was a a very a very mathematical framework which became the standard model of particle physics based on ideas of symmetries and all sorts of beautiful ideas which which really did have mathematical foundations so there's an aesthetic sense I think built into that model and that would be the pure mathematical see I'm you know my people

in astrophysics we have enough embarrassing historical examples of chasing know elegance and Kepler Kepler I'm saying look at Kepler but the I I think the genius of Kepler he had these platonic solids in these ideas right he's got the pyramid and the cube and the this and then he rejected it Based on data yes in 16 but his his first thought was the universe is beautiful and divine and perfect and these solids are perfect planets are in the universe so it must be a connection he spent 10 years looking at it yeah and but then

but then he rejected it and then the laws of planetary motion which which are indicative of a very beautiful thing which is Newton's law of gravitation an inverse Square law and so there is a there's a beauty underlying it but only after he had to scrap this other beauty that he had presumed it would be that's why we we step lightly when someone says I have this beautiful idea yeah okay let's hear it but but it is true that and I think it's one of the great Mysteries that that that there is um historically Einstein's

theory general relativity is another example where where a quest for Simplicity and beauty and elegance which are judgments right the human judgments has led to very very precise models of the way that nature Works given that CERN which has the large hyron collider LHC discovered the higs boson if you to discover more particles presumably you have to keep sort of upgrading the system as the LHC was compared to what was there before so that you can ever with ever greater force bust into the particles and see what's lurking so we can't increase the energy of

the LHC very easily so or even easily or we can't really so that that would be a major change to the machine but what we can do and are doing is so-called High Luminosity upgrades which means you Collide more protons together and the thing about um so then you win on the statistics of the partical physics is it's a quantum mechanics and so things happen statistically so so it's you know one in I don't know the numbers off to my one in 10 billion collisions you'll produce something like interesting a higs it's less than that

but um so so when when giving yourself more collisions gives you more chance to discover new particles and it gives you more particles like higs bosons to explore if you get a higs particle after however many collisions and that's kind of rare if you have more collisions you'll get more higs yeah to improve your statistics on what the hell the higs is yeah because we want to know but then there could be a reaction that's even rarer to manifest than the higs and if your sample wasn't large enough you would just never go there yes

you wouldn't see it if you just made one thing one particle you know what one whatever it is the higs prime whatever if you made one of those then you wouldn't see it if you made one of them superhero Nemesis I'm higs Prime you know I've come toy by the way and we do look for those things Zed Prime the zos on we look for the Z primes because they can be signatures of extra dimensions in the universe by the way so we look for this stuff but the point is that if something is very

very rare then you you won't really see it if you just make one or two of them you need to make hundreds or thousands or whatever it is to see them yeah it's like how many people have to live in a city before you stumble on someone who's seven feet tall yeah that's statistic statistically you yeah you need so possibly Millions yeah so so the upgrades are the the upgrades that we can do and it's you have to upgrade the detectors the cameras that we use as well as the machine okay so you kept the

same hole in the ground yeah yeah because we don't want to dig another one of those or change other magnets around which are very expensive does that hole go through more than one country or is it all contain intland France and Switzerland wow okay yeah most of it's in France actually oh didn't know only a little bit of it's in Switzerland okay so that's one thing and and the other thing is this higs that we've discovered that this the question Still Remains is it the the simplest one the standard model higs called or is it

something more complicated how does it behave so the analogy in in in planetary science would be yeah we discovered a moon and so you go great then you would like to know about the moon you don't want to just say we've discovered this moon it's a DOT that's fine as you said they're interest want characterize it in whatever way you can for that you need a lot of them to to observe so so so it's it's exciting that but and it's challenging because I I think for the first time it's probably true to say in

particle physics we don't know if there's anything else just around the corner which is bad you know but it's also good I suppose it's just science I mean ultimately it's neither bad nor good it's the way nature is that's that's what triggers whatever next round of physics is complete yeah you know you get PE you get those people that show up and say there's nothing left in physics to discover well they be they show up every few decad so utterly wrong that they're not even worth I mean you know there's tremendous progress being it's such

an exciting time in fundamental physics mhm at the moment that uh particle physics not only particle physics but we said gravitational astronomy the the the exploration of the force of gravity black holes Quantum information which is related to Quantum Computing and also all that stuff is is to me utterly fascinating there's some really interesting I read some stuff the other day which I don't fully understand actually um some of the progress in string theory it's interesting because just as an decide it's linking it seems to me it's linking one of the great Mysteries which is

the so-called cosmological constant so the fact that we observed that the universe is accelerating in its expansion and Nobel Prize has been given for the observation not for the understanding yes he a friend of mine who by the way didn't believe his he he didn't believe it when he saw it because it wasn't in the air this idea he was looking at light from Supernova super I'm on I'm on a paper with briyan Schmidt yeah I I'm like very minor author uh you have to scroll down and then like my name is in the super

NOA yeah but it was it was it was analysis of high red ship supern noi yeah and I I totally enjoyed that work but he obviously went on and made an entire sort of yeah branch of his career on it so there's this remarkable idea that which comes from that which is which is in Einstein's theory this idea that you can you can have a kind of energy in the universe let's say or a thing whatever it is because we don't know what it is but something that makes the universe that the rate the the

space stretches increase which is uh so that that's there and it's observed it's one of the great Mysteries because it's I think it's the smallest number in all of physics by what is it it's something like a 10 the^ minus 122 or something in appropriate units right which is absolutely ridiculously so so it's a tiny tiny tiny tiny thing that's causing this rate of expansion um but it's not zero and so the question becomes why is it tiny the the why is it tiny and not zero yeah yeah and and so because if it were

even slightly bigger we wouldn't be here so the universe would have been blown apart so it seems very unusual but I I saw the other week or the other day actually that there's some research that's linking that in in a in a in the framework of a string theory uh or M Theory to uh matter so so so there there's a kind of an idea that if you fix that you get a prediction out that there should be um dark matter but it turns out it's to do with extra dimensions and gravitons in extra dimensions

and things so it's it's quite but it's quite interesting so I think there there are some very interesting areas of string theory where progress is being made quite remarkably do string theorist need a fuller or better inventory of particles so for example are we still looking for a gravit are we still looking for you know every you shake a stick and there's a physicist proposing a hypothetical particle to explain Dark Matter to explain wouldn't it be cool if the Dark Matter were related to gravitons which is that this is not my field I only heard

of it the other day but it sounded interesting but it just shows you that we so to go back the to to LHC um we have the higs particle as you said um we had expected I would say most particle physicists expected there would be other particles discovered there's a particular that same experiment yeah LC so there's a particular Theory which which motivated by String Theory a long time ago called super symmetry which is a a property of the universe we we we it's been around for many decades and it came initially from either from

String Theory are from some other is it got Incorporated in I can't remember historically which way it came but it's um but it's it essentially predicts that there are double the number of particles that we see fundamental particles at this energy so so we and they would have been great candidates for dark matter by the way which is astrophysical Discovery so we should say I suppose the one the one sentence description the dark matter is that we see the the the universe there's far much more ma matter in the universe than we can see see

I I would put it differently yeah I would say there's far it's not dark matter it's dark gravity well you say matter we don't know what we don't know what it is well true so so you see it through its gravitational inter so it's dark gravity yeah we don't see otherwise you get newspaper headlines say oh uh we must abandon our ideas of Dark Matter well if it's not matter it's still there okay it's misnamed yes I see what you mean I mean I I I that's a cool newspaper by the way that would have

a headline like that it goes there at all she usually about a football player and so I'm on board with that newspaper yeah I'm just saying if we don't know what it is we had no business calling it matter at all so the thing to say though is dark Gravity the best which sounds cool so you build model you build models and it is true that the best model that fits all the data which is not just the way that gravit that that galaxies rotate and and Collide and and the way that gravities galaxies kind

of lens light and all those things but also the cosmic microwave background radiation which is the oldest light in the universe and and how that worked and how the ripples the sound waves went through the early universe and all that you put it all together and and it it fits if you have a a light a lsh particle that does not interact with light but interacts weakly so this would be another category of particle in the particle soup yeah that has gravity but doesn't interact electromagnetically or only very weakly and so just it's all right

so that that's a model though you're right so that's a model which is kind of I would said the Baseline model the people assume that and I don't have a problem with it but if anything happens to that model it gets shown it can't be true people oh then there is no dark matter no there's still dark it is a measurement in the universe we just misnamed it yeah I agree the measurement is just galaxies spin round too fast but too fast there it is or the way they Collide and and so on there's quite

a lot of independent measurements of this thing so tell me about Gra I mean is that a real particle I think most physicists would say that quantum mechanics requires is is the base is the base Theory I think the reason I'm careful is because there is some people who would say general relativity is is a thing space time is a real thing and all that but but I think generally most people would say quantum mechanics is underlining and that that would if you have an interaction in other words quantum physics is foundational yeah to the

universe in ways that even general relativity would not be yeah so we we talk about this later but the idea that space and time or space time emerge from a quantum theory is very fashionable at the moment partly because of the study of black holes so we could talk about that but so so given that then you so I I should say just for people who are watching and listening that um so how would we picture the electromagnetic force in particle physics so you know that if you put like charges together they repel and and

so on so so what's happening there or if you bring magnets together right they repel each other everybody knows if the North Pole together and they repel so what's happening in particle physics terms you you picture that as the exchange of a photon it's a particle of light goes from one particle to the other and essentially carries the force so that's that's what our particle physicist would picture a that force all forces have we successfully applied that to gravity no so that's the point so so so so but you the give me a more resonant

no the very the very strong I suppose I'm trying to find the right word for it I think it's that's why I said conviction it's almost I don't know if any physicists who would disagree with because if you can't fold it into the quantum world you don't really have a right to start looking for a graviton because you're going to say the graviton is the mediating particle yes so it's the way the photon is the med particle so and that's um I I think I don't think you'd find anyone who would disagree with that statement

okay although I don't think you would although it is true to say that because gravity is so weak so this is the other thing to say it is tremendously weak compared to the other three forces of nature of which electrom magnetism is one here I tell people you've surely done this in class they say how weak is gravity well I can pick something up off the floor against the wishes of Earth exactly yeah yeah the whole earth is pulling on this ball and I can just pick it up off and and kick kick it and

you're using electromagnetism that's what's happening so your muscles and all that thing so this is all electromagnetic force which completely destroys as you said the gravitational force um but gravity is only additive so it only adds up in the universe so is a do is the dominant force on Cosmic distance scales that's the point about gravity here's a calculation I haven't verified but it sounded legit uh very verifiable I just never I was too lazy that uh if you take like the space shuttle in its Glory Days and you take one remove the electrons from

one cubic centimeter in the nose of the main tank and take all those electrons and put it at the base of the Launchpad it could would not be able to launch the attraction between the electrons at the base of the launch pad and the net positive charge at the top right yeah is enough to prevent it from launching yeah that's a cool idea I could see that that would be yeah yeah actually would yeah borrow a whole so it probably yeah it's not a realistic experiment but to get some sense of the forces involved yeah

that's a really nice okay so gravity is weak that somehow bails you out of this problem well it just means that you can't we don't have experimental access to them okay because it's so weak I agree so whereas we do have experimental access to photons yeah unless you could potentially have access if there were extra dimensions in the universe that are configured in the right way physicist always throwing in extra Dimensions whenever you need it you know it is interesting though that that string theory Works in 10 dimensions and only 10 Dimensions mathematically so that's

um an interesting observation right so I don't I don't I don't have the background to be an authentic drink Theory skeptic but I know physicists who are and so I don't yeah I think there I mean it depends I think it depends what you mean by String Theory I mean there was that if you go back you know a few decades you talk to Brian Green for example and when he started working in this area he would he's a friend of Star Talk he been onest several times he would have um it's great but the

elegant universe is a beautiful description of string theory and and so I think the idea initially with the Hope was that you'd have a theory and you could write it down it's a theory of everything and it would predict the universe as we see it and then you go home and done and I think that's gone as a as an idea but the the the the basic idea of these I mean why is it called string theory is because particles are not point likee the these strings are like little string little loops and and but

that idea I think is still at the foundation of most modern theoretical physics in this area but it's got much more complicated and it's been much harder I think the initial idea that you could just predict everything from one number maybe has gone away one simple equation on one line but there is tremendous progress being made in in string theory so it's it's it's not gone away it's just become more complicated I would say well thanks for catching me up on this I at this conference you're giving a a talk on black holes yeah and

there was some recent announcement the biggest jet from a black hole ever discovered ever yeah ever uh I I when I was asked about it by the Press I simply said there's always a biggest jet in the universe and so now this one is that the A380 okay airb A380 it's a fantastic a did I under sell the significance of this huge jet so what if it's the biggest one unless there's some interesting physics that's coming out of it the area that I have I share a PhD student who's working in the area is more

is more theoretical it's about Quantum information the way the information behaves inside and outside of black hole what happens to things that fall in but um in terms of the astrophysical work that if you go back you know not long ago we didn't really have any observation of how uh things behave in the vicinity of black holes and so I would put it in that box we've got several observations now we've got the radio telescope observations from The Event Horizon collaboration that are shown us how the magnetic fields work for example around the the the

black hole in the Milky Way we've got these Jets which are giving you access to the magnetic structure presumably in the way that they thank you for putting it in that context now I can understand it broadens the astrophysical data set yeah on which we can sharpen our hypotheses for what's going on yeah because they're hard things to observe and of course you can't observe the interior because it's inside this thing called The Event Horizon but what you can do and we are doing is observe the way that material behaves in the vicinity of them

or what the other remarkable thing we've been able to do in the last few years is watch them Collide and see how the ripples in the fabric of the universe come out and we can detect those ripples so all these things are allowing us to probe these objects by and it's worth remembering that they were present they were described um non-spinning ones were described fully by the work that Carl swell did in in 1916 so months after Einstein had published the theory of general relativity he didn't know it at the time but his the the

mathematical descrip description he found which describes how space and time are distorted in the presence of a star a non-spinning star is kind of important um those those fully describe a black hole that isn't spinning remember correctly uh he would die in the first World War I don't think he made it out of the war no he died in 1916 so shortly after not not in action he not in action okay I think he died from dis diseases that it was on the Russian front okay it was yeah so War related but not I think

it was you would argue War related uh yeah so we've got you know more than a century of mathematical foundation for this yeah and then you go forward to with no data no data no and then then then so it takes another 50 years by the way for someone to work out what it looks like for a spinning one which is Roy Kerr it's a famous ker solution but those two solutions there they're in Einstein's theory in some in a sense um and they describe the black ho but um observing them is something that we

haven't been able to do till recently so so in multi-wave lengths as well yeah so so now we have radio observations the gravitational wave observations I'll I'll be a little kinder to that well because it's the way the thing is you as you said right at the start science is about yes having ideas building theories and so on but it's it's really fundamentally about testing those theories yeah and so we can talk about these theoretical object Jacks black holes but really and they are rich theoretically But ultimately you've got to make observations and that's where

these Jets and and seeing how material behaves it gives you access to the magnetic fields and how the thing's spinning and what it's that that's important hey Star Talk fans I don't know if you know this but the audio version of the podcast actually posts a week in advance of the video version and you can get that in Spotify and apple podcast and most other podcast Outlets that are out there multiple ways to ingest all that is Cosmic on Star talk let's talk about your work with the public you you said earlier you you share

this commitment that binan declared duty to bring science to the public you you don't you not only talk the talk you walk the walk and you have spillage everywhere you know you get given tours Public tours in in in Australia across Europe uh and if I remember correctly you're coming back to the United States next spring to give a tour across the country yeah yeah it's a tour that um that that's been going on for quite a long time it wasn't meant to really but we've ended up playing to over 400,000 people across the world

with this tour wait wait wait you're not a musician you say playing get your vocabulary I'm look I'm rock and roll basically I always been so when when we we have five trucks and two tour buses it's brilliant so I'm reliving My Life as a so did I see a version of that when you came to the city yeah it was very early on just after it was just after yeah you have these screens that interlock and then the whole stage is is yeah and that was a very early iteration of this and so it's

changed a lot before I laid it to rest this tour and develop another one I wanted to bring it back here in the form that it is now which is so radically different from what and and it's you celebrating the universe with and for the it is and the public it also morphed into there's a version that I do with the symphony orchestra which is great fun so we did it at Sydney offer house actually initially um last year and it's a big Orchestra because it's 90 piece Symphony Orchestra because of the music that that

I chose and so the The Reason by the way as a slight digression it's part of this tour the classical music is a big part of the tour so it starts with calus's Fifth Symphony third movement and that was because a conductor friend of mine called Daniel Harding I said to him what should Stanley cubric have used in 2001 as a joke like what should he have used we immediately said seus Fifth Symphony and it is it was written in 19 uh 15 same year that general relativity was published but it's the basis of almost

every science fiction theme you've ever heard you hear it's beautiful and and uh so the idea which I've always strongly believed but it came to my mind as I was doing this tour is that what what if we're talking about deeper philosophical questions which are raised by cosmology I say right at the start what does it mean to live a finite fragile life in an infinite Eternal Universe right is it because it and and I say of course I don't know the answer to that do that uplift people or depress them well but but it's

that as you know the moment you contemplate the Scale of the Universe and I should say we don't know whether it's infinite we don't know whether it's Eternal right but but it could well be infinite and eternal for all purposes it kind of is right on a human to a human scale yeah so so the immediately when you contemplate the size and scale of the universe you ask questions about our place and quite vividly what does it mean to live these little finite fragile lives and so I think I try to approach those questions and

you realize or I realize that there are other lights you can shine on that problem and science is a necessary bright and Vivid light that casts a very well delineated Shadow which is given us some obviously it's the framework within which we operate but there are other lights so I you realize that Mara for example so we use Mara in in the classical concerts Mara thought a lot about what it means to live a finite fragile life and he gave a very eloquent answer many eloquent answers in his Symphonies and he was once asked by

the way uh what what are you trying to say what what's this answer and he said well if I if I could say it I would wouldn't have written the music good answer you have this music love that so so the music so the composers that I chose and that part they are in the the tour that we're going to do NE this coming year NE next April 2025 um they're in there as music the the composers were chosen because they explored this question and gave very eloquent answers the the so so it's it adds

to I think the more philosophical exploration of the questions that raised by the signs what's the name of the tour called Horizons Horizons that's easy enough to remember okay very cool but there's a lot of black holes in it as well I should say so it's an exploration of of the ideas that I find black is a horizon of its own they have Horizons yes but but but also life in the universe the origin evolution of Life speculations on we could talk about speculations on how many civilizations there might be as a guest well this

thing about life in the universe you've done many many uh TV series and most recently one on the solar system yeah where the search for life is a main theme well yeah we just saw as we speak last week the Europa Clipper spacecraft was launched yes on the way to Europa we have an entire show devoted just to that we visited the jet propulsion labs and saw felt the excitement of everyone there it's great isn't it it's the first spacecraft I've seen major spacecraft being built so I saw the Clipper and the thing is the

scale of that thing it's it's the largest spacecraft isn't it that's ever been sent into well if you add the so the most massive here's it may be but there's another important fact solar panels have gotten more efficient in the day back if you were going to explore beyond the asteroid belt you couldn't use solar panels the intensity of the sun wasn't high enough this one has a very Deployable large solar panel that'll help it along without having to rely entirely on the on the nuclear Decay PL yeah so it's a huge spacecraft and the

point is that Europa Jupiter's moon is a prime candidate for for a habitable world in the what we know almost certainly I'm always the people who I know work on the mission say don't say we know we we're almost sure there's a saltwater ocean below the surface I think it's pretty indisputable now so pretty sure it's there yeah but whatever is the skepticism what would it be were it not a glal ocean yeah it's very difficult to because and that's from many measurements made amonia I mean there's not you know water molecule is not rare

yeah it looks like salt water yeah and and we have a lot of comparative planetology with is it the Arctic when it freezes over you have these chunks of ice that will break and refreeze and readjust and and you can compare the images and you'd think you were looking at the frozen Arctic yeah yeah so it it looks and there's more water in that ocean than all the oceans of the earth combined geologically active there are questions about how the ice cracks and moves on the surface so it's a fascinating Mission so that's Europa Mars

of course which You' probably spoken about many times on this podcast um Enceladus is another one Saturn's moon even even out of Pluto I even the ones we see the plumes of of geysers I guess yeah yeah when at the right Sun angle you can see who who took those pictures that must must have been right right right yeah so and also there's some measurements from Cassini the particles in those Jets of water which are consistent with hydrothermal vent activity on the floors and hydrothermal vents are one of the plausible candidates for the origin of

life on Earth yes so you seem to have everything the one thing I think europa's got that arguably nowhere else has is it looks like that ocean has been there for many billions of years that's the the Baseline scenario and we evolve life in less time than that here on Earth yeah yeah present what 3.8 billion years ago 3.8 yeah yeah and the the other four and a half billion years old so right yes so so it looks like you have a habitat that's been stable there and I think you can't CL that with in

fact you know it was taught that it took about a half a billion years on Earth to get life going but we were able to revise that number down because in the early Earth these periods of heavy bombardment it's not fair to start the clock while we're still getting slammed by you know still accreting leftover rocks from the solar system as the temperature of the surface of the Earth is high enough to prevent complex molecules give us a chance please so the the periods of bombardment subside Earth surface cools now start the clock and then

it's about 100 100 million years yeah yeah so that's like that yeah which is one of the reasons I think that I think if you speak to many biologists they would say that might suggest that given the right conditions then whatever the origin of life is there's a reasonable probability given the right conditions because it happened quickly here right so but that now that's not that's not definitive in any sense but certainly tempting to go there but then but what I find very interesting then is though when you ask okay but when did life get

more complex than a single cell you're you're then I don't think there's any evidence in the fossil record back Beyond about 600 million years ago that took a while yeah we we as single cell creatures three billion years yeah plus but it seems so I think people who think about this problem are honest about that and so in the search for life on other planets we're really looking for single cell organism well it would be it would be remarkable to see anything more complex well it' be remarkable to see a single cell because then you

know especially if it were biologically different so you can really show that it's got a different origin because it's worth saying that on Mars the material is exchanged between Earth and Mars so it's not obvious yeah that you could and you make all these points in your Series right so where where where can people find your series it's streaming I presume yeah yeah we've got the new one is just on the moment actually that's what I'm saying the solar system so that will appear on Apple I suppose at some point and other places yeah I

mean it's the moment it's on the BBC so um and it's streaming on the BBC and then it will head off around the world one of the coolest things I think about Europa is that the the habitat that the potential habitat requires Jupiter because the the heating it's liquid because of theing around a big but it also seems to require well it requires the other moons iio and ganim to keep it in this orbital resonance which keeps feeding the energy in from the gravitational field the Family Affair but it also might need the the the

material from the volcanoes of IO on the surface of Europa because they might provide the what what we call the oxidant right so that so so life is so you're saying that the an IO which is badly stressed it's just one big volcano there one big volcano so th it spews volcanic substance yeah faster than escape velocity apparently and then it goes which lands on on EUR and it it goes into Pathways that intersect other moons Europa included you do this for a billion years and then the chemistry and then it gets iradi helps out

the chemistry yeah so we we one of the theories that that I've spoken to people on the clip emission said is that that's part of the battery of life that chemistry so life I can't remember who said it but he said life it was someone said it's life it's an electron looking for a place to land that's what life is it's just in one way you can see life is electrons moving around but that means you need the chemistry but to is that all we are just electrons looking for a place to land well that's

that's whatt I'd rather be Dust in the Wind whatever all we are so so but I find that wonderful because then you've got this habitat which is a system and as you said comparative planetology you mentioned earlier it's also true of Earth isn't it you you can't understand Earth without understanding the system the solar system you need to understand the moon and how it stabilizes the spin axis and you need to understand of course the sun and the way it interacts with Earth and so on I'm a few years your senior I don't know if

you would remember this but I defitely do the era where no one was thinking or caring about moons yeah in the solar system you know we had a we have a dead Moon orbiting us oddly large but fine let's go look at the planets yeah and so every Mission out to the planets we the they looked over their shoulder and found moons which had way more geologic diversity than anything we're finding on the planet you know I found it interesting because did you I mean when you were in school did where were we pre Voyage

well Voyage it so I'm pre Voyager and Voyager turned the moons into Worlds yeah that's what happened yeah yeah so the idea you have a habitable zone in a solar system which is the The Zone within which if you have a rocky planet orbiting and everything's right then and the atmosphere is right you could have the conditions to support life on the surface liquid water let's say and so and so that turn out to be needlessly limiting well exactly so so so you just say well Mars Earth Venus in our solar system that's it but

then you find reh habitable zones around gas giants that and that as you said that was the great discovery of VO Voyager I would say yeah began with voyager really for sure yeah should be 19 early 1980s right so I'm I'm delighted even as a particle physicist you get to also platform the solar system because you you have the name recognition was always but that's why I said I started with astrophysics I really just wanted to be an astronomer so I've always been I've I've got a telescope you confess to me I a safe space

to do that ended up in particle physics it was almost so I was doing astrophysics that's what I was doing and I thought I want to be an astronomer we University of Manchester has the jodell bank radio telescope for example which one of the big radio telescopes in the world still and so I that wasn't the one that discovered the first Pulsar was it uh no that Cambridge CD CD J discovered something else I mean just George bank it's it was one of the first so it's Pine it's one of the pioneering it's it does

a lot of the work work on the camp pulsar and so on but uh it was uh so so I thought I'd be an astronomer and I have a telescope you that's what I do I I sit there and in we accept you in the club even though you you you drifted to particle physics space expiration so that's what all what but it was at University I just got interested in mathematics I didn't think I was very good at mathematics at school and uh but I found out if with a bit of practice then I

I enjoyed it so I ended up really getting more into theoretical physics and and went that way so that's why I ended up in partical physics really but then now of course I I've every every opportunity I get I seem to drift back because the universe is cool you know I don't want to brag about the universe but and black holes actually are where they intersect they absolutely particle physics and general relativity astronomy and the Big Bang itself course yeah yeah yeah yeah with your particle physics hat where are we with neutrinos now I thought

with they're sort of fully understood we solved the nutrino problem in the Sun that a Nobel Prize was given for that uh is there anything left to discover about this elusive particle that belongs in the in the I say Tree of Life in the the particle Tree of Life yeah I mean there are neutrinos are fascinating things that they're very very very they're almost massless but not quite and that matters that should ring bells you know it's like why that's the thing about science isn't it you go why is this unusually light or maybe it

isn't maybe the other things are unusually heavy but but but but it's telling us something and it's only neutrinos that how hard it is to interact with them they gives me any belief at all in some other set of particles that might exist that we don't interact with because neutrinos are our own species well they interact through a the weak Force they interact but that's us that's our little world here right any other symmetric particles there other forces that mediate them is that correct there would be so if you have um sort of extensions to

the standard model of particle physics then you you can have forces that change things into other things and and so different forces but as far as we know as far the zoo that we have discovered is is described by the three forces um the strong nuclear force the weak nuclear force electromagnetism and then hanging out there as we've discussed is gravity in in really a different framework at the moment so I Coral Steve ber in elevator one day and uh and you know physicist I'm telling you I'm telling the audience particle physicist one of the

greats yeah and he went to my high school let me allow me to add one of wi Nobel laurates from my high school and I said how can you live with yourself at night given how many particles there are come on there's like I lost count what what what does what does this mean about our universe and he said it's not how many particles there are it's how many laws we have that describe them all yeah and it's only just a few yeah I thought damn good answer yeah he's I remember Steven Weber good answer

I I think I'm right in quoting him as saying that he almost wish black holes didn't exist because they're so perplexing that it would be just easier and he was kind of joking of course because physicists love a mystery but he was almost like this is too difficult there too bizarre maybe nature doesn't make them oh I got so see see he's he's invoking human limitations on the capacity of kind of joke and he was just saying these things are so baffling and so weird in some ways I'd rather they weren't there you know did

he say that in his old age so that he was getting tired of solving the universe he was joking so we're still trying to explore neutrinos and as I understand there's a new nutrino experiment that just there came online I mean there are several I mean I so the I mean what the fundamental question they they do seem that the reason we're interested in them just we're interested in them because they're three of the 12 fundamental particles right so so we are made of basically three particles that's us and electrons protons neutrons uh well no

so so the protons and neutrons are made of quarks oh so okay quarks down let let's start from the we're made of atoms you can start with we're made of atoms and we ATS in Greek means indivisible yeah that's what that word means yeah and and I it is remarkable by the way you say the the Greeks 2,000 years ago uh we only discovered that the structure of atoms in the 20th century or there ads existed well yeah it was up for debates the turn of the 20th century it was one of the debates in

science is there such a thing as an atom yeah it's incredible incredible yeah yeah yeah and Einstein indeed in 1905 one of his famous papers was on brownie in motion which one of the three famous papers in that year one of the other one was special relativity and the other one when he got the Nobel Prize for was the photo electric effects the third one Einstein we should just retroactively give him like a dozen Nobel prizes it's astonishing he didn't get the Nobel Prize for relativity you got it for basically the foundation to Quantum Mechanics

yeah we we discovered that matters made of atoms and then we very quickly discover after that that the atom is a electrons initially we have this almost solar system like model that it's a a nucleus a dense nucleus with an electron going around it and then we discover the nucleus is made of protons and neutrons that's 1930s by the way by orbit model is still the the symbol for an atom yeah you know yeah the atomic because it's classic you know but that's Adams look nothing like that no no no and so then quantum mechanics

comes in tells you you can't have that because charged particles moving around in the vicinity of other charged particles radiate energy away and they wouldn't be stable and that was known of course um and so then you find that the nucleus is made of prot and neutrons and as I said the neutron it's a 1930s Discovery so we're not that long ago I'm amazed when so much you know we're now in the Centennial decade of the discovery of quantum physics back in the 1920s and the whole 1920s was done before we discovered the new that's

crazy yeah it's it's it's almost living it is living memory for some people just about this okay so let's get back to the fundamental particles then then we discovered that the protons and neutrons are made of quarks quarks so they are as far as we can tell Point like objects so they're fundamental they won't be but as far as we can tell they are experimentally so we have the photon the electron well let's the matter particles so we have so the up and down quarks make up protons and neutrons so proton is is two ups

and a down and a neutron is two downs and an up got it and we have two quarks per energy stratum here correct well so then so then we discovered so we had this we have this nice thing so we have the electron as you said the up and down quark and then the thing called the electron neutrino which we so we just talked about NEOS so only four fundamental particles in anything we know or care about so we have four of them yep that's it and then we have so I can construct you out

of these particles if I had the the recip but then so we have four of them so so that's there's four of them and then the for is that that mediate the interactions right okay and which we can also think of as being carried by particles as we said we have the photon partic the electromagnetic force we have the w and z bosons which do the weak nuclear force and the gluons which the strong nuclear force and stick the quarks name gluons GL okay and and so that's it it seems except that there are two

copies of those that are identical except they're more massive so the so there's there's the Str the charm and strange quarks and the muon and the M neutrino that's another family that's nothing that's the next level up in energy they're more massive more massive okay okay so you have the charm and strange and the muan and the Muno and then you have another one yeah which are the bottom and top or sometimes called Beauty and Truth depending on how you want to do it the quarks and then the TOA and the to neutrino and that's

it as far as we can tell so that those are the M 4812 fundamental particles and their antimatter counterparts yeah and then the antimatter counterparts and so that that why we don't know so why there are three and with with experimentally proven really with some very small caveats only three generations only three families of these things is there reason for there to be only three could there be five 10 so we don't know it must be something to do with the underlying it looks like a periodic table so remember you go back to men mendal

and the periodic table what what how do you understand that pattern in the in the chemical properties of the of the elements you understand it when you know that everything's made of atoms yeah I mean the chemist arranged it but didn't have any understanding of it no quantum physics well well you need to know the structure you need to know that there's a nucleus and there's you know hydrogen's got one electron and helium's got two and carbon how can we only get you so far yeah so so you you understand chemistry you understand the pattern

when you understand the building blocks okay so we don't know why that pattern is there but it's clearly telling us about the building blocks or the underlying Theory which we don't know so it's one of the great Mysteries so so this so that's the the the zoo of particles as we know and then there's the higs and just to be clear when I attacked Steven Weinberg in the elevator uh most of the particle identities I was referencing are different combinations of different quirks yeah come together yeah so all these like you said in the f50s

and people were discovering all these things and they're different combinations of ups and downs and strange and charm and and and bottom and you know and so on so they exist in our universe but again they're made of the more fundamental so so basically the these things that the proton and neutron they're kind analogous to an atom in a way so so they're a thing they're quite a big things in particle physics and they have an internal structure and and one yeah and one of the things that I was involved in that we did back

in Hamburg all those years ago was we were mapping the structure of the proton so we we we're saying what what is in the proton how does it work maing the interior structure of the proton and we need that we needed that for the LHC so we need because we Collide protons together so so we have very detailed maps if you like they call structure functions but they're maps of the of the proton well thank you pleasure for joining me I I always love talking to you being we're just like we're Kindred Spirits in this

world and I wish you great success with your spring tour does it go beyond the United States is it a world tour it has been a world tour we've been to I don't know 20 or 30 countries I said we we we're probably approaching half a million people who've come to okay so so that's the that we're we're at the at the end really of this one and so I just wanted to bring it back here it's changed so much we could started in the states actually with it in its Proto form and now and

now I just I I've loved doing it so much and I just wanted to bring I just like the idea that a science talk is being given but there are trucks that have to unload the staging for it it's Pro it's proper rock and roll I got Ries I've got everything do you have a Tor T-shirt with on it yeah oh yeah all right I should have brought one to one of those shirts oh my god oh we've got everything and we've done so many many shows I I how many it is 150 200 they

don't all fit on one t-shirt so so we got different t-shirts for different regions of the the world physics takes the world uh very good Brian again thanks for being on the show this has been an exclusive conversation between me and my good friend Brian Cox from the UK who's coming Stateside with a tour and we're going to look for the solar system on should be Rand yeah if does it BBC how many how many episodes is it five five episodes we'll look forward all right I this has been star talk I'm your host Neil

degrass Tyson as always keep looking up [Music] [Music] [Music]