Listener Questions #19

23:32Thank you for pulling me out of the depression black hole I was inevitably going to slide into. And that's where our intuitive sense of mass comes from, right? Like stuff is made of smaller stuff and the mass of the bigger stuff is the sum of the mass of the smaller stuff. Like you weigh a cat made out of Legos and then you take it apart and you weigh the Legos, you get the same answer, right? That's where our intuition comes from. Cats are way less fun when you take them apart. And also when you make them out of Legos, they're not as cozy. Yeah, nope. And so you're made out of your atoms and your atoms are made of protons and neutrons and electrons.

24:05And we can mostly ignore the electrons because an electron weighs almost one two thousandths of a proton. So they're basically irrelevant when it comes to what you're made out of. So mostly you're made out of your protons and your neutrons. Sorry, electrons. All right. So then where does the mass from a proton and a neutron come from? Right. And so Rebecca is referring to up quarks and down quarks because that's what makes up protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are just different combinations of the same two bits, which is awesome and amazing, and also requires them to have these weird charges.

24:40Like to make a proton, you add two quarks that have a charge two-thirds and another quark that has a charge negative one-third. So plus two-thirds, plus two-thirds gives you four-thirds, minus a third gives you three-thirds or charge of one. That's a proton. Neutron is one quark with a charge two-thirds and two quarks with a charge negative one-third. So you get plus two, minus one, minus one, zero. It's amazing how you can build these things out of the same building blocks, right? That's something sort of cool. Yeah, we were talking the other day about whether or not the universe is beautiful and sort of meets the expectation of our aesthetic preferences.

25:17And I got to say, there's something about plus two-thirds and negative one-third charges that's not aesthetically pleasing to me. But I like that. No, what? I thought you were going to go the other direction. That's beautiful. Showing how you can build two very different things out of the same pieces. It's like when you see somebody build something incredible out of Legos, you're like, wow, that's awesome that you can do it out of the same bits. There's something simple and ergonomic about it. That appeals to my aesthetic. And I guess that's why this question about whether or not physics and math meet our definitions of beauty is so hard.

25:50Because what's beautiful to some person is, you know, maybe not beautiful to others. And we don't even have the same definition of beauty. Yeah, that's true. And I can also get rid of the one-thirds easily. If I just redefine the electron mass to be negative three, then the up quarks and down quarks have charge plus two and minus one. And, you know, it's just because of Ben Franklin that the quarks have a charge one-third. There's no absolute scale there. Why is it Ben Franklin's fault that the charge is negative one-third? We're getting way off track here. But was Ben Franklin around when we were figuring this stuff out?

26:19Well, Ben Franklin, you know, the best president of the United States, he helped define the direction of the currents. And so the direction that we later discovered was caused by electrons, he called negative. Was Ben Franklin ever a president? No, he was not a president. That's an internet joke. Oh, I did that one right over my head. All right, look, this isn't a history podcast, Daniel. Let's get back on track. All right. Anyways, so your protons and neutrons are made out of up quarks and down quarks. But this is where our intuition breaks down. You might imagine that the mass of the proton is just the mass of the quarks it's made of added up.

26:53the way the mass of the Lego cat is the mass of the Legos. But it's not true because mass is not just the stuff you're made out of. Mass is a measure of your internal stored energy, which is a much weirder and more abstract concept. But the universe is not required to be intuitive, right? Or to make any sense to us at all. It's amazing we can't understand any of it. But like to give you a sense for what I'm talking about, if you have a box made of mirrors and you shine a photon in there and then slam the door. So now the photon is bouncing around inside of it. And I ask you, well, what was the mass of the box before and after?

27:31You'd say, well, you just added a photon. Photons have no mass. You've put a zero mass thing in the box. So it has the same mass before and after. And you would be wrong because now that photon is trapped in the box. It's internal stored energy of the box. So the box gained some mass by E equals MC squared. Wait a minute, wait a minute. The other day you were telling me that energy doesn't have – I thought you were saying that energy doesn't have mass and people get confused about E equals mc squared. It doesn't imply that photons have mass. Photons do not have mass. Okay. Photons do not have mass.

28:03But what is mass anyway? Mass is internal stored energy. Photons have no internal stored energy, but you can capture a photon. Same way that, for example, if you absorb a photon, you lay in the sun, you absorb photons, you gain mass. because the photon's energy gets converted into other kinds of energy in your body. And any internal stored energy, that's what mass is. So can we get a short answer for how do you define energy then? Or is that another philosophical side road? So if you've got a photon in a box and now you have more energy, what does that imply that energy is then? Well, yeah, we don't really know what energy is.

28:43If you want to go like really deep and fundamental, until it's not even something that's conserved in the universe, which makes it even harder to define. But we have categories. There's energy of motion, which is what a photon has. A photon is pure energy of motion. There's also internal stored energy, which is what mass is. So we have these examples, and we know that in many situations, the sum of these two things is conserved, that you can convert one kind into another and back and forth. They slosh back and forth. is also potential energy, which is just energy of like configuration. You know, if you have a ball on a shelf in a gravitational field, then it has energy stored.

29:20Like you can make a gravitational battery just by lifting concrete blocks up to the top of a building. And like that has energy in it. You can recover that energy by like dropping those rocks. And then it turns into kinetic energy and you can have that spin a wheel, which then generates electricity, for example. So there's lots of different forms of energy. But mass is a measure of your internal stored energy, which is really weird because in the end, what we're talking about is the inertial mass of the object, right? Like how hard is it to accelerate it? And if you shine a light into a box and then slam the door, you need to give it a bigger push to accelerate it to the same velocity.

29:59Okay. All right. So you've got that photon in a box and you switch one of the quarks to up, and now you have two, or no, you've got three quarks in there. So it's - Photons. You're talking about photons and protons. Oh. Right? I was talking about photons, which have no mass. But they have quarks. No, no, no. Protons have quarks. Photons. Photons. Yes. Ah. Yes. Oh, man, there's a lot to keep track of. I was using photons because they have no mass, which makes it especially obvious that when they add mass to the box, it's not because they have stuff to them. It's because you now have internal stored energy.

30:35You've captured their energy. Okay, got it. So let's return to the proton, which is a good idea. Where does the mass of the proton come from? It does get some contribution from the mass of the quarks, like those little Lego pieces, but those masses are really, really tiny. Like they're about a thousandth or two thousandths of the mass of the proton. Most of the mass of the proton comes from the energy of those quarks, the binding of them into a proton. There's a lot of energy stored in there. And we know there's a lot of energy in protons because there's a lot of energy in the nucleus. It's the strong nuclear force.

31:07This is what fission and fusion deal with, and that's why they're so powerful. And so most of the mass of the proton doesn't come from the bits it's made out of. It comes from the binding energy. And the mass of the quarks themselves does come from the Higgs boson. But so most of your mass comes from the binding energy of quarks inside protons, not from the Higgs boson, which gives those quarks mass. So to imagine what this experiment would look like, if you wanted to switch your quark from down to up, you would need a bunch of energy to break that bond and switch it. And then you don't even really have protons anymore.

31:43Yeah, you wouldn't have protons anymore. So a proton is defined as this combination of up and down quarks. And you can have other combinations. Like you can replace one of the up quarks with a charm or you can replace the down with a strange. And we've done all those. We've seen those particles. We call them other weird things, deltas and omegas. You can have three strange quarks. There's all sorts of different combinations. These particles can be neutral in triplets, meaning that their color charges are all balanced. And so we've made every possible combination we can make, but most of them are not stable.

32:14Even the neutron is not stable. The neutron will decay into the proton. The proton is the stable one. It's the lowest energy state of all of these things. So you can make other particles out of quarks, but they wouldn't be stable and they wouldn't be protons. But let's say you did. Let's say you took a proton and you made the top quark version of it, whatever you call it, and you make it like top, top, bottom, which is an analog of like up, up, down. Number one, it would already be a lot more massive because the quarks themselves are much more massive. Like a top quark has the mass of 175 protons, right?

32:50So the up quark has the mass of like a thousandth of the proton and the top quark has the mass of like almost 200 protons. So it's a huge ratio. Nobody understands this, by the way. Why is the top quark so much heavier than the up quark? Nobody knows. It's just this incredible, heavy grandpapa of a particle. Nobody knows why it's so much more massive. If we could take a quick step back. So up and down quarks are different than top and bottom quarks. And what are top and bottom quarks again? Yeah, top and bottom quarks are the heavy versions of them. They're up and down quarks, which we use to make the proton and neutron.

33:25And then for some reason, that's a mystery to us. There are other heavier versions of them. The charm and the strange are just like the up and the down, but they're heavier. The top and the bottom are just like the up and the down in terms of like electric charges and weak charges and behavior and stuff like this, but even heavier. And the top and the bottom are like the grandma and grandpa of these things. They're much, much heavier than the up and the down. And that's why I think Rebecca was asking you about this, because they feel like different flavors of the same particle. In fact, we call this field flavor physics because top cork and bottom cork feel like different flavors.

34:00And people who study this, we call them heavy flavor physicists, which makes them sound much cooler and hip-hoppier than they actually are. That does sound way cool. Yeah. Yeah. Do they have big necklaces and stuff? Yeah, boy! No? Okay. So if you replace the up quarks with top quarks and the down quarks with bottom quarks, you already, just from the stuff you're made out of, just from the quarks, would increase the mass of this new version of the proton by a factor of hundreds, right? So like a particle made out of a top, top, bottom would have a mass just from the quarks of like 355 protons. And that doesn't even account for the binding energy, which is most of the mass of the proton.

34:43So now this new particle you're building, what would be the binding energy of this thing? How much binding energy is required to bring two top quarks and a bottom quark together? We don't know. We can't do that calculation because quantum physics in the strong force is too hard. Like we can barely calculate what the mass of the proton is. It's like not an easy thing to calculate because the strong force is so strong that every time you try to do a calculation, there's gluons and those gluons make more gluons and those gluons make more gluons and those gluons stick to each other and interact with each other, it gets very complicated.

35:16And all the tricks we can use for other weaker forces don't work because the approximations break down. So we can't make that prediction. I don't know the answer to that. Nobody knows the answer to that. But I can tell you that that particle, if you made it, it wouldn't be a proton and it wouldn't be stable, right? Top quarks are not stable. Bottom quarks are not stable. No combinations of these quarks are stable except for the proton. And so this top, top bottom thing that Rebecca wants to build would definitely not be stable. So if you're designing some like super massive version of humanity and you made it out of these things, it would last for like 10 to the negative 23 seconds before it decayed into something else.

35:53Probably you would end up with protons. You know, I got to admit, I misunderstood Rebecca's question initially. So when she says the proton is made of up and down quirks, which are light, I thought she was asking if we, instead of having up, up, down, what if it was all up, up, up? How would that change the mass? But now, and I thought maybe top was another way of referring to up because if it goes up, it's on top. But now it is all clear. No, top is just another example of particle physicists being brilliant at naming things. Top and bottom is like an analogy to up and down. Don't ask me why charm and strange are called charm and strange.

36:27It breaks the pattern. I'm sure my confusion with the question reveals how clear you guys are with your naming. There's a whole group of physicists who reject the names top and bottom. and they call them truth and beauty. And so there's a whole group of people who said, we don't do flavor physics, we do beauty physics. Oh, wow. Do you guys like get really heated? Do guys and gals get really heated at conferences about this kind of stuff? More snide and snarky than heated, but yeah. We're all just human beings after all. All right, Rebecca. So the answer to your question is, if you tried to put Rebecca together with Top Quirks, you would be very, very massive, at least hundreds of times more massive, probably much, much more.

37:08And you would also decay very quickly down to protonic Rebecca. Sounds like a bad idea, Rebecca. I don't recommend it. No, let us know how it works. I'm curious. Maybe you'll discover something awesome. We don't want to lose a listener. All right, Rebecca, what do you think? Daniel and Kelly, thank you so much for giving me the extra time and your indulgence responding to your answer. And don't think I didn't notice the terminology drift from barrister to lawyer. And I know that you have spared yourself having to explain to all of your viewers that in the UK, barristers don't actually make coffee.

37:48Anyway, back to the quirky court question. Thank you very much, Daniel, for explaining the difference between the ups and the tops and the downs and the bottoms, which now actually makes good sense to me. However, it strikes me that there is research to be had because it doesn't explain why people gain weight over the winter months, specifically in the holiday season. And I wonder if there is a moment in time, possibly due to reduced photons in the atmosphere at that time of year, that in fact all of the fields do a switcheroo and my protons are comprised of top bottom rather than up down and that accounts for the weight gain.

38:41I think that there is money to be had in researching this. What do you think?

38:57Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science and what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth. I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, OK, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it.

39:40But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me. And I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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41:42All right, so our next question is from Robert, who noted that on an episode, I made a mistake by joking about something that actually happens. Let's hear Robert's question. Hello. In one of the podcasts from the past few months, Kelly made a random side comment about how it would be cool if eating carrots turned you orange, which, as it turns out, actually does. I don't really understand how, though. So I'd love it if you could look into why and do some sort of segment about keratinemia, beta-carotenes, and all of that. Thanks. All right, Kelly. Being called out by our audience. I wonder if this is a physics-inspired listener.

42:17Hmm. That would be juicy. I don't know, but I would like all listeners to call me out at least. I assume you'd like us both to be called out. If you catch us making a mistake, please correct us. We want to get this stuff right. And, you know, lots of times knowledge is moving quickly and we might not be all caught up. But in this case, this is something that I got wrong. We've known this for a long time. I think I knew it, but I've since forgotten. Well, let's dig in and marinate in your wrongness. What exactly did you say? And exactly how was it wrong? Great. This is my favorite thing to do. So I said, I think I made some joke about like, wouldn't it be funny if you turned orange when you ate carrots?

43:01And this is called keratinemia. And it's not called keratinemia because you ate carrots. It's called carotinemia because of the carotene that you find in a lot of different kinds of fruits and veggies. And are carrots called carrots because of beta carotene? Or is it just a totally random connection? I'm going to bet that carrots had a name long before we knew what carotene was. Well, Google tells me that the word originates from a Greek word, which is derived from an Indo-European word for horn or head. so it has to do with the shape of the top of the carrot. Okay, well, and carotene is not spelled C-A-R-R-O-T-E-N-E.

43:43It's just got one R. So maybe it's just a coincidence. So anyway, around World War I and World War II, actually, carotinemia, I'm going to slow down and stumble every time I have to say it, was actually moderately common because there were some food shortages and lots of people kept eating large quantities of the same fruits or veggies. And lots of different kinds of fruits and vegetables, not just carrots, have carotene in them. What's an example of something that's not a carrot but has a lot of beta carotene in it? Apricots, mangoes, oranges, green beans, et cetera. Lots of different fruits and vegetables have it.

44:19So these were all sort of orangey stuff until you got the green beans. Yeah, they don't have to be orange. And if you remember, we were talking about carotenoids when we were talking about flamingos. And we were talking about how flamingos extract the carotenoids. from the food that they eat, and they use that to make themselves pink. And they're not always eating pink foods. It has to do with how your body sort of converts and deals with these products. And so in our body, when we consume carotenoids, in our liver we convert some of those carotenoids into vitamin A using a particular kind of enzyme that we have.

44:55And then we go ahead and we use that vitamin A to help us with things like vision and the functioning of our immune system. But if you have too much vitamin A, it can be toxic. So no matter how much beta carotene we consume, our bodies only convert a small amount of it to vitamin A. Is that because we only need a certain amount of vitamin A? Our body's not capable of converting more? Or why does it reject it? We only need a certain amount. And if you have too much, it becomes toxic. And so our body sort of protects us from that toxicity by only converting some amount of it. Well, that's clever.

45:28Into vitamin A. Yeah, go us. Go us. But our body still has it and it binds to fat. And if you accumulate enough of it, sometimes you can actually see those accumulations in our hands and in the soles of our feet. So when you get keratinemia, keratinemia, see how fast I said it? I'm really good. So when you get keratinemia, you mostly can see like a yellowish tint in your soles and in your hands. you don't tend to get it in your eyes because your eyes don't have the right kind of stuff for the carotenoids to bind to and this is one of the ways that you tell the difference between if somebody has jaundice which is a liver problem versus keratinemia if their eyes aren't yellow they probably don't have jaundice but anyway so it tends to build up and you can also get lycopenia which is when you have too many tomatoes which has a different kind of carotenoid called lycopene I eat a lot of tomatoes well are you yellow?

46:25Everyone's a little yellow, right? Well, you're not noticeably yellow and you don't have yellow hands. So you probably haven't eaten too much. In general, this condition isn't dangerous. And we think that in general, if you become orange or yellowy, the solution is to just change your diet, stop eating that stuff. Eventually, your body will extract the carotene and you will go back to your normal tone. but I did find a paper that said, you know, this problem is almost never associated with poor health. Quote, however, a man who allegedly ate six to seven pounds of carrots weekly was found to have constipation, hyperkeratinemia, increased liver enzymes and possible vitamin A toxicity.

47:08So you can overdo it guys. Your body tries to save us, but if you're eating six to seven pounds of carrots weekly, you might have some problems. Is this a carrot farmer or what's the story with this guy? I don't, that's all I could find. I don't know, man. Moderation is key. That's right. That's right. That's right. Throw in some tomatoes, dude. Jeez. That's right. Have a little lycopenia to go with your keratinemia. Wow. This is fascinating. And so can people Google to get like pictures of people with keratinemia that look crazy orange? Is it impressive or is it sort of underwhelming? It's kind of underwhelming, not super impressive.

47:47And that's a fairly safe Google search as far as I can tell. I don't remember seeing anything. More than pinworms, I'm guessing. Yeah. Yeah. I don't recommend actually looking up pinworms, pictures of pinworms. But anyway, that's the answer that I have for Robert. And so is there anything else that if you eat it, you will turn that color? Can I turn purple by eating enough eggplant? I don't know about eggplant in particular, but any of those plants, be they fruit or vegetables, that have a lot of carotenoids, you risk your body storing them in your body as something that will make you yellowy.

48:25Well, as a kid, I enjoyed having a blue tongue after eating blueberries. There's something really cool about that, but you are what you eat and you get that color. That's super cool. Yeah. So it's kind of cool to turn orange after eating carrots. It feels like cartoony biology, but real. It does. Yeah. And I like that you can do this without harming yourself too much. Yeah. Yeah. And it is so sort of counterintuitive that if you eat too many green beans, you could turn yellow or orange. But it is weird. Yeah. Well, it depends, right? Because it's biology. That's right. That's right. But unlike physics, I had a clear answer.

49:01And so let's see what Robert thinks of our clear answer. and Robert, pick a team, biology or physics. No, I'm just kidding. You don't have to do that. Can't we all just get along? You started it. I say after tossing so many bombs. That's right. That's right. That is super interesting. I would not have expected it to be a lipid binding process. I wonder if that means if a person got liposuction procedure, if the adipose would also come out more yellowish. Super cool regardless though. Thank you so much for exploring my question. And as my degrees are social work, psychology, and sexuality, I'm going to have to abstain from your biology and physics rivalry.

49:38I think all science is great. Nothing more human than one to understand. All right. Thank you, Robert, for writing in. And thanks to everybody who sends in your questions. We really do love hearing from you. Write to us questions at danielandkelly.org. Looking forward to hearing your questions. Thanks.

49:58Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D &K Universe. Don't be shy. Right to us.

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